BlueAnt’s new PUMP HD headphones look perfect for sportspersons. I took a look at them at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple weeks back and they look and feel great. They’re a pair of “wireless” Bluetooth earbuds which clips over the ears and shrug off water and sweat.
Does anyone still use IM? In my home, we use iMessage, WhatsApp and Skype messaging, and almost nothing else. Apparently some folks still want to use AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo to do their chatting. And for them, Verbs IM has now been updated for iOS & and revamped to have a less annoying model for making money.
iOS 7.1 includes a host of obvious and subtle improvements, including a key addition that will make iBeacons smarter.
Apple has been trying to get the approval it needs to build its new flagship store in San Francisco for a long time. The company submitted its proposal to the city in March of last year, and today it has been given the final seal of approval.
The new store will be located on the corner of Stockton and Post in Union Square, San Francisco’s luxury shopping district.
The consensus within the rumor mill seems to be that Apple will release not one, but two larger iPhones later this year. According to a new report from Japanese site Macotakara, the new designs will borrow heavily from the existing iPhone 5c and iPod nano.
While there may be plenty of games in the app store with complicated stories and features, sometimes the simplest of games can be the best. The new app Red Bit Escape is an application that has made it to the top of the charts with its addictive yet simple gameplay. Last as long as you can to get a high score, that’s all. Do you think you can get a high score?
Take a look at Red Bit Escape and find out what you think.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Red Bit Escape brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your turn to play Hearthstone, the new free-to-play digital card game from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, now’s your chance. The fast-paced strategy game plays like a simplified yet strategically challenging Magic: The Gathering, and it’s available for your Mac immediately.
The game is free to download from the Hearthstone website, and will install easily and quickly to your Mac.
Once downloaded, you’ll hop in-game for a quick couple of tutorials, and then you can either play AI opponents to hone your skills and learn the various hero classes, or you can jump right in to playing other human beings via Blizzard’s Battle.net game matching service, one of the most robust around.
The current Office for Mac hasn’t received a truly significant update since it came out in 2011. Now Microsoft is planning to finally release a new version of the software this year.
Ever wanted to hear Siri declaim “Luke, I am your father” in 32 different languages?
In a blog post by the developers behind the daily Spanish word app Vocab Ninja, you can click on all of Siri’s different voices — overwhelmingly female-gendered, interestingly enough — in both standard and enhanced audio resolutions.
The creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, has practically gone off the grid since he suddenly pulled his viral hit from the App Store last month. The 28-year-old Vietnamese developer said his game had become “too addictive,” and Flappy Bird was no more.
At the height of Flappy Bird’s popularity, the game was making Nguyen $50,000 per day in ads. Now about a third of all games submitted to the App Store are Flappy Bird knockoffs.
In his first interview since pulling Flappy Bird, Nguyen told Rolling Stone that he is considering bringing it back. The interview also touches on why Nguyen made Flappy Bird to begin with, what it was like for him when the game got successful, and what his plans are for the future. It’s a great read.
Source: Rolling Stone
I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.
Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.
“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”
Day One has been one of the most popular journaling apps in the App Store for years, and it has always stuck to its guns: privately storing your thoughts and memories. But what about when you want to share something with your friends?
Today Day One is introducing Publish, a way to do exactly that.
Apple’s five day music festival is set to start today at SXSW in Austin Texas, but rather than making content available only on iTunes or Apple TV, the company has partnered with Vevo to help stream the event live.
Music fans can plug into the event live on Vevo’s website, but you’ll have to use a Safari browser. Shows will also be viewable on iTunes, Apple TV, and the iTunes Festival app for iOS.
The free concert series kicks off tonight with Coldplay, and features acts like Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Schoolboy Q, Soundgarden, Pit Bull, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson and others throughout the week.
Up until now, iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 has been painful to use. The New York Times calls it “planned obsolescence,” but it’s really just old hardware having a difficult time powering new software.
The good news is that the newly released iOS 7.1 has noticeably sped up animations on the iPhone 4, reports Ars Technica. “iOS 7.1 solves the problem for people who don’t tweak their devices’ settings or for people who like the way the animations look but not how they feel,” according to Ars. “Animation durations have been shortened noticeably throughout iOS 7.1, and toggling “reduce motion” is now purely cosmetic.”
Apps open generally faster, and opening interfaces like Control Center feels smoother. Since iOS 7.1 will likely be the last major update that’s available on the iPhone 4, there is no reason to not download it.
Source: Ars Technica
Grabbing an Apple exec for your board of directors has become somewhat of trend lately among prominent companies. Nike, Ferrari, Goldman Sachs, and even Vail Ski Resorts have done it, and now GoDaddy is the latest to join the ranks.
iTunes Radio has barely been around for six months but after launching alongside iOS 7 in the U.S., Apple’s music streaming service has already knocked Spotify off the #3 spot among the most popular music streaming services in the country.
Apple has made some changes to its Customer Loyalty Program, adding new items and increasing the discount offered on existing ones.
The discounts — which quietly went into effect last week — are on offer to people who spend upwards of $5,000 on Apple products in a 12-month period, making this a loyalty program targeted predominately at companies and education customers.
Companies like Apple using specially commissioned shuttle buses to ferry employees back and forth from San Francisco have caused their fair share of problems in the past.
Wanting to find out just how often the buses traveled past his house, Wired writer Kevin Poulsen recently decided to start monitoring the local Wi-Fi environment to see how often the Wi-Fi equipped buses registered.
In a world in which the iPhone camera is good enough to be most people’s primary camera, the days of low-grade cellphones pics are a thing of the past (for Apple users at least.)
But it’s not simply a matter of megapixels, but about the other “value added” touches that truly make the iPhone a camera worth hanging up your SLR for.
One of those touches is Apple’s neat “tap to focus” functionality, which arrived with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009.
It’s a tale as old as time (and, perhaps, a song as old as rhyme): Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers immediately get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, eventually claw together a jailbreak, only for Apple to then find out about the flaws and fix them for the new iOS version.
Rinse and repeat.
Having released iOS 7.1, Apple has also released a list crediting the individual researchers and companies who helped spot security issues with the previous version of iOS — including jailbreak specialists Evad3rs, the team behind the iOS 6 and 7 jailbreaks.
We all know that Siri has some fun Easter eggs, but according to some Apple’s virtual assistant also has an entire backstory — unlockable by asking just the right questions.
“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” says Adam Cheyer, one of the chief engineers for the project. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”
As mentioned in our iOS 7.1 screenshot roundup, the new iOS update adds auto-HDR mode for the iPhone 5s, letting the camera’s brain decide whether or not to activate the High-Dynamic Range feature.
In theory, this should mean that your iPhone will switch to HDR when there is too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture in one exposure.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here: When we’re in the air, we don’t give a second thought to our luggage traveling in the belly of the plane just a meter or so below us. We don’t really start thinking about our checked bags until we’re standing at the carousel, as we’re wondering if it would look more suspicious to the customs officials if we visited the bathroom before or after picking up our suitcases.
So the Calypso Tag, which lets you know that your bag is about to exit the luggage conveyor, is probably a better option than a GPS tracking tag that you can’t follow when you’re in the air anyway.
If you replaced your first-gen Kindle Paperwhite with the new model just to get Goodreads integration, Cloud Collections and the cool new page-skimming feature, then you should look away now. An update pushed today to the first-gen Paperwhite has added all of these features to the older model.
Instagram has added a new “Lux” filter to its iPhone app, letting you “strengthen or soften your photos with a custom slider.” The slider affects the contrast of your image, but it does in in a way that actually looks good.
