While many augmented reality applications are largely consumer-facing, Volkswagen is instead empowering its technicians with an AR-centric tool to expedite repair and service. Using an iOS app named MARTA (Mobile Augmented Reality Technical Assistance), workers servicing VW's futuristic new XL1 concept car can see detailed instructions as well as real-time labels for specific vehicle parts.

Technicians can see virtual tools applied to various vehicle parts to ensure the job is being done correctly, and even see what new parts would look like when applied to the car, which could come in handy if you're looking to customize your ride. Of course, the app still appears to be in its early stages, and given that it's designed around a car that's not officially available to the public, it may be a while before your local VW dealer adds an iPad to their toolbox.

[via...

One week after high-quality images of a supposed next-generation space gray iPad casing popped up on the Web, a video highlighting the same part has been uploaded to YouTube.
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A picture of Logitech’s alleged iPhone game controller was leaked by @evleaks in a tweet. The apparent promo shot shows the front and back of the controller, which encompasses an iPhone 5. From the picture, we estimate the controller is roughly 7.7” long. A space on the back of…

Gizmodo:

This video shows the culmination of the work being funded mainly through public donations, including the massive, yet-to-be-finished 564-foot tower at its center.

The Sagrada Familia is probably the most famous unfinished building in the world and its design is fascinating whether you like it or not. This video of the finished building shows even more radical changes in the future.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Apple is testing at least three iWatch designs based around flexible OLED displays, according to Korean publication The Chosun Ilbo. These include units with 1.3-, 1.4-, and 1.5-inch displays. The largest of those sizes would still be a tenth of an inch smaller than the Samsung Galaxy Gear....
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We've got good news for expat hockey players and music fans in Germany. According to Macerkopf, Apple TV has been updated for the German market with the additions of Vevo and the NHL channel.

Vevo has been making inroads with Apple TV for several months; the service came to North America and several other countries this past August. The service provides an on-demand library of more than 75,000 music videos in HD quality. Vevo also streams live concerts, original programing and special premieres.

Meanwhile, the NHL channel provides access to live video of the National Hockey League's games for users who have an NHL GameCenter subscription.

As always, you don't need to update your Apple TV to see these new channels. Simply turn on your box and enjoy. Get...

Apple and a number of other technology companies have signed a letter supporting a pair of bills that would clarify the companies’ abilities to publish details on the government’s demands for user information. The bills — Senator Al Franken’s S. 1452, the Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013, and Representative…

As fallout from the "hack" enabling unrestricted use of school iPads, two Los Angeles high schools are pulling back the devices from the student body. Students at Westchester and Roosevelt high schools, and possibly other schools in the district, are begin forced to return the devices acquired in the billion-dollar deal to school administrators, with use prohibited until further notice. According to reports, about 70 percent of the 2,100 devices have been returned by the students....
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It's time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring exclusive TUAW Deals, a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked iOS and OS X selections.

TUAW's Daily Deals

Micro Drone [On sale for $49, down from $108]

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a flippin' quadrocopter! This crazy maneuvering remote controlled Micro Drone can do it all! Fly up, down, laterally, diagonally, flip, and perform all sorts of other agile mid-air stunts.

Quad-rotor helicopters have long been considered a luxury toy due to their pricey nature but now you can grab this one for a fraction of the regular price.

Save 54% on the Micro Drone at TUAW Deals. Promotion is...

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo are among the companies that have signed a new Center for Democracy and Technology letter asking the US Congress to pass Rep. Zoe Lofgren's (D-CA) Surveillance Order Reporting Act of 2013, and Sen. Al Franken's (D-MN) Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013. The bills were first introduced in August, and would let companies be more precise about when and how often they receive national security-related requests and hand data over to the government....
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The boot drive's format and partition structure can be checked both in the OS X graphical interface and in the Terminal.

One big reason that investors like Facebook again: The company looks like it has figured out how to make money — a lot of money — on mobile.

One big reason Facebook looks like it has figured out mobile: App-install ads, which developers use to encourage Facebook users to download their software onto their phones.

Now Facebook is going back to the well, and will try to make even more money from app developers.

This time it is selling them ads that link directly from Facebook’s app to apps users have already installed, in hopes of driving usage and/or sales.

The idea: A music app like Spotify could...

For a long time, in Safari, on either a Mac or iOS device, we had a URL field and a search field. We were able to use the search field to search for text on a page being viewed.  Safari in iOS changes the methodology, and it's made even more confusing by Safari's Favorites Settings.   Here's how it works now.

Flixster’s free app with the lengthy title — Movies by Flixster, with Rotten Tomatoes — has upgraded to version 6.6. The update brings HD streaming to select titles. The app also features a brand new design for iOS 7. Flixster notes those who are having issues with streaming movies…

After teasing its first iOS controller that would work with Apple’s new MFi standard for game controllers, today we get what appears to be an official press shot of Logitech’s upcoming gamepad for iPhone that first leaked at WWDC earlier this year (via @evleaks).  We noticed that...

Remember back in July when Anand Lal Shimpi and Brian Klug at AnandTech caught Samsung cheating on benchmark tests by making the CPU on the Galaxy S4 run higher when it detected benchmark apps? That was terrible, right—but they got caught and probably wouldn’t do it again.[...]

Epson is adding to its range of "small-in-one" printers with one capable of printing photographs measuring up to 11 inches by 17 inches. The Expression Photo XP-950 follows on from the XP-850, Premium XP-810 and the XP-610 in being a compact printer, with the XP-950 using Claria Photo HD six-color inks for smooth graduations and improved skin tones....
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This week in the MacNN forums, excited iPhone 5s owners converge in "The 5s Thread" to converse about the features of the latest addition to the iPhone lineup. One frustrated Fresh-Faced Recruit took to the forums to find some answers after installing iOS 7 on their iPad and iPhone 4. They claim that both devices crash continually, and typing is "unbearable."...
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Expercom.com currently has the 27-inch iMac with a 3.2GHz Intel processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive and three years of AppleCare for $1,910.72 with $23 for shipping. That's $64 less than the original price of $1,974, and about $230 less than what Apple charges for the same configuration. This iMac includes an Apple Magic Mouse or Wireless Magic Trackpad and Apple Wireless Keyboard....
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As expected, Google has begun rolling out Chrome 30 to desktop platforms and Android. The major update brings several redesigned elements, including a different new-tab page that includes the Google search bar above the grid of frequently visited sites. Desktop users can also right click on an image and quickly use it for an image search....
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Paper by FiftyThree (free, with in-app purchases) is an incredibly cool sketching/painting app for iPad that provides virtual notebooks into which those with artistic talents can pour their visions. Now FiftyThree has teamed up with Moleskine to let artists create physical books of their work with a tap in the app.

What do these two companies call their collaboration? Book. Pressing the print button in the app lets the artist grab 15 of their favorite digital drawings from Paper and have them printed in a Moleskine notebook that matches the 4:3 ratio of the iPad screen. The Book is...

President Barack Obama on Tuesday compared the buggy rollout of the new Healthcare.gov website to Apple's iOS 7 release issues, echoing earlier sentiments from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
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During President Obama’s live remarks addressing the government shutdown and Obamacare site outages today, the U.S President compared the issues with healthcare.gov to an Apple product launch (via WashingtonPost):

Now, like every new law, every new product roll-out, there are going to be some glitches in the sign-up process along the way that we will fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site’s been running more slowly than it normally will.

And we’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected. Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a...

It's always busy in the App Store with a never-ending flood of new apps landing on iOS and OS X. Take a few minutes and check out our list of stand-out titles from the past few weeks! If that's not enough, you can also follow our ongoing coverage of new apps as they are released.

New iOS Apps

• Polychord Mini [iPhone; Category: Music; $1.99] Polychord, the award-winning music app for beginners and experts alike now fits in your hand. Used in the studio by world-class bands to help write songs, polychord plays along while you discover interesting chord progressions and melodies.

• NBA 2K14 [iOS Universal; Category: Games; $7.99] With more than 38 Sports Game of the Year and "Best Of" mentions last year on console, 2K14 is set...

Fresh off the release of iOS 7.0.2, Apple is already seeding a final test of iOS 7.0.3 internally and to various partners, sources claim. It's uncertain what the update is intended to fix or add. It's believed, however, that the firmware could go live as soon as next week....
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Belkin today announced its latest product for iPad with the introduction of the new Express Dock for iPad. The dock comes...

Yahoo has released a major new version of its wildly popular Yahoo! Sportacular Pro app which allows fans to track scores, stats and news about myriad sports. The most immediate thing users will recognize about version 4.2 is iPad support. The app has also had a redesign for iOS 7, and now allows users to view their Yahoo Fantasy Football player stats in the app. Additionally, the app can now send push notification alerts for specific in-game events, such as scoring situations like goals, and game starts and stops, like halftime notifications.

Here are the full release notes:

Big update:
- Redesigned with more content, stats and iPad support.
- Sign in to Yahoo to save your favorite teams across web and mobile devices.
- View your Yahoo Fantasy Football player stats on game details.
- New breaking news alerts for the most important stories in sports.
- iOS7 fixes for...

Apple has quietly updated Germany Apple TVs with access to the official NHL and Vevo apps, reports say. The Vevo app a relatively recent addition to the Apple TV platform, having debuted in the US in August. The NHL app, though, dates back to 2011, and has already reached a number of other countries, making its German introduction unusually late....
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Carl Icahn pushed for an expanded, $150 billion Apple share buyback during his dinner with Tim Cook yesterday, according to a Twitter post by the influential investor. "Had a cordial dinner with Tim last night," Icahn wrote. "We pushed hard for a 150 billion buyback. We decided to continue dialogue in about three weeks."...
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Apple Marketing SVP Phil Schiller has been known to take to Twitter in the past to voice his views on rival platforms, and today the Apple executive is once again taking a jab at Android through his Twitter account. Today, Schiller points us to some more Android “shenanigans” with a link to a story from ArsTechinca about inflated Galaxy Note 3 benchmarks.

Ars reports:

After a good bit of sleuthing, we can confidently say Samsung appears to be artificially boosting the US Note 3′s benchmark scores with a special, high-power CPU mode that kicks in when the device runs a large number of popular benchmarking apps. Samsung did something similar with the international Galaxy S 4′s GPU, but this is the first time we’ve seen the boost on a US device. We also found a way to disable this special CPU mode, so for the first time we can see just how much Samsung’s benchmark optimizations affect benchmark scores...

Drink (or not) and be merry!

This week's roundup of iOS accessories includes devices that help you track your drinking: One tells you if you're drinking too much, the other if you need to drink more. We've also got speakers and cables and docks and batteries...the usual mix.

Adonit

This company’s latest stylus offering takes writing seriously: Instead of the standard “fat nib” you find on most capacitative styluses, the $75 Jot Script Evernote Edition uses a 1.9mm, fine-point, “Pixelpoint” (Adonit’s name) tip designed specifically for handwriting—in a pen-like stylus designed specifically to feel like a ball-point pen.

If you’ve got a Bluetooth 4-equipped device, the stylus communicates directly with Jot-enabled apps to enable palm rejection and other nifty features. The company says the new stylus should ship in four to six weeks, though it's taking preorders now.

Audio Pro

The $800...

Apple has added Vevo and NHL channels to Apple TV in Germany. Users will find the channels have been automatically added to the home screen. Vevo requires users to sign up for a free account, while the NHL channel requires a subscription. U.S. Apple TV users received the Vevo channel…

Fitbit's Flex fitness tracking wristband is now available in pink to help promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The company said it will donate US$10 from the purchase of each pink Flex throughout October to the American Cancer Society. The Flex monitors the number of steps you take each day, how well you sleep, and syncs wirelessly to your iPhone or computer. You can pick one up in Apple's retail stores, or at the Fitbit website for $99.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent on the design of the glass cylinder over top its Pudong Apple Store in Shanghai. The cylinder is similar in concept to the cube over top the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City, but made even more complex by the need to curve the glass. To that end, Apple notes that it had to skip conventional glass laminate technology in favor of new construction techniques that could support a large weight load over long periods of time....
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Activist investor Carl Icahn and Apple CEO Tim Cook met on Monday, as expected. And, to hear tell from Icahn, things went reasonably well.

In a post to Twitter, Icahn said he pressed Cook to raise Apple’s stock buyback well above the $60 billion to which it’s already committed. “Had a cordial dinner with Tim last night,” Icahn tweeted. “We pushed hard for a 150 billion buyback. We decided to continue dialogue in about three weeks.”

Sounds like the billionaire investor has a bit more work to do in convincing Cook to return even more of Apple’s massive $146.6 billion cash position to the company’s shareholders.

As I wrote last week: “Apple presumably feels its buyback level is appropriate, and it’s hard to...

LEMMY!

Toronto Blue Jays assistant general manager Jay Sartori is trading in his baseball cap for an Apple logo to serve as the manager of the iPhone and iPad maker's App Store sports and entertainment categories. His job with the Blue Jays includes contract and collective bargaining agreement interpretation, and arbitration, which could play into his responsibilities for Apple.

The Mac Observer Spin:
Cue the "Apple is ready to play hard ball" jokes.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook met with billionaire investor Carl Icahn for dinner on Monday night, in a meeting in which Icahn pressured Cook to initiate a $150 billion buyback of AAPL stock.
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Apple has informed former MobileMe members via email that their 20GB iCloud storage upgrade has expired. Those users who haven’t purchased a storage plan and are still using more than 5GB of iCloud space have found that iCloud has temporarily stopped working. The service will work again once the amount…

“We fought hard for iPad,” a pilot working for the airline told AppleInsider. He described the Delta deal as being about money, travel contracts, and Delta’s Information Technology staff historically being “in bed” with Microsoft.

Why would Delta want to listen to the people actually using the devices at 30,000 feet in the air.

∞ Read this on The Loop

With all that’s been written about The Beatles, I’m amazed that I’ve never encountered this story before. This is well written and really gives you a sense of what George was going through at the time, a time before The Beatles had broken through in the US.

George asked the salesperson if they carried any records by the Beatles and was met with a blank stare of complete unawareness and non-recognition. This introverted George slightly, along with the jarring moment when he saw England’s biggest rock star, Cliff Richard, in his recent move Summer Holiday being played as a second string feature at the local drive-in. These two incidents stayed with George, and when he reported back to the other Beatles upon his return to England, we wondered if they could make it in the States, and actually thought they would flop.

...

I’ve always been fascinated by Natural Language Processing (parsing language into a computer understandable form) and speech synthesis (turning raw text into an human sounding spoken voice). Siri is an example of both of these technologies at work.

This article and the video below does a terrific job filling in some of the blanks on how tech like Siri evolved over time and how it works.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Paper by FiftyThree, the popular sketching and illustration app, today announced that it has teamed up with Moleskine to offer its users the ability to create and order customized 15-page Moleskin books directly from the app. The partnership with Moleskine means you’ll get a quality, hand-assembled 15-page foldout book on sustainable matte paper, but it also means you’ll have to hand over $40 USD in the process:

We believe we’ve built the easiest print-on-demand publishing with the same dedication to simplicity we put in Paper. Book is a new format, created by Moleskine exclusively for Paper, with pages designed to match the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio. There is no need to resize pages, and your journal’s cover art becomes...

Back in May, 2011, a number of small Apple developers using Apple’s in-app payment system received a legal complaint from Lodsys, threatening a lawsuit if the developer didn’t agree to license a specific Lodsys patent.

Within months, that brought a legal challenge by Apple, which saw a clear threat to its ecosystem. Apple had already paid to license Lodsys patents when they were in the hands of an earlier owner—Intellectual Ventures. So Apple went to court, arguing that Lodsys can’t demand additional payments by threatening iOS developers.

Now, after two years of litigation, it’s back to square one. The East Texas judge overseeing Lodsys’ systematic patent attack on app developers has refused to even consider Apple’s motion. Instead, he allowed the patent-holding company to settle all its cases—and then dismissed Apple’s motion as moot. By doing so, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap—who has inherited the patent-happy East Texas court that once belonged to patent-troll...

The Toronto Blue Jays' assistant general manager Jay Sartori is leaving the team to become the manager of the Sports section of Apple's App Store, according to SportsNet.ca. As Shi Davidi first reported:

The Toronto Blue Jays are on the lookout for a new assistant general manager with Jay Sartori set to leave his job next month after accepting an executive position with Apple Inc.

Sartori is taking over as the tech titan's manager of the App Store's sports and entertainment category, a departure from the arbitration, contract and collective bargaining agreement interpretation work he handled for the Blue Jays.

Apple has not made an official announcement about the hire (and, indeed, probably won't). However, it's likely Sartori will act in an editorial/curation role, seeking out the best apps to...

Americans are storming an online marketplace, but this time for health insurance, not iPhones. If you currently lack health insurance, check out healthcare.gov to see what’s available.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

After issuing two reminders to former MobileMe customers that they would lose their free iCloud upgrade from 5GB to 25GB, Apple today reduced the storage limits as planned. Customers who have more than 5GB, and who haven’t bought a paid storage plan, will find that iCloud is no longer working.

If you exceed your storage plan on September 30, 2013, iCloud Backup, Documents in the Cloud, and iCloud Mail will temporarily stop working. To continue using these...

GoPro has made a number of improvements to its action camera line, and has introduced the Hero3+. Offering a 20-percent smaller and lighter design than its predecessor and 30-percent more battery life, the Hero3+ boasts a new lens arrangement and new video capture modes, along with even more mounts and accessories....
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AllThingsD has confirmed our suspicion that it was a software glitch that allowed iPhone upgraders to keep their unlimited data plans.

There is, however, good news for those lucky enough to have upgraded their phones before the glitch was caught:

[Verizon] said it would honor the unlimited plans of those customers who managed to upgrade while Verizon was working to fix its software.

Continue reading more about iOS Devices,...