Apple’s terms and conditions for using its new iBooks author program have now been revealed and Dan Wineman of Venemous Porridge has picked it apart to find a few clauses that could give rise to concern for authors.  The new programme is intended to do for self-publishing what the iTunes store did for podcasts, and open [...]

So what is the future form factor of the PC?  If Intel are to be believed then the ultrabook is the computer we will all want, and I’m waiting on one or two of the first ultrabooks to arrive shortly for review.  What is becoming clear though is that the ‘beige box’ that is the [...]

Christmas was a good week for all of us, but a great week for apps with analytics firm Flurry reporting a 60% leap in app downloads on the previous week.  The figures which cover smartphones and tablets for just iOS and Android operating systems estimated that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day [...]

iOS devices are a wonder. This article is being typed on one right now. Sometimes, however, these robust and snappy little things go “boink.” One of the more common issues a user will perhaps encounter is when the iOS device (iPad, iTouch, iPhone) gets stuck in recovery mode. If you are reading this article, you [...]

When I was young I remember looking at the pre-Christmas toy advertisements on the TV and wanting the latest Six-Million Dollar Man action figure in the Action Man range, the latest new engineering kit from Mecanno, a Lego castle (or two) and perhaps a chemistry set so I could practice blowing things up. Over the [...]

ITunes Match, Apples cloud based synchronization service has just launched. Before you read on, here are the facts. The iTunes Match service is only available in the United States, requires iTunes 10.5.1 or newer and costs $24.95 per year. What do you get for that? The service has been designed to match a user’s music [...]

Those of you who follow my articles with any regularity will know that one of the biggest arguments I make about the modern technology industry is their insistence on playing Patent tennis with each other.  This back and forth of legal battles, and the scrabbling by technology giants to buy up valuable patent libraries only [...]

Steve Jobs famously was Apple.  He ignored focus groups in favour of his own gut instinct and, as such, the latest rumour doing the rounds could well turn out to be completely true.  The Times newspaper in the UK has reported that before his death last week, Steve Jobs left a clear four year product roadmap [...]

Apple co-founder and the man responsible for making the company so successful in recent years has died at the age of 56.  Jobs had been suffering from pancreatic cancer since 2004.  He took medical leave from the company in January this year before handing over the role of CEO to Tim Cook in August. In [...]

When Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 yesterday they said what most people were expecting them to, that a new tablet-friendly interface would be the default way to interact with the new version of the OS.  This new Metro UI would load when you start Windows and that Microsoft expected most people to interact with Windows 8 [...]

It’s being reported, and this news is coming in live as I type this, that Apple founder and Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs has tonight resigned as the head of the company.  According to the AFP news agency he’s to be replaced by Tim Cook, the company’s current Chief Operating Officer. Steve Jobs has been [...]

If you ever wondered who Apple consider its biggest rival the answer probably lies in the dutch judicial system with an injunction the company has brought against Samsung. In the documents reported on today by Cnet, Apple is trying to ban, so it would seem, every Samsung smartphone and tablet product including the Galaxy Ace, [...]

The first glimpses of Apple’s new proposed Cupertino HQ appeared the other month, but now more images have appeared courtesy of Techcrunch The new building, known as Campus 2, will take up 2.8 million square feetm contain a 1,000 seat auditorium and research facilities civering 300,000 square feet. Currently the building, which vaguely resembles an [...]

Researchers at Black Hat have said that they’ve found Windows 7′s Enterprise security to be better than that of Apple’s OS X operating system. The problems for OS X seem to stem from user privileges.  While Windows 7 isn’t perfect, OS X seems to have more “soft spots” according to a report by Network World.  [...]

I’vee been waiting patiently for this moment for years and it comes as no surprise to me that it’s Apple leading innovation in the software sales market.  The company launched their new OS X Lion operating system update as a download through the new Mac App Store.  What they also announced however was that this [...]

The iPad’s rise and rise has now surpassed 1% of all web browsing, according to figures released by NetMarketShare. While Internet Explorer, in its various guises, has dropped again in market share to just 53.68% of the overall market, Safari owns 7.48%. This means that Safari and Google’s Chrome operating systems are the only web browsers [...]

The computing industry is unlike any other in the way that it divides people into one camp or another. People sometimes become fanatical about the way they follow one company, and they can be completely scathing about others. The example you’ll all be able to recognise here is Apple fans who will sometimes go to [...]

Apple last year had problems making its black iPhone 4 white, and now it appears the company has also had issues making it’s lovely silver Macbook Air black. It’s been rumoured for a while now that the company was prepping a black sleek Air to add to its line up in the next few weeks. [...]

In an unexpected twist to begin the day on Thursday, technology news agencies began reporting that Facebook may be working on a brand new mobile application platform to challenge Apple’s App Store. Code named “Project Spartan,” the top secret undertaking poises Facebook to take on Apple’s dominance in its own self-created bubble. Rather than focusing [...]

Apple this week announced their new iCloud service, bringing together MobileMe and iTunes in the cloud. With it though they also announced they were dropping support for Windows XP from the new product. Indeed they were only supporting their own desktop operating system, OS X, going back four years to 10.5 ‘Leopard’ too. This raises [...]

Experienced users of handheld products know that in order to protect your data and applications it is important to sync apps frequently with a primary machine. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done for Linux users. While many devices are able to sync without much manipulation on your part, Apple products tend to cause [...]

Apple introduced their new cloud hosting and synchronization service iCloud two days ago. We have covered Apple’s iCloud service on the date of announcement, but we have looked at the features mostly. To paraphrase what has been written: Apple iCloud will give iTunes users online space to store their purchases in the cloud, to access [...]

Yesterday Steve Job’s unveiling of a host of new Apple products and services was very well received, including the official product tour for the next version of OS X on the Mac desktop.  Some of the features don’t seem to fit well with the current Mac lineup though and this has left me wondering if [...]

Everyone and their mum seems to be releasing a new cloud based online storage service these days. It started with Amazon and its Cloud Drive service, followed by Google’s announcement of Google Music Beta and now Apple with its iCloud service that replaces MobileMe. Choice is good, but it can be very confusing at the [...]

In what Apple enthusiasts called a highly anticipated keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple’s future approach to cloud computing. iCloud, Apple’s latest venture into internet data hosting, will allow users to effortlessly stretch media of all sorts – email, calendars, photos, music, documents [...]

Have you ever seen people at concerts holding an iPhone up in the air, trying to record the live performance (and probably uploading it somewhere later on as well)? But they usually don’t know that the moment they do that, they are infringing on IP copyright law. Piracy is punishable by law, even if it [...]

A couple of weeks ago word started spreading to Apple forums that there was malware installed on some systems. Discussion has continued to grow, and even security companies have reported that there is, indeed, a virus for macs in the wild. Seemingly the only company who is still denying the existence of the bug is [...]

There’s been so much news in recent weeks about stuff that’s going to turn into our computing future that I’m hardly surprised most people have failed to join the dots. If you look at some of, if not all of, the major technology announcements in recent weeks we can see that there is a very [...]

The sheer volume of excitement about Windows 8 has taken me quite by surprise with more leaks than we ever saw with Vista or Windows 7 in the same time-frame.  The excitement and hype easily matches that of Google’s Chrome OS in the same period of its development, even though when the operating system finally [...]

I’m well known for being a PC minimalist. I even make a bit of a fuss about this in my book, Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out, that if you want to have to keep repairing problems in Windows one of the best ways to achieve this goal is to keep installing software into it. There’s [...]

Publisher Simon & Schuster have announced that the first official biography of Apple supremo Steve Jobs will be published early in 2012. “iSteve: The Book of Jobs” from Walter Isaacson marks the first time that Jobs has authorised an official account of his life to be written, and it will make an extremely interesting read [...]

I took delivery of my new Windows 7 Tablet today, an ExoPC Slate, on the day ironically when Apple unveiled the iPad 2 to the world.  It‘s thinner, lighter and has two cameras.  The latter we already knew and the former two should have been expected of a new device.  But what does the arrival [...]

Tech blogger Long Zheng has today published an article directly comparing the Previous Versions feature in Windows 7 to the Versions function in OS X Lion, the forthcoming update to Apple’s desktop OS. He describes how “Once again, Microsoft may have implemented the technology first, but Apple has turned it into a compelling end-user experience” and goes [...]

When Intel first announced its new LightPeak device connection technology the sweaty masses got very excited indeed.  This replacement for USB would be based on fibre-optic technology and offer gigabits of data transfer speed far above what is currently on offer today, even through USB3. Then they dampened down everyone’s hopes a few months ago [...]

It’s been the question that people have now been asking for a couple of years.  Why do Apple just have one iPhone on the market at a time?  If you look at their traditional consumer market with iPods they’re very used to having multiple devices and form factors available to buy concurrently.  Now it would [...]

A proposal from Apple shareholders has been backed by the influential US investor advisory firm, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS).  The proposal wants Apple to lay out a succession plan for the company post-Jobs. Supremo Steve Jobs took an indeterminate leave of absence last month for medical reasons, leaving Tim Cook in charge of the day [...]

I was thinking about what story I should write about today on gHacks.  There’s a lot been happening and it’s big news.  Egypt cut itself off from the Internet while its president tries to quell a revolution (people are dying here too which is something that just has to be mentioned).  The very last ever batch of [...]

I’m not known for applauding Apple so I’ll give you a moment to pick yourself off the floor before I get into the thrust of this article.  I genuinely believe though that while Apple’s claim for their Retina display on the iPhone 4 that ”the pixel density is so high that the human eye is unable [...]

It’s been announced by Apple that CEO Steve Jobs will be taking a leave of absence on the advice of his doctors.  He will remain in the position of CEO and continue to be involved in “major strategic decisions” but Tim Cook will be taking over the day to day operations of the company. In [...]

Sony have announced that they’re suing the hackers who uncovered the security codes for the PlayStation 3, that the console uses to determine that software is genuine.  This means that anybody who has access to this code can use it in non-approved (and even pirated), software to get that to run happily on the console. Microsoft are [...]

A voluntary agreement by all the major mobile phone manufacturers comes into force today in the EU, and because of the way phones are manufactured these days it’s bound to very quickly have positive repercussions around the world. Under the agreement, all new phones announced from today for sale in the EU will have a [...]

Suggested features for the iPad 2 which is expected sometime next spring have today leaked online.    These include a well overdue USB port, front facing camera, retina display type screen and 3-axis gyroscopes.  The leak was reported by Chinese site DigiTimes. It should be noted that this is all unsubstantiated rumour though each feature mentioned [...]

Okay, so I might poke fun at the price Apple charges for its computers, but this one is truly antique.  One of the very first Apple personal computers, first sold as a run of only 200 in 1976, has just sold at auction for £133,250 ($210,000) complete with signed letters of authenticity from company founders [...]

The latest version of Apple’s iOS operating system has been released today and it brings with it several welcome enhancements, not the least of which is multi-tasking for the iPad, iPhone (3G, 3GS and 4) and the iPod Touch (2nd, to 4th generations). In a press release today, the company said… iOS 4.2 makes the iPad [...]

It was only a matter of time before someone made a statuette out of Steve Jobs and as you can see below we now have a lovely figurine (admittedly with a slightly enlarged head, read into that what you wish) that you can buy to grace your desk. The figure, which has removable glasses and [...]

It’s long been rumoured that Apple will launch a streaming music service to rival (erm… their rival) Spotify.  Now the company is talking up “an exciting announcement from iTunes” tomorrow with the headline “Tomorrow is just another day, that you’ll never forget”. Nobody knows that the annoucement will be but the concensus on the web, [...]

As Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 motion-sense controller launches and interesting story has emerged on the website Cult of Mac.  The core technology was acquired, as so often happens these days, with Microsoft purchasing it from the company that developed it.  In this case Israeli company PrimeSense. It has now transpired that PrimeSense initially approached Microsoft’s [...]

It’s finally happened that embattled Blackberry Maker, Research in Motion, has lost the 4th spot of mobile handset manufacturers to Apple. Figures from IDC and published by Engadget show that the league table now stands as… Nokia Samsung LG Apple RIM …and given their recent and ongoing troubles, we can expect to see Nokia lose the [...]

Apple has encountered some problems with the hardware in it’s iPhone 4, most notable with signal problems and with the glass covers cracking.  This may be behind the further delay of the white iPhone 4 to market for the third time. Originally scheduled for launch on the 24th June and later delayed until the end [...]

While Google’s executives have recently been attacking Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Phone platforms, Apple supremo Steve Jobs has now stepped in to hammer Google’s Android operating system. While not attacking the OS specifically he’s been hugely critical of the tablets onto which manufacturers are dropping it, saying that 7″ screens are simply too small [...]