It was only yesterday that we found out that music streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio are helping kill music piracy, as the music industry reported that global revenue rose in 2012 for the first time in 13 years.
Well, according to a different report that crunched some serious numbers, Apple’s iTunes Store played a big part in the music industry’s growth, by accounting for 60 percent of global digital music revenues.
Apple’s always looking to miniaturize its gadgets down to the slimmest, smallest form factor possible, which is why the venerable iOS home button is such a conspicuous space waster: although the button grounds users in the iOS operating system, it’s also a fairly big and bulky element of the front of the device.
According to Peter Zigich in his new concepts for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 mini and iPhone 6 Maxi, Apple should just eliminate it from the front of the device to make way for a nearly bezel-less screen. Bizarrely, though, he thinks it should be shifted to the lower left hand side of the device, in a lower location on each side.
Last week we asked you guys to show us just how amazing you can make your iPhone look with tweaks and hacks for the homescreen and lockscreen, and boy were we impressed. We received over 100 entries in the jailbreaking contest and pretty much all of them were spectacular.
To celebrate the launch of our new Flickr and Instagram groups, we’re giving the 10 best jailbreak screens a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers. After some serious deliberation, we think we’ve got some drool-worthy winners.
Here are the 10 most amazing jailbreak screens:
Apple is an LGBT-friendly company that embraces all sorts of people as long as they are committed to excellence, so it’s bracing to see that they are urging the Supreme Court to support legalizing gay marriage.
The Leap Motion controller could very well be the future of modern desktop computing. It could also just be a really cool invention that is too ahead of its time. We’ll find out in the near future. An exact shipping date has been announced.
After previously saying that it would ship in early 2013, the folks behind Leap Motion have confirmed that the device will start shipping on May 13th to customers who already pre-ordered online. Everyone will be able to pick the Leap Motion up in Best Buy stores around the country May 19th.
Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?
Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.
Spotify has released a major update to its iPhone app that introduces a couple of nice user interface changes.
The app now features a sidebar that can be accessed by swiping from left to right, like Facebook’s iOS app. From the new sidebar menu you can quickly access search, new releases, radio, playlists, your inbox, friends list, and settings. You can swipe to reveal the left sidebar anywhere in the app expect when a song is filling the screen.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — During a Samsung developer conference here at Mobile World Congress this morning, the Korean company unveiled a new service called Samsung Wallet, which lets Samsung smartphone owners turn tickets, coupons, membership cards, boarding passes, and more into digital cards that they can store in a virtual wallet.
The service probably sounds familiar, and it is — Samsung Wallet is basically Apple’s Passbook, but for Samsung phones. It works in almost exactly the same way, and looks very similar, too.
There have been a lot of theories floated for why Foxconn froze new hires earlier this month. Early rumors suggested that iPhone 5 production had slowed, while later reports said that Apple’s new measures to improve working conditions had caused fewer workers than usual to abandon their posts over Chinese New Year.
Now there’s a new theory: Foxconn’s getting out of China, at least in part.
If you use a lot of different browsers, you’ll know that they all want to be your default browser. You’ll also know that, for some weird reason, Apple has you drop into Safari to set any web browser as the default in the first place. If you want links that you click in any other app to open up in a specific browser, you need to set it as the default browser. Which makes doing a lot of work in different browsers on the same Mac a rather tedious exercise.
Objectiv, a free Mac menu bar utility, aims to manage that much more elegantly. Here’s how.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — Here at MWC in Barcelona, Krussell is showing off its latest lineup of waterproof smartphones cases called Sealabox, which let you take your smartphone swimming to snap pictures of the fishes. Available for almost all common smartphones, the Sealabox is IPX7 certified for water resistance up to one meter, and it’s been carefully designed to allow you to make the most of your smartphone in almost any environment.
Remember the Socialmatic concept camera? It was an Instagram icon made flesh, and it worked just like a Polaroid, spitting out a printed version of your filtered and light-leaked image.
Now, after extensive boardroom wrangling no doubt, the camera will actually become a real shipping product, and it’ll carry the Polaroid brand.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – I’m willing to bet that you have – at some point – been frustrated by the App Store. More specifically, you have been driven crazy trying to find apps via search. Even apps which you know are there, which you have used before, and about which you know almost everything but their names.
Quixey is a search engine for Apps, and it will ease your App Store pain.
It had to happen eventually: Photoshop for your phone. As of today you can buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.
It’s understood that iOS cameras are insanely high-quality given their size. The only real knock about them is the fixed lens. Today’s Cult of Mac Deals offer aims to “fix” that – pun totally intended – with this compact lens kit. It includes 3 versatile options that fit snugly over your iOS lens with a tech-friendly magnet – and you can get this kit for only $25 for a limited time!
(Please note: This offer – which includes free shipping – is only available to customers in the United States and Canada.)
Major League Baseball announced that it will be tripling the number of stadiums that will start accepting tickets from Apple’s Passbook app, with thirteen new stadiums coming online to enable paperless, Passbook ticketing, an increase from four stadiums that could do so last season.
Teams that will begin to accept tickets through the Passbook app include the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, with the New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals continuing to accept paperless tickets this way. MLB mentioned that there are three more teams ready to go Passbook, but did not specify which ones.
While you may chalk up any pro-Apple sentiment here as only true to form, it’s perhaps even more telling when there’s another, more impartial group, claiming an Apple win.
Good Technology is one such independent group. The company provides mobile device, app, and data security to over 4000 customers, including banks, healthcare organizations, governments, and retailers. They also do a quarterly Device Activation Report, which looks at the type of mobile devices and uses in the Enterprise. The Q4 report, released today, details which and how many smartphone and tablet devices were activated by Good Technology’s enterprise customers.
Guess what they found? Hint: it’s in the headline.
Amen! A charging case designed for the iPhone 5. Mophie’s new Juice Pack Helium ($79) is one of the first of its kind that work with longer iDevice, so if you find your i5’s often running in the red battery zone by noon each day, read on for the full review. This sleek and slim charging case might just be exactly what you need.
Apple continues to add new capabilities to Siri, but there are still a lot of things the digital assistant can’t do. You can’t use Siri to control third-part music apps like Spotify, toggle settings, or search the App Store.
A jailbreak tweak called AssistantEnhancer takes Siri to the next level by doing all these things and more. It’s the new crown jewel of Siri tweaks, and it contains a ton of useful features that make Siri a more valuable tool.
One of the best games of last year — XCOM: Enemy Unknown — is coming to the Mac, allowing Mac gamers for the first time to tactically repel a full-on invasion of the planet Earth, one turn at a time.
What was once an iPhone-only social network has quickly become one of the world’s largest social behemoths. Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, announced today that the photo-sharing network just surpassed the 100 million active users mark.
Compared to its parent company Facebook, 100 million active users doesn’t sound like much. But when you consider that Twitter just hit the 200 million active users mark last year, Instagram’s got something to be proud of because it’s a much younger service.
Want to hear a good argument for the possibility of Apple launching an iRadio service? According to a couple ofnew report, 2012 is the first time since 1999 that piracy is down, and the music industry has actually grown. And music streaming services like Rdio and Spotify can take all the credit.
BlackBerry has been the preferred handheld for many of the U.S. Department of Defence’s employees because it’s got the security clearance to run on the Pentagon’s network. That might all change in 2014 though when Android and iOS join the party.
The U.S. Defense Department said today that it plans to open up its networks by February 2014 and allow 100,000 mobile phones and tablets from Apple and Google to use the network.
Dropbox is a great service, and I use it both professionally and personally. I share files with friends, presentations and documents with co-workers, and I upload my iPhone photos as well as a secondary backup to PhotoStream, which can be touchy at times. Problem is, I need to ask people if they’re Dropbox users, get the email they’ve associated with the service, then log in to Drobpox and create a shared folder with that person’s email. It’s useful, and not too difficult, but it can be tedious.
That’s where ProxToMe comes in. This free app does all the discovery for you, letting you share any file from your Dropbox account with any other ProxToMe user nearby. Slick!
