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.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company to become Vice President of Technology at Apple, but Tim Cook may have to keep a close eye on him around the iPhones. Back in 2009, Lynch smashed up a whole bunch of them in a bid to get them to run Flash Player. See his destructive side for yourself in the video below.
It’s taken well over a year, but the Jawbone UP finally has an official companion app in Google Play. The device has only been compatible with iOS devices since it launched in November 2011, but now you can track your sleep and physical activity on Android-powered smartphones, too.
Furthermore, starting today, UP will be available in Apple stores across Europe.
If you’ve ever had a party with people in various rooms of your house, maybe even outside, Bem’s Wireless Speaker Trio was made just for you.
The Trio is a neat idea: connect your music source (iPhone, iPad, iPod) via Bluetooth to its base station, then move any of its three rechargeable satellite speakers anywhere in your home, up to 120 feet from the base, and they’ll fill that room with music from your iDevice or Mac.
But while Bem’s Wireless Trio is a great idea and was awesome when it worked, my tests brought to light some problems I just couldn’t ignore.
Call Bliss is an app with its own, industrial-strength take on the iPhone’s newish Do Not Disturb feature. It takes Apple’s basic concept — blocking calls with the flick of a switch, or only letting through calls from selected contacts — and infuses it with management features and more powerful options. And now the app adds two more tricks.
Hotline Miami, a retro, top-down, hyper-violent shoot-em up is finally on the Mac, via Steam and Gamer’s Gate.
Don’t be alarmed: the game is full of bizarre, hipster characters, animal masks, brutal weapons, and truly immense amounts of 16-bit blood and gore. Making it through the punishing difficulty of the game is a point of pride. Sounds like a good time, right?
We’ve been fascinated the stuff emerging from motorcycle-wizards-turned-iDevice-accessory-crafter Rokform ever since we took their machined alloy Rokbed iPhone case for a spin a few years back. Today the company revealed the Rokshield v3, basically a smaller, iPad Mini version of their Roklock case and mounting system.
QuikIO has been a great solution for getting your files from your Mac to your iOS device for a while now, with AppleTV support added this past January.
Today, however, the app has added yet another great feature: the ability to send your files from iPhone to iPhone with the new QuikBeam feature, letting you send photo, video, and other files between iPhones at higher speeds than otherwise available. The developers claim that the feature will send ten full-resolution photos in as little as one second, using a proprietary network intelligence system that finds the fastest path between two iPhones running the QuikIO app.
Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, may be looking to switch from Adobe over to Apple. According to a tweet from CNBC, the high level Adobe Exec is leaving the company to join Apple.
Adobe submitted an SEC filing on Wednesday, March 18th, that confirms Lynch left the company “to pursue other opportunities.” Per item 5.02.b in that SEC filing:
On March 18, 2013, Kevin Lynch resigned from his position as Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, of Adobe Systems Incorporated, effective March 22, 2013, to pursue other opportunities.