At this point, Withings has to be the most complete biometric suite in existence outside of a hospital or Langley. The outfit began with a scale (which also measures body-fat percentage), added a separate blood pressure cuff and then snuck an air-quality sensor and a pulse meter into their scale.
The latest addition is the a wearable activity tracker that adds a feature unique, at this point, to activity trackers: a pulse meter (which explains why they’ve named it the Pulse).
The Cult of Mac team used Glassboard to help coordinate our reporting efforts at this year’s CES back in January. It was quick, simple, tied us all together and made the show a little less crazy.
This time around, maybe we’ll dump Glassboard for Anchor, released today. It’s an app with the same basic idea — hanging out and communicating with all your teammates through your iPhone — but with a heavy slant toward fun. And if anything is a great antidote for crazy, it’s fun.
This is Flowboard‘s second significant update since the app’s April launch, and like the first, brings meaty upgrades. In this case, the big news is that the app now gives you the ability to embed YouTube clips and PDFs in your digital publication, and thankfully adds a way to undo you last action.
There’s a lot of similarity between the Ecoxgear Ecorox Bluetooth speaker/speakerphone and the Navy SEALs. They’re both rugged, packed with stamina and waterproof. Oh yeah, and they both come from aqua-crazy San Diego.
Nestled amid the gentle rolling hills of my old stomping ground of Westlake Village sits Blue Microphones, little more than a half hour north of Los Angeles. There’re actually two lakes in the area: beautiful Lake Sherwood, and the grubby, man-made boating pond of Westlake Lake. Neither, to my recollection, has ever had a reported sighting of a monster.
Blue Microphones’s new USB mic is named “Nessie,” which I guess means now the area has at least one lake monster. Only in this case it’s the good, super-friendly kind of monster.
This is your best chance to grab the best turn-based, world-conquering strategy game on the Mac at the best price.
To coincide with the announced availability date of Civilization 5’s second expansion pack, Brave New World — which will be out Jul 9 — all Civ 5 games and DLC have had their prices cut 75 percent for the weekend. That means the original game is just $10; the Gold Edition game — which includes everything Civ 5 released up to this point including all DLC and the first expansion pack, Gods and Kings — is just $12.50.
Look, I’m no hippy; but there’s definitely something magical and awesome about the idea of transforming sunlight into music (really, I’m not a hippy — I don’t even know what patchouli oil smells like). And just like Eton’s other solar-powered Bluetooth speakers, that’s exactly what the new $200 Bluetooth-equipped Rukus XL does. Only in a bigger, badder, louder way.
By now, the only folks worried they don’t have enough choices when buying a new pair of Bluetooth headphones must be the same folks who worry that this place doesn’t have enough of a beer selection.
The newest newcomer (Bluetooth headphones, not beer) is Outdoor Tech’s spartan-looking Tuis, which we’re assuming means “Bluetooth” in Esperanto.
DataMan was one of the first iPhone data trackers when it debuted back in 2010, after AT&T 86ed the utopian guarantee of unlimited data.
This new iteration, DataMan Next, is much prettier, but essentially does the same thing: It tracks your data usage and warns you before you spend money needlessly on data overage charges; it can even predict whether you’ll end up going over your monthly allowance. And today, it’s free.
If you’ve been waiting patiently for an iPad Mini version of LifeProof‘s rugged, waterproof iPad Nuud case, you’re not going to get one — instead, LifeProof is going to enlarge its Fre%20iPhone%20case%20for%20the%20iPad%20Mini.%20what%20this%20means%20is%20you%20won’t%20have%20the%20Nuud’s%20completely%20bare%20screen,%20and%20instead%20will%20have%20a%20thin%20screen%20cover%20over%20your%20iPad%20Mini’s%20screen.The%20outfit’s%20choice%20to%20go%20with%20a%20screen%20covering%20may%20be%20a%20good%20thing%20or%20a%20bad%20thing,%20depending%20on%20your%20tastes;%20but%20there’s%20no%20argument%20that%20the%20arrival%20of%20LifeProof’s%20thin,%20rugged,%20waterproof%20iPad%20Mini%20case%20is%20a%20great%20thing.
Today Eton added the Rugged Rukus to their Rukus line of Bluetooth speakers. Like most of its Rukus siblings, the Rugged is solar-powered; unlike its siblings, the Rugged is splashproof. A great addition for our all-hell-has-broken-loose list.
I know what you’re asking: Yet another activity tracker? But LIT tracker from NZN Labs has a big secret ingredient that most others don’t — and that special ingredient makes it perfect for action sports like snowboarding, surfing and mountain biking.
One word cropped up over and over at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it wasn’t “speakerdock” (yes, that may be two words; but I’m merging them here because that’s what I’m doing). In fact, the word was “Bluetooth” — a word discordant with the very idea of a dock-equipped speaker.
And yet, amid the tsunami of Bluetooth-equipped speakers at CES, there were holdouts — adherers to the Old Way of doing things, of physically connecting a device to its speaker.
One such holdout is the Aud 5, iLuv’s first speaker dock to harbor a Lightning connector.
https://youtu.be/Vi0HhR-PmQE
Polish-based Infinite Dreams has seen pretty sizable success with their iOS games. Can Knockdown, a physics game that gives the player a row of balls with which to virtually smash stacks of cans, is so popular that the second game in the series (Can Knockdown 2) was even super-sized into a coin-op arcade game.
Now the third game in the series has arrived for iPad and iPhone, Can Knockdown 3. And just like its predecessors, it’s beautifully engineered, gobs of fun and horribly, horribly addictive.
Snapshots is a fantastic idea, and one I can see being used pretty heavily at weddings — or by, say, a gaggle of journalists who shoot an event and might need to pool their images.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XEh-Q_7VuGk#!
Microscope-like macro lenses are super neat — and not just because they let you see the little hairs on a ladybug’s leg. No, macro lenses can show you a whole new world. Or macro lenses can spark (or rekindle) a love affair with photography. Heck, at the very least, they’re good for hours of amusement.
There’s no shortage of macro lenses for the iPhone: There’s the high-end Olloclip, which also comes with a fisheye and a wide-angle lens; then there’s also this rubber-band macro from Photojojo, and these magnetic specimens.
Add to the list the new Carson ML-515 LensMag, a pair of iPhone macro lenses that clip magnetically onto the iPhone 5 — pretty standard fare. Only there is something different.
So far, it’s been an interesting few weeks for digital publishing. Late last month saw the introduction of Flowboard, a digital publishing platform centered around an iPad app.
Now Disney has come out with their (highly simplified) take. Disney Story is a free iPhone app that lets you easily create a storyboard from photos on your iPhone, with accompanying text, which you can then share via email or on Facebook.
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether space aliens actually had a hand in designing the Booq Boa Squeeze. I ran into a couple of Booq bigwigs in an elevator at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas once, and they seemed pretty cheery, completely normal, and not at all alien-like — too not-alien-like, considering Booq is based in Southern California (I consider myself a Southern Californian; we’re all weirdos). And Booq’s Sierra Madre HQ is suspiciously close to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories…
Anyway, whether or not of alien origin, what’s clear is that Booq’s bags are unlike any others on this planet — and their new lightweight, zillion-pocketed Boa Squeeze laptop backpack is no different.
If you didn’t catch our post the other day about the newest game from living legend Sid Meier, the creator of Civilization and a heap of other ground-breaking games, here’s the nitty-gritty.
Meier’s newest masterpiece is called Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol; it’s a sort of turn-based tabletop miniatures game of whirling World War I dogfights, digitized for an iPad’s (or iPhone’s screen). It’s also partially free, looks amazing and is bound to be an instant classic.
If there was one concept I came away with from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, it’s this: Bluetooth has quickly seeped into everything audio.
Nowhere was this more evident than with higher-end headphones; it felt like every manufacturer we visited that week had an obligatory wireless Bluetooth headphone on display.
One booth I didn’t get to stop by was Scosche’s, so I missed a chance to get ears-on with their new Bluetooth-enabled RH1060; but the details about these cans have my interest piqued.
It’s not much bigger than a (large, fat) thumb — but this PhoneSuit Flex battery has more juice than all but the very, very largest iPhone battery cases. While it’s been available in 30-pin and Android/micro-USB flavors for months, it’s now also available for the iPhone 5.
Most Mac users will experience one of three reactions after reading the word “Rosetta.”
The first involves breaking into a cold sweat, and possibly hives, after remembering that Apple no longer supports the translator that ran all those old, useful apps written for PowerPC-based Macs after Apple switched over to Intel chips.
Option two, imagining the Rosetta Stone itself, the magical key to unlocking ancient script, stumbled upon by Napoleon’s troops
Or there’s an association with foreign phrases, mall carts and almost certainly the most recognizable name in language software, Rosetta Stone.
We’re focusing on that last one here, and about how Rosetta Stone has finally brought their language software, in the form of the Navigator series apps, to the iPhone — for free.
Company of Heroes: Campaign Edition is hands-down the best pure real-time tactics game available on the Mac to date; there’s nothing yet ported to the Mac that can even come close to matching the WWII squad-based game’s tactical action and realism.
While you won’t get many arguments about the above statement, gamers have had plenty to say about the fact that the Mac port has lacked a sorely needed skirmish mode since the day it arrived at the Mac App Store.
Not any more though — skirmish mode has just been added to the Mac App Store version. And Aspyr has sweetened the pot further by slashing the title’s price to $10.
With deep strategy titles Civ Rev and Sid Meier’s Pirates in back catalog, just-released Haunted Hollow and the hotly anticipated iOS version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown due out this summer, one could argue that 2K Mobile isn’t the hottest name in iOS strategy games right now — but it’d be a steep uphill battle.
Then add this bombshell to support the argument: Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, due out next Thursday, may be the best 2K iOS strategy game yet.
Today is Star Wars day (for the less nerdy, here’s the punchline: “May the Fourth be with you.” Now look at the date.)
In celebration, Aspyr has drastically cut prices on all five of their ported Star Wars titles — both at the Mac App Store and at Aspyr’s own GameAgent site (though they’re slightly more expensive at the former). Two of the titles can be had for as little as $3.30 each.
