It was recently reported that Apple’s retail employees around the world have been experiencing staffing cutbacks. Word on the street was that some major internal changes were taking place within Apple Retail, and new hires were getting laid off in stores on multiple continents.
In a very uncharacteristic move, Apple today publicly admitted that it “messed up” with recent changes to its retail staffing, and that things will be going back to the way they were before the layoffs.
Instagram 3.0 is launching today on both Android and iPhone. Whereas previous updates focused on bug fixes, new filters, and speed enhancements, Instagram 3.0 is brings some big UI changes so users can interact with photos in a new way. The key? Geotagging and Photomaps.
Hidden Radio, a Bluetooth speaker and radio so minimalist it makes a sheet of blank paper look like something from a Jules Verne story, has finally emerged from a lengthy Kickstarter pupation to go on sale in a web store near you.
It’s stylish, it’s loud and it lasts longer than most other Bluetooth speakers around. What’s not to like?
Apple neglected to give its iPod line any real attention last year, and so it seems likely the devices will receive a much-anticipated refresh before the holidays. Still, we’ve seen little evidence of this, but one German rewards club has promised that there will be a new iPod nano this fall, and that the “old” model is no longer available from Apple.
If you’ve got a fairly recent MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you’ll know that typing in a dark room is a breeze thanks to its backlit keyboard. It now seems as though Apple is looking to extend this feature to the trackpad as well. In a new patent filing entitled “Illuminated Touchpad”, the Cupertino company describes a new touch-sensitive input technology that doesn’t just light up, but also provides an “improved feedback mechanism.”
Could Apple be working on their own answer to Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator: a sophisticated program for professionals doing photo manipulation and digital illustrating? If a new patent is anything to go by, yes, and it won’t just be a major innovation on the Mac… it will work on the iPad as well.
When it comes to iPhoneography, “retro” usually refers to adding some light leaks, desaturating some colors or adding fake grain. But for Jake Potts, it means taking the iPhone’s rear glass panel, turning it into a wet collodion plate and taking a real photograph with it. And because he’s a true photo nerd, he also documented every step of the process.
QuickDraw is about as apt a name for a gadget as any we’ve ever seen. And the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that obviousness extends to its function: Quickdraw is a lens bayonet that hangs on your belt and lets you clip any spare lenses around your waist, read to for – you guessed it – a quick draw.
When Apple purchased AuthenTec back in July for $356 million, the news was a surprise to us all. Unlike most of the company’s movements, this one hadn’t been surrounded by rumor and speculation for months prior to the official announcement, and none of us saw it coming. But now it’s time to take note, because the acquisition could spell exciting things for future iOS devices.
You see, Apple acquired AuthenTec for its 2D fingerprint scanners, which it insisted it needed urgently due to its “product plans and ongoing engineering efforts.” This suggests the Cupertino company is ready to use the technology sooner rather than later — fueling speculation that it will make its debut in the sixth-generation iPhone as the perfect accompaniment to Passbook.
If you can’t make it through the day without some D&D (I’m not talking Dungeons & Dragons you nerds) then this next bit of news is for you. Dunkin’ Donuts wants to keep you running with their new app for Android and iOS. Released today, the Dunkin’ Donuts app allows customers to easily locate the nearest D&D, make payments, gift DD, and more. The app is supposed to make your Dunkin’ run easier, but the payment system seems a bit awkward to me.
I generally don’t favor Apple-themed wallpapers on my Macs or iOS devices, but I just had to make an exception for these meticulously designed, beautifully rendered schematic wallpapers for the iPhone by Ethan Allen Smith. If anything could give you an appreciation of the majestic geometry and elegant ratios that define every visual aspect of iOS, right down to the badges on every icon or where the pips at the bottom of every homescreen are placed, a couple days with these wallpapers will have you thinking hard about them: in iOS, every little line means something.
Smith has provided two wallpapers: one for the standard homescreen and one for the iOS lockscreen. The lockscreen one is nice, but it’s the homescreen wallpaper that really shines.
Magnificent. I hope these get updated for the longer homescreen of the iPhone 5. You can download them at the link below.
This handsome retro-styled accessory is the Textile iCable from Eastern Collective, a dock-connector with its wire wound in cotton to make it look like an old-timey kettle lead or even a bicycle pump adapter. And if I wasn’t banking on Apple switching over to a new dock connector for all future iDevices (and if I didn’t already have a drawer full of white cables), I’d probably already have ordered a few.
Now here’s a slick new way of interacting with tabs in Safari. When you open a bunch of tabs in Safari, it gets a little hard to figure out which tab is which, right? You can, of course, use Command-Shift-Arrow (right or left) to move between tabs, but that’s only reliable if the site you’re tabbing over to doesn’t auto-focus your cursor to a search field, like YouTube or Google does.
Luckily, it urns out that Apple has again made things a bit more iOS like in its flagship Mac operating system, OS X Mountain Lion. To check this tip out on your own, launch Safari on your Mac (be sure you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) and open a few tabs.
Apple has seeded a new OS X Lion 10.7.5 build to registered developers through the Apple Dev Center. It comes with build number 11G36, and weighs in at 1.15GB for the delta release, or 1.92 GB for the combo update.
Google has issued an update to Google+ for iOS that makes it the first app to offer an “Open in Chrome” button for URLs. Version 3.1 also brings teen Hangouts, and bug fixes that promise to improve performance.
Last year, Nicholas G. was 12-years-old. He convinced his dad to get him a developer account from Apple, and began to learn how to program apps.
Nicholas is now 13, and the second update to his first app, Quick Notes!!, is out on the App Store. Version 1.0, says Nicholas, has already accrued over 3,000 downloads. How many downloads did your app have when you were 13? Mine didn’t have any. It still doesn’t.
Better yet? Nicholas hasn’t taken a programming class, at school or on the internet.
The Enough Project released a report today that ranks the top technology companies on how well each one is doing in wiping out the use of “conflict minerals” like tantalum, tin, and tungsten in their products. Apple, HP, Intel, Motorola are at the top of the list, while Nintendo is at the bottom, along with HTC, Sharp, Nikon, and Canon.
The minerals in question, mined in areas of armed conflict and human rights abuses, are used in many technology products around the globe, and The Enough Project – a non-profit arm of the Center for American Progress – tracks these in its effort to combat crimes against humanity.
The iPhone 5 and iPad mini sections of the rumor mill have been churning nonstop as of late, but there hasn’t been any rumors surrounding the future of the Apple TV for quite some time.
Today a report sheds more light on the future of the Apple TV by noting that Apple is in talks with major cable providers to stream live television to a set-top box.
At the end of a long trial day, US District Court Judge Lucy Koh, who’s been the presiding justice over the course of both pre-trial and actual trial, urged that Apple and Samsung speak together to try and resolve their differences out of court before the jury comes back to deliberate on the evidence that has been presented by both sides this week and last.
“It’s time for peace,” Koh said, adding, “I see risks here for both sides.”
Patent analyst Stephen Gray is the next and final witness of the day from Samsung. He’s expected to talk about the limitations of the Apple patent at issue, as well as the same prior art touch screen applications that Van Dam talked about a few minutes ago.
San Jose, CA — The Samsung vs. Apple trial continues in the afternoon with testimony from Dr. Andries van Dam, a pioneer in computing graphics and a long-time professor at Brown University. He is here in the Federal courthouse to invalidate the ‘381 Apple patent of “snap-back” touch screen functionality by identifying “prior art” design of gadgets before the iPhone and iPad innovations.
Gizmodo has posted a photo today of what they claim to be the screen for the alleged iPad Mini we’ve been hearing so much about. Apparently, the screen is exactly 7.85 inches diagonally, which lines up with current expectations of the device.
Interestingly enough, the screen doesn’t have a standard 4:3 aspect ratio like the current iPad, although if recent rumors are to be believed, this very well might just be the case.
Round 3 of the Android Humble Bundle has landed and we couldn’t be happier. Not only do you get to pay-what-you-want, but you also get to support charity and the great devs who have donated their games. All game included in the Humble Bundle are multi-platform, DRM-free, and independently developed games. There are currently four games listed along with a fifth “bonus” game for those who pay more than the average (which is $6.03 at the time of this post).
Apple’s Volume Purchase Program (VPP) is the company’s half-hearted attempt to deliver some form of enterprise licensing program for the iOS App Store. The program does make it marginally easier for businesses to bulk purchase and deploy apps to iPhones and iPads than telling employees to buy apps and then reimbursing them, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. As we reported earlier this summer, many businesses and school still feel Apple doesn’t meet their app purchase and deployment needs.
Mobile app management (MAM) vendor App 47 summed up some of the key issues and how it can help companies deal with them as part of the company’s summer lecture series on app management.
Coming soon to an iPhone, iPad or Mac near you? H.265 video, which will deliver video quality in half the file size of the old H.264 standard, and open the door for the Retina-quality video formats of the next ten years.
Known as High Efficiency Video Coding and MPEG-H Part 2, the new compression standard uses just half the bit rate for the same visual quality as H.264. Likewise, you can double the resolution of a video in the same file size. It supports resolutions of up to 7680 x 4320, making it future-proof through the new 4K and 8K HDTV resolutions.
MPEG has now officially released the draft, with H.265 expected to start hitting apps, devices and graphics chips starting 2013. iPad 4 featuring H.265 support, anyone?