You know those times when you are just about to head out of the house, and you grab your iPhone, only to notice that you’ve got hardly any juice left? Yeah, me too.
When you need a quick charge on your iPhone or iPad, there’s a chimp-simple way to get it charged faster than usual, and it’s available with a quick tap or two.
At Macworld/iWorld last year, I had the opportunity to get a look at The iSlider by Rain Design. After using it for a bit, the folks at Rain Design decided to let me have one to use for review purposes. And after only a few days of use, The iSlider became my go-to iPad stand.
Cult of Mac has reviewed The iSlider before, and while I’ve used several stands for my iPad in the past (among them are the ZAGGmate and the Kribbit) The iSlider is by far the most versatile and best-designed stand I’ve ever used. It’s made me more efficient and effective when using my iPad, which is exactly the kind of thing I like in my tools. And right now Cult of Mac Deals is offering The iSlider for just $39.99.
Arguably, the iPad needs an external camera add-on more than the iPhone, stuck as it is with a previous-gen camera and features. And Sony seems to agree. Now it will sell you an adapter that puts one of its neat QX lens cameras onto any table (or phablet, I guess).
Chil’s Notchbook iPad Air case has one great feature that sets it apart form other cases. There’s a notch, or rather a slice, cut into the bottom of the front cover just next to the spine, and this notch lets you shove your palm up in there making the whole caboodle sit on your hand with no effort needed to grip it.
Neat, especially for when you’re reading books.
Just like the old Trapper Keeper, the STM Dux iPad case keeps all your notes (which are actually inside your iPad, safe within the Dux’s covers). You can plaster photos all over the inside of the clear plastic back. And it even has a little flip-open clasp that keeps the front cover from opening.
How do you increase the size of a touchscreen without increasing the screen real estate? Answer: by creating a smart bezel.
A new patent published today reveals how a future generation iPad could feature a bezel able to detect gesture and touch inputs through Force Sensing. Not only would the technique described allow gestures — such as swipes — to continue off the normal surface of the screen, but it would also allow specific virtual buttons for tasks such as scrolling to be incorporated into the iPad’s bezel.
iTunes Radio now lets you create stations full of the artists and songs you like, just like Pandora. You can also add artists to the list that you don’t want playing in the station.
When you create a new iTunes Radio station, though, it’s typically named after the first song or artist that you create the station with. That’s not always what you want.
You can rename any station you like with a couple of easy taps.
The immensely popular SwiftKey keyboard makes its debut on iOS today via a new note-taking app called SwiftKey Note. It promises to be the fastest way to make notes on an iPhone and iPad, and it boasts features like Evernote syncing and multilingual typing. It’s also completely free.
Everyone knows Apple didn’t come up with the name iPhone. Cisco owned the trademark on what they called I-phone long before Steve Jobs unveiled the smartphone that would change the world back in 2007. But did you know that Apple didn’t come up with the name iPad? In fact, Intel was hawking a device they called the I-pad — or “information pad” — way back in 1994.
Spurred on by the holiday season, Apple sold a record 26 million iPads last quarter, which according to IDC’s latest numbers, was enough to boost the company’s tablet market share up to 33.8% to finish off the year, up from 29.7% the previous quarter.
Wall Street was less than impressed with Apple’s sales numbers though, and according to IDC there’s cause to be concerned as signs point to a tablet market that is growing dramatically slower year-over-year.
Felix’s FlipStand is like a better version of Apple’s Smart Cover. It covers the screen and leaves the rear case mostly naked, but instead of using a flimsy folding action to give limited viewing angles when used as a stand, the FlipStand is almost infinitely adjustable between zero and ninety degrees, and holds the iPad steady like a kickstand.
Most iPad drawing apps take a rather old-fashioned approach. They try to mimic paper and pencil, or paint and canvas, and of course they never get it quite right, even with pressure-sensitive styluses and fancy paint engines. Archipad takes a different approach: it recognizes that you’re drawing on a computer screen and embraces that fact, letting you draw to scale, in 3-D and with perfect lines, all my using a finger or stylus.
For the last few weeks, I have had a little pebble-shaped gadget sat out on the wall of my balcony. It’s the Tempo, a Bluetooth thermometer which keeps the last 24 hour’s temperatures in memory, and passes them to your iDevice on demand. It’s also pretty tough, as we’ll see…
If you’re a movie nerd, then you’re going to freak out about Yeah! Movies. It’s an iPad app which lets you stream many great films (Kill Bill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Caddyshack and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. You also get around 500 “curated extras” with every movie purchase.
Readability, the oft-overlooked but competent rival to Instapaper and Pocket, has reached v2.0, and added an iOS 7 makeover, plus a few neat new features.
Most of use post our crap onto Twitter, Flickr, Instagram or – ugh – the Facebook. But creative pros have their own social network. Behance is more than just a place to hang your latest photos, motion-graphics, fashion or branding design, though. It’s kind of a mix between an online resume and and portfolio, with plenty of concept ideas thrown in for good measure. And it’s also built into some Adobe apps: Lightroom lets you publish straight to Behance, for example.
Which is a long way of getting to the point. Behance v3.0 for iOS just launched, and it brings an updated look and new features.
Evernote continues to suck as an app, and excel as a back-end service for better-designed apps. EverMemo is yet another quick note taking app which posts your important scribblings direct to your Evernote account to be indexed and assimilated, all without having to launch Evernote’s own bloated monster and tap desperately as you try to find the new-note button before you forget whatever it was you were trying to remember.
I’ll be honest: Missile Command was never my favorite classic game from the glory days of Atari. Originally released as a coin-op in 1980, designed by Dave Theurer (the man who also created Tempest and the world’s first commercial game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics, I, Robot), Missile Command came straight out of an era in which the scariest thing imaginable was a nuclear attack.
The game puts you in control of three anti-air missile batteries, as you defend cities from being destroyed by an endless hail of ballistic missiles. Like every game of its era, Missile Command didn’t have fancy graphics to carry it: it had to make do with limited processing power and graphical/audio capabilities by crafting a playing experience simple and fun enough to keep you pumping quarters into the arcade.
The team behind cult drawing app DrawQuest have sadly announced that it will be closing shop.
For those unfamiliar with it, DrawQuest is was an iOS app — originally for iPad, but with an iPhone version launched in November last year — that set daily drawing challenges to a niche community of artists.
In a blog post on the DrawQuest site, app creator Christopher “moot” Poole (also the man behind 4Chan) wrote the following:
Apple has today announced that iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager are expanding into new markets across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and other countries around the world. The expansions brings the total number of countries supported by iBooks Textbooks up to 51, while iTunes U Course Manager is now available in 70, including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia.
A New Zealand father-and-son duo tracked down their stolen iPad using the device’s “Find My iPad” function.
After enjoying a meal in a restaurant in Nelson, New Zealand, Chris and Markham Phillips returned to the parking lot to find their car had been ransacked — and cash, glasses and an iPad were missing.
“As despair and disgust begin to kick in, we remember a newly installed tracking application on both the stolen iPad and the retained iPhone,” son Markham told a local reporter. “We fire up the app [and] the iPad icon pings onto the map.”
iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.
You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.
This lovely retro-style bag is made to carry over your shoulder, or on your bike. Made by the Goodordering Company of Hackney, East London (in England, for those of you who may still be half asleep), the bag can be quickly converted between shoulder bag, pannier (“saddlebag”) or handlebar bag.
This tiny $7 dongle looks essential for anyone who uses a case on their iPhone or iPad. It’s a Lightning to Lightning adapter that does one thing: move your iDevice’s Lightning port a centimeter (0.033 feet) down from the bottom its host.
Lightroom might be coming to the iPad sooner than your think, if this accidental posting of the photo-editing app is anything to go by. Oddly, it shows “Adobe Lightroom for Mobile, Annual” at $99 per year, which would suggest that this is a landing page for a service, not an actual app as one source of the story believes.
