Looking for an alternative to Google Reader? The might I suggest Skimr, a rather minimal web app which will let you read your feeds right there in the browser. It shows your feeds in a big, bright and beautiful single-column list, and when you open a feed it shows you the articles in a similarly cruft-free view.
It’s just about perfect, as long as you don’t have more than a few feeds.
Wish you could access your computer located a thousand miles away?
Now you can.
Jump Desktop is your solution to staying connected to all of your devices while your out on the road, in a plane, or simply down the street. And you can get it simply – and inexpensively – right here courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals for 50% off the regular price: only $15!
A couple of days ago I showed you two handy jailbreak tweaks for Notification Center. “Compose” and “Kamera” give quick access to Mail, Messages, and the iPhone’s cameras. Along with tweaks like NCSettings, there’s a lot you can do enhance Notification Center on a jailbroken iOS device.
A Cydia tweak called “Tap to Widgets” is one of the most useful Notification Center tools I’ve seen for jailbreakers.
A joint venture company between Philips and Sony called Intertrust, has decided to file a patent infringement suit against Apple, asserting that 15 of the company’s patents have been violated.
Intertrust’s patents cover a range of devices and services for digital restrictions management (DRM) to protect intellectual property.
If Apple sold an iPhone 5 dock designed to work alongside the iMac, then the OCDock would probably be it. Born on Kickstarter and provided by the fine folks at BiteMyApple.co, this device fixes to the base of your iMac or Apple Thunderbolt Display and provides you with a beautiful built-in dock that looks like it was always a part of your machine.
The OCDock has a paper-thin wire that runs under the base of your iMac’s stand, so it looks like it’s completely integrated. It also has a spring-loaded base that moves up and down, so it will even accommodate your iPhone in a case — providing the case isn’t too thick.
Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.
One of our biggest hopes for iOS 7 is that it will come with a huge update on UI. iOS is starting to look a bit old and everyone’s tired of the skeuomorphic features. It needs some innovative minimalist touches from Jony Ive.
Mohamed Kerroudj has created his own vision for what the iPhone’s Lockscreen should look like. The linen backgrounds have been replaced by flat white surfaces, but what’s better is you can actually respond to message right from Notification Center, or trash them, or schedule a date in your Calendar, or toggle your Wifi. It’d be great.
Take a look:
So, there you are, typing a long note on your iPhone or iPad, when you suddenly realize that you need–gasp–a special symbol or accented character. Perhaps you want to use the £ (British pound) symbol, or the é symbol when sending an email to a business associate or family member.
No, you don’t have to use the Emoji keyboard (unless you want a copyright (©) symbol), but there is a bit of a trick to it. Here’s how.
Tap Tap See is a camera app for blind people. Sure, any partially or non-sighted person could just snap bad, out-of-focus pictures of their shoes, or of the backs of their friends heads, with any camera app. But only Tap Tap See will then say to them, out loud, “Shoes,” or “Head.”
You see, Tap Tap See is like a sighted assistant that never grow tired of you asking “what’s that?”
WWDC 2012 sold out in under two hours last year. It was insane. A lot of people on the West Coast didn’t even get a chance to buy a ticket because Apple announced tickets were available at 5am.
Everyone who’s really wanting to go to WWDC this year is probably looking for the best method to alert them on tickets, so Oisin Prendiville has created a service that will call you as soon as tickets are available.
Wacom has announced a new baby Cintiq graphics tablet. The new 13-inch model joins the plus-sized 22 and 24-inchers in the lineup, and will let travelling designers and artists work on the go.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets have been some of the best competition to the iPad, mostly because they’re cheap but come with good software. It seems like Amazon would sell the Kindle for as cheap as possible if it meant taking a slice of Apple’s pie.
Earlier this morning, a rumor was floated by TechCrunch that Amazon is making a $99 tablet to compete with the iPad mini. It sounded crazy at the time because the Kindle Fire is already $130 cheaper than the iPad mini. Turns out that the rumor was too good to be true and Amazon’s already shot it down.
iOS 6.1 had not one, but two security exploits that allowed an attacker to bypass an iPhone’s lockscreen to gain access to a users’ data. Apple finally patched up those two holes yesterday with the iOS 6.1.3 update, yet the new version of iOS contains another passcode security flaw.
Using the iPhone’s Control feature, attackers can still bypass your lockscreen. The good news is that the new lockscreen exploit only works on iPhone 4 units right now.
Ex-Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, hasn’t been working at Motorola for even a month yet, but he’s already dropping hints on what Motorola’s next flagship smartphone might be like.
Earlier this week, Guy Kawasaki hinted on his Google+ page that Motorola’s next phone will have customizable hardware options.
Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.
Meet Trygger, a new polarizing lens for the iPhone 5 that was born on Kickstarter and aims to provide you with better smartphone snaps. The device clips onto your handset in an instant, then removes unwanted glare and reflections and makes your images sharper and more vibrant.
Depending on how well it works for you, the Apple Store app’s EasyPay system is either a dream of a convenience or a total nightmare that ends up getting you arrested. And now a similar experience is rolling out to over 200 Walmarts nationwide.
If you ever tried to explain Instapaper (or any other read-later app) to a “straight” (non-nerd) friend or family member, you’ll know why Apple added a reading list to Safari. Even without the terrible experience of adding a javascript bookmarklet to Mobile Safari, Instapaper requires way too many steps: save page; remember to open Instapaper before the internet goes off to load that saved page; remember to read.
Safari, on the other hand, just saves the page inside Safari. That’s it.
And so Amazon is now simplifying Instapaper’s Send to Kindle feature, allowing you to send a web page to your Kindle with one click.
Its plastic chassis may feel cheaper than the iPhone 5’s glass-and-aluminum materials, but Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 smartphone actually costs significantly more to make. In fact, almost 20% more.
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has today approved Apple’s application for a registered trademark for “iAd,” 21 months after the Cupertino company first applied for it.
What if Siri tried to kill you? That’s the plot of a new Dutch horror film called App that features a malevolent Siri clone called IRIS (get it?) that starts killing people. And as a cool twist, App allows you to download a free app to use while you watch the film.
Amazon hasn’t been able to beat the iPad in terms of features, apps or build quality, but the ace up the online retail giant’s sleeve was always the price: at just $199 for the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, getting Amazon’s tablet is at least $130 cheaper than Apple’s cheapest iPad mini.
Undercutting Apple on price, then, is the major way Amazon is competing ith Apple in the tablet space, and a new report suggests they are about to take that even further with the release of a $99 Kindle Fire.
Square Enix has been working hard to port its classic Final Fantasy titles over to iOS, and the next in the series, Final Fantasy V, is expected to hit the App Store by the end of the month. Like previous Final Fantasy ports, the game will bring updated visuals, and new controls optimized for touch-based devices.
Ron Gilbert is the weirdo behind some of the best and funniest games of tjhe last thirty years. Maniac Mansion. Secret of Monkey Island. Heck, just last year he designed The Cave, a game about evil psychic twins, a hillbilly and a time traveler going spelunking. It’s available for Mac if you haven’t given it a try.
Gilbert’s next game, however, is coming to iOS, and the title is so deliciously weird and unwieldy you just can’t help but get excited. Are you ready? It’s called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage To Discover The Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG. Let’s see him fit that under the app icon.
Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”
Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.