I’m no tree hugger, but some technological advances absolutely stun me. Apple said in an updated report of its environmental policies today that all of their data centers now run entirely on renewable forms of energy.
As of three years ago, only 35% of the Cupertino corporation’s energy consumption was from renewable sources. But as of today’s updated environment page, the company now says that upwards of 75% of their energy consumption is now from renewable sources, a 114% increase. (more…)
Build-Your-Own Smart Lightbulb
The basic idea is this: You take a lightbulb, and you stuff it with a bluetooth antenna, an arduino and a bunch of RGB LEDs. Then control dimming, color, and anything else you can think of with your (BLE enabled) phone. Good stuff.
It would be really cool to have one of these in my room.
CNBC‘s Jon Fortt yesterday tweeted that Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch is leaving the company to join Apple. This of course is interesting for one main reason: Adobe’s forefront technology has never been natively supported on iOS. Today, John Gruber has brought to light a Mythbusters parody video that features Apple’s new hire destroying iPhones, simply because they won’t run flash. (more…)
As many of you probably know, yesterday was the announcement of Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4. With it came a plethora of software features that will be new to Samsung’s proprietary version of Android. One of these features was dubbed “Smart Scroll.” The phone will first detect that a user is indeed looking at it, and you can then slightly tilt it to top or bottom or scroll up or down the page.
This is a feature we have never seen natively on iOS, but we have seen a couple tweaks and apps that support it. Of those is “PhyScroll,” a deprecated tweak that is not currently compatible with iOS 6. With yesterday’s announcement, however, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that tweak updated, or another released to take its place. Is that something you would be interested in seeing? How do you feel about tilt scrolling?
With about 30 minutes to go, it might be a good idea to hit play on the video above to ensure you don’t miss the action. Rumors for the smartphone announcement include a 5-inch screen, a quad-core processor, a 13-megapixel camera and eye tracking. Regardless of what the rumor mill says, however, we will be sure to see a decent amount of innovation this afternoon from the South Korean technology conglomerate.
Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments!
You know those silly little Japanese characters called Emoji? They’re only native on iOS and Android 4.1+. Ever been browsing Twitter on your desktop only to see little boxes instead of the actual Emoji characters? I’m sure you have, we all have. If you have Chrome, though, you will never experience this again as long as you install the new extension Chromoji. (more…)
It’s no secret that Google is making bold strides in to the up-and-coming wearable computing industry. This year at SXSW, they have even furthered demonstrated this push with a prototype shoe made in partnership with Adidas.
The shoe aims to both entertain and encourage its user by saying various things based on the wearers actions. For instance, if you’re sitting around and the shoe detects little to no movement, it will say something like “this is boring.” When you get up and run around a little bit, however, it will encourage you by saying “now that’s more like it!” (more…)
What Will Come of the Mac Pro?
The Mac Pro is Apple’s halo car. It’s a chance for Apple to make the fastest, most powerful computer it can, besting its own past efforts and the efforts of its competitors, year after year. This is Apple’s space program, its moonshot. It’s a venue for new technologies to be explored.
The Mac Pro is becoming a bit of a dinosaur for the average consumer. People are moving to lower-powered devices such as tablets, not behemoth desktops. Most casual internet users may soon no longer need a desktop computer at all; the tablet has definitely proven a successful experiment. So where does this “Post-PC” era leave the very-PC Mac Pro?
Last week we took a look at LivePapers, a tweak aiming to let you use a more dynamic and interesting backgrounds on your iOS device. Today’s tweak (which we also look at three years ago) has a similar goal, but it provides it in a slightly different way.
Parallax has been around a while, and it is now compatible with iOS 6.1+ and the latest devices. The functionality that Parallax feels undoubtedly similar, as an identical concept has been possible natively on various Android devices for a long time. Do you like having a background that scrolls as you flip your pages of apps? This tweak brings that concept to iOS. (more…)
It’s well known that the iPhone 5 has an 8 megapixel camera and that it’s capable of recording some pretty stellar HD shots, but how often do you see said footage make its way off the phone to be edited and polished? YouTube user “DecimalBrothers” has done exactly that with his most recent upload. Istanbul, Turkey is a beautiful city, and this clip is a testament to how the iPhone — and most smartphones — have the ability to produce high-quality videos in a snap. Have you ever recorded similar footage on your iPhone? Share it in the comments!