Video showcases Gold and Space Gray iPhone 6 mockups

We’ve seen a steady stream of iPhone 6 mockup devices from a variety of blogs including Nowhereelse.fr and MacRumors. Now 9to5Mac has compiled its collection of cases and mockups, including two iPhone 6 mockups in Gold and Space Gray, and showcased the units in the video embedded below.

The mockups match earlier leaks, with a rounded design that is reminiscent of the iPod touch and a larger form factor to accommodate a 4.7-inch display. The cases and the mockups are from different sources, but they match perfectly notes 9to5Mac, suggesting these dummy units and their cases are machined carefully based on leaked schematics and not hastily thrown together

Of course, these mockups are based on leaked schematics that may or may not match Apple’s final design for its next generation iPhone. You can check out the dummy units in the comparison video below, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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Twitter officially rolling out Mute functionality to all users

Earlier this month, we told you that Twitter is rolling out mute functionality to certain users of the Twitter iOS app. Today, the social network is rolling out mute to all users on iPhone, Android and web.

From Twitter’s blog post:

Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.

Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.

You can mute a user by tapping “•••” on any of their tweets and selecting mute @username. Alternatively, you can go to their profile, tap on the gear icon and select mute @username. You might not see mute available to you immediately as Twitter is gradually rolling out the feature to all users in the coming weeks. For more information on Mute, visit Twitter’s support site.

Third-party Twitter clients have long offered similar, and even more advanced muting features, as we detailed here. The good news is that third-party developers will be able to tap into the mute feature via the API, so your mute list should be synced across multiple Twitter clients (provided all of them add support for it).

Let us know in the comments if you’re seeing the mute option on your device.

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Coldplay’s Ghost Stories album available early via iTunes Radio

Apple’s streaming music service iTunes Radio includes First Play, a feature that provides exclusive premieres from top-selling artists including The Black Keys, Eminem and more. Today, the company kicked off another promotion that makes Coldplay’s upcoming album Ghost Stories available for free before its official debut later this month.

The unreleased tracks are being streamed on an iTunes Radio channel dedicated to the album. You can listen to the Ghost Stories premiere by opening the iTunes link on your computer or iOS devices. You also can open the iTunes app and click on the Coldplay “First Play” banner that is featured on the landing page for the iTunes music store.

The Ghost Stories album is slated to officially debut on May 19th, with pre-ordering available within iTunes. The nine-song album is available for $9.99, with pre-order customers receiving instant downloads of the tracks Magic, Midnight, and A Sky Full of Stars.

Have you listened to any other First Play featured artists? What do you think of the feature?

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Microsoft’s Office for iPad apps cross 27M downloads

Hyper makes accessories for Apple products, and its latest product called the iStick is the first Apple-approved Made-for-iPhone/iPad USB flash drive that comes with both a USB as well as a Lightning connector so as to work with computers and iOS devices.

The iStick is a small accessory that has a sliding switch with a USB port on one end and a Lightning connector on the other. With the USB end, you can use the iStick as a regular USB flash drive, and you can access the same data on your iOS device through the Lightning end of the switch.

The accessory has a companion app lets you play music, download photos and watch videos stored on the drive, without occupying any additional space on your iOS device’s inbuilt storage. Videos can be in almost any format, including native formats like mp4, m4v, mov as well as non-native formats like avi, mkv, wmv etc. You can even use the iStick to share data between two iOS devices.

The iStick drive comes in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB variants and costs $129, $169, $199 and $299 respectively. The product is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, where you can reserve an iStick for 50% off, which makes the costs $65 for 8GB, $85 for 16GB, $99 for 32GB and $149 for 64GB.

The lack of an option to expand iPhone or iPad storage can be frustrating at times, but I’m hoping the iStick makes up for the lack of an SD card slot on iOS devices. Let me know what you think about the iStick in the comments below.

[via 9to5Mac]

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iPhone 6 vs. iPhone 5s: New photos gives a good look at the radical new design

Few days back, the physical mockup of the iPhone 6 was compared to the iPhone 5s.

Folks at French website Nowhereelse.fr have published some more photos of the iPhone 6 mockup compared to the iPhone 5s, which gives a much better idea of the next generation iPhone’s radical new design.

According to Nowhereelse.fr, which claims it received these photos from an unnamed source, the iPhone 6 mockup measures 138 mm tall by 67 mm wide and 7 mm thick, compared to the iPhone 5s which measures 123.8 mm tall by 58.6 mm wide and 7.6 mm thick.

As you can see in the photos below, despite the 4.7-inch screen, the iPhone 6 doesn’t seem to be substantially bigger than the iPhone 5s probably due to narrower bezels. If these measurements are accurate, it will be only 11.5% taller and 14.3% wider than the iPhone 5s.

The leak also reveals the iPhone 6 will be 7 mm thick, which is marginally thinner than the iPhone 5s, and not 6 mm as some rumors had suggested, making it a lot more believable.

The power button is also on the top right hand side of the device, which is in line with rumors that have indicated Apple will be changing the position of the button for easier one-handed access on the larger iPhone.

I think this is the best physical mockup of the iPhone 6 we’ve seen so far. Some readers have criticized the rounded edges, but I really like the new design though I hope Apple does a better job of hiding the cut-outs for the antenna at the back.

Check out the iPhone 6 and iPhone 5s comparison photos below, and let me know what you think in the comments.

[via Nowhereelse.fr]

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Beats Co-Founders May Be Unveiled as Apple Execs at WWDC

According to people familiar with the matter, Apple may unveil Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as executives at the company’s June Worldwide Developers Conference. With more evidence popping up every day that Apple will indeed be acquiring the headphone maker and streaming music provider, it would make sense for the company to use WWDC as a stage to welcome Iovine and Dre to the company.

Apple is reportedly closing in on finishing the deal which entails Dre and Iovine selling the Beats brand to Apple for a decent $3.2 billion sum, and its announcement is expected soon. Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre are both expected to assume roles on Apple’s executive board, but there is not yet evidence to confirm that these roles even exist. “One person said Iovine would likely oversee all of Apple’s music strategy and handle relationships with labels and publishers,” writes Billboard.

Apple has felt pressure in relationships with music labels recently as paid iTunes downloads have taken a dip, and some analysts say that Apple’s quick push to acquire Beats represents nervousness about partially missing the music streaming train. Apple’s iTunes still serves as the world’s leading digital music store, but the company has had to propose drastic measures such as exclusive albums for download ahead of streaming services to help remedy continually falling sales numbers.

Notably, if Apple were to give Dr. Dre some stage time at WWDC, it wouldn’t be the first time. Dre, also known as Andre Young, took the stage about 10 years ago via video to personally congratulate Steve Jobs on the launch of the iTunes Store and the iPod. Beyond this, the acquisition is equally as tied to Iovine, who met with Steve Jobs to talk about a music service in 2003, and met with Tim Cook to talk about the Beats streaming service last year.

Reuters reports that the acquisition will be announced at some point within the week, and Apple’s WWDC is set to happen June 2-6. It looks like we’re in for a busy couple of months in many different respects. What do you think about Dr. Dre being in an Apple executive role?

[Billboard]

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Apple looking to further boost Safari JavaScript performance with upgrades to Nitro engine

Apple is working on boosting JavaScript performance in Safari across Mac and iOS, as revealed in recent builds of WebKit, the open source rendering engine Safari is built upon.

The WebKit wiki shows an update to the Nitro JavaScript engine codenamed “FTL JIT” that make Safari’s JavaScript performance much faster than Chrome, and comparable to Firefox. Info World reports:

FTLJIT is still considered experimental, so although it’s being made available in the OS X port of WebKit by default, it’s not actually turned on yet — it has to be enabled through command-line flags.

So far, the speed boosts afforded by FTLJIT vary but are intriguing. AreWeFastYet, the JavaScript testing site founded by Mozilla’s JavaScript team, ran its own benchmarks on 64-bit OS X and found the LLVM-powered build of WebKit to be markedly faster than Chrome on some benchmarks. That said, Firefox running asm.js versions of the same benchmarks still consistently beat WebKit.

While speeding up JavaScript is a technical detail, it has a direct impact on the user experience, as most modern websites today make heavy use of JavaScript for features like dynamic loading of content without page refresh, animating elements on the webpage, etc.

The Nitro JavaScript engine, introduced in 2011 in iOS, improved JavaScript performance by a factor of two, and a combination of the improvements in the engine as well as processor advancement will further contribute to faster performance.

Apple however hasn’t made the Nitro engine available to third-party browsers and in-app web views in apps like Twitter, Facebook etc., so it’s uncertain whether the FTL JIT updates would benefit these browsers or not.

We hope that Apple is working to bring these JavaScript improvements to iPhone and iPad as part of iOS 8.

[via MacRumors]

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