This morning, tickets went on sale for Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference at $1,500 a piece. In a matter of two minutes the conference was sold out, and many developers were left staring at their computer screens with mouths agape.
But it looks like Apple didn’t sell all of the tickets just yet. Apple is reserving tickets and offering them to developers who were able to place their orders online.
The hardware controller for Leap Motion’s futuristic gesture tech was slated to arrive in stores on May 19th. Now Leap Motion is having to delay its public release until July 27th. The reason for the delay is the need for more beta testing and integration with partners who will support the gesture-based platform.
In case you haven’t seen any of the demos, Leap Motion is incredibly cool. It allows you to control your Mac using Minority Report-style hand movements. Developers have been testing and integrating Leap Motion with their apps, and the software will come with its own app store at launch.
Your heart races as you stare at your Mac’s screen, breathlessly anticipating the browser window loading another time. “If I just hit refresh again, maybe it will work,” you tell yourself. And it doesn’t. You check Twitter to see that your nerdy, developer friends can’t order tickets either.
WWDC 2013 sold out in two minutes. That’s crazy, but it’s true. You missed out.
Perhaps the above image is a more appropriate logo for this year’s WWDC, considering how many saddened devs won’t be able to attend. Apple gives third-party devs its full attention only one time of the year, and that has historically been WWDC. My colleague, John Brownlee, has already explained the reason tickets sold out so quickly. And Apple simply can’t open the conference up to more devs. Better luck next year.
Source: Louie Mantia
Mailbox may be the best email app out there, but it’s only on the iPhone. In Cult of Mac’s official review, we noted that one of the biggest cons was a lack of iPad support. Because Mailbox has such a distinct workflow for managing email, it’s difficult to use when not present on all devices.
The good news is that Mailbox is coming to the iPad. Orchestra, the developer behind the app, is working on an iPad version as we speak. Other platforms are also being looked at, including the Mac.
Today Apple announced its financial earnings for the last fiscal quarter, reporting the first year-over-year loss in profit the company has seen in ten years. The tone of Apple’s call with investors was quite different than past quarters. Tim Cook and co. seemed very much on the defensive, as Wall Street has been hammering AAPL for the past several months.
There were still several interesting tidbits from the call that we’ve rounded up. Tim Cook spoke vaguely about exciting new products in the fall and throughout 2014. Comments were made about the possibility of a larger iPhone, iMac supply constraints, and, of course, plenty of numbers.
Apple has released its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2013. The Cupertino company reported $43.6 billion in revenue and a net profit of $9.5 billion. That translates to earnings of $10.09 per diluted share.
Wall Street has been incredibly pessimistic towards Apple in recent months, but today’s results for revenue managed to surpass even the more bullish claims. Apple’s estimates for the next quarter are even more conservative with $33.5-$35.5 billion in revenue. The main problem with today’s results is that profit shrank compared to a year ago for the first time in ten years.
“Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software, and services and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline,” according to Apple.
Press release with more sales figures and details below:
Google has released a standalone iPad app for its Google Fiber TV service in the App Store. If you haven’t heard of Google Fiber, don’t feel bad: it’s only available in Kansas City at the moment.
Besides lightning-fast, fiber-opic broadband, Google Fiber also offers TV like Comcast. Android devices have been able to control Fiber TV, and now the iPad can be used as a remote for controlling the big screen.
I like to keep my iPhone’s lockscreen clean and free of distractions. Jailbreak tweaks that add weather, RSS, and more are useful for many, but the lockscreen can easily start to feel cluttered after awhile.
That’s why I’m excited to present “atom,” a new jailbreak tweak for the lockscreen that replaces the unlock slider with a beautifully subtle app launcher.
Netflix has announced a new family plan that will allow an account holder to have four simultaneous streams. The plan will cost $12 per month. A specific launch date for the plan has not been announced, but Netflix revealed the news in a letter to shareholders today.
Apple and Samsung aren’t on the best of terms. Since Apple won a $1 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung in U.S. court last year, the two have been at each other’s throats in the media. Samsung’s Galaxy TV ads depict Apple customers as mindless sheep. Apple’s Phil Schiller recently went on the offensive against Samsung on the eve of the S4 announcement. The two are clearly at odds.
Would Samsung result to bashing Apple in online article comments? It appears so. In fact, the Korean company may have its own army dedicated to trolling the comments sections of blog posts.
Apple has added a small but notable option to the iTunes Store. You can now choose to download movies and TV shows later. When you make a purchase, a new dialog box asks if you want to download the media now, or store it in your purchases list.
While the feature itself isn’t anything new—you’ve been able to download previously purchased items for awhile—the option to postpone a download until later is something Apple just added.
Jailbreaking is great for fine tuning the iOS experience. Abstergo is a new and excellent jailbreak tweak that does just that, and it’s available in Cydia now for $2. Developed by Joshua Tucker and Andrew Richardson, Abstergo improves Notification Center by adding some subtle features. It won’t blow you away, but it will make interacting with notifications less annoying—and sometimes that’s all it takes for a tweak to be great.
Fans of hit vertical jumper The Incident will be pleased to learn that the game’s makers are about to release a new creation in the App Store called Space Age. Based on early screenshots and demo videos, it has the same delightfully retro charm as its predecessor.
The App Store has a chokehold on mobile gaming, but Apple has yet to set foot into the world of living room consoles. And Apple doesn’t need to worry about competing with the likes of Xbox—the App Store has already created an incredibly vibrant and profitable gaming ecosystem.
You can mirror a game running on your iPhone to the big screen with an Apple TV. It works, but there’s more that could be done. That’s why a gaming startup based in India is bringing Wii-like motion gaming to the Apple TV. Instead of playing on the iPhone, you play with the iPhone.
About a month ago, Amazon bought Goodreads, a popular social network for reviewing and recommending books. The reason was obvious: Goodreads in the Kindle Store. But what a new report shows is that the buyout was also a move to steal Goodreads away from a potential partnership with Apple.
Auxo is one of the best jailbreak tweaks out there, period. It started as an iOS app switcher concept and has since matured into a full-fleged jailbreak tweak that puts Apple’s switcher to shame. Instead of tiny app icons, you can jump between apps by viewing large, card-like tiles. There’s also an enhanced music player and quick access to system settings, like screen brightness and WiFi.
While it works great on the iPhone, I’ve always thought that Auxo was better suited for the iPad’s larger display. The good news is that Auxo will finally be coming to jailbroken iPads everywhere sometime next month. An exact release date and price have not been given yet. Auxo for iPad will be going into private beta testing soon, and I’ll have more to share then.
Source: A³tweaks
Cultured Code has updated its popular to-do app, Things, with several nice improvements and a lot of bug fixes. Moving in and out of different time zones no longer causes a task to show up on the incorrect day. General performance should be much faster for the Mac app in just about every way. Things Cloud Sync, a feature that was introduced last year, has also been made snappier.
Over 50 additional bug fixes have been included in Things 2.2, so you should no longer be seeing random crashes or weird glitches. Things 2.2 is available now on iOS and OS X. The app costs $50 on the Mac, $20 on the iPad, and $10 on the iPhone.
Source: Things Blog
6Wunderkinder’s popular task management app, Wunderlist, is about to go pro. Don’t worry, the current version will remain free on all platforms. Wunderlist Pro is coming for those interested in collaborative task management with a team. The goal is to make assigning tasks to different people “downright simple and a lot more productive.”
The time has come. Funny or Die’s Steve Jobs mockumentary featuring Justin Long has arrived. iSteve is available for streaming in non-Apple-friendly-Flash on Funny or Die’s website. The “biopic” lasts about 80 minutes.
Warning: It is not as hilarious as we thought it might be. In fact, it’s pretty bad. It’s also historically inaccurate in many, many ways. I barely made it through the first 10 minutes. Kudos to you if you can finish. Ashton Kutcher’s JOBS is starting to look a lot more legitimate.
Source: Funny or Die
There has been an unprecedented amount of drama surrounding the removal of AppGratis, a popular app discovery tool Apple recently pulled from the App Store. An online petition with over 800,000 signatures begs for Apple to bring AppGratis back into the App Store’s good graces. Heck, the French government is pissed. What’s all the fuss about?
Apple said that it pulled AppGratis for sending app promotions to iOS users via push notifications. The discovery service coordinates with third-party developers to offer discounts for paid apps. Apple also said that AppGratis behaved too much like the App Store itself.
It looks like AppGratis’s sins run deeper.
According to a leaked document, AppGratis was charging developers large sums to get their apps to the top of the App Store’s charts.
Earlier today it was revealed that Facebook was about to launch version 6.0 of its official iOS app, and now the update is available in the App Store. Facebook 6.0 brings Chat Heads from Facebook Home on Android, little chat bubbles that pop up whenever you get a new message in the Facebook app. There are also stickers, which are basically large emoticons you can send in messages.
On the iPad, Facebook has redesigned the news feed to make it better a better overall experience.
Remember when you got frustrated that you had to wait in a virtual line to use Mailbox, the hot new iPhone app that promises to fix all of your email woes? Well now you have to wait no longer. Mailbox’s reservation system is gone, and the app is now free for everyone to use!
You’ve always been able to download Mailbox from the App Store, but unless you’ve been lucky enough to get in, the app only displays the number of users waiting in front of and behind you. 10 weeks later, that is no longer the case.
Loren Brichter is somewhat of a rockstar in the iOS app developer community. The Wall Street Journal has called him the “High Priest of App Design.” If you don’t know Brichter by name, you know him by his work: Tweetie and Letterpress.
Twitter bought Tweetie and turned it into the official Twitter app for iPhone and iPad. Letterpress is a hit word game Brichter created after he left Twitter. He also worked with a small team at Apple on the first iPhone back in 2006 and 2007. Now he’s helping out at Facebook.
Apple has started selling refurbished models of its latest iPod touch online. In this case, that means $50 off, which translates to a 12%-16% price cut depending on the storage size. A 32GB refurbished iPod touch costs $249 instead of the normal $299, and a 64GB model costs $349 instead of $399. A refurbished option is not available for the 16GB iPod touch, unfortunately.
Colors options are yellow, blue, pink, white, and black for each storage size. You can also get refurbished versions of the 4th-gen iPod touch (released in 2010) for considerably less.
There’s really no reason to not buy refurbished if you’re shopping for Apple products online. Everything is factory certified, and the warranty is the same.
Source: Apple Store
As an Apple employee, you can take a private, roomy bus with onboard WiFi along a secret route to get to work in sunny Cupertino, California. But why not just take a bike and get some exercise?
Apple has given its corporate employees the option to use a company-issued bicycle since 2011, and now thousands of workers use them to get to and from Apple HQ. Wired snapped the above picture of an Apple employee on his bike after sleuthing about Cupertino. There are apparently 420 of these bikes available on campus for employees to rent.
Cult of Mac Reviews Editor Charlie Sorrel posted about these bikes at Wired back in 2011. He discovered that they were M3 Mixte models from Public Bikes, a company located down the road in San Francisco. Apple ordered a custom batch without logos. Colors are light blue, silver, and gray.
Source: Wired
Image: Alex Washburn / Wired