News - page 1686

Along with this week’s surprising news that Scott Forstall is leaving Apple, Tim Cook also announced that Bob Mansfield is planning to stay with Apple for two more years. Just last June, Mansfield had decided that he was going to retire, but now he’s quickly decided he’s not ready to leave just yet, and will stay on to run a new Technologies unit.

Why the sudden change of heart? According to a new report, Mansfield and Scott Forstall haven’t gotten along too well, and when news surfaced that Forstall was on the way out, Mansfield decided Apple would be a lovely place to work at again.

The iPhone 5 is the best camera Apple has ever made (OK, maybe the second-best), so why not dress it like one of the best film cameras ever made?

That’s just what PetaPixel’s Leica skin will do, turning your long, thin iPhone into a long, thin fake rangefinder.

This is odd: when you receive your iPad mini, a stated software requirement listed on the box is that you will have a PC with iTunes 11 installed.

The only problem? While iTunes 11 was originally slated for an October release, it’s now been pushed back to November.

It’s not a big deal: if you plug in an iPad mini into the latest version of iTunes, it works just fine, albeit without an iPad mini icon. To me, that implies that we’ll probably see a small update to iTunes drop later today.

Source: iGen

Path, the popular “personal network” exclusive to smartphones and tablets, has today made its debut on the iPad. With a new interface designed to take full advantage of the iPad’s larger display, Path for iPad “allows for larger moments” and lets you see more of your family and friends on one screen.

South Korea has asked Apple to remove the Japanese names of the Dokdo islets from its new Maps app in iOS 6. Both Asian countries claim ownership of Dokdo, which has long caused tensions between the two. In iOS 5, when Maps was powered by Google Maps, only the Korean name for the islets was used, and that’s how Korean officials want it to stay.

It’s November, and you all know what that means: No, not the growing of wispy, creepy mustaches. November is National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for (almost) short.

NaNoWriMo is the annual attempt by many tens of thousands of people to finally get that novel out of their head and into the cloud storage option of their choice. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight on the 30th November, and you can get there by fair means or foul. The rules? It has to be a novel, it has to be 50,000 words (or more) long, and it has to be written in November.

The tools you will need most to write your NaNoWriMo novel are inspiration and a lot of perseverance. Luckily, apps can help you with both. Here’s the definitive guide to NaNoWriMo apps on the Mac and iOS. If you can’t drag that novel kicking and screaming into the world with the help of these apps, you can’t do it at all.

One of iOS’s most limiting aspects is its icon-driven interface. iOS’s default interface, the homescreen, it simply a grid of equally sized icons, and while these icons are pretty, they all look pretty much the same. Worse, they are dumb: they can’t do anything cleverer than pin a badge to themselves to convey information.

Compare that to the way Android or Windows Phone handles the homescreen. In Android, you can pin intelligent widgets along with apps to the homescreen; in Windows Phone, the tiles operate not just as app icons, but as smart widgets that can convey to the user changes that are happening within the app, even when it’s not as open.

iOS users have been clammoring for Apple to figure out a way to make the iOS homescreen smarter for quite a long time, and this concept video describes one possible interpretation, which mixes up the iOS homescreen with Android’s widgets and Windows Phone’s Live Tiles.

A court of appeal has reprimanded the “non-compliant” statement Apple published on its website regarding the case against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in the United Kingdom. Apple now has 48 hours to correct the statement, which must then be displayed on the homepage of its website until December 14.

iFixit is currently in the processing of tearing down the new iPad mini — a full day before the tiny tablet goes on sale in Apple retail stores the world over. Having already torn down the iPhone 5 and the new iPod touch, iFixit hasn’t too many surprises with the iPad mini; it’s just as difficult to get into as its siblings, and not at all easy to repair.

To Amazon’s displeasure, the teardown has also confirmed the presence of stereo — not mono — speakers, a Samsung display, and more.

You can now help Superstorm Sandy survivors by making a donation to the American Red Cross via iTunes and the App Store on your Mac or iOS device. Apple is accepting donations of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 — and 100% of your contribution goes straight to the Red Cross.

It turns out that the iPad Mini is the first Apple mobile device to ship with stereo speakers. Although Apple’s product page only mentions a “built-in speaker,” the two grilles on the new iPad’s bottom edge do in fact contain separate stereo speakers.

Apple submitted its annual 10-K report with the SEC today, which summarizes the company’s growth over the last year. Reading the report shows an amazing amount of growth for the Cupertino-based company across all areas of its business: retail, research and development, and square footage it owns.

Now that fiscal 2012 is over, Apple has filed its year-end 10k document to the SEC that contains a trove of financial data. Also contained in the filing is an item that contains information about Scott Forstall’s new role.

Forstall was removed as Senior Vice President of Mobile Software on Monday but will be stay at till 2013 in a special role under Tim Cook too keep him from jumping ship to a competitor. Forstall’s new official title is “Special Advisor to the Chief Executive Officer.”

Here’s the exact info from Apple’s 10-k filing:

Apple’s legal battles have been quietly continuing in the U.S. even after their landmark $1 Billion win over Samsung a few months ago. Apple is currently trying to fight patent claims lobbied against it by Motorola Mobility which is now owned by Google.

With five days to go before their contract trial starts in Wisconsin, Apple formally declared to the court that it will be willing to pay a licensing fee to Motorola Mobility as long as the license is $1 or less per iPhone sold.

Unshielded, shoddily built and as close to dangerous junk as you can get without actually being dangerous. Today, this description happens to apply to these knock-off Lightning adapters from China, but it could equally describe any cheap no-name Chinese electronic accessories.

With the official launch of the iPad mini fast approaching this Friday, Amazon put an anti-iPad mini ad on their homepage praising the specs of the Kindle Fire HD against those found in the iPad mini.

The Kindle Fire HD is undoubtedly cheaper, and a good buy, but the move seemed a bit uncharacteristic of Amazon, who usually doesn’t engage in product comparisons. Amazon has since pulled the ad and it’s nowhere to be found on their website.

Unaware of Scott Forstall’s recent exit from Apple, Siri will tell you that information on Forstall can be found on Apple.com, even though Apple already moved him from the Executive Profiles page.

Somebody’s got to break it to Siri that her buddy Scott is gone, and who better than Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Phil Schiller. In their latest comic, Joy of Tech imagines what that awkward conversation with Siri would look like, head over there to see how she takes the news.

Source: Joy of Tech

How does the new iPod Touch’s 5MP camera size up to the iPhone 4’s low-light-loving 8MP monster? IMore’s Leanna Lofte decided to find out, pitting the cameras head-to-head in a rather extensive test. The short form: if you were thinking of buying the iPhone 5 just for the camera, you could probably save yourself some money.

starts

The iPad mini is slated for release on Friday, and reactions are mixed: some see it as the device that finally takes the iPad line to iPhone-like mainstream popularity, while others see it as a shrunken down iPad 2 that can’t really compete with the competition in either specs or price.

So which will it be? To help predict, it might help to go back to the first “mini” sized iDevice Apple released: the iPod mini. Before that, there was just the iPod, shipping 1.5 million in a year. In 2004? The iPod mini helped increase the number of iPods sold by five times as many.

I give great, fluid, professional-appearing speeches. Put me up in front of a crowd and I’ll crow on all day log, with nary a stammer nor a hesitation. The problem? I have nothing to say.

Other people actually have interesting information to convey, and yet they’re scared stiff of public speaking. Speeches app is here to help. It won’t boost your confidence, but it will help you to remember what you’re supposed to be talking about.

Poor Siri. Her and Scott Forstall looked so happy together each time they hung out at the Apple keynotes, swapping jokes, answering questions and chatting. Now Scott’s kind of almost gone, but no one’s had the heart to break it to Siri that Mr. Forstall no longer plays a major role at Apple, and won’t be there to show off all her new designer threads at the iOS 7 keynote.

Each time you ask about Scotty, Siri tells you to just go look at Apple.com, like he totally works there and the info’s all there man. But yeah, it’s not.

Over the course of the last five years, there have been a lot of movies with the gimmick that they have been shot on the iPhone, but few have pulled it off as well as this incredibly scary little short film made by Clement Deneux for the 2011 Disposable Film Festival, a film festival dedicated to short films shot on smartphones and either pocketable cameras.

It’s called Les Ongles, or The Nails, and it would be a discredit to describe the plot in much detail, except to say it’s a found-footage-style short that takes place during a party in Paris in which one guest is compelled to quit a nasty habit. You’re going to want to watch this.

Even though the news that Apple fired Scott Forstall and John Browett was released on Monday, investors didn’t have an opportunity to react to the new changes in management thanks the the stock markets being closed due to hurricane Sandy.

The markets opened today for the first time all week and investors showed that they’re not feeling incredibly optimistic about Apple right now. Apple’s stock price dropped about 2.4% and was trading at $589.60 this morning, which is the lowest price the stock has seen since July.

Lookout is like Apple’s Find My iPhone app, only it adds a whole bunch of extra features. It’ll let you track your lost phone from any web browser, even when the battery has dies (kinda), and it also adds a slew of features that only the dumbest of people will need.

There are only a few hours left until the entire country goes jettisons itself into a deranged mess of Halloween parties. If you don’t have your costume ready by now then you might be panicing about coming up with something cool on the fly.

Don’t worry. We’ve got three great Apple-themed Halloween costume ideas that you can pull of in minutes before you head to your parties tonight. Check ’em out.