The latest speculation from the tech world suggests that Apple have a dedicated team of over 100 people working on the design, development and marketing of their purported iWatch. Backers are starting to receive the first shipments of the fantastic Pebble smart watch that managed to attract over $10 million worth of funding through the Kickstarter initiative. It seems that intelligent watches are all the rage at the minute, which is why it is quite staggering that we are set to see the world's first independent smart watch introduced in mid-April. And boy does it pack a punch.
Many of us like to, or are often forced through work commitments, to travel around on a frequent basis. As a hardcore geek, blogger, and general Internet obsessive, I take my MacBook Air pretty much everywhere I go, but as any seasoned journeyman would vouch, plugging in for a charge at any given location can be a trying task. With so many variants of the two-pin plug aiming to make life as difficult for somebody like myself, who has only ever used the three-pin here in the UK, it winds up being another annoying thing to tick off the list of pre-travelling to-dos.
A recently published patent filing latched onto by AppleInsider suggests Apple has a plan up its sleeve to deal with the common problem of blurry and underexposed images. The patent outlines a system which would see an iOS device begin buffering a series of stills prior to the point when a user presses the capture button, after which it will automatically select the best one.
Popular iOS title Infinity Blade has gone free for a very limited time, having earned Apple's coveted App of the Week award. The revered action RPG will be available at no charge for the next week, with the normal price returning from 21st February.
When Apple first made iOS 6 available to the public, it managed to open a floodgate of criticism that mainly centered on aspects of the firmware which consumers felt weren't ready for the prime time use. After a public apology signed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, an internal corporate restructure and a few point releases to the OS; the controversy seemed to have died down. However, when you're at the top of the food chain, things are never quiet, with Apple now coming under fire for inadequacies found in iOS 6.1, first with connectivity issues on iPhone 4S, which were fixed quickly in iOS 6.1.1, then with battery life, flaw in Passcode Lock Screen, and now with an issue with Exchange support.
iOS 6.1, released last month, has already received its fair share of criticism and bad press as major connectivity issues were discovered within weeks of the system’s public release. If that wasn’t enough of a reason to put you off from upgrading for the time being, this might be: with a few simple steps, it is possible for any user to bypass the passcode lock screen on an iPhone, giving an unintended user permission to view and edit sensitive information such as contacts.
Gestures are one of the most innovative ways (yet) to interact with any device that supports human interface input. Almost all modern devices, be it smartphones, tablets (that includes the iPad, too), or modern ultrabooks, support some form of gesture input. And for good measure, too, because using that, you can easily get things done that would otherwise require some form of button input, tapping on the screen, or navigating through the system otherwise. Being a long time user of the iPad, I can testify that the multi-touch gestures are, indeed, a blessing.
The Apple TV may not strictly run on the same software as the likes of the iPad or iPhone, but it still has to be considered an iOS device, because, well, it runs on a variant of iOS. Following the Evasi0n jailbreak for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, the same exploit used on that occasion has been utilized by FireCore, the team of individuals behind the Seas0nPass jailbreak tool, to provide an untethered jailbreak on the very latest Apple TV 5.2 firmware.
Blake Jorgensen, CFO of Electronic Arts, has given his take on the next-generation consoles of Microsoft and Sony, noting that he believes neither the Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4 will offer backwards-compatibility. Although this has long since been presumed to be the case among gaming circles, this is the first time a genuine insider has stepped out with all-but confirmation that neither of the hotly-anticipated next-gen consoles will offer any kind of support for pre-existing titles.
Mozilla's biggest export is Firefox, and with Windows 8 having been in circulation for a few months now, the next stage of preparations for a version of the popular browser tailored to Microsoft's latest OS release have begun. Last week, the Metro/Modern-ized browser reached Mozilla's nightly build channel, and today, it has reached Mozilla-central. Although Firefox desktop product manager Asa Dotzler confessed there is still "plenty of work" to be done, it has now reached a point where it is stable enough for regular testing.
