News - page 1395

Foul-mouthed YouTube Senor Pacman teaches you how to beat the $50,000 a day App Store sensation, Flappy Bird. Or, at the very least, he teaches you how Flappy Bird will ultimately beat you.

Source: YouTube
Via: TUAW

We’ve all likely done it: you’re sending a text message — only to find out after hitting the “send” button that your carefully crafted comments have fallen victim to some embarrassing autocorrect abomination.

Clearly someone at Apple has had the same experience, since a new Apple patent suggests that future iPhones may include an option for correcting messages after the user has instructed the device to send, but before the transmittal of the message has taken place.

From quadrocopter deliveries to rumors of a 3D Kindle smartphone coming in 2014, Amazon has been on the cutting edge of tech for quite some time now. The company’s latest update for its iOS app, however, might be among the most fun new developments we’ve seen.

Along with the ubiquitous bug fixes seen in practically every iOS app update, version 3.2.1 of Amazon’s retail app includes a feature called “Flow” which lets users quickly and easily search for products using their iOS camera.

We said it wouldn’t be too long until a jailbreak was available for iOS 7.0.5, and thankfully the good folks at Evad3rs haven’t let us down — since Evasi0n has just released its untethered iOS 7.0.5 jailbreak.

U.S. iPhone users won’t get a whole lot from the iOS 7.0.5 update, since its changes mainly deal with minor bug fixes to network errors on Chinese carriers — but for those looking for assurance that their unlocked iPhone can be used internationally without problem, it may be worth a download.

What do Steve Jobs, Tony Hawk, Elvis Presley, and Marlon Brando have in common? All of them qualify as “cool.”

That’s the verdict of the curators of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery — opening Friday — which explores the concept of “American Cool” through some of its most iconic figures.

Apple’s dislike of bitcoin has been on display for quite some while now, but the cyber-currency has been hit yet again as Apple removed Blockchain — the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet — from its App Store late Wednesday.

Apple had previously removed fellow wallets BitPak and Coinbase — while Blockchain had previously found itself excised, only to later be re-accepted.

After what seems like a lifetime of anticipation, Final Fantasy VI for iOS has finally touched down in the App Store.

Representing the FF series at its 2D peak, the game (which originally hit consoles back in 1994) takes place in an eye-popping Industrial Revolution-inspired world, as characters Terra and Locke battle to escape the clutches of an evil Empire.

When I was young, maybe between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I used to make very basic games with a friend of mine called James Brzezicki. They were almost always the simplest things imaginable: a single sprite jumping over other sprites, or a ball bouncing back and forth between two paddles. This wasn’t because we had worked out how to strip gaming down to its most base elements, but rather because it was all we could work out how to program.

Samsung is an official sponsor of the Sochi 2014 Olympics, and the Korean company has been giving athletes Galaxy Note 3 phones to use during the games. In exchange for the gifts, Samsung has reportedly asked the athletes to specifically cover the Apple logos on their personal iPhones.

What happens if athletes don’t respect the rule remains unclear. Logos were also asked to be covered by Samsung when it was a sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics, so this isn’t a new tactic. However, it does illustrate Samsung’s corporate contempt for Apple.

Winter Olympics fans rejoice, for theScore is here to deliver unique sporting content and breaking news direct from Sochi to your iPhone. The app has its own team of news hounds who will push news on heats, medals, and podium positions in real time right to the app, which has been updated for this specific feature.

The app will show new in little bites that break down the big stories in to easily digestible snacks. Each update will come in on top of the previous, along with images, animated gifs, videos, and tweets from the events.

Twitter’s new web design began rolling out to all users yesterday, but if you hate the new white UI there’s already an extension for Safari that darkens the scene.

The Winter Olympics are just three days away so of course we’re working on a special edition of Cult of Mac Magazine all about the intersection of the winter games and Apple.

99.997% of us aren’t talented enough to get an invite to Sochi, but we can all take a damn good selfie. So with the spirit of competition upon us, we’re introducing the Cult of Mac Selfie Olympics – a competition to see which of our readers can take the absolute best selfie before the real athletes battle it out in the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

Generally speaking, you can count on the latest iPhone to improve upon the camera of the model that preceded it. That means that when the iPhone 6 comes along, we can expect it to have a better camera than the iPhone 5s’s 8-megapixel camera with an f/2.2 aperture.

Now a new rumor suggests that Apple has already selected a supplier for the iPhone 6, which will have a 10-megapixel camera with a f/1.8 aperture. Moreover, it will replace the hybrid IR filter used on the iPhone 5s with a resin lens filter, which would allegedly result in clearer images.

There was a time when the most luxurious laptops around weren’t MacBooks. They were Sony Vaios, and up[on his return to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs so admired the design and engineering of the Vaio line-up that he wanted to make an exception and license OS X to Sony for use on their laptops. And it almost happened.

A new Apple patent describes an invention that may one day replace the Mac’s Finder.

Referring to a method for classifying documents in such a way as to allow for a multi-dimensional graphical representation of their contents, the patent would move away from the way information is currently structured toward a “graphical multidimensional file management system and method” that would be far more intuitive than the system used today.

President Obama used an iPad for an impromptu interview during a recent appearance at a Maryland middle school.

The President — who has previously claimed that he spends hours using the iPad each day — seemed perfectly at home as he used the device to carry out an interview with the classroom teacher, before turning the iPad to record the pupils, assembled press members, and “Mike, my secret service agent” who he claims “never smiles.”

Google Maps’ latest update for iOS adds a new “Faster Route” feature, which notifies users in navigation mode when a quicker journey to their destination becomes available.

The new feature works in conjunction with Google Maps’ existing ability to track traffic data in real time. Once alerted that there is a possible faster route, users have the option of either tapping “No thanks” and remaining on their present course, or else hitting “Reroute” and diverting their journey to one that Google predicts will be faster.

Apple is the fourth greenest tech/telecoms company — generating  85 percent of its power through green power sources — according to a new list published by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The recently published report compares the amount of power used by America’s top technology and telecom firms with the percentage that comes from renewable “green” resources, such as wind, solar, bio-gas and other options.

Recently launched free app WerYoo takes on Instagram — combining a photo app with a social network — by allowing users to place their photos and hashtags on a map, which they can then share with friends.

WerYoo lets you show off your photos to people in your immediate proximity, and pings you whenever a new nearby photo is added — thereby letting you both keep up to date with friends and connect with new people.

Forgotify is kind of like that box at the back of the thrift store which holds vinyl records so bad that even the sample-crazy music nerds won’t touch them – only on the internet. It’s a web service that collects the roughly 4 million (!) unplayed tracks on Spotify, and serves them up to you at random.

I love the press-to-shoot feature of Instagram’s video mode: it stops you from making one long boring take to fill up that eight seconds or however long it is that you get. But maybe you want to make a boring one-shot clip, or you’re planning on making the world’s shortest remake of Hitchcock’s Rope. Whatever, this neat trick from Photojojo is for you.

Dungeon Keeper for iOS has received its first update, one week after its initial launch in the App Store.

Sadly, the update doesn’t remove some of the game’s worse freemium-associated elements (our review criticized its approach to micro-payments for being “overeager to claim all of your precious gems to get anything done”) but it does add a host of other modifications — including “the power of friendship” which lets you drag in other friends to play through Facebook and Game Center.

Lovers of bookbindery cases who find beautiful plain leather covers a little boring can now tweak their Pad&Quill iPad Air cases with any number of fancy patterns. The highly-protective, last-forever cases can now be customized to order on the P&Q store, letting you obsess over such options as the delicious-sounding “Gold Metallic on French Roast,” and the distinctly 1980s-style " Chevron on Gray Linen.

I’ll admit it. The main reason I’m posting about the beautiful Project Bloom iPhone case is the hedgehog. Specifically Woody, the African Pygmy hedgehog that you see in the photo above.

But that’s not to say that the case isn’t worth a look. It is. So Let’s.

Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.

Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.

Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.