Guide to Mac, iPod, iPad and iPhone news and reviews
Many Mac users use utilities to temporarily prevent their computer from sleeping, often relying on sleep corners, the third party tool called Caffeine, pmset, or more recently, the command line utility that is now bundled with OS X called caffeinate. B…
Of all the companies that would make sense for Apple to acquire, Nuance — the company behind Siri — would seem high on the list. That’s apparently not the case. A new report from the Wall Street Journal states that Apple’s chief rival Samsung is moving in to acquire the influential creator of voice-recognition software, which could mean dire things for the folks in Cupertino if the deal goes through.
Nuance isn’t just known for Siri; it’s also the company behind DragonNaturallySpeaking, one of the first and most reliable names in voice-recognition software. The company has also done some work for Amazon and other companies, but its relationship with Apple has earned it the most attention in recent years. Apple managed to keep the extent of the relationship secret for some time after Siri’s launch, but last year Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed that the iPhone maker does, in fact, rely heavily on the service.
That could change in the near future. Just last April, Apple bought the rival speech recognition service Novauris, which was founded by former team members from DragonNaturallySpeaking. Back in July of last year, Apple quietly staffed its Boston office with voice-recognition specialists formerly employed by VoiceSignal Technologies. It was the first indication that the Cupertino company was attempting to distance itself from Nuance.
Apple thus appears to have been preparing for a development like this, but there’s always a chance that the transition to an entirely in-house service could see a few bumps as in the case of the launch of Apple Maps. As for Nuance, it’s possible Apple doesn’t even have anything to worry about. As the Journal reports, “It isn’t clear where sale talks, some of which happened earlier this year, currently stand or if they will lead to a deal.”
Follow this article’s writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
Cropping is an essential image editing function, helping to improve composition of a photo, to emphasize the focus of an image, or to reduce unnecessary parts of a picture. While many Mac users use third party tools to perform image cropping, no additi…
[This is an advertorial. Maclife gets a portion of each unit sold.]Have you ever had the urge to build a website? Maybe it’s just for a personal project or a portfolio page, or maybe it’s for something bigger like your business. Whether you’re just sta…
[This is an advertorial. Maclife gets a portion of each unit sold.]Scanners are great pieces of technology that turn your phyiscal pieces of paper into digital documents. But you don’t always have a scanner around when you need it and they aren’t exact…
FlipPix Art is a logic puzzle app that is fun for all ages. You need to use logic to fill in squares that form an approximation of an image. When you touch Play, you are presented with a picture with question marks representing hidden pictures that will be revealed when you solve the puzzle. Touch a […]
Apple has been long known for using incredibly beautiful imagery for their product marketing efforts, and like most beautiful pictures, they make for amazing wallpapers too. With that in mind, we went through Apple.com with the handy developer inspecto…
Maiko 434 is today’ featured iPad painting. It was created by Flickr member Yoshiyuki Uchida, using the Brushes 2 app on an iPad 3. I believe the word Maiko is an apprentice geisha in western Japan, at least so says Wikipedia. In any case I think this image is incredibly striking and the colors in […]
With production of iPhone 6 nearing, an array of physical mockups and supposed hardware parts from the device are surfacing around the web which are able to provide a look at what the next iPhone may actually look like. If the past is any indicator of …
This weeks featured reader setup comes to us from Iain S., who has a great Mac studio for his work in photography and music production. Let’s jump in and learn a bit more about this workstation: What hardware composes your current Mac setup? iMac 27″ (2013 model) with 32GB RAM MacBook Pro 17” (2011 model) … Read More
Our featured iPad Insight deal is a return of a hugely popular previous offer – the Complete iOS Developers Course at 88{813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b} off. It’s available for just $59, down from the standard price of $499. Here’s a little intro to the offer: A true iOS Bootcamp, you’ll gain the skills and learn the tools needed […]
Great apps are a big part of what makes for a great mobile (or even desktop) device. As iPad users, we’ve been fortunate that right from the start there have been rich pickings when it comes to great iPad apps – and we continue to be spoiled for choice when it comes to finding excellent […]
The Mac issues a warning when an attached disk, drive, or volume has not been ejected properly, this is to insure against data loss on the drive in question, and it is good advice to follow. Of course the next obvious question for so many newcomers to …
I recently took pains to re-establish my IMDB account to track all the movies and shows I actually want to see. This has been working well for movies, but it’s inelegant for tracking TV episodes because there’s no easy way to mark an episode as “watched”. I track movies by adding them to a watchlist […]
Do you like watching soccer matches, or as the rest of the world knows it, football? Want to watch live streams of the 2014 FIFA World Cup live from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Don’t miss any of the action, because you’ve got a few free native iOS apps that will help you in … Read More
TouchPal is the first keyboard that supports swipe (or slide) typing to offer a video demo working on iOS 8. The demo shows swipe typing in action on an iPhone running an early iOS 8 beta. It’s hard to gauge how well this TouchPal keyboard will work compared to other leading swipe keyboards just from […]
