Verizon Wireless is just about matching the deal other carriers have offered for a while to entice customers on other networks. It’s essentially offering to buy you out of your contract with up to $650 per line, less the trade-in value of your current device. But Verizon also has a few extra bonuses to brag about.
iOS 9 finally brought split-screen views to the iPad, but it’s still not nearly as useful as the windowed multitasking views you get on a Mac. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has come up with a much better solution with a new proof-of-concept called iOS window management that would bring the joy of working in a windows environment to the iPad.
Apple already has the foundation built thanks to UIKit. It only took Troughton-Smith 500 lines of code to build the concept with the UIWindow subclass, allowing individual app screens to be resized an overlaid on top of each other.
Check out the concept video:
Just when you thought it was hard to achieve a first in flight in this day and age, a city near Las Vegas has broken ground on what is believed to be the first commercial drone airport.
The Aerodrome, a non-profit in unmanned aircraft education, has partnered with Boulder City, Nevada to develop the droneport. The 50-acre site about 28 miles from the Las Vegas Strip is already partially operational but won’t be complete until 2018.
The makers of a tiny (but badass!) new LED flashlight say they took inspiration from the 9mm bullet, but Apple’s incessant drive toward miniaturization seems at least as much of an influence.
You can almost hear the dulcet tones of Jony Ive’s voice in the description of the Bullet, which its maker calls “the tiniest flashlight on Kickstarter.”
Trying to play a song in iTunes and getting the same error over and over can be frustrating. If your computer isn’t authorized with your Apple ID via iTunes, it won’t let you play any songs you’ve downloaded from the iTunes Store until it is. Sometimes iTunes will seem to get “stuck” prompting you again and again with the need to authorize.
If you’re having trouble playing your purchased iTunes on your Mac due to the repeated prompts to authorize your computer, there are a few things you can do.
Rapper, producer and dance meme-maker Soulja Boy finally removed his regrettable Gucci forehead tattoo over Christmas weekend, and to celebrate he released a fresh new song that’s all about his love of Steve Jobs’ greatest gift to gangsters: the iPhone.
The new meme-worthy trap song blasts the same highly repetitive lyrics and catchy trap beats that turned Soulja Boy into a sensation in 2007 with his hit “Crank That.” Aptly titled “Trappin On My iPhone” (but not to be confused with Bigg Quan’s “Trappin Off My iPhone“), the ridiculous new song contains more than 40 iPhone references and talks about why true CEOs of the streets manage drug empires with the best smartphone, instead of a lame flip-phone burner.
Listen to the song below:
If you’ve ever had a hankering to try out VR with your iPhone (or other smartphone), the Merge VR Goggles are a fantastic fit. They’re made of a soft, lightweight, purple sculpted foam that will fit any face and pretty much any smartphone.
You’ll be able to comfortably wear these as long as you can stand virtual reality apps on your iPhone, thanks to the way they mold to your particular facial features and don’t weigh your head down.
As far as party invitations go, this may be the only one that asks unattractive people to stay away – unless of course they can produce a tax return at the door that shows a yearly income above $200,000.
Luxy, the dating app for only the wealthiest, will be hosting a series of singles nights around the globe next year. If you find such an invitation rude, you probably weren’t going to make it past the door anyway.
It’s been a terrific year for gaming. The next-generation consoles now offer a library of spectacular games that somehow keep getting better and better, while PC gaming just gets greater every year.
2015 brought exciting and long-awaited entries to wonderful franchises like Fallout and The Legend of Zelda, surprising indie smash hits like Rocket League, and must-play platform exclusives like Blooborne and Super Mario Maker.
Here are the best games that we couldn’t put down this year.
OpenEmu, the ultimate old-school game emulator for OS X, just got even better. A beefy update brings an improved user interface, real-time game rewinding and — best of all! — support for an additional 16 game consoles, including the Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation Portable.
Siri is (usually) great for answering questions, but for helping us stay on task it’s a bit of a dud. EasilyDo on the other hand will make sure you’re on time and on point with all your obligations. It’s a powerful assistant for managing contacts, calendar, email and more that’s just $19.99.
If all of the big boys’ flagship phones – the iPhone 6s Plus, the Google Nexus 6P and Microsoft’s Lumia 950 XL – raced in NASCAR, which would be the fastest phone around? This speed-test video puts that concept to the test, making all three phones “run laps” to see which is the fastest.
Tis the season for playing around with weird iOS apps with your friends and family, and boy, do we have a doozy for you. It’s called Face Swap Live, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.
Usually, an app update is a good thing. But sometimes, things go wrong: An update does the opposite of what you expect it to do. In that scenario, you want to roll your apps back, but unfortunately, at least on the iOS and Mac App Stores, Apple makes that seemingly impossible.
But it isn’t impossible — just a little tricky. Here’s how to roll your iOS apps back to an older version when things go wrong.
Although Fitbit may consider the Apple Watch a technical threat, Apple’s smartwatch didn’t seem to hamper Christmas sales any for the company: the market-leading activity tracker seems to have had a huge sales surge thanks to Christmas. Could Fitbit have outsold the Apple Watch this Holiday season?
Although Samsung has vowed to take its patent fight with Apple all the way to the Supreme Court after welching on a deal to pay Cupertino $548 million in damages, Apple isn’t letting up its assult on the Galaxy-maker. As a Christmas present, Apple just asked for an additional $180 million in damages.
DVDs have all but gone the way of laserdiscs and the dodo. With HD streaming video and high capacity hard drives, keeping shelves full of movies just doesn’t make much sense anymore. But that doesn’t mean you should toss them, at least not yet. The two applications in the MacX DVD Video Converter Pro Pack make it easy to capture and convert your DVDs and other digital videos into formats friendly to your computer and mobile devices. It’s a great way to extend the life of your favorite DVDs into the future for just $11.99.
The Apple TV’s App Store is still so new, odds are you might be having trouble figuring out which apps are the best.
The holidays are just around the corner, so for the sake of the friends and relatives who will soon be swarming your living room, you might want to populate your new set-top box with some must-haves. Take a look at Cult of Mac’s top picks for best Apple TV apps.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: We venture into very heart of Apple, inside Jony Ive’s super-secret design lab, and what we find is amazing. Plus: the best holiday iOS App Store deals and our favorite movies of 2015!
Our thanks to FreshBooks — the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster — for supporting this episode. Get started with a free trial at Freshbooks.com/cultcast.
This post is brought to you by Code Atlas, maker of Veer.
Sometimes great innovations are really just refinements of something few would have thought of trying to improve. If you think Apple’s already figured out the best way of reaching out to your contacts in iOS 9, Veer will make you reconsider. It’s a novel new iOS app and Notification Center widget that blends seamlessly into your iPhone’s normal operations, simplifying and streamlining how we use the device to reach people.
In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.
It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.
Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.
If you want to work in an organization of any size, becoming fluent in project management is one of the most marketable skills you can acquire, This bundle of five classes, clocking in at more than 120 hours, offers a clear path to getting PMP® certification, and the pay bump that comes with. It’s an invaluable resume booster can be yours for only $39.
If you’re feeling guilty about your festive overindulgence, you may be planning to lose some weight and get fit in the new year. Well, sorry to be a Grinch, but research suggests that only 8 percent of New Year’s resolutions are successful.
The good news is that there is a better way. One that involves steadily building healthy habits over time. There are some handy iPhone apps that can help with this, but you won’t find them in the Health & Fitness section of the App Store.
If you got new devices for Christmas, don’t just put the old ones in a drawer — use Cult of Mac’s buyback program to get paid for them today!
It was a little tough to whittle our choices for the best movies of 2015 down to 11, but we did.
If you’d told us five years ago that we’d be getting new Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Mad Max movies, and that they’d all respect their predecessors while forging their own paths, we’d have ask the bartender for whatever you’d been drinking. But all of those things happened, and 2015 was better for it.
We also got some great original movies, including some charming comedies and one of the scariest monsters in recent memory. It was a pretty good time, regardless of your tastes, is what we’re getting at.
Here are our picks in no particular order.