Google today announced that it is revamping the Google voice search feature available in Chrome on the desktop. While users have always been able...

EA has announced that its Frostbite game engine, used to power popular game like "Need for Speed" and "Battlefield 4," is coming to iOS. Dubbed Frostbite Go, the game engine is set to give a big graphics and performance boost to cutting-edge iOS games. From the Frostbite website where the engine was officially announced for the first time:

One of our most exciting current projects is called Frostbite Go, a mobile division empowering EA game developers with Frostbite's proven excellent workflows and features to bring true Frostbite experiences to all major mobile platforms.

Currently there's no release dates for any games using Frostbite Go, but the site does mention that EA games using Frostbite Go are actively in development.

EA's Frostbite engine could improve iOS games originally appeared on...

Update: The app is now live on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Google today launched its much rumored messaging service live on stage at its I/O keynote and announced the service would be coming to multiple platforms later today. While some thought the service would be dubbed “Babel,” Google instead rolled out a standalone app called simply “Hangouts” that will be making its way to iOS, Android and Gmail on the desktop.

Google execs provided a demo of the app running on Android , but also gave us a glimpse of the iOS version as pictured above. The demo mostly focused on showing a list of conversations (not contacts) as well as one-on-one and group messaging, photo albums stored in the cloud, and the ability to start text conversations and video calls with contacts in one tap.

As for Gmail:

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What does this mean for...

Square's new stand does more than simply hold your iPad: Thanks to its built-in credit card reader the Square Stand turns your iPad into a complete payment station without the look of a clunky cash register or bland card reader. It works with Square's Register app so that's customizable for what you sell, and it works with the Square cash drawer, receipt printer and barcode scanner to make a complete POS terminal that looks sleek on your shop counter. Square Stand is priced at US$299 and should be on store shelves in July, but you can pre-oder from the company now.

It's time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked selections that include some sweet deals on iOS and OS X software (all prices are USD).

Deals from Dealnews

• li>StackSocial: [Mac Software] MacX Video Converter Pro for Mac for free
• MacMall: [Apple Computers] MacMall Mac Blowout Sale: Up to $1,099 off Macs, iPads, and more
• Other World Computing: [Computer Accessories] OWC 2012 Featured Move 'em Out Sale: RAM, accessories, HDDs, more
• ...

On Wednesday, Google introduced its long-anticipated Spotify competitor: Google Play Music All Access, a "uniquely Google approach" to subscription music service.   ...

In advance of the bench trial in which Apple will have to fight off charges that it colluded -- and fostered collusion -- with publishers to raise prices on e-books, both the iPhone maker and the US Department of Justice have filed initial court documents to lay out their respective cases. At issue is both the use of Apple's "agency model" pricing scheme, as well as former CEO Steve Jobs' overtures to the major publishers -- seen by some as trying to wrangle publishers into raising prices.... ...

The next time your Samsung Galaxy-toting friends try to annoy you, here's a piece of information you can throw back at them. According to a study published yesterday by investment bank Piper Jaffray, iPhones depreciate at less than half the rate of similar Android devices from Samsung.

Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray referred to the new index as "a pulse on what consumers are willing to pay for unsubsidized phones in the US." The index compares US eBay auction ending prices for the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II over a rolling 8 weeks to create a trend on resale prices.

"The key takeaway from 8 weeks of data is that the iPhone is holding slightly more of its value compared to the top two Galaxy phones," according to Munster. The iPhone 5's eBay auction ending value dropped about 11.2 percent in the last 8...

From 9to5Google:

Google just announced its much rumored new music service called Google Play Music “All Access” live on stage at its Google I/O event keynote presentation.

Google execs focused on showing off curated playlists but also made a note of pointing out a “radio” feature that will automatically create an endless radio station based on the song you’re currently...

You can create a standalone OS X installation drive without having purchased OS X from the App Store.

From 9to5Google:

We knew from leaks in the weeks leading up to I/O that Google was planning some gaming related announcements and today the company has officially announced the service in a press release ahead of its Google I/O keynote taking place now. Not only will the service allow Android developers to build in real-time multiplayer, social features, achievements, and leaderboards while storing game saves and settings in the cloud, the SDK for Google Play game services will also be available to iOS and web developers.

Google noted a few titles for Android have already been updated with the feature including World of Goo, Super Stickman Golf 2, Beach Buggy Blitz, Kingdom Rush, Eternity Warriors 2, and Osmos.

Not surprisingly, the cross-platform gaming service will also build in Google+...

Keep it short and sweet, folks.

Per The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Apple’s voice interaction system Siri has been updated, this time specifically to ask users to keep it short. Siri’s system doesn’t deal well with longer user queries, so if you happen to ask something that’s just too long for Siri to deal with, she’ll interrupt you, giving you a quote from a famous person, and then asking you to rephrase the question, shorter or in fewer words. Siri herself doesn’t have the authority to change your speech patterns, apparently, so she’s recruited figures such as William Strunk and Thomas Jefferson to make her point more clearly.

So,...

You can’t say ABC’s not investing in the iOS side of things…

Per AppleInsider, Tuesday saw the launch of of version 3.0.0 broadcaster ABC’s iOS app, one that for the first time will allow users in select markets to watch live television from a U.S. broadcaster.

The new version saw ABC’s app’s name change from ABC Player to Watch...

Mac Geek Gab cohost Dave Hamilton joined the Mac Roundtable crew to talk about the the lull in Apple news, and what type of leadership the company needs.

Handy updates are handy updates.

Late Tuesday, Adobe released version 11.0.03 of its Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro applications. The updates, which can also be snagged through the Adobe Update Utility, add the following fixes and changes:

Japanese support:
- Automatic signature detection is supported.

- Added support for the Japanese Postal Code barcode.

EchoSign integration:
- Acrobat and Reader now intelligently detect if a document may need to be...

Mac Geek Gab listener Stephen is trying to update an app on his Mac, but the app's installer won't work because the app, or its processes, are still running. We show him how to quit those pesky apps and kill their hidden processes so that he can safely update or remove the app from his system.

Last year’s party at WWDC went so well, I decided to have another one this year. This is an invite-only event and I do ask that you RSVP. Invitations will be emailed out today.

An app called Buycott is giving iPhone owners the chance to make a political statement each and every time they shop. The concept behind the app is simple: when you're in a store, scan an item's UPC code to see what parent company owns the product.

"What company owns the product?" you might ask. "Wouldn't that be the name of the company on the package?"

Not necessarily. Popular brand names are often subsidiaries of bigger corporations. And those corporations might have their fingers in things you politically disagree with. This means that even though there is no way you would support the corporation's political activities (say they donate to political campaigns you don't like) you may be inadvertently supporting that corporation by buying one of its subsidiary's products.

Gallery: Buycott

...

Apple has denied U.S. Justice Department claims that it colluded with publishers to artificially raise ebook prices and is saying the companies had independently decided they wanted to break Amazon's stronghold on the market ahead of iBookstore negotiations. The company said it ultimately negotiated individually with publishers to strike content deals through what it called hardline talks.

The Mac Observer Spin:
Apple is the only company that hasn't agreed to a settlement in the DOJ's ebook price fixing case, and it's lookinging like the company is ready to see this through to the end. Since the accused publishers all agreed to deals Amazon was able to start setting its own ebook prices again, so regardless of the case's final outcome, it looks like Amazon is already the winner.

...

Fixes issues recognizing connected video cameras and improves compatibility with iMovie for iOS($14.99 new, free update, 1.08 GB)

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.

Daniel Eran Dilger:

Malware targeting mobile devices is rapidly growing in both the number of variants found in the wild and in their complexity and sophistication, but the only platform being actively targeted is Google’s Android, which researchers now say is resembling Windows on the desktop PC.

Perfect.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Beleaguered smartphone maker BlackBerry has announced that its Messenger service will come to iOS and Android this summer. The chat service, one of BlackBerry’s most loved features, is still used by 60 million people a month, generating 10 billion messages per day (that’s five times as many iMessages were sent per day as of January 2013). But with BlackBerry’s woes of the past few years, the release still feels like a rearguard action.

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.

Facebook Home has come under attack both for not doing enough and for taking over too much of an Android phone.

But the folks behind Facebook’s mobile project say that, like many engineering efforts at the company, the goal was to get out a product that did a set of features, and then tweak things from there.

Speaking at the recent Dive Into Mobile conference, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer and Cory Ondrejka talked about how Home came to be, and also hinted that the software could soon span areas beyond the home screen and messaging, with photos and dialing among the areas of interest.

Facebook also used the appearance to announce the arrival of the Chat Heads feature for the...

Nvidia is making its Shield game console a reality – expect to see it in June, for $349.

As the debate over use of portable electronics during takeoff and landing of commercial flights rages on, details of a 2011 incident suggest that an iPhone may have caused interference with the flight equipment on a regional airliner.  ...

Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer's Managing Editor, joined the team at The Mac Show to talk about more about Adobe's licensing changes and Creative Cloud, as well as what may be in store for Apple's World Wide Developer Conference this year.

Yahoo! Mail for iOS received an update that brings support for printing attachments via AirPrint on compatible printers. The update also includes improvements to the performance of the app as well as bug fixes.

The update is available now in the App Store.

//

What’s New in Version 1.5.3

● AirPrint: Easily print messages on your AirPrint-enabled printer, by selecting “Print” in the reply menu of a message, or via...

In the ongoing e-book price fixing case with the Department of Justice, in which Apple is accused of conspiring with publishers to fix eBook pricing and cut out Amazon, Apple has again responded to the DOJ’s claims detailing the “tough negotiations” it went through with publishers. To further prove its point that it was not colluding with publishers to fix e-book pricing, Apple said it “one-on-one” and “contentious negotiations” at a time when publishers were already considering methods of getting Amazon to increase pricing:

//

But Apple said the publishers had decided, independent of Apple, to eliminate discounts on wholesale book prices of e-books, to sell lucrative hardcover books first to bookstores in a practice called windowing and to take other measures to push Amazon to raise prices.

Each...

Apple is attempting to add Samsung's Galaxy S4 smartphone to its list of infringing products in its ongoing California patent lawsuit. The hope is to strike down its rival's latest smartphone before it can penetrate the market. Apple's claims against Samsung are nothing new. However, since the patent process can be slow -- especially compared to an industry that is advancing so fast -- many infringement claims are on outdated devices with few sales.

Josh Constine, writing for AOL/TechCrunch:

Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app
folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home
was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who
built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack
of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these
features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads
since launching a month ago. […]

The lack of droidfooders didn’t have serious consequences until
Home, Facebook’s new “apperating system”. It replaces the lock
screen, homescreen, and app launcher of compatible Android phones
with a Facebook-centric experience. It offers Cover Feed, a big,
beautiful way to browser the news feed the second you bring your
phone out of sleep. It’s missing the ability to build real-time...

colinneagle sends this quote from an article at NetworkWorld: "I run a very nifty desktop utility called Rainmeter on my PC that I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to keep an eye on their system. One of its main features is it has skins that can monitor your system activity. Thanks to my numerous meters, I see all CPU, disk, memory and network activity in real time. the C: drive meter. It is a circle split down the middle, with the right half lighting up to indicate a read and the left half lighting up for write activity. The C: drive was flashing a fair amount of activity considering I had nothing loaded save Outlook and Word, plus a few background apps. At the time, I didn't have a Rainmeter skin that lists the top processes by CPU and memory. So instead, I went into the Task Manager, and under Performance selected the Resource Monitor. Under the Processes tab, the culprit showed its face immediately: AppleMobileDeviceService.exe. It was consuming a ridiculous amount of...

Internet search giant Google is said to be preparing a launch of a subscription-based music streaming service akin to existing offerings like Spotify, with the announcement possibly coming as soon as this week at the company's Google I/O Developers Conference.  ...

How much is an hour with Apple CEO Tim Cook worth? Roughly a 2013 Lamborghini Aventador judging by the final results from a CharityBuzz charity auction. That auction closed Tuesday at US$610,000, tying CharityBuzz's previous record for the above-mentioned super car.

Switching resolutions on a Retina MacBook Pro usually requires going through System Preferences, but an app called QuickRes is designed to mitigate that annoying process.

QuickRes puts an icon in your Mac’s menu bar that allows you to quickly jump between a variety of preset display resolutions, even beyond supported by Apple, all the way up to 3840×2400. QuickRes can also enable HiDPI mode on non-Retina Macs, effectively doubling the resolution and giving a clearer (albeit bigger) picture.

To switch resolutions, you can right-click the app’s menu bar icon to select which display you want to change (if you have more than one), then select a resolution from a list of presets. You can also setup anywhere from two...

According to "sources familiar with the company," Google is planning to debut a new subscription music service sometime during the Google I/O conference. Reports have surfaced that Google has signed licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, the three largest record labels in the world in preperations to launch the music offering....  ...

Apple has released a minor update for iMovie, the video editor included as part of its iLife suite. Version 9.0.9 copes with a trio of issues, mainly a glitch which can prevent iMovie from detecting connected video cameras. It also deals with general instability, and compatibility problems when importing iOS iMovie projects. The app is a 1.36GB download....  ...

Ive is making the point that whilst embellishments (like skeuomorphic design elements) can be perceived as clutter, that’s not the core problem. The actual issue is that such designs focus on analogy rather than essence: a paper book itself, rather than the novel inside.

This is a great article from Matt Gemmell.

∞ Read this on The Loop

A new feature released Tuesday from children’s app maker Kidaptive lets parents track the progress of what their children are learning inside the company’s first story and game application.

Leo’s Pad has been out for a year, releasing short story and game content it calls “appisodes.” The new parental layer shows a control panel broken out by child, and breaks down which areas children are struggling with and what new things they’ve learned. It also gives tips on how to increase color recognition, for example, and cites research for each recommendation.

Kidaptive Leo’s Pad

The company’s founders have a varied background in comic book writing, education and 3D animation, which helped create an app that children’s-application watchers say sets it apart.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment,...

With this review, I think that we're just about through the Spring 2013 crop of iPad Bluetooth keyboard folio cases, and it appears that I've saved the best for last. The ClamCase Pro for iPad (US$169, currently available for $20 off with coupon code SPRING20) was a pleasant surprise, providing the best keyboard I've ever used on an iPad along with some of the best protection to be found on any of the new keyboard folios.

Design

The ClamCase Pro is designed to look like a little laptop computer. The area around the keyboard is solid aluminum, and the keyboard itself uses black keys with white lettering. The top and bottom of the case are encased in white polycarbonate, which lends a very clean look and provides excellent protection. The iPad is held securely into place with two barely visible clips on either side of the device, and that design makes it simple to remove the iPad when necessary.

Malware targeting mobile devices is rapidly growing in both the number of variants found in the wild and in their complexity and sophistication, but the only platform being actively targeted is Google's Android, which researchers now say is resembling Windows on the desktop PC.   ...

As noted over at NeoGAF, EA has recently updated its website for the popular Frostbite engine to list details regarding a new version of the development platform for mobile devices dubbed “Frostbite Go”. While there aren’t many details, the page confirms that EA has plans to bring the engine to both iOS and Android, something that was previously rumored based off job listings for Frostbite.

One of our most exciting current projects is called Frostbite Go, a mobile division empowering EA game developers with Frostbite’s proven excellent workflows and features to bring true Frostbite experiences to all major mobile platforms.

Runtime in Frostbite supports a highly scalable model in order to appeal to the diverse array of platforms available on today’s market. Efficiency in both our runtime memory and runtime performance are both key factors to enabling...

A minor update for iMovie has been released. Version 9.0.9 fixes issues where iMovie didn't recognize when video cameras were connected to the computer, adds improved compatibility with iMovie for iOS projects, and includes the usual stability improvements.

The update is currently available for download in the App Store.

iMovie update 9.0.9 released originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 14 May 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | ...

Breathe in energy and positivity. Breathe out distractions and bad feelings. Envision a calm place and let yourself go there.

Who are you kidding? You’re probably racing to or from work along with hundreds of other people and the anxiety level you feel is indescribably high. You may want to try to meditate or center yourself in stressful situations like these, but never actually remember to do it.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested two sensors that might help: the $99 HeartMath Inner Balance Sensor for iOS and $119 Tinké by Zensorium. Each device plugs into Apple’s iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, and digitally monitors heart rate and breathing patterns, offering on-screen coaching to get you into a calmer zone.

While a traditional heart monitor often just spits out a number, both the HeartMath Inner Balance and Tinké provide feedback as you use them. People who meditate regularly but don’t know whether or not their heart and breathing are...

Square today unveiled the Square Stand, the company's latest effort to become an even more entrenched player in the mobile-payments market.

The Square Stand is essentially an elegant stand with an embedded card reader for the iPad, which when running Square Register, offers a compelling alternative to traditional cash registers. You might also notice that the device bears an ever so slight resemblance to Apple's iMac.

"Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expensive, and complicated point of sale system cluttering their counter," Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, said in a press release. "Square Stand is elegant, fast, affordable, and easy to use. Whether you're selling cupcakes, cardigans, or cappuccinos, running your business with Square has never been easier."

As pictured above...

A Florida woman last week lodged a class action lawsuit complaint against Apple reagrding an issue with the iPhone 4's power button, saying the company continued sales of the handset despite knowing of the problem.  ...

A charity auction for a coffee meetup with Apple CEO Tim Cook has come to a close. The initial goal of the auction, supporting the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, was to raise roughly $50,000. By the time bidding closed today however, the final bid was valued at $610,000....   ...

We've talked before about how the iPhone can do a lot of things for you, but can it serve as a scope on a tactical rifle? That's the idea behind the Inteliscope, a new accessory that connects your iPhone to an actual tactical firearm. You just clip your iPhone 5 (or 4S or iPod touch) to the accessory, connect that to your rifle, and you've got a heads-up scope that allows for custom crosshairs, video recording, a built-in compass and GPS, a timer, and a few more handy functions.

The idea is pretty ingenious -- it seems like using the iPhone's camera would offset the view, but maybe the accessory actually uses mirror to line up your shot. At any rate, the Inteliscope and its associated app will be available in June of this year, with each model costing $69.99. You can...