Hey! do you have 16 iPad’s and a 13-inch MacBook that you travel with regularly? Are you sick of plugging and unplugging them, and having to roll them in newspaper every time you take a plane?
Well, if you’re happy to put all your iEggs in one tough, roll-along basket and entrust it to the notoriously light-fingers of the airport baggage handlers, then Parat Solutions has just the, uh, solution for you.
App and template designer Jumsoft announced a new collection of images and patterns for Apple’s iWork suite. The new package, known as Elements for iWork, is the company’s eleventh collection of professionally designed images, templates and stationary designed to help businesses, students, and consumers create stunning documents and projects using a range of Mac apps.
Apple stock hit an all-time high of $636.64 per share on Thursday, and today that price continues to rise. The last time Apple jumped above $630 a share was back in April, right before its share price began a six-week decline that knocked $115 off the price — and $100 billion off Apple’s market cap — when it ended on May 18.
It’s unlikely we’ll see a repeat of that now, however. According to one analyst, investors are so keen to plough their money into Apple before the iPhone 5 sends share prices rocketing that there’s no sign of those prices dropping anytime soon.
Here’s an awesome little jailbreak tweak that you might find incredibly useful. It’s called Turn to Hangup, and as its name suggests, it instantly dismisses incoming calls when you place your iPhone on its face.
Reader Chris M asked us yesterday about finding a way to see the source media files in Safari now that the Activity Window has been retired in OS X Mountain Lion. He writes:
A while back you showed a great feature. If you were using Safari watching a video, you could go to WINDOW—-ACTIVITY—and it would show everything on the website and you could Option click on the video file and automatically download it. That feature went away in Mountain Lion. Will you PLEASE write an article and show if there is any way to access this feature any more.
You’re in luck, Chris, as we found just the thing. It’s not quite a full “bringing sexy back” fix, but it should serve the purpose you used the Activity Window for – finding media files in web pages.
iOS hacker and security researcher Pod2g has uncovered a major SMS security flaw with the iPhone that could lead to text message spoofing. The problem is with the way in which the iPhone handles text messages, and it’s present in the latest version of iOS — including the iOS 6 beta 4 release. However, Pod2g insists he’s pleading with Apple to get it fixed.
A professional clown has been arrested for possession of Steve Jobs’s stolen iPad a month after it was taken from the Apple co-founder’s home in Palo Alto, California. 47-year-old Kenny the Clown, whose real name is Kenneth Kahn, was busted in San Francisco while using the stolen device to entertain local kids.
Say what you like about Windows 8, but Microsoft seems to have knocked developers into line when it comes to interface design. Exhibit a: Skype for Not-Metro, which not only matches the minimal tile design of the OS, but manages to make the iOS version look positively baroque.
Twitter has announced some new changes that make it significantly more difficult and tedious to develop third-party software around the social network. We’ve known that Twitter was evolving its business model and changing its attitude towards developers for quite some time, but this recent announcement marks the first major shift towards a closed Twitter. To put it plainly, many developers probably won’t be looking at Twitter as a potential platform to build on anymore.
What’s changed? Along with a host of new rules and restrictions that limit how apps like Flipboard interact with Twitter, developers are now being told to basically stop developing traditional clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot. The golden age of Twitter is over.
Well-known video game developer and publisher, Sega, is taking a cue from publishers like Chillingo and helping indie game studios find their footing in an uncertain market.
The initiative, called the Sega Alliance, will assist independent developers with creative consultation, marketing, production, localization, and distribution tasks. The first indie studio to get this special support from Sega is Owlchemy Labs, the makers of Smuggle Truck and Snuggle Truck for iOS, Mac, and PC.
Last week, Square announced a partnership with Starbucks to provide back-end payment processing and CRM for the coffee mega-company. Today, Square brings news of the other end of the business spectrum. Small businesses who make less than $250,000 per year will no longer have to pay the standard 2.75 percent per swipe processing fee (though they can still opt for this) if they pay one flat rate, currently set at $275 monthly.
If a small businesses chooses the flat rate option, they’ll essentially end up paying 1.3 percent per swipe – a significant savings if they meet the criteria. IF the business goes over the line, they’ll be charged the standard per-swipe rate.
This is Square making sure that it can have as many users as possible, from super corporate giants to small mom and pop shops with a bit of tech savvy.
Yesterday The Wall Street Journal shed some light on Apple’s future plans for the TV, noting that the company was in talks with cable providers to offer live broadcasts through an Apple set-top box. The report also alluded to the possibility of an Apple-branded HDTV.
Tonight The Journal published a follow-up report that adds more details to yesterday’s story, including the not-so-surprising revelation that Apple wants to greatly simplify the overall TV viewing experience.
If you haven’t played Valve’s amazing sequel to its arguably even more awesome original Portal game, now may be the time to jump in. Valve has updated the map editor for Portal 2 to include co-operative levels, called test chambers. Now you can create these yourself and share with the vibrant Portal 2 community on Steam for Mac, according to today’s news from Valve.
Developer Phosphor Games knocks it out of the park with a new, beautiful iOS game named after protagonist, Horn. The game uses the Unreal Engine and multitouch-based gestures to a third-person action adventure game. While the technology, visual style and swipe-based combat in Horn bring to mind Infinity Blade, it’s clear from the start that this is something different.
From the App description:
San Jose CA — Mani Srivastava, PhD Professor at UCLA department is now in court to bust another of Apple’s patents, this time the 460 (No. 7,577,460) U.S. patent. The claims of the patent describes the use of an email program that is allowed to send pictures from a phone, and to scroll through image galleries.
San Jose, CA — After the final financial expert testified on behalf of Samsung after lunch , the defense rested. However, the game is not over yet. There are plenty of follow up witnesses that will be around to fill out the information docket for the jury before they receive the case early next week.
We talk about the iPad’s role in healthcare pretty regularly. Many physicians and health care practices have found innovative ways to integrate the iPad into daily patient interactions. According to a new study, the pharmaceutical industry has discovered that the iPad is an excellent tool for promoting new medications and that it can influence the prescribing habits of doctors.
Apple announced a $45 billion stock dividend and repurchase plan back in March, and the company starts paying its investors today, August 16th. $2.65 per share will be payed out for all owned shares of record as of Monday, August 13th.
Today marks the first dividend Apple has payed out since 1995. If you own Apple stock, you should see the payment deposited in your brokerage account before the day is over.
During its education event in January, Apple unveiled its plans to revolutionize the K-12 classroom with the iPad, electronic textbooks, a revamped version of iTunes U that supports content for K-12 schools as well as higher education, and tools for educators to create their own digital content using iBooks Author and iTunes U.
In the intervening months, schools and districts around the country have made significant investments in iPads, including the San Diego Unified School District, which invested $15 million in 26,000 iPads for its students. Those sales created a record quarter for Apple in the K-12 education market.
With the back to school season upon us, it’s clear that the massive iPad deployments will give Apple the opportunity to disrupt the classroom in the ways it has whole industries and, in many ways, that’s a good thing.
Once again, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has lost her patience with the lawyers at the Apple vs. Samsung trial. As noted in our ongoing Apple vs. Samsung liveblog, a frustrated Judge Koh asked Apple’s attorneys if they were “smoking crack” after trying to book too many few witnesses for their last few hours of making their case.
After the amusing skirmish between the Judge and attorneys on late-filing motions and a quick five-minute testimony from a survey expert, we get a bigger fish to fry in Samsung royalty analyst Vincent O’Brien. He is testifying about similar but separate findings than the earlier witnesses.
Here in the US, if you’re in the military or work in aviation, you might actually use what most of the rest of the world thinks of as standard, 24-hour time. While it will confuse all your US-living friends and relatives when they ask for the time and you show them your iOS device’s lock screen, that’s their issue, right? You, at least, will have the joy of knowing that you are fully prepared for the type of time tracking that most people around the globe use.
The default iOS clock in the US is a 12-hour clock, with AM and PM appended to the numbers to denote morning or evening. The other, more standard way of representing the time is with the 24-hour clock, in which any time after 12:00 is the logical 13:00, 14:00, and so on. It’s really easy to set on your iPhone or other iOS device.
Question: Do you have any idea what the following terms mean?
Multiply, Screen, Layover, Soft Light, Hard Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Addition, Difference, Darken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.
Answer (if you didn’t answer “yes” yourself): They’re blending modes. And a new iOS called Layover lets you use them to combine layered images. Still confused? Read on…
Walk into your local AT&T, Verizon or Sprint store and ask to look at the latest and greatest smartphone. A store employee will show you the Samsung Galaxy lll and other Android phones from the likes of HTC and Motorola. You may be shown a Windows Phone like the Nokia Lumia 900. At Verizon, you’re definitely going to be shown about the Motorola DROID RAZR 4G.
You won’t get pitched the iPhone as easily. In fact, many walk into a store with the plan of buying an iPhone and come out with the latest Android phone in hand.
Why? Employees and customers we’ve spoken to agree that sales reps from all three big carriers discriminate against the iPhone on the store floor, but it’s not a conspiracy: profit margins and device-specific incentives pressure employees to intentionally steer customers away.
Gura Gear’s Kiboko 22L+ ($379) can gulp down multiple DLSRs, two or three lenses, your multitude of other photo accessories, and oh yeah, a 17-inch Macbook Pro, but still fit in the overhead bin of almost any aircraft in the world.
But its tricks don’t stop there.