Not many opera companies have ventured on to the App Store, but London’s Royal Opera House has and the result is something unexpected: not a listings app, not a tickets app, not anything you’d normally associate with opera. It’s a game. And it’s great.
The Steam gaming network has been incredibly popular on the Mac since it made its debut in March of last year, and it enjoys over 35 million subscribers all over the world, offering a huge library of over 1,400 games. It’s not exactly the most popular network amongst gamers today, however, after it confirmed that its database has been hacked, potentially compromising the personal data and credit card information of all its subscribers.
Having a problem with your iPhone 4S’s rapidly draining battery even under iOS 5.0.1? Take your complaints to Apple’s official support forums, not the police. A 48-year-old man from Bristol, Illinois is now in police custody after calling 911 five times to belly-ache about his broken iPhone.
There’s a reason Sprint has stopped selling SIM unlocked versions of the iPhone 4S today, and it’s not just because of the pleasing parallel symmetry of the digits in the date 11/11/11. It’s because today is also the day that Apple has started selling unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4Ses to customers willing to pay a premium.
Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson he had “finally cracked” the television set, sparking more rumors his team in Cupertino are on the cusp of launching a revolutionary new television that will change home entertainment forever.
Apple won’t be the first to attempt this, however. Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer says he is competing against Steve Jobs to change the traditional television set.
For years, Apple has been warning would-be jailbreakers that jailbreaking their iPhones could lead to them getting ripped off. How rich, then, that the latest jailbreaking scam originates in Apple’s App Store itself: a new, approved iOS app simply called Jailbreak that definitely does not do what it says on the tin.
While Sprint’s initial batch of iPhone 4S handsets were sold unlocked, allowing you to swap out your Sprint SIM card for a SIM card of your choice, that will no longer be the case. From today, November 11, Sprint will be SIM locking Apple’s latest iPhone.
A lot of people don’t have access to unlimited 3G data plans, so they need to keep an eye out on the amount of data they use every month. There are different tasks and apps that will use data on an iPhone or iPad, and it can be hard to keep track of them all. Luckily, Apple has thought of a few ways you can limit access to 3G data by forcing apps to use Wi-Fi instead when it is available.
iCal’s Reminders feature is a handy way to keep track of our To Do lists, but sometimes you get pestered more than desired. Here’s one way to quiet things down when your iDevices have nagged you sufficiently:
I love the new Reminders app for iOS, and it ties in beautifully with my use on my iPad and iPhone. However, I hate sitting down at the end of the day and having to click through all my day’s reminders on my computer through iCal. In the iCloud settings, I can only disable iCal, but I don’t want to disable my calendars, just the reminders part of it. Is there a way I can disable iCal reminder notifications on my Mac without disabling the calendar syncing? – Benjamen
Apple issued its first iOS 5 update to the public yesterday — an update which was released to fix “bugs affecting battery life” under the latest firmware, amongst other issues. Following the update, however, users have reported that their battery life has seen no improvement, and that iOS 5.0.1 comes with more bugs of its own.
Following a firmware update for its MacBook Pro yesterday, Apple has issued a new firmware update for its AirPort Extreme Base Station and Time Capsule devices, which fixes a number of issues, including a problem with audio streaming through AirPlay.
New on the Mac App Store is Tincta, a text editor for coders and writers. It’s small, lightweight, fast – and free.
Sometimes all it takes is a little tweaking to turn a decent gadget into one that makes the corners of your mouth curl up in a grin every time it’s pulled out and powered up.
That’s exactly what happened with the Logitech Wireless Boombox for iPad ($150), a portable six-speakered dock based off Logitech’s S715i dock, which we reviewed earlier this year.
While we can’t seem to find a practical reason for buying the Swivl iPhone mount, we still want one. The Swivl auto-tracks your movement with your iPhone’s camera, all thanks to a handy receiver that can held or worn on a lanyard.
So many possibilities!
A firmware update has been released for the MacBook Pro that resolves an issue involving the laptop randomly shutting down during a heavy workload. MacBook Pro SMC Firmware Update 1.5 is now available in Software Update, although Apple has not specified which MacBook Pro models get the fix.
Microsoft opened doors on its first retail store in Northern California just a few steps away from an Apple store.
Apple employees at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara must have had a strong sense of déjà vu watching people camp outside waiting for the doors to open on Microsoft’s 4,000-square-foot shop today. The proximity is unlikely to go unnoticed, since the mall is about 7 miles away from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.
“I feel bad for those guys in Apple,” said Blake Contreras, a 12-year-old from San Jose who stayed overnight so he could be first in line for the grand opening. “Microsoft’s having this big party and the Apple employees just have to sit there and watch.”
Reallymet is a new app that claims to be about making those real-life social contacts important – but perhaps the real utility is showing your boss or your spouse that you really are where you said you’d be.
The free app is billed as a “check-in service” for people suffering from cyber-friend fatigue (“Do you ever get tired of the long list of friends you don’t really know on your social network service?) and seems plagued with the usual gamefication features (you earn points if your friends confirm the check-ins; “It’s the social game of your real everyday life!”).
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This TEDTalk was given by Thomas Suarez at TEDxManhattanBeach. Thomas is in the 6th grade at a middle school in the South Bay, and he’s made several apps for the App Store and established his own company, CarrotCorp.
Besides his fantastic presentation skills, Thomas is an amazing testament to how the younger generation is shaping the world of technology. What a smart kid. Steve Jobs would be very proud.
And we’re downloading his app, Bustin Jieber, as we speak. It looks fun.
One of Tim Cook’s first changes as Apple’s new CEO was the introduction of a corporate matching program for charitable donations to nonprofits. Apple pledged to match donations of up to $10,000 per US employee per year.
In less than two months, Apple and it’s employees have already raised $2.6 million for nonprofits.
Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal puts the enormous gains in the electric efficiency of computation (or how much power a computer draws) in perspective using the example of Apple’s new MacBook Air.
Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.
When Steve Jobs called the MacBook Air magical, this isn’t what he meant, but after reading this article, it’ll be hard to look at the wafer-thin ultrabook on my desk the same way ever again.
The iPhone is an incredible, world-changing device… but it’s never been cheap to own one. That’s just as true with the iPhone 4S as it has been with any other iPhone, which means every saved penny counts.
Figuring out which carrier to go with when you sign up for an iPhone 4S requires considering many different factors. For the best bang for the buck, though, Sprint is the way to go: their $79.99 Everything Data plan includes 450 minutes per month, free nights and weekends, as well as unlimited data and text.
Think that’s a pretty good deal? That’s nothing. Follow this guide and we can not only help you save up to $240 dollars on your Sprint iPhone 4S contract over the course of two years, we can even help you get more minutes for less money!
Interested? Read on.
After iOS 5 came and broke Stanza good and proper, it seemed almost certain that Amazon intended on killing off their world class e-reading app once and for all.
Thankfully, Amazon has taken pity on fans of the app with a long overdue update finally fixing Stanza under iOS 5, but with that reprieve comes a dose of bad news: according to Amazon, this will be the last Stanza update.
Well, that didn’t take as long as some of us feared. Apple just released iOS 5.0.1 to the public, fixing the well publicized iPhone 4S battery life issues.
Here’s what is new:
This update contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
– Fixes bugs affecting battery life
– Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
– Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
– Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
The update is available through iTunes or Over The Air using Settings > General > Software Update.
Remember, if you want to jailbreak your iPhone 4S in the future, you may want to hold off on this update.
Anyone noticed any improvements with their iPhone 4S battery? Let us know in the comments.
I’ll confess right from the start that I’m not much of a gamer. I tend to just play lightweight puzzles and dip-in-and-out games that don’t demand too much attention. But Aquaria is something special – an incredibly detailed action/RPG that’s compelling enough to pull even a non-gamer like me right in, and keep me playing for hours.
Appcessories. Just the word sounds cool, blending the popularity of apps with the omnipresent accessories for your Apple device. But can a word create a trend? You decide. The idea is being promoted by a hardware developer that iPhone apps controlling hardware devices could be as big as that watermelon-flavored case or the Nike+ iPod add-on. Indeed, the Apple Store could feature the category soon – or not.