John Brownlee - page 7

Looking for a fun weekend project? Got 36 iMac boxes lying around? Make yourself an iMac hamster wheel.

Around four years ago, developers Almost Human released The Legend of Grimrock, a throwback to the first-person dungeon crawlers from the 1980s (Dungeon Master, The Bard’s Tale and even the first Phantasy Star game for the Sega Master System) for Mac.

They claimed it was was coming to iPad “by the end of the year.” It actually took three. I assumed, after all that time, it would never come to iPhone, though… but as it turns out, I was wrong.

Minecraft is no stranger to beautiful user-made worlds, but this recreation of the deep sea feels special, even by Minecraft standards.

It actually feels like you’re in a submarine, sinking deep beaneath the waves into an underewater world.

Developed by Silvio Rizzi, Reeder 2 was our favorite feed reader for Mac when it was released last year, but design wise, it was themed an OSX Mountain Lion app in an OS X Yosemite world.

Now, Reeder 3 is here, available to everyone as part of a public beta. And not only does it have a new look, it comes with a huge number of new features.

Does your Mac also boot into Windows? Mine does, and it’s a pretty great perk of owning a Mac since 2006. But modern Intel-based Macs aren’t the only ones that can dual boot operating systems.

Proof? This Amiga from the 1980s booting up Mac OS 6.0.1, the result of a particularly clever hack from the vintage computing archives.

Maybe you’re like me, and you’re interested in trying Apple Music. Maybe, though, you feel locked in to Rdio or Spotify, because over the years you’ve set up an extensive library of favorites and playlists. Favorites and playlists you count on.

Well, good news! Migrating your whole life to Apple Music is just $4.99 away.

iOS engineers must keep their eyes on the jailbreak scene. In the past, popular jailbreak tweak Auxo showed what iOS’s approach to multitasking should be like years before Apple made its best ideas part of the core operating system.

Let’s hope this pattern holds with Alympus. It’s a new tweak that radically improves, for the better, iOS 8 multitasking.

Those of us old-school instant messaging warriors remember the day when Yahoo! Messenger was the king of the IM clients. The purple search giant is hoping that day may well be at hand again.

Yesterday, we reported that Snapchat was starting to lock out jailbreakers.

Today, the popular video messaging service is locking out users who are on an out-of-date version of the app. It’s a move aimed at jailbreakers that’s going to catch some people who are slow to update in the crossfire.

If you game on a Mac, or an iOS device, you’ve probably never played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. But that’s something that has now, quite miraculously, changed: After more than a decade, KOTOR 2 is finally available for Mac, and the game is (quite literally) better than it has ever been.

Were you interested in Znaps, MagSafe adapter for Lightning connectors that we posted yesterday? You might want to hold off on ordering them. There’s a big possibility that patent issues could derail them from being delivered as promised.

It seems like just yesterday in many ways that Apple released the first iPhone, but it was actually the better part of a decade ago. Even so, it took the better part of that “better part of a decade” for the competition to catch up, as this great video, showing the evolution of smartphones, shows.

The Apple Watch is a great way to unlock all sorts of aspects of your life, from better health to your bank account. Heck, it’ll even unlock your Mac. But will it unlock your door? It can now.

Do you jailbreak? Might want to watch your Snapchatting, then. The video messaging platform is starting to lock out users who uses Snapchat-related jailbreak tweaks to hack the core features of the service.

If you want to hear who this year’s MTV Video Music Awards nominees are, you’ll hear it on Apple Music’s Beats 1 channel first. Even before you’ll hear it on MTV!

Project Titan, Apple’s hundreds-strong initiative to create a next-generation electric car, is continuing to ramp up.

Word has it that Cupertino has just hired one of the industry’s veteran manufacturing executives to help push the so-called Apple car to market.

If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time in Instagram during the day. In fact, if you’re like me, you probably spend so much time in Instagram that you wish it was integrated right into iOS, just a swipe away from no matter where in the operating system you are.

Apple’s never going to get around to baking deep integration to the Facebook-owned Instagram into iOS, but here’s the next best thing: a new app that puts Instagram right in iOS 8’s Notification Center.

Attention: jailbreakers. A new hack has just hit the Cydia App Store that allows you to “unjailbreak” your iPhone. And it’s surprisingly useful.

A reputable analyst is predicting the Apple Watch Sport will come in yellow and rose gold. And we won’t have to wait for the Apple Watch 2 to get those colors: They’ll be available alongside the iPhone 6s later this year.

Apple’s on a roll with new iPhone ads. A little more than a week after debuting a series of news ads as part of their “If it’s not an iPhone” marketing push, Cupertino has supplemented it with a new ad, focused on the kaleidoscope of wonderful apps available for the iPhone 6.

Tweetbot 2 for Mac was a long awaited update to Tapbots’ fantastic Twitter app, bringing a host of new functionality and a flat, Yosemite-friendly redesign to fans. But it wasn’t exactly a finished release, as Macworld’s review makes clear.

But Tapbots is not a developer to leave things half-done. They have just released Tweetbot 2.0.1 for Mac, and it’s so ahead of the curve it supports a feature even Twitter hasn’t delivered on yet.

Billy Corgan is an outspoken guy. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman turned semi-pro wrestler is known to speak out when he’s got an opinion, especially about politics. And he’s none too happy about what Apple’s been doing with Apple Music.

The Apple Watch might not seem like it has the most powerful processor on the block, but it’s still an A5-caliber CPU, similar to the one shipped with the iPad 2, the original iPad mini and the iPhone 4s.

That means the Apple Watch’s processor is still more powerful than pretty much every other CPU of the last 40 years. And it’s certainly up to the task of emulating a vintage Mac, as this video abundantly proves.

We all know that the Apple Watch doesn’t exactly have great battery life. At best, it’ll get you through the day. But, of course, one of the big sells of the Apple Watch is that it’ll save your iPhone battery life, because you don’t have to pull it out as much.

Of course, then you end up in a Catch-22. Your Apple Watch depends on your iPhone to work properly, but without pulling out your iPhone, you can’t tell how much battery you have left, therefore risking both your Apple Watch and your iPhone crapping out on you in the middle of the day. If only the Apple Watch could tell you your iPhone’s battery level.

It can’t, but luckily, there’s an app for that. And it might be the loveliest one yet.

Color blindness is an extremely prevalent disability, especially amongst men: according to official statistics, 1 in 12 men are color blind (although women fare better, at a rate of only 1 in 200). These rates of color blindness are part of the reason why Google places such importance in their Material Design guidelines on designing with color blindness in mind. For example, by not relying on color alone to relay critical information within an app.

But no matter how well programmed an app is, it’s not going to help someone who is color blind see colors… or is it? Red Stripe is a new app by developer Michel Fortin that aims to do just that.