iPad

Would you eat a burger created by The 404 Podcast? CNET social-media expert Caroline McCarthy joins us on today's episode and tell us about the burger joint of the future.

Rex Sorgatz, one of the founders of Fimoculous and former guest of The 404, consulted on 4Food, a new restaurant that adds a social-media twist to the burger by letting customers save their unique burger creations in the 4food system; a profit-sharing system even gives the creator 25 cents of in-store credit for every custom burger sold! Since Caroline knows practically everyone in Web 2.0, expect to see … Read more

As a long-time Mac troubleshooting researcher and consultant, one of my favorite and perhaps the most valuable Mac knowledge sites online is Apple's own Support Discussions forums. According to an official post on the site, the forums will be receiving a makeover, becoming more socially inclined by adding feature sets like avatars, homepages, and widgets. … Read more

This week, Scott stands in a very long line at the Apple store for an iPhone 4; Dan previews some possible fixes for NYC's terrible Taxi TV screens; and we reveal everyone's back-to-school tech picks.

Two video games have us buzzing right now. It's Madden season, so Scott (dressed in full Jet regalia) and Joey debate the merits of this year's $60 roster update; then we check out the trailer for BioShock Infinite, and show off some cool props from the game we managed to get our hands on (you can also check them out in the gallery below).

… Read more

We weren't fans of Bose's first in-ear headphones, but maybe Bose will make a better impression with its new line of in-ear headphones, which include the IE2 audio headphones and the MIE2 and MIE2i mobile headsets, which are designed "specifically for music-enabled mobile phones." The company says each is engineered with proprietary Bose technologies for improved audio quality and feature new StayHear tips for "greater stability and a comfortable fit."

None of these models are noise-canceling or noise-isolating. While the IE2 headphones don't feature an in-line microphone for receiving cell-phone calls, both the … Read more

When Apple released iOS 4 in June, it came with a new advertising system, called iAd, that it developed after acquiring Quattro Wireless. The early reviews from developers interviewed by CNET about the iAd platform are positive.

"When we looked at iAds, the experience and execution is in line with how we feel about brand advertising--communicate without interrupting the user," Shravan Goli, president of Dictionary.com, told CNET. "That makes the iAds really remarkable."

Before iAds, when an ad was clicked from an app, the user would be taken out of the app and into a … Read more

We've already written about a couple of robots that fetch your beer. Now we have one that gets you information about your beer. Kegbot is a free, open-source project that turns an ordinary beer kegerator, such as a KegMate, into a computerized drink tracker.

On its own, this is a pretty cool project. Using an Arduino microcontroller together with KegBot software and the Kegbot Arduino firmware, you can track the temperature of your beer and know how much is left, view statistics on who drank what, authenticate users via RFID tags, prevent unauthorized drinking, and more.

But why stop … Read more

Brace yourself for a lot of video game news on today's episode of The 404 Podcast as we discuss Wilson's obsession with throwing pigs at cats, Street Fighter experts offering lessons for $50 an hour, Rage running on an Apple iPhone, and BioShock Infinite!

Fresh off the success of this year's BioShock 2, the creators of the original game just announced a complete reimagining of the franchise in the form of BioShock Infinite. The original BioShock enjoyed countless game of the year awards, thanks to its creative storytelling. Ken Levine, creative director at Irrational Games, tells us … Read more

Adobe's Photoshop is one of those ubiquitous tools that touches everyone's life in one way or another. As the universal default program for photo and image manipulation, you may have used it to crop and retouch snapshots, create Web site ads or graphics, or just played around with making your own fake future iPhone design mock-ups. And if you're not actually a user, rest assured, pretty much every image you see online or in a magazine has been put through the program to some degree.

As a bit of a Photoshop wiz (I'd call myself a … Read more

Like many, I was excited at the prospect of Frash, a new third-party tool that cropped up this past weekend for jailbroken iPhones and iPads that adds Adobe Flash compatibility to these devices.

The add-on, which was created by development firm Comex (makers of jailbreaking tool JailbreakMe.com), is in its early alpha stages, so it's unfair to compare it to say, something like Adobe's first-party efforts with its beta on Google's Android. But after using Frash for the past three days, I'm impressed.

Yes, it crashes a lot, and yes, it's incapable of doing most videos, or any sort of Flash games, which are arguably the two main reasons to get Flash onto an iOS device. However, for something as simple as loading up a restaurant menu, or a Flash-only splash screen that clicks through to an HTML site, Frash has the makings of an invaluable tool.

But even with jailbreaking now legal in the U.S., is it worth the related risks such as:

• Voiding your warranty agreement with Apple • Relying on a vulnerability that was patched by Apple on Wednesday • Trusting software from an untested source?

Let's find out.

Note: CNET does not encourage voiding your warranty, or running unsigned, third-party code. This story is for informational purposes, and should not be considered a how-to guide.

Before setting out into the exciting world of Frash, it's worth understanding how it works.

Frash is not available in the App Store, but it's still easy to get it on a device that's been jailbroken through one of the third-party application installers. Users need to first add an additional download source to one of the available third-party app installation programs like Rock or Cydia.

Once it's installed, visiting Web sites with Adobe Flash elements in Safari no longer show up with the dreaded "this site requires Flash Player X or later" message, or large missing chunks of space. Instead, users see gray boxes emblazoned with the word "Flash," which when pressed, load up that Flash element and that Flash element only--just like how Adobe implemented Flash in its beta for Android.

When Frash is installed, it's on the whole time and cannot be toggled off. That is, unless you install another unsigned third-party app called SBsettings, which adds a drop-down menu to the top of your iOS device. Every time a user does this, it restarts Safari and requires reloading whatever Web pages you were looking at.

The first thing you'll discover after installing Frash is that it tends to crash. A lot. But when it works on something, it's a great feeling.

One large grouping of sites where you could only get by with Flash are automobile sites. In the recent months, that's let up a bit, though there are still a handful of sites including Saab, Cadillac, and Lamborghini, where you can't even get in the door without Flash installed. In the case of Cadillac, you still can't get into it with Frash enabled, because it detects that you're on an iPhone/iPad.

Many other car sites, including Subaru and Ferrari, have photo viewers that you can't get to without Flash. With Frash enabled, most of these worked to a point, though they were slow to load and we ran into problems with the interfaces being designed for a mouse rather than a finger. Also, in most cases, by simply turning Frash off, we were presented with an iPhone or iPad-formatted version of the site in question, so the need here was a relative non-issue. … Read more