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Opening
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Opening Music
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Music is Say Anything by Manda and the Marbles
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Mandaandthemarbles.com
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Sponsor: Smile
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PDFpen for iPhone and PDFpen for iPad
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PDFpen for iPhone and PDFpen for iPad
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They are on sale through the end of the year at a great price, so get a gift for yourself this holiday season
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PDFpen for iPad $6.99 (reg. $14.99)
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PDFpen for iPhone $1.99 (reg. $4.99)
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Then you can edit, markup, fill out PDF form, and sign PDFs on the go.
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With iCloud and Dropbox integration you'll have access when and where you need your PDFs
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And don't forget to also grab a few of the other great Smile apps too. TextExpander Touch, PDFpen for Mac, TextExpander, and Disc label too.
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News
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Apple expands Texas operations
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Apple has started construction on a 1 million square foot operations facility in Texas
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The facility expands existing operations that Apple has in Austin in which the currently employee about 3,500 workers
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The new operation is expected to generate about 3,600 new jobs over the next 10 years
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The project will be completed in 2-phases
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The current phase is for a 200,000-square-foot facility in two buildings and will cost $56 million, It's scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015.
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Phase 2 is due to complete by 2021 and will involve another 800,00 square feet of facilities spread across multiple buildings.
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Apple is expected to spend approximately $304 million on the expansion and will get $30 million in tax breaks for the project
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The project was almost scrapped in April when they ran into some approval issues with local officials in Travis County.
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A deal was eventually reach however Apple agreed to an average salary of $35,000 for the bottom 10 percent of workers at the facility and that project contractors would get a minimum hourly rate of $11-per-hour.
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iOS 6 adoption up with Google Maps release
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Google reported that in the first 48 hours after it released their Google Maps app for iOS that it had 10 million downloads
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The app was meet with very positive reviews from pundits like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, with even Google admitting the iOs version was bet than the current Google Maps app on Android.
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This week the ad network, MoPub used data taken from the 12,000 iOS applications they support and claimed they saw a 29% increase in devices running iOS 6 in the five days following Google Maps’ introduction
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They suggest the data shows there was a large number of iOS users waiting to upgrade due to Apple moving to their own Maps and from the subsequent negative reviews surrounding the release.
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The study from MoPub is up for debate however. The ad service Chitika ran a similar report just a day and a half after the release of Google Maps and found that iOS 6 usage had jumped just 0.2%. The MoPub data is likely more accurate though since they had a much larger sample and most users likely didn't update until a few days later.
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After the report was published Chitika came back and said that their numbers were flat for the 6 day period following the release of Google Maps
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They speculate that the real reason for the increase moPub saw in iOS 6 adoptions was the iPhone 5 launch in China
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The Chitika numbers only represent US and Canada while MoPubs numbers are global
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Apple launched the iPhone 5 in China (and 32 other countries) on the 17th.
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Apple Said they sold more than 2 million iPhones in the opening weekend
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The real answer is likely a mix of both, but it seems more likely to me that the iPhone 5 launches cased a larger percentage of the adoption spike
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Rivals unite to scoop up Kodak patents
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Kodak announced this week that it would be selling more than 1,100 patents related to the capture, manipulation and sharing of digital images to groups lead by Intellectual Ventures Management LLC and RPX Corp.
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The deal was also backed by 12 companies including Apple, Google, Research in Motion, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others.
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Apple and the others will license the patents in the deal and as a result resolve all patent-infringement lawsuits coming from Kodak.
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By splitting the deal with the 12 other parties Apple not only gets to only pay a potion of the $525 million dollar deal it also avoids having to go to court on the patent infringement claims made by Kodak. Claims in which Kodak alleged that Apple owed them more than $1 billion in patent royalties.
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The deal sound like a big win for Apple and the partners, but also helps Kodak which had filed for bankruptcy protection in January. Kodak still retains 9, 600 other patents and has been working to gain financing to exit bankruptcy in the first half of 2013.
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Lightning and 30-pin accessory mash-up mix-up
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A multi-device Kickstarter charging station project drew quite of bit of attention to a restriction in the Made for iPhone (MFI) guidelines looked to prevent the fully funded project from reaching consumers
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The POP charging station was going to offer both Lighting and 30-pin connectors as well as USB charging ports so it would be a universal charging solution that would support multiple devices including multiple generations of Apple products
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But the developers hit a snag when Apple told them they couldn't move forward because the MFI guidelines prohibited devices that included both Lightning and 30-pin connectors.
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The POP station developers posted on the Kickstarter blog that due to the restriction and because they didn't want to make compromises in the product that they were going to fully refund all the backers money and kill the project.
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Further, because Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunds, they developers built their own system and were going to eat the Kickstarter fees themselves.
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The story got a lot of attention this week and it looks like Apple was paying attention because the PR team responded saying that the restriction was in place due to " technical issues that prevented accessories from integrating 30-pin and Lightning connectors"
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There is a happy ending for everyone though, Apple also announced that they had resolved the issue and have now updated the guidelines to allow products with both both 30-pin and Lightning connectors to support charging.
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The POP product team said if the guidelines have indeed been changed then the project will be back on, but they were cautious as so far the word of the change has only come from Apple PR and not the MFi group.
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I would imagine it will be until after the Holidays before they know for sure.
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New Mac don't do Windows
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Some new iMac owners are frustrated to discover that their new system won'rt run Bootcamp
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The issue is isolated to owners who opted for the highest end 27" models with the 3TB Fusion Drive
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Apple does have a note about the issue in it's Fusion Drive support documents, but it's likely most people wouldn't have noticed that.
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Some other limitations Fusion Drive owners may have missed
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You can only add one partition to the hard disk on a Fusion Drive.
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You can only mount a Fusion Drive in Target Disk mode on a system OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2 or later.
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If you are video capturing a project to a Fusion drive and the capture exceeds the 128GB size of the Flash it will fall back to the HDD storage and could start dropping frames
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iOS 6.0.2 battery drain
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Some users are reporting rapid battery loss on iOS devices after apply the iOS 6.0.2 update
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The update has seemed to fix issues that some users had when connecting to Wi-Fi networks, but may have come at a cost.
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One theory is that when it's scanning for wi-fi networks it's using more power to do so. Some users say the drain seems to be happing as the travel where the device might be seeing and trying to detect various wi-fi hot spots
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Other users say it may simply be a visual bug. One user reported being at 4% battery for several hours with no change in the battery indicator.
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Personally I don't think I've noticed and change in my devices since applying the update. How about you?
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Apple has reportedly been aware of the issue and is supposedly already investigating.
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Number show growth in smartphones and tablets
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According to TechCrunch Forrester Research published its annual “State of Consumers and Technology” report and not surprisingly it shows significant growth in the tablet market this year
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The study found that 19% of US consumers now have a tablet, a number that has doubled from last year.
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For proof that Apple may need to get more serious about the TV business this year the study showed that 43% of consumers now connect to the web with their TV sets. 42% use game consoles, 19% use connect TV sets, and just 14% use a set top box, like Apple TV or Roku
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Nielsen published end of the year numbers on Smartphones
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This year US ownership of smartphone finally surpassed feature phone usage. Their study noted that smartphone ownership at the start of the year was at 49 percent, but had grown to 56% by the end of the third quarter.
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In OS share the study found that Android accounted for 52 percent of the market, with iOS accounting for 35 percent with Blackberry in 3rd with 7%. Windows phone came in at 2%.
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Looking at a smaller time frame though gives a different perspective
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Kantar Worldpanel ComTech released numbers for the last 12 weeks of US smartphone sales and they show the iPhone trending upward to gain a slight edge over Android
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According to their findings the iPhone now has 53 percent of the United States smartphone market with Android at 42%
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The upward trend for Apple likely has to do with relatively recent the release of the iPhone 5.
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The study does also note however that despite a small 2.5% growth for the iPhone in Europe, Apple there captured just 25.3% of the market vs. Androids dominant 61% share.
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New iPads already in the works
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So just got that shiny new iPad or iPad mini for the holidays? If some rumors are to be believed Apple could grinch it up in the spring
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RBC Capital Markets analyst Doug Freedman, says he was touring chip factories in China and he think it looks like Apple could be moving up production of the next gen iPad mini which is rumored to be adding a retina display
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Here's the thing though. No one has a firm idea of when Apple planned to release version two of the mini, so just saying their stepping up the release schedule really doesn't tell us much
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Freedman also says that Texas Instruments is one of the chip suppliers being asked to produce components for the next mini. I'm not sure that there are any TI chips in the current gen mini, but TI has done touchscreen controller chips in the iPad 2 and Apple's new lightning connectors also have integrated circuits from TI
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Well if you believe the Japanese blog Makotakra, and they have been right on Apple rumors in the past, they say their sources claim Apple is planning new iPad updates in March
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In addition to the iPad mini retina update the blog says Apple will update the 9.7" iPad making it thinner, lighter, and bring the design in-line with the iPad mini and iPhone 5
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One thing that cast a shadow of a doubt on the Makotakra report is they also claim the mini will get a bump up to the 9.7" iPads A6X processor which seems unlikely given the iPad minis much smaller battery capacity.
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At this point I'm not putting anything past Apple. I think they may go ahead and move to a bi-annual iPad update cycle.
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As much as this will alienate consumers at first, we'll get used to it
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It also gives Apple more flexibility to update the products as new technologies and manufacturing cycles allow and let's they stay up with or ahead of their competitors who already use more aggressive product update cycles.
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Feedback, Comments and Commentary
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Saving Instagram Photos
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Phil wanted to know if there was a way to save the full sized image of another users instagram photo on iOS
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When I investigated this seemed incredibly hard to do as the photos are pretty protected. There might be a simpler way, but this is what I did:
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1) In Intsagram on iOS locate the image and click the "•••" button
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2) Click the 'Tweet' option
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3) In the Tweet Sheet select and copy the Instagram link
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4) Tap cancel to not send a tweet and exit Instagram
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5) Open Mail end email your self the link (the next part has to be done in Safari on the Mac. I couldn't get it to work in Mobile Safari)
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6) Open the link in Safari on the Mac and make sure you have the 'Show Developer menu in menu bar' option turned on in Preferences > Advanced
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7) Right + Click the image in the Safari window and choose 'Inspect Element'
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8) In the web inspector you should see the image URL as a "background image". Double click and you should be able to select the URL.
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9) Copy and paste the URL into Safari
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10) Now you should be able drag out the image or Right + Click and choose 'Save Image As…'
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Of course another option would be to just take a screenshot in iOS
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Press the Home + Sleep Wake button, but that will five you a low res copy and Phil wanted to save out the original
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With Instragam's privacy policy debacle this week there were a few ways to Save off your own Instagram photos that surfaced
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I found one site called Instaport, that will downlaod all your images as a ZIP.
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Another one is Free the Photos. This transfers the images from Instagram to your Flickr account
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Accessorize your new iOS device
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Consider Apple Care Plus or an 3rd party plan with accidental damage protection
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As someone who had his new iPad and iPhone befall a tragic fate this is one add on I have reconsidered
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I never used to get Apple Care on my iOS devices, but now think it or a third party option is worth considering based on how accident prone you tend to be with your gadgets
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A few note on Apple Care Plus
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Doesn't necessarily cover full immersion
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You get 2 accidental damage incidents
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Case or no case
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For my iPad I go with the Smart Cover. I like the ability to quickly attach or detach it plus that it adds very little bulk
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There certainly is no shortage of case options.
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Physical keyboard
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Overall I tend to use the on-screen keyboard just fine, but I'm a hunt and peck typist
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If you want a physical keyboard the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard cover gets rave reviews from folks I know who have it.
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Another option is a bluetooth keyboard. When I need it I use Apple's awesome wireless keyboard
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I also have the Incase Origami Workstation case
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Adapters
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Lightning to 30-pin adapters
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Standard ($29)
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0.2m cable edition ($39)
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Support analog and USB audio, as well as syncing and charging
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Some older speaker docks that used the Firewire pins to support charging won't charge
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Adapters don't support video out. The Lightning connector itself does, but you'll need the appropriate lightning to video adapter
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iPod out, the feature that sends control signals to external accessories like car head units, is not supported with the adapters
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USB audio in and out will work, so old 30-pin mics like the Blue Mikey Digital should work.
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Lightning to Digital AV Adapter (HDMI) or Lightning to VGA Adapter
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These I have found less useful since being able to to Airplay mirroring
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Still needed if you want to hardwire
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Lightning to Micro USB
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For charging, even with a higher wattage adapter, this will only draw 5W. That's a limitation of the micro USB spec.
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Lightning to Camera Adapters
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Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader
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Lightning to USB Camera Adapter (midi, some USB keyboards, mics, etc)
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You could use the Lightning to 30-pin adapters, id you have the older 30-pin camera adapters
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My must have apps
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Reeder
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Pocket
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Instapaper
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GoodReader
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PDFPen for iPad or iPhone
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Dropbox
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Tweetbot
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Twitter, but only because it brings iOS integration.
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Google Authenticator
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TextExpander Touch
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1Password
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ByWord
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Textastic
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iBooks
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Downcast
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Netflix
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PBS
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Amazon Prime Video
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Ignition
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iSSH
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Letterpress
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Jetpack Joyride
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Closing
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Podcast Marketplace
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Thanks to my sponsors
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Circus Ponies
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Smile
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Gazelle
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Keep emails coming. Audio comments.
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281-622-4269 or 281-Mac-I-Am-9
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PLEASE LEAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
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MacCast Forum
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Follow me on Twitter
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Checkout the page on Facebook
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