Tech

Apple was awarded a patent outlining public transit navigation tools

Apple might finally be adding a long-awaited public transit navigation tool in Apple Maps, the company’s mapping service heavily criticized for its direction problems when it launched in 2012.

Apple filed a patent called “Location Based-Features for Commute Assistant,” a function providing directions on buses, subways and trains, according to a patent it was awarded Thursday. The patent describes basic features closely resembling those offered by Google Maps, along with the ability for users to pinpoint specific spots for the route to include.

Still, Apple’s filing doesn’t mean such a feature is definitely coming to Apple Maps — companies routinely file for patents without incorporating the included ideas in any of their products.

Apple’s new patent arrives after the company acquired Embark and Hotspot last year, two popular services offering mass transportation directions. Apple bought both companies shortly before filing for the public transit direction patent in November 2013.

While Apple Maps initially suffered from faulty driving directions — paths allegedly included airport taxiways, for example — the service managed a strong rebound from its initial flop. In June, there were 42 million American adults using Apple Maps, compared to 64.5 million using Google Maps, according to comScore, numbers likely helped by Apple Maps’ status as the default map app in iOS.

Looking to download a few great iPhone apps while saving some money this weekend? Check out these five, all on sale or free for the new few days.

The Hobbit: Official Visual Companion

As we await the release of the third installment of The Hobbit (how time flies), we may also find ourselves, for good reason, significantly less invested in the plot of this series than the original Lord of The Rings.

That said, a fascinating app that tells us about the goings on of Middle-earth might be precisely what we need to stay caught up before the release. Packed with interactive maps and character bios, this app might finally tell you the difference between all of the dwarves.

The Hobbit is temporarily free in the App Store.

Sonic Jump

There are a certain class of games that have gone surprisingly undeveloped for iOS — Sonic and friends is one of them. Sonic Jump, although not the classic vertical running game that made the franchise famous, is all about jumping heights. Play as Sonic, or your other favorite characters from the series, like Tails and Knuckles. Collect rings the way you did when you were 8.

Sonic Jump is on sale for $0.99 in the App Store.

Appetites

If you’re anything like most people, cooking recipes never turn out the way you expect. It’s no fault of your own, but your meals might turn out less like a pile of mush if you were taught how to do it properly. Appetites offers countless step-by-step instructional cooking videos to make sure you don’t mess things up miserably.

Appetites is temporarily free in the App Store.

Fuel My Run

If you, like all your friends and relatives ,are training for a marathon, there’s the likely risk of hitting the 20-mile-wall. An app like Fuel My Run can use your phone’s GPS to track your pace and help you monitor progress. It will also watch your mid-race caloric intake in order to make sure you physically have enough energy to actually finish your run at your desired pace.

Fuel My Run is temporarily free in the App Store.

Catan

At this point, everybody’s been forced to play a game of Settlers of Catan at a party as it dies down. Of course, there’s that embarrassing moment when you have nothing left to spend and have been forced to make dark and shady deals simply to stay in the game. This iPhone version may offer just enough practice hours so you don’t end up losing all the time.

Catan is on sale for $2.99 in the App Store.

After hackers leak salaries, social security numbers and films

Sony Picture’s security team had few resources and a poor reputation among its employees, according to new reports about the company-wide hack that led to leaked movie budgets, salary information, social security numbers and unreleased films.

Unnamed sources with ties to the company told Fusion that Sony had a lax attitude towards security. “Sony’s ‘information security’ team is a complete joke,” one former employee said. “We’d report security violations to them and our repeated reports were ignored.”

Just 11 people are assigned to the information security team out of a company of 7,000 employees, according to leaked files discovered by Fusion. Only three people on the team are not managers or directors.

The executive director of information security at Sony Pictures, Jason Spaltro, told CIO Magazine in a 2007 interview that it may be “a valid business decision to accept the risk” of a security breach, depending on the cost of investing in security and the cost of a successful attack.

Sony is offering one year of free credit monitoring and fraud protection to current and former employees, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Many experts speculate the recent breach, which is now being investigated by the security firm FireEye as well as the FBI, was perpetrated by North Korea, though a Pyongyang diplomat recently denied his country was responsible.

Prime members will be able to get Amazon-branded diapers and baby wipes

Amazon is now offering a new perk exclusively to its Prime members: Amazon-label baby wipes and diapers.

The baby products are the first part of a new lineup of consumer goods that the e-commerce giant announced on Dec. 4 called Amazon Elements. Elements, Amazon says, will feature labels that customers can scan on the company’s mobile shopping app to find where and when they were made, and where the ingredients were sourced from, among other information.

“The two things customers told us they want are premium products that meet their high standards, and access to information so they can make informed decisions, Amazon Elements offers both,” said Sunny Jain, Amazon.com consumables vice president in a statement.

Amazon also sells Pampers diapers, produced by Procter and Gamble, and Huggies, a Kimberly Clark product, so the new product line sets the online retailer up as a competitor with its suppliers. Amazon.com acquired Quidsi, Inc., which operates Diapers.com and Soap.com, for $550 million in 2010.

Elements products are made by third-party manufacturers, Amazon said, with the diapers manufactured in Canada and baby wipes in Indiana.

An Amazon spokesperson said there’s demand among Prime customers for products including diapers, as well as information about where products are sourced.

Elements is the latest feature offered to Amazon Prime members, a $99-per-year subscription for customers that includes discounts on shipping, as well as free music, video and book downloads.

It's a barrel of a deal

If you were waiting to buy Breaking Bad, now’s probably the time to pull the trigger.

The collector’s edition Blue-ray ‘barrel’ is being sold on Amazon for an all-time low price of $120. The package includes all 62 episodes as well as bonuses like 55 hours of special features, a replica money barrel, a commemorative challenge coin, and some other stuff to eventually put in your basement for a while and then forget about.

The standard edition complete Blu-ray set is being sold for $86, if you don’t want the extra knick-knacks, and the DVD version is $60. According to Kinja Deals, that’s the cheapest it’s ever been offered for on Amazon.

[Amazon]

Apple CEO Tim Cook "honored" to lend his name to the bill

Alabama lawmakers plan to name an anti-discrimination bill after Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, who disclosed in a magazine essay last October that he was gay.

The ‘Tim Cook’ bill will bar discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender state employees, including school teachers, Reuters reports.

Alabama’s only openly gay state lawmaker, Patricia Todd, told Reuters that she originally posed the name in jest, but it gained traction in the media and eventually reached Apple’s executive suite. A statement from Apple confirmed that Cook was “honored” to have his name attached to the bill.

The statement came after a company official reportedly called Todd to express reservations, a position that was later reversed by Apple’s general counsel.

“I never in a million years would have expected it,” Todd said.

Read more at Reuters.

Ask these questions to yourself or before buying a gift

By the way Microsoft is marketing the Surface Pro 3, you’d think tablets and laptops were practically interchangeable: just a matter of personal preference. We’re not convinced.

Using a mix of product testing and data crunching, we’ve come up with five key questions to ask yourself before you commit to one device over the other for yourself or for a holiday gift.

1. Precise control or display quality?

Unless you’re talking about tablet-specific apps (which we’ll get to below), the laptop is still the king of control. Whether you’re writing a document or crafting a presentation, the tablet has yet to beat the precision of a point-and-click mouse or the convenience of a shortcut-rich keyboard. Don’t fool yourself with a flashy tablet demo; even the simplest spreadsheet will become a chore after weeks of taps and swipes.

On the flip side, however, tablets have a sneaky advantage: display quality. Typically measured in pixels per inch (PPI), a device’s pixel density determines how sharp your content looks, and after several hours of use, how much your eyes will (or won’t) hurt.

According to our data, the average 2014 tablet has a pixel density of about 260 ppi (pixels per inch)—fairly solid for a 10-inch device. That’s not to mention flagship models like the Galaxy Tab S 8.4, Amazon Kindle Fire HDX and iPad Mini 3, which each have pixel densities well over 300.

For laptops, the 2014 average drops below 200 PPI, barely better than the pixel density on the original iPhone (163 PPI). Yes, top models like the Yoga 3 Pro (276 PPI) and 2014 Razer Blade (262 PPI) are notable standouts, but even these products don’t match the best tablets on the market.

The bottom line is that most tablets will be easier on the eyes, and thus, better for extended viewing.* The question is just whether you’ll have enough control to get everything done.

*If you want to get technical, you can factor in “typical viewing distance” to make the comparison more apples-to-apples. On average, tablets still win handily.

2. Screen size or portability?

Yes, you can find just about any screen size on either device these days. The Planar Helium (a tablet) has a 27-inch display. The Acer Aspire One (a laptop) sports a diminutive 10.1-inch display.

But these are the outliers. Generally speaking, tablets are 7-11 inches, while laptops are 12-16 inches. Within each device category, if you wander outside those ranges, your selection tends to drop fast.

So let’s concede that the laptop will usually get you more screen real estate. Instead, consider portability, a feature that both tablets and laptops like to advertise. Once again, we crunched the numbers to see just how thin and heavy the average device in each category tends to be.

The average 2014 tablet is less than half the thickness (0.42 inches) of the average 2014 laptop (1.09 inches, folded). What’s more, with Sony and Apple shaving off inches on the iPad and Xperia every year, the gap may grow even wider.

The comparison looks even worse for laptops when you turn to weight. The average 2014 laptop still weighs about five pounds (4.99 lbs), over five times as much as the average 2014 tablet (0.95 lbs). Those extra inches and pounds will add up during commutes, presentations and vacations, so choose carefully.

3. Performance or simplicity?

Glance at a tablet’s spec sheet and you’ll see a few misleading numbers, like processor cores and clock speeds. Numbers like these tend to look comparable next to today’s mid-to-high range laptops, but they don’t tell the full story.

Take Geekbench, which stress tests all sorts of products to give you a fair comparison between device categories—a better reflection of real-world performance. Here, even some three-year-old laptops outperform today’s most powerful tablets. When looking at the table below, consider that the late 2011 MacBook Pro (13-inch) scored a 5,119. (The latest 13-inch MacBook Pro scored a 6,373.)

The silver lining for tablet buyers is that they may not need any of that power to begin with. If you’re just browsing the web, checking email, and downloading Angry Bird spinoffs, you’ll never need the processing power to edit a video or run a high-end video game. In fact, most tablets are built from the ground up to do one simple thing at a time, and do it well. If this is all you need, the simplicity of a tablet will more than make up for its lack of power.

4. Web browsing or apps?

Both laptops and tablets can browse the web. Both laptops and tablets can run apps. But each device excels where the other is merely satisfactory.

Take web browsing. To this day, tapping your way around the mobile Internet is an inconsistent experience. Flash is still buggy, text sizes unpredictable, and menus sometimes unusable. Granted, most modern websites work fine on a tablet, but there are still enough unpleasant surprises to send users back to their laptops, particularly with activities like buying gifts, managing finances or updating professional profiles.

On the other hand, the laptop often falls short in the world of apps. Sure, there are the old standbys like Word, Excel and Photoshop, but the laptop tends to miss out on new content from young, agile development teams. With a tablet, you can pick from dozens of polished photo-editing apps, half of them available for free. On a laptop, it’s often an extreme choice: either a $300 application from Adobe or a risky download for a clunky, limited editor from 2009.

In the end, it comes down to where you prefer spending your time. Love apps? Grab a tablet. Prefer to do everything in a browser? Stick with a laptop.

5. High-performance games or time-wasters (or neither)?

This won’t apply to everyone. For the gaming-indifferent, there’s no need to obsess over a laptop’s graphics card or a tablet’s selection of games.

For the rest of us, however, the situation gets a bit more complicated. Today’s best tablets are reasonably powerful, but traditional developers have yet to launch a truly incredible title on tablets (sorry, Infinity Blade). The device is still best for clever puzzles and fun time-wasters, like Angry Birds or Monument Valley (and we mean this as a compliment).

Meanwhile, the best gaming laptops can play just about anything, often outperforming the latest game consoles in performance and graphical prowess. The problem is that you’ll need to drop at least $1,500 to get the power you need.

Either device can scratch your gaming itch, it just depends upon the kind of game you’re into. Keep in mind, however, that a ~$500 laptop is probably the worst of both worlds: it’s not optimized for simple tap-and-swipe games, yet not powerful enough for top PC games. So if you like gaming, and you prefer PCs, start saving. Strapped for cash? There’s a big, angry bird waiting with your name on it.

More from FindTheBest:

Editors’ Choice: Best Game Console
The Best Holiday Gifts for Geeks
Are Phones and Tablets Becoming the Same Device?

Forget New Year’s resolutions. Your body needs these right now.

The holidays are here and — along with good tidings of comfort and joy, of course — they bring stressful shopping trips, overeating, late-night Elf on the Shelf antics, and a general abandonment of usual fitness routines.

But as you button up the year’s end, you don’t need to fall apart. These five connected fitness devices can help you stay on track before you get sidelined by the season’s trappings:

Basis Peak

Fitness bands and smart watches are on everyone’s list this year, but you might be better served to pick this one up early, rather than letting it sit all wrapped up for a month. The $199 fitness and sleep tracking watch has a few sensors that will not only help you survive the holiday, but be able to view the month-long flurry as a time to thrive.

In addition to the usual step and calorie counting, Peak also monitors body heat, sweat dissipation, and heart rate (take that, shopping stress!) without a chest strap. So when you’re running from store to store looking for that Snow Glow Elsa doll, you can honestly declare it a workout.

And then a month from now, when life gets back to normal, this Android and iOS-compatible watch can also automatically track your sleep (without having to tell the device you’re down for the night) and set gradually increasing fitness goals, so you can make next year your best one yet.

Fitbug Orb

Tiny wearables like Fitbug Orb are great for tracking motion, but it’s up to you to actually do something with that information. This $49 sensor not only keeps an eye on steps taken, calories burned, and sleep logged (and syncs this data with an iOS app), it also integrates with KiQplans, which are weight loss programs that combine your movement data with fitness activities and nutrition tips to help you actually slim down.

With 12-week, $19 regimens like Beer Belly Blaster and Goodbye Baby Bump, KiQplans are a good way to turn the most wonderful time of the year into an end-of-the-year, data-driven boot camp. Just make sure to stay away from the figgy pudding.

Push Band

If you’re the kind of fitness freak who won’t get shaken out of his or her routine, then this is the wearable for you. The first fitness tracker aimed at measuring strength, this $189 arm band links with an accompanying Android or iOS app to monitor not just your activity but your output. Pairing with your smartphone via Bluetooth, the app and device lets gym rats set strength, power, speed, and muscular endurance goals. Then, within the app, the user selects from a list of pre-programmed exercises, sets a weight load, presses a button on the armband and starts pumping.

After each set the app reviews velocity and power of each rep, as well as the resting time between, and can even recommend to going up or down in weight the next time you do that exercise. And when the workout is over, a progress tracker gives a session summary in full detail. It’s about working out smarter, not necessarily harder.

Sense Sleep Tracker

Just like Santa, Sense sees you when you’re sleeping, and knows when you’re awake. And it knows if you slept bad or good, with proximity, ambient light, particulate, temperature and humidity sensors, so you’ll learn to sleep good for goodness’ sake.

This $129 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and ANT-connected bedside and pillow-mounting combination sensor can help you to learn about your sleep, from patterns that you go through naturally, to disruptions in your environment that might be interrupting your shuteye. Its microphone detects your snoring and a small speaker wakes you up with gentle, gradual sounds.

But most importantly, the sleep sensor’s Android and iOS app learns your sleep cycles, so it can wake you up when you’re in a light level of sleep near to when you wanted to be awake, rather than at a specific time when you might be off in Never-Neverland.

Withings Smart Body Analyzer

It doesn’t take much to use this Internet-connected scale — literally, you just have to stand there. But by tracking weight as well as body composition data like fat mass and body mass index, this app-synced device can be more helpful than even the most sophisticated fitness trackers.

Still, loaded with sensors, it’s not like this smart scale isn’t trying. Able to automatically recognize up to eight individual users, track heart rates, and even monitor indoor air quality, it can give you a well-rounded picture of your overall health. And paired with Withings’ Health Mate app (and more than 100 other partner apps), it can help you gradually meet weight-related goals — so you won’t have to ask for elastic-waist lounge pants for Christmas this year.