iOS 7 changed the visual palette on our favorite Apple mobile devices, and it may not be to everyone’s liking.
If you want to tone it down a bit, consider darkening the colors up, and reducing the white point on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to make things just a little bit less intense.
Finnish developer Supercell has a huge hit on its hands with Clash of Clans, and they’re releasing a brand new follow-up that looks surprisingly similar: Boom Beach.
In Clash of Clans, you build a base and defend it with your medieval warriors. You can also go out and attack other people’s bases.
In the trailer for Boom Beach, you might notice a familiar mechanic at work.
If you’ve spent enough time messing around in Terminal, you’ll know one thing for sure: re-typing the stuff you’ve laboriously typed in with only minor differences is tedious. And it happens more often than we’d like.
The Terminal does, however, keep a history of all the commands you’ve typed into it. To see this in action, you can cycle through the last few commands you’ve typed in, simply hit the arrow keys up or down when in Terminal.
There are a few more less intuitive commands to make the best use of your Terminal history, however.
Seems like all the kids these days are using YouTube to listen to songs. It used to be trivially easy to play videos in the background, though, by just starting a video in the YouTube app or in Safari, and then just switching out to another app.
These days, however, the latest iOS version has changed that, and switching out of the YouTube app or Safari with a video playing stops the playback. Never fear, though, there are a couple of workarounds.
Wow, is this app fantastic. Even if you’ve never written a lyric or performed music, you’ll be able to create and share a professional-sounding song recording with new music app, Tunedra.
As a musician, I’m simply stunned by the ability to quickly prototype and edit a song right on my iPhone.
Simply plug in some headphones, tap Record, and start singing. Tunedra will tune your voice and add backing tracks in a variety of styles that match the melody you’re singing. Once you’ve recorded your masterpiece, you can play it, edit it to make it sound less–or more–auto-tuned, and then share it with other Tunedra users or on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and email.
Need a way to hold your iPhone up in portrait or landscape mode? Hate wrapping it in some bulky case that hides the natural tech-beauty of Apple’s best smartphone design?
The Breffo GumStick aims to solve your problems, friends, with a minimalist iPhone stand that looks–and works–like a stick of gum.
“The Breffo GumStick is deceptively simple to use,” said Breffo CEO Patrick Mathews in a statement. “It feels perfect in your hand and entices you to want to hold it and mold it.”

Image credit: Wired
Flappy Bird came onto the scene with a bang, ruffling feathers from Hanoi to Hannover. Dong Nguyen, the developer of this seemingly overnight sensation, was as taken aback as the rest of us, evident from his shocking decision to stop offering the game for download as well as his recent decision to bring it back.
Game developers and publishers can only hope to reproduce this kind of crazy success. And each and every one of the people we talked to at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco were eager to share their opinions on how Flappy Bird happened, how it might happen again, and why it was such a runaway hit to begin with.
In case you’ve been holed up for the last few months, Flappy Bird is a one-button game with absurdly simple mechanics: tap the screen to keep a goofy-looking Nintendo-styled bird in the air as he rushes across the world, avoiding hitting randomly placed Super Mario-inspired pipes. The difficulty is brutal; super-low scores are common, even among gamers who love twitch games.
SAN FRANCISCO — We’re gearing up for our weeklong foray into the world of video games at the Game Developers Conference here. Cult of Mac will bring you the best of the conference, from heartfelt chats with independent developers to wacky schwag we find on the expo floor.
Stay tuned as we add real-time posts to this liveblog all week.
When I opened the box that contained the Pi Dock-It Pro from Parle Innovations, my first thought was that it looked like an older model HP or IBM laptop. The dark gray plastic case, surrounded on all sides with a matte, silvery metal structure just scream “high tech,” albeit from a time in the recent past.
The manufacturer wants you to use the Dock-It Pro to turn your iPad into a laptop while letting it remain useful as a tablet, and they’ve succeeded in doing just that, at least from a design standpoint. I found myself using the Dock-It Pro case as a flip-up laptop more often than as an tablet, though.
Does The Dock-It Pro truly transcend its clunky, quaint visual style and become something truly useful? The answer is–of course–somewhere in the middle.
SAN FRANCISCO — The Game Developers Conference is an odd beast, less a trade show and more a topical conference that caters to the folks actually making the games you while away the hours with on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, plus that console under your TV.
Cult of Mac will be on the scene when a gaming tribe of 23,000 comes to town — that’s about the population of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. — and here’s what you can expect.
So, here’s a weird one–have you ever wanted to watch a window animate itself really slowly as you minimize it to the Dock? No?
Well, let’s assume you did for some reason. How would you go about it?
In Mavericks, anyway, it’s a trivial thing, and it produces a fun effect: your window will minimize to the Dock super slowly, even slower than in the animated image above.
There’s a new accessibility feature built into Apple’s already pretty splendid suite of options for people of various abilities. Called Switch Control, it allows those with motor difficulties to connect a switch to their iOS device for better access.
The feature, originally released alongside iOS 7, allows users to connect a switch via cable or Bluetooth as well as setting up the screen itself as one big switch button.
In iOS 7.1, then, Apple added another useful option: to use the Camera itself as a head switch. Here’s how to set it up.
If you’ve been using OS X for any length of time now, you know the special joy of desktop “spaces,” what Apple calls its virtual desktop system. You can switch between them by hitting Command-Arrow (right or left) on your keyboard, or you can activate Spaces with the F3 key on most modern Macs. You can also reorder these Spaces around fairly easily.
But did you know you could add more Spaces? Delete the ones you have?
Well, you can, and it’s pretty simple.
ALIENS ARE DESTROYING HUMANITY.
CAT MUST STOP THEM. WITH MIND BULLETS.
CAT MUST REMEMBER: AIM FOR THE BRAINS.
CAT MUST SURVIVE.
Seriously, do you need more from the press release than that? You do? Really?
Ok, fine. Ignoring the fact that you already knew your cat had mind-bullets, Team Chaos announced Wednesday that its latest free-to-play iOS game, Cat vs. Aliens, is live and in the App Store.
iOS 7 allowed you to switch between the day view and the list view with the tap of a button.
The new iOS 7.1 update now lets you see your events list along with your monthly calendar all on the same screen, giving Apple’s Calendar app a much-needed boost in usefulness.
Here’s how to enable it.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never had a problem with storage on my iPhone. I run a middle-of-the-road iPhone 5 with 32 Gb of space on it, I load a ton of games and take a lot of pictures with the thing, and I rarely worry about running out of space.
I do, however, continually run out of battery life. The Mophie Space Pack has both issues (or non-issue plus issue, it gets confusing) covered with both a kick-ass extra battery power feature and a extra 32 Gb of space feature. The Space Pack works with a neat little app called, appropriately, Space, which definitely gets the job done.
I’m just not sure it was a job that needed doing.
Quick – when is Earth Day this year? How about Saint Patrick’s Day? Not sure?
Then why not enable US Holidays in your Calendar app, right on your very own Mac? It’s quick, simple, and will make sure you never forget to wear green on March 17, or recycle on April 22.
The second season of The Walking Dead: The Game is well underway, with the launch of Episode 2, “A House Divided” on the 4th of this month. It’s ready for download as an in-app purchase on the Mac version of the game via Steam as well as through the iOS version of the gritty adventure game based on the award-winning comic book of the same name.
Publisher Telltale Games has just put up a slick-looking trailer for the game, with a haunting new song that plays over the end of the video. You can download the song over on the Telltale Games site for free as well, in case you’re longing for the old-timey feel of the thing after you watch the trailer below.
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your turn to play Hearthstone, the new free-to-play digital card game from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, now’s your chance. The fast-paced strategy game plays like a simplified yet strategically challenging Magic: The Gathering, and it’s available for your Mac immediately.
The game is free to download from the Hearthstone website, and will install easily and quickly to your Mac.
Once downloaded, you’ll hop in-game for a quick couple of tutorials, and then you can either play AI opponents to hone your skills and learn the various hero classes, or you can jump right in to playing other human beings via Blizzard’s Battle.net game matching service, one of the most robust around.
Ever wanted to hear Siri declaim “Luke, I am your father” in 32 different languages?
In a blog post by the developers behind the daily Spanish word app Vocab Ninja, you can click on all of Siri’s different voices — overwhelmingly female-gendered, interestingly enough — in both standard and enhanced audio resolutions.
I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.
Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.
“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”
Ever wonder what’s going on in the skies above you at any given time? If you’re interested in airline flights in the air over your head, you can just ask Siri.
The personal digital assistant will check WolframAlpha for you and drop you a great little chart of the planes in the air overhead.
Seriously, if I have to start over from scratch one more time when I try and use Siri to send a Tweet or book an appointment, I may just give up using Apple’s much-touted personal digital assistant altogether.
As it is, I tend to skip trying to use Siri other than as a glorified app launcher and I use the built-in dictation instead from within the Messages, Twitter, or Calendar apps.
But that was before I found out that you can just tell Siri to change whatever it is she’s not getting.
Sure, it’s Monday, but what better way to blow off your entire day than with some gaming?
See, Cellar Door’s Rogue Legacy is one of them fancy-pants Rogue-like-like action games, and it’s got all the sticky, addictive power of “just one more go” with a whole heap of extra “play me more” sauce.
Typically $14.99, it’s on sale right now for a measly $5.09, so get your feets over to Steam and give it a try. Though you really might want to hook up an Xbox 360 controller, as the keyboard controls are just, well, odd.
Back in the day, I used to care for a couple of labs full of Macs. Invariably, I’d find myself in the lab at the end of the day, shutting them all down for the night. I’d run up and down the rows of eMacs or whatever they were at the time, and hit the power button, then click on the Shut Down button. Or, if I was feeling frisky, I’d just hold down the power button until they shut off.
This took some time, needless to say. I wish I’d known of these useful keyboard commands to shut down or sleep the Macs, saving myself several minutes each day.