Sorry, But Your iPhone 4 Just Became Obsolete

At Monday's WWDC keynote, Apple announced a flurry of fun new features. With OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, your Mac and iPhone are closer than ever, opening the door to the Future of Computing. Too bad iPhone 4 users won't get to enjoy any of it—and neither will anyone with an even older phone.

The new Apple iOS 8 presented at WWDC 2014 is a lot more than Healthkit—Apple's new vital… Read more

The oldest phone that will run iOS 8, when it's released to the general public this fall, is the iPhone 4S. And based on how poorly iOS 7 performed on older iPhones, you can expect some lag running iOS 8 on a 4S. Regardless, it won't work on an iPhone 4 at all. Of course, if you're running iOS 7 on a 4, you were already way behind. And after all, this is how tech works. Welcome to the upgrade StairMaster. So RIP iPhone 4.

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iOS 8: All the New Features For Your iPhone and iPad

 

The new Apple iOS 8 presented at WWDC 2014 is a lot more than Healthkit—Apple's new vital statistics monitoring system—and a few adjustments to the interface introduced last year. Here you will find the complete catalog of new features along with live commentary on all of them.

Healthkit

Apple has created a new API called Healthkit. Developers will be able to link applications to a central database of your personal health data.

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This will be available not only for apps you can buy in the app store, but also professional medical applications and platforms. So if you get your blood pressure or your sugar blood data from your hospital, your iPhone will receive a secure notification with this data. You will be able to store it privately and—even better—share this information easily with other doctors and hospitals. Apple listed a lot of institutions that are jumping right in, including the Mayo Clinic

Camera new features

Apple seems to be beefing up the camera software quite a bit. For users, iOS 8 will add Time Lapse photography, which is pretty cool. But the news may be in the developers side, with a new camera application programming kit that will allow third-party apps to access the camera hardware in depth, with controls that weren't available before. This may indicate that the camera in the next iPhone may be beefed up quite considerably.

Photos

Apple has also included a new Photos app that includes new editing capabilities that can be used with a simple thumb gesture. It seems pretty easy to use, especially their equivalent to Photoshop's Shadows and Highlights, which uses smart image analysis to get pretty great results (at least in the demo.) The technology seems similar to the iOS version of iPhoto but with a much simpler interface.

Apple is also building a OS X Yosemite version of Photos, fully built around Apple's cloud. This may indicate that they are going to phase out iPhoto.

All photos are now in the Cloud with 5GB of free storage. Other storage plans, Apple says, will start at $1 per month. There's no more distinction between local and cloud. Your local device will act as a cache for what's on the cloud—hopefully with lots of security, so nobody can access your nudie pics.

Continuity

Continuity is one of the most exciting things in iOS and OS X. It is a group of technologies that seamlessly integrates both Macs and iOS devices:

Airdrop. Now works between Macs and iOS devices. You can drag and drop a file from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad via a Wi-Fi network, seamlessly.

Handoff. Your iPad and iPhone are always aware of what you are doing on your Mac. So when you are working in a Mail message and you have to leave your workstationn, you can pick it where you left it on your iPad or iPhone to continue that message right away. The iOS device will show a small icon on the bottom left corner of the lock screen. Clicking on an icon will open whatever you were working on before.

Text message integration. Now your iPhone can send text messages to your Mac, which is very cool feature. The iPhone would relay your regular text messages—sent by non-iOS phones—into the iMessage app in your Mac. All your messages, regardless of their origin, will be synchronized everywhere. I wish this worked with other chat services, like Gchat or Facebook, finally providing a centralized, seamless message center.

And of course, it's yet to be seen how smooth this synchronization is. Apple's troubled past history with iMessage is not a good sign.

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Call integration. Even cooler than the text messaging is that you can use your iPhone to relay voice calls to your Mac—complete with Caller ID—and call from your Mac through your iPhone. It's all automatic: The iPhone gets fully integrated and your Mac acts like a speaker and microphone.

New notifications

The notifications have been enhanced.

At last, the new iOS 8 provides with a way to answer notifications without having to leave your app. You can also do the same from the lock screen, without having to unlock your phone.

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Accessing people

You can access people by double tapping on the home button. The most contacted people will pop as a line of icons. Clicking on one face will give you access to all the forms of communication available: Calls, chat, FaceTime or FaceTime Voice (I wonder if this could be extended to Whatsapp or Facebook Chat too—more on extensions below.)

Enhanced mail

The new mail has a variety of enhancements, but the best is the gesture based message manipulation, a la Mailbox. You can swipe to the left to delete a flag or reply to a message. Swipe a bit harder and you can easily delete the message itself. I'm a Mailbox fan, so I'm happy they have implemented a similar feature for email management.

Spotlight

Spotlight—accessible from the lock screen and everywhere in iOS with a downward swipe—works across the entire iPhone to give you results but also now offers you suggestions of things that are not stored in your device. It will give you suggestions on:

• News

• Wikipedia

• Nearby places

• iTunes store music, podcasts and movies

• iBooks store

• Suggested websites

• Movie showtimes

Even apps that you haven't downloaded yet related to your search (which maybe can get quite annoying). It's similar to what Google does in Android or Microsoft on Windows Phone. It works in Safari too.

Keyboard enhancements

For the first time, Apple is renewing its keyboard. The new iOS finally supports context-sensitive predictive typing, giving you a list of words that you can use to make your text entry a lot faster.

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Apple claims that the new engine learns how you write. It's so sensitive that it knows who you are talking with and adjusts the suggestions accordingly. In the example above you can see more informal suggestions to a friend and more formal ones to a colleague. Apple claims it learns from your behavior.

The prediction of the words is also context sensitive, so if you are talking about a dinner date, it'll give you the adequate words for that environment. It will even interpret questions and give you answers so you only have to click and not type. It seems pretty cool but for some reason I think this is not going to end well for our communication abilities.

iMessages

You can mute particular conversations now, which will be very convenient.

Another cool feature is the ability to share your location on a conversation by conversation basis, and for limited times.

You can send audio and video messages in iMessages too. Like SnapChat, the messages self-destruct. But unlike SnapChat, you can select not to destroy the messages and they take a long time.

You can listen to audio messages sent via iMessage from the home screen. Just take your phone to your ear to listen, no touch required. The same to reply.

iCloud Drive

Of course, apps will be able to access iCloud Drive to enjoy the same "continuity" as Apple apps. A third-party application like Sketchbook will be able to save changes to documents automatically to your cloud, so now every bit of data from every application would be available across iOS devices and Mac (provided the developer uses this feature, of course.) It works with Windows machines too.

Entreprise features

The new iOS has plenty of features for companies and corporations, Apple says. It supports new tools for device management by IT departments, is ease to share documents through central company clouds, and shows calendar availability when making appointments.

Family Sharing

Now you can share stuff with your family in a very easy way: Family calendar, photos, and locations (another nice feature that can end in very wrong places! Such fun ahead.)

You can share all the books, music and movie purchases between all the members of your family, up to six. Of course, you should use the same credit card for this to work. If you are a father, don't worry, your kids will be able to use your credit card to buy the latest game, but you will always get a message asking for permission.

Siri

They have updated Siri to listen constantly. When you plug it into your car, for example, you just can say "Hey Siri" and it will activate automatically—without you touching the home button at all.

Another good addition is the integration of Shazam: Siri will now be able to recognize songs on the spot without opening that horrible app. It will also let you buy a new song from the results screen.

Extensions (this is really really great news, trust me)

This is, by far, the best feature of iOS: Like in OS X, Apple is now allowing app developers to provide extensions for iOS. Developers will be able to add services that other applications can use. An app will be able to use some other app's photo editing software, for example. Or maybe post to Pinterest using a Pinterest extension.

For the user, this will be transparent: When you install any app their services will become automatically available to all other apps.

Apps will be able to offer widgets too, at last. Which can be interactive. Apple showed an eBay widget that allows for direct bidding on watched auctions.

You will be able to extend Apple's Safari with other extensions too: Here's an image of how Bing Translate works within Safari.

You can even extend the iOS itself, adding custom keyboards.

All these extensions run, according to Apple, with a lot of security layers so the user is always in control and no software can grab any information (without permission.)

Touch ID for all apps!

Touch ID is a great idea but it was pretty useless until now. At last, now apps will be able to use Touch ID for authorization. You will be able to use your thumbprint to access your account through your bank app.

Metal: New 3D engine for iOS

Apple is claiming that their new Metal graphics engine offers ten times the performance of their previous 3D rendering engine, which apparently is really impressive (it certainly looks really impressive.) One of the developers, from Epic, says that they were able to bring a full "console-level" engine to the iPad with full fidelity and full performance, whatever that means.

The demonstration was pretty damn good.

Availability

The update will be available "in the fall."

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Apple Healthbook Will Track Your Life Down to Every Breath

For a couple months now we've been hearing about Apple's plans to release a new fitness tracking system in the near future called Healthbook. This morning, 9to5Mac reports a lot of details about the rumored health-monitoring app for iOS. The app is impressively exhaustive. How is all of this possible? We're loathe to say an iWatch might be coming...but maybe?

From the screenshots reported by 9to5Mac, Healthbook takes its core design from the existing Passbook app for ticketing. Instead of a repository for everything from boarding passes to concert tickets, this time, the file box will store a variety of health metrics that tell you about everything from fitness to nutrition to sleep to new metrics we've never seen before like hydration.

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For each of the above categories, Healthbook is capable of charting a lot of metrics, which altogether paint an impressively comprehensive picture of your health. Like existing fitness tracking software, the app will help you monitor your weight weight, activity, and nutrition. Like some of the newer products we've seen released over the last year, Healthbook will also help you keep an eye on your heart rate and blood pressure. Healthbook also wouldn't be the first piece of software to help you monitor your sleep.

Curiously, the app tracks metrics we haven't seen done in a practical or mass market way yet on mobile devices. Tracking bloodwork, oxygen saturation, and blood sugar would be a revolution for people who need to monitor those metrics on a daily basis. Hydration, as we mentioned before, is also totally new in this sphere. It's a metric a lot of us aren't keeping an eye on, buy we'd probably be happier if we did.

The final question is will Healthbook be integrated directly with a Cupertino-produced piece of fitness tracking hardware. We've been hearing about the "iWatch" for years. Sure, much of what Healthbook tracks could be data from the iPhone's on-board sensors, the M7 Motion Co-Processor introduced last fall, as well as information gathered from third party wearable devices. But there are enough new metrics that nobody is tracking that maybe the iWatch is closer than we think? 

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The Brains of Successful vs. Unsuccessful People Actually Look Very Different

What's the best way to take control of your own life and push yourself against boundaries?

According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, it's all about your mindset. Successful people tend to focus on growth, solving problems and self-improvement, while unsuccessful people think of their abilities as fixed assets and avoid challenges.

Dweck says that there are two basic categories that peoples' behavioral traits tend to fall into: fixed and growth mindsets. This infographic by Nigel Holmes summarizes these differences.

Image Credit: Brain Pickings

A person with a "fixed" mindset tends to view themselves with static traits and a deterministic outlook. For these people, intelligence, character and creative ability all cannot be changed in any meaningful way, while success is seen as affirmation of those given abilities and traits. The fixed mindset views the human almost like an already-completed spreadsheet, with things like intelligence and personality operating as unchanging, fundamental characteristics. Thus, "striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled."

A person with a "growth" mindset, on the other hand, sees challenges as things to overcome and views failure as an opportunity for growth and personal development.

In the end, Dweck says, how we approach life can determine our success and happiness. She writes her "research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you commit to and accomplish the things you value." Going into more detail, Dweck argues the following:

"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

"... There's another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience."

Image Credit: Shirley Clarke / Bullitt Schools

The science: This isn't just another self-help book; Dweck has the science to back it up. In anow-famous 1998 study, Dweck and Claudia Mueller separated 128 children aged 10-11 into two groups. Each group was asked to solve mathematical problems; one group was praised for their innate characteristics ("You did great — you must be really smart") while another was praised for their effort ("You did great, you must have tried really hard").

Next, they were given a harder set of problems — so hard, in fact, that many subjects barely got even one question correct. All were told they had done worse. This was followed up with a third set of once-again-easier questions to see how failure impacted performance.

The result? The children who had been praised for their intelligence did roughly 25% worse on the third test than those praised for their work ethic. The intelligence-praised group was more likely to blame their inability to solve the problems on their lack of ability or the difficulty of the question rather than not having tried hard enough. They also enjoyed working on the tests less and gave up sooner.

Overall, Dweck and Mueller's research "[supported] our hypothesis that children who are praised for intelligence when they succeed are the ones least likely to attribute their performance to low effort, a factor over which they have some amount of control ... [such praise] does not appear to teach children that they are smart; rather, such praise appears to teach them to make inferences about their ability versus their effort from how well they perform."

Dweck and Mueller performed five other, similar experiments and found that the children who were told they were intelligent rather than hard-working learned to measure their own intelligence from the praise. In fact, they seemed to take low performance as an indicator that they simply weren't up to the task. The children praised for their effort seemed to learn that intelligence was "malleable" and defined it in terms of "motivation and knowledge."

In another study, Dweck and other researchers offered children a choice between redoing an easy jigsaw puzzle or trying a more difficult one. Those with a fixed mentality redid the easy puzzle, expressing the belief that smart kids don't make mistakes, while ones with a growth mentality were confused as to why someone would want to repeat the same puzzle and saw tackling new problems as a way to advance themselves.

Other research has shown that attitudes towards a task matter just as much as a person's actual ability to perform them. Soldiers about to embark on a standard 25-mile march, for example, were given different information about the length of the route they had to complete. Those told it was going to be 37 miles, or told nothing about the length, psyched themselves out and did worse than those given an accurate description or told it was only 18 miles. The authors concluded that "what mattered was how closely the anticipated challenge matched the soldiers' actual capabilities," saying that "If we do not believe we can make it, we will not get the resources we need to make it." The results were confirmed by measuring stress hormones in the soldiers' blood levels.

What's this mean for me? Here's how Prof. G. Richard Shell summarizes the results of Dweck's field of research in his book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success:

"… Repeated experiments have demonstrated the value of praising effort rather than innate talent. If you are praised by others in the right way, this can lead you to praise yourself based on your genuine effort when you accomplish something significant and discount comments about the role of your natural ability. You should ignore any result — good or bad — that comes after you put in only a halfhearted effort. And you should be proud of any result that follows hard work — even when the result is not what you had hoped."

Or as to paraphrase Dweck, people with fixed mindsets tend to shy away from challenges. Their perceived deficiencies seem permanent and in the face of setbacks, they tend to be less resilient, believing they've reached their potential and can't go any further. In the long run, fixed minds will achieve less. 

Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, don't necessarily think "anyone can be Einstein, but they understand that everyone can develop their abilities and that even Einstein wasn't Einstein until he put in decades of dedicated labour." Challenges help these people improve and setbacks ultimately motivate you to work harder and move forward. 

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Why choose Google Apps for Business over Microsoft 365

I was with a client today,at a point in the conservation I mentioned that Hapaweb is an authorized Google Apps Business reseller and all of a sudden he looked me straight in the eye and asked, why should I choose Google over Office 365? Here’s my answer.

1. Access to services from anywhere, anytime– A key benefit of the Google-hosted solution is that you can access email, contacts, and calendar from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection, anywhere in the world
2. Lower infrastructure costs — All your email will be stored securely on Google’s servers, so you’ll no longer need to maintain email servers on-site.
3. Ability to consolidate our platforms — You can eliminate redundancy by moving all of your email and calendar platforms to Google Apps.
4. Lower support costs — Because Google hosts the email and calendar services, there’s no more email client software to maintain on your computer.
5. Innovative solutions — You can leverage the ongoing creative and technical solutions of the Google Apps platform to provide your employees with powerful, easy-to-use tools for getting their work done.
6. Highly scalable environment — With Google Apps, your email capacity will grow automatically as your company grows, and you’ll avoid the complexity of internal systems.
7. More collaboration features — With Google’s next-generation applications, you can collaborate with colleagues, customers, and partners more easily and efficiently than ever before.
8. Instant messaging — Because Google Apps includes Google Talk, you can now implement an instant messaging system for our county employees.
9. Instant video messaging – Because Google Apps includes Google Hangout , you can now implement an video conferencing with your colleagues at no extra cost.
10. Security — Google Apps offers a true cloud model, and with this model comes the inherent security of the cloud. Google’s multi-layered security strategy keeps your information safe at each stage of data storage, access and transfer. Your data will never be lost because a user’s hard drive crashed, a computer was stolen or on site data was compromised by fire or floods. 

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30 Amazing iOS 7 UI Kits – Part One

When iOS7 was first released there was a lot of arguing about the new flatter design, while most people loved it there were just as many who hated it and swore they would never upgrade to iOS7. The design changes were made by Jony Ive who by many is regarded as a design genius. In this two part article series we have collected 30 Amazing iOS7 UI Kits, we will present the first 15 this week and the remaining 15 next week. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

iOS 7 UI Components

iOS7 UI Kit (PSD)

iOS 7 iPhone UI kit

Apple iOS 7 Redesign

Flat UI Pack for iOS 7 Apps

IOS-7-IPAD-AI-GUI

IOS 7 Flat UI Kit

Free IOS 7 Flat UI Kit

iOS 7 style icons of social media FREE PSD

Beautiful 4 GUI IOS 7 Flat Package

IOS 7 Flat UI Kit

iOS 7 iPhone AI Download

iOS 7 UI Kit Lite (Sketch)

IOS 7 Flat free Ui kit

Free iOS 7 UI Kit

Tips for Talking About Yourself

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