Steve Jobs was a massive fan of English rock band The Beatles, and once revealed in an interview for 60 Minutes that his business plan was inspired by the group. To honor Steve’s life and his achievements, The Flaming Lips will provide a special performance at the O Music Awards on October 31 where they will perform a cover of The Beatles‘ “Revolution”.
Ever since it first landed in 2010, iPad users have been clamoring for a native port of the great Mint.com app, which allows people who use Intuit’s great personal finance tracking service to watch their spending and savings on the go. Mint.com’s website worked, but just barely: it was really designed with a desktop experience in mind.
Well, the wait’s finally over. Mint.com has just been updated to a universal app, and the iPad version is just a gorgeous piece of work.
Yet another publisher is singing the praises of Apple’s Newsstand appfor the iPad. Magazine publisher Condé Nast announced Tuesday a 268 percent hike in subscriptions after the tech giant released Newsstand as part of iOS5 unveiled in early October.
Apple has reportedly begun building a huge solar farm that will provide power to its data center in North Carolina. According to the report, the farm will be built on 171 acres of land, and will be situated right next door to the data center.
If you missed our editor and resident Steve Jobs expert Leander Kahney on Macbreak Weekly yesterday, you should check out the full episode below. Leander got to sit in with Leo Laporte and the gang to talk about his interview with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, the biography itself, and Steve Jobs the man. It was an interesting and entertaining roundtable.
Following Monday’s report detailing a new Apple pilot program that will allow online shoppers to collect their Apple order from their local retail store, the Cupertino company has now rolled out the service to stores in San Francisco, California. Orders made online can now be collected — often on the same day, if in stock — from the Chestnut Street, Stonestown and San Francisco Apple stores in San Francisco.
I was wrong about the iPhone 4s. I said it would be great. I predicted it would be the best phone ever built. The truth, it turns out, is that the iPhone 4s kind of sucks.
There. I said it.
And it’s not just the iPhone by itself. The iOS 5 upgrade, the design of some new apps and iCloud all add up to a degraded experience with using the iPhone.
Here are the 6 major things wrong with the new iPhone.
(Note: This is a promoted link to a story written by one of our writers for an outside site.)
Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs hit the iBookstore earlier this week, and after a few hours, I wondered why it had such a low star rating. I read some of the reviews to discover that many users have had formatting issues, which made some pages of the book illegible. Apple has now issued an update to the book and begun instructing customers on how to get the new version.
The tip today is a simple one that most Mac experts might already know, but I met a newbie today who didn’t have any idea why there are so many items listed in Recent Items a sub-menu on the Apple menu.
“There are just toooo many recent items under documents,” they said, and complained about the Server item being there when they didn’t have any servers.
So I showed them how to fix it, and now I’ll show you too.
Apple operates under the philosophy that the latest and greatest OS is what everybody should use, but many of us prefer to try things out first and upgrade a bit more slowly. When you dual-boot your Mac among two different versions of Mac OS X some things will work fine, while others require one system or the other:
I’m running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro 3,1 and I just got a new 750GB, 7200rpm drive to put in. Can I create say a 100GB OS X 10.7 Lion partition and share the apps / data from the 10.6.8 partition?
Gameloft & Sega are getting into the Halloween spirit and offering tasty treats in the form of cheap iOS games. For a limited time you can grab a some of the most popular games for your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for just $0.99, including Order & Chaos Online, Driver, ChuChu Rocket!, and Virtua Fighter 2.
Here’s the full list:
The iPad has been a staggering success for Apple since its inception in 2009, but if it wasn’t for one loud-mouthed Microsoft employee, the tablet may have never been born. Steve Jobs decided that he would create the device after listening to a Microsoft employee boast about a Windows tablet over dinner. When he got home that night, Steve said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet really can be.”
My original plan when downloading this app was to use it as the basis for a little light humor.
“Sorry readers, can’t write another word, my phone is telling me to go and kiss someone.” That sort of thing.
But after downloading it, I made a terrible mistake: I actually tried using it. It turns out When Should You Kiss is the worst thing I’ve seen on iOS for a long, long time.
Carbon weave has got to be the Miracle Whip of gadgets — it makes anything taste better. We reviewed Sound ID’s 510 Bluetooth headset in a BT headset head-to-head (try saying that fast) a few months back; and while it sounded great and was pretty much our pick of the week, it wasn’t the coolest looking kid on the block — and you couldn’t order it to do stuff, like you could some other headsets. Sound ID’s new Six fixes all that, and adds a trick for Siri too.
This is pretty wild: the Kogeto Dot ($80) is a 360-degree lens that snaps onto the back of an iPhone 4, shoots 360-degrees worth of video; then a player in the cloud (if you upload the clip) or on your iPhone 4 in the form of Kogeto’s free Looker app (if you keep the clip on your phone) allows you to play the app and change to any viewpoint in a 360-degree circle during playback.
Almost all mic-equipped canalphones that can be had for about $100 use moving-coil drivers to produce sound, as is the case with all the previous IEMs in this review series. But the Ultimate Ears 600vi ($120) are different — this set employs a single tiny armature in each ear. Armatures generally allow for a more neutral sound with better definition than their moving-coil brethren, and that’s exactly the case with the 600vi. In fact, this set uses pretty much the same excellent drivers as in the now-discontinued, $180 SuperFi 5vi we reviewed early last year.
And yes, apart from the V-Moda Vibrato, the 600vi is $20 more than the other earphones in this review series — but we think the extra Jackson is worth it.
One of iOS 5’s hidden gems is the ability to create custom keyboard shortcuts, a feature that works like TextExpander on the Mac. In this video, I’ll show you how to create and manage keyboard shortcuts from any iOS 5 device.
To commemorate the launch of the official Steve Jobs biography in Taiwan, a bookseller handed out apples and bags printed with two portraits of the Apple co-founder.
You were supposed to be dressed in a Steve-esque black turtleneck to get the snack and commemorative bag at bookchain Eslite, but as the guy holding his bag wearing a Steve McQueen t-shirt shows, the rules for the giveaway weren’t strictly observed. (Or maybe all Steves look alike?)
The news comes to us from tireless Steve Jobs spotter Dan Bloom, who notes that Eslite’s sales of the bio are expected to outstrip Harry Potter.
Now that’s truly magical.
Via Dan Bloom
Here’s a question for the nervous flyers: would you be reassured to know that an iPad was scheduling your plane’s upkeep?
Flightdocs, a Florida-based company that helps airlines keep track of the moving parts that keep the friendly skies safe, has just launched an iPad app.
Brent Schlender has worked for a number of publications over the years, and has served in positions like lead technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Now serving as a contributor for Fortune, Schlender has covered Steve Jobs for the past 25 years on numerous occasions.
In a recent article on Fortune, Schlender tells of “chapters in his [Jobs’s] story I was never able to tell, either because they would violate a personal confidence or because what I had learned didn’t really fit into a typical analytical business story.”
Some particularly fond memories of Jobs are included in Schlender’s anecdotes, including Jobs’s plan to ‘fix’ AOL in 2003, the time he previewed the original Toy Story to a group of kids, and when he decided to take extended medical leave from Apple in 2008.
“BOOM!” That’s what Steve Jobs said when he demoed the Slide to Unlock gesture on the iPhone in January of 2007. Whether you’re on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you always have to slide your finger across that slider to get past the Lock screen. It’s become a staple aspect of iOS and Apple’s mobile products.
The United States Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple the patent for Slide to Unlock today. This means that no other company can use the gesture without infringing on Apple’s new patent. Boom.
Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.
That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!
Popular accessory maker Twelve South has announced the “BassJump 2” USB subwoofer for Mac. Packing 8 more decibels of crystal clear sound and a sleek, aluminum build that Apple would be proud of, the BassJump 2 is an excellent Mac accessory for music lovers.
The BassJump 2 works with the Mac’s built-in audio to enhance the user’s listening experience with deeper and richer sounds.
Although for many years Macworld was the place where Apple showed off their new products, the company decided to orphan the expo in January 2009, claiming trade shows were now superfluous with the dawning of the Internet.
Of course, Macworld’s recreated itself since then as a place for third-party companies to show off their wares, but as Apple has increasingly emphasized its iOS side of the business, the Macworld name has started seeming anachronistic.
You probably won’t be surprised what Macworld’s organizer’s are renaming the conference. You may be surprised at what a charmless mouthful it all is, though.
During the initial iPhone 4S buzz we told you that Apple’s newest smartphone is among a class of new devices with Bluetooth 4.0. Apple’s most recent MacBook Airs and Mac minis also sport the technology.
Bluetooth 4.0 has been rebranded as “Bluetooth Smart” and “Bluetooth Smart Ready.” The technology focuses on low-energy consumption and will be present in all kinds of consumer products moving forward.