The new FitBits are -- thankfully -- a lot like the old ones.
FitBit, my favorite fitness and activity-tracking widget, has at last gotten a brother and sister, putting an end to that awkward only-child behavior which surely would have developed otherwise (animal torture; computer programming; you know the drill).
The newborns have been named FitBit Zip and FitBit One, the baby and the smart overachiever of the family, respectively. The One can also sync direct with your iPhone.
In OS X Mountain Lion, you can set a Calendar notification for a repeating event on your iPhone, then get that notification on your Mac. Conversely, you can set a Calendar event on your Mac and get it when you’re out and about with your iPhone. Pretty slick, right? It’s all a part of Apple’s new iCloud integration, and it works pretty well.
But what if you really don’t want to be notified of a certain type of event when you’re on your Mac? In OS X Mountain Lion, you now have a few more options for notifications that come from Calendar.
Apple has issued a press release this morning confirming that iPhone 5 pre-orders topped two million units during its first 24 hours of availability. That’s more than double the record held by the handset’s predecessor, the iPhone 4S, and Apple has warned that while the majority of pre-orders will be delivered on launch day, September 21, “many” are scheduled to be delivered in October.
With Apple’s initial iPhone 5 pre-order stock gone within just one hour on Friday, we knew the company’s sixth-generation smartphone was going to be huge. Even Apple itself has said that it has been “blown away” by the demand. It’s little surprise to hear that the iPhone 5 has broken AT&T’s sale record, then, making it the fastest-selling iPhone the company has ever sold.
MacHeist 4’s first nanoMission is live as of now, according to an email I just got from the organizers. Solving this one will net you one copy of NetShade, a $30 anonymous proxy software for your Mac that will let you search all those websites privately. While the prize isn’t a slam dunk by any means, it’s a nice little bit of kit for relatively little effort along with a bit of fun. Oh, and you’ll also be helping MacHeist donate 25% of the proceeds to a charity cause, so it’s definitely worth the karma points.
With all the changes in the web and graphic design world, I hope you don’t think for a moment that Adobe has diminished one iota as the king of graphics and layout. Good. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about learning these infernal apps.
I don’t know anyone who uses Adobe apps who doesn’t have even just a touch of a love-hate relationship with the tools. Which makes learning Adobe apps with Adobe Authorized training all the more awesome. Even more awesome when you get get $100 worth of training for less than $50—Learn Web Design With Train Simple
Ticket to Ride Pocket is one of those games whose very existence seems absurd. It’s an iPhone version of an iPad version of an online game that originally gained popularity — massive popularity — as a board game. But the talented people over at Days of Wonder (who publish the entire series) managed, inconceivably, to make a triumph of TTR Pocket through careful execution and attention to detail. And today is your last chance to own it for free, before it heads back up to $2 at midnight.
Veteran iPhone case-maker Incase sent us this image of all four iPhone forms in profile — each covered by a version of their Slider cases, which, as Incase says, has been available since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. We thought we’d share it; simple, yet fascinating, isn’t it. The pace of change has slowed somewhat of late. At least, cosmetically anyway.
Oh, right — the Slider; you can pre-order your $35 iPhone 5 Slider case now, and Incase will ship one to you when they become available in October.
With iOS 6 right around the corner, Google’s official YouTube app for iPhone couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s a great app — much better than Apple’s built-in YouTube app — and it’s headlining this week’s must-have apps roundup. It’s accompanied by Poster, a great new blogging app; Journal for Evernote, and Google Drive.
Look at that. Just look at it. That’s Samsung’s latest anti-iPhone 5 advert. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Not only is it one of the most slanted product comparisons I’ve ever seen, but it’s got a pitiful message: “Our phone is better because our contrived spec list is longer!”
SAN FRANCISCO — American companies are rightly proud to show off any manufacturing facilities supporting jobs during the current recession, and San Francisco-based Timbuk2 is no exception. This week, the company known for its messenger bags showed us the hangar here in the Mission district where workers cut and sew colorful swaths of material and help contribute to the local manufacturing economy.
As a group of reporters was ushered through the trendy open-plan set-up, it made us think about what a factory tour of Apple’s manufacturing plants would be like. We’ll never know, of course. Tim Cook would never allow a tour like this one.
Our all-new CultCast is an Apple iPhone 5 media event extravaganza, and you my friend, have a front row seat.
Don’t miss this special episode, where we’ll tell you everything you want to know about Apple’s new iPhone 5, iPod Nano and Touch — we even include a discussion on Apple’s new EarPods, the most amazing perfect best earphones ever engineered… PERIOD.
Plus, the feature we’ve all been waiting for is here: the iPod touch Loop! We’ll ponder how we ever lived without this amazing new iLanyard, and what life looks like now that it finally lives among us.
You’ve created a great app. Maybe you learned how to code it up through the Learn To Code Bootcamp Bundle, but do you have your website ready for it? I blows my mind how many times I try to learn more about an app (especially when I want to review it) and the website either isn’t complete or just looks…bad.
We get nearly all our official information about Apple and its products through occasional announcements or developers conferences, such as the big announcement this week in San Francisco.
As we approach each event, there are things we know, things we don’t know.
During the event, there’s a reshuffling. Some questions are answered during the announcement. And some questions emerge from the announcement itself that remain unanswered.
Here are the 6 biggest questions that were either unanswered in the event, or which emerged from the event.
Fieldrunners 2 is finally available in HD on the iPad, and it’s headlining this week’s must-have games roundup. It’s accompanied by a terrific new platformer called Apocalypse Mac, Miniclip’s answer to Temple Run, and a wonderful adventure golf game that I can’t put down.
The only people that really need to know all of the iPhone 5’s dimensions down to the nearest hundredth of a millimeter are case manufacturers, and rabid fanboys that can’t devour enough Apple knowledge. Apple posted the blueprints for the iPhone 5 in the developer center, but for some reason they can be accessed by anyone even if you don’t have an account.
The full high-res blueprints show crazy small details, like the degree of the proximity cone for the camera, and the difference in thickness between the antenna band and the display screen. It’s everything you’d need to know to make your own iPhone 5 case. To access the entire high-res blueprint PDF you can click here.
So, I’m hanging out on Twitter, basking in the Tweet-flow (you know what I mean, right?), when I start to notice this thing happening. FTL. I see it in a tweet by a game developer I follow. Then I see it in a tweet by another smart person I follow. Then it’s almost everywhere. FTL. FTL. Starship captaining (is that a real word?). FTL.
I think, “For the Loss?” Well, maybe. Or perhaps, “Faster Than Light,” says my inner sci-fi geek. Looking it up on the interwebs, I see that it does, indeed, refer to the speed at which we cannot go, and it is for sure a sci-fi geek’s dream. I also notice that it came out today, which is why everything’s all a-twitter.
Sword of Fargoal 2, an upcoming game for Mac OS X, iOS, PC, and Linux, just launched a fund raising project on Kickstarter. This will be a sequel to the iOS and Mac OS X game that was itself a re-imagining of the original Commodore 64 game from 1980.
The team is high-end, as it includes original developer Kevin McCord, developer Paul Pridham (Saucelifter, Punch Quest), Emmy award-winning animator Charlie Canfield, and British composer Daniel “LittleBigPlanet” Pemberton–all of whom contributed to the highly-reviewed iOS/Mac port from a couple years ago, published by Chillingo/EA.
The Kickstarter campaign was launched to help take the sequel, Sword of Fargoal 2, from 80 percent done to fully done. The extra funding will help the team add new music, animations, and graphics to the game, as well as polish up the game engine itself to ensure fluid movement and controls.
Add another mark in the “winning” column for Apple today, as a judge from the US branch of the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Apple did not infringe any of the four patents brought before the commission by Samsung.
Judge James Gildea posted his ruling in a short notice on the court’s website. He also found that Samsung was unable to prove that it had a “domestic industry” that used the patents in question. This last bit has to do with a requirement of the ITC that the patents being brought before the court must actually be used in the same country as that court. This ruling is preliminary; the full ITC panel will review the ruling early next year.
Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, an updated release of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons role playing game coming from Bioware, has been delayed until November 30, 2012, according to the company’s forum. The Mac and iPad version was scheduled to release in September, sometime soon after a September 18 PC release date.
Now, all three versions will ship at the end of November.
During the onslaught of iPhone 5 news that’s been circulating this week, a tethered jailbreak for the final iOS 6 Golden Master (GM) was released. The iPhone Dev-Team announced the update yesterday.
While iOS 6 will be unleashed for the public to download on September 19th, hackers have already been working on finding exploits to create a public jailbreak release.
According to the first day of preorders, the iPhone 5 is anything but disappointing.
Shipping estimates for iPhone 5 preorders slipped to 2-3 weeks only a few short hours after they were made available this morning, and initial stock continues to dwindle as the day wears on. Apple is expected to shatter the previous preorder sales record it set with the iPhone 4S, and demand for a new iPhone has never been higher.
Although specific preorder sales numbers have not yet been released, Apple has said that it’s “blown away” by how well the iPhone 5 has done so far.
As of next week, when Apple starts shipping the iPhone 5, the standard earbuds supplied with its portable devices will be superseded by the new EarPods. From the outside, these look a lot like the iconic white buds they replace. But yank them out of your ear and you’ll see that the design is quite unlike any earbuds you’ve ever seen.
The product blurb tells us that they’re resistant to sweat, and that they sound as good as headphones many times the price. It also says that they tenaciously hold on to your earholes, even when doing sports, and that they do this while remaining comfortable. So how do these claims hold up?
I don’t know about you, but I spend too much time waiting for the Camera app shutter to open so I can take a photo with my iPhone. The problem with that, of course, is that I miss a lot of shots that way, even when I’m using the lock-screen camera swipe.
Luckily, there’s a simple way to make things move a lot faster when trying to take a quick action shot with your iPhone.