News

OWC launches SSD Upgrades for Mid-2013 and later Mac Notebooks

Other World Computing (OWC) has announced on Tuesday a major new step forward in upgrading the flash storage of your 2013 or later MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Now available are the OWC Aura solid state drives (SSD), which come in flavors of 480GB and 1TB. These storage drive upgrades are direct PCI-e drop-ins for any of the supported computers.

Hound voice assistant launches in the App Store, but how does it compare to Siri?

There are numerous companies competing to be the top dog in voice assistant software, but the makers of sound-tagging service SoundHound have made another alternative called Hound that promises an excellent voice assistant experience. Many initial reports suggest it's even more capable than the voice assistants you're used to using already, such as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana.

So just how capable is Hound? In this piece, we'll walk you through the new free-to-download Hound voice assistant for iOS and find out if it's as good as everyone says.

LMcable: a 2-in-1 Lightning and Micro USB connector

Lovers of technology who own both iOS and Android devices are forced to use two different cables for charging their batteries – a Lightning cable and a Micro-USB cable.

The discrepancy in charging cable type can be a pain for people who don't want to carry around more than one cable with them, and that's why a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called LMcable is trying to make its way onto the market to make charging easier for everyone.

Extensify soft launches, lets you install ‘tweaks’ without a jailbreak

Last August, we showed you a really cool project known as Extensify, which is a third-party extension store that allows you to install 'tweaks' for App Store apps on your device without a jailbreak.

Created by iOS developers Majd Alfhaily and Kevin Ko, who are both well-known in the jailbreak community, this extension store works on iOS 9 devices and is side-loaded through Safari.

As of Monday, you can now apply to be a part of the app's soft-launch program via the Extensify website.

Kommute for iPhone downloads websites for offline use and is better than Safari’s Reading List

Today’s websites are big, even more so taking into account that scripts from ad networks continue to gobble up data long after actual website content has been retrieved.

One valid approach to reading news involves adding articles you want to read later to Safari’s Reading List, but that will download each saved webpage to every device that has Safari enabled in Settings → iCloud.

A nicely done iPhone app called Kommute from developer Red Brick Labs might be a far better solution for those people who are eager to download their favorite websites in order to read them on the go, or when they’re not on Wi-Fi.

With Kommute, you just add any URL and the app intelligently fetches home page content along with deep links, for you to browse later. From my brief hands-on time with Kommute, I liked the app and the fact that it works as advertised.

Major MacID software update now available for iOS and OS X

Popular for letting users unlock their Mac with the Touch ID sensor on their iPhones and/or iPads, MacID comes with a slew of other useful features as well that take advantage of a Bluetooth connection between these devices.

A massive update to the $3.99 MacID app for iOS devices and the free software for Macs is now available that provides a slew of improvements and new features for users. 

PayPal app redesign adds new start screen, ‘one-click’ cash request, & more

The PayPal app for iOS, which has been long over-due for an update, has finally received its much-needed update on Thursday that adds official support for the retina HD displays of Apple's 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch handsets.

The app, which is still a free download from the App Store, has been completely redesigned with a slew of changes to make using the app not only feel better, but look better.

Zentrum offers an omni-interface for accessing multitasking, music controls, system toggles & shortcuts

In iOS, the Control Center and App Switcher interfaces are separate from one another and this means to get to one or another, you have to use a different gesture. It seems like some improvements could be made by merging the two interfaces into one, as we've seen with the popularity of previous jailbreak tweak releases such as Auxo 2 & 3.

A new jailbreak tweak called Zentrum is now available in Cydia's BigBoss repository for $1.99 and it introduces users to an all-new omni-interface for multitasking, viewing music controls, and accessing system toggles & shortcuts, but it even bakes into the mix a quick app launcher, which you can configure to your liking.

Some of the Mac apps known to be affected by the Sparkle vulnerability

A vulnerability discovered in an outdated version of the Sparkle updater framework that many third-party OS X apps depend on for serving the user with regular updates has been getting a lot of attention recently.

As we reported on Tuesday, the security problem affects a number of third-party Mac apps downloaded from the internet, and not apps downloaded from the Mac App Store. The vulnerability roots from the lack of an encrypted connection and gives a malicious hacker the ability to perform a man-in-the-middle attack.

But what OS X apps are affected? This is the information you need to know as soon as possible to keep your Mac safe from potential malware threats.

What you need to know about the Sparkle vulnerability affecting some OS X apps

A new vulnerability has been discovered to affect a wide variety of third-party apps for OS X that have been downloaded from the internet and use an outdated version of the Sparkle updater framework.

The new vulnerability puts a number of users of affected third-party apps at risk of being hijacked when those apps attempt to use the outdated framework to alert users of new app updates.