Has this happened to you?
New email messages may only appear to arrive in your Mail app when you first launch the app. No new mail seems to arrive until you actually quit and then relaunch Mail.
If this is a problem for you, Apple has released a new workaround that will get your mail coming in without having to quit the entire app.
In a tweet earlier in the day on Saturday, Dong Nguyen–developer of the wildly popular iOS and Android game, Flappy Bird–apologized to fans while simultaneously promising to take his game down, assumedly from the various app stores it’s been selling like crazy on.
Like, $50,000 per day crazy.
His tweet hints at the insanity of success, and we can only assume that a shy, retiring game developer might have a hard time with the kind of success Flappy Bird has seen.
I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users, 22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore.
— Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) February 8, 2014
With teens and young adults leaving Facebook in droves, it’s up to social networks like We Heart It to pick up the slack.
The new image-centric app is gaining a ton of traction with this highly-coveted target demographic, breaking the 25 million user mark and pulling in over a million new users monthly.
CEO Ranah Edelin spoke with Cult of Mac on the phone, and attributes this incredible growth to one thing: We Heart It is a safe space.
“Social networks mimic what happens in the real world,” he said. “There is a ton of bullying on them and they mimic popularity contests. Our users tell us they love We heart It because they can express themselves authentically without having to brag or worry about getting bullied.”
Did you watch that? It’s total crap.
The security expert quoted in the piece, Kyle Wilhoit, has just written a blog post that calls out the report, essentially saying that the hacks shown in the video can happen anywhere, and require some risky user behavior to even happen.
That’s a long way from “if [tourists] fire up their phones at baggage claim, it’s probably too late to save the integrity of their electronics,” as Brian Williams claims in the clip above.
Talk about fear-mongering.
Mark Smith’s Spell Quest: Grimm’s Journey is this week’s iOS Game of the Week, and it’s a fun one.
You’ll need to spell words to move Grimm from left to right, with longer words causing more damage to the baddies you encounter. You’ll pull letter tiles from a grid below, and some tiles will give you power ups, others will poison you. It’s a fun mix.
Check out our video below for some gameplay footage.
While iPhone calls these days are vastly better than those of iPhone models in the past, let a lone calls made on those old flip phones, they can still be pretty cruddy, depending on your service coverage and location within that area.
If you’re at home (or at a place with WiFi) and in a bad location for cell tower reception but still need to make a voice call, you can do one thing to immediately improve the audio fidelity of your iPhone to iPhone calls: use FaceTime Audio.
While I’m a huge fan of the new Control Center on iOS, I can see where it might not be the best thing to have enabled on the lock screen. We’ve all left our iPhone or iPad out in places where folks might be able to get a hold of it, and you might not want those folks messing about with your settings.
Once you take Control Center out of your Lock Screen, you’ll have to enter your password (or use Touch ID) to authenticate to your phone before you can use Control Center, which is a pain, but so will anyone else, making your device just that much more secure.
Preview is a fantastic image viewer with some basic image and PDF annotation tools.
If you’re viewing a high resolution image and want to magnify a small portion of the image, without zooming the whole thing in, you’ll want to use the magnification tool, also known as a loupe.
We’ve shown you how to enable the hidden Smart Mailboxes in iOS 7, which is a great way to manage your email in Apple’s own built-in Mail app.
If you’re like many of us, though, you’ll have a few folders for organizing your mail as it comes in. I use Mailbox on my iPhone, but Mail app on my iPad, and I want to be able to access the Mailbox “Follow Up” folder on my iPad without having to tap through a ton of different folder hierarchies.
It’s relatively easy to set your Mail app up to add any folders you have in any of your email accounts.
Winter Olympics fans rejoice, for theScore is here to deliver unique sporting content and breaking news direct from Sochi to your iPhone. The app has its own team of news hounds who will push news on heats, medals, and podium positions in real time right to the app, which has been updated for this specific feature.
The app will show new in little bites that break down the big stories in to easily digestible snacks. Each update will come in on top of the previous, along with images, animated gifs, videos, and tweets from the events.
I hate thick wallets. I carry mine in my left front pocket most of the time, and I really don’t need something huge and bulky in there to both look dorky and hurt.
I’ve spent some time paring down the stuff in my wallet, too, making it as minimal as possible. I usually carry my driver’s license, my Visa debit card, a bit of cash, and a couple of shopping club cards, like Costco and Safeway. I rotate a credit card in on occasion, too, if I need the extra buying power.
Usually, and especially when I go out on the town for an evening, I only need the ID, some cash, and my debit card.
That’s exactly what fits easily in the new Wally Wallet iPhone case, making it a dream come true for this wallet minimalist.
When I’m sitting at my Mac and need to do a quick bit of calculation, I typically launch the Calculator app with my app launcher of choice, Alfred.
If you don’t want to launch the app, click on the numbers, or enter in the calculations via that graphical interface, you can just use Spotlight.
First off, activate Spotlight by hitting the Command and Space keys on your keyboard, or by clicking on the little magnifying glass in the upper right of your Mac’s screen.
When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.
Cult of Mac reader Rob J asks,
Having an issue with the conference call feature on iOS 7 and thought you might be able to help. Getting everyone on the call is no problem but I can’t seem to figure out how to have a private conversation with one person in the call.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do, if not super intuitive.
The developer of 10000000–pronounced “ten million”–is working on a sequel, and to celebrate that fact, he’s dropped the price on the Mac and iOS versions of the first game (still pronounced the same way).
For $1.50 on Mac or $0.99 on iOS, you can get one of the coolest mashups I’ve played in recent memory. 10000000 is a delightful and engaging mix of endless runner, match-three, and RPG, and it’s super fun to play.
The new game, called You Must Build A Boat, has a pretty interesting story behind it, as well.
OS X offers a very nice graphical user interface to verify and repair your hard drive, located in the Utilities folder. It’s called Disk Utility, and you can use it as the first line of defense when weird disk-related things happen to your Mac’s hard drive.
If, however, you want to dig in a bit deeper, or you’re already running Terminal a lot and don’t want to launch a separate app, you can use the following commands to both verify (check for problems) and repair any problems that you might find when verifying.
Daniel Hjelm has a pretty nifty game on his hands here: Loot Hero.
It’s the essence of RPG games, distilled down for the mobile platform. You tap on the left and right sides of the screen, and mow down enemy bad guys with your upgradeable weapon.
Here’s a quick video of my impressions and play through.
You know those times when you are just about to head out of the house, and you grab your iPhone, only to notice that you’ve got hardly any juice left? Yeah, me too.
When you need a quick charge on your iPhone or iPad, there’s a chimp-simple way to get it charged faster than usual, and it’s available with a quick tap or two.
We’ve all done it, sent that nasty email to a boss, co-worker, spouse. That email that we really wish we hadn’t sent? You know the one.
If only we could go back in time, we could un-send that email and save the hard apology we’ll have to go through.
While Google doesn’t provide a time machine, it does give you a ten second window to rethink your email send. Here’s how to enable it.
iTunes Radio now lets you create stations full of the artists and songs you like, just like Pandora. You can also add artists to the list that you don’t want playing in the station.
When you create a new iTunes Radio station, though, it’s typically named after the first song or artist that you create the station with. That’s not always what you want.
You can rename any station you like with a couple of easy taps.
Episodic noir-thriller adventure game, The Wolf Among Us, gets its second episode next week with “Smoke & Mirrors.”
Bigby Wolf is hell-bent on solving the murders revealed in Episode One, and will stop at nothing to get at the truth.
I swear, the more I learn about the Mac OS X operating system, the more there is to know!
There are so many little hidden key strokes on the Mac that help you do all sorts of things, and there’s really no way to find them out.
This little gem is something I just found out today, and I’ve been sending you OS X Tips for the better part of two years.
To get rid of the system menubar icons, you can drop into each System Preference pane and uncheck the “Show in Menu Bar” option, or you can just do this.
Are you on a capped data plan? Unless you’re one of the lucky few that were grandfathered in by an older, unlimited cell plan for your iPhone, chances are you are.
But you want to do FaceTime calls, right? If you need to track how much data you’re using on them, iOS 7 has a handy tool built right in to the FaceTime app. Check it out.
Visuals are extremely helpful, especially when you’re trying to differentiate between a lot of text information.
Consider your contacts list, which could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people’s information in it. Sure, you can break them up into groups and just search for the contacts you want, but there is a neat way to find what you’re looking for using the Emoji keyboard that’s now included in OS X (and iOS).
One cool thing you can do in the Finder is set any window to view as large, 512X512 icons. You can do this by clicking on the icon button in the top left of any Finder window, then dragging the resizing slider in the lower right corner.
It’s fairly easy, but not super precise, and if you often use the Finder to quickly scroll through large photo icons to preview images you’ve taken or downloaded, it can be somewhat of a tedious chore.
Creating an AppleScript to do it for you is easy, and it will save you some serious time.