Hands On With iBooks Author 2.0
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld
In another blow to the credibility of Apple Maps, the company has delayed the turn-by-turn navigation feature in Australia, making us the last country to receive the upgrade.
Occasionally in some setups, opening even standard document filetypes can result in odd and frustrating errors.
I can't think of another company that cares as much about how its products are designed and built — or one that knows how to maximize a supply chain as skillfully — so something tells me it's no accident that this tablet isn't selling for $200. It doesn't feel like Apple is racing to some lowest-price bottom — rather it seems to be trying to raise the floor.And it does raise the floor here. There's no tablet in this size range that's as beautifully constructed, works as flawlessly, or has such an incredible software selection.
I was really surprised with how much I used the iPad mini in my daily routine — more than the 10-inch iPad.The iPad mini is a well thought out device and it’s exactly what you would expect from Apple.
The actual iPad Mini display is not terrible. It’s exactly what you think: it feels like an iPhone 3GS display cut to iPad size, including the fact that the pixels seem deeper from the surface of the glass. (It does seem brighter and more vibrant than a 3GS display, perhaps because it uses an IPS panel.) And after a week of using it as my main iPad, the individually discernible pixels are no longer jarring to my eyes. The non-retina resolution is the one and only significant complaint I have with the iPad Mini, and it’s an issue that is only apparent to those of us who already own a nearly-new iPad.
With its latest update, and the iBookstore’s continued growth, iBooks 3 offers an excellent reading experience, if you don’t mind limiting your ebook reading to iOS devices.
Here’s spokesman Tom Neumayr’s take: “The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right. We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.”
Two things distinguish the Panorama option in the Camera app from most other offerings. First, just how darn well it works. Even when I try to screw up, it still produces an interesting picture. And second, how well integrated panoramas are into the Aperture, iPhoto, and iPhoto for iOS applications. This integration encourages me to use pano images in new ways.
Cook thanks Apple’s iOS Senior Vice President Scott Forstall “for all of his many contributions to Apple over his career.”Perhaps in bigger news from this internal email, Cook says that Bob Mansfield, the new executive in charge of Apple’s new “Technologies” group will remain at Apple for two years.
But the big news today is about Jony Ive. I don’t think it can be overstated just how big a deal it is that he now oversees all product design, hardware and software. For the last year, outside observers have been left to wonder just where the buck stopped for UI design at post-Jobs Apple. That question has now been answered: Jony Ive.
Apple today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.
While Starbucks and its implementation are at fault, it points up the fact that the integration between Passbook and third-party developers is a weak link when said implementation isn’t done properly.
Letterpress may very well not be the only culprit in Game Center's bugginess, but it's certainly the focal point for some of Twitter's most vocal gaming crowd.
It is one of the world's largest hedge funds, with $121bn under management, but its name is virtually unknown in financial circles. Braeburn Capital is not operated from the top floor of a Manhattan skyscraper or a plush Mayfair townhouse. It is located in a quiet suburb of Nevada's capital, Reno, and it belongs to Apple.
Who is the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro for? It’s ideal for professional users who want a large, yet compact digital workspace that doesn’t sacrifice a lot of processing performance. The MacBook Air is still the choice for users for whom weight is a top priority—traveling business users or students who need to write papers in-between treks across campus. However, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro isn’t that much heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air, so if you are a demanding user who works on location, you won’t feel like you’re sacrificing much portability with the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
Game Center is supposed to be this fun and engaging infrastructure to enrich games and provide services like online matchmaking and connectivity. The idea is great, the infrastructure is really necessary, but the actual implementation is so bad almost all developers I know and talked about it dread using it. This has many reasons, some of them will be topic on this blog. But for now I just want to put attention to the one structural reason:There is no internal client for Game Kit and Game Center at Apple.
I think Apple respects the concept of “affordability.” It’s just not a driving passion for the company.
The iPad mini, according to Cook both during the call and at Apple's iPad and Mac event previously, is 7.9-inches rather than 7-inches, and due to its 4:3 and 1024x768 pixel display, it has 35% more screen real-estate than a 7-inch, typically 16:9, tablet. Including the difference in landscape height, and depending on interface chrome, Cook said that translates into a 50-67% more space.
For the first time, the average selling price of a Mac laptop is higher than that of a desktop.
There are three questions, then, which real people will ask about the iPad mini. Do I want it, can I afford it, and which model should I get. The answers to those questions will determine how many iPad minis Apple manages to sell. But the question which most of the press concentrates on — how does the iPad mini compare to its non-Apple competitors — is one which gets asked much less often than the Apple-as-company people tend to think.
While this may raise concern about where the connection is going, the situation does not appear to be malicious in any way and instead has arisen from an apparent hosting configuration change for the image file.
In the meantime, if you have a Java applet that you need to run on your system and you can't get it working in Oracle's Java 7, then you can re-enable Java 6 without needing a Java runtime manager utility like Apple's Java Preferences. The installation of Java 7 does not remove the Java 6 runtime from OS X, but simply replaces Apple's Java Internet plug-in link with its plug-in package. Therefore, to downgrade and use Java 6, you can replace this package with a link to Apple's Java runtime.
"The iPad is far and away the most successful product in its category. The most affordable product we've made so far was $399 and people were choosing that over those devices," Schiller said."And now you can get a device that's even more affordable at $329 in this great new form, and I think a lot of customers are going to be very excited about that," Schiller said.
The new iBooks doesn’t seem to be a dramatic change from its previous iteration. Instead, it appears aimed at making the reading app a bit more social, and a bit more usable—whether you’re using a device with less storage, or one with less screen real estate.
Fans of word games won’t be disappointed. If you’re starting to tire of Words With Friends, or just want additional word-focused fun, Letterpress deserves your attention.
I don't really buy the argument that young children need a smaller device. That's intuitively appealing but I don't think it stands up. For one thing, the smaller the device is, the finer motor skills you need to manipulate it. Young children don't have such fine motor control. This is why you give a young child a fat pencil and an older child a thinner one. Secondly, our experience has been that younger children tend to lose small things. We see younger pupils losing their own iPod touch devices quite often in school but never their iPad. The most compelling reason to give a younger pupil a smaller iPad is cost and, at the price points Apple's offering, I don't see the savings over a three-year lease as compelling. The benefits to having all pupils on the one device are probably greater - especially for a school like mine with all grades K-12 in the one school.
We also wonder whether the more limited range of motion on a one-handed iPad mini might lead app developers to redesign their interfaces; an Apple representative we talked to suggested that the new continuous-scrolling mode in Apple’s own iBooks app may have been introduced specifically to make it easier for iPad mini users to read without having to stretch their thumbs to make a page-flip gesture.
Indeed, it's a smaller version of the iPad, but in use, the iPad mini doesn't "seem" significantly smaller. Apple claims you can hold the device with one hand, which may be technically true for some of our larger-handed readers. For me, it was just barely doable, but still possible.
The manager at the Stockton Street store in San Francisco explained that "this specific store" would allow purchasers of the third-generation iPad to exchange their device for the fourth-generation iPad if purchased within the last 30 days. She emphasized that, unless the recently purchased iPad showed serious signs of wear-and-tear, the usual 14-day return policy would be waived.
It's a classic Apple strategic move: entering a pre-existing market with a premium device, and banking on design and ease of use to take it to the front of the pack. It's the same strategy Cupertino used with the original iPod 10 years ago, which originally sold at $399 with a mere 5GB of storage, competing against much cheaper MP3 players.
GeekTool is an amazing free app that is a bit like Dashboard for the super nerdy. It allows you to place functional widgets, called “Geeklets,” right on top of your desktop, so you can always see them.
As I paid for my power cord, I asked the nice Apple lady about the announcement."You've already been told everything, right?" I said."No, no,' she replied. "We've got it on the screen over there."
Apple's Fusion Drive does not appear to function like an SSD-backed disk cache, but rather seems more like a file-level implementation of a feature that has existed for some time in big enterprise disk arrays: automatic tiering.
Apple's innovations emerge from a systematic and sustained application of what are in fact well established, if not (yet) widely understood, principles, and practices. It aims for little, more—and enjoys a lot more success as a result.
The iPad mini is 7.2mm thick—23 percent thinner than the new, fourth-generation iPad—“thin as a pencil,” as Schiller put it. It weighs 0.68 pounds, which is half the weight of the previous iPad. “It’s as light as a pad of paper.”Schiller also took the wraps off the new fourth-generation iPad, saying, “It’s amazing.” The new iPad uses the Apple A6X chip, a new chip that further improves upon the speed performance of the A6; the company claims that it’s twice as fast as the A5X, with double the graphics performance. It gets the same ten hours of battery life as the third-generation iPad.
The new Mac mini looks nearly identical to its predecessor on the outside, with the only external change being upgrades to the computer’s four USB ports—the mini now uses the USB 3.0 standard.
While the familiar almuninum design remains, the new iMac is much thinner than its predecessor. The company reengineered the iMac’s internals and display, and Apple says the display system is 45 percent thinner and 8 pounds lighter.
The Fusion Drive, which is available as an option for the new iMac and both Mac minimodels, is a hybrid drive that merges a 128GB flash drive with a hard drive—all into a single volume.Schiller explained that Mountain Lion and the apps that ship with your Mac—like iTunes and iPhoto—reside on the flash drive; other data you add fills up the traditional hard drive. But the Fusion Drive is smart and handles data storage automatically: If you use Numbers more then iMovie, for example, it will automatically move Numbers to the flash side, with iMovie moving to the traditional drive side. Mac OS X figures out what programs you use the most and what would benefit from being on Flash.
The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro sports a display with a resolution of 2560 by 1600 pixels, a huge 4-times increase over the 1280 by 800 resolution on the 13-inch MacBook Pro released in June.
The app now supports more than 40 languages—including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese—and features a new “continuous scrolling” reading option for those who prefer scrolling over page-turning. Another welcome addition: iCloud not only syncs your page turns, but all your purchased iBookstore books over your various devices.
If you have a recent Apple TV, check your home screen; there’s an Apple Events icon.
One of iChat’s nicest features was the way it allowed you to sift through the transcripts of past chats; you always had a record of the promises you made for work (or in the rest of life). Although the new Messages app in Mountain Lion doesn’t do away with transcripts, it repackages the feature in a way that many iChat veterans find obscure.
A Samsung spokesman told CNET that the Korea Times post was 100 percent false.
Keep an eye on AirPlay — I believe it’s a more important technology than might be evident at first glance.
The calendar view is now customizable, letting users view schedules according to date ranges—ranges that include a “year view” with a heat-mapping feature that allows users to see their busiest times of year at a glance. The improved “list view” can also be adjusted to use custom date ranges, and now includes a new “total duration” feature that lets professionals easily calculate their billable hours.
These two systems, IDLE and push, account for the multiple notifications I simultaneously received on my iPad and on my Mac when the new message arrived in my iCloud account. But there are subtle differences in behavior between the two systems.
Samsung Display said Monday that it will terminate its contract with Apple and no longer supply liquid crystal display (LCD) panels to its long time partner.
British startup Made in Me wants to get parents and children drawing and recording with Peppa Pig, Peter Rabbit and other characters.
This little digital trick allows you to remove unwanted objects or people from an image. Using a series of algorithms to determine what should be filled in where the object you removed was, it smartly and quickly repairs the photo with intelligent guesses about what to fill in.
I pay obeisance to the iPad not because it recasts me as a superstar, but because it reflects back to me my new adult life.
The opening of larger stores marks a shift in strategy for Apple in China, which had earlier announced plans to open 25 stores across the country by the end of last year. Some have questioned why the company would open yet another store in Beijing instead of tapping markets in so-called second-tier cities like Kunming, home to the fake Apple store mentioned by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a debate on Tuesday. But analysts point out that Apple’s sales in China are robust despite the lack of stores in other places, thanks to a large network of resellers, both authorized and unauthorized.
So, it was no secret that the UDID was going to be replaced with something else, and that alternative was expected to be more privacy-conscious. Now that iOS 6 is out and available to the public, the new IDFA is indeed in place, and advertisers have already been using it to track you on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Surprise!Advertisers largely use the two IDs in the same way, but there are a few key differences between them that affect both users and advertisers.
I’m thrilled that Tweetbot has made the leap to the Mac; despite a couple complaints, I think it’s just a terrific app. All of my Twitter consumption now goes through Tweetbot clients, and that suits me just fine. Tweetbot is the Twitter app I've long wanted on my Mac, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Good Old Games is a digital video game reseller that has grown to prominence through repackaging older titles so that they run without issue on modern operating systems. Today, the company put a smile on the faces of OS X gamers by making a chunk of their retro-centric catalog playable on Macs, starting today.
The Call Recorder for Skype app records Skype calls, which instantly makes it valuable two ways. For family Skype calls you get a movie– a complete record of the call, including both sides of the video call. For business use, you get a movie which also acts as an audit trail of who said what and when.
This week, I took a look at three password-manager apps for consumers: LastPass, by a company of the same name; 1Password , by AgileBits; and RoboForm, by Siber Systems. Each app stores all of your various information in one central place, where it’s protected by a single master passcode. This way, you only have to remember one password, instead of dozens. And since the apps automatically fill in the data for you, they also allow you to use more complex, stronger passkeys for everything else.
Tweetbot for Mac is the best Twitter app currently available for the Mac. If you're a big fan of Tweetbot for iPhone and iPad and also a Mac user, what are you waiting for?
The inability to enable Dictation services in OS X may be from faulty Parental Controls settings.
Apple yesterday started scrubbing most Macs of older Java browser plug-ins, a move that will force users to download the software from Oracle. The company also patched Java for OS X, the second time Apple synchronized its Java security update with Oracle's, releasing its patches for OS X the same day as the Java software maker.
What’s really happening is that Color’s engineering team — about 20 people, comprising almost the entire company — is being “acqhired” by Apple at what’s being called a “nominal” price of something like $2 million to $5 million, according to multiple sources familiar with both sides of the situation.
The company says the app’s $20 fee comes due to Twitter’s increasing limitations on third-party apps.
Is $20 a reasonable amount to pay for Tweetbot? I think so. But if Tapbots would have preferred to charge even less, has it been fairly priced?
Strange as it may seem, touchscreen devices are heralding an age of more inclusive "Everybody Technology".
Despite the prominent addition of sharing features in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, the company's concept of "sharing" is actually a narrow one. And in an increasingly interconnected era—when people are spending more and more time sharing words, images, files, and more with other people and among a variety of devices—that's a problem.
Creating Pinbook has taught me a lot, and there’s lot more I could say about pricing, testing and other things. But right now I’m just so excited to work on future versions and to make sure it remains the best at what it does.
Whether you’re making a movie, building a podcast, or just pasting two MP3s together, at some point you'll want to edit an audio file on your Mac. GarageBand can handle lots of audio-related tasks, but Fission, by revered Mac developer Rogue Amoeba, can handle fast edits and format conversions much more easily. It's simply packed with useful features.
Version 1.1, released today, adds recurring reminder, snooze reminders and more, making a handy utility even better.
When you have to copy files from one Mac to another, make big files available to others, or get files from your company’s shared volumes, you need to connect to a server. It may be a file server, a NAS (network-attached storage device), or just another Mac on your network. You probably already know a basic way to perform this everyday task, but is that method the quickest and most convenient? Here are eight ways you can connect to a server.
What you get onscreen is a pop up window– the focus bar– which reminds you of the important task you should be working on instead of browsing Facebook.
RSS.app sits in the menubar, and checks for updates to your feeds every few minutes or hours. It then displays new article alerts using Notification Center.
Mail remains as stable and sturdy an email client as ever, striking a pleasant balance between super-simple webmail front ends and professional-grade behemoths like Outlook. The new features alone in Mail 6 hardly justify an upgrade, but as part of the whole Mountain Lion package, they fit in well.
The iPad 3's Retina display along with Apple's more liberal submission policy have prompted the file sizes of popular iOS apps to grow substantially - especially for games.
AirPlay is the technology used to stream media content from various Apple devices to other devices in your house, like your television or stereo system. AirPlay in general, and specifically for the Mac, has gotten a lot of extra attention lately, so this tutorial will show you the ins and outs of playing your media precisely where you want to, using AirPlay.
The calendar may be running out, but Apple’s going to get in some more product announcements before the end of the year. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would be holding a media event in San Jose’s California Theatre next Tuesday, October 23 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific.
Taken together, Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, EchoSign, and FormsCentral have impressive capabilities, but the links for EchoSign and FormsCentral are just that—links; that is the extent of their integration into Acrobat XI Pro. They are separate components with minimal integration, and I suspect that having to deal with three different components will make the paperless office concept look good only on...paper.
I’m loving everything about how the app looks. A well-designed app really makes all the difference when it comes to a great news reading experience.
"It's just too thin!"
Advanced imaging of the chip in question revealed circuitry Chipworks says is "consistent with a serial communication chip including some simple security features."
The new iPod Touch continues to be the cheapest way to buy into the iOS ecosystem, and it's still a great product if you're looking for the convenience and features of a smartphone without the added overhead of an expensive data plan. The faster hardware, the bigger and better-quality screen, Siri, and other features help the iPod touch stay current, even if it's not quite as fast as the iPhone 5.All of this is marred by one thing: fifth-generation iPods start at $300. This isn't too bad if you consider its 32GB starting capacity—a Nexus 7, for example, can be had for $200, but the 16GB price is $249 and a 32GB version isn't (yet) available. Still, the absence of a $199 or $249 16GB model is keenly felt. This is especially true given that the slower hardware, inferior screen, and laughable camera in the fourth-generation iPods are still being sold as entry level models. If you don't need or want that 32GB of storage, you either have to go with a slower model, a competing product, or just suck it up and pay.
Apple's hard drive replacement program for 2011 iMacs has been expanded after discovering even more machines may be affected. The company has updated its support page about the program to note the 1TB Seagate hard drives could be faulty in iMacs sold as early as October 2009. Apple will offer free replacement hard drives to affected customers for three years after the first sale of the device, or until April 12, 2013, whichever is longer.
If needed, you can have the Terminal alert you when a process or script is complete.
Amazon and Apple have informed some e-book buyers that they'll receive credits for future book purchases, as part of a recent settlement three major publishers signed to settle a price-fixing lawsuit.Eligible Kindle e-book customers will receive credits ranging from 30 cents to $1.32 per book, Amazon estimated. Apple did not specify a range.
Now version 3, released today, has added bi-directional integration with iOS reminders and a feature that allows you to add geotagged reminders for any location you find in the app. Localscope can remind you with an alert if your are near a location. It integrates with Apple Maps and is a great supplement because it has far more search resources, including Google Local search, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Citysearch and Yelp.
In Reminders, you can now create a reminder grouping, and then share that particular reminder group with one, two, or a dozen people. Great for group projects. However, it’s currently impossible to share a particular reminder with a particular individual within a group. It also not possible to share a reminder directly from the iPhone or iPad currently, which is pretty disappointing.
Apple has hired major Amazon exec and prominent search technologist William Stasior to run its Siri unit, according to sources.
Adobe is shipping Acrobat XI, a new version of its cross-platform PDF authoring and viewing software, featuring augmented tools for cloud services such as online forms and digital signatures.
Microsoft announced the launch of Xbox Music Sunday night, which could become the company’s first serious attempt to take on both Spotify and iTunes. It will debut on Microsoft’s own platforms first, but come to Android and iOS soon after. That’s a remarkable different tune from a company whose most recent attempt in the digital music space focused all around its ill-fated Zune device.
After just a few minutes, my friend had introduced himself to Siri, as well as his wife, his extended family and a few co-workers. That makes Siri much more pleasant to use. Now he can say things like, “Call my wife” or “Send a text to my manager” and Siri will know who he’s talking about. Likewise, he can ask about work, and Siri will understand that he means the office.
Apple recently released the latest version of Configurator, the company's management software for iOS devices, for download in the Mac App Store. Configurator version 1.2 is intended to give organizations a way to mass-configure iPads, iPhones, and even iPods with applications, settings, and security policies. It's also, as it turns out, the perfect tool to prank a teenage son, teaching him the hazards of leaving his iPad unattended and of interrupting conference calls with extended drum solos.
You can put your data on a diet, without risk of losing anything important. The trick is to be more selective in what you save.
Macs can sync Mail, Calendars, and even Notes with Android phones and tablets with virtually the same seamless nature as Macs sync through iCloud with other Apple devices like the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The only requirement to sync a Mac with an Android device is that you have a Gmail (Google) account, which if you’re using Android you almost certainly do.
Apple will be launching its largest flagship store in Asia at Beijing’s iconic Wangfujing Street. According to our sources, the store will be a massive one, sporting a gigantic glass display and a wide-open space.
I had a completely different summation in the first draft of this review, but now I have to temper all the terrific results the app returned for the duration of the test with the one oddball error that had me driving all over the suburbs the other night.The iPhone's maps certainly are far from perfect, but the turn-by-turn navigation functions are as good as any I've seen.
Die Schweizerischen Bundesbahnen SBB und Apple haben sich über die Nutzung der SBB Bahnhofsuhr auf Geräten wie iPad und iPhone verständigt. Dies haben die beiden Parteien in einer Lizenzvereinbarung geregelt.
Disassembly instructions were solicited from the manufacturers, the laptops were bought on the open market, and they were sent to an electronics test laboratory that would do the tests."They found they could disassemble all the laptops in at most 20 minutes and remove batteries in at most 3 minutes," said O'Brien. "The recommendation was that all five [laptops] be found in compliance."
Price aside, whether you’re in it for the apps, games, or media, this is an iPod you’ll treasure. With its improved cameras, zippy performance, bright and roomy display, support for Siri, and more colorful and statuesque form, the fifth-generation iPod touch is a winner.
The seventh-generation iPod Nano is an incredibly compact portable media player with gym-friendly features, but it's overshadowed by the superior value of Apple's iPod Shuffle and fourth-generation iPod Touch.
There are plenty of software packages that allow users to easily transfer their voicemail files—as well as text messages, photos, music, and other data—from an iOS device to a computer. No jailbreak hanky panky required.
It’s about people who love technology, delivered as a curated collection of articles from great writers. In a way, it’s the opposite of Instapaper: while Marco’s more popular app is what you make of it, The Magazine is Marco’s own vision. So, yes – you’ll have to trust him on this one.
There might be some people for whom spending $149 on a 16GB iPod nano makes a lot of sense. If you’re a runner with a very specific set of playlists, or if you just need the cheapest way to play your existing iTunes library, the nano will be just fine. But most people will be much better served spending an extra $50 on the $199 16GB iPod touch, downloading Spotify, and leaving iTunes — and files — behind.
Microsoft today disavowed comments made by its Czech subsidiary that the company will roll out iOS and Android apps of its Office suite early next year.
For the sake of those of you that decided to join in on the Passbook party and create your own passes we present here some of the pitfalls we ran into. As with every new and fangled thing, Passbook is still rough around the edges and surely you’d rather work on actual features and reduce the time spent on just getting the damn thing to work, right?
If you need to lock your system when briefly stepping away, there are other options you can use, which involve the use of Apple's screen lock feature that simply requires your password after a period of time once the system has gone into sleep, the screen has slept, or the screensaver has been enabled.
BBedit stays out of my way by relying on the one truly foolproof file format: plain text.“BBEdit’s still important because at its essential core, it’s a tool for working with text,” says Rich Siegel, Bare Bones Software’s founder and CEO. “Not text for presentation, as in a word processor or page-layout application, but rather text as data supplied to other software: code for compilers and interpreters, markup and Web applications for Web browsers, log files and data tables for analysis, and for any tool that inhales raw text and turns it into something else.”
So yes, Google and Apple did spend more on patents in 2011 than R&D. But that’s very likely to be a one-off, simply because 2011 was an unusual year which saw several highly-desirable patent portfolios come on the market. What the NYT didn’t say is that Apple also increased its R&D spending in 2011 by 33%, and that Google’s R&D spending continues to trend upwards massively, with the company spending a whopping 12% of all its revenue in R&D last year.
"Movies that have bonus scenes will be indicated in your watch list with a seat icon. If you see one, sit tight and don’t immediately leave the theater after the movie is over!"
Contacts has hidden depths, including the ability to pull in Twitter handles and Facebook friends automatically, sync Google contacts, display a map of a contact’s address, and help you put faces to names.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore will probably slow the pace of appreciation in the local dollar as moderating price pressures provide scope for measures to support economic growth, according to a survey of analysts.
Developers have been complaining about Apple's Maps since shortly after they were given the first pre-release version in early June, CNET has learned. They say they filed bug requests, sent e-mails to specific Apple employees, and vented on message boards only other developers and Apple could see.
The same mic-less EarPods also ship with the new iPod Nano. Oh, and these step-down EarPods don't come with a carrying case. In all other respects, including sound quality, the two EarPod versions are the same.
Dragon Dictate is a step forward for Mac users who need, or prefer, to use voice to write and control a computer.
Coming from a pro photography background, 645 Pro really speaks to me with its "pro camera" interface and the ability to save full-resolution TIFFs. However, ProCamera has nearly all of the advanced power with a more iPhone-like interface, and it also includes video capture and editing features. Either of these apps would likely suit the most demanding "iPhoneographers."
In old Mac systems, Apple included a power button on the keyboard that could be used to access the Power menu when the Mac was running. Apple has removed this button, but the functions invoked by it are still available in OS X by pressing Control-Eject on your keyboard.
Patent holding company Lodsys claims it's gaining momentum in its battle with independent developers. The company posted two new blog posts on Monday evening—after almost a year and a half of silence—claiming it has both gained the favor of the US Patent and Trademark Office and made a number of new patent licensing deals with smaller companies. But some of the indie developers targeted by Lodsys have begun chest-thumping in response, declaring that Lodsys "needs to be stopped."
It’s almost a no-brainer for anyone who wants sophisticated features and the capability to make complex documents while maintaining an easy-to-use, minimalist interface.
With a bit of configuration, it can fill almost any synchronization or backup need, and the added capabilities of ChronoAgent make it that much more compelling. If you’re looking for a single app to handle synchronization and backup tasks, ChronoSync is an impressive choice.
The fifth-generation iPod touch Apple introduced last month is powered by an A5 chip running at the same speed as last year's iPhone 4S, according to screenshots posted by Japanese Apple blog Macotakara. The site has posted early benchmarks of the device that show iPhone 4S-like performance.
There’s a lot to like about the new iStopMotion for Mac and the drastic price drop, coupled with its support for using iOS devices as a camera mean that more people will be able to afford to get into this age-old art of stop motion animation and have a lot of fun doing so.
Shiny Development's annual trend graph for Mac apps shows average review times of a few days to a week through approximately April 1 of this year, after which time the trend began a fairly steady rise. That rise has accelerated in recent weeks, with developer reports now indicating that their apps are spending an average of nearly a month in review.
Composer and producer Brian Eno has pretty much done it all in his 40-plus year career, but one of his best-known musical traits are his incredibly minimalistic soundscapes. They're not for everyone, but those who love ambient music should enjoy his new app, Scape.
Power users may want to stick to a power client, of which the App Store has several, but for those who simply want to enjoy the occasional podcast, as well as iCloud sync and Apple-style integration, Podcasts is a great choice.
This weekend, I took a look at OpenDrive, which does a fine job of doing what iDisk used to do. You get a desktop mounted virtual drive, complete with public and private folders. You can drag anything in, or set it up to sync with any files on your computer. The system encourages collaboration, and it is easy to give someone a URL so they can download a file, files, or a folder.
Still, only since the release of OS X Mountain Lion that enough applications have started to support iCloud document syncing for this feature to be useful. Working with iCloud is fairly simple, but you need to know the ground rules if you plan to start storing your documents in the cloud.
Apple’s Retina revolution is an interesting evolution that is turning the design world upside down.
Now, almost a month later, it’s time for me to get something off my chest: I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve had the iPhone 5 for about a week and a half, and I’m still annoyed about the dock connector thing. But it’s a small problem, and in retrospect I was wrong to allow myself to become overwhelmed by dock-based frustration.
Because the phone’s new metallic casing is easily scratchable, Apple required stricter quality controls on Foxconn’s plant in Zhengzhou where the handset is assembled. That sparked tensions that led some workers to walk off the job over the weekend, sources in Zhengzhou told the FT.
Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.
It appears iOS6 no longer likes 2am or 2pm if your location is set to the parts of Australia that switched to summer daylight savings this morning.
It may be a stretch to say Steve Jobs invented the iPod Touch or most of the technologies contained in it. But Steve Jobs certainly put it in my son’s hands, both by making it a sub-$200 device (and in our case, giving it away free with a laptop) and by helping to create an ecosystem of software applications for people with disabilities — perhaps especially communication disabilities.
Apple has issued a support article to address the mounting concern over the strange purple light being found on numerous photographs taken with the iPhone 5’s camera. The problem shows on the photographs as a purple flare on the edge of a picture or as an actual purple spot in the main frame of the picture. Apple’s support article addresses these issues and claims there is nothing to worry about.
In other words, it looks better but doesn't work better.
The interesting problem will come in 10 years' time when designers will be disdaining the new computer interfaces that mimic the apps-centric interfaces of 2012. The French have a phrase for this: plus ça change.
Is it all a huge game changer? No, I don’t think it is. But like the AppleTV, it is interesting and fun to play with.
Camera+ now offers a photo editing experience worthy of the iPad, and I highly recommend it – especially if you have already tried iPhoto, but were left wanting something easier to use and sync.
Instead of letting emails sit in the catchall inbox, the app offers ways to organize them. This includes the ability to set priorities, apply due dates, and create assignments for you and your contacts.
No action is required on the part of the user, with the extension running through September 30th, 2013.
As iPhones get thinner and lighter, the reachability problem will become less and less of an issue. But the facts are clear: until we have wafer-thin, impossibly light phones, it will be harder to use 4-inch screens one-handed than it is to use 3.5-inch ones. Even so, the benefits vastly outweigh the downsides.
Many of Apple's own employees—the engineers who work passionately on the hardware and software that customers use every day—have found themselves involved in repeated conversations over the past year about what Jobs would have done. Or if they were not directly involved, they heard about such conversations from their peers. The question became a common refrain within Apple, though opinions differ on whether its effect has been positive.
You'll still look foolish singing along to your iPhone, but TuneWiki will at least help you get most of the words right.
Though in theory sandboxed like everything else in the App Store, Apple seems to have granted itself blanket entitlements that let Aperture perform all the tasks it used to perform before sandboxing was introduced.
Here’s a look at how you can work with the iOS Podcasts app, but also how you can work without it, if you’d prefer going back to the old method.
Crazy Talk is an inexpensive way to create animated talking heads – either for fun or to use as narrators in videos and presentations.
The tribute ends with a brief letter from Tim Cook, who asks us all to "reflect on his [Jobs's] extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place."
Apple recommends it for all users of Mountain Lion, and says it addresses three bugs: an issue with Japanese characters in Mail, a problem with Safari accessing secure sites when Parental Controls are enabled, and an issue that could prevent Macs with more than 64GB of RAM from booting up properly.
However, when we started searching further-a-field things got a bit more data heavy on iOS 6 Maps. When we asked for directions from Paris to London iOS 5 came out trumps, sending 27KB and receiving 788KB, compared to iOS 6 which sent 45KB, received 907KB. It was worse from London to Paris: iOS 5 sent 45KB and received 1.7MB, while iOS 6 sent 121KB, received 1.9MB.
To keep app windows both in their place and at exactly the right size for maximum efficiency and peace of mind, I use Moom. This handy Mac-like app (which means it’s so good that Apple should do in OS X what Moom does) pins app windows into specific locations on the screen.
Fullscreen mode in OS X helps to relieve some of the window clutter, but makes it impossible to bounce from one app window to another. For that you need a Window Magnet.
The ModBook, a MacBook that is professionally converted into an OS X powered tablet, will be making its return five years after the project was halted.
Manufacturers feared that Apple would use licensing rules to restrain the availability of non-Apple Lightning accessories. Now, those fears appear to have been valid. Sources for iLounge have confirmed that Apple has significantly altered its MFi Program rules, limiting the manufacture of Lightning connector accessories to Apple-approved factories. Since no such factories have been approved thus far, accessory makers don't expect to have any accessories available before the busy holiday shopping season.
AppleScript was created by pure psychopaths, who obviously had a deep, deep hatred for humanity and a less than solid grasp of logic and organizational skills. Also, just about everyone who's ever used AppleScript and posted their solutions online is a complete moron. Probably myself included, but here goes.
Less visibly, Cook has managed the inevitable internal strife as Apple’s execs tried to fill the leadership vacuum. And he’s got the operations side of Apple working better than ever, lining up the company’s suppliers to support the unprecedented scale of the iPhone 5 launch, which is on sale in nearly 30 countries and on track to be available in 100 by the end of 2012.
Has Apple built a system that makes it easier to pay for apps then to actually pirate them?
Apple supports several ways to establish file-sharing connections with Windows PCs.
Tapbots, the creators of the extremely popular Twitter app Tweetbot, have released Netbot, an iPhone and iPad client for the Twitter-like social network App.net. If you're a fan of Tweetbot, you'll immediately feel at home with Netbot with its identical interface, familiar sounds, and simply outstanding design.
Two of the people said the smaller tablet will have a 7.85-inch liquid-crystal display with a lower resolution compared with the latest iPad model that came out in March.South Korea's LG Display Co. and Taiwan's AU Optronics Corp. last month began mass production of the LCD screens for the new device, they said.
It turns out there are a number of smaller things that people really liked but can no longer access. There are also a few features that people would've liked to see Apple take just a little further.
“On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB, the company wrote on its Web site. “Apple Maps came in at 271KB – that’s approximately 80% less data! On some actions, such as zooming in to see a particular intersection, Apple Maps’ efficiency advantage edged close to 7X.”
I think Keyboard Maestro is perhaps one of the more difficult apps to explain, because how I use it might vary greatly from how you use it, but once you get to know how it works and some of the things it can do, maybe you'll see how you might use it.
I’m not sure I see any problem that Apple is solving here with this ban.
Verizon iPhone 5 customers may have noticed an issue wherein their phones gobbled up extra cellular data when they were theoretically connected to Wi-Fi networks. Those customers now have two bits of good news: There’s a special software update that fixes the problem, and they won’t be responsible for unexpected charges related to unintended network overages related to the issue that spurred the carrier update in the first place.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding wrote to member countries to ask them to check whether Apple retailers failed to advertise buyers’ right to a minimum two-year warranty for products such as the iPhone and the iPad tablet computer.
But now that iPhone users know they have a choice in where to get mapping, even Google won’t be assured success. Now we can decide between Apple, Bing, Google, Mapquest, and a host of start-ups. All the competition will fuel further investment in maps—in the same way that all browsers got better after Google began building Chrome, all mapping will get better now that Apple has decided to take on cartography.
Preview is Apple’s top-secret tool for viewing and manipulating PDF files, graphics, and more. The secret, however, isn’t that it exists (look in your Applications folder) but that this seemly simple program harbors tons of advanced features. You can use Preview to annotate PDFs, delete or rearrange PDF pages, crop images, and more. Here’s an overview of the recent additions to Preview that you may not know about.
Multiple people here at TUAW are seeing the same plan bumps, though none of us has upgraded our plans, not to mention paid 38 years in advance.
Every developer we spoke to said they believe end users are better off security-wise with GateKeeper. Whether it's because users need to be protected from themselves or they simply need an extra layer of security so they can sleep easier at night, there appears to be a tremendous level of confidence in the fact that users are safer now.