It doesn’t take a genius to guess or soothsayer to divine that Apple’s been holding back the iOS 5.1 update to debut it alongside the iPad 3, and so it appears, with reports now indicating that iOS 5.1 has just gone Gold Master.
Calvin And Hobbes — Bill Watterson’s beautiful elegy to imagination, impishness and inquisitiveness — is still a comic strip that is unmatched in my affections over fifteen years after the final strip ran. In fact, it’s always been interesting to me to imagine what Calvin might be doing now if he’d aged in real-time. He’d be around 32, and really, what company better for him to explore his imagination and his inquisitiveness than Apple?
Since such musings tend to pop around my head, I was delighted to stumble upon this great Reddit thread, in which Redditor ClassicWinger merged Calvin And Hobbes with OS X Lion’s default wallpaper to come up with an all new wallpaper, in which Calvin and his tiger look up at a densely packed universe in the hushed awe it deserves. You can download it in full-resolution here.
Love the wallpaper above, but wishing for something more appropriate to Mountain Lion? We’ve got it after the jump, alone withan even better wallpaper, featuring my favorite Calvin alter-ego, Spaceman Spiff!
Did you know that the Calculator app built into iOS has a hidden swipe gesture that allows you to delete those digits that you tap accidentally? No, neither did I until this morning, when I discovered this nifty little backspace trick by accident.
With the number of MIDI controllers on the market, the search for a great portable controller can be daunting.
Let me introduce you to the Korg microKEY, my favorite mobile MIDI controller.
The patent saga continues with U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner in Chicago ruling that Motorola and Google must provide Apple with information regarding Android development as well as information about the impending merger. It’s unclear exactly what specific “information” must be provided and while everyone goes ahead and assumes it’s some sort of top secret documentation, I’m betting it’s nothing of the sort and Apple won’t be gaining any trade secrets out of this. It’s all ridiculous and will only end as all of these patent suits have ended, with nothing more than a software update.
Valletta is yet another Markdown editor for the Mac, but one with a crucial difference. Instead of using a separate window to preview your document, it converts only the current line you’re editing, leaving the rest as clean and beautiful preview. It’s a clever idea, but we’ll have to see how well it works in practice.
Cult of Mac’s reviews editor Charlie Sorrel and I have a bet going on whether or not the iPad 3 will have LTE.
I figure Apple’s got to see the impact of LTE on their iOS devices sometime, and the iPad is the perfect launch platform for it: they can sell the functionality as optional and at a premium, as they do 3G, making sure a minimum number of people get burned by a lack of LTE deployment in their area (and falling back on HSPA+ when LTE isn’t around)…. all the while the iPad 3’s biggery battery mitigates 4G power management issues.
Charlie thinks that argument’s stupid, and LTE’s far too immature to deploy. At stake is a solid buck, or half Charlie’s monthly salary, so tensions are high as the iPad 3 announcement lurches closer and closer on the calendar.
The latest report suggest that buck could very well be mine.
Take apart one of Apple’s latest iMacs and inside you’ll find plenty of space for mounting an additional hard drive. Of course, it’s useless if you don’t have the tools for the job, but that’s where iFixit comes in. The teardown specialists have released a new kit that provides you with everything you need for installing an additional hard drive in your new iMac.
IOS runs HTML5 games a crazy three times faster than Android, according to a study by Spaceport.io. The tests were run on various hardware and software combinations, both for Android and iOS, and the results are pretty startling. And there’s an even more amusing data point: The Blackberry Playbook beat every Android device.
One of the big things missing from Lightroom — Adobe’s excellent photo processing app — was printing. Not boring old printing where you have a big, expensive box in the corner of your office spit out endless sheets of paper until one of them is right. No, we mean remote printing, where you choose some images, hit a button and, a short while later, a gorgeous book appears on your doorstep.
Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture have had this for a while. Now, thanks to Blurb, the brand-new Lightroom 4 has it too.
