Things haven’t been going all that well for HP on the PC shipment front, but it’s hoping to make up for that with its new high-tech Project Moonshot servers. In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman is so jazzed about her company’s new servers that she’s even going around bragging that Apple might be considering HP for its iTunes services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqfEE_X5cpQ
Joining its buddy Microsoft, Nokia has decided to start attacking Apple’s products head-on with a new ad campaign for the Nokia 925 that bashes the iPhone 5’s camera.
The new ad starts by noting that more pictures are taken on the iPhone every day than on any other camera. But Nokia’s all about quality instead of quantity, goes the ad, so you should totally buy the the Nokia 925 if the only thing that matters in the world to you is your smartphone’s camera sensor.
To Nokia’s credit, their PureView cameras are pretty nice—if you don’t mind lugging around a big bulky Windows Phone that still doesn’t even have Instagram.
Thanks: Dave
Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.
Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:
In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.
Football season is only a month away, so the NFL has completely rebuilt its NFL Mobile app for iOS and Android with a redesigned look that gives football fans quick access to breaking news, scores, and video highlights.
As part of the update, the NFL has folded in functionality from its Verizon-made app, which gives Verizon subscribers the ability to pay for premium features such as live streaming NFL games on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights and NFL RedZone on Sundays.
Apple has sent out an email to registered developers to outline its restoration plans for a number of services that are still down following its Developer Center outage. Those include Xcode automatic configuration and access to license agreements, program enrollments, and renewals—all of which are to be reinstated this week.
Feedly, the company that picked up the Google Reader API, cloned it, and made it available for all and sundry, just announced their first attempt at monetization: Feedly Pro.
Coming in at a very affordable five dollars per month, Feedly Pro gets paying members more features than the standard Feedly, with promises of more to come, sourced from Feedly users themselves.
Those with older iPhones and iPods are now being contacted regarding a possible payout over faulty liquid damage indicators that caused some customers to lose out on free AppleCare repairs. Apple agreed to pay $53 million in a class action lawsuit earlier this year, and those who may be eligible for damages should be receiving an email soon.
I love Google Chrome—it’s my browser of choice on Android, Mac, and iOS. But navigating your bookmarks within the mobile apps is nowhere near as easy as it should be. Fortunately, there’s an awesome little tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that solves that.
It’s called BMarks Bar, and it introduces a handy bookmarks bar that offers one-tap access to your favorite sites.
Pegatron may be gearing up to take on future iMac orders from Apple after “some related upstream supply chain players” revealed that they have sent iMac components to Pegatron for assembly. Quanta is currently tasked with assembling Apple’s popular all-in-one, and it’s unclear whether the two will now work side-by-side or whether Pegatron will take over.
If there seems to be one universal law of commerce, it is this: If you purchase an iPhone from a strange man in the back of a Burger King parking lot who you initially contacted through Craigslist, it is a fact that there will be anything except an iPhone in the box he sells you.
This is a law of commerce more nitwits should probably internalize, since yet another poor sucker has fallen for this classic ploy, with one important difference: It was a McDonald’s! Dum dum DUM!
Leica’s incredible Monochrom camera costs $8,000, and shoots only B&W images. That is of course an absurd price, but it does bring amazing light sensitivity and detail thanks to the fact that there are no color filters blocking light from the sensor, and that all three dots from each pixel are dedicated to grabbing luminance data.
New Zealander Raymond Collecutt clearly liked the look of a dedicated monochrome sensor, but didn’t like the price. So he did what anyone would do—he sacrificed one of his two Canon EOS 1000Ds to the cause, and scraped off the color micro lenses on top of the sensor.
As someone who has been testing iOS 7 for months, I can tell you that when it drops, some app icons are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Why? Because icon design that looked good in the house Scott Forstall built are going to look really out of place in the house Jony Ive knocked flat to the ground.
Unfortunately, unlike on OS X, there isn’t an easy way to swap out an app’s icon for a custom one of your choosing. That said, a new app called Iconical has figured out a workaround. The app lets you customize your homescreen, no jailbreak required, by taking advantage of the custom URL schemes of over 14,000 apps. This, my friends, is a clever idea.
In about a month, every iPhone and iPad on Earth will suddenly gain the ability to stream an unlimited number of tracks for free, thanks to iTunes Radio.
For people who want more granular control over their music even when it’s streaming, iTunes Radio isn’t likely to tear them away from the likes of Spotify and Rdio, but if all you want to do is hear new jams without thinking about it, iTunes Radio is a killer feature that could potentially get you to cancel your service.
So Spotify, at least, is acting defensively. They’re rolling out a new feature called Expert Playlists. And it’s potentially way better than iTunes Radio.
Squaready is one of my most-used photo apps on iOS. It has one purpose: to take your rectangular photos and turn them into squares by padding the edges, letting you post them intact to Instagram.
The trouble is, it’s ugly as sin, with the kind of interface that you’d expect to see if Linux and Windows XP got drunk on cider one night and had a little “surprise” appear nine months later.
Happily, Squaregram exists, and its a lot prettier. It also now works with Camera+, and has had some UI tweaks to make it even better.
You’re going to love this one. What if I told you there was an iPad accessory that combined a full-sized keyboard, a case, a desktop tray and an iPhone dock, plus a compartment for storing a whole mess of charging and connection accessories. And what if I told you this behemoth was styled into a package that would make a 1990s-era traveling businessman proud to use it?
Well, as you may have suspected, this absurdity does exist. It’s called the Modus III, and it’s all kinds of awesome.
If there’s one thing I hate more than kids, it’s the thought of their filthy hands touching my pristine gadgets. Worse, these walking fetuses have brains so undeveloped that they will drop something the second they stop thinking about it.
For me, the solution is easy—just avoid the little monsters. But parents aren’t so lucky (although you could argue that they brought it upon themselves), and need a little help. And today that help comes in the form of Kensington’s “SafeGrip™ Rugged Case & Stand for iPad® mini.”
If you thought the switch from the squat screen iPhone of the iPhones 1–4 to the tall and slim screen of the iPhone 5 was bad, then wait for iOS 7. I have the beta in daily use on my iPhone, and when I go back to my iOS 6-encumbered iPad mini, it feels like I’m visiting my grandmother’s house. Worse: any apps with a lot of heavy UI chrome start to seem as oppressive as a serial killer’s basement.
Thankfully, there’s an easy fix in the simple and clean shape of Glyphish, a set of beautiful icons, illustrations and (not so hot) backgrounds.
Did you ever find yourself pinching to zoom a paper map, or tapping and holding on an unfamiliar word in a newspaper trying to pop up a dictionary definition? It always ends in frustration, no? Not anymore. Not the second one, anyway: Meanings is an app that lets you use the iPhone’s camera to look up up real-world words in the fake-world dictionary.
The Obama administration has vetoed a product ban on older Apple devices that was proposed by the U.S. International Trade Commission in June. Apple was found guilty of infringing a Samsung wireless patent, and the ITC declared a sales ban on iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and third-gen iPad.
Trade Representative Michael Froman issued the veto for the executive branch today, marking the first time a presidential administration has vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987.
Friends—this week’s episode of The CultCast is so much fun, you might find yourself doing the Balki Bartokomous dance of joy. Join us and special guest Adam Christianson from the very popular MacCast podcast as we discuss why the low-cost iPhone 5C is a unicorn you might soon see. We’ll cover all the recent rumors. Then, we’ll cover what’s new, like the just-seeded iOS 7 beta 4. Plus, there’s new evidence of a fingerprint sensor coming to future iPhones, but will the 5S be getting the upgrade? All that and so much more!
Have a few LOLs and get caught up on this week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Show notes up next.
We’re getting to the stage in the Apple rumor mill when next-gen parts start leaking left and right out of the supply chain overseas. Multiple parts for the iPhone 5S, low-cost iPhone 5C, and upcoming iPads have already surfaced. Now alleged parts for the upcoming iPhone 5C and iPad 5 have been partially assembled and shown off on video.
While the authenticity of these kinds of leaks should always be questioned, today’s leaks are corroborated by previously reported parts for Apple’s unreleased products.
We shed a tear when Infinity Blade Dungeons was canned after mouthwatering footage was shown at an Apple event, but there may still be hope. One of the most popular iOS games in history isn’t over yet, if a LinkedIn profile is to be believed.
A Senior Q&A Tester for ChAIR Entertainment, the iOS development arm for Epic Games, has “Infinity Blade 3 for the iPhone” listed as one of the games he’s testing. While that’s by no means a confirmation, it isn’t surprising. ChAIR teased us with “just wait till you see what we’ve got in store for the Infinity Blade universe” earlier this month.
Infinity Blade II received a big upgrade last summer, but development has been quiet since then.
Maybe we’ll see Infinity Blade III at an Apple event this fall? Now that iOS 7 opens up the possibility for hardware controllers, things could very interesting.
Via: Kotaku
For the first time, Apple is allowing children under the age of 13 to have an iTunes account with the approval of an educational institution. Back to school season is nearly here, and Apple is preparing for the increased number of iPads that will be distributed by educators to young students.
Apple’s updated terms and conditions don’t mean that any pre-teen can create an iTunes account at will. Only approved institutions can add IDs after having obtained “verifiable parental consent.”
Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.
Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.
Cocktail is a popular OS X utility that has been around for years. It’s a simplistic app that lets you clean up and optimize your Mac’s system. The developer behind Cocktail, Maintain, has finally released a version that is fully compatible with Mountain Lion. A Mavericks edition is also in the works.