With Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone set to make its debut this year, there’s no doubt the company has a number of prototype devices — all with different designs and specifications — in testing within its Cupertino headquarters. One of those handsets is said to feature a 3.95-inch widescreen display with a 640 x 1136 resolution that’s taller than all the existing 3.5-inch iPhone displays we’ve seen to date.
Using your iPad on a plane or a train can be a frustrating experience, especially if you’re attempting to use a wireless keyboard at the same time. But the Arctic Flight is a new Kickstarter project that hopes to change that. It’s a lightweight case and stand that’s fully adjustable and designed specifically for use in flight.
It fits perfectly onto those tiny pull-down trays, and it has one novel feature than means you’ll never have to hold onto your iPad through a whole movie again.
Tired of connecting and disconnecting a ton of cords and peripherals to and from your MacBook Pro? Product developer Veritas Forge certainly was, but unlike me (or you, most likely), these guys actually went ahead and invented something to solve their issues.
Elgato has announced Game Capture HD, a USB device that will record gameplay from a Microsoft Xbox 360 or Sony PlayStation 3 and send it to a Mac or PC. The little dongle requires no power supply, and it uses HDMI to record HD footage from a Xbox 360 and AV to record from a PlayStation 3. Elgato uses H.264 video compression to capture 480i, 576p, 720p or 1080i video. Theoretically, Game Capture HD will also work to capture most signals from other HDMI/component-enabled devices.
When capturing gameplay footage with the new device, you can still keep playing on a regular TV via HDMI. The desktop software allows you to edit and timeshift footage before saving it or sharing the video on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
A host of Hollywood celebrities payed special tribute to late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs tonight at the 2012 Webby Awards. The special segment of Monday night’s show was introduced by the actors from Apple’s famous ‘Mac vs. PC’ TV ads, Justin Long and John Hodgman. Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who narrated the original Apple ‘Think Different’ ad, also took the stage to honor Jobs’ legacy.
Celebrities like Bill Clinton, George Lucas, Adrianna Huffington, Bono, Al Gore, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Colbert and John Stewart payed tribute to Jobs in a short video clip. The mashup ended with President Barack Obama saying, “We only need one word to describe Steve Jobs: amazing.”
Sprint has just announced the availability of the HTC Bluetooth music adaptor for wirelessly streaming music from your phone through your car stereo speakers. It’s a fairly expensive adaptor at $59.99 and considering it plugs into a 3.5mm aux port, it’ll leave you wondering “why not just buy a cheap aux cable?”
Popular music streaming service Spotify is now available in Australia and New Zealand, making the platform available in a grand total of 15 countries. Spotify lets its users stream 16 million tracks via its desktop and mobile apps, and the service is updated every week with new albums and releases.
May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.
Tangoe is a company with a long history of wired and mobile telecom expense management. The company offers incredible hand-on services for evaluating communications expenses and offering cost saving advice for small/mid-size businesses and large enterprises alike. Tangoe’s biggest advantage is that it offers real-time review of telecom bills tied to specific departments, users, and device – and that it uses that data to build a specialized telecom expense plan for its clients. The company also offers a solid range of device and app management. However, Tangoe’s real-time expense management capabilities are the company’s signature features.
The iOS 5 Notification Center displays incoming messages in a couple of ways. When you have an iOS device unlocked, a new message can be shown via a small banner notification at the top of the screen. A regular alert can be displayed for certain apps, and incoming notifications are also pushed to the iOS lock screen when a device is locked. The system works well, but Apple restricts the amount of text you can see in a given notification. If you want to read an entire message that’s more than a sentence or two, you have to open the associated app.
The jailbreak community has improved the way Notification Center handles longer messages. A new Cydia tweak called Reveal lets you view long chunks of text from a banner or lock screen notification.
Facebook has launched its official iPhone app for managing Pages. After a slow rollout throughout other parts of the world, Facebook Pages Manager for iPhone is free and available now in the U.S. App Store. If you manage Pages on Facebook, this app will let you check statistics, post, comment, and more on the go.
Panic, the company behind popular Mac app Coda, has announced the second major version of its prized web development tool. Coda 2 for Mac will launch on May 24th alongside a new app for the iPad called Diet Coda. Version 2.0 of Coda is “better at everything,” according to Panic, and Diet Coda will allow you to preview your code live on the iPad as you write on the Mac. The iPad app will also let you make quick edits to your code on the go.
This post is brought to you by FakhrApps, publisher of the My English Translator app.
Language translation software can easily make you appear to be saying something downright preposterous. It can also get you a slap in the face when smiles and hand gestures would have done a better job of getting your intentions properly understood by your non-English-speaking foreign acquaintance.
But here comes a dependable mobile translator: the just-released $0.99 My English Translator, which aims to put an end to English incomprehension everywhere you go with a new app for iPhone / iPad.
The app can translate any text or idiomatic expression in fifty-nine different languages including Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian, Yiddish, Norwegian… even Latin. My English Translator works in real-time as you type for instant translations, and its voice feature speaks the results in the correct pronunciation.
The rumor mill has been saying for many months that Apple is planning a 4-inch iPhone for release later this year. Two major publications, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, recently hopped on the bandwagon to “confirm” the rumor. All signs are pointing to a larger iPhone, but what does that mean for iOS developers?
People have hypothesized all kinds of ways Apple could make an iPhone with a larger screen and still make it easy for developers to update their apps. The general consensus seems to be that Apple could change the aspect ratio for a taller display, but now the people that actually make apps have weighed in on the topic. While it’s unclear exactly how a new screen size would be implemented, developers feel confident that Apple won’t “pull an Android” and create a fragmented mess.
Reminders is a pretty powerful task list app. While it’s not a full project management suite, it does the ToDo job nicely with an easy to use user interface, location-based notification triggers, and iCloud syncing. In today’s tip, we’ll walk you through the basics of using Reminders app in a more efficient manner than just tapping away and hoping it all works out.
If you’re a freelance or independent developer, designer, content jockey or two-person startup, you may not even consider yourself a small business.
But the client data on your laptop and the banking you do with your iPhone leaves you wide open as a target for hackers — and lawyers.
For Neal O’Farrell, executive director of the San Francisco nonprofit Identity Theft Council, thinking you’re too small to get serious about security is about as dumb as you can get.
In my neverending quest to find the perfect iPad case, I’ve been giving the DODOcase a spin with my new iPad for the last several weeks. I’ve used Incase’s book jacket for the longest time on my iPad 2, and I wanted to change things up when I got the third-gen iPad.
Based in a bookbindery and wood shop in sunny San Francisco, DODOcase has been an award-winning brand for iPad cases since 2010. Built with pinpoint precision for the newest iPad, the DODOcase lineup blends nostalgia and the cutting edge into a charming combination.
If I was to ask you what kind of product is the PlugBook, what would you say? If you guessed that it’s a power adapter in the shape of a book, then congratulations! You just won today’s Cult of Mac Cup Of Awesomeness, which means you can go have a drink alone in your local bar.
What’s Snabbit? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s Snake, all over again. Is gaming still all about collecting stars? This game is.
LTE devices, including iPads, offer users two major advantages: speeds typically faster than many wired providers (in my neck of the woods, Verizon LTE is just over twice as fast as Time Warner’s Roadrunner Turbo) and ubiquitous access for LTE devices (and any devices tethered to them) that is a lot more convenient than relying on public network or hotspots like those found in your neighborhood Starbucks. A downside is that LTE’s speeds make it easy to rack up a large bill.
If you’re looking for another high-speed wireless option that offers better bang for your buck, there’s one joining the field to consider – and it’s coming from an unlikely source with an unlikely price. Five major cable companies are joining forces to deliver ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage for any of their subscribers… for free.
“Oh. Oh. Oh!” was the ejaculative ‘sentence’ I uttered when I saw the press release for this new Micro Four Thirds lens. It comes from Panasonic, and runs from 12-35mm, or 24-70 in old money, and also packs in image stabilization.
That’s fine. But the reason I’m excited is that the maximum aperture is a constant ƒ2.8 along the whole zoom range — a first for mirrorless systems says Panasonic.
FarSight Studios, creators of Pinball Arcade, is looking for your help to digitize one of the greatest pinball machines of all time: The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone table was released by Midway under the Bally label and is currently number one in user rankings on the Internet Pinball Database. Many pinball experts consider it to be the most complex pinball machine ever created, and being able to preserve it in digital form is a dream of FarSight Studios.
AT&T is one of 48 carriers worldwide which have a network vulnerability that allows hackers to intercept cellular data and inject malicious content into the traffic that passes between smartphones and the websites they visit. The flaw can be used to transfer code to unencrypted pages which causes a user to perform unintended actions, like sending messages or friend requests from Facebook and Twitter. And your iPhone may be vulnerable.
Finally, a magnetic iPhone mount that won’t embarrass you, either when actually mounted on the wall or in transit. It’s called the Wallee M, and it is about as sleek as a mounting set could get.
One way to look at the consumerization of IT is as a democratization of workplace technology decisions. Executives and employees alike have become much more sophisticated users of technology. Through iPhones and iPads, they see how well-designed devices, platforms, and apps can create enjoyable and, more importantly, productive user experiences. As a result, they don’t tolerate clunky business systems and slow IT responses as much as they did a few years ago.
Many executives and pundits believe this has already changed the balance of power between the CIO/IT management and the CFO and other executives. A recent Gartner survey found that overall, CFOs are leading IT decision-making more than they were just two years ago. One could even argue that in addition to disrupting industries like music and mobile technology, Apple is subtly disrupting IT and business itself (with some help from other tech and business innovators).
Imagine that you could buy a tiny USB-powered box that detected your motion like Microsoft’s Kinect, only instead of watching you jump around a room, it watched your hands and fingers. Imagine that the box was sensitive enough to track the tip of a pencil tracing out letters in a 1cm square of space, and to turn that into accurate handwriting on the screen.
Amazingly, that box is available for preorder right now. It’s called the Leap, and it works with your Mac.