Solving a problem that nobody seemed to have in the first place, Berger and Fohr’s “Rechner Calculator” trades button presses for multitouch gestures that will supposedly speed up your calculating needs by 200 percent

One of the goals of touchscreen technology is to make software more intuitive and instinctive. What’s more natural than touch?

The Rechner Calculator is an iOS app that simplifies a calculator’s functions. To subtract, swipe to the left. To add numbers, swipe to the right. It’s as easy as increasing and decreasing figures. The equal function is now one swipe up and to clear everything is two swipes downward. It’s that easy.

Despite its intuitiveness, the same can’t be said for the multiply and divide functions. For some reason they’re hidden in a drawer that can be activated with one swipe down. Hopefully the app gets updated for something smarter like three or four finger gestures.

The app is available at the App Store link below. It’s $1. Best $1 I spent all day.

via: dvice

It’s that magical time of year again, when everyone expects a new iPad to be right around the corner. Which in turn means an amassment of iPad 3 rumors clogging up our lives. Here’s a quick guide to making sense of them.

Take all of these with the usual large piles of salt grains. Oh, and remember: The iPad may only be two years old, but it’s already such an institution that any radical shifts in design or philosophy are almost definitely out of the question (sorry, 7-inch believers). But that doesn’t mean we don’t expect see some significant changes both inside and out.

Display

One of the iPhone’s most beloved features is its ultrasharp retina display. And while the iPad 2′s screen is no lightweight, a bump up in pixel density is one of the most hotly anticipated iPad 3 improvements. There have been numerous unsourced reports from the supply chain stating that retina screens are coming to iPad. More officially, iBooks 2 has 2x resolution images that would make a lot of sense for a super resolution iPad. But then, that was the case last year, too.

Android tablet displays passed the iPad last summer, and since then have moved into 1080p territory, so it seems far fetched that Apple would put off upgrading the iPad’s screen another year.

Guts

It’s extremely unlikely that anything other than a superfast new A6 chip will power the iPad 3, as Bloomberg and others have reported. The main question at this point seems to be whether that A6 will pack quad core power. On one hand, competitors like the Transformer Prime have moved on to quad core chips, and the incredible gaming and HD movie processing heft that upgrade entails. And both BGR and Bloomberg have recently reported that the A6 will indeed be quad core. But for what it’s worth, Apple has shown in the past that it’s willing to stand pat if it feels a spec is more than good enough for the next generation, like it did with the iPad 2′s 512MB of RAM.

Speaking of RAM, if we’re going to take the retina display rumors seriously, it would make sense that the RAM would finally see an upgrade in the iPad 3. The iPad 2′s 512MB, like the iPhone 4S’s, was buffered by the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware. But it stands to reason that the brute force required to push the massive number of pixels a 10-inch retina display would require a memory upgrade. File that under pure speculation.

Camera

iLounge cited several sources saying the iPad 3 will have an HD front-facing camera for HD Facetime. This would make a lot of sense, considering that quality front-facing cameras have found their way into phones like the Lumia 900, and people use their tablets for video chat much more than their phones.

It’s worth mentioning here that while many of these hardware upgrade rumors seem inevitable, we thought the same about the whoops-that’s-not-happening-iPhone 5. So keep that enthusiasm curbed until the official announcement.

Network

BGR recently leaked debug screenshots of what it claimed was proof of both that fancy new A6 processor and global 4G LTE, and Japanese blog Macotakara reported similar network details around the same time. Bringing LTE to the iPad before the iPhone would make sense, because the iPad’s larger battery can handle the 4G drain. Then again, a 4G iPad would almost certainly portend a 4G iPhone this summer, and it’s not at all clear that Apple considers the network mature enough to hop on just yet.

Siri

iOS 6 is still a long way off, but the iPad 3′s software warrants a quick mention because it might be the first non-iPhone 4S Apple product to get Siri, as some details in the iOS 5.1 beta reference the iPad in Siri Dictation.

Availability

Early March is the logical landing zone, with multiple reports claiming that, and the previous two models coming in early March and very early April.

And for what it’s worth, two European Amazon sites had iPad 3 instruction manuals slated for a March 29th release.

Design

The one thing that’s almost certainly not changing about the iPad is its overall look. Apple’s had wild success with the size and shape, and there’s no reason to rock the boat now. The only changes that could happen would be a very slightly thicker build if it needs to compensate for a retina display and/or a larger battery.

Otherwise?

via: gizmodo

With news of Steve Jobs’s change of roles at Apple sweeping the web, it’s worth looking back at how the company changed during his reign as CEO.

Apart from taking Apple from its dismal depths to the most valuable company on Earth, under Jobs’s leadership Apple also completely transformed several industries while outright inventing others.

This is what Apple’s main products looked like in 1997, before Steve Jobs retook charge of Apple for the first time since leaving in 1985:

Did you own any of these? Chances are pretty good that you didn’t. Very few people did. I didn’t, although both Mike and Steve claim that they still have Newtons sitting on the shelf. Apple was on its deathbed back then, while Microsoft was unassailably ascendant. Apple was considered at best a niche company for niche users; at worst, it was considered a boondoggle. Michael Dell, CEO of the company that bears his name, famously quipped that Apple should be liquidated and the resulting money given back to the shareholders.

A year later, in 1998, this happened:

Steve Jobs killed the beige boxes and introduced the iMac, the genesis of Apple’s new focus on style. The iMac stood out in the crowd in the late 90s, its unmistakable silhouette a stark contrast to the sea of anonymous beige/grey/black boxes of its competition. And in a move that would typify Apple’s approach over the coming years, the iMac both introduced new technology and mercilessly pruned away the old — it was the first mass market computer with USB and the first to ditch the floppy drive. Every Mac made since then can trace some part of its design back to this late-90s progenitor, the product that caught the world’s attention and made us all think that maybe Apple was in it for the long haul after all.

Then in 2001, this happened:

Whether you thought it was revolutionary or “lame,” over the course of the early- to mid-2000s the iPod went on to utterly dominate the portable music player scene. Ten years after its introduction, the iPod (and its descendants, in the form of the iPhone and iPod touch) has effectively killed both the CD player and the CD itself for a large portion of the music-listening crowd. More so even than the iMac, the iPod turned Apple’s fortunes completely around and made the company a force to be reckoned with for the first time since the 80s. A well-known “halo effect” ensued, where users enamored of the iPod’s interface, craftsmanship, and ease of use started buying up Macs in large numbers. It’s no huge stretch to say that without the iPod, Apple as we know it might not exist today.

Then, in 2007, this happened:

Touchscreen smartphones are everywhere now, to the point that many of us take them for granted. But in 2007, the iPhone knocked the entire phone industry on its ear. Looking like something that came straight out of Captain Kirk’s belt, the iPhone proved to be every bit as revolutionary as Apple claimed. Naysayers everywhere predicted the iPhone would be Apple’s doom, because the company was now dipping its toe into an established market with industry giants who were all too eager to slap this upstart tech company into the dirt.

The pundits were all wrong; the iPhone has single-handedly transformed the smartphone market from the RIM-dominated days of monochrome, button-laden BlackBerrys into the new world of glass-paneled touchscreens that adapt to our needs rather than requiring us to adapt to theirs. The App Store showed the iPhone’s true potential; far more than a phone + iPod + internet navigator, thanks to hundreds of thousands of third-party apps the iPhone could become almost anything to almost anyone.

Then, in 2010, this happened:

In the 1980s, Apple called the Macintosh “the computer for the rest of us.” Sadly, it never really lived up to its potential as the computer for the masses — that mantle fell upon Windows, for better or worse. Less technically-inclined users have always wanted a computer that simply gets out of their way and lets them use it, and that desire is likely a major factor in the iPad’s tremendous success thus far. Geeks will obsess over what the iPad doesn’t have — ports, menus, windows, a built-in keyboard, an accessible file system, and so forth — and just like the iPhone, scores of analysts the world over predicted the iPad would fizzle in the marketplace and prove to be Apple’s first big misstep in ten years.

Instead, the iPad has done to the tablet market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: upended it, redefined it, dominated it. People may question whether anyone needs the iPad, particularly if they’ve never used one before. I know — I was one of them. But perhaps more than any of the products discussed here, the iPad points the way to the future of computing. Instead of intransigent boxes that get in the way of what we want to do half the time (yes, even Macs), the future of computing is computers as an appliance, far more adaptable to our needs than the traditional PC ever was or ever could be.

This is what Apple’s main products look like today:

This is what fourteen years of progress looks like. I can only imagine how things will be in 2025.

Over the course of the coming weeks, we will undoubtedly hear from many sources that Steve Jobs’s move from CEO to chairman means the doom of Apple. We’ve already been hearing that for years. Looking back on how Jobs changed Apple, it’s not hard to see why so many pundits might think Apple’s success is dependent on having Jobs at the helm — but Apple’s success hasn’t been due to a single man. No man builds an empire alone, and the best-built empires live on profitably long after their founding fathers have handed over the reigns to someone else.

Apple is a company composed of thousands of talented and visionary individuals. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad didn’t spring fully-formed from Steve Jobs’s forehead. Neither did the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, OS X, iLife, iTunes, or the App Store. To view Apple as Santa’s workshop and Steve Jobs as Mr. Claus is to miss the point entirely.

No one can predict with certainty what the future holds for Apple now that Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO. Many will try, no doubt. But history shows the folly of counting Apple out before the match is truly finished — if you’d told 1997′s tech pundits that Apple would be where it is 14 years later, they’d have laughed you out of the room.

All of us at TUAW want to thank Steve Jobs for turning Apple into a company worth writing about, worth getting excited about, and worth making a daily part of our lives. I’m not known for being an optimist most of the time, but I still don’t see any of those things changing anytime soon.

Via: TUAW

Retro seems to be in the air these days. First the Commodore, now this. Atari has delivered a pleasant surprise to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners. The company has just released its Greatest Hits collection for iOS devices, which includes 18 classic arcade games and 82 Atari 2600 games — those available either in 25 separate packs for $0.99 apiece, or in one massive time sink bundle for $14.99 (Pong comes free with the app itself). As you can see, you’ll also get things like the original box art and arcade cabinets for each game, and some of the titles will even let you play head-to-head with a friend over Bluetooth. Ready to get started? You know where to find it. I like retro, it brings me back in memory and makes me feel like a kid again.

photo: courtesy Engadget