Your finger hovers over the download button in your smartphone's app store. Maybe it’s free, maybe it’s not. Even if it costs only 99 cents, you spend four times that much at Starbucks every day. Yet you hesitate, haunted by the memories of that app you downloaded a few years ago, fell in love with, and then watched as the servers shut down and the app was abandoned and left to wither and die on your launcher.
And that sometimes makes us hesitant to hand over money, even a dollar, for apps that a developer spent weeks, if not months or years, building. It makes us consider if paying up front for apps and services is the way to go, or to minimize risks by going with free-as-in-ad-supported apps instead, or to try and give developers more money through in-app purchases or subscriptions in hopes that maybe that will help keep them around.
It makes us wonder -- can we depend on our apps? Can we count on them to be there for us when we need them? And which ones?
I caved. Throughout WWDC 2013 I swore I wouldn't buy one of Apple's new, Haswell-based MacBook Airs. I was firmly committed to waiting for a Haswell-based 13-inch MacBook Pro instead -- which is pretty much the only realistic Retina MacBook Air for the near-future -- and I wasn't going to be tempted. But who're we kidding? Roughly the moment I got back to Montreal I went over to my local Apple Store and asked for the highest end 13-inch MacBook Air they had in inventory. And it turned out that was pretty much the highest end 13-inch MacBook Air configurable...
Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg have discovered weaknesses in the Personal Hotspot feature in iOS. The weak, and somewhat predictable password generation -- used in all current versions of iOS up through iOS 6 -- means people are susceptible to brute force attacks when using the personal hotspot feature on their iPhone or cellular iPad.
User experience (UX) design studio Teehan+Lax is offering a free downloadable Photoshop file containing interface elements from the first beta release of iOS 7. You can grab the iOS7 GUI PSD file by visiting their Web site.
Lots of people itch to try new iOS beta versions when they become available and iOS 7 has definitely attracted lots of people that were curious to try out the new features ahead of time. If you were one of those and didn't heed our warning about betas, you may find yourself frustrated with lots of bugs and annoyances.
Fortunately, there's a pretty easy way to get back onto iOS 6 without too much fuss. If you're regretting the decision to install iOS 7 beta, follow along and we'll help you get back to iOS 6.
A quick heads up for Mailbox users that the latest update that has been pushed out to the App Store brings portrait support for the iPad. Strangely, when Mailbox finally gained iPad support, it was only useable in landscape view, but that has now been rectified.
Good news for Max Payne fans today; Rockstar Games has announced that the latest title in the series, Max Payne 3, will finally make its way to the Mac on June 20. That's just two days from now.
Acquisitions are part and parcel of the modern life of app development. For differing reasons, large companies have a habit of buying up smaller app developers. Sometimes -- take Instagram as an example -- the app in question lives on as its own separate entity. Others, like Snapseed, lose their apps on some platforms, but remain on others. And then, there's those that get killed altogether. So, lets take a look together at some of those apps which have gone the way of the Dinosaurs.
ChemDraw for iPad allows you to not only create molecular structures directly on your iPad, but share them just as easily via email or ChemDraw's own Flick-to-Share™ technology that allows you to send structures to anyone else using the app. From chemistry student to chemist, ChemDraw is a great learning app and productivity tool wrapped into one.
We're talking about what to do when your favorite apps get bought, sold, killed, abandoned, and otherwise left for dead. (Looking at you, Google Reader!).
