Late last month, Apple rolled out the iTunes Music Store to twelve new European countries. Now they’ve done the same for the iTunes Movie Store, so if you’re Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian or from Cyprus, hey, go nuts!
[via MacTrast]
Care to see just what Apple means when they talk about Android’s fragmentation problem? Check out this incredible chart put together by Michael Degusta. Not only are most Android phones out of date, but almost half of the smartphones on this chart have never been up-to-date with the latest version of Android OS, even at release!
Comparatively, every release of iOS has been backwards compatible for at least three years. No wonder the iPhone developer community is so strong: devs and users alike can count on almost every iPhone owner being on the current, most bug-free version of iOS!
We thought we’d put this Apple television business to rest as a pipe-dream, but then Steve Jobs’s biography came out, where he claimed he had finally “cracked” the TV problem. Now the rumor mill has started itself up again with renewed vigor, and the latest report from Nick Bilton over at The New York Times: his sources tell him that Jobs thought that the “industry was totally broken” a real Apple-branded television set “isn’t a matter of if, but when,” a “guaranteed product.”
It’s not quite Game Over for Nintendo, but Angry Birds and other iPhone games cost the company nearly $1 billion for the first half of 2011. What’s more, an aging Wii is being overshadowed as more and more gamers turn to smartphones. It’s enough to give Donkey Kong indigestion.
The BlackBerry is popular again. Ha ha ha. Sorry, just kidding. That popularity extends only to owners rushing to trade them in after a recent nationwide service outage.
Indeed, one firm specializing in buying your unwanted phones says BlackBerry trade-ins are up 80 percent this week — and it can be entirely attributed to long beleaguered Blackberry owners trading in their devices for the iPhone 4S.
Fancy a break from the constant tintinnabulation of your iPhone? Here’s a great Siri tip spotted by the guys over at OS X Daily: just press down the hold button and tell Siri to “turn off all alarms.”
Once you’ve been able to catch your breath, turning your alarms all on again is as easy as saying “turn on all alarms.”
We reported yesterday that our favorite Photoshop-on-a-budget app, Pixelmator, was hitting the big two point oh today, and so it has.
It’s available now on the Mac App Store as a free upgrade to previous users, or a $29.99 purchase new.
The biggest additions to Pixelmator 2.0 are content-aware fill, vector drawing and editing tools, wrinkle, blemish and damage repair tools for photos, new retouching tools such as smudge, sponge, burn, and more. In addition, Pixelmator 2.0 gets full OS X Lion support, a new interface and some impressive speed and stability improvements.
For 90% of us, Pixelmator was already a better and cheaper replacement for the industry standard, Adobe PhotoShop. With 2.0, closes the gap another few percent, and becomes even more of a no-brainer to recommend to just about everybody.
If Apple needed another argument in favor of the iPhone, Sprint’s CEO Wednesday offered up a whopper: iOS devices are 50 percent more efficient than Android handsets when it comes to slurping up 3G data. The comment seems to confirm previous reports that devices running Google’s mobile operating system are the data hogs, not iPhones.
Ever since Steve Jobs’s untimely death and the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography, America’s been going Steve crazy… but you know where Jobsmania is even worse? China. In fact, from the launch lines, you’d think it was the iPad 3 that was coming out, not a book.
If you use your iPhone or iPad in a speaker dock, you’ll understand that the ability to control it from across the room would be just awesome. Apple may already be working on a solution, according to one of the company’s patent applications, which suggests future Macs and iOS devices could be controlled from afar using special gestures.
In a classic example of the ‘tipping point’, a research firm which once advised enterprises they need only support Windows, now urges companies embrace Macs. “Stand in the way of Apple users,” the firm says, “and you will eventually get run over.”
One thing that many seem to forget about Apple’s new voice recognition assistant is that it’s still in beta. Although Siri is available to iPhone 4S users in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, you can’t expect a seamless experience.
While many have still been impressed with the feature since its release, others are too quick to criticize it. A report from British tabloid The Daily Mail today brands Siri a frustration that has left Scottish users “bamboozled” because it cannot understand their accent.
Codify is an awesome new app for the iPad from Two Lives Left which allows you to create games and simulations — “or just about any visual idea you have” — without a computer. It claims to be the most beautiful code editor you’ll use, and it’s optimized for a touch-based device, allowing you to “touch your code.”
If there’s one feature we’re all anticipating for the iPad 3, it’s a Retina display. We’ve become accustomed to high-resolution displays on our mobile devices since Apple first introduced the Retina display to the iPhone and the iPod touch, and we all want one on the iPad 3.
According to one report, the third-generation device will indeed boast a 2048 x 1536 resolution display, but LG and Samsung are struggling to produce enough of them to meet Apple’s demands.
Adobe has today launched a set of new applications for its Carousel photography service that allow users to gain access to their images, and edit them, from their Mac and iOS devices. Both applications are free and are available now in their respective App Stores.
Let’s face it: Chess is pretty geeky. Then again, so is the iPad (c’mon, it is). Blend the two though, and you’ve got…well, let’s just say that playing chess on an iPad at your local coffee hangout is a Wookie’s fingernail-width less geeky than insert-hyperbolic-geek-stereotype-here.
Who cares though; with its portability, large screen and potential to reach all 600 million chess players around the world, the iPad is the ultimate gadget for playing electronic chess, and the free Social Chess app is the way to play.
Hot on the heels of the early 2011 iMac firmware update comes an EFI firmware update for the mid-2011 MacBook Air and Mac Mini. The new updates are labeled version 2.2 and 1.4 respectively. The updates are available via Software Update or direct download.
The updates address the following issues:
Apple is issuing another reset of iTunes Match for tomorrow, October 27th. The wipe applies to developers that have been beta testing the service for the last couple of months.
Beta testers are asked to disable iTunes Match on their iOS devices and computers for the reset tomorrow. All saved libraries will be erased. Apple is expected to launch iTunes Match to the public very soon.
Besides his signature black turtleneck, New Balance sneakers, and blue jeans, Steve Jobs was known for his silver Mercedes SL55 AMG. What was perhaps most interesting about Jobs’ ride was the fact that it never had a license plate.
Jobs’ Mercedes was photographed many times over the last several years, but the car was always plate-free. How did he do it? Did he pay the fine every time he was confronted by the police? Did he obtain a special permit? Did he just get lucky?
The answer is actually very simple.
Apple has released an update to the early 2011 iMac EFI firmware. The new update is labeled version 1.7 and it is available via software update.
The update addresses the following issues:
Apple has released an update to iPhoto bring it to version 9.2.1. This update primarily addresses the complaints about iPhoto quitting unexpectedly that we’ve received from Cult of Mac readers.
The update is available now via Software Update on your Mac. Check out the complete details about iPhoto after the break.
Apple has filed its annual 10-K form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the fiscal year. The company’s spending has increased and there has been a considerable number of new employees added to the payroll since last year.
Steven VanRoekel, the new Chief Information Technology Officer for the United States, says smartphones and apps have raised the bar for citizen expectations of their government.
The second person to hold the CIO post, after nearly a decade at Microsoft VanRoekel headed to the FCC. There, he launched Apps.gov and ran a public contest for a Mobile Broadband Testing app that earned him a phone call from late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Pixelmator is a very popular image editing tool for the Mac that serves as a much cheaper alternative to Photoshop. The app sports a gorgeous interface that looks like it could have been designed by Apple itself.
Version 2.0 of Pixelmator will launch tomorrow in the Mac App Store with a host of new image editing features, including content-aware fill and support for OS X Lion’s Versions and Auto Save features.
Most of us are hopefully unfamiliar with the prison scene, so Gizmodo has taken an interesting look at technology in California’s San Quentin State Prison. The series is called “Lockdown,” and the latest installment focuses on how smartphones are used behind bars.
Phones in prison are a hot item, going for $300 to $700 behind bars. Inmates use them to communicate with the outside world and orchestrate nefarious activities like drug drop-offs. Prisoners will do basically anything to keep an iPhone from being confiscated. And we do mean anything.