Free Stuff!

You heard us! Free stuff! And actually good free stuff too!

To celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the App store, Apple are giving away 5 games and 5 regular apps.

This is for a limited time, so get in there quick kids!

The apps you can get are:

Barefoot World Atlas
Day One ( Journaling app)
How To Cook Everything
Over
Traktor Dj for phone

The games you can get are:

Badland
Infinity Blade 2
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery
Tiny Wings
Where’s My Water?

All for freeeee! Happy Free Stuff Monday!

Image courtesy of appadvice.com

Hell is other people- the app that helps you avoid people

So, we’ve done a review of the lover-ly app that is Tinder, we were planning a review of the similarly themed ‘Bang with friends’ app, however it has been unceremoniously dumped from the Apple App store ( for the time being…).

We thought maybe now we should review an app for the people who are not really interested in human interaction, or face-to-face interaction specifically. Cos it be scary. We get that, so this one is for you guys!

The app?  ‘Hell is other people’. Got a nice dystopian ring to it doesn’t it? People are calling this an Anti-social app, and as unfriendly as that sounds, we think that it has definite potential in certain circumstances.

Here’s how it works.

You download the app onto your device. You go out for a quiet Sunday afternoon stroll. Say….say you might not have slept at home last night, say you’re on what some people might call, a ‘walk of shame’. Who you wanna see? Altogether now: No-one.

Change the situation to your good self hung over and wearing track pants and not wanting to see that girl/guy, or when you might not be where you’re supposed to be and yet there you are staring at your very unimpressed boss in the bar down the road.

Or, imagine you’re just somewhere in the world, you walk into a cafe, and look, there’s that guy that does that weird long silence thing between sentences. Or worse, that chick who does the weird silence thing in the middle of  her sentence, and then you react to their weird half sentence, and then you realize that they hadn’t finished and oh my god just walk away.

Here is that magic thing that you’ve been waiting for- a chance to avoid that particular awkward awkwardness.

So, is it really magic? Will I never have to have an awkward social interaction ever again?

Well, no, sorry kids. The above ( and many more too)  are all situations where the Hell is other People App would come in handy- as long as the people you know and want to avoid in certain situations all use the location based social media app Foursquare. Frequently.

If they do, then you’re in luck. The app will track, record and plot your friends most recent check in’s on an ‘avoidance’ map for you, so you know where people are and when they checked in, making it perfect for sneaking around them.

The man behind the app, Scott Garner, a student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme, says that he hopes to include check in’s from facebook and geo-tagged tweets in the future.

This would create an even more comprehensive way to avoid your friends in sticky situations, or just, you know, cos your friends suck.

This is not a downloadable app, and you have to me a member of foursquare for it to work. Go to http://hell.j38.net/ to sign up using your foursquare log in information and you can see your ‘Avoidance’ map from there!

Happy avoiding guys!

Image courtesy of Hell is other people.

The iWatch

Good news for those of us waiting for a brand spanking ( ooh) new Apple product!

Yesterday, Apple’s application to trademark the term ‘iWatch’ in Japan was made public.

iWatch is, of course, the rumored name for the first wearable Apple device and the potentially out of this world Smart Watch. The trademark was applied for on June 3rd this year and is actually the second time that Apple has applied to trademark the name, the first being in Russia in February.

Momentum (and the rumor mill) for this product is building rapidly. Yesterday’s reports come after Bloomberg posted in March this year that according to their sources there were 100 engineers working on the planned smart watch, and after Tim Cook said in May that the wearable device market is one just waiting for innovation. And who better to do it than Apple?

Unlike other Smart Watches currently available (see the wonderful Pebble Watch), the much speculated iWatch will most likely be a stand alone device, with biometric potential that could turn the way we use technology on it’s head.
Suckily, experts agree that we probably won’t see the iWatch until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2014.

C’mon Tim Cook! We want wearable device innovation, and we want it now! Or soon! Please?

Image courtesy of  Forbes.

The Annual Apple ‘Back To School’ Promotion

Something for the learners & learned amongst us!

Apple have announced that to celebrate that magical time of year- the beginning of the school year- their annual Back To School promotion will be starting as soon as tomorrow.

The promotion offers students who purchase a Mac a $100 iTunes/App store gift voucher, and for those students who purchase an iPad or an iPhone, they will be offered a $50 gift voucher.

Sweet deal!

What’s sweeter? This promotion is added on top of the usual student discount of $200 off a new Mac.

To be eligible you must be a college student, parents buying for college students, teachers (including homeschool), school administrators & Staff.

Happy learning guys. Also, we apologize for calling the beginning of the school year magical.

Image courtesy of top10films.co.uk

Microsoft Games coming to iPhone

This is one to be filed under F for Fun! Erm… yeh, so anyway, who likes playing games?

Everyone? Cool. Later this year, according to reports via Reuters, Microsoft will be bringing a bunch of their X-Box and Windows games to the iPhone.

Helping bring their gamey goodness over into the smartphone world is Japanese gaming firm KLab Inc.

The first game is said to be Age of Empires, and is also said to be F for Free!

P.s We do apologize, some of the team here at iPhone Antidote appear to have been taken over by Sesame Street.

Images courtesy of isource.com and blogs.sfweekly.jpeg

Get an iPhone 5 through AT&T for $100 Without an Upgrade!

Not eligible for an upgrade but still want to cash in on AT&T’s latest 50% off deal?!  No Problem!

So you saw our last post about how AT&T is running this incredible promotion where they are offering half off on their phones that are priced between $0 and $199.99, but you realized that you already upgraded your iPhone last year, right?  No problem at all!

As it turns out, AT&T is actually offering this promotion even to people that are not eligible for an upgrade!  That means if you upgraded earlier this year, or last year, you would actually still be able to take part of this deal!  When we tested it, our checkout priced at $136 + Tax for a brand new iPhone 5, pretty good deal if you ask us (especially since we buy iPhone 5’s for $350)!

Pretty easy way to make a few extra bucks cash (lets see,  $350-$136 is $214 profit!)  All just for extending your contract to two years from today, for a bunch of people, this might only be adding an extra 6 months or so to your contract!

Awesome deal!

Deal of the day

Listen up kids! One most excellent deal of the day, brought to you by AT&T.

Online only, for a limited time and with waived activation, you can now get a new phone on a 2 year contract for HALF the price at AT&T. That’s  a HALF price discount. Divided by two, people.

Here’s how you get it:

Step 1. Choose a smartphone priced between $0.99 and $199.99 ( we’d say go for the iPhone 5. Wait, was that obvious?…).

Step 2. Magic! ( also…choosing an appropriate plan and stuff)

Step 3. You get a 50% discount automatically applied to the phone in your shopping cart.

So, iPhone Antidote, can you give me an example?

We sure can guys! This means that you can get a 16gb iPhone 5 for only $100! That’s RAD!

You wanna know what else would be rad?  I got a couple more steps for you…

1. Buy shiny new iPhone online using 50% discount. Laugh maniacally.

2. Send us your old stinky iPhone. Laugh maniacally.

3. We give you a bunch of cash for stinky old iPhone, and hey, that new phone cost you next to nothing! LAUGH MANIACALLY.

This deal is only available online and for a limited time so get your butts into gear! As always, terms and conditions apply, check out the deal here: http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/smartphones.html

Image courtesy of Forbes.

WWDC lowdown!

Alright guys, so yesterday was THE BIG DAY!

The four day annual world wide developers conference for Apple began yesterday morning, kicking off at the Mascone Centre in San Francisco at 10am.

As per usual, WWDC began with a perfectly orchestrated keynote speech given by Tim Cook, featuring a few other key Apple guys AND more importantly, featuring some new Apple software and hardware announcements and previews.

DOUBLE RAINBOW EXCITING!

For the first time, the keynote was broadcast live from the Apple website and on Apple TV.

The two hour address was, as expected, super stylishly presented, with multiple media presentations, some jokes, and a few fantastic and even surprising new Apple products and updates.

The top things you should know about that were announced today are:

– The new Mac Pro. Stellar, revolutionary and round.

– iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out.

– OS  X Mavericks – the new operating system named after a California beach break.

– New Macbook airs with super extended battery life.

– iTunes Radio – the much talked about radio product that actually sounds better than we expected!

Super double rainbow exciting, right!?

We’ll have even more from WWDC coming up this week!!

The New Mac Pro

We got a sneak peak today, with a big drum roll please announcement of the new Mac Pro.  Apple’s line of Mac Pro’s are generally used a lot by graphic designers, software developers, video editors, people who need a lot of power.

The new Mac Pro is innovative in it’s size and cylindrical design, and sounds just basically miraculous and perfect. And we’re not ones to go over the top. Much.

There are some people who say it looks like a giant pill. One of those ones that doesn’t go into your mouth…we disagree. We think it looks svelte and sexy, so there.

The Mac Pro is one of Apple’s products that haven’t had the privilege of being updated in quite a few years. And now it got the privilege, it got it all over the place. The old Desktop Mac looked like this:

This new one is 1/8^th of the size! But it’s also faster, better, stronger and, well, not harder. Just the first three then. The casing can be rotated using a handle at the top and the computer will use motion sensors to light up the input panel so you can see all the ports.

It’s assembled completely in the United states ( Go Patriotism!), we have no idea how much it costs yet ( but probably expensive) and it will be released later this year sometime vague.

So, here’s what’s so impressive about it apart from the new design and size. It’s 2.5 times faster than the previous model, and according to Apple, will provide twice the performance.

According to Apple, the specs are as follows;

The next generation Mac Pro is architected around an ingenious unified thermal core that allows the desktop to efficiently share its entire thermal capacity across all the processors. The result is a pro desktop with breakthrough performance packed into a design that is one-eighth the volume of the current Mac Pro. Next generation Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 core configurations deliver double the floating point performance. With two AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, the all-new Mac Pro is up to 2.5 times faster than the current Mac Pro and delivers up to an amazing 7 teraflops of compute power. The new Mac Pro also features PCIe-based flash storage that is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives and includes the latest four-channel ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866 MHz to deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth. With all that power, the new Mac Pro lets you seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background.

So, it’s super fast and powerful and stuff. And it looks really cool. We want one. For Christmas. Please. We’ll use it to make the best penguin meets llama animation that anyone has ever seen, promise.

Images courtesy of; Engadget, Inrumor, Gizmodo & Macrumors.

iOS 7

Yesterday we were given a preview of iOS 7, and apart from the fact that we only saw a teensy snippet of one of our personal favs and the man mainly responsible for iOS 7, Jony Ive, the new iOS announcement exceeded even our expectations. And we had high hopes!

Now, this system update will not change your life drastically, it will not do your job for you or make you a more beautiful person, but what it does is promise to enhance your life, with it’s combination of a pared down and simplified beauty and increased functionality.

This seventh system update is the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out with the user interface changing pretty drastically as well as the addition of a number of new features.

As was predicted ( or leaked in a timely manner by Apple), the new iOS has none of the skeumorphic, life like graphics or icons as seen in the previous versions.There is a whole new color palette, completely new icons and the overall impression is a much cleaner, flatter, brighter and simpler user interface.

There is a translucent feel to the screen, which gives depth to the phone, even down to the wallpaper, which you can now see behind app icons, and that moves intuitively in relation to the motion in your hands.The typography, also, has been redesigned to be bigger, spacier and cleaner.

Apple has said that this is the future of iOS, that as well as being the biggest change to iOS since the original iPhone, it is a new beginning.And, well, we haven’t tested it out yet, but we like the way it looks. We like the new features, and we like the direction Apple is going with it.

Here are some new features that make iOS 7 super, double rainbow exciting.

Control center
Swiping up from the bottom of the device, you can find the all-new control center. This innovation provides quick access to preferences and settings. You will find switches for wifi, Airplay, a flashlight, do not disturb, brightness, airplane mode, and quick music buttons.

Weather, Messages, Calendar

Messages and the Calendar app have both been cleaned up and simplified. The updated weather app has animation representing live weather, (the lightening looked particularly cool) with the ability to see more details such as humidity, and scrunch all your favorite places together to see not only the weather in each, but the time in world clock format.

Multitasking

Pressing the power button twice will now give previews of apps that are open, rather than the small app icons that we see right now on iOS 6.

The phone will intuitively learn which apps you use most often and at what time. Background processing will then provide updated content, ready and waiting for the time that you use them.

This also applies with apps that send push notifications- when that happens, the phone will start processing updates because it knows that you will more than likely be opening that app soon.

The phone will recognize and take advantage of power efficient times, such as when it is connected to Wi-Fi, to update apps.

Airdrop
This is a new function, sadly only available on the most recent devices ( iPhone 5, iPad etc).

Airdrop makes it super easy to share photos, videos, contacts and other stuff between friends with iPhones. Connecting via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, you can simply click the share button and choose the recipient from those around you.

You can send whatever you want ( from apps that support Airdrop) and the person receiving can choose to save the item- it will then be located in the appropriate app. Photos in iPhoto, etc.

Safari

Safari is updated with a new full screen look and smart search tab, one tap access to favorites and better parental controls.

You also have the ability to see and browse your tabs from other devices.

Also… and this is kind of a biggie… no more eight tab limit! Oh my god apple, why did that take so long, but thank you, thank you.

Tabs are also now organized differently- vertically in 3D instead of horizontally, with the ability to reorder the tabs. To get rid of one tab you just swipe it to the left.

Photos and camera

The camera app now includes 4 camera options- Normal, square cropped, video and panoramic. You also have the option of a number of live filters to apply to photos.

The photos app has a brilliant way of organizing your photos using time and location to bundle your photos into ‘moments’, which are photos from the same time and/or place. These ‘moments’ can then be organized into ‘collections’, which are groupings of moments using that same organizational information.

You can also view your whole collection via year, see what locations you were in for each year, and scrub to find a specific photo.

Siri

Siri now has not one but two new voices, a more human like female and male voice!

A new interface, with sound waves to represent Siri when he/she’s processing, French and German capabilities and a whole whack load of higher intelligence makes Siri exciting again.

The results can now include photos within the app and has the ability to answer more questions more intelligently, with Twitter, Wikipedia and web search results from Bing integrated into the app. Interesting choice with Bing, but we’ll ride with it for a while…

Siri itself has also become more integrated into your device, and can perform functions such as turning the brightness down, turning Bluetooth on etc.

New app store
For starters, the new app store looks way better. Secondly, all of your apps will now update automatically, (down with those little red numbers!) and thirdly, we now have some new search options.

You will be able to search for apps based on your location, or or an event or festival you’re at. You can also now search for and find apps using age range, which is designed with kids in mind.

Itunes Radio
We have a whole other section on iTunes Radio, go here to read it ☺

Ios in the car
iOS will soon be integrated into your car by having your device display through the in-car monitors. A bunch of cars will begin to be integrated with Siri, Maps, messages and more in 2014.

The introduction to this was pretty broad, however there will be more details to come. The car manufactuors who will be including iOS in at least one of their models include Honda, Mercedes- Benz, Nissan, Volvo, Kia, Acura, Ferrari, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Opel, and Chevrolet.

OK, so those are the big features. There are also a ton of different, smaller features in iOS 7, like the updated notification centre that can now be accessed from the lock screen, and synced across all of your devices, and the activation lock to try to prevent theft ( no-one can use your iphone unless they know your iCloud username & password.)

We think that iOS 7 is really pretty cool, especially considering that we’ll be getting at least a few more cool features in the hardware component around the same time (Fall this year). What do you guys think?

iOS 7 will be available to the public in the Fall. Demos for iOS 7 are available on Apple’s site- here.

First image courtesy of techradar.com, all others courtesy of Apple.com