Foxconn Building "iPhone 5 Base" in Tai Yuan

Foxconn is reportedly looking to recruit no less than 20,000 workers that will be tasked with assembling the next-generation iPhone 5. At the same time, hundreds are going on strike because Foxconn allegedly failed to compensate them properly. Reports from The China Morning News and M.I.C. Gadget reveal that “Foxconn in Tai Yuan is now building a new base for iPhone 5 production.” An insider at Tai Yuan Foxconn tells the press that, “As long as they meet the basic standards, (we’ll) take as many as possible.” The news comes just as other reports say that hundreds of Foxconn workers from a factory in Shanxi Province in northern China have gone on strike. The strike is said to be taking place at a factory in the Xiaodian district of the provincial...

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OS X Mountain Lion Features: Game Center

Apple never said it was getting serious about gaming on iOS but, eventually, it did. So the next natural step was to do that for the Mac as well. And it’s all going down in OS X Mountain Lion, available in late summer. “Mac gets in on the game,” reads the Game Center marketing page on Apple.com. “The Mac is about to go up against iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch — in a friendly Game Center way. Now it’s a bigger playing field with even more competition.” OS X Mountain Lion will allow you to create a Game Center account with your Apple ID right on your Mac. You won’t need an iOS device to do it, as is the current requirement. You’ll be able to spot all your Game Center friends, challenge them to a multiplayer game (or play co-op, depending on...

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Script: Vanilla Forum

Vanilla Forum is one of the most used open-source PHP systems for running an online bulletin/message board. From support forums to troll-haunted tech boards or just a simple Q&A consultancy website, Vanilla can handle it in stride. If an avid forum troll, you might have recently noticed a massive change regarding the platform most forums run on. Once the king of all open-sourced forum systems was phpBB, but for 1-2 years now, especially in tech and support forums, the main choice has been Vanilla. Boasting a fast admin panel, a constantly growing modules repository and a unique and memorable interface for displaying forum topics, Vanilla is one of our Editors' go-to script when it comes to recommending an open-source forum to our...

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Finally, a Plausible iPhone 5 Rumor

A fairly believable iPhone 5 leak has emerged mentioning 4G LTE radio, a similar (if not identical) screen size / form factor, and a micro dock connector. iMore‘s Rene Ritchie has some well connected sources who are telling him that the iPhone 5,1, as it is being referred to in iOS betas, will have: "similar if not same sized screen (currently 3.5-inch but not set in stone); 4G LTE radio; new “micro dock” connector; fall/October 2012 release." Apart from the “micro dock” connector (which isn’t all that far fetched either), all these details seem highly plausible. There have been numerous rumors that Apple will increase the size of its iPhone to support a 4-inch display. While that may work for other smartphone vendors, Apple seems to be...

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Apple Rejecting Apps that Access UDIDs

Facing pressure from regulators regarding how apps can obtain and share user data, Apple has commissioned two of its ten review teams to start rejecting iOS software that accesses the UDID (unique device identifier). Sources with alleged knowledge of Apple’s plans are telling TechCrunch that two of a total of 10 review teams “started doing blanket rejections of apps that access UDIDs this week.” Of the 10 teams Apple uses as a net for the tens of thousands of apps being submitted each week, four will be commissioned for the job next week. The number will keep escalating until all teams will be “turning down apps that are still using UDIDs.” The report quotes Jim Payne, who led mobile advertising network AdMob before it sold to Google...

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Script: MediaElement.js

MediaElement.js is a library for creating audio and video players that work with the new HTML 5 audio and video tags. The library is different from all other similar tools because it does not create HTML5 audio/video players and then offers a Flash fallback for older browsers. MediaElement.js uses a totally new concept of Flash Fallforward (instead of fallback), upgrading the browser with custom Flash and Silverlight plugins that mimic the W3C HTML5 MediaElement API. This ensures ancient browsers like IE 6, 7 and 8 can work nicely with <audio> and <video>, and music and movie formats can work across all browsers, regardless if they have been implemented or not. Yes, this means WebM in Safari, h.264 in Opera and many more. Of...

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Facebook's Full Page Logout Ads Go for $700,000, €529,000

A few weeks ago a new type of Facebook ads made the rounds, the logout page ad. It's the biggest display ad Facebook has to offer and it has some unique, and not quite obvious advantages. One question though was how much do they cost. We have a price now and because of it we know the advertisers Facebook is targeting with this ad unit as well. AdAge says Facebook is asking $700,000 for the full page ad per day so, clearly, only big name advertisers are going to afford it. There's a catch, the ads can be bought on their own, they're bundled with home-page ads so you're not paying the full sum just for them. In fact, the homepage ads go for $550,000, €415,000 with the logout option being $160,000, €121,000 extra. Facebook said some 37 million...

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Chrome OS Laptop Examined by FCC, Sony VAIO Is the Brand

We've barely heard anything about Chromebooks over the past few months, but it looks like the idea hasn't completely been abandoned. We don't base this conclusion on anything official, not really, even though Sony is, essentially, the one that enabled us to draw it. What happened was that a certain product developed by this particular company passed through the testing labs of the Federal Communications Commission. For those who don't know, products that communicate over Wi-Fi or 3G have to pass a screening by the FCC before they are given the green light to start selling. The one that has now come to our attention is Sony's VAIO VCC111 Series, the company's first Chromebook. In other words, it is a laptop running the Google Chrome operating...

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Comice OS 4 Final Officially Released

Introduced last month, the final version of the Comice OS 4 Linux operating system, built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment and customized to look like Mac OS, has arrived, on March 23rd. Comice OS 4 is based on both Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS distributions, containing Linux kernel 3.2, GNOME 3.2.2, Mozilla Firefox 11, Mozilla Thunderbird 11, LibreOffice 3.5, Clementine, Shotwell, Totem Movie Player, BleachBit, Adobe Flash Player plug-in and Synaptic Package Manager. Comice OS 4 (previously known as Pear OS) also contains the Pear Appstore, which features parallel downloading, resuming of downloads, updates notifier, cache cleaner, and one-click installation. Comice OS 4 is distributed as Live DVD ISO images for both the 32-bit...

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RIM Offers Devs BlackBerry 10 Prototype Smartphones in May

Research In Motion is trying to keep developers close now more than ever. The company has just confirmed it will offer them BlackBerry 10 prototype smartphones at its May event in Orlando. It's unclear if all attendees at the event will get the device or just a fair number of lucky developers. What's certain is that RIM will demonstrate lots of new toolsets for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system. It appears that RIM will release the first beta of BlackBerry 10 Developer Tools at BlackBerry 10 Jam conference, which will take place in Orlando from May 1st through May 3rd. The Canadian company has jusct confirmed on its developer site that the following tools will be demoed during the conference: BlackBerry 10 Native SDK, BlackBerry...

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Script: Sweet Tooltip

Sweet Tooltip is a jQuery and CSS 3-based tooltips framework for creating visually appealing, animated hover tooltips. There are many tooltips systems out there, but not many rely solely on code to render the tooltip graphics. Sure, there are a couple of good ones like Tipsy, jqTip or qTip, but none of them was updated to use the latest CSS 3 syntax. Utilizing new styles made possible by CSS 3 features like linear-gradient, box-shadow, text-shadow, :after and :before selectors, Sweet Tooltip creates heavenly-looking graphics with just a few lines of code. On the other hand, jQuery is used for animating the tooltips and acquiring the tooltip text from the hovered element. Check out the Sweet Tooltip demo here. Download Sweet Tooltip here...

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Nokia to Launch 808 PureView in the UK Only in May

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is gearing up for the release of its most advanced camera phone to date, the Nokia 808 Pure View.  Made official at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the handset will arrive on shelves with Symbian on board and with a 41-megapixel photo snapper on the back.  What hasn’t been made official as of yet is a release date for the device. The latest reports on the matter, however, suggest that May might be the lucky timeframe for enthusiasts.  According to the guys over at KingOfGadgets, the handset will land only in the middle of the second quarter of the year, though no official confirmation on the matter has been delivered as of yet.  Nokia’s latest Symbian phone runs under Belle...

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Acer's Ultrabook Aspire Timeline Ultra Uses Kepler GPU

Microsoft, NVIDIA and Acer have jointly announced the Aspire Timeline Ultra, the first ultrabook to use a discrete GPU from NVIDIA's 600M series. When we covered the NVIDIA GeForce 600M notebook graphics line, we didn't have many examples to give in terms of laptops equipped with them. That situation has now changed, thanks to an apparently joint effort on the part of Microsoft and Acer. The Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra has become the first ultrabook to incorporate one of the GPUs, specifically the GeForce GT640M. As an extra divergence from the regular ultrabook mold, the 15-inch item comes with a DVD drive. “It’s for the consumers who are looking for a laptop that will meet their needs today but also anticipate the things they’ll be doing...

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