Rob LeFebvre - page 19

The zombies are here and they’re standing around waiting to be blown to bits. See, these are “Stupid Zombies” and the object of this third installment in the franchise is the same as the first two: use a knowledge of physics to bounce bullets around each level and kill as many zombies as you can with each shot.

Stupid Zombies 3 offers over 100 different levels to blast your way through using a shotgun, flare gun, or grenade launcher (it’s bouncy!) to rid the world of these intellectually challenged individuals who experience undeadness.

Check out the trailer below to see what I mean.

Do you mediate every bit of your experience through the cold display of your iPhone? Do you film concerts, text during dates, and spend more time looking at your screen than into the eyes of the people you’re hanging out with?

Are you addicted to your iPhone?

NoPhone may have the solution for you. In what seems to be a rather tongue-in-cheek product page, NoPhone touts its thin, light, wireless design. Which makes sense for a smartphone-shaped hunk of plastic.

If you’ve been using iCloud to back up your iOS devices for a while like I have, chances are you’ve got a few older backup files crufting up your iCloud storage space.

If you want to maximize the space on your iCloud account, you might want to delete some of these older iCloud backups to make room for more.

Here’s how to do that.

Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as famous super spy James Bond looks to take a darker, more roguish turn than ever, with Bond looking to “disappear” from the British spy agency that gives him the “00” license to kill rating.

The new trailer has all sorts of dramatic moments interspersed with the action, gadgetry, cars, women, overly-confident villains and explosions fans want to see.

Check it out below and be ready to see your first glimpse at the big bad behind the scenes of anti-spy organization, SPECTRE, which seems to be aimed squarely at Bond, James Bond’s broad shoulders.

Video game streaming juggernaut Twitch.tv is stepping up its HTML5 game today with a move to get rid of buggy and overly-patched Flash in Twitch’s website.

The move today is only for the player part of the equation, but a full HTML5 solution should be forthcoming.

“Today’s redesign moves half of the video player – specifically the controls – from Flash to HTML5 and Javascript,” Twitch writes on its blog page. “The video itself is still in Flash underneath the controls. However, this is an important step to releasing the much-anticipated full HTML5 player.”

We didn’t get Apple Watch numbers, but Tim Cook and Luca Maestri delivered plenty of good news about Apple’s current financials and future prospects during Tuesday’s earnings call. Amid all the canned statements and bewildering biz speak, they dropped some tantalizing tidbits.

Cook and Maestri teased us with plenty of bullishness — and a little debunking — about impressive Apple Watch sales and consumer responses to the new device. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Apple hit record numbers again this quarter, with massive sales of both iPhone 6 and Macs across the globe.

Here are the highlights from today’s third-quarter 2015 Apple earnings call.

Apple’s new streaming music service is coming under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for possible anti-competitive practices.

The recently launched Apple Music costs $9.99 per subscription (or $14.99 for an up-to-six-person family plan), with the first three months free. Competing services like Spotify or Rdio are subject to Apple’s 30 percent take from any app sold on the App Store, which makes the FTC uncomfortable, as Apple Music is not subject to the same rules.

When Apple created the MagSafe power connector for its highly desirable line of MacBooks back in 2006, the world changed. Gone were the days of tripping over your power adapter cord and pulling your entire MacBook down onto a cold, uncaring floor.

These days, your iPhone and iPad have a similar problem, with a Lightning cable that connects so securely to the power port that if you happen to walk by and trip on the cable, you’re gonna fling that oh-so-precious device right to the ground, dashing its poor little silicon brains out.

This Kickstarter project, ZNAPS, aims to fix this design nightmare with a magnetic Lightning cable adapter that will transform the way you charge your Apple mobile devices, all for an excitingly low price of $9.

Websites these days have another tool to engage you: the desktop notification. Many sites, this one included, allow you to opt in to a system of popup notices that encourage you to click through and see new content.

Of course, not all content is created equal, and you might someday wish to stop being notified of new cat photos from that feline-friendly website.

Here’s how to manage web notifications using two of the Mac’s most popular web browsers, Safari and Chrome.

The new iPods are here, but should you even bother getting one? We’ve got our opinion on the matter, plus one on what Apple should really do to fix its built-in fitness apps.

Plus, a bit about why the Apple Watch isn’t doomed after all, a profile of another fantastic iPhone photographer, and a gallery of some cringe-worthy iPhone cases that you’ve really got to see to believe.

All that, plus much, much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Don’t forget to subscribe and download this week’s issue.

When it comes to app downloads, China and Mexico surged in the first fiscal quarter of 2015, says a report by the mobile analysts at App Annie.

China took the top spot for iOS downloads while Mexico now ranks among the top five countries for Google Play downloads, surpassing South Korea this quarter.

While we’ve seen Google Play lead the number of downloads across the globe and iOS facing a shrinking lead in revenue, Q1 2015 showed a huge jump for iOS in terms of revenue, to the tune of about 70 percent more (up from 60 percent higher in Q3 2014). Google Play continues to be top dog in downloads, though, with 70 percent more downloads than Apple’s digital storefront.

Most every app I’ve installed on my Apple Watch brings some sort of Glance along with it. While that’s a neato-keen thing to put in your App description to sell more apps, I’m not convinced that every app I have needs to be on my wrist.

Nuzzle, Words with Friends, Tile, Fandango, Foursquare: These are all apps I surely do not need or want on my Apple Watch.

Here’s how to clean up your Apple Watch Glances section for a much more focused and clear informational workflow. Because seriously, how many swipes do I need to get to the battery Glance?

Four undergraduate students at UC Berkeley created a rocking chair called the Volta that stores kinetic energy from an attached pendulum.

At first, the team thought such a chair would be a novelty, a student project that had rocking chair users see how much energy they could generate from rocking back and forth.

Of course, once chair sitters interacted with the smartphone app that tracked the energy they were producing, they wanted a USB port to keep their iPhone charged up.

The disgruntled avians are headed your way yet again in a new game, cleverly titled Angry Birds 2, according to a fairly vague website and trailer from Finnish developer Rovio.

Details are scant, but here’s hoping we see more of the compelling gameplay of the first title in the series — and way less of the karting and endless running of recent releases.

Netflix just added 3.3 million more subscribers, the company said in a live Google Hangout Wednesday morning, making cable just that much more irrelevant with the news.

CEO Reed Hastings even showed up to the earnings call in a Bojack Horseman sweater, contrasting nicely with all the other suits onscreen.

It’s like he’s letting everyone know that Netflix can’t be stopped, and he’ll wear whatever he damn well pleases, thank you very much.

Netflix’s stock price has also rocketed up for the just finished fiscal quarter, which comes on the heels of the June 23rd announcement of a seven-to-one stock split.

Sounds like Netflix is taking a cue from Apple’s playbook on this one.

There are two kinds of people in this world, those that want to watch television on their wrist, and those that don’t.

I fall into the first camp, so you can imagine my disappointment when I heard that while the update to Hulu’s iOS app includes support for Apple Watch, it does not include (dang it!) support for watching TV on Apple’s hot new wearable. Boo.

It does, however, allow you to control Apple Watch, as it’s a remote for Hulu on the various devices Hulu comes on, like Apple TV, PlayStation 3 and 4, Chromecast and Xbox ONE. So, I guess there’s that.

That Slice data? Totally misleading, says analyst Mark Hibben.

Instead, he says, Apple sold over 4.5 million Apple Watches in two months of the June fiscal quarter. That’s way more than the 1 million units of the original iPhone Apple sold when it first launched in 2007.

“Apple Watch has a bright future,” writes Hibben, “despite what some market research polls might indicate. In its launch quarter, Watch will add about $2 billion in revenue to Apple’s top line.”

With numbers like that, even Apple can’t call the Apple Watch a hobby.

Phenomenal survival game, This War of Mine, is now available on your iPad (and select Android tablets).

The team did a fantastic job of creating the atmosphere of war from the perspective of the civilian’s caught up in it. The game’s visuals, music and play mechanics all work together to create an utterly compelling experience as a non-combatant trapped in a war zone, hungry and vulnerable.

It’s something every one should play, and now that it’s on sale for mobile tablets, everyone can. Check out the launch trailer below.

Apple seeded two new incremental updates for developers today, one for the current version of OS X Yosemite, 10.10.5, and another for iOS 8.4.1, the current version of iOS available for consumers on iPhone and iPad.

“The OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac,” writes Apple in its release notes. Further details on iOS 8.4.1 are as yet unavailable.

If you’re looking for a best-in-class photo retouching and editing app, you can’t go wrong with Pixelmator, available both for Mac and iOS.

The mobile version is utterly fantastic, letting you engage in the same sort of high-end photo editing, painting, and graphic design that you find in the desktop version for a fraction of the price.

The new update, which came out on Tuesday, ramps up the photo Repair tool to something that’s five times as fast, and even more precise. There’s also a new Dynamic Touch system, which lets you use the tip of your finger for thin strokes and the pad of your finger for thicker lines.

You won’t see this kind of subtlety and power in any other photo app, especially for $4.99.

While Apple hasn’t been adding DRM to your music, there must have been some issue with the service when paired with iTunes Match.

iTunes 12.2.1 is out now, and it contains a fix for any iTunes Match users who saw iTunes change some songs from Matched (which gives you access to high-resolution audio files that you own) to Apple Music (which will disappear if you let your subscription lapse).

This week, we’ve got a ton of even more great stuff for you all in one place. Check out our guide to getting Apple Music on your iPhone so you can listen without burning up all your data on streaming, our beginner’s guide on running with the Apple Watch, a profile on one of the best sports photographers out there who also happens to use an iPhone, a hilariously true interview with the developers behind, yes, the Farty Troll game, and the straight skinny on iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan public betas.

Get all that (and more!) in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Download and subscribe right here, too.

There are a dozen-odd ways to chat with people these days, from IM to Twitter direct messages to apps like Slack, Snapchat and GroupMe.

If you want to create your own with no more fuss than typing in a unique URL in your web browser, though, you can’t go wrong with hack.chat, a new, bare-bones, no-frills approach to private chat that looks like something out of the DOS era. And I mean that in a good way.

It’s dead simple to use (though you can also run your own server) and incredibly disposable. Perfect for those quick chats you need to make happen that you may not want on something like Slack, which keeps an archive of all the inappropriate comments you’ve ever written.

Apple Music Connect is like another version of Apple’s failed Ping service. It’s being promoted as a way to keep in touch with your favorite artists, but man is it impersonal.

My Connect page is full of bland PR-style stuff and links to buy music from artists I’m following. There’s just not enough quality posts in there to justify checking it each day.

Until now. Jonathan Poritsky has a fantastic idea over at his music blog: why not follow the folks on Apple Music who actually share and curate music? Follow Julie Adenuga, Zane Lowe, or any of the genre or curator profiles hidden in Apple Music.

These are the folks that are sharing amazing music. Here’s how to follow them.

Excited about the new Heroes: Reborn series coming back to television? Want to relive highlights from the original Heroes series in preparation for the reboot set to air this fall?

How about an entire prequel series that explains how the world has changed since Heroes? You’re in luck, then, as NBC has created a digital series that does just that: Heroes Reborn: Dark Matters.

If you want to see it, though, you’ll need to download the Heroes: Reborn app, which is only on iOS.