Despite being a veritable genius when it comes to selling the masses on the latest tech product, Steve Jobs once candidly admitted that he set strict guidelines for how much time his own kids were allowed to watch screens at home.
It seems Jobs’ Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, isn’t quite on the same page, however — as Woz argues in a new interview that kids should be able to spend as much time on the computer as they want.
In a week in which Tim Cook was named the most influential gay man in America, Apple Stores went green in advance of Earth Day and much, much more, app developers continued to do what they do best: to churn out high-quality apps to improve all of our lives.
I’ve chosen four great apps for this week’s app roundup — including a smart calendar app, a truly awesome photography app, and some great new games. Check out our picks below.
Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t come out publicly until 2014, but he’s quickly become one of the most powerful leaders of the LGBT community.
Out Magazine ranked Tim Cook as the most influential LGBT person of 2016 in its 10th annual power list that charts everything from a person’s impact on the economy, political clout, and how they change our world view.
If role-playing games take too long, and you don’t think Threes is violent enough, Stencilsmith might be your jam.
It’s an endless puzzle title that has you sliding tiles around to harvest ore, craft weapons, and fight monsters, and it manages to do all of those things with beautifully simple and elegant style. And while everything looks pretty basic and charming, you’ll find after a while that you have way more to keep track of than you thought, and that’s when its ridiculous difficulty will start to gnaw at you like one of those wolves that always shows up on the board when you aren’t quite ready.
But it’s all great fun, and you should definitely check it out.
Snapseed is a free image editing app from Google that has some fantastic editing tools to make any photo even better.
The killer feature here is the set of Tune Image tools that let you take a good photo and turn it into a great photo, right on your iPad, with very little effort.
Here’s a quick intro to these fantastic tools and how to make them tune your photos to best effect.
The striking thing about Motor Trend‘s piece on the rumored Apple car is all the talk of the “user experience.”
The various auto designers and experts interviewed by Motor Trend speculate that Apple will try to redefine the car “experience.” They talk about stuff like acoustics, and look and feel, rather than specs like miles per gallon or engine torque.
They predict that Apple will bring a better “user experience” to the car of the future, not just a better physical product.
This reminded me of interviewing Apple’s designers for my Jony Ive book. They explained that the design group takes exactly this approach when thinking about new Apple products. Instead of starting with chip speeds or screen resolutions, they begin by asking each other how the new product should make the user feel.
And thinking about this made me realize why Jony Ive has a chauffeur. It’s not because he’s a one percenter. It’s about Project Titan, Apple’s future car.
You can think of iTunes like the biggest content candy store in the world, a mother lode of albums, apps, games, movies and TV shows, and on and on. If you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like to go into iTunes with a huge bag to fill as you please, today could be your lucky day. Right now you can enter to win a $1,000 iTunes gift card, no strings attached.
Instagram gets personal in hopes of helping you find interesting shared videos much more easily with a new feature in the Explore area of its popular photo sharing service.
Called “Videos You Might Like,” the new personalized channel can be found in the Explore grid within the mobile app. Now you can spend less time slogging through the junk and get right to the good stuff.
Let me say this up front: Space Box is a fantastic game. It’s challenging, fun, and has some really great mechanics and art. And if you have a set of virtual-reality goggles to plunk your iPhone into, you can even play it hands-free in 3-D using head-tracking controls.
And that’s where it runs into some trouble, but you shouldn’t let it ruin the game for you.
Apple has announced that it is dropping its iTunes Allowance feature, which allowed users to limit the amount of money that could be spent by their kids (or themselves!) on iTunes games, apps, movies and music.