News - page 1361

You want iPhone rumors? Well CultCast’s got’em, brotherrrr! This time: the rumored 5.5-inch iPhone 6 gets delayed and patents indicate a future of interchangeable iLenses. Plus, what FireTV has that Apple TV needs; iWork online gets an update; Office finally comes to iPad; and Facebook bought Oculus, but why?

Chuckle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!

Our thanks to New Relic for supporting this episode, the all-in-one web application performance management tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code. New Relic helps the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them. Start your 30-day free trial at NewRelic.com/cultcast.

Click on for the show notes.

Let’s be honest, searching in the iTunes Store sucks, especially on the desktop. It’s often slow, and the results are difficult to navigate. Apple has tried to simplify things by displaying one result at a time in the App Store on iOS, but that approach also means that it can take longer to find the specific app you want in a sea of knockoffs.

A new web tool called “fnd” makes it easier to quickly search and navigate not just the App Store, but the iTunes Store in general.

Princess Ida needs to find herself, and she’s doing so with a quest across an unpredictable and shifting landscape that takes inspiration from perspective-bending Escher art and hit indie game Fez.

You’ll need to tap on the screen to get Ida moving to her end goal, swiping and rotating dozens of different mechanical gadgets to make sure she can continue on her way. The puzzles aren’t super difficult, but they do require a bit of thought, and plenty of them are downright ingenious. You’ll feel pretty darn intelligent when you finally get that “aha!” moment.

Check out our play-through video below to get a sense of how lush and calming Monument Valley really is.

Talk of the popular app Flappy Bird has still seemed to be far from fading out. As developers everywhere continue to fuel the craze with remakes and clones, players everywhere have seemed to grow bored of many new app store releases. Although in spite of common trends, some developers have managed to channel the joys of Flappy Bird into their own creations. The new app Lightspeed Hero is one of the latest releases to do this. Avoid asteroids for as long as you can and see how far you can make it without crashing your spaceship. Just how long do you think you can last before game-over?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Lightspeed Hero – Squideo Games, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

Apple finally announced the dates for WWDC 14 and while there won’t be a mad two minute dash to sellout this year, it might be even harder to get in thanks to Apple’s new lottery system.

Only 5,000 developers will be selected to purchase tickets to the Apple event of the year that will packed with everything from new product announcements, hands-on labs, concerts, and code melting out of your eyeballs.

Here are five reasons why WWDC 2014 shouldn’t be missed:

When you walk into an Apple Store — the minimalist design, the Macbook screens tilted just so, the approachable, encyclopedic sales staff — you might be forgiven for being a little bit speechless.

It’s not unlike walking into a Porsche or Mercedes dealership — you don’t expect to find bargain bins full of junk. The presentation is, in fact, as important as the product, and once inside, you’re going to hand over your money to get both.

Even though Apple stores have become tourist attractions in their own right where folks come from countries like Sweden and Brazil to purchase these great products at prices lower than at home, savvy customers might someday shun those stunning glass facades and signature spiral staircases for cheaper prices found elsewhere.

A new report by DealNews shows that Apple products are getting deeper discounts sooner in a product lifecycle than ever before, begging the question: is the Apple Store the best place to buy your gear?

Facebook has updated its Facebook Pages Manager app, adding several notable improvements.

Pages Manager — for those unfamiliar with it — helps admins connect with their audience and keep up with activity on multiple Pages, all in one place. Users can monitor Page activity using Insights, reply to private messages, and post media.

In addition to the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the app’s latest update adds new pinning and editing features.

Siri can be hit in and miss in terms of quality, but a recent acquisition by Apple may result in the service being greatly improved.

Taking place last year — although only announced now — Apple acquired UK-based automatic speech recognition company Nouvaris Technologies to work on its virtual assistant tool.

When headphones look this good, who cares how they sound? Well, me, for one. After all, unless you carry a mirror everywhere you go, you never see your headphones while you’re using them. Still, Phiaton’s Bridge MS 500 headphones just got a Red Dot award, so there might be something to them other than good looks.

Sound Freaq’s Sound Rise is an old-fashioned concept wedded to new-fangled function. It’s a clock radio (remember those?) that plugs into your iPhone and charges it while sucking the sound out of your music library or favorite streaming apps.

Here’s the Das Keyboard 4, possibly the most bad-ass clacky keyboard in existence. No keycap markings, USB 3.0, Cherry MX switches and a huge knob. All that plus Das’s trademark feature: it’s as big as a boat. A “Das Boat” if you will.

Elgato’s Thunderbolt Dock has a few unique features that are appropriate for a company that makes video accessories for Apple devices. First, there’s an HDMI port around back, and second, the USB ports put out enough juice to charge your iPad at a decent speed.

As the old song goes, “Google Maps and QuizUp, sitting in a tree, now both visible from low-Earth orbit.” It’s not catchy, but it is true – now the super-addictive trivia game has a Google Maps channel.

This little baby launched its Kickstarter on April 1st, but as it’s still there a few days later (and as Brian from Pad&Quill says it’s legit) it’s time for a write-up. The Micro Field Bag is a miniaturized version of the Field Bag, the heavy monster I reviewed a few weeks back. It’s tiny, cute, and built for the iPhone.

Imagine slapping your nightstand to snooze your iPhone’s alarm. Or rapping on the kitchen countertop to flip recipe book pages so your flour-coated hands don’t mess up the iPad’s screen. These scenarios could soon be real: XTouch is a new technology that essentially turns any solid surface into an input device for an iPad or iPhone.

Borderlands 2. BioShock Infinite. Civilization V. Just a few of the AAA titles hit with deep discounts at Aspyr’s GameAgent game store as the platform celebrates reaching 100,000 members. How deep? All the above-mentioned titles can be had at 75 percent off. Even non-Aspyr titles like Napoleon: Total War and XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be discounted, though at only (only!) half-off.

Like Nests’s futuristic thermostat, its iPhone-controlled smoke/carbon monoxide detector looked like the perfect replacement for the antiquated systems used in most homes today. It turns out that the Nest Protect was a little too good to be true.

Since the device went on sale in November of last year, Nest has discovered that one of the Protect’s hallmark features can malfunction. And that happens to create big safety concerns. Until the issue is resolved, Nest Protect sales have halted.

For those who thought Office for iPad was too late to the party, the numbers tell a different story. Today Microsoft announced that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote combined have been downloaded a staggering 12 million times in one week.

If you doubt that number, then just take a look at the App Store charts.

Vine has added video messaging. After today’s update, video messages (or VMs) can be sent to friends on Vine or through SMS and email.

A six-second message can be sent to more than one person, but not as cleanly as Instagram Direct works. A new conversation thread will be opened for each person you send to, meaning you have to send the same video multiple times.

Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android has thrown the company into the courtroom more times in the last five years than ever before, so in an effort to make U.S. patent laws bend to its will, Apple has joined forces with some some of its old enemies, IBM and Microsoft to form a U.S. lobbying supergroup to fight patent trolls and push new legislation through congress. 

Today Facebook Messenger was updated with the ability to make free voice calls over WiFi both domestically and internationally. Making calls over a cellular connection uses data. The features works similar to FaceTime Audio, which is natively baked into all iOS devices and Macs.

Facebook Messenger technically added VOIP (voice over IP) calling in January 2013, but the feature has been limited to the US, UK, and Canada until now. Facebook users with the Messenger iOS app installed can be called with a new phone icon at the top right of a conversation thread. The calling interface looks almost identical to Apple’s stock Phone app in iOS 7.1.

Messenger was recently updated with group messaging and forwarding. After WhatsApp was bought by Facebook earlier this year, it was revealed that VOIP calling is coming to that app as well in the coming months.

Source: App Store

Sure, we all love a good game of Civilization V, but we also all know that the epic turn-based strategy can really suck up our time.

That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about Hero Generations, a Rogue-like strategy game with a unique, personal question at its core: what will you do with the limited time you have left?

You’ll have plenty of choices, but your character will age one year for each turn in the game. If you want to truly influence the kingdom, you’ll need to find a mate, settle down, and have a child.

Your offspring, then, becomes the next controllable character in the game, with all the experience and items that you amassed before you died.

If that doesn’t intrigue you, I’m not sure what will.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.

One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.

If you haven’t been using If This, Then That (IFTTT) on your iPhone or iPad, you really ought to be.

It’s a really amazing way to connect up all the things you do on your devices, putting them together in new ways for new uses.

Want to send all your iOS photos to OneNote or Evernote? There’s a recipe for that. How about making your Phillips Hue lightbulbs flash a specific color when you pull up into your driveway? There’s an IFTTT recipe for that, too.

Chances are, if you can think of it, you can make it happen, connecting different services and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your iOS Photos app, location services, and the like in fantastically useful new ways.

There’s a new update for the iOS app, and it’s got some pretty spectacular new stuff to check out.

The iPad is four years old today and my mom hates it. Maybe not hate. Dislikes. Loathes. I don’t know the right word but for two weeks it sat in Apple’s pristine white box, unwrapped, unlocked, setup and then discarded; snuggling in its brown leather SmartCover completely untouched.

After dismissing it as “just a big iPhone” it’s grown on her in four months, just like it’s grown on us since 2010. Now it’s the only place she watches YouTube, looks at pictures, reads websites, FaceTimes and gets down on Solitaire like Kim Jong-un at a nuclear buffet.

It’s the best damn thing to ever happen for children with tech-illiterate parents.