Rob LeFebvre - page 27

This week, Alex has a quick look inside Apple’s secret health lab, Leander has some of his own thoughts about the hot new Becoming Steve Jobs book, Luke has important info about how hackers are brute-forcing simple passwords, Rob gives you a quick how-to on marking all those unread iMessages as read, and David has a pretty neat story about Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty. Wild, fun, and all Cult of Mac — that’s what we have for you in this edition of Cult of Mac Magazine!

Sure, you’ve got Touch ID set up on your iPhone 6, but you’ll still need a passcode to keep your iPhone secure. If you have an older iPhone without Touch ID, or your fingerprint isn’t recognized for any reason, you’ll need to fall back on a passcode.

If you want to make your passcode even more secure, try using our recipe for a code with special characters instead of a simple number-based solution.

Indie developer Daryl Hornsby has a novel approach for getting kids engaged with educational games: Don’t dumb things down.

That’s the key to Machineers, the clever puzzle-adventure game his company crafted to to lead kids through various programming logic concepts.

“When you say you want to target 10 to 15 year-olds, you’re told you have to make it overly colorful and bubbly, and that no kids read text,” Hornsby told Cult of Mac. “We’ve been able to prove that this is not quite the case. We’ve found that kids want to be treated like adults, but it still has to be approachable.”

Note: Chosen is available for free right now but the ability to sing and judge is invite-only for now. As a special treat for Cult of Mac readers, however, the first 500 folks that enter the code 313 into the app after downloading it will be able to get in and participate.

David Hyman is no stranger to the music business, having sold MOG to Beats when the headphone company wanted a music subscription service. He was the CEO at Gracenote before that, and the director of ad sales at music blog Addicted to Noise before that. Hyman even served as interim CEO at Neil Young’s PonoPlayer.

At the Game Developers Conference this March, Hyman sat down with Cult of Mac to show off his latest music project: Chosen, a new game that marries the idea of fan-made YouTube music videos with the American Idol-style competition television, all on your iPhone.

We sat down with Hyman at the chic Hotel Zetta at the beginning of March in San Francisco, where he demoed Chosen, Hyman’s latest foray into making music accessible to all of us.

What happens when your daughter is infected by the zombie virus? You love her, and you want to save her.

Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to kill her.

Action-hero and California governor Schwarzenegger stars in the upcoming Maggie, a gritty, realistic, and very human portrait of the possible zombie apocalypse.

If you dig creating fresh beats and smooth grooves on your Mac, you’ll likely love GarageBand. It’s a fantastic bit of musical creation kit for anyone, regardless of native ability or experience. You can use loops to make new songs, play your own music with MIDI keyboards–even make your own ringtones for your iPhone. It’s quite versatile.

When you download GarageBand from the Mac App Store, you’ll immediately get 50 sounds, 500 loops, 1 drummer, and 2 basic lessons for guitar and piano. Likely, though, you want the full package, which is available as a free download that expands the content to 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 basic lessons for guitar and piano.

Here’s how to get it.

Apple continues to tweak its emoji keyboard in the latest iOS 8.3 beta, the fourth iOS beta so far to make its way to developers to test and try out new features.

The new options organize the skin tone modifiers — which debuted in beta 2 of iOS 8.3 — into tap and hold menus, making things just a bit easier to utilize while streamlining the process as well.

In addition, all the yellow-colored Emoji people that previously had brown hair now have yellow hair, as you can see in the image below.

It looks like that cheap cassette adaptor I bought for my first iPhone and that universal remote for all my TV gadgets at RadioShack in the last ten years may come back to haunt me.

If you’re like me and you’ve shopped at RadioShack within the last several years, your personal information may be included in the sale of all of the failed electronics retailer’s assets in an auction that concluded Monday of this week.

The sale also includes Radio Shack trademarks, patents, leases, and the court presiding over the matter will likely decide whether Radio Shack can continue its retail operations at a smaller scale.

The reported winner of the bid, Standard General, is also RadioShack’s largest shareholder, making this an odd one. The winning bid still needs to be approved by a bankruptcy judge, who will have to consider the pending legal challenges to this sale.

Like, for example, whether a retailer that bragged, “We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list,” can sell them once bankrupt.

Rock band OK Go contains some incredibly talented folks. Their crazy-creative videos keep us dancing and guessing “how did they do that?” while they make iOS games and manage a successful touring and record-making career along the way.

Now the foursome is advertising for Red Star Macalline, a Chinese furniture company, with an advertisement using their hit song “I Won’t Let You Down,” including a video shot in China itself, as well as a remix of the tune for the ad.

Check it out below, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. Chair dancing will probably ensue (if you’re sitting down).

If you’re like me, you’ve got a ton of unread iMessages on your iPhone and tapping through them all just to get rid of your app badge anxiety seems like a bit too much effort.

Apple has your back, though, with a nicely designed way to mark all your iMessages as read. It might not be apparent at first glance where to find this magic trick. Here’s how.

Face it, we’ve all imagined ourselves in the hot seat of a TIE fighter or X-wing at some point.

With this hot new fan-made anime, you can finally get your tour of a galaxy far, far away from the perspective of one of the Empire’s sweet Twin Ion Engine pilots. It’s a loving homage not only to the Star Wars franchise, but also to those rad anime shows of yesteryear, like Robotech and Speed Racer

Buckle in and check it out below. You’re gonna love it.

Imagine getting early access to videos from your favorite YouTube channels, like Good Mythical Morning or Smosh.

Now imagine paying for the privilege.

Vessel, from former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Richard Tom, proposes you do just that: pay $2.99 per month to get your videos three days earlier than the rest of the internet.

You’re not alone if you think this is a tough sell to a market obsessed with getting things for free, but Hulu Plus (which offered shows seven days earlier for a fee) did pretty well with the model, becoming the fastest paid subscription service, according to Kilar.

The team has also made the first year of Vessel for free, so that will help.

Fritz the Golden Retriever may be adorable with his bandanna and soulful doggy eyes, but man he can’t catch a damn thing. Well, except maybe a french fry near the end of this hilarious video that looks like it was shot on an iPhone in slo-mo mode.

Since it’s National Puppy Day, let’s all empathize with this sad canine and wonder — what kind of owner keeps tossing food at its head?

Woof.

Sometimes you just need to emphasize something. One of the best ways to do so when you’re texting is to make the words you really need to get across in all capitals. Or maybe you just want to shout at someone, and an ALL CAPS sentence will certainly get that across for you.

Before now, I’ve always just deleted the word I was trying to emphasize and re-typed it after double-tapping the Shift key in iOS (for Caps Lock). Now, however, it looks like you can change the case of the word after you’ve typed it without deleting anything.

Here’s how.

Getting your game featured by Apple is the best way to jumpstart your indie game success. Sometimes, even games that seem rather basic at first glance can become powerhouses.

Mr. Jump is seeing some phenomenal success with five million downloads in the last five days since its release. It’s shaping up to be another Crossy Road-style success story, and the developers at 1Button games attribute the game’s instant success to Apple.

“I think that being featured by Apple in most countries has initiated the buzz,” says
Jérémie Francone, one of the co-founders at the studio. “That’s what really launched the game.”

Nathalie Lawhead speaks swiftly, a gentle European lilt in her accent. On the screen behind her is a random-seeming collection of internet memes rendered in outsider art chic. At first glance, her games look absolutely absurd, random, and ridiculous.

“If Monty Python made games, the Orange County-based developer told Cult of Mac at the Game Developers conference last month, “this is what they would look like.”

Hell just froze over.

Nintendo has finally given in to the fact that smartphones have dealt its handheld gaming business a huge blow; the only way they’re going to stay relevant is to release their immensely popular gaming characters and game franchises onto the devices we all have in our pockets.

Whether you’re a Nintendo super fan or just looking at the gaming history this venerable Japanese company represents, you’ll be excited for this new era in which Nintendo partners with social and free-to-play juggernaut DeNA to bring it’s valuable content to mobile devices.

Even though Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata insists that the company has no intention of porting existing games to mobile devices, he said nothing about not brining the incredibly popular and cash-generating characters and franchises that have become synonymous with the company, and with video gaming in general.

Here, then, are ten of our top wishes for the characters and franchises Nintendo should bring to the iPhone or other smartphones.

This week, Luke gives us a sneak peek inside the new Steve Jobs biography, Alex takes a good look at the upcoming Apple TV service, Leander helps us decide whether the new gold in Apple Watch is anything special, John figures out who invented USB-C (hint: it’s Apple), and Leander checks in with an Android user who made the funniest Apple parody video we’ve seen in a long time. All that and more in Cult of Mac Magazine, free to download (and subscribe to!) right now.

The future of automobiles is getting closer every day.

German auto maker Mercedes Benz showed off a “car of the future” prototype self-driving car in California on Wednesday and futurist and Steve Jobs wannabe Elon Musk’s new Tesla Model S is getting an autopilot mode within the next few months.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re all sitting in a living-room style automobile, sipping slow-brewed coffee and reading the latest social news from our iPads as we zip along to our next appointment or meeting, right?

Because as Musk famously said: “Someday, driving a car will be illegal.”

It’s tough at the top.

Mobile video game publisher Rovio Entertainment detailed Thursday its first revenue drop since the Finnish company hit it big with the Angry Birds franchise in 2009.

Perhaps the saturation of the market with no less than 11 Angry Birds-themed games since then (and three spin-offs) and way too many toys and animation projects has something to do with the loss of revenue, down 9 percent to $170.6 million in 2014.

Of course, as Rovio’s mobile gaming business did rise a bit (16 percent), making the overall drop in revenue that more incredible, the company seems to be focused on doubling-down on its mobile game offerings.

“2014 results show that steps in the game portfolio, free to play competency building and advertising are going in the right direction. I am confident that with new simplified organisation and clearer vision, we will be back to the path of growth in 2015,” said CEO Pekka Rantala in a statement.

“I believe men of talent have a part to play in the war to come,” says spymaster Varys to Tyrion, the Lannister least likely to beat anyone in a duel.

That’s the takeaway line from one of a pair of new clips out today from HBO’s hotly anticipated Game of Thrones Season 5 premiere, which is slated to air April 12.

Isn’t that (and the newly announced cable-free HBO Now) why you all got a new Apple TV? I know I did.

Sure, it’s an Adam Sandler/Kevin James summer blockbuster with a ridiculous premise: the Earth is besieged by huge video game characters bent on destroying everything by turning stuff into pixels.

While Peter Dinklage and Jane Krakowski might elevate this potentially awful movie, Pixels, to something more cult status than forgettable popcorn fodder, it’s the nostalgic use of Pac-Man himself that made us watch the trailer in the first place.

First up, we’ve got the Mini Coopers all painted up to look like the iconic Pac-Man ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, which is all kinds of awesome. However, it’s the lovely tribute to Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani, portrayed by Denis Akiyama (Johnny Mnemonic, Dead Ringers) at about 1:52 in.

Do you remember the first time you saw one of these cool iPod & iTunes commercials? Surely you were impressed with the motion, the cool white earbuds and silhouetted dancers, and the hip soundtrack pulsing out from your TV. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.

Ciat/Day’s iconic silhouette ads captured the cool of the iPod brand without trying to make us identify with any specific actor or band (at least at first). The iPod came out in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2004 that it had any kind of mass-market success, due to both the fact that iTunes went PC, and these ads.

You can now watch all 22 of these iconic ads in one long, 13 minute stretch, thanks to the Steve Jobs Documentary YouTube Channel.

Citizen George is slated to be a full-length independent film about a director who creates a hugely popular space opera film trilogy (read, George Lucas and Star Wars), only to end up releasing disappointing film prequels 20 years later.

So far, so basic, right? The catch here is that you have to choose the type of movie this fan film will end up being. Want a dramatic story about a serious film auteur and the perils of fame and fortune, like Citizen Kane? Drop some cash into the Drama tip jar. Want a wacky, time-travel comedy like Austin Powers? Slide your money into the Comedy tip jar.

Taking macros of your monitor or American Apparel hoodie with your iPhone is so last year.

A Make Magazine tutorial shows you how to make a powerful microscope with up to 375x magnification using just your iPhone, a clear plastic panel, a piece of plywood and some inexpensive hardware.

If you’re a DIY-er that knows how to drill holes and take apart a laser pointer on a keychain, you could be taking super up-close pictures of cricket legs and your cat’s tongue before you know it.