I bought a fake Mophie Juice Pack (so you don't have to)
I find it wryly amusing that the first phone I ever owned with a sealed-in, non-swappable battery -- the iPhone, of course -- was also the first phone with a battery life so short as to warrant the ability to swap the battery. Hence the commercial popularity of battery cases like the various ...
Lifehack: Use a to-do app for cooking inspiration
I'm a pretty keen amateur cook; perhaps unusually so (I have a sparsely updated food blog, Objection: Salad!, if you want to see the gory details). However one aspect of my cookery that is probably utterly typical is running low on inspiration for the daily grind of weekday dinners. I've been ...
A possible explanation for the iOS New Year's Do Not Disturb bug
If you've been living under a blissfully silent rock for the last couple of days, it may have escaped your notice that an annoying bug in iOS means scheduled Do Not Disturb periods don't automatically end. Apple's response was a rather weak KB article that amounts to a shrug and a claim that ...
The Human Face of Big Data: an unlikely subject for a great book
Big data is, like many trendy IT buzzwords, an increasingly nebulous term. The Wikipedia definition, for example, is rather jargonistic and impenetrable. If you read big data conference information you'll typically see a lot of naked commercial stuff that might be terribly important to bigwigs ...
Everything Everywhere, Explained: the UK gets LTE
Following the recent regulatory approval, UK telecoms operator Everything Everywhere today announced its new LTE service under the new EE brand name. The network is currently running in engineer testing mode in four cities (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and London). With few users to congest the ...
Making money in a crowded App Store: it's dog eat dog and Spy vs Spy
On the 25th of July, a shiny iOS remake of the 8-bit classic Spy vs Spy launched on the App Store for $1.99. The next day, the price dropped to $0.99 in a launch sale. On the 30th, it went up briefly, then developer Robots and Pencils announced that "to show our appreciation, we are extending ...
Apple's "disappointing" quarter cause for questions, not panic
In amongst the MoLo Madness, there's been some back and forth in the blogosphere today over the possibility that Apple's third quarter financial results were "disappointing" or not, mostly based on the fact that professional analysts predicted Apple would earn far more than it did and now they're ...
OS X Mountain Lion: The TUAW review
It's here! Following a surprise announcement in February, OS X Mountain Lion has arrived (to use its full and formal title, sans the 10.8 version number). Barely a year after the release of Lion, this new OS nevertheless boasts an impressive list of new features. The overriding theme is ...
One-bit Internet: The iPad is/isn't a content creation device
In the conclusion to my Retina MacBook repairability post, I wrote: "on the Internet, it often seems that everything must be compressed to a one-bit image: black or white, triumph or catastrophe, the very best or the absolute worst." So it goes for the eternal debate over whether the iPad is a ...
The whys and wherefores of a shrunken Dock connector (Updated)
Rumours that Apple would be switching the next iPhone to a new, smaller connector than the venerable 30-pin Dock connector go back a long way -- as far as iMore's writeup from February. They resurfaced recently following a claim by TUAW's sister site TechCrunch that a source had confirmed this ...