Wish you didn't have to pay for online orders before they showed up? You won't have to, if you've loaded up a PayPal account. In the wake of a trial run, the company has formally rolled out Pay After Delivery, a service that gives you up to 14 days...
It's another week, and we've gathered together the very best apps and games that have been released over the last seven days for iPhone and iPad. If there's a running theme for the games this week, it's racing. We've got a fresh endless runner, a casual game, and some more classic racing racing games to take in. On the app side, there's a healthy selection for the creatives out there, with art, video, and photography apps, but also something for the left-brained iPhone owners.
Enough yap, let's start downloading some sweet apps for iPhone and iPad.
This is a free game similar to the awkward long-distance runner QWOP. Players have to delicately maneuver a giant two-legged spider-type creature for as long a distance as possible. Every tap of the screen switches which legs are moving, but make sure to time it right, because Daddy Long Legs has an awful sense of balance and it's a long way down. Best (worst?) of all, the game keeps tabs on how many falls you make over the course of playing.
Daddy Long Legs has quick replay value, a sharp art style, and a high difficulty curve.
Zombie Highway 2 brings back the classic endless racer where players need to avoid post-apocalyptic debris and shake off ravenous zombies. To do that, you can scrape them off by barely missing obstacles, or load up your death machine with ramshackle weaponry. 6 cars, 10 zombie types, 55 different objectives, a daily challenge, and 15 upgradeable weapons make for a fun, gorey ride. In-app purchases are available if you need a hand mopping up the undead.
Zombie Highway 2 as fast, ridiculous, and an awesome way to kill time.
Cars: Fast as Lightning is a casual city-building game with light one-touch racing elements. It features the whole cast of the familiar Pixar movie, and even has a dash of original voice acting. Players build up their own little town of Radiator Springs and customize tracks with outrageous stunts. Race against fierce competitors in one-on-one battles relying on tight turns and big jumps. Expect the usual freemium elements here, such as resource gathering at regular intervals, premium currency, energy meters, and upgrade timers.
Cars: Fast as Lightning is kid-friendly, and offers some unique mechanics in the grand scheme of casual games.
Reckless Racing 3 is a gorgeous rally racing game with touch-friendly controls. Work your way through 36 different routes in career, arcade, or single events. If you feel like you're on your A-game, you can give the obstacle course a try and hone your drifting skills. Gamepad and iCloud support are both included, plus if you've got the urge to fast-track progress, there are in-app purchases available.
Sporty drivers will have great time in Reckless Racing 3.
The classic mobile time management game has been revamped with fresh graphics. The new Diner Dash has players hopping between receiving new guests, taking orders, delivering meals, gathering checks, and clearing tables from a wide range of over-the-top (and often picky) customers. There are over 90 levels and three diners to work in, and 20 customer types to serve. The usual freemium tropes are here, such as energy meters, social tie-ins, and premium currency.
If that's alright by you, Diner Dash is a tried-and-true recipe that is long overdue for a fresh serving.
Clips is a handy little Notification Center widget that helps you keep tabs on content you copy to your clipboard and need to paste later. Multiple items (either text or images) can be saved, which is perfect for folks who are jumping between apps regularly. It even ties in with the keyboard for future pasting. With a premium upgrade, you can access Clips between iPhone and iPad.
Clips is a light, helpful, and free app that can make your life just a little bit easier when putting together documents or messages.
Prompt 2 is a highly functional SSH client for anyone managing web servers. The brand new version introduces Clips, which offers one-tap access to common commands thanks to a customized keyboard bar, private key generation, Touch ID lock to keep server access secure, and not to mention a sleek redesign for iOS 8 and the latest iPhones.
Prompt 2 is a great way to ensure site admins can fix things fast no matter where they are.
Reflect+ is a fun little photography app that lets you drop in reflections in your images, and add haze or ripple effects as desired. Mirroring of existing subjects is easy, but you can also drop in fireworks, rainbows, lens flares, and other skyborne objects seamlessly. Various presets ensure your reflections are convincing, plus filters can help add just a little extra atmosphere to your shot.
Anyone itching to get creative with their iPhone pictures will find plenty of opportunity in Reflect+.
Adobe Premiere Clip helps you easily import video shot on your iPhone or iPad onto your Mac for editing, in addition to enabling some light editing of your own. Trim your videos, make some color adjustments and transitions, plus drop in soundtracks, including a handful included with the app. The Auto Mix feature will make sure audio quality is consistent between clips. Of course it all ties in with Adobe Creative Cloud so you can upload your video and keep working on it on other devices seamlessly.
Adobe released a whole bunch of other great iOS apps this week that are also worth checking out: Brush, Shape, and Color, plus significant updates to Line, Sketch, and Mix.
Autodesk revamped their freehand drawing app for iOS, and the new version is fantastic. Fine tune a wide range of brushes, some of which are bundled, some available through an in-app purchase. A layer editor and a mirroring tool unlock once you set up an account, plus you can plug into DeviantArt to share your stuff instantly. Tablet and smartphone screen sizes are supported.
SketchBook is worth a download if you do any doodling whatsoever.
There are tons of new apps coming out all the time for iOS, so hit us up in the comments with the latest downloads on your iPhone or iPad.
Good news for users of the OS X Yosemite public beta: beta 2 is now available. The fresh update brings the public beta inline with the latest version of the Yosemite Developer Preview. The first edition of the Yosemite Public Beta was released late last month, bringing a taste of the next generation of OS X to the masses. We're likely quite close to an official release for Yosemite, so the updated public beta should be more stable with fewer bugs and the like that the previous edition. An update version of the redesigned iTunes 12 beta is also included for beta testers.
If you're in the public beta program, the beta should now be available to download through the Mac App Store.
Yosemite brings a flattened user interface to the Mac that's reminiscent of what launched in iOS 7, as well as greater integration between OS X and iOS 8.
Though Yosemite is currently in a closed beta, Apple is expected to release a public beta for the OS later in the year, once we get closer to launch (which is likely only a few months away).
In the meantime, what new features in Yosemite are you most looking forward to?
Imagine a boss at a company with a really great salesperson who lands all the best, highest valued customers for the company. Now imagine that boss hates having to pay that salesperson their really high commission, even though it's the salesperson who's closing all those deals and ensuring all that money comes to the company. The boss can't afford to lose that salesperson but they're desperate to find anyway they can to cut that salesperson's commissions. Likewise, the salesperson knows their value and insists on being richly compensated for the deals they close. That's the relationship between the carriers and the iPhone, and between the price carriers pay Apple for the revenue the iPhone generates. It's also why the carriers hate Apple and the iPhone, and why when a new iPhone — like the iPhone 6 — is on the horizon, we get articles like this: "As Phone Subsidies Fade, Apple Could Be Hurt". The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. wireless carriers are making unexpectedly fast progress moving their customers away from subsidized phones, a shift that could put further pressure on sales of expensive devices like the iPhone.
Apple Inc. charges more for its phones than many companies charge for low-end laptops. Until recently, American subscribers have been insulated from the sticker shock by carriers that subsidized hundreds of dollars of the cost with hopes of recovering it via two-year service contracts.
What's meant by "subsidies" in North America is "loan". The carriers front you the phone and then add an extra ~$20 a month to your plan to pay it back. That does hide the true cost of the iPhone — which historically starts at $650 for the base flagship model — but the carriers certainly aren't giving anyone anything for nothing. Some carriers have even double-dipped under more recent plans, keeping the ~$20 "loan repayment" in plans and adding an extra "installment charge" on top of it. Lovely people, they.
As to Apple charging more for their phones than low-end laptops, iPhones are computers, and better ones than low-end laptops. That's how premium products — from Apple, Samsung, or any vendor — are priced. It's how typically un-"subsidized" products like iPads and MacBooks are priced.
And the carriers, spin aside, have zero interest in lowering prices for us. They have complete interest in keeping more of our money for themselves. Witness everything from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint over the last decade, and the more recent antics of T-Mobile.
All things considered, I find paying Apple more in line with my interests than carriers. They're the ones who manufacture phones to exceedingly hight quality levels, who refrain from festooning them with logos and clogging them up with crapware, who provide services like iMessage and FaceTime that work around often exorbitantly priced carrier cash-grabs. It's a glimpse at what a carrier-as-dumb-pipe world could truly be like.
Which, of course, the carriers know and why, of course, they hate Apple even more. Hence why these types of articles — and articles about Apple raising prices — pop up every time new phones, like the upcoming iPhone 6 start working their way towards distribution.
It's negotiation by media. It's theater. And it's absurd.
Or does anyone here really feel sorry for the carriers, and their having to pay Apple a premium for the premium profits the iPhone delivers them every month?
Note: There's an absolutely valid argument to be made that, in an "unsubsidized" market Apple won't sell as many $450-$850 phones as other vendors will sell budget under-$400 phones. Apple will either have to move into lower segments, as they did with iPod, or content themselves with less market share but more profit share, as they did with the Mac. But that's an argument for a different piece and a different day.
Note 2: It occurs to me I pay $750 on average for a new iPhone every year. (Contracts, until recently, were 3-years in Canada.) That sounds like a lot, but it works out to roughly $60 a month, or $2 a day, for a computer I use every day, all day, more than any other object. Yes, I could get a cheaper one, but cheapness isn't always the most important feature.
Sony and Microsoft's console sales were neck and neck for awhile, but the gap is starting to widen: according to the latest NPD numbers, Sony is winning the race. Yesterday, the Japanese hardware manufacturer announced that it has moved more than...
Despite hundreds of keyboard and stylus accessories for your phone or tablet, a pen and paper is still the easiest way to take notes at work. And in their continued effort to bridge your gadgets and notebooks, Evernote and Moleskine are introducing a business-oriented notebook that gives you space for jotting private notes not meant for coworkers' eyes.
It's been a long time coming, but the iMore show's video feed is finally back on both RSS and iTunes for your viewing pleasure. That it was missing in action for so long has been as irksome for us as it has been for all of you who emailed and tweeted us about it. But, long story short, now we're back!
Long story slightly less short, nobody was happy with the performance of our previous video host, not us, not you, not them. We got nothing but complaints about how long it took to download shows and how often they'd get interrupted when streaming. It wasn't the host's fault, they just weren't optimized for large video files. Wrong tool for the job. After a ton of searching, a ton of tests, and a ton of downloads and uploads, we found a place that better suited our needs and got everything back up running.
Well, iMore everything. I started with the iMore show simply because I had all the files handy and if anything went wrong, I'd only have myself to yell at. We'll get the other video shows back up and running as soon as possible, including Android Central and ZEN & TECH. It might take a few days because we're moving around a bunch of big files, but the new beginning is in sight.
If you've been missing our video shows on RSS or iTunes, here are the link so you can (re)subscribe, and there also YouTube, which carries all our videos shows as well. Thanks for the patience and the support, enjoy the shows!
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Tim Cook publicly welcomed Microsoft Office for iPad via Twitter today, and Apple will be taking a 30% cut of all in-app purchase revenue from the new apps. This is standard practice for the App Store and means that Microsoft will indeed be surrendering a cut of all Office 365 subscriptions it sells that way. So, there's every reason for Apple to be doubly excited. Re/code:
Indeed, Microsoft does offer Office 365 subscriptions within the just-released Word for iPad and the other Office apps and, yes, it is paying the 30 percent cut, Apple confirmed to Re/code. Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.
Apple has taken a hard line with all manner of publishers that want to sell things, even subscriptions that go well beyond the iPad content — if anything is sold in the app, they have to use Apple’s method and hand over 30 percent.
It sounds like a fair amount of money – especially given how much a subscription costs – but it's important for the App Store that Apple hasn't shown any favoritism. Smaller developers have to surrender 30% so the big guns shouldn't ever be allowed to avoid that, either.
It's interesting Microsoft opted to go this route, though. Google offers no in-app purchases in its content delivery apps like Google Play Music presumably to avoid handing Apple any of its revenue. Microsoft is taking a hit in the wallet for offering a better purchase experience to iPad customers.
So, it's a double whammy for Apple. The huge arrival of Office for iPad at long last and a cut from any Office 365 subscriptions sold through the apps. What's not to like about that?
Source: Re/code
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The wonderful thing about science is that researchers are always pushing to produce the latest, greatest and most wonderful findings they can. They never let up. And 2013 was no exception.
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