Rob LeFebvre - page 25

As a sufferer from dysmappia (not a real word), I still get lost in a town I’ve lived in for 15 years. The iPhone and GPS accessibility has allowed me to find my way around pretty much any urban center I’ve been in, and even some rural ones as well.

Now that Maps is on Apple Watch, I’m going to be navigating around even more easily, lifting my wrist to see which way to go instead of burying my head in an iPhone. It’s sure to at least be a ton safer.

Here’s how to get from point A to point Z using just your Apple Watch.

Notifications are why we all got an Apple Watch, right? We want to be able to know what’s going on in our digital lives all the time, but we want to do it faster, without having to pull out an iPhone. Because that’s just rude.

However, getting every single Notification that you get on your iPhone shunted automatically over to your Apple Watch is going to get tiresome. No one wants to deal with a wrist tap every time someone takes a turn in Evil Apples.

Here’s how to manage all of the notification cruft a little bit better.

Getting your Apple Watch set up is fairly basic, but to truly make this your own personal device, you’ll need to dig into the Apple Watch settings.

You can do all of these things on the Apple Watch itself, but why force yourself to tap and swipe on that tiny screen? Use the Apple Watch app on your iPhone for a much more pleasant experience. You can thank me later.

 There are 10 Apple Watch faces to choose from, and each one comes with a crazy amount of options. The moon phases widget is pretty neat, but do I really want to clutter up my watch’s minimalist look? If you’re looking for the coolest Apple Watch faces to match your style, there are plenty of customizable options.

The cool thing is that you can almost have it all. Apple makes it pretty easy to pick your preferred Apple Watch face and then tweak the specific options you want to add to (or delete from) your wrist.

Here’s how.

Let’s face it: A time will come when your Apple Watch crashes or freezes. It’s gonna become unresponsive, but you’ll be ready thanks to this handy Apple Watch restart tip.

From James Bond’s laser Rolex to Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, spies have always been suckers for wearable tech.

To salute secret agents’ fondness for the latest gadgets, the makers of Spy_Watch crafted their new game for the latest cutting-edge device — the Apple Watch. And, like clever spymasters, there’s a twist: They paired this super-modern smartwatch with a vintage videogame mechanic to make a compelling game suitable for a gadget the size of Dick Tracy’s famous wrist radio.

“The idea is to immerse yourself in the idea that you are a spymaster controlling a spy out on missions,” Vince Farquharson, COO of Spy_Watch developer Bossa Games, told Cult of Mac. “To make it feel like they are a real person and that this is really happening.”

Looks like you don’t need to be a long-time Star Wars fan to totally geek out over The Force Awakens trailer that appeared online last week, as these cuties so ably prove.

Even super young babies get it: this is the coolest, most exciting trailer ever in their young lives: it’s time to completely freak out.

Check out how these little ones react to the best Star Wars thing in recent years in their own America’s Funniest Home Videos YouTube post.

Rob-James Collier, who plays the evil butler on Downton Abbey, Thomas Barrow, is running the London marathon to raise money for a local Multiple Sclerosis charity.

While he might have been able to raise the goal amount of £10,000 on his own cache in the popular British period drama alone, he chose to film a few members of the cast on set playing with lightsabers.

How can you not want to watch Downton Wars?

Crafting a tiny icon for an Apple Watch app is a huge design challenge. Coming up with one that’s truly adorable – even at 80 pixels by 80 pixels – requires something like a graphic design miracle.

Lucky for anyone strapping an Apple Watch on their wrists this Friday, some designers have been working wonders. Behold the cutest Apple Watch app icons in the world!

Adobe’s Behance, Adobe Color CC, and Creative Cloud apps have all been updated to include Apple Watch support in a move designed to both sell more iOS apps as well as inspire their current customers to get outside of the computer and create.

“That’s because designers get a lot of their best ideas,” writes Adobe’s David Macy, “not while sitting at our desks, but from interacting with and observing the world around us.”

Here’s what would happen if Superman and Batman got together for coffee to talk about the big trailer reveal of the past week.

No, it’s not Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Instead, Supes is excited about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and calls it the best trailer out there. Batman tries to get the Man of Steel to consider their own dual trailer to no avail.

Superhero banter, sarcasm, and some pretty funny lines ahead. You’ve been warned.

In a video sent out to Apple retail employees, Apple’s senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts clarified that the Apple Watch will be arriving for many customers this Friday, but that online ordering was still the only way the Apple Watch can be purchased right now.

Ahrendts talks directly to retail employees, reminding them that the Apple Watch isn’t the only great new product aut right now, but that it is an entirely new type of product and way of selling things for Apple.

“This is not just a new product for us, this is an entirely new category,” she says in the video, “and it is the first time we’ve ever previewed a product two weeks before the availability.”

Even with the horrible audio echoes and Ahrendts’ vocal-pause-laden and seemingly unrehearsed speech, the video is a fascinating look at the messaging all Apple retail staff will be hearing this week as they prepare for the hordes of new customers looking to buy an Apple Watch or new Macbook.

There are two different channels for audio on your iOS device: there are ringers and alert sounds and there are media sounds, like from the Music app or various games on your iPhone.

The hardware volume buttons on the side of your iPhone are set to control both by default, but you can separate it out, making the hardware buttons only turn down the media sounds instead of both media and ringer sound.

Here’s our recipe on how to make sure you never miss a call because someone “accidentally” turned your volume all the way down.

Disney’s has been showing us glimpses of its Brad Bird-helmed live action film for some time now, with the slow burn first trailer last October focusing on the young woman who gets a mysterious pin that transports her to an unseen, futuristic world, complete with jetpacks and glittering skylines.

That and present-day George Clooney, who convincingly portrays the curmudgeon next door with secrets of his own.

This new trailer, however, ratchets up the sci-fi action, giving us several more shots of the eponymous future city, even more jetpacks, and a team of future SWAT cops with ray guns coming after our heroine and Clooney as they climb into a bathtub and launch themselves into an uncertain, well, future.

Maybe Tomorrowland won’t be the sappy kid flick we all thought it would turn out to be, after all.

It can be tricky to get the best shot when taking a selfie or group shot with your iPhone. If you want a better angle than the length of your arm can provide (or your ridiculous selfie stick will telescope to), you might consider setting your iPhone on a ledge or tripod and using the built-in timer mode to get yourself and everyone else into position before the shutter goes off.

It’s not super-tricky, but you do need to know where to look. Here’s our recipe to enable timer mode on your iPhone.

In Mac OS X, you’ll spend much of your time in the Finder, the part of your operating system that manages files and such. While you might think you know all there is to know about it, the Finder is a complex and wonderful app — with its own special tricks to master.

Here are 10 essential Finder tips that will help you get the most out of your time working or playing on your Mac.

Is this a new era of marketing directly to stoners?

In Ben & Jerry’s new ad for its in-shop confection, the Brrr-ito, a young woman wearing an ice cream server’s uniform runs into a room of slack-jawed young men staring at a screen showing a boring old ice cream bar.

What happens next should be no surprise to those of you who remember Ridley Scott’s famous ad for Apple in 1984 introducing the Mac.

This week, Leander takes some time to try on the Apple Watch in-store, finding out whether the hottest smartwatch out there is worth your time or money, David heads into an Apple Store on Magnificent Mile in Chicago for a fitting and to get some customer reactions, plus a ton of news about this latest wearable tech that you’ll want to read from cover to cover. We’ve also got Stephen with some travel tips for you and your trusty MacBook, as well as Luke’s take on why you want to upgrade your iOS to 8.3 right away (hint, it’s not emojis). Rob also walks you through a couple of how-tos, including one way to make sure your iOS gaming sessions aren’t interrupted with a simple tweak to Do Not Disturb.

Make sure to head on out and download Cult of Mac Magazine to get your own “hands” on the great content we dose you with every week.

One of the cooler hidden features of Photos (and iPhoto before it) is the ability to create more than one photo library. You can make one for your home photos, work photos, photos from a different camera, or those racy photos you don’t want the kids tripping over.

It’s pretty simple, but not totally intuitive – there’s no menu item to select to create a new library.

Follow our recipe to create as many different libraries as you like for separate but equal Photos access.

“The Force is strong in my family,” says Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker voices over this second teaser trailer for the hotly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie that will hit the big screen this coming December. “My father has it, I have it, my sister has it. You have that power, too.”

That’s how the nerdgasmic second trailer begins, and then slams into some seriously amazing scenes from the upcoming film, including a massive, crashed Star Destroyer, close ups of new stars Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley, and a brilliant moment of fan service with everyone’s favorite smuggler and his humongous furry sidekick.

“Chewie,” says Han Solo, “We’re home.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook is the fourth person on Time‘s list of “The 100 Most Influential People,” a self-referential grouping of important figures from technology, music, politics, and our global culture.

Cook’s short essay focuses on his business acumen as well as his socially responsible world-view.

“It could not have been easy for Tim Cook to step into the immense shadow cast by the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs,” writes Congressman John Lewis for Time. “But with grace and courage and an unabashed willingness to be his own man, Tim has pushed Apple to unimaginable profitability—and greater social responsibility.”

With the advent of Apple’s motion coprocessor chip (the M8 in recent iOS devices), any apps that you download and grant permission to can use this data to enhance their offerings.

This lets apps like RunKeeper, Carrot Fitness and others both gather fitness data from your iPhone as well as send it to the Health app.

This could raise privacy concerns for some, so being able to decide which apps we allow to access our fitness-tracking data — or whether the iPhone tracks these activities at all — can be a helpful.

Here’s our recipe for getting finer-grained control over your fitness-tracking data.

Oh, that pesky list view in your iOS Calendar app. It sure likes to go missing in various iOS updates, doesn’t it, like in iOS 7 when it just, sort of, disappeared.

It’s not totally gone now in iOS 8.3, but there is a new way to access it along with a new layout. There are also some funky ways to move around your Calendar app that may not be as intuitive as they should. These aren’t necessarily new to iOS 8.3, but it’s handy to know them, as well.

Here’s the recipe you’ll need to view your iOS Calendar the way you want on your iPhone and iPad.

Hearthstone addicts players rejoice! Blizzard’s incredibly compelling digital card game is now optimized for your iPhone or iPod touch.

We’ve heard rumors that some folks even use their iPhone while in the bathroom. Gross! If you’re one of those people, though, get ready to never stop playing Hearthstone again.

Sure, the video game company behind mega-hits World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III has had a version of this easy-to-learn, hard-to-master two-player collectible card game on the Mac and iPad since 2013, but this is the first time you’re able to play it on the small screen without any jailbreaking or hacking needed.

“Hearthstone is now officially supported on iPhone and iPod touch,” says the App Store description. “…Featuring an all-new intuitive interface hand-crafted for the mobile experience, it’s never been easier to take Hearthstone with you anywhere you want to play.”

You’re in the green room, waiting for your curtain call. You can hear the throngs of rabid fans in the audience, just waiting for you and your group of rock and roll rebels to take the stage.

You and your bandmates head out, winding through backstage. You flirt with a cute blonde production assistant; a bearded roadie hands you your favorite axe. You step out onto a massive stage in front of a crowd of thousands. You totally suck at playing the guitar. The crowd, fickle as ever, turns on you.

No, this isn’t that anxiety dream you’ve been having ever since you were a teenager, this is the new Guitar Hero, a new video game with a familiar name and a very different experience.