Changes in California smartphone laws

A new law, State Sen. Mark Leno’s Smartphone Theft Prevention Act (Senate Bill 962), was signed into California law on Monday indicating a change that will hopefully prevent the massive amounts of cell-phone theft that has been plaguing the state.

After July 1st, 2015, every smartphone sold in in California must by law be equipped with default theft deterrent technology that will render the phone useless to the thief if stolen, eradicating the incentive to steal smartphones almost completely (unless said thief knows a super great place to sell smartphone parts) as well as the violence that comes along with such robberies.

The law dictates that every smartphone sold in California (online or in store) no matter where it was manufactured, must come with a default kill switch that when activated, will remotely turn off the phone and erase it’s contents, being able to withstand a hard reset or operating system downgrade, henceforth making it useless. There must also be the ability to turn it back on by the owner of the phone if the phone was found to be misplaced instead of stolen.

Authorized users also will have the opportunity  to opt out and turn the kill switch feature off, which, just like the iCloud lock, you will have to remember to do if you are selling or giving your smartphone away!

So, good news? Well, we think it’s awesome news that people are trying and succeeding in changing technology laws in an effort to enhance public safety, certainly. But will this effort decrease the amount of robberies in California? We can only hope, and wait and see.

Deal of the Day!

We have an excellent deal of the day for you guys! Especially for those of you who like to understand how things work, love to learn new things and maaaaaaaybe a bit of a nerd. Like the good kind of nerds, the charming good looking ones.

Straight from the wonderful humans over at Slickdeals.com, we have ‘The Complete iOS 7 Course’, the iOS Bootcamp that teaches the tools needed to develop iPhone and iPad applications for iOS 7. You learn by building 14 apps along the way with the final app being a full featured dating app: A Tinder Clone.

This course from BitFountain is usually – wait for it – $499 – but for a short time only it is – wait for it – FREE!

Head on over to http://bitfountain.io/course/the-…UPON111677 . You will need a Mac, and probably some spare time. Go! Learn! Educating yourself is THE BEST.

Image courtesy of Webdesigner Depot – http://www.webdesignerdepot.com

Tim Cook does the Ice Bucket challenge. BTW, if you haven’t heard, there’s an ice bucket challenge.

So if you haven’t heard, there’s a social media ‘challenge’ making the rounds where you pour a bucket of ice on yourself, film it, and put the evidence on social media. Um… fun? Well, yeah, duh it’s fun, but the actual reason behind the challenge is to raise both awareness & funds for Amyotrophic Lateral  Sclerosis, more well known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Sweet! But, is this like those other times when you do the thing and put the thing on social media and then everyone makes fun of you for doing the thing and no one actually benefits? Well, the good news is – not so much with this one.

The Ice Bucket challenge has garnered some high profile challengees such as Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake to name but two, and it has a caveat – if you refuse to do the ice bucket challenge once you have been challenged – you must make a donation towards ALS charities. What is awesome is that many people who have participated in the challenge have poured ice over themselves and  made a donation.

So far, since August 12th, the challenge is said to have raised over $4 million dollars. Now that’s some seriously helpful cash.

Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook took part in the challenge after being challenged by Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller.  He did it at the company’s bi-weekly beer bash with Vanilla Ice playing in the background. ICE ICE BABY MR COOK SiR.

He then went along with the rules and challenged three others – Apple board member Bob Iger, musician Michael Franti, and Beats co-founder Dr Dre.

So we learnt two things today – The ice bucket challenge is good and fun and we should do it if we get challenged, and Apple has a BI-WEEKLY BEER BASH WHAT

Bucket of Ice by Nautical9 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitive indication there will be two models of the iPhone 6!

So, the rumor mill has been spinning off it’s wheels lately  ( do mills have wheels? Sure they do.) regarding Apple’s upcoming iPhone 6 release, which is expected to be announced early september.

Most people believe that there will actually be two versions of the iPhone 6 – differentiated by size. One is said to be 4.7 inch whilst the other will be a pretty massive 5.5 inch.  Speculation is rife as to if this will come to fruition, if those are the correct specifications, and if the’ll they be released concurrently.

BUT WAIT! Now we seem to have something pretty definitive ( probably) with a recent announcement from Takorn Tantasith, who is the Secretary General of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) in Thailand.

Uh, what does he have to do with anything? Well the NBTC needed to approve Apple’s application to distribute two iPhone 6 models in Thailand. Which they did, and according to government regulations, these approvals had to be announced publicly. Which is also what they did.

On August 5th, Apple reportedly filed the import application and on August 8th they received certification of equipment and a written approval notice  for two iPhones with model numbers A1586 and A1524. The approval was then announced and was also mentioned in a tweet by Nakorn Tantasith. 

Details on the iPhone 6 handsets referenced in the documents are, unfortunately, sealed. Bummer hummer. Guess we’ll just have to wait like patient little Appler’s!

New iPhone announcment September 9?

Behold! The future is getting closer!!

(Duh)

According to sauces in the know, specifically John Paczkowski from Re/code,  Apple will hold a special media event regarding the iPhone 6 on, wait for it, wait we already told you in the title, September 9th! That’s only like, 34 days, 6 hours and 4 minutes away! Who just got shivers!?

The rumors are still holding strong that the new iPhone will come in 2 sizes, most likely 4.7 and 5.5 inches respectively, that they will both retain the fingerprint sensor, run on new and improved A8 processors and feature sapphire displays.

Traditionally, the new iPhone is released to the public the next Friday after they are announced, so if Apple continues on that theme, some of us will be able to hold the new iPhone 6 in our hot little hands come Friday, September 19. Lucky Us!

And THEN we can use that awesome piece of technology ( we hope)  to track the next piece of Apple newness – the iWatch, rumored to be announced in October! Yay!

3nder is here!

So the next ‘nder’ App some people may or may not have been waiting for is here!  That’s right, it’s the threesome answer to Grindr, Tinder, and Brenda, and it’s called, trumpets please – 3nder. That’s pronounced ‘Threender’ for those of you playing at home. And playing at home (with more than one person) is indeed the aim of the game in the particular circumstance. Or, you know, in hotels and stuff too.

The App is new, even though the idea behind it certainly is not –  neither is how it works. Once you download the App from the App store, you log on through Facebook, set your parameters  such as distance around you in which you’re interested in finding people, how many people you are and how many people you’re looking for, and what kind of interests and desires you have.

For example – 24 yr old single guy looking in the local 300 mile area for a couple of bi ladies who are interested in adding a male bedroom partner to their date nights. And, good news guy – after playing around with the app for research, we can attest that there indeed are such ladies on 3nder!

The App then works it’s magic, and shows you pictures of people in your prescribed area, their interests and desires, if they are in a couple or single,their sexual persuasions,  etc. Scrolling through the pics, you have the option to swipe up over them to indicate interest, and to swipe down if it’s more of a mmmm….no. You can them continue on scrolling through your options.

Once you swipe up and you are lucky enough to be matched ( meaning of course that they are also interested in you)  you have a set time to talk to the person or people that you’re interested in, so there’s less of the procrastination that some find in Tinder, where you find a match and then everyone just sits around being excited about the match and not talking to the person.

As 3nder says, it’s ‘the gentlest way to form a trio, without the knowledge of your friends and family.’ And it just might be.

3nder is currently available free through the App store, although you can upgrade to an incognito version for $2.99. An Android version will be available later this year.

‘King Penguin threesome on the beach’ image provided by Liam Quinn under the CC BY-SA 2.0 License

New iOS 8 Features discovered

There’s by now been some time since the features of iOS 8 were announced at WWDC 2014. Developers have had access to the new operating system since then and some more details have arisen from that. Hooray for developers!

Here’s some of what they’ve discovered:

* You can send your iPhone or iPad’s last location to Apple before it’s battery dies.

* The magical miracle of Shazam will not be integrated into Siri, and you will have the option to buy or find out more about the song playing once it’s identified. Um, Awesome.

* Using Safari, you will be able to use the device’s camera to scan in credit card numbers when you make online purchases, rather than typing the number in. Because those numbers are soooo long, you guys.

* You know how sometimes you hand your phone or iPad to a friend so they can see a photo? And then they just start rolling on through all the rest of your photos? And sometimes we have photos that should not be seen by others, are we right? Well, in iOS 8 you will have the option to hide certain photos from the Moments, Collections and Years view within the app. The photos will still be visible in the albums view, but in a sneaky new ‘Hidden’ album.

* The Photos app will have two new albums; “Recently Added” and “Recently Deleted.” The Recently Deleted album will temporarily show photos that have been recently deleted. (d’uh).

* The Camera app will have a sweet new Time Lapse feature, manual exposure controls and a self timer mode for 3 or 10 seconds.

* The new Weather app will take it’s information from The Weather Channel in iOS 8 and will feature a bucket load more details about the weather- UV Index, sunset/sunrise times, humidity, pressure and that all important ‘feels like’ option.

* Photos will be able to be inserted into notes in iOS 8, so that instead of trying to describe that amazing thing you saw that one night that meant that you were actually supposed to be an astronaut, you can take a photo. Cos that’s a thousand words right there.

*There will be new options for calendars in iOS 8, including Islamic, Chinese and Hebrew. Meanwhile, keyboards will be available in Filipino, Marathi, Slovenian, and Urdu. Sladko!

* There will be location based apps displayed on your screen depending on where you are – the example given is the Apple App store App will display automatically if you’re in an Apple store. So many Apples.

* Peer-to-peer Airplay will give users the option to stream content via Apple TV without having to share a network connection.

So there you have it, some more details surfacing about iOS 8! Pretty neat ones too. Although we really can’t wait until the developers tell everyone about the iOS 8 line of sight transportation feature. Now that’s a rad feature.

iPhone Tip Of The Day

This one’s for the walkers out there, you good honest souls you! When using maps in iOS 7, you have the option to choose walking directions as a dafault in settings, and to have Siri read you the directions turn- by- turn. Snazzy.

To set walking directions as your default, go to Settings>Maps. Scroll down to the Preferred Directions section and choose between walking and driving.

To ask Siri to give you prompted map directions whilst walking, tap the Directions button in the top left hand corner, select the walking icon at the top of the screen, enter your destination and then tap Route.

Interesting, (and some might say challenging), fact for you – Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.

Go to it!

iPhone Tip Of The Day! Camera Edition

If you’re like us, you use your iPhone camera a lot. Which is super handy and awesome, right, but sometimes there’s that little issue of lighting that can overexpose, underexpose, or just crappily expose your photos.

Here’s a handy tip for getting better lighting by using the Exposure and Focus Lock feature:

*Point the Camera at the lighting you want to use.

*Tap and hold to lock the exposure to those light conditions.

*Turn the phone to the object of your photographic attraction, taking the locked exposure with you.

*Shoot your photo as normal.

*Magic.

This feature is also be used to lock focus, so you can overcome weird depth issues as well by doing  exactly the same as above. And now, you, like us, can become just that little bit closer to shooting photos like a pro!

Sweet Bro!

Just sent a text you didn’t mean to? We got you!

Ever have that moment of sheer panic when you realize that you just sent a text to the person you were talking about, not the person you were talking to?

Yuck.

Here’s something you can try the next time you realize you sent a message and you realllly don’t want it to be actually sent.

Put your phone into airplane mode IMMEDIATELY. Like, faster than your little fingers have ever moved before kind of immediately. If you’re successful, the message will fail to send, allowing you to delete the message into the ether, never to be seen by any human’s eyes again.

Just a word of warning- there’s a great chance it might not work. Your phone/network might be too fast, and then you’re on your own, guys. Plead temporary insanity, drunkiness, or a badly played off joke. Or you could be, like, honest we guess, people say that’s a good thing don’t they?

OR OR OR, OR – someone kidnapped you, took your phone, and is using it to torture you by screwing your life up in very minute ways…

Remember: Text responsibly!