Business and career social network LinkedIn has finally released an iPad app – or, more accurately, a universal app for both the iPad and iPhone. In designing the new app, LinkedIn scrapped the clunky and somewhat confusing user interface of its earlier releases completely and built the new version based on the usage habits of users browsing the site from their iPads. The result is a complete new and stunningly simple app with a very Apple-like feel to it.
Imagine the scene: You are a student in England, living in a broken-down house further broken down into noisy, thin-walled apartments (or “flats,” to use the local term). One of your junkie friends has sold you a (totally legit, honest) iPad for just £50, and you need somewhere to stash it for both security and protection.
You look around your decrepit kitchen and see a chipboard door hanging from one of the cupboards. You rip it off and attack it with a saw, screwing and glueing until you have a sturdy box for your non-stolen tablet. To close the hole in the top you pull the artists beret you’ve recently taken to wearing from under a pile of dirty laundry and cut it to fit over the gap. Behold! An iPad case.
But what to do next? If your name is Eric Rea, you quickly form a company called Fine Grain, open up a Kickstarter project and start hawking your new invention under the name “BOWDEN + SHEFFIELD Minimalist iPad Cases.”
Apple’s iOS devices have been stealing market share from portable consoles since the day the App Store opened its doors. Four years later, they have led Nintendo to report its first ever annual operating loss of $454.4 million.
Six months after its initial debut on iOS, Jetpack Joyride is still receiving some terrific updates. In fact, its latest promises to be “the biggest and most anticipated update” yet. In addition to new achievements and new stats, version 1.3 brings 15 (yes, 15!) new gadgets, including the Gravity Belt, the Freeze-O-Matic, and the Missile Jammer.
Spotlight debuted in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, bringing a whole new way to find files and launch applications. In Mac OS X Lion, it resides in the top right corner of the Menubar, accessible from within any application via mouse or with the default hot key combination of Command-Space. You can find any indexed file on your Mac with Spotlight, and launch any App, as well. Today’s tip shows you how to do even more with Spotlight: copy files.
Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drive Apple’s Success, made its debut this week, and one of the more entertaining anecdotes within details Steve Jobs’s plans to celebrate the one millionth iMac purchase.
Rather than a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card like the company usually offers up for milestone App Store downloads, Steve wanted to play Willy Wonka and provide the lucky customer with a golden ticket that would entitle them to a full refund on their iMac purchase and a personal tour around Apple’s Cupertino campus.
One of the main reasons many of us turned to Apple’s machines and its OS X operating system is the belief that the company’s software is more secure than Windows, its biggest rival. However, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky, one of the industry’s leading security specialists, believes that Apple is “10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” and that Apple need to invest more into security audits for its software.
Twitter feed of the week – possibly the year – has got to be Text-Only Instagram, which gently pokes fun at Instagram and the kind of photos you often see there.
“Latte with foam shaped like a heart,” it reports. And later, simply: “Feet.”
It’s satire, yes, but the problem is that it really works. Read those tweets and you instantly conjure up an image in your head that fits the description.
Don’t let the satire make you mad, Instagrammers! It’s just a bit of fun. And you can subvert it by making your Instagrams increasingly weirder. Someone might even start by, say, taking Instagrams of the the Text-Only Instagram Twitter feed. Oh wait, that’s started already.
Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil started out as a way to stream any non-iTunes audio to your AirPort Express mini-router, back when AirPlay was still called AirTunes. Then it was expanded with a free iOS app which would let you stream music from AirFoil on the Mac to AirFoil on your iPod or iPhone, handy for hooking up to a stereo.
Now we have AirFoil Speakers Touch 3 for iOS, and it adds in proper AirPlay support, letting you send music from pretty much any iDevice you own.
Popular social media tracker service Klout released its official iPhone app today in the App Store. The free app shows your Klout influence online with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Never before has your online ego been so easy to track.
Sprint has always been adamant about its love for the iPhone. The carrier has taken a pretty substantial financial hit since it poured billions of dollars into the iPhone and Apple’s ridiculous subsidy rates. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has reiterated that being an iPhone partner is part of a greater strategy for his company, and he expects the decision to yield profitable results in the years to come.
Since AT&T and Verizon have terminated their unlimited plans, Sprint is the only iPhone carrier in the U.S. that offers unlimited data for new customers. With rumors saying that Apple’s next iPhone will have 4G LTE networking speeds, Sprint has said that it wants to keep offering its unlimited plan regardless.
Following legendary Apple retail guru Ron Johnson’s departure to JC Penny, former Dixons CEO John Browett has officially joined Apple has the new Senior Vice President of Retail. Apple announced that Browett would be coming to the company back in January, but a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that he has officially joined the company with $60 million in stock.
Here’s Barack Obama taking control of a Sphero during a visit to Boulder, Colorado yesterday.
WWDC 2012 is already like the VIP party everyone wishes they were special enough to attend. After selling out this morning in just two hours, every spot has already been taken by those who got to register before it was too late. If you missed the window of opportunity, you’re out of luck. No admission. We especially feel bad for you developers on the west coast.
One dev thought it would be a good idea to put his extra WWDC pass up on eBay. The current bid sits at $2,850. What this eBay seller sadly failed to realize is that you can’t actually resell a WWDC ticket.
Head on by the kiddy table at your local Apple Store and you used to see four iMacs, loaded up with educational software and games. Go on by with your kid today and you’ll see four iPads running educational iOS apps instead.
Hope they wipe those things down frequently: never seen a kid without at least several culture farms worth of germs on his or her pink, sticky hands. Those iPads are going to be disease-crusted petri dishes after a day’s worth of kids finish sliming them up.
Otherwise, great call. The only better learning tool for a child than an iMac is an iPad.
Apple has a patent for a touchscreen iMac with an arm that swivels the display down to allow you to manipulate the display more like an iPad, without getting “gorilla arm.” It’s a cool patent, but what would that iMac look like in real life? Motion graphics and 3D animation student Joakim Ulseth put together an awesome video bringing an iMac Touch running OS X Mountain Lion to life. There’s a lot of problems with this sort of design, and Apple would never in a million years release it, but it sure does make a sexy video. [via iFans]
Remember back in the day when Apple and Google were all chummy? Back when the original iPhone was released in 2007, and Google wasn’t in the smartphone business? That all changed once Google betrayed Apple’s trust and launched the Android operating system, and ever since then Google has held the stance that they never copied the iPhone. It’s hard to prove that a company wasn’t thinking about something, but newly released designs of Google’s original concept phone from 2006 show that Google wasn’t even considering the creation of a touchscreen smartphone back when the iPhone was unveiled, so they stole Apple’s designs instead once they saw them.
You know how many tech companies strive to make our experience of their products easier and more transparent so that — in the case of things like the iPad — the product disappears and lets us enjoy whatever it is that it does?
Koss didn’t get that memo, and has launched Striva, an “initiative” which takes something as simple as a headphone and makes it as complicated as an old-school router.
You know how it is. There are a bunch of apps out there that allow you to open and edit different types of files on your iOS device. Look, we get it. You just want to view the file, right? No need to edit or collaborate or whatever. Just, you know, look at it. Sadly, while iOS is fairly magical, it only has a few file types it can view natively. Which is where today’s tip comes in.
Google Drive was announced yesterday, and we’ve spent some time putting the OS X client software to the test. How does it stand up against the list of rivals (which seems to be growing by the day)?
Gameloft released a teaser video for the upcoming N.O.V.A. 3 game which is rumored to be powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. This is the third installment in the N.O.V.A. franchise, which stands for Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, and picks up with Kal Wardin crash-landing towards Earth. Gameloft has been known for their console-quality mobile games and N.O.V.A. 3 doesn’t look to disappoint.
In theory, there are two players in the bookbindery iPad case market: Pad&Quill and Dodocase. But that’s a little like saying that there are two players in the tablet market itself: iPad and (snicker) Android. Technically it’s true, but the difference in real life is huge.
Sure, Dodocase makes a nice lightweight case, but it is pretty much the same one it launched a couple years ago. Pad&Quill’s cases, on the other hand, have just gotten better, iteration by iteration. Just like Apple’s products.
The latest are the Contega and Octavo cases for the iPad 3, and they pack a surprising amount of tech into such a traditional design.
Tickets to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference sold out in less than two hours this morning. WWDC is a great event for any developer to attend. The media focus around WWDC, however, always centers on the keynote that kicks of the conference Monday morning – and with good reason. That’s the only public event at the show and also the least technical part of the conference.
The keynote is always more Apple announcement and preview than it is developer content. Apple uses it to announce and preview new technologies in the next iterations of OS X and iOS. The company has also used its WWDC keynote to launch new products (like the iPhone 4 in 2010).
One of the greatest things about a service like Dropbox is that as long as you are either using apps with support baked in or can save your files to a Dropbox folder, you can keep all your data synced between multiple Macs.
What if you want to keep app data synced between Macs that don’t lend themselves to being saved to a Dropbox folder or don’t come with Dropbox support, though?
For example, most Mac games don’t allow you to specify where you keep your saves, but what if you want to be able to save your game on your iMac and then load it up again on the road on your MacBook Pro? Or what if you want to keep your app settings synced between your iMac and MacBook Air? Settings files are usually stored in a hidden system folder on your Mac, so how do you keep things synced then?
It’s actually way easier than you might think. Here’s how to keep any file or folder synced between Macs using the cloud, no matter where it’s stored.
Apple had a crazy earnings call this week. The company nearly doubled quarterly profits, vastly exceeding Wall Street expectations.
Apple’s stock price will probably now reverse course and head back into the stratosphere, and for one reason: China.
Apple sold 35.1 million phones during the quarter worldwide, which provided half the total revenue reported by the company. Half!
Chinese phone sales in the reported quarter were, incredibly, five times higher than the same quarter last year. What’s surprising about this growth is that Apple still hasn’t signed a long-awaited deal with China’s largest carrier — the world’s largest carrier — China Mobile.
So it has become clear to everyone that Apple’s highest-revenue product ever has enormous future sales potential in China.
Also: Apple feels that it has far fewer points of sale (stores) in China than it needs.
When the China Mobile deal happens and Apple builds more stores, watch out. China is likely to become Apple’s biggest handset market, far exceeding even the United States.
Overall revenue for China was $7.9 billion, three times higher than last year.
Another crazy milestone: Asia-Pacific revenue for the quarter was actually higher than European revenue for the first time ever. The relative importance of Asia over Europe is likely to continue indefinitely.
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