Zee for The Next Web:
Three months after the acquisition of Gowalla by Facebook, the company has officially closed it doors.
Foursquare is the dominant independent service in this market now, though Facebook has its own Places service, too.
Peter Willington of Pocket Gamer:
No other piece of hardware in the last two decades has shaken up the games industry like the iPhone.The downloadable content-only model, along with a low barrier to entry for game makers to the App Store, propelled the independent dev scene forward in ways unimaginable prior to 2008. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that thousands of developers owe their livelihoods to Apple’s 3.5-inch touchscreen slab.
Many Apple enthusiasts will read this and say, “No duh,” but the iPhone still isn’t taken seriously by some gamers. Good to see it get its proper due here.
Hollywood Reporter:
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said Saturday that he was approached about a year ago by Steve Jobs to provide content for Apple’s long-rumored television service but he declined to participate.Moonves told a conference audience that he met with Jobs, the late Apple CEO, and heard a pitch for what was billed as a subscription content service, but ultimately he said he wasn’t interested in providing CBS shows or films to the venture.
“Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts and the quantity available for pre-order has been purchased,” Apple said in a statement. “Customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.”
So much for the people that said it wouldn’t sell.
This is just classic from Matt Thomas.
If you were wondering what security fixes iOS 5.1 features, Apple posted a document on its Web site.
Digital Nomad:
IfAlarm is the first ever alarm to set alarms not just by times but by real world conditions.If Alarms are set like they’re said: * “If it’s a beautiful day wake me at sunrise.” * “If I slept at least 6 hours wake me shortly after.” * “If it’s been raining wake me around 7, otherwise wake me at 8.” * “If it’s been snowing and it’s a clear day wake me at sunrise, otherwise don’t wake me at all.”IfAlarm keeps track of the details while asleep, and intelligently wakes up when asked, in plain English. Set alarms to wake early to avoid bad traffic, to go for a morning stroll, a dawn surf, to be the first on the mountain if there’s fresh powder, or sleep in till the last minute if really needed.
As someone who works at home, I don’t get up at a set time each day. It changes according to the time I went to bed and what I have planned for the following day. So I’m always changing my iPad’s alarm clock Wake Time. IfAlarm isn’t a complete solution but it adds some very interesting configurability.
It’s possible, notes a researcher, that beards are meant not to attract women, but to “fend off other males.” Perhaps that makes sense: Males described the bearded men as older and tougher.
Women love the beard.
Time:
Do you ever have those days when you just can’t decide between an iced tea and a beer, and you think, If only I could combine them?No? Seriously, you don’t? Well, that’s not going to stop Molson Coors from launching Coors Light Iced T. The beer giant announced Tuesday it will roll out the new product in Canada next month, followed by a likely debut in the U.S. The iced-tea-flavored brew will contain 4% alcohol and no caffeine
Do. Not. Want. But I bet it still tastes better than Heinken.
Consumer Reports:
Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.We have owned our car for just a few days; it has less than 200 miles on its odometer. While doing speedometer calibration runs on our test track (a procedure we do for every test car before putting it in service by driving the car at a constant 65 mph between two measured points), the dashboard flashed a message and sounded a “bing“ showing a major fault. Our technician got the car off the track and put it into Park to go through the owner’s manual to interpret the warning. At that point, the transmission went into Neutral and wouldn’t engage any gear through its electronic shifter except Park and Neutral.
Consumer Reports didn’t like the iPhone 4 very much in its review, but at least the thing didn’t break down.
John Gruber is on vacation so Dan Benjamin is joined by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop to discuss Apple rumors, 20 years of publishing and following Apple, the new iPad, iPhoto, the future of Apple, and much more.
It was a pleasure to fill in for John.
Cool Material:
If you were to write a list of all the potentially manly things a person could do, reading a cookbook would probably not be on it. The Better Bacon Book is a manly cookbook.Yes, it exists. It has 20 HD videos, 150 hi-res photos and 31 original recipes from top chefs that cover everything from Pancetta to Pork Belly to Bacon Crème brûlée.This could very well be the Bacon Bible.
If you’ve ever seen any of the guys who write for The Loop in person, you’d know there isn’t a vegetarian among them. We’d love this cookbook!
Many thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
Say “hello” to Piezo!
Whether you want to record a Skype conversation, save a streaming radio program, or just record a quick voice memo, Piezo can do it. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 and it can capture audio from any application (yup, even sandboxed App Store apps).
Download Piezo free, then buy it in the App Store or directly through our store.
In 2009 Apple introduced iWork.com as a public beta – a service that enabled users to view, download and comment on documents created using Apple’s iWork software application suite. With the advent of iCloud, Apple is discontinuing the service effective July 31, 2012 – a month after it formally shuts down its MobileMe service.
According to a document sent by Apple to registered iWork.com users, users have until the end of July to download any existing iWork.com documents. After that time, the service will stop working and documents posted via iWork.com will no longer be available.
Apple is pushing iCloud, the cloud-sharing service that replaced Apple’s MobileMe service, as iWork.com’s replacement.
With a new way to share iWork documents between your devices using iCloud, the iWork.com public beta service will no longer be available. As of July 31, 2012, you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com site or view them on the web.
Slate:
Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple.How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser?For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened.
Anthony Kay:
680 News is a local AM station in Toronto that does all news all the time. They started a Twitter feed back in 2008 that alternately informs and annoys. Then there are times you wonder if the person tweeting is actually lucid.
The State of Texas on Friday announced that Apple will significantly expand its Austin, Texas facilities with a new campus and an expanded workforce – 3,600 new jobs over the next decade, more than double Apple’s current Texas headcount, according to a statement from the governor’s office. Apple houses customer support, sales and accounting personnel in the Austin offices.
In return, Texas is kicking in $21 million, money taken from the Texas Enterprise Fund, a business incentive fund in operation since 2003.
(via MacRumors)
With crime lord Charles Jericho now on the loose, San Francisco faces a terrible threat. Only one man can stand against him. He has driven the streets of a hundred cities and spent his whole life putting criminals behind bars. But to take Jericho down, there can be no turning back, and he knows that this may very well be his last ride. His name is John Tanner. He is the DRIVER.
I’m not much of a gamer, but I like driving and shooting games.
Jeff Sonderman for Poynter:
Jenna Myers Karvunidis says the Chicago Tribune and its Red Eye commuter paper seem to be “stealing scoops” from her and other amateur bloggers on the Tribune-owned ChicagoNow site.
This echoes TechCrunch alum MG Siegler’s recent rant at the Wall Street Journal, which he alleged stole his scoop about Apple’s acquisition of Chomp.
More than ever, journalists need to be careful to document their research and newspapers need to make sure that attribution rules are clearly spelled out.
Stephen Totilo for Kotaku:
“We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on,” Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi said, referring to a new Steam interface that will make the online gaming service easily useable for people who want to play Steam games on a PC that’s connected to their TV. “We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount.
The Verge suggested last week that Valve was working on a video game console to play games from its Steam service. Valve’s Doug Lombardi won’t rule out the long-term possibility, but says it’s not in the cards for now. So for now, you’ll have to make do on your Mac or PC.
Hubert Nguyen for Ubergizmo:
Because Apple has used the term Quad-Core in an unusual context (graphics unit), it leaves a lot of users confused about what Quad-Core means. Coincidentally, this was exactly what Apple needed, from a PR/Marketing standpoint. To make a long story short: the Apple A5X is NOT a quad-core processor, but let’s take a closer look…
Nguyen explains that the A5X chip inside the new iPad uses a graphics core that can operate twice as fast as the previous-generation model thanks to the addition of more graphics processing units.
Apple’s claim that the A5X is faster than Nvidia’s new (truly) quad-core Tegra 3 raised eyebrows, and Nguyen is skeptical that it does outperform Nvidia’s hardware in graphics performance measurements other than fill rate. Apple certainly needed to do something to speed up the iPad’s graphics since the new screen is pushing so many more pixels than before.
Electronista:
Apple now has the top-selling cellphone of any kind in Japan, IDC Japan determined late Thursday. The iPhone 4S launch helped Apple claim 26.6 percent of all cellphone shipments in the country this fall.
Apple outsold Fujitsu/Toshiba, Sharp, Kyocera and Panasonic.
Geoff Duncan for Digital Trends:
The fees to use Google Maps probably aren’t what’s starting to put off companies like Foursquare and Apple — it’s probably the ever-increasing reach of Google’s advertising efforts.
Google Maps isn’t part of the new iPhoto for iOS – it’s using OpenStreetMaps data instead.
TECHi:
Space may or may not be the final frontier, but the television and movie series Star Trek and its subsequent incantations have sparked the imagination of sci-fi fans across the ages. From Kirk and Spock to Picard and Data, then back to a new Kirk and Spock, Star Trek has become one of the most influential fictional concepts of the modern era.From nerds to geeks to hipsters and beyond, the dreams of millions have been guided by the ideas of particle transporters, warp engines, and photon torpedoes. It is an icon of pop culture and road map towards a better distant future.
Time to get your geek on!
CNET:
Besides Apple, RadioShack is now open to sales of the new iPad.Today the company said it’s taking pre-orders for the new tablet, which was announced at an event yesterday and proceeded to go up for pre-sale only on Apple’s Web site.There is a catch for those who choose to pre-order with RadioShack though, buyers need to purchase a $50 RadioShack gift card, and make the pre-order from one of RadioShack’s retail stores.
Iljitsch van Beijnum for Ars Technica:
…despite the fact that 1920×1080 means 2.25 times as many pixels as 1280×720, file sizes often differ by a factor of 1.5 or less. So what’s going on—is the 1080p content pretty much indistinguishable from the 720p version, or did Apple succeed in magically upping the compression?
Van Beijnum concludes that Apple’s compression for 1080p content has improved. That, combined with specialized decoding hardware in the new Apple TV and the new iPad, makes it possible for that video to look great without making the file itself huge.
Via Drew Olanoff at The Next Web:
Nick Brown for Reuters:
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper, who oversees Kodak’s Chapter 11 case, said at a Thursday hearing it would be an “inappropriate way forward” to allow Apple to continue pursuing litigation over a Kodak patent that lets consumers preview digital photographs on LCD screens.
Kodak is in the process of trying to unload patents as part of its bankruptcy restructuring. The judge hearing the case says that Apple can’t block Kodak’s attempts under existing law that protects bankrupt companies from lawsuits that might qualify as “creditor harassment.”
The Verge:
An AT&T spokesperson says “We are working with Apple to enable this feature in the future, but we currently do not offer it.” So for the moment, hotspot capability on the new iPad appears to be a Verizon exclusive in the US.
Might make the choice of US carrier easier for some people.