Apple’s iOS devices have had a huge impact on gaming, and more and more people are choosing to get their kicks on the iPhone and iPad rather than dedicated handheld consoles from the likes of Sony and Nintendo. By the end of this year, analysts expect Game Center accounts on iOS to surpass the 200 million milestone, making it the world’s biggest gaming platform.
Almost two years after making its debut on the iPad, The New Yorker is finally available on the iPhone — and it comes with two free issues from August 13 and August 20. Like the iPad app, it delivers new issues automatically every Monday morning when you subscribe, and each one is packed with videos, audio, infographics, and images that you won’t find in the print edition.
The new iPhone is coming out and supposedly it’s going to have a 4-inch screen. Rather than making the device wider, Apple’s just going to add more pixels to the top of the screen for a bigger display, which might be pretty cool, but how how are your favorite apps going to look once they’re all stretched out like that?
Well if you have access to Apple’s developer tools (which you can totally download for free by the way), then you can run the iOS Simulator and this quick hack to see for yourself what apps will look like at a display resolution of 640 x 1136.
Here, try it out and let us know what you think.
Department of Veterans Affairs is no stranger iOS devices or to developing custom apps to help deliver key services to veterans and their families. In fact, the VA’s CIO last year said that the agency needed to become “iPad friendly” in order to effectively support the agency’s physicians, nurse, and other medical staff and an iOS pilot program was launched earlier this year.
More recently, the VA has been looking for ways that mobile technology can help homeless veterans find food, shelter, and other critical resources. To achieve that goal and raise awareness of veteran homelessness across the country (one out of six homeless adults in America is a veteran), the VA has teamed up with JBJ Soul Foundation, the non-profit charity created by music legend Jon Bon Jovi to launch an iOS/Android app contest called Project REACH.
With an update last week, iOS and Mac diary app Day One went from a tool for angst-mongering teens to full-fledged journal, adding support for photos (the original was pretty much text-only) and locations, and the ability to automatically pull in weather info.
But for serial hacker and tweaker Brett Terpstra, maker of the amazing Markdown preview app Marked, among many, many other things, this still wasn’t enough. So Brett wrote a tool called Slogger, which pulls in posts from your existing social networks and adds them to your Day One journal, rendering any text in Markdown, naturally.
Yesterday, Apple officially announced that the YouTube app will no longer be a default staple of iOS. While Google is working on a standalone app, Apple has informed developers that they will need to change their embedded YouTube URLs if they want them to continue to work.
In the changelog for iOS 6 beta 4, Apple explained the changes by linking to a video for one of the internet’s oldest memes – Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up video.
Apple’s next iPhone is widely expected to feature a larger 4-inch display and slimmer form factor. While speculation has been that Apple will move to a larger display to accommodate the battery required for LTE 4G networking, exactly how Apple will implement a larger display has remained up in the air. Many seem to think that Apple will change the iPhone 5’s aspect ratio to 16:9 to match the taller display. According to new evidence found in Apple’s own iOS Simulator developer app, the iOS home screen can be scaled to fit a taller 640×1136 display with 5 rows of icons.
There are plenty of stories out there about the explosive growth of mobile technology in the workplace. The trend towards bring your on device (BYOD) models in which employees are allowed or encouraged to bring their own iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office is driving a massive expansion of the number of mobile devices used for work tasks. At the same time, the annual (or even more frequent) device an OS release cycles that have become common are driving up diversity of devices and resetting the mobile technology playing field every few months.
That constant change is forcing the IT professionals to adapt to new devices, apps, use cases, network models, and security threats faster than anything the IT industry has ever seen.
This is particularly visible in the mobile management space. A year ago, the primary method for handling mobile device and data security was to manage and lock down the device itself using one of dozens of mobile device management (MDM) suites on the market. Over the past six to nine months, however, MDM has been replaced by mobile app management (MAM) as the best way to secure business data. That’s a warp-speed transition in the mindset and goals of IT professionals.
It’s likely to be at least a month before Apple releases iOS 6 to the public, and so it’s unlikely apps will receive iOS 6 support for a few weeks yet. But Spotify is getting its update out of the way early. Its latest iOS release — version 0.5.4 — brings iOS 6 support, more radio stations on the iPad, and bug fixes.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned blogging about Apple, it’s that the company doesn’t stand for copycats — especially when those copycats go after patents that Steve Jobs was particularly proud of. That’s what Samsung did when it copied Apple’s inertial scrolling feature, right after Jobs told them not to.
While Apple and Samsung duke it out in Northern California this week, it makes sense to take a little time comparing the two on sales numbers, units shipped, and profit made. And while many folks these days like to bring up the fact that more Samsung devices are sold than iOS devices, those same folks are missing the boat.
According to a report from Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, via website AllThingsD, Apple’s iOS devices are making its company a ton more profit than Samsung’s devices are. Let’s take a look at the numbers.
Registration is now open for MacTech Conference 2012. The annual conference, which is a great learning and networking experience for IT professionals and developers, will be held October 17 – 19 in Los Angeles. A pre-registration discount is available for anyone who registers by the end of August.
The conference is sponsored by MacTech magazine and was launched in 2010, the year that Apple chose to focus its annual Worldwide Developers Conference solely on iOS. Since then, the conference has grown into a major event for IT professionals that need to support Macs and/or iOS devices in business, enterprise, and education environments. The conference has also become a serious event for Mac and iOS developers.
Apple just released iOS 6 beta 4 to developers. So far it looks like there are a few small bug fixes and performance enhancements except for one unexpected surprise – Apple has removed the YouTube app from the iPhone and iPad.
It’s no secret that Apple has been trying to remove Google’s app from iOS and replace them with better alternatives. Some might think YouTube’s removal isan act of war, but we think it’s just as likely that Apple removed YouTube as a default app just because of plain obsolescence.
An online petition has been created to try to convince Apple to make changes to its Bonjour network discovery service and related technologies including AirPlay and AirPrint. The petition is asking Apple to redesign Bonjour and other services to deliver a better fit with education and enterprise networks. It was started by Lee Badman, wireless network architect for Syracuse University, on behalf of the Higher Ed Wireless Networking Admin Group at Educause, a non-profit resource organization for IT staff working in higher education.
Minimalist weather apps must be the current hot trend among developers right now because we’ve seen a slew of pretty new iOS weather apps hit the App Store recently. If the last three weather apps we covered haven’t quite done it for you, maybe Partly Cloudy will.
Partly Cloudy is different from most weather apps in that it displays all the information you would need to know for a single day in one unique and compelling infographic. Modeled on a traditional clock face, Partly Cloudy’s infographic presents weather data in a fun new way that’s also very useful.
Susan Kare, the graphic designer famous for creating a number of icons for the Macintosh, will be called as a witness in the ongoing trial between Apple and Samsung. Kare will reportedly talk about the similarities between the user interface graphics on the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.
PreviewMaker is a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones that’s likely to be particularly useful to app developers, theme designers, reviewers, and more. It takes all the screenshots you’ve taken on your iPhone and applies an iPhone-style frame, meaning you no longer need to edit each one and add it manually.
The number of companies investing in mobile management and security solutions related to bring your own device (BYOD) programs is growing, but not nearly as fast as the number of companies that are actually offering BYOD to their employees. The result is that many companies are putting themselves and their data at risk by jumping onto the BYOD bandwagon too quickly and without properly securing employee iPhones, iPads, and other devices or the business data that is stored on them.
Apple kicked off 2012 with its education event in New York. At that event, the company announced its electronic textbooks for iPad initiative, iBooks Author, and the revamped iTunes U. According the Apples latest financial data, the education initiative has paid off with both iPads and Macs being purchased by schools in record numbers.
A 21st century vision of education , however, is about more than getting the iPads and MacBooks into the classroom. It also requires technology goals, professional development for teachers, high-speed access to up-to-date content, education-centric portals for students and teachers, back-end systems, and education apps or software.
Ever wanted to try your hand at iPhone app development? The folks at Code School want to teach you, via a series of web-based coding courses focused on learning to code for iOS now available for backing at Kickstarter. The new set of coursework is called Try iOS, and it will use video, in-browser activities, and a hands-on approach to teaching anyone how to code for the iPhone.
We want to create Try iOS, a Code School course which teaches how to build your own iPhone apps. Our course will combine high quality screencasts, in-browser code challenges, and gamification principles to make learning fun. There will be no need to install anything, since students will build iPhone apps using our in-browser iPhone simulator.
Not long go, we reported to you that the FPS Dead Trigger had given up the fight and gone free on Android, due to an “unbelievably high” piracy rate. Today, it appears that Madfinger Games, the developers behind Dead Trigger have given in and made the game free on iOS as well.
The member companies that make up the Enterprise Device Alliance announced earlier this week that all of their products have either been updated already with support for Mountain Lion or will be within a few weeks.
The Enterprise Device alliance is a consortium of companies focused on integration Apple technologies in the business and enterprise environments. The solutions offered by those member companies include Active Directory integration, Mac and iOS device management, advanced file and print integration options, mobile backup, Windows virtualization, and help desk operations.
The New York Times recently said that Apple was considering a multi-million dollar investment in Twitter. The report was then refuted by other publications, including The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, Apple’s investment talks with Twitter were more than a year old. It seemed odd that Apple, a company known for rarely buying (much less investing in) other companies, would pump so much money in a financially-healthy startup like Twitter.
In a new report today, The Wall Street Journal sheds more light on Apple’s relationship with Twitter, highlighting that the two companies have been focusing on how to tie Twitter into Apple’s OS X and iOS platforms. Interestingly, Apple is currently working to add deeper iTunes integration with Twitter.
We’ve taken a couple of looks at ownCloud over the past few months. The company launched its signature cloud server software in April and issued a major update about a month ago. Today, ownCloud announced its iOS and Android apps, making the product a serious option for many businesses that need to develop a secure internal cloud strategy.
Traveling for business is a lot different from taking a vacation. While you may get to experience far off cities, meet new people, and have some genuine fun on a business trip, you’ll also need to work, worry about delays that could make you miss critical meetings, ensure you leave your hotel room looking your most presentable, and keep track of every expense related to the trip.
Of those stress factors, tracking expenses so that you can submit them for reimbursement or explain charges you make to a company credit card may not seem the most stressful. The majority of the time it isn’t (unless you lose some big-ticket receipts or have unusual charges to justify). It is, however, often tedious drudgery that is prone to human error and mistakes.
There are many iOS expense tracking apps out there and there are some very good reasons to invest in one of them.