OS X Mavericks

We would have suggested OS Liger ( rawr!), but Apple went ahead without consulting us and decided with this system update to start over with the naming process, leaving the big cat names behind.

Coinciding with their new ‘Designed by Apple in California’ ads, and the announcement that the Mac Pro will be built solely in America, Apple have started a new naming scheme for their operating system based on locations in California.

To start it off, announced yesterday at WWDC, we have OS X Mavericks. Mavericks is a surfing location particularly well known for its dangerous big wave riding in Northern California, just north of the town of Half Moon Bay.

Now, it’s also the new Apple operating system. Is it as cool as beach with big wave breaks? Well, kinda? We may have trapped ourselves in that comparison- it might not be that cool, but it is very cool.

Here’s the double rainbow of coolness for you guys;

New Finder Tabs.

Just like in your Internet browser, you can now have independently controlled tabs in your finder windows. You can merge these finder windows and take the finder full screen.

Tagging.

Filed under ‘I wouldn’t have though of this, but now that you did, it looks really freakin useful’ is tagging.

With Mavericks you will be able to ‘tag’ documents and media – save it, tag it as sports, home, to do, etc. and it catalogues these under their tags in the side bar of the finder.

You can tag documents with multiple tags, create new tags on the go, and the best part? Searching using tags. For instance, searching for ‘iphone stuff’ and ‘the best’ will naturally take you directly to your saved iPhone Antidote Wallpaper.

Multiple Displays

Users will now be able to access the menu bar and dock separately on each screen with multiple display support. You will also be able to load separate and independent applications on each screen, and drag them from screen to screen.

Apple TV is not forgotten here either, as it can now be a fully powered OS X display, with access to menu bar dock and independent applications also.

Extended Battery Life

There is a heap of new processing elements included in Mavericks to extend your battery life and reduce CPU utilization by up to 72%.

We particularly like a new feature called app nap, which figures out what applications and web pages are in use, and which are not. The system will then simply stop giving power to the web pages and applications that you’re not currently looking at.

Compressed memory pretty much does what it says, compressing inactive memory to provide spare memory to running applications when needed.

Timer Coalescing groups low end operations together , creating tiny periods of time when your computer can enter into an idle, low power state, which in turn saves your battery.

Safari

Safari is updated with Mavericks, starting with an all-new homepage with top sites and a sidebar with your bookmarks and access to your reading list. This will also include shared links from people you follow on Linkdin and Twitter.

Safari uses less energy in this update and includes accelerated, smoother scrolling and one click bookmarking.  In your readin list, you will be able to scroll continuously through all of your articles, one after the other.

iCloud keychain

Cross device safe keeping of all your passwords and credit card information starts with iCloud Keychain.

This new feature will store all your passwords, across all your devices, so you don’t have to think about them ever again. Sounds pretty good right? The keychain will even suggest new passwords for you, and then will go ahead and put it in the cloud, encrypted.

With your credit card information, when shopping online, the keychain will offer the last four digits of all the cards you have stored, and you can pick one when paying and be done with it.

Although this sends little tiny shivers of scariness up the security part of our spine, it also sounds super useful and convenient.

Notifications

You can now get all your notifications, from all your devices, on your computer.

What’s also pretty great about this is you will have a number of new options for action within the notification when it appears on your screen.

You can respond directly to most notifications, (by replying to email, declining Skype calls etc.), within the notification banner when it appears.

Once you have actioned a notification, you won’t see it again on any of your other devices, and they will all be updated with your response to the original notification.

When the computer is awoken from sleep, all the alerts you may have gotten when it (and you!) were asleep will be listed.

Calendar

The calendar app has been updated in a really cool way- where now if you have appointments scheduled, the app will give you a ton of information you might need for them.

The calendar will now provide you with weather in the spot where your appointment is scheduled, as well as suggestions for restaurants etc if you require them.

We particularly like that the calendar will work out and tell you the travel time to and from your appointment, and will even add it to the calendar so you cant double book the time when you’re supposed to be on your way!

You will also get notifications of when you need to leave on your phone and/or computer.

Maps

Maps hits the computer with Mavericks! You can now access street maps, 3D flyover data and info cards. You can also push turn-by-turn directions to our iOS device straight from your computer.

iBooks

iBooks will be on your computer by Fall with this system update. Now you can access all the books in the iTunes store as well as your stored books and bookmarks, and read them full screen on your computer screen.

But what is really cool is for the educators and the learners amongst us.

iBooks for Mavericks will come with interactive textbooks, which feature videos and other media embedded within the normal text. You will also have the ability to highlight and make notes, and learn using study cards made from the material.

Sounds pretty awesome huh?

OS X Mavericks will be available to the public in the Fall.

All images courtesy of Apple. 

New MacBook Airs

MacBook Airs were given a small but quite amazing revamp in time for WWDC 2013.

The new 11-inch and 13-inch notebooks use Haswell processers, which provide better overall performance and most importantly- increased battery life or ‘all day’ battery life as described by Apple.

The 11 inch MacBooks will increase from 5 hours of battery life to 9 hours and the 13 inch MacBooks will increase from 7 hours to a pretty amazing 12 hours of battery life. I know we just said Amazing to describe that, but we totally think it deserves an Astounding too. Simply astounding battery life!

The new MacBooks also come with 40% better graphics performance, and up to 3 times faster Wi-Fi capabilities with 802.11ac compatibility.  802.11ac is the newest Wi-Fi standard, but as it is not common yet, Apple also announced a new Airport Extreme that is compatible with 802.11ac.

The pricing has changed a little (for the better) with the narrowing hard drive options, as the 64 GB is not available with this update. The 11″ MacBook Air starts at $999 with a 128GB hard drive and the 13″ MacBook Air with a 128GB hard drive starts at $1099.

Available online and in retail stores as of today (yesterday officially, but a lot of stores actually started selling them today).

Image courtesy of Ubergizmo.

iTunes Radio/ i wish they’d called it iRadio cos it’s easier to type

Yay! We really like this one.

iTunes radio is the Pandora-like radio streaming app we’ve all been anticipating from Apple, except it’s not standalone, it’s stuck inside iTunes. Which is actually a lot better, because it makes it easier for you to intertwine your own music and what you stream.

iTunes Radio provides a bunch of featured radio stations like ‘Summer songs’, around 200 genre based stations, as well as whatever songs/stations that are trending on twitter, and stations that your friends are listening to ( using Airdrop).

You can create your own station ( and share it with friends) based on genre, song name or artist. You can also start a station from a song in your own iTunes library.

When listening to a station, you can tell iTunes Radio to ‘play more like this’, ‘never play this song again’, or to add the song to your wish list. Like Pandora and Spotify, the app will learn from these actions and will intuitively play songs and artists more and more to your liking, whilst at the same time letting you discover new music.

You can look over your entire history on the app, as well as your wish list, giving you a super easy way to buy the songs you like from the store, straight into your itunes.

iTunes Radio is free, but it is supported by ads. If you are an iTunes Match subscriber than you get it free, with no ads.

Now, people have been freaking out a little bit since iTunes Radio was announced yesterday, saying RIP Pandora ( and Spotify and iHeart Radio etc) and other such way-ahead-of-yourselves-stuff, which we think is a little hasty. We love Pandora.

But here’s the thing. A yearly Ad-free subscription to Pandora is $36. A yearly subscription to iTunes Match, and hence ad-free iTunes Radio is $24.99. Some people will care about that $11 a year if the service and experience is comparable.We just don’t know that it is yet.

On the other hand, if you are like a lot of people and can just put up with ads, even if it’s the same damn one over and over and over again, then we can’t compare iTunes radio with any other radio streaming service yet, because the only hint to how many ads you’ll get is the word ‘occasional’.

One thing that Apple has over the other services is a whole other system built into some of the devices iTunes Radio will be used on. Siri wil be integrated into the service so that you can ask her to change the song, skip a song, ask who it’s by, ask her to play more songs like it, etc.

Apple promises first releases of new tracks and has apparently made deals with Universal, Warner and Sony in an effort to get access to a huge range of artists and songs. We can’t wait to try it, but until then, and maybe after, we still love you Pandora!

iTunes Radio is built into iTunes and will be available in the Fall with iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks across all devices, Apple TV and  iTunes on PC.

Image courtesy of Apple.

WWDC!

WWDC is here!

Apple’s annual developers conference starts today in San Francisco. Everything kicks off at 10am with the keynote address.

Go here to watch the live broadcast: http://www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2013/

or stay tuned for updates of all kinds of exciting Apple stuff!

Friday Afternoon App Review: Vine

So, Vine. It is no longer only wine in a Transylvanian accent; it is now also a mobile app. One of those fast up and coming social media apps that are going to take over the world. We feel like we should be running right now, that kind of thing.

The general gist of Vine is that it with it, you can create and post video clips. These video clips have a maximum length of 6 seconds and are posted in an unending loop.

The video clips that are posted have the ability to be shared on both Facebook, and Twitter, who since Oct 2012 actually own the app. So, cool. But what exactly am I using this for?

Well, companies have started using it in branching out further into social media advertising; some people are using it in journalism, it’s become big in film and there have already been Vine film festivals, and there are even those who believe that soon, video will take over the internet, and it all starts here. Bye, words.

You also get to see cool things like a person making a dog look like they are eating cereal. AND you get to play with stop motion, which, call us geeks but… it’s rad.

Three reasons you might have heard of Vine recently:

1. The head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, climbed the Bay Bridge in San Francisco on June 3rd to celebrate the release of Vine for Android. He also put it on Vine.

2. Those people we all know who are always one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to cool new things are talking about it. Usually exclusively on social media.

3. Vine was also made famous for a reaction from one of the actresses of Game Of Thrones, regarding the so called ‘red wedding’ episode. And by that I mean I refuse to say anything more about it because the amount of people already talking about it is unbelieveable. Ever heard of spoilers people??

Anyway.

The app is pleasantly simple to use. You can browse through the editor’s picks of video’s, the popular section, or search for specific video’s by using people’s names or hashtags. To make your own video, simply press the video camera button, and Vine will take you through a tutorial.

Vine is free from the app store, however due to Twitter not forbidding pornography explicitly ( Ha!), upon Apple’s request, you now have to be 17 to download the app.

Image courtesy of agbeat.com

Apple vs Samsung Update

For those who have been enjoying the life of those who live under rocks, Apple and Samsung have been very unhappy with each other over the last little while. They have expressed this unhappiness through the law, as you do.

They have both basically been going back and forth calling each other big cheaters and copiers and tattle tales  over their technology patents being infringed upon.

This has been going on for a while, but this time, Apple has lost. The United States International Trade Commission are the people in charge, and they have just overturned a previous judgment from last year, which had ruled in Apple’s favor.

They are now saying that, yes, Apple did infringe on some of Samsung’s patents, specifically to do with their 3G technology, and have henceforth banned some of Apple’s products from being imported into the States.

What does this mean iPhone Antidote?

Well, at the moment it means that the following AT&T products are banned from US imports and sales; iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G.

This doesn’t mean anything if you have any of those models currently, or are planning on buying a used model. It also doesn’t affect Apple very much to be honest, because those products are specific to AT&T and are all old models.

What it does do is pee Apple off, and worsen the relationship between the two biggest smartphone providers. Yaaaay?

Apple will be appealing, with the defense that Samsung made these patents available for use under FRAND terms. FRAND = Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory. This is used to cover technology that is a standard and is meant to prevent litigation like this, and it seems to have been ignored by the ITC in their ruling.

Hey, guys, why can’t we just get to the part where we’re all friends and making super awesome blow our minds technology? Huh?

Image courtesy of applerumors.it

What Tim Cook said at D11: All Things Digital, and what it means.

Tim Cook has confirmed that OS X 10.8.4 and iOS 7 will be announced and previewed at WWDC 2013. Well, d’uh Tim Cook.

And I know I just said D’uh, but iPhone Antidote just thought that was obvious- we’re still SUPER excited about seeing the updated software previewed! Yay!

Mr. Cook confirmed this at D11: All things digital, where he also expressed Apple’s interest in wearable devices ( Hello iWatch), said that he can’t imagine trying to convince someone who doesn’t wear glasses to do so ( … take that Google glass!) and spoke about how Apple is, for reals, not done in the business of game changing technology. Duh! And Yay!

Mr Cook also announced the hiring of ex- Environmental Protection Agency Chief Lisa Jackson. Tim did forget Lisa’s official job title (oops) but said that her role within Apple would be to coordinate their environmental responsibility efforts. Cook also reiterated that Apple had achieved 100% renewable energy use at its data centers, with its corporate facilities using 75% renewable energy. Nice job, Apple.

So this is what a few people in the tech world are miffed about- what Tim Cook failed to do, and completely on purpose, is to give away anything that people hadn’t already kind of knew about. He was very good at staying mute on subjects such as the next iPhone, and only hinted at the possibility of other product lines in Apple’s future.

Which we should be used to, really. Apple is the king of secret products and well laid secrets, leaked when and to whom they want.

A lot of people say that they have been waiting for too long for an Apple game changer, a product that blew our minds, but in reality after a shockingly good rate of 3 game changing products in 10 years, and then a three year wait, now is the time where we are amping up. Where Apple is amping up. Apple has genuine competitors now, and a new look, tighter, executive team since last years shake up and Steve Jobs’ death.

Everything ( as well as a subtle Tim Cook) is pointing towards a software heavy WWDC, with the hopeful inclusion of iRadio and some super exciting announcements starting this fall, extending into early 2014. Think a beautiful new iOS and OS X,  iWatch, iRadio, iTV, new iPhone, new ipad, and new Macbooks.

It’s an exciting time to be an Apple user!

Image courtesy of techland.time.com 

100 million iPod Touch’s sold and a new, cheaper update released!

Another milestone for Apple- they’ve just sold their 100 millionth iPod touch! That’s like, 5 iPod touches for everyone in Australia! Yay!

The device has been around since 2007 and the latest update has just been released last Thursday- with interesting results.

The updated iPod only comes in two colors, is only 16GB and has no rear facing camera. That all sounds …a little bit bleh, until you discover the reason for this is the lowered price- now only $229 compared to the 32Gb at $299 and the 64Gb at $399.

Selling cheaper versions of their products has been something that Apple seemed to have shied away from previously. Now however, with this cheaper iPod update, it seems like the first steps for Apple in trying to provide a bigger price scale of their product line to reach more people.

This gives credence to the rumors that Apple is planning to bring out a less expensive version of the iPhone.

According to Analysts, an ‘iPhone mini’ will be announced in July, called such not in reference to size, but in price- with guestimates pointing at a price tag of about $350- $400 to buy outright.

That’s a pretty penny saved compared to the price of the iPhone 5 which is currently $700-$900.

Just like Apple, we’ll have to wait and see if this iPod touch product meets with enough success in sales to know if the move to provide cheaper Apple products is a good path to take.

The risk of trying out this path is that people might rather stick to what they know, be it more expensive Apple products with all the bells and whistles, or another cheaper brand that is already established in that price range.

We vote… good move, Apple!

Image courtesy of engadget.com

Friday Afternoon App review: Tinder…

The two newest dating/meetup Apps that everyone is talking about are ‘Tinder’, and ‘Bang With Friends’.

Yes, you read that right.

We at iPhone Antidote take app reviewing seriously so we have tested both of these (…not to the full extent…) and, if you’re interested in meeting up, dating, or, umm… banging people, whether it be Facebook friends or strangers/potential friends, here’s the low down.

Tinder first.

The rather more subtly named Tinder has gained extraordinary popularity spread mainly by college students (those horny buggers). You sign in using your Facebook logon information, although what happens in the app, stays in the app- the (necessary) promise is that nothing will ever be shared on Facebook or posted on any walls!

The app does however use your Facebook profile picture, (cue reminder to make sure your profile picture is you, not you and your boyfriend/girlfriend, a group of people/a cat.)

The app scans the area using preferences set by you in the settings tab. Preferences include- the scannable distance from a 5-mile to a 50-mile radius, and the gender of people that you’re interested in.

Then, it scans. It’s pretty exciting.

And this is the crux of the app. A photo appears on your screen, and you say if you like them or not.

Tinder is mainly based on looks, but you can also see if you have similar interests from Facebook, like the 49’ers or Coachella and you can also see if you have friends in common, which is good to know for many reasons, from ‘oh that’s neat’ to ‘oh god, don’t click like, don’t click like, avoid that awkwardness’.

You have two choices to like or dislike someone. You can click the cross or the heart, or you can swipe left for not interested, right for interested. Warning- this has the potential to become too automatic!

The first time you like or dislike someone, you get a warning asking you if you’re sure – and after that, you’re on your own. Not the end of the world, though.

Once you like someone, if they’ve already liked you, then you get a match! Yay! You now have the ability to message them through the app. You can also get notified if someone you like, liked you back after the fact. That’s a lot of liking.

If you dislike someone, well, no-one will never know. Kind of.

The people who had the most likelihood of being liked, in our humble opinion, was not only good looking people, but people who had good pictures- pictures of famous landmarks, famous people, the people doing awesome things.

Even though the app is designed to be almost purely superficial, it is human nature to respond to other triggers within the photo that suggests personality traits that are more admired- success, adventure, fun etc.

The user average (in our area at least) was 18-24 for girls, and mid to late twenties for boys, but there were ages up to 70 in both genders.

In our testing, guys will say that they like a girl far more easily than girls will say that they like a guy. Kinda like the world, right? Am I right?

Out of about 30 matches, only 2 people messaged after the match, one was super graphic, one was really nice. Sorry really nice guy, iPhone antidote was just testing!! Bad iPhone antidote.

So, Tinder. Definitey an addictive ego boost. Definitely useful for singles, but only if you and the person you match with are in it for the same reasons and you actually talk to the people you match with! Also, kinda like life.

Next time: Bang with friends. Review. Bang with friends review.

Image courtesy of Businessinsider.com

Tablets taking over the world?

Tablets are predicted to overtake notebooks this year in sales, and projected to overtake sales of PC’s and notebooks combined by 2015, making tablets pretty much the king of the computer castle.

This is according to research firm IDC who released the figures in the last week, saying that tablets are expected to grow 59% this year, shipping 229 million units compared to a measly 144.5 million last year.

Although tablets have been around for a long time, their recent popularity is thanks to the Apple iPad, but the current growth is due to the proliferation of cheaper Android tablets and the role of Apple pushing for tablet use in education.

Here is a graph:

Pretty impressive, tablets. Anyone would think you had an evil plot to take over the world…or something.

Of course, these numbers don’t account for the mini computers we call phones, or any super awesome blow your mind technology that will be released between now and then, and it certainly doesn’t render the personal computer sector obsolete. Take that, tablets.

Now, when we start to get tablets that are flexible, have holographic keyboards, floating capabilities ( so you don’t have to carry them, d’uh), and an included wormhole for teleporting, then maybe tablets will be ready to take over the world.

p.s I love you iPad.

Photo courtesy of crowdcare.com