iPad By Davis: “Contest Winners: Black Ops Elite cases from Element and Aria cases from Pad & Quill!” plus 15 more |
- Contest Winners: Black Ops Elite cases from Element and Aria cases from Pad & Quill!
- eBay app for iPhone gets a visual overhaul and license scanning for quick registration
- Hangouts for iPhone and iPad review: Google+ cross-platform messaging service
- Google’s Hangouts App for iPad Is an Ugly Mess
- iTunes gets updated, check out the new MiniPlayer!
- Google Play Books catches up with the times and allows PDF files and ePUB books
- The State of Apple's Location Services and User Privacy
- Karateka Classic brings legendary beat-em-up to iOS
- New OS X Spyware Discovered at Oslo Freedom Forum
- iPhone 5S component leaks show updated vibrator assembly and more
- Watchup iPad Video News App Updated: Lots of New Channels
- iMore show 349: Live from Orlando
- Apple announces 50 billion app downloads. For real.
- Cool Things: Coffee-Colored iPad Smart Cover Made with Real Coffee
- Deal of the Day: 64% off the Amzer Shellster ShellCase w/ Holster for iPhone 5
- Juice up your iPhone 5 with the new Mophie Juice Pack Plus
| Contest Winners: Black Ops Elite cases from Element and Aria cases from Pad & Quill! Posted: 17 May 2013 02:19 AM PDT
If there's one thing iMore loves even more than iPhones and iPads (and iPods!), it's giving cool iPhone and iPad accessories and apps to our awesome readers. This week we have amazing cases from both Element and Pad& Quill! The winners are:
Congratulations everyone! Winners will be contacted via email in the next few days. Looking for another chance to win? We always have a contest underway for something cool, so keep your eyes on the blogs for those announcements.
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| eBay app for iPhone gets a visual overhaul and license scanning for quick registration Posted: 16 May 2013 05:01 PM PDT
The official eBay app for iPhone just got a nice update that brings a UI refresh to the online auction service. The bump up to version 3.0 adds a general refresh to most areas of the app, and improves photos in listings making them now much larger and better looking. Photos also now look larger in search results at the tap of a button, though iOS 6 and above is required for this. Beyond the visuals, U.S. customers in selected states now have the facility to scan their drivers license for quick and easy eBay registration. Also available to U.S. customers now, along with those of us in the UK is access to the new eBay shopping cart, giving you the option to checkout multiple items at once. Sellers in Spain will also be happy to know that finally they can sell their wares using the eBay app, as this feature has been turned on in the latest version. Grab it from the App Store now, and be sure to let us know how you're finding it. Does it make your eBay experience a little better now?
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| Hangouts for iPhone and iPad review: Google+ cross-platform messaging service Posted: 16 May 2013 03:27 PM PDT
Hangouts for iPhone and iPad is Google's new cross-platform messaging app that lets you converse with your friends regardless of what phone, tablet, or computer they are using. It features a beautiful, clean design and support for video messaging. The chat view in Hangouts is very traditional and flat with some subtle shading. Your messages and picture are on the right and everyone else is on the left. All users' chat bubbles are the same color, so only the picture distinguishes users from each other; something I actually like. It's simple
Tapping a user's photo will take you to their profile which includes everything they've made available on Google+, including work history, basic information, education, and more.
Video chatting with Hangouts is super easy, looks great, and also sounds crisp and clear. I had a quick conversation with Rene while he was in a noisy environment, yet I had no problem hearing or understanding him. Google Hangouts also gives you control over who gets to hangout with you and who must send a request. You can also choose to automatically snooze notifications after 1-72 hours and block specific users. The good
The bad
The bottom lineIf you chat with friends on Google Talk or Google+ often, then Hangouts is awesome and you should definitely pick it up.
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| Google’s Hangouts App for iPad Is an Ugly Mess Posted: 16 May 2013 10:26 AM PDT
At yesterday's Google I/O event Google announced the very promising Hangouts app, a sort of unified messaging app / service for iOS, Android and web. And the Hangouts app for the iPad and iPhone was released yesterday too. The iPad app is a horrible, ugly mess. There a number of very good iPad apps with simple, basic user interfaces. But Hangouts has a drab, clumsy UI that looks very much like it was slapped together with little to no thought or effort. That's one of the app's main screens above. It's just sad looking right? Hit the break for a couple more screenshots of the app in all its glory.
Here's a typical Hangouts screen when having a text chat:
What's going on with all the huge amounts of blank space? And the goofy positioning of the text blocks? It just feels like it's not meant to be this way. Like somebody started working out this screen design and then...         Related Stories
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| iTunes gets updated, check out the new MiniPlayer! Posted: 16 May 2013 11:01 AM PDT
There's a new iTunes update in town, and at the top of the list of new goodies is a new look MiniPlayer. The tiny little iTunes window has had a makeover that now includes a progress bar for the track currently playing, alongside your album artwork too. It may well be tiny, but it does look a lot nicer now, so good job on that front, Apple. Also getting the visual makeover treatment is the songs view. With this latest update you can enjoy all your album artwork whilst in songs view. It's a small touch, but I know from personal tastes that having album artwork on show just makes the whole experience a little more pleasurable. But, that's just me. That's not all though. Also improved in iTunes 11.0.3 is support for multi-disc albums. No more will separate discs be listed as separate albums, all discs will now appear in your iTunes library as a single album. Something I've wanted for some time, as I'm sure countless other users have. Grab a copy of iTunes 11.0.3 from the download link below, or by heading into Software Update on your Mac, or iTunes on your Mac or Windows PC and hitting check for updates. Once you're done, head on back here and let us know how you like the new updates.
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| Google Play Books catches up with the times and allows PDF files and ePUB books Posted: 16 May 2013 10:28 AM PDT
Amid the extravaganza that is Google I/O, the folks from Mountain View quietly pushed out an update to one of their applications that finally catches up with the times. Google Play Books has never quite matched iBooks or Amazon's Kindle, but the latest update to their iOS app finally adds support for PDF files and ePUB books bought from other sources. Features such as these are likely taken for granted by users of Apple's or Amazon's eReading platforms, but anyone who is heavily investigated in Google Play Books will now see the benefit. The only drawback is that the files have to be added to your Books account via the web, for them to then become available on your iPhone or iPad. There's also a handy dose of stability and performance improvements for good measure. Grab it now for iPhone and iPad from the App Store now. Anyone out there using Google Play Books? Does this make your reading life that much more bareable?
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| The State of Apple's Location Services and User Privacy Posted: 16 May 2013 10:24 AM PDT
Apple's handling of location data has made its way back into headlines recently due to a tool written by security researcher Hubert Seiwert. Seiwert presented the iSniff GPS tool, which makes it easy to capture potentially sensitive iPhone user data, last July at the Blackhat USA security conference and posted the source code to Github a month later. While the tool isn't particularly new, it has been the recipient of some media attention after being covered earlier this month by SC Magazine. While the disclosure of the sensitive information by iPhones was previously known, iSniff makes the information more easily accessible and is worth a closer look to determine if users need to worry. iSniff has two primary components; the first extracts relevant data from traffic captures while the other provides a web interface to interact with collected data. The first component, iSniff_import.py, captures ARP requests from iPhones on the same network and SSID probes from iPhones not currently connected to WiFi. While SSID probes are something normal for all WiFi enabled devices not currently on a network to send out, these particular ARP requests seem to be unique to iOS devices and were initially reported on by Ars Technica after Mark Wuergler initially discovered them. Normally ARP requests are sent by networked devices in order to resolve the network IP address of other devices on the network to their hardware MAC addresses. Upon joining a network, iOS devices send ARP requests addressed to MAC addresses belonging to the DHCP servers for the last three wireless networks they've been connected to. Nobody quite seems to understand why, but one guess is that it's an attempt to speed up the device's joining to the network. This means that if your iPhone is connected to WiFi at your house, then you head to Starbucks to get some work done and connect your iPhone to the network there, upon connecting, your iPhone will send an ARP request on Starbucks' wireless network containing the MAC address of your home router. What makes this concerning is that the geographical location of most wireless access points, along with their MAC address, have been mapped, placed into databases, and are available for anybody on the Internet to lookup. If somebody on Starbucks' network was monitoring for these ARP requests, they could acquire your MAC address and do a lookup to find out where it is located, potentially revealing to them where you live. When your device is trying to determine your current location, it can use GPS, but depending on the availability of satellites, this can take a while to determine your location. Nearby WiFi base stations offer a faster way to determine a user's approximate location. As you walk around with your iPhone and it detects various wireless signals, it sends anonymous data back to Apple, reporting the device's location and information about nearby wireless base stations ( iSniff makes a location query to Apple's servers with a single MAC address to find out the MAC's location. By spoofing the user-agent in the request to appear to be from iOS' location daemon (locationd), iSniff gets Apple to return not only the latitude and longitude of the given MAC address, but information on up to 400 nearby base stations. iSniff will then plot all of this data onto an interactive map in your browser, making it easy to view the data held by Apple's location services servers... 400 APs at a time. While interesting to see, this also raises a number of privacy concerns for users. But should regular users need to worry? Not really. While there are issues with sensitive information being disclosed without customer awareness or control, the likelihood of this information being leveraged in any sort of attack on a user is quite slim. While you could capture and use the information to figure out where somebody lives, you would not only need to get them to join your network, but you'd also have to know which one of the three MAC addresses, if any, belong to their home router. In specialized cases like security audits performed on companies by hired penetration testers, it might make sense to exploit this information in order to track employees back to their houses to try and acquire more sensitive information. But for day-to-day users, it's extremely unlikely that anybody would try to perform an attack like this in order to learn where a user lived. After all, since physical proximity is required to be on the same WiFi network, in many cases it would seem just as easy to simply follow the person when they drive home. It would be interesting to know why exactly Apple's devices exhibit this behavior. You also can't help but wonder if it's possible to exploit Apple's location services servers in other ways. In fact, Seiwert has mentioned in some of his talks that he's currently exploring this possibility. It might be wise of Apple to try and lock those servers down a little tighter before information disclosed by them becomes a bigger concern for users. In the meantime, this isn't something users should be too concerned about. If you're already joining untrusted wireless networks or networks with malicious users on them, your problems are likely much bigger than somebody getting the MAC address of your router. Update: Seiwert has informed me that while initially it was believed turning off Diagnostics and Usage in Settings would opt you out of contributing access point data, he has since witnessed devices still transmitting this information even when the Diagnostics and Usage option is disabled. 
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| Karateka Classic brings legendary beat-em-up to iOS Posted: 16 May 2013 10:15 AM PDT
Legendary game designer Jordan Mechner went back to his roots in 2012 with a reimagined Karateka, a brand new game based on his original 1984 Apple II hit (it would eventually make its way to just about every other common home computer platform of the day). Now the original has returned in all its eight-bit glory. They've recreated the original gameplay experience right down to the sound of a floppy disk drive grinding away reading sectors off a 5.25-inch disk as the game first loads. What's more, settings let you adjust between color, green, or amber displays, since color displays were relatively rare back in the day. Karateka Classic is, quite literally, the same game that appeared for the Apple II in 1984. It's the original game code running within an Apple IIGS emulator developed to work on iOS and other platforms called ActiveGS. The game runs natively on iPhone and iPad. Karateka was Mechner's first game, before he created the Prince of Persia series that he's best known for. He programmed it when he was still a university undergrad, and it is, for its age, a real gem. It's a side-scrolling martial arts combat action game set in feudal Japan. You assume the role of the titular karateka (literally, a practitioner of karate) as you attempt to save Princess Mariko from the clutches of the evil Akuma. Debug 7: Jordan Mechner and Karateka To do so, you must make your way inside Akuma's heavily guarded fortress, squaring off against opponent after opponent in karate duels. The game's original keyboard commands have been replaced with on-screen buttons that control your movement, your fighting stance, three punching positions, and three kicking positions. You can turn off the button overlay if you find it distracting. Each time your opponent hits you, you'll lose a health point, and once you're down to zero, that's it - game over. You need to restart from the beginning. And just like the original Apple II game, there's no saved game or continue feature. Your health does slowly regenerate in between rounds, so sometimes it's a good idea to not rush into the next melee before you've had a chance to catch your breath. In addition to other run-of-the-mill enemies you need to defeat, you'll occasionally be attacked by Akuma's hawk (which can be deflected with a well-timed punch), and avoid various pitfalls around the castle. Then, finally, you'll face off against Akuma himself in a boss battle. The good
The bad
Bottom lineFor a 29 year old game, Kareteka is surprisingly challenging, and it still looks good. Working within the significant technical limitations imposed by the hardware of the day, Mechner employed techniques like rotoscoping to get realistic animations for his characters. The simple graphics and color palette won't challenge gamers cut on today's sophisticated titles, but the gameplay more than makes up for it.
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| New OS X Spyware Discovered at Oslo Freedom Forum Posted: 16 May 2013 10:08 AM PDT
During the 2013 Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference focused on human rights, a new piece of spyware was discovered on an attendee's Mac. The spyware, which was discovered by security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, is currently being analyzed by F-Secure to fully understand what it does. Appelbaum discovered the backdoor during a workshop in which freedom of speech activists could learn how to protect their devices from government monitoring. An interesting property of the spyware is that it's actually signed with an Apple Developer ID. The use of Developer IDs for signing software is meant to prevent users from installing known malicious software, but isn't effective against newly discovered malware. Fortunately, now that the malware is known, Apple should be able to block installation of the malware by more users, and may have already done so. What is known so far about the spyware is that it will add itself to the list of applications that are launched when the user logs in, ensuring it runs every time the victim logs in to their computer. While running, the spyware takes periodic screenshots and stores them in a directory called MacApp that is created in the user's home directory. Information was also uncovered about two C&C (command-and-control) servers apparently used by the spyware to upload captured screenshots. C&C servers can also allow for malicious software to receive instructions from the spyware's author(s). While the full impact of the spyware is not currently known, hopefully its reach is restricted by security features introduced with Gatekeeper. And with Apple's ability to block further installations of the spyware, the risk to other users should soon be mitigated. Users can easily check for the presence of the spyware on their own system by checking for the MacApp folder in their home directory. Source: F-Secure 
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| iPhone 5S component leaks show updated vibrator assembly and more Posted: 16 May 2013 10:01 AM PDT
Some parts have been posted online that purport to belong to the iPhone 5S, or whatever Apple calls their next generation phone. While the iPhone 5 might continue the tradition of keeping the previous year's form factor, that doesn't mean the internals can't change. If these parts are genuine, they show updates to the vibrator assembly, earpiece and speaker brackets, and more. Here's the image from BGR:
Taking a look at the images, major updates could be made to the vibrator assembly, earpiece and loud speaker brackets, the SIM tray, and more. The photo above is a photo of the vibrator assembly and component cable running to it which purportedly will surface in the iPhone 5S. The photo pictured below shows the current vibrator component cable and motor that is found in the iPhone 5.
Apple made the switch from a rotational vibrator motor in the iPhone 4S back to a linear motor in the iPhone 5 which was an odd choice. Rotational motors are typically a lot smoother and have less problems. The vibrator motor in the GSM variant of the iPhone 4 had a linear motor and typically saw more issues than the rotational variant found in the CDMA 4 and the iPhone 4S. This switch back was probably made in the iPhone 5 in order to conserve on space. It looks as if the next generation iPhone will still feature a linear vibrational motor but with an overhaul and better design. This isn't surprising as the iPhone 5 has suffered vibrator issues. In my experience with AnoStyle and according to iMore's sources within Apple, the current vibrator assembly in the iPhone 5 can be sketchy at best when it comes to performance. If the cable isn't secured just right with the contacts laying on top of it, it produces a weak and/or sporadic vibration pattern. Securing the assembly to the actual cable would make sense and most likely solve a lot of the issues users are experiencing with the iPhone 5. The other changes such as the loud speaker and earpiece brackets aren't surprising as shields and brackets typically do see revisions every year to some extent. Currently the iPhone 5 earpiece speaker is attached to the display assembly. While there haven't been many issues reported to iMore, it does take up quite a bit of space and could be changed to make room to accommodate other revised components. The SIM tray doesn't appear to take a different sized SIM card but is shallower which could indicate that the contacts on the board have moved slightly, which isn't all that surprising with revised components and internal hardware. You can hit the link below to view all the components BGR managed to snag photos of. Overall, it appears that Apple is minimizing the amount of space component cables need to occupy. The WiFi flex has shrunk as well as many of the other brackets and components. This begs the question, what is Apple making space for? Source: BGR 
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| Watchup iPad Video News App Updated: Lots of New Channels Posted: 16 May 2013 09:29 AM PDT
The Watchup iPad video news app has been updated this week – adding a number of good new channels.The update, issued yesterday, takes the app to Version 1.10.1. New channels added for the US include Chicago Tribune, The Motley Fool, KXAN (Yay Austin), Moyers & Company, TechCrunch and more. There are also a great number of new international channels added: • Latin America: NTN24 Watchup is great, simple app for keeping up with daily news via video from a strong, curated list of sources. It's a recent pick of ours for ...  Related Stories
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| iMore show 349: Live from Orlando Posted: 16 May 2013 09:06 AM PDT John P. of GeekBeat.tv, Christina Warren of Mashable, and Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry join Rene live from BlackBerry Live in Orlando to talk BBM for iOS, the new Google Hangouts, Google Maps for iPad, and a look ahead to WWDC 2013.
Show notesPending. GuestsHostsCreditsThank to Kien Tran for producing the show! You can reach all of us on Twitter @iMore, or you can email us at podcast@imore.com or just leave us a comment below. For all our podcasts -- audio and video -- including the iMore show, ZEN and TECH, Iterate, Debug, Ad hoc, and more, see MobileNations.com/shows
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| Apple announces 50 billion app downloads. For real. Posted: 16 May 2013 08:55 AM PDT
Apple has released a statement concerning their recent 50 billion app downloads, and in it, they completely bury the lede. From Apple PR
That makes an already impressive number even more impressive. Here's what Apple's SVP of internet services, Eddy Cue had to say:
Apple also included a selection of quotes from happy developers. Find them below, and let me know -- do download numbers mean anything beyond bragging rights? Are they an indicator of app ecosystem health or user delight?
Source: Apple PR 
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| Cool Things: Coffee-Colored iPad Smart Cover Made with Real Coffee Posted: 16 May 2013 08:19 AM PDT
The photo above shows a gorgeous coffee-colored iPad Smart Cover – but it's not a color you'll find in the Apple store range. It's the result of a DIY project involving actual coffee being applied to the Smart Cover.This is the creation of simeon, one of the developers at twolivesleft – makers of Codea and other apps and games. Simeon decided he wasn't seeing quite the aging effect he had hoped for on the tan Smart Cover, so he decided to create his own.
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| Deal of the Day: 64% off the Amzer Shellster ShellCase w/ Holster for iPhone 5 Posted: 16 May 2013 07:47 AM PDT | ||||||
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Juice up your iPhone 5 with the new Mophie Juice Pack Plus
Posted: 16 May 2013 04:11 AM PDT
iPhone owners who need a little extra battery power to see them through have been turning to Mophie for many years now. The current lineup for the iPhone 5 includes the Juice Pack Helium and the Juice Pack Air, and now they're back with this, the Juice Pack Plus.
The Juice Pack Plus packs more battery than either the Helium or the Air, and as such occupies a slightly larger form factor than either of those two. The Juice Pack Plus measures in at 0.70 inches thick, compared to 0.63 inches for the Air and 0.59 inches for the Helium. That extra thickness means a 2100mAh battery in the Juice Pack Plus, giving you an extra 125% battery power over the standard iPhone 5 battery.
The Juice Pack Plus is available to buy in black right now, white coming May 22 and a PRODUCT(RED) version will follow on May 31. All three are available for $119.95. Anyone going for one of these?
Source: Mophie
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