Rumors have been saying for the past two years that Facebook is working on its own smartphone. According to The New York Times today, Facebook has been hiring former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone and iPad. The new talent will reportedly help Facebook try to build its own smartphone by next year, according to the report.
It’s the next big thing. It’s what makes all the great—and cool—websites, not to mention powerful mobile apps (like LinkedIn’s new app for iOS). What is it? HTML 5 and CSS. Demand for HTML5-powered sites is going through the roof. Everyone wants an amazing site that behaves just like an app. The question is, do you know HTML 5? No? Now you can learn.
For only $49 you get 60 lectures with over 7 hours of video content on learning HTML5 and CSS brought to you by Udemy, one of the leaders in online video education. These lessons are taught by experts at Infinite Skills and start you right off at the beginning. Start with “basic” and get all the way to “amazing” at your own pace. You can watch, and re-watch, all the lessons as many times as you need. In fact, you have lifetime access to these lessons from Udemy, so you can always go back an get a refresher when you need it. How’s that for a deal? Only $49 and you can become a web wizard and start making the next big thing.
Convergence. It’s all the rage, lately, and what better two items to converge than your Mac, running OS X, and your iPad (or iPhone, or iPod touch), running iOS? IT’s two great tastes that taste great together, to quote an old commercial that mostly no one has heard of any more.
With these five tips, you’ll amaze your friends with a Mac that looks more like your iPad than it does your Mac. So, read on, intrepid souls, and follow our steps to make that sweet Apple computer into something resembling the post-PC magical device we all love.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a new web browser from Yahoo! called Axis, which hopes to redefine web searching on desktops and iOS devices. We’ve also got a terrific app for web editors, one that’ll help you monitor which apps are accessing your personal data, and two new apps from Facebook.
Not only does Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster see Apple’s and its investors’ financial outlook as essentially rosy for the foreseeable future, but he’s taking it one step further. He’s convinced that he has at least ten reasons to stay bullish on Apple stock over the next three years. He also thinks the stock price is going to hit $1000 per share.
Rich King Casting is looking for people to work on a “movie in Silicon Valley / Palo Alto based on Steven Jobs.” The casting company is looking for folks with that quintessential seventies look, with “longish hair, sideburns etc.”
In addition, if you have a car that was around in 1965 to 1973, the’d be interested in checking them out as well. The Craigslist ad also promises “Pay when working and meals included,” which sounds like a fantastic deal to me.
The site Patently Apple Wednesday posted a detailed analysis of a new Apple patent application for an iPen, a vibrating pen that makes noise.
The application describes a haptic stylus containing a tiny speaker, which is designed to be used on touch screens.
Apple watchers are scratching their heads over this one. Apple is going to sell tablets with pens like the Microsoft Tablet PC, or phones with pens like the Samsung Galaxy Note?
Not exactly.
But the iPen patent does hint at amazing and brilliant things to come — for Apple and the entire PC industry.
Men in Black 3, the official game of one of this year’s biggest action blockbusters, is now available on iPhone and iPad, finally giving you the opportunity to create and manage your own MiB agency and protect New York from the scum of the universe. It’s completely free and its leading this week’s must-have games roundup, which also includes Sega’s first Virtua Tennis title for iOS, a stunning new game from Chillingo, and more.
The weekend hasn’t arrived quite yet, as Apple has quietly pushed out a revised build of iOS 5.1.1 for the GSM iPhone 4 (AT&T). The update (Build 9B208) is available now only for GSM iPhone 4 owners who have not yet updated to the 5.1.1. If you have a GSM iPhone 4 on 5.1.1 already, you won’t be able to grab this second (seemingly identical) update.
Apple has re-released iOS builds in the past, but this time around there seems to be no known bug fixes or changes. It’s also interesting that the update is only for GSM iPhone 4 owners. Some sort of changes must be included, but Apple has provided no documentation. There’s a chance that updated builds for other devices could pop up, so we’ll keep you posted.
More casting details have surfaced today for the Steve Jobs indie biopic starring Ashton Kutcher. Actress Ahna O’Reilly, most known for her role in The Help, will star opposite Kutcher as Chris-Ann Brennan, the love interest of Steve Jobs.
The biopic, titled jOBS, is expected to start filming next month and be made available later this year.
Today the Chronic Dev Team released a new version of Absinthe, the popular tool used to jailbreak iPhones, iPads, and iPods. In this video, I’ll show how to jailbreak your device running iOS 5.1.1 with Absinthe.
Auction house Sothebys has just posted a memo written by Steve Jobs to his co-workers at Atari, where he worked before starting Apple. The memo was written to his then-supervisor Stephen Bristow, and suggested changes Jobs had for Atari’s World Cup Soccer arcade game to extend the shelf life for arcade owners.
Funnily enough, while the memo is typed on Atari letterhead, it includes a stamp with the name of Steve’s company, “All-One Farm Design” and the address of the garage in which he and friend Steve Wozniak would soon create history with Apple Computer. Imagine if he’d gone ahead with designing farms?
How many 7th Graders can say they best selling authors? Well this group of kids from Woodlawn Beach Middle School in Northern Florida can thanks to their teacher Andrea Santilli and iBooks Author.
Ms. Santilli, a self-professed “die-hard Mac girl”, was looking for a new way to not only challenge her Advanced Life Sciences class, but also leverage technology to make learning fun. Not to mention get some practical experience in the real world of writing, photography, video, and ebook publishing. Just a few minutes with this free ebook and you can see how much potential there is for iBooks Author and iPads in the classroom. Not to mention you’ll probably learn something interesting.
Now that you’ve successfully jailbroken your iPhone 4S running iOS 5, what do you install? Whether you’re new to Cydia or a jailbreak veteran, we’ve gathered a list of the best jailbreak apps available for Apple’s latest smartphone.
There are a handful of intrinsic beliefs that Apple has as company – most of which came from Steve Jobs. The constant focus on building experiences rather than just products is one of them. Another is that Apple looks forward and not backward when it comes to technology. The company simply acknowledges that to offer its users truly great new experiences (and products), it cannot hold onto (and be held back by) outdated technology.
Apple often gets criticized for pushing its technologies and its users forward, particularly in business and enterprise IT circles. Despite that criticism, Apple may be doing companies (and users) a big favor by not supporting older Macs and OS X releases indefinitely as Microsoft does with Windows XP – and that advantage isn’t just about better products.
An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft discovered that supporting XP now costs companies and schools five times what it would cost them to support Windows 7 – making Apple’s forward-looking policy not only technically advantageous but also significantly less expense in the long run.
Samuel L. Jackson may love Siri, but are every-day users as smitten? Find out what we think on our latest CultCast.
And someone call King Arthur, Jony Ive just got knighted. But is he ready to protect the realm?
All that and our thoughts on Facebook’s new Camera app on The CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes and read on for our show notes.
Some people are never satisfied. They are always searching for the app that brings just the tiniest advantage to their daily workflow. People like this might not want to just stick with the Reminders app that’s bundled in with iOS 5, no. They might want to try an alternative. One such alternative is NotifyMe. Let us tell you a bit more about it.
The Chronic Dev Team has pushed out a minor update to its Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak. The tool was only released this morning, but this new update addresses issues where the software can freeze up during the process of jailbreaking. If you’re having trouble jailbreaking your iOS device on iOS 5.1.1 with Absinthe, grab this update now.
With the release of the iPhone 4S and its super incredible camera, point-and-shoots were supposed to be dead. What’s the point of buying a compact digital camera if it only takes photos that are the same, or slightly better than the iPhone in your pocket? For the most part, I think we’re right in saying that the point-and-shoot is destined to become a relic. However, there are certain exceptions to that rule.
I love my iPhone 4S so much that I don’t want to endanger its gorgeous glass body. I also love hiking in the summer and water activities, and even if I buy a military grade case for my iPhone, I still get scared when taking it on outdoor adventures. That’s where the Olympus TG-820 point-and-shoot comes in. It’s waterproof and shockproof, and ready to go where you’re too scared to take your iPhone.
Another day, another neat, camera-like iPhone case. But I promise you that this one is different. First, it manages to be highly functional without doing very much at all. Secondly, it’s actually a case you will want to keep on your iPhone and carry around with you all day.
With Office 2011, Microsoft killed off Entourage—and I don’t think anyone shed tears over that—and brought in Outlook for Mac. Outlook 2011 for Mac brings a lot of the power of Outlook for Windows to the Mac for the first time, but the question is—can you master it?
In this special course you’ll learn Outlook for Mac 2011 for only $24! That’s over half off for three and a half hours of hands-on instruction on Outlook. This is an in-depth course that will make you an Outlook Jedi in no time.
Over the course of May, we’ve highlighted a number of different mobile management companies in our Mobile Management Month series. Profiling these companies made me realize how much the mobile management market has expanded to include cloud or SaaS options in addition to on-premise servers installed inside a company’s network.
That’s hardly surprising really – after all cloud models are being applied to almost every type of business computing need.
There are several significant and attractive advantages to using a cloud service as your approach to mobile management, particularly for small businesses.
Vowels are dropped from names so commonly these days that it can only end with the leftover consonants becoming so jammed together that they will densify and densify into some kind of alphanumerical black hole, dragging in all words until us humans will be rendered mute, and I will be forced to shut up once and for all.
And if you thought that paragraph had nothing to do with the next gadget, you’re dead wrong. It’s called the Statc (missing vowel) and it’s a camera “tripod” consisting of nothing but a big lump of super-strong magnet (black-hole-like attraction).
Yesterday, Apple yanked Airfoil Speakers Touch for unspecified reasons. A little birdie told us it was because Airfoil Speakers Touch duplicated inherent functionality in iOS 6. It’s possible that that’s still true, but if it is, it’s not why Airfoil Speakers Touch was pulled, as Apple has now gone on record saying it was actually because Rogue Amoeba violated a developer guideline against non-public APIs.
In the latest iPhone 4S ads that debuted earlier this week starring actor John Malkovich, Siri tells a joke upon request… and let’s face it, it’s a pretty lame one. Not bad for a computer, but the kind of thing that would get you beaten up in the men’s room at the local Laugh Emporium if you pulled it out during your set at open mic night.
What if Siri told a real joke? What if she told a dirty joke? Heck, what if she told the dirtiest joke there is? Here’s a great video parody of the recent ad, with a very, very clever (and totally safe for work!) take on that old blue comedy classic, The Aristocrats.
If you’ve never heard The Artistocrats before, Bob Saget’s version (go figure!) is generally considered to be one of the filthiest. You can compare and contrast Siri’s version to it here (NSFW!)
Thanks: Gil!