food

The iPod touch exists to be used by waiters, warehouse staff, delivery persons, and anyone else whose employer wants them to use an iOS device as a handheld on-the-job computer. That’s why it just got an update, and it’s probably why it hasn’t — and never will — change size or shape. It is a utility computer. Making it an all-screen, buttonless iPhone-lite is pointless. Adding Touch ID is equally useless when it is used by multiple people.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a great device for everyone else. If you need a utility iOS computer, then you should buy it. Musicians are one great example of potential users. Let’s see why the iPod Touch is still great.

It’s now easier than ever to pay for Uber Eats orders, thanks to the arrival of Apple Pay.

The food delivery service has finally adopted Apple’s mobile payments platform in almost 20 countries. It makes completing a transaction as easy as tapping your finger or scanning your face.

Apple has revealed a whole bunch of new emoji coming with iOS 11.1. They’re all based on new additions to Unicode 10, and they will join the handful of characters Apple teased back in July for World Emoji Day.

NYU graduate student Dejian Zeng pulled back the curtain on Apple’s factories in a tell-all that details his six-week stint working on an iPhone assembly line in China.

Zeng’s lengthy interview reveals details on everything from conditions inside a Pegatron dormitory to how Apple slowly shifts production for new iPhone models. Some of the most interesting bits, though, are the tiny details that show how working in an Apple factory could drive you crazy.

Here are the wildest details Zeng revealed.

Apple CEO Tim Cook appears to be open to a friendlier relationship with Google than Steve Jobs ever was. Cook got spotted dining with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at one of the top Vietnamese restaurants in Silicon Valley this week. What the two powerful tech leaders were discussing is still a mystery, though.

Here’s another angle:

Finding an awesome spot to eat has always been easy on the iPhone. But iOS 10 makes it super-simple to book a restaurant reservation in Apple Maps.

With the new third-party app extensions in Maps, users can now reserve a table without ever leaving the Maps app. Just find the spot you want to dine at, and with a few extra taps you’ll be on your way to a fine dining experience.

Book a reservation in seconds with these steps.

Getting your chicken fix will no longer require a wallet at Chick-fil-A restaurants.

The company’s long-awaited Apple Pay rollout that was announced last year is finally coming to stores nationwide this week, allowing iPhone and Apple Watch owners to pay with a tap.

There are many meal-tracking apps and iOS-compatible smart scales out there, but for really dedicated calorie-counters the problem with the majority of them is that they don’t give you the nutritional content of the exact meal sitting in front of you.

A new high-tech food scanner straight out of Star Trek hopes to help solve that problem, by giving you a new iPhone attachment called NutriRay3D, which will use 3D image processing to accurately calculate the volume and calorie measurement of any meal.

Got a hunkering for “Asian-inspired” food but left your wallet at home? If you live near a Pei Wei, ditching your credit card won’t be a problem, as the fast-casual restaurant chain will begin accepting Apple Pay at all of its 197 stores in the United States.

Every summer Oreo comes out with a crazy new limited edition cookie to get you to stuff your face with more delicious cream filling. This year’s no different except instead of using watermelon, birthday cake, or lemon creme filling to tempt you, the company has taken a bite out of Apple’s playbook by making the Oreo impossibly thin.

Fritz the Golden Retriever may be adorable with his bandanna and soulful doggy eyes, but man he can’t catch a damn thing. Well, except maybe a french fry near the end of this hilarious video that looks like it was shot on an iPhone in slo-mo mode.

Since it’s National Puppy Day, let’s all empathize with this sad canine and wonder — what kind of owner keeps tossing food at its head?

Woof.

Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?

Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.

You know how when you pull that rank-looking piece of meat from the fridge, you don’t really know whether it’ll fill you or kill you? Is that chunk of chicken still fresh? Should you grill that fish or toss it?

Now (or soon anyway), you can use the Peres to answer those questions. It’s an electronic nose that sniffs your meat and tells you whether it’s still good to eat.

It’s time to take your diet from digital to delightfully simple.

ReFleX NutriCrystal is a Bluetooh enabled, glass-top kitchen scale to help you track calorie intake and reach your healthy eating goals. And Cult of Mac Deals has it right now during this limited time offer for 27% off – just $79.99.

Basil, still hands-down my favorite recipe app for the iPad, is going 2.0 just in time for iOS 7. And man, if you thought the original was clean, slick and easy to use, then you’re going to be blown away by v2.0, which developer Kyle Baxter tells me is “basically an entire new app.”

Google’s head of Android and Chrome, Sundar Pichai, has just confirmed that the next delicious version of Android won’t be just any old generic desert, but will instead be called Android 4.4 KitKat.

Along with the announcement of the new name Pichai told his Google+ followers that he just got back from a trip to Asia to visit device partners, and that Android has now passed over 1 Billion device activations:

Y’all know Serious Eats, right? It’s the one place on the Internet where you can go to be entertained, educated and properly fed. I’m a fan of cooking, but I generally avoid recipes on the web because it’s hard to gauge their quality until it’s too late. Serious Eats is solid every single time.

And now there’s a Newsstand magazine, and — again — it stands out above the rest.

Apple’s added a lot of Yelp integration into iOS over the past two years, but despite providing copious amounts of reviews for every restaurant in the U.S., the app hasn’t let you actually write a review from your iPhone.

Yelp 7.0 was just pushed to the App Store and now gives users the ability to write reviews from their iPhone. Now you can trash a restaurant’s king salmon tartare on taro chips while waiting for your waitress to bring a check. Not finished with your praise? You can save a draft and publish it later, too.

The free update is available on the App Store now.

Source: iTunes

Social networks have trained us to share all the superfluous details of ourselves, but a new app called Leftover Swap is trying to take things to the next level by allowing users to share leftover scraps of meals with one another.

Hungry, but too cheap to buy a $0.99 hot dog down the street? With LeftoverSwap you can just pull up a map of discarded meals in your area, make a selection, and then go pick it up from your neighbor.

Being able to find a great restaurant in any city from your iPhone is pretty great and all that, but when you’re starving, the only thing that matters is injecting that food straight into your digestive system as soon as possible.

Rather than drooling on your way to a restaurant you found on Yelp, you can now order your meal straight from the app. Restaurants supporting the feature will have an “Order Pickup or Delivery” button on their Yelp page where you can binge on all the burritos, pizza, bonbons and kabobs you want.

Support for the new feature is limited to select locations, but Yelp says it will be rolling out to more locations in the coming weeks. The free update is available now in the App Store.

Source: iTunes

You already have a connected scale for tweeting your weight. You might also have a baby scale to do the same, (only for the baby). Now you can get a smart scale for dinner. Not to eat for your dinner–to weigh your dinner. Or breakfast. You know what I mean.

The Smart Food Scale is a Kickstarter project and comes from Chef Sleeve, the folks behind the Chef Sleeve, the ultimate wipe-clean iPad prophylactic.

Did you know that Chipotle had an iPhone app? Well it does, and that app allows you to order from your iPhone and skip the line when you arrive to inhale your burrito goodness. It’s a beautiful idea, but the app itself has not been so beautiful for the past few years. Today Chipotle updated its app with iPhone 5 support, the ability to select brown rice, and so, so much more.

Basil is just about my favorite iPad cooking app. It doesn’t come loaded with recipes, nor does it feature videos of people slicing and sautéing fancy ingredients. Instead, Basil is a version of your paper notebook, only better. And it’s just about to get a huge makeover.

Do you trust the translations you see on Chinese menus? I don’t. Why? Because my local Chinese restaurant — which lists dishes in Chinese, English and Spanish — manages to write a different description for each one.

Luckily, Waigo is here to help, with it’s augmented-reality translation. Or is that “here to confuse”?