Apple’s iWatch is rumored to be launching later this year (or a little over a year from now, depending on who you ask), but an Indiegogo project called the Meteor by Kreyos promises an iPhone-comptatible watch that could give Apple’s hypothetical device—as well as other existing smart watches already on the market—some intriguing competition.
Following Google’s decision to shut down Reader, many alternative RSS services have started popping up around the web. Today, AOL launched their own Reader service as a limited private beta. To get in, you’ll need to visit the AOL Reader page and enter your email address.
The service will presumably accept AOL and non-AOL addresses, but so far it doesn’t seem to provide any visual feedback or a confirmation email telling you whether you’ve been added to the beta pool when we tested with both Gmail and AOL addresses.
Additionally, Digg’s impending Reader product has gone into private beta. Gizmodo has a preview, and notes that the service, while still noted as a “beta, beta,” does a solid job of importing your feeds from Google Reader and presenting them in a nice, clean format:
Vloggr, an app that launched on Kickstarter today, is an interesting new app designed to quickly shoot and edit video blogs. The app sports a fairly simple interface that allows you film and reorder clips, then publish them to your social networks with a few taps.
The Kickstarter campaign is seeking $6,000 to cover the app’s development costs . A few of the rewards for early backers include promo codes to download the app at launch and your first vlog featured on the app’s website for a month.
Messages for Mac is buggy. There’s no denying that fact. At some point, all of us have tried to search for a specific message in the app only to be confronted by everyone’s favorite multi-colored symbol of despair.
Several weeks ago, Flexibits, developers of Fantastical for Mac and iPhone, announced a new project called Chatology that would finally solve this issue once and for all. Today, they unveiled the app to the world. So what exactly is Chatology? Does it solve the problem it sets out to solve? Keep reading to get answers to those questions and more.
Apple published an open letter late Sunday night responding to recent allegations that the company had given customers’ personal information, including phone call logs, to the U.S. government as part of the National Security Agency’s secret “PRISM” program.
In the letter, Apple notes that the government had in fact issued several thousand requests for such information, but that Apple’s legal department had carefully examined each request and turned over only the smallest amount of information necessary, sometimes rejecting requests outright.
From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.
Apple has placed a link to the full letter at the bottom of their home page, or you can read the entire thing after the break.
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Here’s a look at the all-new design in iOS 7. If you’ve got screenshots you’d like to send us, shoot us an email at tips@9to5mac.com. We’ll be updating this post as we get more images.
A few changes to note: Newsstand can finally be tucked away in a folder, and the Clock app finally shows the actual time on the icon. The Mail app allows you to set individual inboxes to show or not show on the main accounts screen. You can also pin frequently-used folders right below the inbox list for quick access.
Thanks Alec, Will, Nick, Zach, Michael, and Frederik!
Apple’s developer center went down right after the WWDC keynote ended, but the site has returned with betas of OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 inbound, both of which were announced at today’s event. Unfortunately the site still seems to be having some problems under the weight of such high demand.
iOS 7 beta Download links
We’ll have more coverage of both OSes as soon as we’ve got them installed. If you spot anything that wasn’t during the keynote, shoot us a message at tips@9to5mac.com.
A new developer document posted to Apple’s website today details the technologies that power OS X Mavericks. The 36-page document includes information on new additions in 10.9 such as App Nap and Compressed Memory.
Thanks to Tim Cook for the automatic iphone app updates! #apple #wwdc
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) June 10, 2013
John McCain took to Twitter today to thank Apple CEO Tim Cook for the addition of automatic app updates in iOS 7. In May the Arizona Senator questioned Cook about why he constantly needed to update the apps on his iPhone manually, to which Cook replied, “We’re trying to make them better all the time.” Obviously this fix was in the works long before McCain requested it, but we’re sure the Senator feels pretty good about it all the same.
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Following today’s iOS 7 announcement, Apple has pushed a new page live on their website to preview iOS 7 for the iPhone. The iPad version wasn’t displayed during today’s keynote and will be shown off later. Curiously, there seem to be very few images of a black iPhone running iOS 7, which features a new interface that heavily relies on white elements.
The Apple Store has been down since just before the WWDC keynote started earlier this morning and has just come back online with a bunch of new hardware announced today. New additions to the store include today’s updates to the AirPort Extreme, AirPort Time Capsule, and of course the refreshed MacBook Air.
During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple showed off a new Maps application for OS X. The app features the same maps that iOS users are familiar with along with some additional tweaks, including an SDK for third-party developers to integrate the maps into their own software.
Other updates include the option to see your estimated travel time and weather for your destination. An updated Calendar app, for example, can find the location listed in your events and apply the travel time and weather to the entry automatically.
The Mac app is also integrated with its iOS counterpart. Bookmarked locations can sync between the two using iCloud, and iOS users can press a button that sends the current directions from the Mac app to their iPhone as a push notification.
Apple showed off Safari 7 today at WWDC, which includes a cleaner design and performance improvements. Safari 7.0 also features better integration with Reading List and a sidebar for bookmarks. There’s also a “shared links” tab for browsing links posted to social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. Finally, Safari 7 uses much less processor power and memory than its predecessor and competitors.
Also included in Safari 7 is a new iCloud Keychain feature that generates and stores secure passwords across all of your devices, much like 1Password.
Safari 7 will be included in OS X Mavericks.
When Mountain Lion launched last year, Apple introduced some basic Facebook sharing options to OS X. You can post a status update from Notification Center or upload a photo from Finder, Preview, iPhoto, or other Mac applications. While those functions are useful, Apple has yet to really embrace all of Facebook’s features. For example, you can’t tag a friend in a status update or create a new photo album, and the notification integration, while nice, is a bit unreliable.
Today, Tapmates released Moment, a new app that bridges the gap between OS X’s Facebook integration and the features you’re already used to on the Facebook website. Keep reading for our full review.
Dropbox released version 2.3.12 as an “experiemental” build today, adding a few interesting new features that will hopefully make it through the beta process into the shipping version of the app. The new features, as noted by MacStories, include the option to have screenshots automatically added to your dropbox with the link copied to your clipboard for easy sharing, much like the automatic sharing features found in CloudApp and Droplr.
New in 2.3.12
- Screenshot to Dropbox
- Move to Dropbox
- Import from iPhoto
- Much faster upload/download speeds for large files
Photo by <a href="https://twitter.com/astern">Andrew Stern</a>
Ahead of next week’s WWDC 2013 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Apple has begun putting up banners at the venue. The multi-colored artwork is reminiscent of the invitations that went out in April and feature the tagline “Where a whole new world is developing.” Hit the break for a few more photos from reader Andrew Stern. If you’re in the San Francisco area and manage to get some photos of the banners, send them to us at tips@9to5mac.com.
Late Wednesday night, Apple quietly removed the fourth-generation iPod touch from their online store, replacing it instead with a modified version of the current generation. The new model features only a few differences from the fifth-gen, but the omissions are significant.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srPSlTFrH2A]
Tempo, the smart calendar app that launched earlier this year, was updated today with dial-in support for the twenty most popular conference call providers. The complete list of new services includes AccuTalk.net, AdConferencing, AnyMeeting, Calliflower, Free Audio Conferencing, Free Conference Calling, Free Conference USA, FreeConference, FreeConferenceCall.com, Fuze, GlobalMeet, GoToMeeting, join.me, Powwownow, Rondee, TalkShoe, Totally Free Conference Calls, UberConference, Wiggio, and WebEx.
The update is live now in the App Store and is free for new and existing users.
Tim Cook noted during his interview at the D11 conference tonight that “Apple has no religious issue porting an iOS app to Android,” but was careful to point out that they would only do so “if it made sense.”
When asked about Facebook’s Android home screen replacement and whether such access would ever be available to developers on Apple’s platform, Cook noted that there are plans to allow deeper access to iOS, but such changes will only be allowed if they don’t impact the customer’s experience. Kara Swisher specifically asked about the possibility of Chat Heads becoming part of iOS, but Cook was quick to shoot the idea down:
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[tweet https://twitter.com/FabulousButEvil/status/337737589702418432 align=”center”]
UPDATE: Some users are reporting that their accounts have been restored following the deletion earlier this evening. We’re still waiting on an official response from Instagram.
UPDATE 2: Instagram has responded with the following comment.
A small percentage of users could not access their accounts for a few
hours as a result of a temporary glitch. We have restored access for these
users, and no pictures or data were lost.
It seems many Instagram were caught off-guard today when the free photo-sharing app suddenly deleted a significant number of accounts, citing “terms of service violations” as the reason despite many affected users having no such content on their profiles.
[tweet https://twitter.com/1Password/status/337670364379373568 align=”center”]
1Password has just announced the private beta for the overhauled version of their Mac client. Users interested in testing the new update can sign up through the 1Password beta page.
1Password 4 for iOS (see our review) launched in December of last year. The new features from that update will finally make their way to the Mac in the upcoming version 4.0 release.
Scanner Pro, which lets users scan documents, receipts, and more using their iPhone or iPad, recieved a big update to version 4.5 this week. The update enables live border detection, which allows the app to intelligently find the edges of whatever is being scanned while you photograph it.
In our testing, the border detection was very accurate, although it did have a bit of trouble when the paper and the background where different shades of the same color. The app does still allow you to manually edit the borders to fit the document perfectly, just in case there is a detection error, so any small problems are easy to correct.
The app itself is well-designed and features a solid storage solution for your documents. Multi-page scans are supported and you can save everything to a variety of cloud storage services, including iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and more. You can even fax scanned items right from your iOS device.
Scanner Pro 4.5 is available now on the App Store. Existing users get the update for free, while new customers can get it for $6.99.
Funny Or Die, creators of the awful iSteve film we recently reviewed, released a new trailer for their terrible movie today. The trailer features quotes from various reviews of the horrible waste of time, including a choice tidbit from your friends here at 9to5Mac: “Do not watch this movie.”
Switching resolutions on a Retina MacBook Pro usually requires going through System Preferences, but an app called QuickRes is designed to mitigate that annoying process.
QuickRes puts an icon in your Mac’s menu bar that allows you to quickly jump between a variety of preset display resolutions, even beyond supported by Apple, all the way up to 3840×2400. QuickRes can also enable HiDPI mode on non-Retina Macs, effectively doubling the resolution and giving a clearer (albeit bigger) picture.
To switch resolutions, you can right-click the app’s menu bar icon to select which display you want to change (if you have more than one), then select a resolution from a list of presets. You can also setup anywhere from two to eight of your favorite resolutions and switch between them quickly by clicking on the menu bar icon.
QuickRes is available in two flavors. The paid version is available for a 9to5Mac-exclusive price of $.99 (regularly $1.99) through this discount link. The free version, which supports fewer resolutions and does not include a quick HiDPI toggle for non-Retina, is available on the Mac App Store.
