When it comes to fun, cool, and otherwise amazing camera accessories, there’s no site quite like Photojojo, and with the release they just dropped this week, the Photorito Lens Wrap, they’ve entered the camera / food crossover market in a strange, strange way. We just happen to have one of these burrito-themed lens wraps right here, and we’re going to take a look at it with you. Look tasty enough to fit in your backpack, protecting you loved ones?
I’m often asked when Sony will launch its next PlayStation. Just about everyone is interested in finding out if the next console the consumer electronics giant offers up can be as appealing and popular as its predecessors. The push for Sony to launch a new PlayStation is also born out of the fact that Nintendo is launching a new console this year, called the Wii U. And if history is to be our guide for the future, most console makers launch their new devices around the same time.
Apple’s education-driven press event took place earlier today in NYC and unveiled the company’s plans to revolutionize textbooks and the entire learning experience. The news announced almost made us want to go back to school. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of the magic that was unleashed.
It’s taken a special kind of ebook to make headlines over the past year or so: anyone can throw together a basic document, but a rarified breed of immersive, interactive app/ebook hybrids has also developed. Often seen targeting children or delivering iPad versions of print magazines, they’ve invariably taken big money and plenty of time. Now, with iBooks Author, it’s simple enough for the layman. Check out our hands-on impressions after the cut.
iTunes U isn’t new – Apple first revealed its educational download store back in 2007 – but the new iTunes U app and companion service revealed today is. A suite of not just individual lessons but entire classes and curriculum, iTunes U opens the door to content from high profile schools like Duke, Yale, The Open University and UCLA, with all the multimedia you could desire. Read on for more hands-on feedback.
The folks at Apple have this week shown off their new Textbooks category in their iPad and iPhone-based iBookstore, showing how interactive teaching can be done in a brand new way and for a much less expensive price: $14.99 or less. That’s the price the books in this new section of the store will cost, and that’s what groups like McGrawHill and Pearson have agreed to work with. We’ve seen how we can grab these books with iBooks 2, how iBooks Author can allow anyone to create such a fabulous interactive text, and now Apple is taking a vast swipe at the future of education with cost.
A brand new application was revealed this week at the Apple education event by the name of iBooks Author, this app brought on aside the iBooks 2 app update and the addition of interactive Textbooks to the fold. This event has played host to a set of updates to the iPad-based world of books, the iBooks Author app at the center of how you’ll be making books yourself with your Mac desktop machine. Templates will be included and a simple interface will be in place so that anyone, no matter their background, can make a fully interactive book for use in the iBooks world.
Apple held an event this week promising no less than an education-heavy set of announcements, Phil Schiller starting the event off right with a series of affirmations that Apple has always been dedicated to helping students learn. Putting the same passion and energy into every product Apple makes is the same that they’ve done for their education business, and now a new page is being turned. “Students are being introduced to the iPad.”
Anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA protests have begun in force today, with sites like Wikipedia giving the internet a taste of a web without freedom of speech, as censorship and piracy take center stage for lawmakers, content-owners and users alike. The proposed acts are, we believe, a heavy-handed and naive approach toward the legitimate issue of content theft. Being against the proposed acts isn’t the same as being “pro-piracy”; that’s why we here at SlashGear (and R3 Media, the company behind SlashGear), as avid content-creators and content-consumers, believe SOPA and PIPA are the wrong way to tackle piracy online.
If you’ve not heard of either SOPA or PIPA in the last few weeks and months in your journeys through the internet, now’s the time to get educated, and quick. While the most recent news has been that the White House reaction to the SOPA bill specifically has effectively curbed it, there’s no reason why it can’t pop up again with a different name or a couple of simple changes that allow it to pass silently. These two bills, SOPA and PIPA, are amongst the most dangerous pieces of legislature ever to be written up for passage by the United States government in regards to innovation and the free market on a global scale today: this post will tell you why.
This morning there was a rather large break-in of a couple of sites related to online sales of clothing and shoes, Zappos and “6pm” amongst them, and one theme sticks out as a beacon to us as far as how users can avoid being smashed by this situation: password safety. Ironically it’s not that you need to change your personal details, not your credit card numbers, your phone numbers, any sort of address information at all, but your password itself, and not necessarily on the site that got hacked. The simplest way to keep yourself secure on the internet is to use different passwords on each “secure” site you interact with.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show revealed itself to be the real Ice Cream Sandwich treat for tablets in the Android sector, with one whole load of crap tablets attempting to burst the bubble of the very few high-class units that were or will be soon certified by Google. On the Windows 8 side of things, there were certainly some tablets to be seen, but certainly not to be touched – Windows 8 will be ready later this year, but Microsoft wasn’t having it when it came to showing it off fully here at the convention. Then there’s oddities galore like the Samsung Galaxy Note, a device we’d seen late 2011, but until now had never had a chance to peek at it on a USA carrier – it’s time!
