Rob LeFebvre - page 12

Best List: BlueSync RGD Bluetooth speaker by GoGroove

There are those of you who like to take risks. Face it, you love living on the edge, taking your precious electronics into dusty, dirty and even wet locations.

If your dream is to play tunes at high volume while you raft Class V rapids, rappel down a sheer cliff face or just take a shower, GoGroove has you covered.

The BlueSync RGD is a super-rugged, water-resistant Bluetooth speaker that will go with you anywhere and deal with almost all the dangers you can throw at it, all for a wallet-friendly price.

I made an Apple Music playlist of Paste’s top 50 albums of 2015 via iTunes on my Mac. I was able to share it out on Facebook and to my friends via Messages, but I wasn’t able to see the playlist on my iPhone.

I made sure that I was logged in to my iTunes account on both my Mac and my iPhone, I signed in and out of iCloud, and I even force-quit Apple Music on my iPhone to try and fix the issue. None of these options worked.

After a bit of searching on the internet, I figured out what the problem was.

Here’s what you can do if you’re having the same issue.

With over 1 billion downloads, Temple Run and it’s sequel, Temple Run 2, are the very definition of mobile gaming success.

It’s even better that husband and wife developers and co-founders Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova are such incredibly nice people. Their startup, Imangi Studios, has found the gold at the end of the rainbow, and they’ve no intention of stopping.

“Frozen Shadows” is the latest (and largest) free update to the franchise yet, giving you new characters like Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox to run through a brand-spanking-new ice world. You’ll also get new artifacts, winter costumes, and an absolutely terrifying new demon monkey to run from. Yikes!

“We’re really trying to expand the Temple Run universe,” Shepherd told us on the phone, “in much the same way as a novelist or storyteller would.”

Once Apple brought games to the Apple TV, it was a no-brainer that we’d all want to play them together on the couch in our living room.

Apple requires developers to support the new Siri Remote, but they can also allow third-party game controllers to move stuff around on the screen, too.

Crossy Road, the excellent Frogger-like hit iOS game with the seemingly endless supply of cute creatures to play as (that was also an Apple TV launch title), goes one step further. If you want to play with a buddy and don’t have a second gamepad, you can have your pal play Crossy Road on Apple TV with just their iPhone.

Here’s how.

Logging into any service on Apple TV is a pain. The text-entry field is one long line, and if you’ve got a particularly lengthy username or password for apps on the Apple TV, entering them can take much longer than it should.

Twitter-owned Digits is offering its own take on a solution with an SDK that tvOS developers can implement in their apps and let users type in a short string of numbers and letters that they get from their iPhone, rather than the full-on username and password combination.

This could solve the problem altogether, and it’s not much more tricky than using an app for Two-Step Authentication, which we all do now, anyway (or should).

Best List: Reference R6i On-Ear Headphones by Klipsch

Sometimes you just need a solid, great-sounding set of wired headphones. They don’t need to charge up like my Bluetooth favorites do, nor do they require pairing (or repairing, like several models I’ve used).

Earbuds are great, too, but for extended listening sessions, I prefer on-ear headphones. They are less sound-isolating — I don’t need to hear my own breathing all the time.

Apple Watch is becoming second nature to me after several months of owning it. It’s gotten to the point where I feel like something’s missing when I don’t strap it to my wrist in the morning before starting my workday.

Thing is, the Apple Watch has so many animations on it that I sometimes feel like getting things done takes too long. I just want to find and use apps, with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Luckily, you can turn off those animations on Apple Watch to make it all feel a bit snappier.

Apple is positioning the iPhone 6s as both incredibly user friendly as well as ridiculously powerful in a couple of new spots appearing on YouTube Tuesday evening.

The first ad, “Ridiculously Powerful” admits that the iPhone 6s is essentially the same as the iPhone 6, except now it’s incredibly high-powered.

Check it out below, along with a second video that focuses on friendliness via the Hey Siri feature of the new iPhones.

Gabriella van Rij thinks we all need to be kinder to each other — especially online. To that end, she’s leading a kindness movement aimed at eliminating the cyberbullying that can happen when kids get their mitts on the hottest gifts around: smartphones and tablets like the iPhone and iPad.

“The truth is,” says van Rij, “smartphones can be weapons in the wrong hands.”

Black Friday was great, but there are even more killer sales for Cyber Monday. Check out the most spectacular deals below, like huge deals on rugged Bluetooth speakers, still-useful discounts on Macbook and Macbook Air, and a super useful iPad keyboard case for less.

Cult of Mac will keep digging through Cyber Monday ads to find the best deals on Apple products, electronics and gifts for everyone on your list. The deals are all piping-hot and ready for your online shopping blitz.

It might be a short week for most of us here in the U.S., but that didn’t stop us from piling up a whole, well, pile of great content for your long weekend enjoyment.

We’ve got all the Black Friday sale info you can handle, a bunch of sweet gadget reviews (like the rumbling, rabble-rousing Sonos Play:5) and a fantastic assortment of Apple news and views that you’ll love.

Be sure to download the Cult of Mac Magazine app now to get your own copy of our latest issue.

Here’s the rundown:

There are so many Black Friday deals out there it’s incredibly difficult to keep up with them all, even for someone who’s paid to do just that.

We’ve taken pity on you and have pulled the absolute best deals that we could find and added a special value-added service at the end: A single line of text that you can copy and paste into your Google Calendar Quick Add field or your Calendar Quick Event field (just click on that big Plus button at the top of your Calendar app).

That way, you’ll have reminders when these fantastic deals appear, whether you’re at home zoning out to Fallout 4 or out at a holiday party drinking good cheer.

Check out our evolving list below.

Every once in a while, you might have an app or two that you really don’t want to show off. Whether it’s a racy game or two or dating apps you don’t want your children seeing when you hand them your phone to keep them occupied, being able to hide those apps from general view is a handy thing.

Until now, you had to jailbreak your iPhone to make that happen. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case, and you can–thanks to the fine folks over at Redmond Pie, who originally found this tip–hide apps on your own iPhone, with no jailbreak required. It’s a bit involved, and requires that you change your wallpaper to something boring, like white or grey, but it works.

Here’s how.

It’s one week away from Black Friday, and in addition to our killer live blog with up-to-the-minute deals, we’ve got a new magazine with all sorts of quirky products that our loving reviewers have taken the time to get to know.

We’ve got a funky clip-on lampshade for your iPhone, a Pro Tip to max out your iPhone battery, a conceptual piece on how Apple could fix the next version of its wristband, a secret messaging app that pulls in 1 million downloads every day, and (of course) our weekly gabfest about all things Apple, The Cultcast.

Here’s the rundown of what we’ve got for you in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Best List: Sit-Stand Desktop Workstation by Ergotron

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with standing desks. While I love the health benefits of standing, I seriously cannot stand at my desk all day every day. It needs to be easily adjustable.

Also, not all of us have the space for yet another desk in our homes or offices. Most of us have a regular, plain old desk. If you’re looking for a standing solution – you can convert that plain desk super easily with this Sit-Stand Desktop Workstation. It’s a heavy-duty, solid piece of work, and it sits right on top your regular desk. There’s room to strap on a monitor or two, or even just place your Macbook on top with an external keyboard and mouse below.

If you’re an Apple ID owner, you know that two-step verification is the best way to make sure that only you have access to your personal credit card details along with your app, music, and video purchases.

Until a couple of weeks ago, Amazon–another company that probably has private financial information from you–didn’t have a way to do the same thing. That way, even if someone figures out your password, they’ll only have half the info needed to make changes to or access your account.

Now that the Seattle-based books-and-everything-else company allows for it, it’s time to zip up your personal details. Here’s how.

The new Apple TV is all about apps and games, so it makes sense that there are five new ads from Apple on its YouTube channel that are all about specific games and apps.

Check out the videos below for streaming media apps like Netflix and HBO, along with a trio of gaming titles, including Apple TV ads for Asphalt 8 from Gameloft, mega-hit casual Crossy Road from Hipster Whale, and Disney Infinity 3.0 Edition: Star Wars from the House of Mouse.

If you’re enamored of the beautiful aerial screen savers on your new Apple TV and want to do something similar on your Mac, you’re in luck.

SaveHollywood is a screen saver module that will work on any Mac running OS X 10.8 or later, and it lets you play any movie you want when your Mac enters screen saver mode.

Here’s how to get it set up.

Best List: iPad mini keyboard by Brydge

We all like to carry our gadgets around with us, but there are definitely times when you’ll want to be ultra portable and just take along, say, your iPad mini on vacation. Or, perhaps you want to get some writing done on the airplane:we all know the seat-back tray is way too small for a full laptop.

This ultra-portable Brydge keyboard is a fantastic match for the iPad mini, letting you be a bit more productive than you would without an actual keyboard. It’s designed to match whichever iPad mini you own, turning the whole thing into an adorably small Macbook-like laptop-style tablet.

Californium is an upcoming first-person game inspired by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It seems to be about a writer who “slips” between different realities as his life falls apart.

It looks amazing, and more than a bit creepy. Check it out:

My iPhone 6 Plus is a battery hog. I routinely get around 12 hours off of one full charge. I carry around external battery packs to make sure I’m not short when it matters.

I’d do pretty much anything to increase the amount of battery I have left at the end of the day, including the following fairly extreme trick.

Sure, the hot new iPad Pro is big, beautiful, and plenty capable, but it’s also apparently future-proof.

Apple snuck in a USB 3.0-capable Lightning port into the bottom of your favorite massive tablet without telling anyone.

We’ve gotten our happy little hands on the gorgeous, huge new iPad Pro, and we’ve got first impressions of the next-gen post-PC Apple tablet right here.

Plus, some Mac-like keyboard shortcuts for your new friend, must-have iPad Pro apps for creative types, a review of The Room Three (a fantastic puzzler in the App Store), and a check-in with Pope Francis, who wants us all to spend time with each other at the dinner table.

So check out all that and a bunch more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, the best slice of Apple news and info this side of Cupertino. Be sure to get your own copy today.

Here’s a quick preview of what’s inside:

If you’re one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a big, beautiful iPad Pro, you might be surprised that many of the same OS X keyboard shortcuts, like the ones for cut, paste, find, etc., are available right on your new giant laptop replacement.

The iPad Pro keyboard has a Command key on it, as do several third-party keyboards.

If you’re already a Mac user (and you should be), you’ll feel right at home when you need to create a new document in Pages, make your text bold or italic, or even show the word count in a document. Here are several key combinations you can use right out of the box.

If you’ve called out, “Hey Siri” to your iPhone before, you know the joy of this Star Trek-style technology. You don’t even need to hold the Home button down. Sure, your iPhone needs to be plugged in, but it’s a pretty neat party trick.

Excitingly, you can do something similar on your Mac: activating dictation with a voice command. The next time you get a great idea and need to document it, you can just call to your Mac and dictate it right then. No pen, no paper, no walking all the way to your keyboard.

Here’s how.