iPad By Davis: “Vauxhall now shipping the Adam with integrated Siri connectivity, current owners get a free upgrade” plus 14 more |
- Vauxhall now shipping the Adam with integrated Siri connectivity, current owners get a free upgrade
- Apple reportedly extending OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 testing beyond developers
- 13-inch MacBook Air unboxing and first impression
- iOS Personal Hotspot passwords vulnerable to brute force attacks
- Mock up iOS 7 screens in Photoshop with this file
- How to downgrade iOS 7 beta back to iOS 6
- FiftyThree, creator of Paper, receives $15 million to fund new projects
- Latest update to Mailbox adds a portrait mode for iPad
- Rockstar Games releasing Max Payne 3 for Mac on June 20
- Rest in Peace: Great apps killed by an acquisition
- ChemDraw for iPad review: Molecular structure creation, sharing, error checking, and more!
- Talk Mobile Live Hangout - Come chat about the living dead!
- Watchup Video News iPad App Updated: Adds ESPN & New Features
- Racing to the app grave: the dead, the zombies, and the parasites - Talk Mobile
- Feedly RSS App: How to Prep for Its Migration from Google Reader to Feedly Cloud Sync
| Vauxhall now shipping the Adam with integrated Siri connectivity, current owners get a free upgrade Posted: 19 Jun 2013 03:00 AM PDT
The Vauxhall Adam -- or OPEL, if you're in mainland Europe -- hasn't been on the market for long, but from today each Adam that drives out of the showroom will have Siri connectivity. But, current owners aren't left out, as they can take their car back to Vauxhall for a free update to their Intellilink to give them Siri in their car as well. Siri is reachable in the car via a button on the steering wheel. Hitting this voice control button will automatically link up with Siri on your iPhone, and everything Siri can do, suddenly your car can do. Pretty sweet. Beyond this, Vauxhall is also to start selling the 'Siri edition' of the Adam. This special edition version is available in 'Apple style' white or black paint jobs along with some brushed aluminium wing mirrors. But don't call it an iCar. Any Adam owners out there excited for this? Let us know when you grab your update! Source: Pocket-Lint 
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| Apple reportedly extending OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 testing beyond developers Posted: 19 Jun 2013 02:35 AM PDT
Registered Apple developers have been able to test OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 since their announcement at WWDC 2013, but reports are now emerging that Apple is widening the reach of both slightly. According to 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, selected Apple retail employees are now receiving an invitation to test out Mavericks for themselves:
Sources have also indicated that Apple is turning to the residents of Cupertino to assist with iOS 7 testing. Apple is said to be holding on-campus sessions with the locals in order to garner feedback on the latest version of iOS. It's unclear how people have been selected, but it's said that they are likely relatives of Apple employees. Source: 9to5Mac 
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| 13-inch MacBook Air unboxing and first impression Posted: 18 Jun 2013 11:25 PM PDT I caved. Throughout WWDC 2013 I swore I wouldn't buy one of Apple's new, Haswell-based MacBook Airs. I was firmly committed to waiting for a Haswell-based 13-inch MacBook Pro instead -- which is pretty much the only realistic Retina MacBook Air for the near-future -- and I wasn't going to be tempted. But who're we kidding? Roughly the moment I got back to Montreal I went over to my local Apple Store and asked for the highest end 13-inch MacBook Air they had in inventory. And it turned out that was pretty much the highest end 13-inch MacBook Air configurable. We're talking 1.7GHz dual core i7 proc with Intel HD 5000 graphics 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The ports are the same as last year's -- 2x USB 3 and 1x Thunderbolt. Sadly, it's Thunderbolt 1 and not the new, fancy Thunderbolt 2, which kind of puts the damper on Retina Thunderbolt display support, and makes it standard size pixels all around. The only new addition is the second mic, which should hopefully help with sound input quality. That's fine. The MacBook Air with it's claimed 12-hours of battery life isn't being aimed at the performance market. It's being aimed squarely at the heart of the persistence market. This is the MacBook for people who want to leave the house with nothing but a chuckling backward glance at their power supply, still plugged in next to their desk, as they leave the house for the day. This is for the airplane travelers and live bloggers, for coffee-shop hopping entrepreneurs and class-changing students. It's not the MacBook for anyone even remotely needing a Pro. Hence the difference in names. I've only had it for 24 hours, so aside from unboxing and setting up, I haven't had much of a chance to but the new 13-inch MacBook Air through its paces. I have remarked at how well the battery is doing so far, and how blazingly fast the SSD is. I'm also okay with the screen. The 11-inch has nowhere nearly enough pixels for Safari, Coda, Photoshop, or Final Cut Pro X -- the apps in which I live -- but 13 is fine. I feel about it much as I feel about the iPad mini. You can have screen density, lightness, or battery life, and you only get 2 out of the three. This is the compromise for people who want lightness and long battery life, and that'll be the perfect compromise for many, many people, at least for now. I also picked up the new Airport Extreme Time Capsule, which is an 802.11ac router to go with Apple's first 802.11ac computer. I do expect that wireless technology to quickly propagate to other Macs, as well as the iPhone and iPad, so I'm eager to test it out. Look for that unboxing and first impressions post tomorrow. Okay, that's it for now. Time to finish my set up and start my reviewing. Off to the coffee shop! 
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| iOS Personal Hotspot passwords vulnerable to brute force attacks Posted: 18 Jun 2013 05:30 PM PDT
Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg have discovered weaknesses in the Personal Hotspot feature in iOS. The weak, and somewhat predictable password generation -- used in all current versions of iOS up through iOS 6 -- means people are susceptible to brute force attacks when using the personal hotspot feature on their iPhone or cellular iPad. A brute force attack is one that systematically tries all possible combinations of a password until the correct one is found. The more complex a password, the more computing power and/or time it takes to try the combinations. Under Settings on iOS, inside Personal Hotspot, you will normally find Wi-Fi Password to be pre-populated with a memorable password followed by four digits. Andreas Kurtz, Daniel Metz and Felix C. Freiling found that iOS chooses from only 1,842 words in a wordlist, each 4 to 6 characters in length, when generating these default passwords. iOS generates these passwords with one of the words from the list, followed by a four-digit number. This combination only leaves the possibility of about 18.5 million different passwords, a relatively low number when it comes to password cracking, making it an easy target for a brute force attack. It was also discovered that words from the list aren't chosen randomly, and some words are chosen much more frequently than others. This knowledge can potentially speed up the process of cracking the password by trying the most commonly chosen words first. The researchers state that all of these factors make it possible to compromise a hotspot connection in less than 50 seconds.
The Personal Hotspot feature employs WPA2-PSK encryption, which is generally regarded as secure for WiFi. However, the short list of known passwords being used in iOS means that these default passwords are extremely susceptible to brute force attacks. When a device connects to a hotspot, a handshake takes place in which the client and the hotspot negotiate their connection. This is also the time where the client authenticates with the hotspot using the pre-shared key. By capturing this handshake, an attacker is then able to run a brute force attack using the known word list to generate and attempt all 18.5 million possible passwords, until it finds a match. Once a match is found, an attacker could then connect to your personal hotspot to use your connection, or potentially leverage further attacks against other connected devices. The report also mentions that other mobile platforms showed signs that they were affected by similar problems, including Windows Phone 8 and some vendor-modified versions of Android. The researchers also released the source code for Hotspot Cracker, an iOS app that demonstrates their findings. The app allows you to generate and export the wordlist from iOS, view the 20 most common words used for personal hotspot passwords, enter your hotspot password to find out approximately how long it would take to crack, and gives instructions on how to crack a password once you have captured the handshake. When calculating how long it would take to crack your password, the app presumes a GPU cluster of four AMD Radeon HD 7970s, which can run about 390,000 guesses per second. With these calculations, the app determined my iPhone's personal hotspot password would take just under 25 seconds to crack. The reason iOS and other mobile platforms generate passwords automatically is to avoid having users set up hotspots without any encryption. These passwords are certainly better than having no encryption at all, but this research shows that these passwords should not be considered secure. iOS shows you how many devices are connected to your hotspot, making it easy to recognize if there are ever more devices connected than you expect. Until Apple changes to more secure defaults, the easiest thing for iOS 6 (and earlier) users to do is simply set their own unique password for Personal Hotspot. 
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| Mock up iOS 7 screens in Photoshop with this file Posted: 18 Jun 2013 02:57 PM PDT
User experience (UX) design studio Teehan+Lax is offering a free downloadable Photoshop file containing interface elements from the first beta release of iOS 7. You can grab the iOS7 GUI PSD file by visiting their Web site. Teehan+Lax said that the file is being offered "to help you pitch, design and build amazing software." It's suitable for using with mockups that you're creating, but the company asks that people interested in making software or their own Photoshop files that work similarly to recreate their own interface elements independently. 
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| How to downgrade iOS 7 beta back to iOS 6 Posted: 18 Jun 2013 02:52 PM PDT
Lots of people itch to try new iOS beta versions when they become available and iOS 7 has definitely attracted lots of people that were curious to try out the new features ahead of time. If you were one of those and didn't heed our warning about betas, you may find yourself frustrated with lots of bugs and annoyances. Fortunately, there's a pretty easy way to get back onto iOS 6 without too much fuss. If you're regretting the decision to install iOS 7 beta, follow along and we'll help you get back to iOS 6. Before you beginPlease keep in mind that if you downgrade back to iOS 6, you'll only be able to go to the most current version, which is 6.1.4 for iPhone 5 users and 6.1.3 for iPhone 4S and below. When it comes to iCloud backups, you won't be able to use an iOS 7 backup on an iOS 6 device, so be aware that you're going to lose any information you may have in those backups. You also won't be able to recover any jailbreak with saved blobs. If you're still wanting to downgrade after understanding all this, continue on... How to downgrade from iOS 7 beta to iOS 6
Now just let iTunes do its thing and if all goes according to plan, your device should eventually reboot and be downgraded to iOS 6 again. If you've managed to successfully downgrade your device to iOS 6 again, let us know how it went in the comments! 
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| FiftyThree, creator of Paper, receives $15 million to fund new projects Posted: 18 Jun 2013 01:13 PM PDT
FiftyThree, the company behind the very popular Paper app, have received $15 million in funding to jump-start the development of their next project. Posting on their blog about the goals for these plans, FiftyThree said that they're working on a suite of mobile creativity tools, focusing on two key area: physical creation and collaboration.
Moving beyond apps, FiftyThree has ideas for hardware accessories as well. Using tools, they say, is an important part of how we as humans express ourselves. We've already seen part of this philosophy with Paper. Of course you can use the app without a stylus just fine, but FiftyThree encourages the use of one. With new hires in the New York and Seattle offices, the company as strengthened not only their software team, but also their services and hardware teams. FiftyThree has not yet announced specifics regarding either hardware or software projects. They only say that they're building"the essential suite of mobile tools for creativity." Source: FiftyThree, Chris Dixon 
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| Latest update to Mailbox adds a portrait mode for iPad Posted: 18 Jun 2013 12:50 PM PDT
A quick heads up for Mailbox users that the latest update that has been pushed out to the App Store brings portrait support for the iPad. Strangely, when Mailbox finally gained iPad support, it was only useable in landscape view, but that has now been rectified. Other than this, there's a handful of bug fixes thrown in for good measure, and you can download a copy for yourselves now. Portrait view something you've been waiting on?
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| Rockstar Games releasing Max Payne 3 for Mac on June 20 Posted: 18 Jun 2013 12:25 PM PDT
Good news for Max Payne fans today; Rockstar Games has announced that the latest title in the series, Max Payne 3, will finally make its way to the Mac on June 20. That's just two days from now. You're going to need a pretty well specced out Mac to play it, with a dual-core Xeon or i Series chip at 2.4GHz or above to play, 4GB of RAM and a whopping 35GB of free space on your hard drive. You'll also need OS X 10.7.5 and above, and either a NVIDIA® 8800GT 512MB VRAM or AMD Radeon HD 4870 512 VRAM graphics card too. Max Payne 3 sees the title character on the streets of Sao Paulo protecting a wealthy family, far away from the New York City police life of old. Bullet time is back, and it promises lifelike movements and a "dark and twisted story." Sounds great. No word on pricing as yet, but we're not too far out from release either. Who's excited? Source: Rockstar Games (Twitter) 
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| Rest in Peace: Great apps killed by an acquisition Posted: 18 Jun 2013 11:57 AM PDT
Acquisitions are part and parcel of the modern life of app development. For differing reasons, large companies have a habit of buying up smaller app developers. Sometimes -- take Instagram as an example -- the app in question lives on as its own separate entity. Others, like Snapseed, lose their apps on some platforms, but remain on others. And then, there's those that get killed altogether. So, lets take a look together at some of those apps which have gone the way of the Dinosaurs. Kitcam and Photoforge 2
Kitcam and Photoforge 2 are the most recent casualties of the acquisition market. Big spending Yahoo! snapped up the team at Ghostbird Software just last week with a view to integrating them into their Flickr team. While existing users can continue to use their apps, and even re-download them to their devices, anyone yet to try them out is out of luck; both were removed from the App Store at the same time as the acquisition announcement. Kitcam is one of our favorite photography apps, and we're sad to see it go. Sparrow
Sparrow quickly became a success, and earned a reputation as being one of, if not the best email clients for iOS. While it 'lives on' in the sense that it can still be downloaded for both iOS and Mac, the acquisition by Google ceased all active development for Sparrow. Thankfully we have plenty of options to fill the Sparrow shaped hole in our hearts, but it shall be missed. Summly
Summly is another application that was acquired to come under the Yahoo! banner. It gave us summarisation's of news, little bite size snippets. While the app may have died, the service lives on as Yahoo! has integrated the service into their own mobile applications. The only drawback is that you have to use Yahoo! apps to get Summly, and not everyone wants to do that. Wavii
Wavii is another service that was acquired by the mighty Google, absorbed into their own services and discontinued from the App Store. The Wavii acquisition was all about their natural language technology, which Google wanted to fold into their own voice recognition software. And with that, this promising, news aggregating iOS app faded away into the night. Poster
This one is literally hot off the press, with Automattic having just acquired Poster in the last couple of days. Poster was regarded as a far better solution for editing and posting WordPress blogs than the official iOS apps, and now Poster has been acquired to be absorbed into the WordPress empire. Many say simply that WordPress should bin their own iOS app and re-release Poster as their own. Those people might have a point. So, there's just a few great apps that were acquired by big corporations and either re-deployed or pulled completely. Join the discussion in the comments below, and share with us your favorite apps that were killed off by an acquisition. We'll pour one out for each and every one of them. 
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| ChemDraw for iPad review: Molecular structure creation, sharing, error checking, and more! Posted: 18 Jun 2013 10:57 AM PDT
ChemDraw for iPad allows you to not only create molecular structures directly on your iPad, but share them just as easily via email or ChemDraw's own Flick-to-Share™ technology that allows you to send structures to anyone else using the app. From chemistry student to chemist, ChemDraw is a great learning app and productivity tool wrapped into one.
The main menu for ChemDraw gives you access to the tools you'll need to create molecular structures. As you drill down further into the menus, you'll have more options. Options to create collinear bonds, isolated bonds, and more are all there. ChemDraw will also check for errors as you go. For example, if a valence error occurs, you'll see a notification at the bottom telling you so.
Once you're done drawing a molecular structure you can tap the info button in the top to view information such as the exact formula, exact mass, and molecular mass. You'll also get a brief elemental analysis all in one view. You can choose to share your structure via email or with ChemDraw's Flick-to-Share option. The latter allows you to see anyone else who is currently using the app in somewhat of a desktop table view. When opening Flick-to-Share you'll be able to simply "flick" your structure to someone else and they'll receive it on there end. Since it doesn't depend on iCloud or any other third party account, it's a nice way to share items with colleagues or other students without the need for additional setup.
There is also a nice period table view that will show you the chemical compounds of each element. In order to add an item or bond from any menu, simply tap on it and then tap on the screen where you'd like to insert it. ChemDraw supports many different kinds of molecular structures by default such as linear, tetrahedral, and more. For bonding, the usual suspects are also found in their own menu including normal, wedge, hatched, and dashed bonds. The good
The bad
The bottom lineChemDraw is off to a very nice start and has the technology and knowledge behind it. It's currently a great tool for students and those new to chemistry. For more experienced users, a few missing features such as annotations could become an annoyance but more than likely, they'll still find ChemDraw to be a very convenient and fun to use way to share and create molecular structures on the go. Admittedly, I'm not a chemistry wizard by any means so if any of you are and have used ChemDraw before, let us know what you think of it in the comments!
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| Talk Mobile Live Hangout - Come chat about the living dead! Posted: 18 Jun 2013 10:04 AM PDT We're talking about what to do when your favorite apps get bought, sold, killed, abandoned, and otherwise left for dead. (Looking at you, Google Reader!). 
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| Watchup Video News iPad App Updated: Adds ESPN & New Features Posted: 18 Jun 2013 08:50 AM PDT
Watchup is a great video news app for the iPad and a recent pick for our Best Free iPad App of the Week. The app received another substantial update yesterday, to Version 1.11.0. One of the most notable items in this update is the addition of ESPN to the channel list. For sports fans this is very good news – as most of the app's channels have been more general news up to now. It's good to see the leading sports network added. Other new channels added in this update include the New York Daily News, This Week in Startups, and local channels from Boston and Portland. There are also some nice UI changes in this update: All-new interface:         Related Stories
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| Racing to the app grave: the dead, the zombies, and the parasites - Talk Mobile Posted: 18 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT  Your finger hovers over the download button in your smartphone's app store. Maybe it's free, maybe it's not. Even if it costs only 99 cents, you spend four times that much at Starbucks every day. Yet you hesitate, haunted by the memories of that app you downloaded a few years ago, fell in love with, and then watched as the servers shut down and the app was abandoned and left to wither and die on your launcher. And that sometimes makes us hesitant to hand over money, even a dollar, for apps that a developer spent weeks, if not months or years, building. It makes us consider if paying up front for apps and services is the way to go, or to minimize risks by going with free-as-in-ad-supported apps instead, or to try and give developers more money through in-app purchases or subscriptions in hopes that maybe that will help keep them around. It makes us wonder -- can we depend on our apps? Can we count on them to be there for us when we need them? And which ones? Let's get the conversation started! 
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| Feedly RSS App: How to Prep for Its Migration from Google Reader to Feedly Cloud Sync Posted: 18 Jun 2013 08:03 AM PDT
The Feedly RSS service has taken a leading role in providing a replacement sync solution for when Google Reader is shutdown on July 1. They are now reaching the final stages of their migration from the Google Reader backend over to their new Feedly Cloud – and yesterday they published some advice for users on how to make sure they're prepared for the upgrade. The first and most important step is to make sure you are running Version 16 on all your devices – current versions are 16.0.513 on the desktop, 16.0.1 on iOS, and 16.0.5 on Android. Their guidance is that if you're unsure of your version number on a mobile device, you should uninstall and reinstall it. Here's more of the advice and guidance on the upgrade: Sync'ing via the cloudOver the next 2-3 days you should expect to receive a green banner message (desktop) or a green card (mobile). This is the...  Related Stories
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