Innehållsförteckning för #146 från AppleMagazine

Robin Williams, a comic and sitcom star in the 1970s who became an Oscar-winning dramatic actor, died Monday at 63 in Marin County. The Marin County Sheriff’s Office said he appears to have committed suicide.. The news of the beloved actor’s death rocked the nation. Channels broke into their usual programming to make the announcement, and within minutes, Williams dominated online trending topics. Even President Obama noted his passing. Along with an Antoine de Saint-Exupery poem, Williams’ daughter, Zelda, tweeted: “I love you. I miss you. I will try to keep looking up.” Williams, hailed as a comic genius, was a star of movies and television for more than three decades. He also suffered from substance abuse problems. The actor “has been battling severe depression of late,” his publicist Mara…

Smartphones and tablets would be much more useful if they allowed us to multitask the way desktop and laptop computers do. When I’m watching video, for instance, I have to pause it to read an email or text that comes in. When I’m composing a message to make plans, I have to leave the app to check the weather forecast. For the most part, I’m not able to do more than one thing at a time on a single screen. That’s starting to change with Android devices, though. Windows tablets do let you run multiple apps side by side, but Windows phones do not. The iPhone and iPad don’t, either. In this installment of A Closer Look, I assess some of the Android devices that offer limited multitasking. These approaches…

iOS #01 - Heads Up! By Warner Bros. Category: Games / Price: $0.99 Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone i Pad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #02 - Minecraft - Pocket Edition By Moja ng Category: Games / Price: $6.99 Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #03-Afterlight By Simon Filip Category: Photo & Video / Price: $0.99 Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #04 - Micromon By Pocket Trend Category: Games / Price: $0.99 Requires iOS 6.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #05 - Rules! By…

Facebook’s fight against prosecutors over nearly 400 search warrants for users’ postings and other data is drawing support from other social media companies and civil libertarians. Lawyers for Foursquare, Kickstarter, Meetup, and Tumblr said Monday they were seeking to join the clash on Facebook’s side. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union also have recently said they were backing Facebook. They see the warrants - for data including friend lists, photos, and private messages, many of them from users who have yet to be charged and may never be - as a troubling message for digital-age privacy. Facebook has said it had previously never received so many search warrants. “With the burgeoning tech industry in New York, the need to protect the privacy of users…

Social and mobile game company King Digital Entertainment Pic reduced its 2014 forecast after reporting lower-than-expected second-quarter revenue on Tuesday, as gamers continued to spend less money on its “Candy Crush Saga” game. King also announced a $150 million special dividend, or 46.9 cents per share, payable to shareholders of record on Sept. 30. Its shares, however, slipped 22 percent in after-hours trading after closing at $18.20 on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which went public in March, said it has reduced its 2014 forecast and expects gross bookings in the range of $2.25 billion to $2.35 billion from its previous estimate of $2.55 billion to $2.65 billion. “We have seen a step down in monetization in the latter part of Q2 and so we have adapted the…

At St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Mobile, Alabama, the high school that produced Crimson Tide quarterbacks AJ McCarron and Jake Coker, there’s a new preseason ritual for football players: the social media talk. It’s about more than minding their manners. Coach Steve Mask warns players not to post about injuries, which can scare away recruiters. Committing on Twitter to a school is also discouraged - one recent former player tweeted commitments to four different schools without informing any coaches. “He came across as being not reliable,” Mask said. “He gets a little joy out of the attention, but it’s not worth it.” This season, Mask is taking his players’ online personas so seriously that he’s assigning an assistant to monitor their accounts. As college programs increasingly use Twitter, Instagram and…

Facebook’s recent effort to force people to adopt its standalone mobile messaging app has privacy-concerned users up in arms. Many of them believe the app is especially invasive. One blog from the Huffington Post published in December has gone viral, making the rounds on the social network recently because it claims the app gives Facebook “direct control over your mobile device” and allows Facebook to call phone numbers without a users’ intervention and send text messages without confirmation, but none of that is accurate. In truth, Facebook Messenger isn’t any more invasive than Facebook’s main app -or other similar applications. The fear and confusion stem from a message that greets owners of Android devices when they install the app. It explains that the app requires permission access to the device’s…

Manjula Stokes has twice sworn off television, once throwing a set off her deck in a fit over an ex-husband’s sports obsession. Now she’s a devotee of programs like “Downton Abbey,” “’Mad Men,” “Survivor” and “Masters of Sex.” The teacher from Santa Cruz, California, illustrates a subtle change in society’s attitude toward television. The medium is growing in stature, propelled by both art and technology. More worthy programs are available at a time when viewers are becoming more comfortable setting up their own schedules to watch. “I feel it’s more like reading a good book,” Stokes said. “The acting is better, the direction is better. I think it’s more serious as an art form.” A CBS survey of 700 people in the U.S. with Internet and television connections last year…

Locke Played out over one absolutely riveting car ride from Birmingham to London, UK, the British drama Locke tells the story of Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), an English construction foreman whose life is profoundly changed during his time behind the wheel. One phone call sets in motion a series of events unraveling Locke’s family, job and soul. FIVE FACTS: 1. Tom Hardy is the film’s only actor physically onscreen. 2. Other actors providing voices include Tom Holland, Olivia Colman, Andrew Scott, Ruth Wilson, Ben Daniels and Alice Lowe. 3. The car in which the entire film takes place was mostly driven down a motorway on a flatbed truck. 4. The movie was also shot in real time, breaks only being taken to change the cameras’ memory cards. 5. Writer and…

Apple Inc’s suppliers have begun manufacturing new iPad tablets in an attempt to revive flagging sales of the tablet, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Apple, which helped create the tablet market in 2010 with its first iPad, has seen growth plummet from 2012, as larger phones became more popular and people delayed replacing their tablets. Mass production of the iPad with a 9.7-inch (24.6-cm) screen has already started, and it is likely to be unveiled by the end of current quarter or early next quarter, Bloomberg said, citing two people familiar with the matter. A new version of the 7.9-inch iPad mini is also entering production and is likely to be available by the end of the year, Bloomberg said. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to…

APPLE TV, SET-UP BOXES AND SO MUCH MORE Pretty understandably, whenever the online rumor pages mention Apple - which, let’s admit it, tends to be quite often - it’s almost always an iGadget or Mac device that’s being referred to, or perhaps the software for either of those. How frequently is Apple TV named? To be fair, the answer might just be “more often than used to be the case”. The last three years, after all, have seen steadily increasing attention paid to the Apple TV by the boys at Cupertino. Enhancements have been made to both the hardware and content offered to boost the popularity of the media streamer, and although it hasn’t yet transformed into the complete standalone Apple television that had been hoped for in some quarters,…

iOS #01 - Facebook Messenger By Facebook, Inc. Category: Social Networking Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #02 - Snake!Snake!Snake Byyibinyu Category: Games Requires iOS 6.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #03 - Run Forrest Run By Genera Mobile Category: Games Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPod, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #04 - Godus By DeNA Corp. Category: Games Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. #05 - Walmart App By Walmart Category: Lifestyle Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPod, and iPod touch. This app…

Since the end of June, there has been much metaphorical handwringing over the socalled decline in iPad sales during the third fiscal quarter. This phenomenon has been tagged with words like “collapsing”, “falling”, and “failing”. Each media report of iPad sales numbers in the past few weeks was followed by lots of fretting and general anxiety over graphs and charts. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Statistics can be used to manipulate and deceive, leaving out important context. Apple Inc. knows this, many other corporations-tech and otherwise—know this. The negative reaction to this year’s Q3 iPad sales “decline” is a prime example of stats without context. Just how deceitful can statistics be? In November 2010, Horace Dediu of Asymco was looking at Gartner’s and IDC’s data on the…

They Want My Soul Spoon Indie rockers Spoon haven’t released a studio album since 2010’s Transference - instead filling the void with side projects, production ventures and studio work - but they certainly sound reinvigorated on this comeback release. In fact, They Want My Soul has been declared their most sonically adventurous album yet. FIVE FACTS: 1. Spoon was formed in 1993 in Austin, Texas. 2. Its current members are Britt Daniel, Jim Eno, Rob Pope, Eric Harvey and Alex Fischel. 3. They Want My Soul marks keyboardist and guitarist Fischel’s first appearance on a Spoon album. 4. Frontman Daniel has said that the band was “a little burned out” following the 2010 release of Transference, and that he personally needed “something that was going to reinvigorate me, to excite…

A Russian lawmaker’s son accused of hacking computers at hundreds of U.S. businesses and stealing credit card information pleaded not guilty to 29 charges Friday. U.S. District Judge John L Weinberg ordered Roman Seleznev, of Vladivostok, Russia, held without bail until a hearing Aug. 16 to consider his custody status. His trial has been set to begin Oct. 6. A 2011 grand jury indictment alleges Seleznev stole more than 200,000 credit card numbers and sold more than 140,000 of them, generating more than $2 million in profits. Some of the victims are in Seattle, where the investigation was centered and an indictment was filed. Seleznev was arrested last month at an airport in the Maldives and flown to the U.S. territory of Guam, where another federal judge sent him to…