Apple Inc.

Welcome to our weekly installment of Picks of the Week at iSource where we provide our expanded coverage of Apple accessories and applications Here we will promote our favorite iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and Apple TV related items, as well as bring you occasional tips and tricks. Hopefully many of our favorite items will also be of interest to you. Please feel free to comment on our selections, and suggest picks of your own. Check out this week’s picks after the break. Espresso  [ v 2.0.1 ] My pick this week is Espresso, a web development tool from MacRabbit. I am currently enrolled in a web design class at my local university, and on occasion do paid web development. I’m not particularly great at it, and certainly can’t handle the more advanced Javascript functionality. However, I am pretty comfortable with HTML and CSS. That’s where Espresso shines, with tag highlighting, code collapsing, and other helpful goodies. It even allows you to preview your website from within the app. Although Panic Inc.’s Coda is a wonderful, competing tool in the marketplace, I prefer Espresso. If you do any sort of web development, and don’t want to shell out the big bucks for Dreamweaver, this is a great tool. Espresso can be purchased from MacRabbit’s website for $79. A free 15-day trial download is also available 15 Day Free Trial Cloud  [ v 1.5.3 ] There’s lots of ways to exchange files that are too big to be emailed – but hardly any this easy. Cloud App is a small app that resides in your menubar and exists for one purpose – to make it easy for you to share files, pictures, and even URLs with other people.   It couldn’t be easier to use – just drag a file to the icon in the menubar and the file is uploaded.  Click the icon, select the file you uploaded, and you’re presented with a link that you can give out.   Cloud App operates under the Freemium mode; you can share 10 files per day and have a maximum file size of 25MB.   Paid Pro accounts get unlimited shares per day of files up to 250MB in size.  The web site (which is conveniently linked through the icon) allows management of your uploaded files. It’s tough to beat the simplicity of Cloud App; it’s earned a place on my menubar, ready for Read More

Wow, wie sich die Zeiten ändern können: Die Video-Spezialisten und langjährigen Final-Cut-Konkurrenten aus dem Hause Avid bieten mit Avid Studio (3.99 €; App Store-Link), einer iPad-Videoschnittsoftware, Apples (3.99 €; universal; App Store-Link) die Stirn. Die zehn ersten Minuten begeisterten mich mit flüssigen ‘Storyboard’-Arrangements aus Video-, Foto- und Musik-Material der lokalen Bibliothek. Einige Sound-Effekte bringt die App auch selbst mit. Die UI erinnert mit schmalen Buttons an Apples ehemalige Pro-Software, sortiert sich jedoch intuitiv und verständlich zu bedienen auf dem 10-Zoll-Bildschirm. Euer finales Werk lässt sich als Videodatei in die Foto-App rendern, zu Facebook und YouTube exportieren oder über iCloud sogar an die Windows-Software weitergeben. Mit einem iPad der nächsten Generation, das noch in diesem Jahr mehr Pixelpower und Prozessorkraft verspricht, stehen uns insbesondere für (mobile) Videoschnittsoftware spannende Zeiten bevor. Read More

Freshly available in Software Update are AirPort Utility 5.6 and AirPort Utility 6.0. AirPort Utility 5.6 is a minor update to its predecessor which "Resolves an issue with using network passwords stored in the Keychain," while AirPort Utility 6.0 is a major overhaul of the user interface that matches its iOS counterpart in both appearance and basic functions. In fact, AirPort Utility 6.0 is so similar to the iOS version that it essentially looks as though its been back-ported. While AirPort Utility 6.0 certainly looks snazzy and features an interface that novice users will find much easier to navigate, AirPort Utility 5.6 is still around for a reason -- AirPort Utility 6.0 can't be used to administer older, 802.11g-only base stations. People like me who still have an old school 802.11g AirPort Express on their network will have to use the older version of AirPort Utility. This is a confusing and unfortunate oversight on Apple's part, and hopefully this is something the company is able/willing to address later on. Just from my brief interaction with AirPort Utility 6.0, I can definitely say I'll be reverting to 5.6 for reasons other than hardware incompatibility. The graphically-driven interface feels nice and natural on iOS devices, but it feels far too dumbed-down on the Mac. Critically, in AirPort Utility 6.0 the entire program is unusable if you happen to be updating firmware on any one base station; administering any other base station is impossible if you're updating firmware on any AirPort device on your network. For novice users with supported AirPort devices, AirPort Utility 6.0 will be a much easier way to administrate their wireless networks. The rest of us may prefer to stick with the old interface; I know I will. Read More

Posted 01/30/2012 at 9:42am | by J.R. Bookwalter Apple and education have always gone hand in hand, but Cupertino has taken a bold leap with iBooks 2, a full version update offering zero new features for those of us who graduated from school long ago. But for iPad-toting students, the company’s new digital textbook initiative is a revelation. iBooks 2 is the same as it ever was, adding only the ability to read interactive, multitouch textbooks on the iPad, purchased via iBookstore on your tablet or through iTunes on the desktop; iPhone and iPod touch users are sadly left out on this fresh feature. But despite Apple’s hyperbolic marketing, iBooks 2 arrives with a mere nine textbooks from two of the three top publishers. The real revolution is the price: $14.99 compared to $75 for a print textbook. Available titles cover high school basics (algebra, biology, chemistry, and physics), but Apple nabbed one exclusive: E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth, a work in progress whose first two chapters are free, while future entries can be purchased when released. You’ll need to clear space on a 16GB iPad, though, since textbooks consume nearly 1GB or more. Despite an otherwise modest update, textbooks are a joy to use. Almost everything on the page is interactive, including graphics, diagrams, photos, and videos. Objects can be enlarged or rotated with a pinch of your fingers, and you can even highlight text just by swiping with any digit. A Study Cards section consolidates notes, highlights, and glossary items in one place, and everything was fast and fluid on my iPad 2.The bottom line. Non-scholars may have no urgent reason to install iBooks 2 other than maintaining version parity, but the update is worthwhile as a glimpse into the future of education. Kids, I'm jealous: If my generation had such cool textbooks, I might have paid more attention in school. 1 of 5 On iPad, iBooks now includes a dedicated section for buying digital textbooks. iBooks 2 allows students to swipe along the bottom to find exactly the page they want. Almost everything in an iBooks 2 textbook can be tapped, including embedded movie files. iBooks 2 offers quick access to the Table of Contents and Glossary for each textbook. Drag across textbook passages with your finger to highlight them, then recall them with a tap in iBooks 2’s My Notes section. Product  Company  Apple Contact  Price  Requirements  Read More

By Chris Kirby on January 29th, 2012 Our weekly round up of the best news and reviews from the past week across the 148Apps network. There was a vast profusion of cool stuff happening across the 148Apps network this week, but the top of the top was the culmination of our 2011 Best App Ever awards. Head honcho Jeff Scott writes, “It was an amazing year. With over 1.5 million votes cast (over three times the number cast last year) and a record number of nominations, we now have the winners of the 2011 Best App Ever Awards. Thanks to all that voted, nominated, and made these fantastic apps!” Kid-friendly GiggleApps featured a review of Fun Clock-Learn to Tell Time. Reviewer Amy Solomon writes, “Few apps actually tackle explaining the true concept of telling time they way this app does. After watching the included video in Fun Clock – Learn to Tell Time, children will be will well on their way to understanding how to read a analogue clock. As a parent, I don’t think I could have explained this better myself, also wishing that this video had been around when I was a child.” $2.99 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad Released: 2011-09-22 :: Category: Education Finally, over at Android Rundown, Carter Dotson took a closer look at Apple’s recent iBooks education initiative and evaluated it for what it could mean for the Android platform. Dotson writes, “It may not have been the sexiest announcement, but Android supporters – manufacturers and users alike – should not underestimate Apple’s education gambit. Their big push into education with iBooks 2 being optimized for textbooks (both the reading and selling thereof) and iTunes U offering deeper integration with college courses could be the necessary roots they have to lay down for long-term success at the expense of Android.” FREE! + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad Released: 2010-04-02 :: Category: Books And that’s the week that was. Don’t forget to read a full list of Best App Ever winners at www.bestappever.com, and keep following us on Twitter and Facebook for all the contests, news and reviews you can eat. I’ll be playing Jetpack Joyride non-stop until next week, but I’ll see you back here then. Read More

We've heard a lot of stories about Find my iPhone helping people track their lost and stolen iOS devices, but here's one of the first stories involving Photo Stream. According to this Fox 4 Dallas report, it all started late last December in Dallas, TX at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Ken McLellan had just arrived home from a business trip. While he reached to pick up his checked bags, he put down his iPad along with his carry-on bag. You probably can guess what happened next. With bags in hand, he turned to get his iPad, and it was gone. As a loyal Apple user, McLellan also has an iPhone and an iMac in addition to his purloined iPad. He's also one of 85 million people using iCloud and had, rather fortuitously, turned on Photo Stream sharing. Imagine his surprise when new photos from his iPad began to hit his iMac a few weeks after his device was stolen. He's collected the photos of the people who currently have his device and posted them to Facebook. He's hoping to identify them and possibly get his iPad back. Getting his iPad back might not be that easy, though. Perhaps the thief resold the device to these unsuspecting buyers who don't realize it was stolen. It's also possible the thief returned the stolen iPad to Apple for a new device. A recent report details how a savvy thief can use Apple's generous repair policy to get a new device and leave the stolen one behind. It's also possible the people with the iPad are the ones who lifted the device and they'll dump it once they spot their photos on Facebook. Read More

At a special event held at the Guggenheim museum earlier today, Apple released several new applications all related to education, school textbooks and bringing students and teachers together through a single device. Introduced by Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue, with demonstrations by the VP of iTunes Jeff Robbin and the VP of Productivity Software Roger Rosner, iBooks 2 was the first new app unveiled. Rather than an entirely new app, it’s actually an update to the existing iBooks application, but it adds a new series of textbooks specially designed to take advantage of the iPad’s abilities. So, instead of pages of text and flat images, students will get interactive features, photos and video, all controlled using multi-touch.  Displaying more visual content when read in landscape, then becoming more text based when turned to portrait, readers can still take notes, highlight passages and create study cards for later use. Each textbook is aimed at high school students and are priced at $14.99 or less each, plus there’s a free sample to download too. Next up was iBooks Author, a Mac app used to create textbooks for use in iBooks 2.  It’s a lot like an iWork application and can adapt text from both Pages and Word for use in iBooks, as well as deal with the interactive and visual content too. The new app is primarily aimed at the conversion of existing or the creation of new textbooks, but can in theory be used for any book.  It’ll be interesting to see if it’s embraced by the self-publishing industry as a way to get into the iBookstore.  iBooks Author is free to download from the Mac App Store, but only works with OS X Lion. Finally, Apple announced the iTunes U app.  It can be used by students, teachers and those simply interested in taking a free course, and offers everything from text, audio and video course materials, plus all the relevant documents and presentations.  Assignments can be shared between teacher and student, as well as vice versa, plus notes can be transferred across from relevant iBooks. The iTunes U app is free to download and available now. Surprisingly, Apple didn’t announce a promotion to offer iPads at a reduced rate to students, which remains the largest hurdle for widespread adoption of these textbooks.  Apple called the iPad ‘affordable’, and also highlighted how many iPads were already in use in schools, but Read More

Engadget has posted a hands-on video of the iPad's interactive digital textbooks in the press demo section of Apple's education-focused media event today, and they were impressed: Interacting with the books is a generally intuitive combination of tapping, swiping and pinching. You can pinch from any page to get out to the heading of that chapter, then drag along a bar on the bottom to quickly go from one chapter to the next. When you're looking at any page, you can get a closer view of any of the media there by simply pinching it. Tiny picture of an ant? Give it a nudge and it's full-screen. You can then swipe through galleries, play movies and interact with various other widgets that authors can drop in place. As always with an Apple product announcement, the company has produced a promotional video complete with interviews of Apple executives and regular customers using their products. The video for the digital textbook includes teachers talking about how textbooks are out of date as soon as they are printed and how digital-savvy students expect more out of their learning materials. Apple has also posted a gallery of the various elements that can be built-into interactive iBooks with the iBooks Author app, including HTML Modules, Keynote Presentations, 3D Images, and more. Apple's initial focus for its textbook effort is on high school textbooks, with books priced at $14.99 or less. Authors can continually update their content, and the students get to keep their copies indefinitely. Books are available via the iBooks app, available as a free download from the App Store. [Direct Link] Read More

Apple held its press event in NYC this morning and unveiled a suite of new and updated apps for education and book publishing. Front and center was iBooks 2, an updated version of the eReader app that’ll support interactive textbooks for all education levels. These textbooks will mix traditional text with interactive multimedia content. These textbooks can be updated on a regular basis and will offer students the opportunity to interact with their material instead of just stare at it. Apple showed how students can pinch to zoom on high-resolution images, and then click on the them to pull up additional information (like the details on the peptidoglycan within a microbial cell wall). There’s also a Notes feature that’ll automatically create study cards from highlighted content within the textbook. iBooks 2 is available now for the iPhone and iPad from the iTunes App Store. Apple will launch these interactive textbooks with the help of McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Most of the early textbooks will be science textbooks for college and high school. The books will be priced reasonably with the high school books starting at $14.99 or less. To help you create these multimedia textbooks, Apple also introduced its new iBooks Author app. iBooks Author is compatible with Lion and available for free from the Mac App store. Also on the docket for Apple’s NYC event was the introduction of the iTunes U App. The iPad app will let students complete an entire course using only their iPad. The iPad app will include lecture notes, course information, and posts which will let teachers send information directly to students. Posts would be perfect for time-sensitive information like class cancellations and changes to homework assignments. iTunes U is available for free, and course content can be easily created by any teacher. Update: Apple posted the video of the event on its website. Kelly spent the last three years covering mobile technology at places like BGR, Gizmodo and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Before writing, she spent a few years working with and teaching others how to use Adobe Flash and Macromedia Director. Even earlier than that, she spent six years working on her Ph.D in Microbiology. When she's not writing, she can be found fishing the lakes and hiking the mountains of Western Maine with her husband and children. Read More

Today, Apple held their education event in New York, and one of their announcements was iBooks 2, and update on their book store which sets textbooks in the iPad’s sights. The goal was to create portable, durable, interactive, searchable and current textbooks that still include all the great content. Some of the first demos today showed a biology textbook with graphical table of contents, interactive 3D models of cells, along with all of the usual full text. Publishers will have full control over content layout, and even be able to remotely update the text as needed. Textbooks can include quick shortcuts to glossaries and dictionaries, so you can quickly figure out foreign terms. There’s going to be full-text search with auto-completed suggestions for when you’re looking for a particular passage. Textbooks in iBooks 2 will even include little quizzes, to make sure you’ve absorbed the content from the last chapter. You can also include custom-made flash cards and notes to build your own quizzing scheme. Not sure if you want a particular iBook? They’re going to offer free samples so you can take a peek inside. iBooks may be a little on the large side… Some that we’ve seen are over 1 GB, so odds are you’ll only be downloading and syncing these over Wi-Fi. Textbooks are available starting today in their own dedicated section of the iBooks store, with prices being $14.99 or less. Wow, that’s a hell of a lot cheaper than textbooks in my day. Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt are just some of the initial publishing partners. The event is ongoing, so more information will be posted here as it happens. Be sure to follow our live commentary here! If you haven’t downloaded or updated iBooks yet, you can find the latest version live in iTunes here. Full changelog after the jump! Introducing iBooks 2 — now with iBooks textbooks. The iBookstore offers textbooks on Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry, and Physics from McGraw-Hill and Pearson. These textbooks are currently available to customers in the United States. Textbooks from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are coming soon. iBooks textbooks are created with iBooks Author — now available as a free download on the Mac App Store. iBooks – Free – App Store Link iBooks Author – Free – Mac App Store Link Read More