Topic - TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

There will come a time when you would like to simply transfer a file from one iOS device to another or to a Mac; it's inevitable. When the time arises, you will discover as most of us already have that the process is not as straightforward as one would think, considering how powerful these devices are. The most common methods used up to this point have been emailing oneself, cloud services like iCloud or Dropbox, file sync with the USB cable and iTunes or pleading with the always capricious C...

I was lucky. My mom and dad had me while they were finishing up their graduate work in the 1970's at North Carolina State University. My dad was, at the time, a bit of a gadget nut. Of course, back then "gadgets" were more commonly found in the kitchen and came from companies like Ronco. My dad was more into the electronics side, and I remember seeing TAB books about building robots around the house. We never built those robots, but my dad did buy two pieces of tech which changed my life fore...

A teenage girl alone in a remote farmhouse; an absent father, a boyfriend off at college... and a locked door that conceals a tragic secret. These are the creepy, chilling tropes on display in Haunting Melissa, a serialized video horror story delivered in the form of an iOS app available today on the App Store. Watching the first episode is free, and then you'll wait -- and pay -- to keep going with the narrative. Haunting Melissa, and the underlying Hooked Digital Media content management pl...

This morning at Google I/O the company announced that Google Play is coming to iOS. No, not the Android store, but Google Play Game Services -- a new group of application programming interfaces (APIs) the company is releasing to developers today. The APIs allows gamers to pick up their games across platforms, meaning if some is playing a game on an Android phone and it dies, their game state is uploaded to the cloud allowing them to pick up where they left off on an iPhone. In addition to clo...

Square today unveiled the Square Stand, the company's latest effort to become an even more entrenched player in the mobile-payments market. The Square Stand is essentially an elegant stand with an embedded card reader for the iPad, which when running Square Register, offers a compelling alternative to traditional cash registers. You might also notice that the device bears an ever so slight resemblance to Apple's iMac. "Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expens...

Sure, kids can play with an iPad to learn how to program, but what about robots? Play-i is a start up company seeking to develop affordable (under US$100), programmable robots as an educational tool for children. Normally this would sound like the plot of a bad 90s sci-fi movie of the week, but the development team behind the Play-i have impressive resumés. CEO Vikas Gupta, a former head of consumer payments at Google, is joined by Saurabh Gupta, a former head of the iPod software team, and M...

If you are looking for a way to get more out of your MacBook or MacBook Pro, consider a solid-state drive (SSD). SSDs offer faster data read and write speeds, fast file transfers, speedier boot times and will save you some battery life. In the past, SSDs were considered somewhat pricey upgrades and out of reach for many users. Today, prices are dropping and quality drives can be had for a song through retailers like Amazon and OWC. Today I will show you how to install an SSD, specifically the...

While the Origin Stories series has typically focused on products, in the coming weeks we're going to focus a bit more on the people and personalities behind the products. In this episode I spoke to Saul Mora of Magical Panda during the MacTech Conference in 2012 to learn about how he got started in iOS development. Origin Stories: Saul Mora, developer originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 May 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Per...

The wait is over. Random Access Memories, Daft Punk's first proper album* since 2005's Human After All, is now streaming in its entirety over at iTunes. It features guest spots and contributions from Chilly Gonzales, Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, Julian Casablancas, and others. While the album doesn't officially hit stores until May 21, its leak earlier today most likely brought about this early stream. Head over to iTunes to stream the album in one glorious 74-minute track. Don't worry, t...

One of the most common frustrations among mobile phone owners is the feeling that you're paying way too much for services you're not using. Being locked in a contract that doesn't fit your needs just because it's all that offered is the pits. Zact, a new service from the Verizon-backed software company ItsOn, is looking to change that. Zact provides a flexable, changeable, data plan that empowers users to only pay for the services they actually use. Along with customization of how many minute...

Popular image editing app Pixelmator has released version 2.2., which brings slew of new features to the already powerful program. The update comes with an expanded collection of shapes and tools to manipulate them, enhanced gradient palettes, and a new paint selection tool among the more than 100 new features. The Text as Shape feature in particular looks like it will be a lot of fun to play with. At $14.99, Pixelmator is a steal of a design tool for people who can't justify dropping hundred...

Over the past few months, Apple has consistently, and yet silently, continued to increase the number of areas which receive the 3D Flyover treatment in its homegrown Maps app. Now, the French-language site iGeneration is reporting that Apple has added 3D Flyover support for Paris, France. The report adds that the 3D coverage extends to Versailles, Aulnay-sous-Bois, to Disneyland Paris, and to L'Hay-les-Roses Previously, the only city in Paris subject to 3D Flyover coverage was Lyon. Apple's M...

It's dock o'clock, thank goodness, as Belkin's long incubation period of the Thunderbolt Express Dock closed out last month. The US$299 expansion peripheral is now shipping to customers; is it worth your attention? We've had a week to put it through its paces. The most direct product comparison for the Express Dock is Matrox's $249 DS1, which we reviewed a few weeks ago. Like the Matrox unit, the Belkin dock requires but does not include a Thunderbolt cable -- so you should mentally add at le...

Welcome back to another hour of fun, excitement and chat on this week's TUAW TV Live. The show is now part of the AOL On Network, so we're using a different livestream tool and chat room. No more Ustream, no more IRC chatroom. It's all right here on this page, where you'll watch the show and also be able to join us in Chatroll. Just click the play button on the player around 5 PM ET, sign into Chatroll with your Twitter or Facebook account, and you're ready to roll. Today Doc and I will be ta...

First of all, go enjoy the wonderful trailer for this game. If you're not sold on Leviathan Warships (US$4.99 on the App Store) after watching that, then I'm not exactly sure what else you want. Leviathan Warships is a turn-based naval strategy game. Your job is to guide a series of ships through watery battlegrounds, leading them turn by turn against your opponents. The game is similar to Bungie's Crimson: Steam Pirates, in that you guide ships around by dragging them, but it's much more com...

When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, he elicited quite a few laughs when he exclaimed, "... and boy have we patented it!" Two years later, starting with its 2009 suit against Nokia, Apple's patent infringement lawsuits began piling up in quick succession. Since then, Apple has been embroiled in litigation with a number of hardware manufacturers regarding alleged patent infringement. While Apple ultimately secured settlement agreements with both HTC and Nokia, its pate...

Fresh on the heels of the announcement of the Adobe Creative Suite turning subscription-only, the company also showed off two hardware projects: the Project Mighty stylus and Napoleon ruler. Both hardware offerings use low-energy Bluetooth to communicate with an iPad or iPhone, and work with the new Creative Cloud software. The Project Mighty stylus is not a normal stylus -- Adobe has done an amazing job of integrating the software and hardware. The stylus has one button on board; when presse...

Judging from the huge crowds that attended the opening of the new Apple Store Kurfürstendamm in Berlin on Friday, the German capital was starving for an Apple Store of its own. The Berlin store is the 11th Apple Store in Germany, but the first in Berlin. The video below shows the controlled chaos in the store as the throng is welcomed into the store at 5:00 PM local time by blue-shirted Apple employees. ifoAppleStore's Gary Allen took a road trip for the store opening and tweeted that the 4,5...

There are only six known working Apple I computers in the world, and one of these units will go on sale later this month. According to a report in Computerworld, German auction house Breker will be auctioning off the machine that was owned by Fred Hatfield. The Apple-1 includes the original manual, a letter signed by Steve Jobs and a circuit board that bears the name "Woz" on the back. The vintage computer is expected to fetch up to US$392,000 when it hits the auction block on May 25. You can...

If you've ever used index cards to organize lots of notes or ideas, take a look at Index Card by Dennis Vogel. Available for iPad and iPhone, Index Card is ideal for researchers and fiction writers who need to put cards on a wall, but need that wall to go with them. A good example of skeumorphic design, Index Card is pretty much exactly like what you would use in real life, cork board background included. In this episode of Origin Stories Dennis tells us how he came to create Index Card. Orig...

Why create a browser for iOS when Safari ships with every device? Creator Dave Wilson explains the numerous features in Graze, a browser for iOS. It has a very different user interface, and adds gesture controls and additional browsing oomph for iOS that has yet to be seen in Apple's Safari. While there's always the risk Apple will adopt some of the best ideas in Graze, if you want power user features, the app is a good deal (and there's a free version to try out). Origin Stories: Graze is an...

I've run into this issue a number of times while producing comedy shows: I want to play intro music for a comedian, but I don't have a staff available to sit there and punch buttons on my iPad. Enter Tango Remote, a handy tool which allows you to remotely control your playlists from iOS to iOS device. Now I can use my iPhone to not only queue up songs, but change the volume on the fly. It's not only very responsive and robust, it's designed well and easy to use. Tango Remote has saved my baco...

I saw the upcoming iOS game Icycle: On Thin Ice back at GDC, and I think it was the best game (out of maybe fifty or more) that I saw that week. Reece Millidge is an animator and game developer based in Britain, and I first came across his work while playing the Flash version of an abstract putting game he made called Wonderputt. Millidge has a wild sense of design and pacing, and both of those skills make Icycle: On Thin Ice one of my most anticipated iOS games of the year in 2013. Just rece...

If you were a kid in the 1980's you may remember the oddball consumer gaming console called the Vectrex. Notable for it's use of vectors instead of bitmapped graphics (like every other console), the Vectrex never quite took hold but before it was discontinued a number of fun retro games were made available. Enter Rantmedia Games, which took the aging catalog and ported it to iOS. In this Origin Stories learn about the nostalgia-driven passion behind the creation of Vectrex Regeneration. In ad...

While the iPhone has GPS, and it's good enough for most people, performance-oriented athletes may find the precision lacking. Enter EpicSesh, makers of the Xensr line of "sports motion sensing devices." While it looks like the sensors are still undergoing testing, the promise is that athletes will get more accurate data to help training. If you've ever wanted more accuracy than that blue circle allows, Xensr is what you've been looking for. If you're a bicyclist, you can precisely track your ...

I'm not sure if Doc Rock will be joining me today for TUAW TV Live or not, seeing that he's at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. But if that's the case, I should be easily able to fill an hour of time talking about some of the fascinating projects being touted at this year's event. There are also some useful and interesting accessories that have arrived at the TUAW Labs that I'll be demonstrating, and of course there are some good rumors out there that we can talk about in the chat room. Below, you...

polychord (US$9.99) is a virtual instrument for making and creating keyboard / electronic-style music on the iPad. With its easy-to-use approach and layout, polychord makes it painless to get your head around the basics and start making some really lovely sounding and creatively inspiring music. Whether you're an expert musician looking to perform live or a novice, you'll find polychord engaging and fun. There are two main components to playing polychord: chord circles and strum keys. There a...

11 Bit Studios has announced that Anomaly 2 now has an official release date. The game will be available for the Mac (along with Windows and Linux) on May 15. Anomaly is, of course, a popular iOS game these days, though the series started on the PC and it's returning there for the sequel. Previously, the game was available through a "secret pre-order", but there's a new bonus for a regular pre-order right now: If you get the game before it comes out for $14.99, you can get a second copy to gi...

Microsoft was late to the mobile phone game and has struggled to snatch market share away from their competitors at Apple and Android. They face a big problem: every smartphone has their own selling points, but they've mostly got the same basic features. So how do you set yourself apart? Apparently the answer is pointing out how obnoxious your competitors' fans are. In their new spot Microsoft shows a brawl breaking out at a wedding reception as the wedding party, segregated into sides by the...

Millions of merchants across the US have embraced the Square Register app to accept credit card payments without the need for a merchant account, expensive equipment or high fees. Now Square has updated the free Register app with new features that target a fast-growing segment of Square's business -- restaurants. As you'll recall from a previous TUAW post, Square now sells a full point-of-sale system called "Business in a Box for Square Register" that includes a cash drawer, a couple of Squar...

If you're old enough to remember the Polaroid SX-70, celebrating its 41st birthday this week, you may remember how it felt to instantly, miraculously see the images you captured with one of Polaroid's cameras appear right before your eyes. Now that we all have superpowered cameras in our pockets, we may not be as tuned in to how photography, especially instant or digital photography, changes the way we see the world around us. Apple's still tuned in, though. That sense of wonder in photograph...

Putting words in other people's mouths: more of a hobby than a vocation for most people, I'd say. If your work or play involves facial animation, however, you know how much work goes into making fake speech look convincingly real. Although there are impressive pro animation tools for this task, they might run you hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. That's why the Mac version of Reallusion's US$29.99 Crazy Talk 7 Standard is such an intriguing product. For a modest cost, this app delive...

WebStart is a US$0.99 utility in the Mac App Store that lets you customize a browser home page with frequently used links, like search engines, news or weather. Yes, you can just use standard bookmarks as you are already doing, but this simple app presents your preferred links on one page. When you open the app for the first time you'll get a brief tutorial. Basically you create topics and add relevant URLs. You can customize the fonts by color, style and size and choose the fill and backgrou...

Hopper is a Mac app for deconstructing binaries for analysis and debugging. If you're not a developer it's probably not for you, but it's a cool tool nonetheless, built from scratch by a developer who built it himself. Once again a developer needed something, didn't like what was out there, and built what he needed then used Apple's storefront to sell it in case others needed the same thing. In fact, in this case there were only some Windows tools, clumsily ported to Mac in some cases so Vinc...

Taphive's TodoMovies (US$1.99) app for iPhone has recently been updated to version 2.0. I'd not seen or used TodoMovies before, but as a huge movie enthusiast, I knew I had to check it out. At its heart, TodoMovie is an app that keeps track of movies you want to watch, but it's supercharged in every way. Here's how it works. Say, for example, you heard a friend talking about a film, like Iron Man 3. You want to know more about it, so you open ToDoMovies and go to Discover View. You enter the ...

Those of us who are on a first-name basis with our FedEx delivery person have a new reason to be happy with the company's iOS app today. FedEx has added a new Delivery Manager feature allowing customized delivery options -- even letting you sign for packages from within the app. If you have an existing FedEx account or sign up for a new one from within the app, you're eligible to sign up for FedEx Delivery Manager. This provides a way to schedule deliveries, give your FedEx driver instruction...

John Lennon's Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit state-of-the-art mobile audio and HD video recording studio. For the last sixteen years the Bus has provided youth with tours of the studio as well as free songwriting and multimedia production classes. The bus has three on-board engineers who teach students writing, performing, recording, and producing their own original songs, as well as producing and shooting broadcast quality music videos, in a single day. Thanks to sponsorships fr...

I grew up with rudimentary typing tools on older computers, but TabTyping aims to improve your typing on the iPhone's screen. The developer had to get creative when creating the app, so hit up the video for the story behind TabTyping's creation. TabTyping is free and offers in-app purchases for additional lessons if you want to train your fingers to fly across that glass screen with unparalleled accuracy. TabTyping also provides a wealth of stats to track your progress, including your accurac...

Developer Saied Ghaffari of It's About Time was perplexed by something recently; while there are good dedicated YouTube apps for iOS, there's nothing similar for OS X. Instead of a clean, fast app for discovering and viewing YouTube videos, Mac users must rely on web browsers and the YouTube site. The result isn't that great -- you can't type or read comments if you put the video in full-screen mode, scrubbing doesn't work very well, and the video pages have a lot of wasted white space. Seein...

The universal iOS LinkedIn app has been updated to version 6.0. The update brings a dramatic overhaul to the iPhone app, plus bug fixes and improved performance on the iPad. According to the LinkedIn Blog, the iPhone app has a new interface, which makes using the app a lot easier to navigate and interact with. Now users can invite, follow, like, share and comment on content directly from the update stream, which is now the center of the app. One particular new feature adds shortcuts to the ne...

Popup Window (US$5.99) provides an organizer utility for your desktop, enabling you to stick folders onto the edges of your screen and fold them in and out on demand. I loved the idea of this app although I ran into several problems when actually using it. The app is meant for anyone who needs to balance easy folder access with the desire for a clean workspace. Drag a folder to the edge of your screen and it transforms into a tiny spring-loaded tab. Click the tab and the folder opens and clos...

We don't care that the falling phones are CG animated; we don't even care that they have a hypothetical NFC patch on the back. This is a great video that put a smile on our faces. We offer it to you as today's No Comment. It's done by the same studio that inadvertently fooled an NYC TV station with an iPhone 5 concept video last year. Hat tip: Sachin ArgarwalNo Comment: Cool iPhone dominoes animation originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:45:00 EST. P...

Nobody likes spam, but if you use Apple's Mail on Mountain Lion, at least you have some tools to deal with it. Plenty of Mac users rely on Mail to read, manage and process their emails... and spam messages. If you use email, you have spam -- that's just the way it works. Following up on Kelly's how-to from a few months back, let's take a look at some ways to manage spam efficiently and decrease your email processing time. Built-in Spam Filtering Mail's built-in spam filtering is enabled by de...

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is an old series back from the early 1980s where you "played" through a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-style story, except that instead of just flipping pages, you actually cast spells, fight in combat, and do other fantasy-based activities. These books were reprinted back in 2002, but it's been announced that they're coming to iOS soon, as fully interactive books to play with. Most interactive books on the App Store are either meant for children or show off only a...

One of the big questions I always hear from newbies to the iOS world is "Why are there battery pack cases for the iPhone but not for the iPad?". That's a really good question, and one that I couldn't honestly answer. Now Digital Treasures has done the inevitable and created the Props Power Case for iPad mini ($79.95) as well as two larger versions for your full-sized iPad ($89.95 for 8000 mAh battery, $119.95 for 12000 mAh battery). In this review, I'll take a look at the Props Power Case for...

As TUAW's official case-tester-in-chief, I've seen cases and sleeves for iPhones, iPads and Macs made out of just about every material under the sun. There are those beautiful wood and leather cases, and some crafted from aluminum and other materials, but the vast majority are made of some sort of plastic. That has often made me wonder where all that plastic ends up after a few years when Apple users move on to newer devices. Now Griffin Technology is making waves by bringing Papernomad's pap...

Here's a nice blast from the past: Ubisoft has announced new Prince of Persia game, which is a remake of the second title in the series, made specifically for smartphones and tablets. Prince of Persia: The Shadow and the Flame is being remade as a 2.5D action title -- it seems to feature the same basic levels as the 1993 original, but the graphics are all completely updated, and there's going to be some new gameplay elements as well. It looks like a lot of fun, as you can see in the trailer b...

T-Mobile is now selling the iPhone 5 and some stores are seeing lines for the Apple smartphone, says a report in TechCrunch. Lines were forming in Washington, New York City and other locations. The iPhone is available on T-Mobile with a low US$99 upfront payment and a 24-month payment plan. The iPhone is compatible with T-Mobile's Simple Choice plans that do not include a contract. Customers can choose a plan and cancel it at any time without paying an early termination fee. To promote its ne...