Get your jam on anywhere, anytime with Jamstik+

So it’s not quite an ax. It’s more of a hatchet.

But you can do some shredding on the diminutive Jamstik. It’s a portable smart guitar that gets beginners playing recognizable chords within a few minutes and helps the inspired musician instantly articulate those notes blooming in his or her brain. Connect it to most Apple devices and learn with the Jamstik tutorial app or record in Garage Band.

The first version was popular, but Minneapolis-based Zivix wanted to make improvements based on customer feedback. The music technology company raised more than $800,000 on a recent Kickstarter campaign to bring Bluetooth technology and a magnetic pickup to the newest generation, Jamstik+.

The Jamstik story fits nicely into a musical chapter on the history of technology, with hardware and software that makes learning and recording music more accessible to a greater number of people, especially those on tight budgets.

Jamstik is small practice guitar with five frets and strings that never need tuning. It weighs under two pounds and has a patented sensing method to determine finger position on the fretboard. It’s powered by a rechargeable lithium battery..

The magnetic pickup on the Jamstik+ greatly reduces the response time to picking customers of the first version experienced.

Users can record and add additional instruments with a host of compatible apps, like Arctic Keys,Sunrizer and Animoog. Zivix’s own jamTutor app gets Jamstik players strumming tunes in no time with lessons, how-to videos and interactive exercises.

Jamstik+ requires iOS 8.12, iPad Mini, iPad 3 or later, iPhone 4S or later, iPod touch fifth generation or later or Mac OSX Yosemite.

The new version will ship by July and is available for preorder at around $300. The original Jamstik can be purchased for about $50 less.

Apple Music adds 20,000 indie labels by signing Beggars Group and Merlin.

Indie musicians haven’t been too keen on Apple’s music streaming service that originally planned to cut them out of a paycheck for three months. Now that Taylor Swift has won her battle against Apple Music, thousands of indie artists are changing their tune toward the upcoming service.

Beggars Group and Merlin, which represent over 20,000 labels and distributors worldwide, have officially signed on at the last minute to be included in Apple Music when it launches next month, reports Billboard. 

Adele, Radiohead, Prodigy, Arcade Fire and many other popular indies have been part of Beggars at one point in their careers. Merlin, which launched in 2008, represents 20,000 labels and distributors worldwide with offices in London and New York, and a head office in Amsterdam.

After inking the deal with Apple Music, Merlin CEO Charles Caldas sent members the following letter:

“I am pleased to say that Apple has made a decision to pay for all usage of Apple Music under the free trials on a per-play basis, as well as to modify a number of other terms that members had been communicating directly with Apple about. With these changes, we are happy to support the deal.”

Beggar, which has four imprints — 4AD, XL, Matador and Rough Trade — has firmly opposed Apple’s offer until now. Martin Mills who built the Beggars Group from the ground up previously told reporters Apple Music’s free trial aspect doesn’t move the industry away from freemium services, and instead only takes “the ‘mium’ out of freemium.” However, in a statement on the company’s website, Mills has done a complete 180, saying “we are now delighted to say that we are happy to endorse the deal with Apple Music as it now stands, and look forward to being a big part of a very exciting future.”

TaiG jailbreak now available for iOS 8.3 – but Substrate and MS tweaks not yet working.

TaiG has released an untethered jailbreak for iOS 8.3 – but Cydia Substrate isn’t yet working, meaning that many third-party add-ons won’t run. MS Tweaks likewise don’t work at present.

The release notes suggest that the jailbreak installation may take several attempts.

If jailbreak failed, turn off WIFI and try again. If failed again, please use TaiG Pro to restore and try to jailbreak again.

If you’re not yet running iOS 8.3, TaiG Pro allows you to perform the upgrade as part of the data backup process …

At present, the jailbreak requires a Windows PC. You can download the jailbreak from the TaiG website, and find the tutorial here.

If you want to open up your watch as well as your phone, three well-known developers recently managed to hack the Apple Watch to run truly native apps on the device.

As always, jailbreaking is at your own risk and is something Apple frowns upon

Here’s the Apple Watch emulating a vintage 20 year old Mac.

The Apple Watch might not seem like it has the most powerful processor on the block, but it’s still an A5-caliber CPU, similar to the one shipped with the iPad 2, the original iPad mini, and the iPhone 4S.

That means the Apple Watch’s processor is still more powerful than pretty much every other CPU of the last forty years. And it’s certainly up to the task of emulating a vintage Mac, as this video abundantly proves.

Software developer Nick Lee has figured out a way to emulate a 20 year old Macintosh, all on his wrist.

By hacking an Apple Watch running watchOS 2.0 beta, Lee was able to get Mac OS System 7.5.5, first released in 1996, running on his wrist, all courtesy of the MiniVMac emulator.

As you can see, it’s not super functional, a necessary casualty of the Apple Watch’s limited input capabilities and postage-stamp-sized display. But Lee’s video does do a good job of showing the possibilities ahead: the Apple Watch has plenty of processing chutzpah to run far, far more than notification apps, and watchOS 2 is what’s going to unlock them.

iOS 9 allows users to temporarily delete apps to free up space for software updates.

A new iOS 9 feature added in beta 1 was only discovered when users attempted to update to beta 2 earlier today. This new feature will allow the operating system to intelligently delete applications if you don’t have enough free space to perform a software update. Once the update is complete, the apps will automatically be reinstalled and your data will remain intact.

The feature is designed to accompany another iOS 9 tweak that was announced during the WWDC keynote that enables Apple to push out much smaller updates that require less free space.

Other space-saving features introduced in the new OS include “app thinning,” which allows developers to distribute only the necessary portions of their apps to users, and Swift libraries built-in so developers don’t have to include them with every app.

Dark Sky update looks to ‘revolutionize weather forecasting’ by tapping iPhone sensors.

Smartphone apps are a godsend for obsessive weather watchers, offering constantly updating forecasts wherever there’s signal. But the next step is transforming these apps from passive data receivers into active data gatherers, utilizing our phones’ sensors to generate accurate, hyperlocal forecasts. Popular iOS-only weather seer Dark Sky is the latest app to join this trend, with a major new version of the software released last week adding a “report” feature to let users contribute data from their smartphones.

“Up until now, we’ve relied mostly on government-run weather stations to provide ‘ground truth’ to validate our forecasts,” said the app’s maker in a blog post. “But there are relatively few stations world-wide, and they don’t always provide timely updates when we need them. By recruiting our wonderful users to help us, we can greatly increase the on-the-ground data that we need most.”

DARK SKY CAN NOW COLLECT DATA FROM THE BAROMETERS IN THE IPHONE 6 AND 6 PLUS

While the concept of crowdsourced weather data isn’t new (Android and iOS app WeatherSignal has been doing it since 2013), Dark Sky‘s decision is notable simply because of the app’s popularity and critical acclaim. Dark Sky users who download the update can submit manual reports just by saying whether the weather near them is cloudy, sunny, or rainy, etc. Or, if they have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, they can turn on automatic data gathering from the new iPhones’ built-in barometers.

It’s this information that has the potential “to revolutionize weather forecasting,” say the Dark Sky’s makers. They haven’t said when this crowdsourced data will be integrated into the app’s actual weather reports, but add that they’ll “hopefully have lots more to say about this in the coming months.” The update also adds a range of new features, including custom alerts for any given weather criteria, daily weather summaries delivered each morning, and alerts for “impending adverse weather such as thunderstorms, hail, hurricanes, flooding.”

Apple already working on putting a virtual Home button into the iPhone screen.

The idea of replacing the iPhone’s physical Home button with a pure touch one embedded in the display has been around for quite a while now, but a report from the variably reliable DigiTimes claims that Apple is already working on the technology.

Apple is internally developing touch and display driver integration (TDDI) single-chip solutions for its iPhones, according to sources in Taiwan’s IC design industry.

The TDDI single-chip solutions will also come with integrated fingerprint sensors, said the sources. The integrated design would fit into future iPhone designs – models with ultra-thin and ultra-narrow displays, and with a whole plane design eliminating the Home button.

While the report doesn’t specifically reference embedding the home button into the display itself, referring only to ‘a whole plane design,’ this would seem to be what the report hints at …

 The Apple Watch of course already has a Force Touch sensor – but not Touch ID – embedded into the display.

As ever, the sketchy source suggests caution. It’s a likely development at some stage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Apple’s new material will eliminate iPhone’s unsightly antenna lines.

Apple’s been using antenna lines in its smartphones ever since the days of the iPhone 4 and antenna-gate, but a new patent filed by the company could soon make those unsightly lines disappear for good.

In a new patent filed last week, Apple has detailed its plan to create a composite material that looks just like the anodized metal iPhone cases are made out of, expect it still allows wireless signals to get through.

U.S. Patent #20150167193, titled ‘non-capacitive or radio frequency-transparent materials with anodized metal appearance’ could allow for future iPhones and MacBooks to have a sleek, cleaner look that doesn’t compromise on signal reception.

Apple also mentions in the patent description that the new material could be used as a coating on trackpads for the Mac, so that it looks more unified with the rest of the metal enclosure. It could even potentially be used for touchscreens, as well.

Whether Apple will actually use the patent still remains to be seen, but with the iPhone 7 rumored to have a home button built into the display, it might be the perfect material to make an iPhone that just looks like one solid hunk of metal.

The life cycle from your iPhone’s point of view.

I’m a sucker when it comes to upgrading to the latest iPhone, but like a lot of people I’ve stopped to think about how bizarre it is that new iPhones go from coveted items we’ll queue up for hours to get our hands on, to scratched, slightly-battered handsets we’ll sell or pass on to friends — all within the course of just one year.

Filmmaker Paul Trillo has taken this idea and used it to put together a pretty nifty short film showing off the life, death and reincarnation of one such device — all shot from the point-of-view of the iPhone itself.

Check it out below:

It’s a funny, clever, and weirdly poignant short movie — that’s made all the better by the fact that the whole thing was put together on Trillo’s iPhone, courtesy of Vimeo’s new Cameo app.

In some ways it reminds me of the Modern Family episode which aired earlier this year, shot entirely using Apple products — ranging from the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 to MacBook FaceTime cameras.

Wallpapers of the Week: Airplane wallpapers for iPhone.

The Wallpapers of the Week section continues to grown in popularity.

One trend in the section is having images that are chronologically relevant. Having just the right image on your device for just the right time of year seems harmonious in some way. Currently, it is travel season, at least in the northern hemisphere. People are taking time away from work to vacation or holiday. It is time to fly.

Airplane wallpapers

Download “Verticality:” iPhone

Download “Smooth Flight:” iPhone

Download “Boarding:” iPhone

The remaining three images were merely sourced from around the internet. Take note, the following image is two wallpapers which are divided below for download.

Download: iPhone Left | Right

Download: iPhone