There are a lot of great apps out there that will alert you to what track is currently playing in iTunes by flashing a notice on your Mac’s desktop; Coversutra and Growltunes, to name just two. But did you know that iTunes has a secret option to display track information on your desktop every time the track changes? It’s true. It’s attractive. And it’s just a terminal command away.
The biggest shopping day of the year is fast approaching. This Friday, countless retailers all over the U.S. will be slashing prices for Black Friday, causing a frenzy amongst shoppers who cannot wait to spend some of their hard-earned cash on discounted goods.
Apple famously recognizes the event by discounting some of its hottest products in the Apple online store for one day only, with savings to be made on new Macs, iOS devices, iPods, and even the latest accessories for your beloved Apple gadgets. This year will be no different, so based on the past few years’ reductions, here’s what to expect at the Apple online store on Black Friday.
Yes, the iPhone design is sleek and sexy – and the Apple device is full of jaw-dropping features. But while that may convince some, what really puts the cash in Cupertino’s pockets are those boring, unexciting carrier agreements. Indeed, 50 percent of cell phone growth comes from adding new carriers. Although Apple has inked deals with 230 carriers, that is just 30 percent of the nearly 800 global service providers.
This week we’re really excited to announce one of the best giveaways we’ve had in a while. We’re teaming up with Monster Cable to give readers the chance to win a Monster Accessory Pack worth over $250 AND a free iPhone 4S! For this giveaway you’ll have two chances to win one of the amazing prizes we have in store for you. Here’s how to play:
Carved from aircraft-grade aluminum with two tripod mounts, the iPhone Lens Dial defiantly asks — and responds to — the question, “Who says you can’t put external frickin’ lenses on your iPhone? Stupids, that’s who!” But who is stupider: the guy who doesn’t think you can put a lens on your iPhone, or the guy who pays $250 for a bulky case to do just that?
Described as an “explosive development in the tablet market,” the holiday season could finally see a two-way race for consumers’ attention as the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire vie for nearly 90 percent of sales. In a survey of North Americans intending to buy a tablet, 65 percent said they plan to buy an iPad, while 22 percent said they would pick the Kindle Fire, according to ChangeWave Research results released Monday. Those percentages may look disparate, but the Kindle Fire is still proving to be a shot across the bow of iPad… and it could soon become a full broadside.
The U.K.’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, has slammed Apple and its co-founder Steve Jobs for creating an egocentric and selfish consumer society that has only led to unhappiness. He claims the company’s advertising methods only make shoppers aware of what they don’t own, and he singled out Apple for creating a culture in which people only care about themselves. What hypocritical nonsense.
The folks at Canlys this morning are doing what analysts are fond of: playing the ‘if’ game. If iPads were included in the same category as computers, Apple might soon overtake HP as the world’s largest PC maker — particularly if the Cupertino, Calif. company launches the iPad 3, anticipated by many to be a 2012 release. Canalys, which does count tablets as PCs, expects Apple to pass HP before mid-2012.
Last week, we reported that French developer Applidium had managed to blow the Siri protocol wide open, making it possible for any internet connected device to dial into Apple’s Siri servers and get a response.
Any internet connected device? Pshaw, you might scoff. But one week later, we have the proof: a hacker who has tricked Siri into talking with his internet-connected thermostat!
We exclusively confirmed way back in February that Apple had plans to build a store in Grand Central Station’s main terminal, and following months of speculation it seems the store is set to open its doors this week, just in time for the Christmas rush.
While we all eagerly await an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, many of us are using custom settings shortcuts on our iOS homescreens to duplicate the functionality of a more robust Cydia hack like SBSettings.
The only problem? While the shortcuts work really well, some of the icons can be ugly and distinctly un-Apple-like.
Why settle for some puked-up icons, though, when you can have icons sexy enough to lick? Just go over to https://brdrck.me/settings/ on your iDevice and get downloading. Follow our previous how-to if you need guidance on setting these up.
[via iDB]
The Tilt by madMINDS from Sulmo Kim on Vimeo.
A cooling stand is traditionally one of the ugliest accessories you can buy for your svelte MacBook Pro, one that’s guaranteed to take all that hard work Apple put into creating a beautiful notebook and just throwing it away. That is, until the TILT came along.
It’s Thanksgiving Week, and that means most of us Americans will start thinking about how much weight we’ll gain and how much money we’ll end up spending on Black Friday, especially if we have children clamoring for an iPhone, iPod or iPad.
If you, like many other parents, are planning on buying your kids an iDevice this Christmas, you should know that your kids will need an iTunes account to use with their new device. Presumably, you’ll want to control how much they can spend buying apps. So you’ll be happy to know you can set up an iTunes account without a credit card. Your kid will be able to download a plethora of free apps and you’ll be able to give them gift cards to use to buy paid ones. This will let you control how much they spend, which is a lot better than giving them carte blanche access to your line of credit.
Sprint’s debut iPhone 4S commercial (unsurprisingly) boasts about the biggest reason for choosing Sprint over its rivals, and that’s “truly unlimited” data. It also praises Apple’s App Store, which is home to half a million apps, by floating popular app icons around New York City.
Walter Isaacson’s terrific Steve Jobs biography offers a magnificent insight into how Steve created Apple, and the work he did behind the scenes. However, it doesn’t talk all that much about NeXT — another computer company Steve founded during his spell away from Apple in the mid-eighties.
These fascinating clips from a series called Entrepreneurs do, however. They show Steve as many of us have never seen him before — discussing new ideas with his team, brainstorming on company retreats, and leading NeXT to create something awesome.
Check out more of the documentary after the break.
With security becoming an ever more serious issue, keeping your files safe is more important than ever before. Using an encrypted disk image is an easy way to safely store away files, while keeping them in one consolidated location. In this video, I’ll show you how to set up encrypted disk images.
Greg Joswiak is Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod, iPhone, and iOS product marketing. He’s presented at past iPhone and iOS Apple events and is a critical member of Apple’s corporate team.
While speaking at the “Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge” event in the UK, Joswiak shared what he believes to be the four keys to Apple’s success.
Nick Bilton of The New York Times recently sat down with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. In the interview, Isaacson shared his opinions of Jobs and other details surrounding the book.
Steve Jobs “didn’t go into details” about Apple’s future products during his discussions with Isaacson, but Jobs did reveal three things he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks, and photography.
Last last week, VMware released Fusion 4.1, an update to its popular virtualization software that adds many improvements and bug fixes. The biggest improvement is the applications ability to run older versions of Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Microsoft recently unveiled its first retail store on the East coast at the Tysons Corner mall in McLean, Virginia. Like other Microsoft stores, the new location is strategically placed near the local Apple Store.
In an attempt to appeal to the hip and cool computer geeks out there, Microsoft hired a DJ to play music during the store’s opening. Can you guess what kind of laptop the DJ used?
The Apple iPhone dominates the world of consumer smart phones, but is a bit of a laggard in the business market, right?
Wrong! It turns out that the opposite is true. Apple is in fact a relatively minor player in the global consumer smart phone market, but by far the dominant player in business.
According to Gartner, Android has 52.5% global smart phone market share, Symbian 16.9%, iOS 15%, BlackBerry 11%, Bada 2.2% and Microsoft 1.5%.
In business, however, the iPhone has recently emerged as the top market-share leader with 45%. To achieve this dominance, Apple recently edged out BlackBerry, which has now fallen to 32% of the market. Android gets 21%, recently surpassing Nokia.
To be accurate, these numbers are apples and oranges, so to speak. The Gartner numbers are for both consumer and business and worldwide, and the iPhone numbers are businesses worldwide.
Android’s big global consumer numbers and iPhone’s big business numbers say more about whose got money and who hasn’t than what people’s preferences would be if all phones were priced the same. The fact that very cheap Android phones exist in the world, but very cheap iPhones do not exist, explains much.
Still, it’s a shocking result that’s counter to the conventional wisdom.
Perhaps even more shocking is BlackBerry’s recent second-place status in businesses and enterprises to the iPhone. Business is all BlackBerry’s got. Yet iPhone clobbers RIM in this space now.
More to the point, how can a phone that supposedly ignores business concerns surpass a phone that’s totally designed for business in the business marketplace?
Here’s why iPhone beats BlackBerry in business.
Early reviews of Amazon’s Kindle Fire haven’t been kind, but I like the device. It’s a versatile and enjoyable little media tablet.
It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not (a general-purpose tab), and though not as polished as Apple’s products, its a good first try.
The trouble is that everyone is comparing the Kindle Fire to the iPad, and it will always come up short. The Kindle Fire is actually closer to the iPod touch, but it’s not that either. It’s a well-made, well-designed window into Amazon’s media ecosystem, and on that score, it succeeds very well.
Hauling my back end out of bed each morning is a horrible task, especially during the winter months. Even with the recommended eight hours sleep, I never wake up feeling refreshed. However, I was hoping all that was about to change, thanks to a little app-enhanced headband.
The WakeMate ($60) is an accessory and app for your iOS device that has two main objectives: to help you track and analyze your sleep pattern; and to wake you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle so that you feel better about waking up early — which is just what I needed.
If you caught our canalphone roundup a few weeks back, you’ve by now come to the accurate realization that there’s no shortage of real alternatives to those awful white buds bundled with each iPhone. But these two are a little different.
Like the five we reviewed that week, these two pairs of IEMs — the MEElectronics CC51 ($90) and the Thinksound ts02+mic ($110)— are higher-end, designed with superior sound quality in mind and cost around $100. But unlike the others, these two are from small, boutique manufacturers; they also both have housings made from exotic materials (the CC51’s is ceramic, while the ts02’s is wood), and eschew the inline volume controls of the pairs of reviewed in the $100 IEM week, instead making do with a single control button on their inline microphones.
It’s that time of the year. The busiest shopping day in existence is nearly upon us: Black Friday.
As Apple and iOS fanatics, we naturally look to the App Store for useful apps when life’s obstacles are thrown our way. The topic of Black Friday is no exception, so we’ve collected some of the best, free iPhone apps available to help you make the most out of your shopping experience this year.
