Hey Strobists! Don’t you just hate the constant charging and swapping of batteries that your hobby/profession entails? What if I told you that you could ditch the AAs and instead use a li-ion battery pack that plugs straight into the external power-port of your flash, halves your recycle time and keeps going for way longer than your AAs?

You be interested, right? So what if I also told you that the graphics on the unit itself seem like they were ripped wholesale from the side of a 1980s arcade game cabinet, shrunk and stuck onto the Lumedyne X? Awesome, right? But there’s a problem.

We Apple users get teased for the lack of buttons on our devices. Jony Ive continues he and the late Steve’s joint crusade against the button. The thing is, it’s a crusade against the unnecessary button, which is why we’ll always have a home button on our iPhones, a kind of ejector seat for when things go wrong.

Android, on the other hand, has no such qualms about bad, user-unfriendly design. Which is why it has fallen to two Kickstarterers to go out and make a button for Android devices, which often lack physical switches of any kind [1].

Whitespace is an note-taking iPhone app that kind of combines Q Branch’s Vesper with a corkboard concept (only without the actual cork texture — this is the age of iOS 7 after all). It’s slick, it works with pictures, and it’s free (ish).

Hawaiian Airlines announced that due to unexpected turbulence in the quality of inflight entertainment options, it has jettisoned its inflight movie systems in favor of the sleeker, lighter, and infinitely more fun iPad mini. Jettly is the perfect source of answers for those of you with questions regarding the entertainment options on a jet, which could turn out to be the best pick for the reasonable price it charges for privacy.

Starting September 1st, 2013, all fourteen Boeing 767-300 aircraft in the Hawaiian Airlines fleet will be equipped with iPad minis to serve up entertainment to weary passengers on their way to paradise.

Pyle is definitely making some waves out in the waterproof-gadget space with their hydrophobic earphones and speakers.

We’re venturing out into deeper water with this next Pyle gadget, though, as it’s pretty unusual: The Surf Sound Talk is a waterproof Bluetooth hybrid handset-speakerphone capable of taking calls, if not actually underwater (due to the inability to conduct a conversation with one’s mouth full of water) then at least while splashing around a pool, in the drink or under a shower.

Following the release of Parallels Access on the iPad, the ninth version of Parallels for Mac has been announced. The popular Windows virtualization software has been updated with full support for OS X Mavericks and Windows Blue 8.1.

Besides performance upgrades, Parallels 9 features several new features, like integration with Power Nap in OS X. Windows users will rejoice that Parallels has brought back the old Start menu to Windows 8 as well.

Yesterday it was revealed that T-Mobile isn’t letting its employees take vacation time on the weekend of September 20th. Vacation blackouts are usually how carriers get ready for a big iPhone launch, so it should come as no surprise that AT&T has reportedly done the same for the latter half of next month.

BGR says that AT&T won’t “be launching any other high-profile devices” during that time, so the blackout points to new iPhones. Apple is expected to announce the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C at a September 10th event. Judging off past years, preorders will likely happen the weekend of the 13th, with in-store availability kicking off on Friday the 20th.

Now is an excellent time to sell your old iPhone with a service like Gazelle. Best Buy also has a nice trade-in deal going on this weekend.

Source: BGR

Image: CNET

If you’ve been wondering why the TV Shows icon on your Apple TV has suddenly vanished today, you are not alone. We’ve been getting tips for the past several hours from readers who can’t access the TV Shows category of the iTunes Store on their Apple TVs, with some complaints being as old as this morning.

What’s odd is that Apple’s status page for cloud services hasn’t mentioned the outage yet. The TV Shows section of the iTunes Store seems to be working for most on the desktop, so maybe it’s just a bad glitch. We’ll update this post once Apple acknowledges the issue.

Image: Alexander Martinez

Bang With Friends has returned to the App Store after a three-month hiatus. The app has shifted its tone and is now called “Down,” a name which still needs little explanation.

BWF has had problems staying in the App Store since its initial release earlier this year. Apple banned the app shortly after it became available in May, forcing the its creators to rebrand it into something a tad tamer.

There are a huge amount of video games out on iOS for kids, from educational games to adventure games and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of video games on the App Store that they’re playing.

This week, it’s Big Fish’s brilliant adventure/platforming game, Fetch – A Boy and his Dog.

You know those long email threads, conversations, whatever you call them? The ones that run to the hundreds of words, several layers of indentation and quoting? Yeah, of course you do. We all deal with them.

Did you know that you could cut through the confusion with a simple move on your iPhone or iPad when replying to one of those beasts? Yeah, you can be the voice of coherence and reason, cutting to the chase and only replying with specifically selected text in your reply email.

Here’s how to do just that on your iOS device.

The Beamhaus BillFold is a wallet case with three pockets; one that holds your iPhone 5, another for your credit card or ID, and another for your cash. The iPhone pocket has a suede lining that’s kind to your iPhone’s display and prevents it from getting scratched.

The BillFold is made entirely of leather; “Horween latigo” in tan is used externally, while the inside is lined with “Horween Dublin” in black. It’s only available in these colors, but I think you’ll agree it looks pretty darn beautiful.

The BillFold is priced at $89.99, which is a little pricey for an iPhone 5 case. But is it worth it?

The Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, for the initiated, is an annual gaming conference held in Seattle. It was created in 2004 by the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who wanted to go to a gaming show that focused on their own passions: console games, computer games, and tabletop games.

PAX got big, fast. Billed as a celebration of gamer culture, PAX, and spin-off conference PAX East, is more of a giant nerd gathering, contrasting nicely with the hard-pounding media-fest of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) or the academic and developer focus of the Games Developer Conference (GDC). PAX is for gamers, by gamers, of all stripe and affiliation.

Apple’s 30-day concert series is about to take off in just three days, so to promote the iTunes Festival and the bevy of artists that will be putting on free shows, the Apple Store iOS app is giving away six free tracks to iOS users.

To get the free tracks all you have to do is download the Apple Store app and then tap on the “30 Nights of Music” section on the main screen. The offer officially expires on October 31st, 2013.

The full track list:

Best Buy is now offering 50% off an iPhone 5 (16G or 32G) for customers who bring in a working iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S this weekend. The retailer announced that the deal, which requires a two year activation, starts tomorrow and will last through Monday.

AppleCare+, the $99 extended warranty for iPhone and iPad that covers accidental damage as well as component failure, could soon be heading to Europe. Apple first began selling the service two years ago, but as things stand, it’s only available to customers in the United States and Canada.

Skype has confirmed that it is working to deliver 3D video calling for compatible televisions and computer displays. But according to Mark Gillett, Skype’s corporate vice president, it could be a number of years before the technology comes to fruition due to a lack of suitable capture devices.

The Peablins are back.

The Peablins, for those not in the know, are the stars of 10tons’ hit iOS game, Joining Hands, a cute little puzzler that challenged players to connect a bunch of cute, gentle creatures across a variety of landscapes and levels.

The sequel takes the warmth and cute-factor of the first game and just knocks it out of the park. It helps that Joining Hands 2 is also a pretty fantastic little puzzle game, too.

Clear your schedule for the weekend because you won’t want to leave the house. After a lengthy wait, BioShock Infinite and the new SimCity are now available for your Mac. You can download BioShock Infinite from the Mac App Store or from Steam, where it’ll cost you $39.99; while SimCity is available through EA’s Origin platform starting at $39.99.

But both titles can be downloaded for free if you already purchased them for PC.

As it turns out, I end up having to sign a lot of documents, such as contracts, IRS forms, and the like. Many of these are in PDF form (bravo), and some even let me fill them out via my keyboard (even better).

Unfortunately, they still expect us to print these babies out, sign them with a pen, and then get them back into some sort of digital format, via a scanner or picture with our iPhone or something.

Luckily, Apple’s own Preview makes all that superflous. It’s super easy to get your pen and paper signature onto a PDF. Here’s how.

The “Kúla Deeper” might sound like yet another technique ex-Policeman and legendary love-machine Sting has learned in order to drive the ladies wild, but it is in fact an add-on for any DSLR that makes shooting 3-D pictures and movies easy.

Yes, in theory those 3-D videos and pictures could be of Sting removing Roxanne’s red dress in slow motion, for eight hours at a time, but you could also use its powers for good.

Patent trolls are everywhere these days, swaming over the hills of Silicon Valleys on the back of their patent wargs. Everyone is dealing with the frivolous lawsuits patent trolls make a living bringing against any technology company that experiences even a modicum of success, but hey, go figure: ultimately, patent trolls are more interested in suing Apple than anyone else.

It appears that today is officially App Update Thursday here on CoM, and I’m not even writing about all the great stuff that my iOS devices sucked down during the night. But I will tell you about Mailbox.

The Mailbox app, which lets you swipe and tap your way through your email, getting to “inbox zero” easily several times a day whilst turning your mail account into a kind of super-handy to-do list, will now search your entire Gmail archive. And that’s not all.

Did you ever find yourself using the amazing Snapseed and thinking to yourself, “man, I love this app more than a man should love a piece of photo-editing software, but I sure wish it could do more. Like, what if it could save my edits as presets?”

Well, you lucky, app-loving deviant, you: your wish has been answered. No, not by Snapseed, which Google will surely kill off soon enough anyway, but by a brand new app called Photoristic.

Evidence is mounting that Apple plans on releasing the next iPhone on September 20th. The latest proof? T-Mobile, the latest official American iPhone carrier, has told all of their employees to not even bother asking for any days off between Friday, September 20th and Sunday, September 22nd.