There’s a special delight to be had in watching upcoming movie trailers. Apple even has its own website and app dedicated to them. Watching a trailer is also a great way to find out if you want to even bother going to see a movie.
So, if you’re hanging out, looking for something to do on your iPhone or iPad, or you want to decide what movie to watch this evening, maybe you just want to ask Siri for help.
It’s pretty easy to ask her to show you a movie trailer. Here’s how.
Last week, The Drowning released on iOS to mixed reviews, many of which echoed our own. Most reviewers praised Scattered Entertainment’s control scheme but panned the gameplay itself as shallow and repetitive.
The game has been doing well, however, hitting the top five most downloaded free apps list on iPhone in 16 countries, and the top five free apps on iPad in 42 countries.
This week, then, The Drowning is getting a global in-game event: The Toxic Beast Hunt, letting players take part in a boss hunt together and compete for prizes, though to truly win, you’ll need to buy some gold.
When you update to OS X Mavericks beta 5, you might notice something rather exciting in your Applications folder: iBooks for Mac!
Double click on the iBooks icon to launch iBooks for Mac, and then click Agree on the iBooks Author Software agreement. You’ll see the iBooks splash screen as above. Click Get Started.
You’ll be asked to sign in with your Apple ID. Click on the blue Sign In button and enter your Apple ID and password. If you’re not ready to connect your Apple ID, click Not Now. When you do connect up, you’ll be able to get your purchase history from iCloud and sync your bookmarks, highlights, and notes you may have created on your iPad or iPhone over to your Mac.
Not too surprisingly, the five major publishers originally named in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book case regarding their collusion with Apple on pricing have now themselves filed a complaint regarding the Justice Department’s proposal to eliminate the use of the agency model in any Apple agreements with publishers for a period of five years.
Publishers like the agency model as it allows them to set prices for e-books, instead of the distributor, as Amazon did before Apple’s own iBooks system launched on the iPad.
The cloud storage wars continue with a new tweet from Microsoft’s SkyDrive Twitter account. The service, typically offering seven gigabytes of online storage for free, just made an offer Apple’s jilted MobileMe members might not be able to refuse.
In a tweet today, @SkyDrive offered anyone who could forward the Apple downgrade email to a special SkyDrive email address would receive an extra 15GB of Microsoft’s own cloud storage system for one year for free.
My iPhone 5 camera has gotten some grime inside it, and my pictures are all yucky because of it. I’ve procrastinated taking it to the Apple Store to get cleaned out because, hey, I’m busy lazy.
Luckily, there’s a guy on YouTube whose buddy had the same problem, and he put up a video showing how to clean out the iPhone 5 with a tiny screwdriver, suction cup, can of air, and a plastic non-marring tool.
A quick disclaimer: if you choose to try this fairly simple iPhone 5 surgery, you’re responsible for any damage that might occur. Please don’t email us asking for a replacement iPhone.
Mobile app, Twine, is trying to do something new in the dating app space. Unlike other dating or random chatting apps like ChatRoulette, Tinder, or OK Cupid, Twine connects you with new people around you and lets you chat and flirt with them without revealing your identity until you decide to.
That’s kind of a big deal, especially for those who find themselves overwhelmed with overly assertive individuals on many online and app-based dating services. Twine also tries to keep things gender balanced, saying that it only allows in equal numbers of each gender (it only recognizes two), so that’s why some folks may be put on a waiting list when they join.
When I opened the mailing box to find three pairs of EarSkinz, I wasn’t super impressed. Especially as this model, the ES2, so closely matched the shape of the EarPods it’s designed for use with, I figured it was just another throwaway product.
My apologies for even writing the above, but imagine my surprise when EarSkinz turned out to be an essential accessory for my set of EarPods. I’m even thinking about buying a pair of ES1s for my older Apple earbuds.
The EarSkinz marketing material claims that the little ES2 silicone earbud coverings will improve the comfort, fit, and sound of a pair of EarPods. I found that they indeed improved the comfort and fit, but I’m not so sure about improving the sound, though of course your mileage may vary.
One of Apple’s Best Apps of 2012, Pixowl’s The Sandbox is a fantastically inventive mobile game that encourages players to create entire worlds and works of art, right on their iOS or Android devices. The Sandbox has reached five million downloads across app stores, and has over 300,000 unique worlds shared in its Online Gallery. That’s a lot of stuff, folks!
The new update for iOS today brings vehicles to the pixel-based world-building game, letting you carry yourself and crafting materials in a Truck from one place to another much faster. Or, if you’re of a combative turn of mind, grab a Tank or twelve and create a battle world to experiences the horrors of war, digitally.
There are new, more advanced contraptions as well, like Conveyor Belts and Multi Electro contraptions, letting you create and manage even more complicated machines and systems within your world.
Backing up your Mac via Time Machine is highly recommended, and super easy to do, as well. It’s really the only backup system I’ve ever found myself using on a regular basis, because it’s so simple to use and easy to set up. All you need to do is connect any USB drive to your Mac, head to the Time Machine preferences, and select that USB drive as your Time Machine backup. Mac OS X does the rest.
I was thinking, though, that since I back up my Macbook Air onto a 128 GB flash drive, it’s even more possible than ever that someone might get a hold of the drive and then be able to have all my backed up stuff on it. That’s not a huge deal for me, as I don’t keep much on the Macbook Air in terms of private stuff, but if I did, I’d want to keep those files extra secure.
Encryption could be the answer, and Mac OS X Mountain Lion makes it easy.
So, the dude who said he’d quit rock and roll when he turned 33 just turned 70. This is a guy that typically covers 12 miles during a Stone’s show as he leaps about the stage, running and dancing. Mick Jagger has been on the cover of Rolling Stone (no relation) twenty times, the first time in 1968.
To celebrate this fairly amazing milestone for the quintessential rock and roll superstar, This Day In Music apps has made its Rolling Stones tribute app, This Day In The Rolling Stones, free.
If you’re a Stones fan, and let’s face it, most of us are in some way, you should check this one out. According to the developers, This Day In The Rolling Stones is going to remain free forever. Bravo!
If you have the time and inclination, and a certain sense of daring, you can share your cellular data as a Wi-Fi signal for free, without connecting through your data carrier. I’m not a huge fan of jailbreaking, per se; even the non-jailbreaking solution seems a bit technical, and some folks might see it as borderline unethical.
If you fall into either camp, and want to set up your qualifying iOS device via your cellular data carrier, here’s how.
Holy crap, right? Robert Suarez dropped this amazing video up on YouTube, showing him beating the entire tower in under three minutes (2:58, to be exact), a full 32 seconds faster than the game developer’s own Game Center achievement.
There are some slight spoilers in the video, as it shows the entirety of the tower, from the bottom to the top level, with some cool avatars, power ups and the final boss. If you don’t want to see these things, preferring to work your own way up to the top, don’t watch the video.
For the rest of us, who know we’ll never be as good as this guy, it offers an incentive to keep plugging away at the game, which we reviewed favorably here.
We’ve contacted Robert via Twitter to find out how he got to this feat of Knightmare Tower awesomeness, and will update as we hear more.
Via: TouchArcade
It looks like this has been possible since, oh, Mac OS X 10.5 or so, but I hadn’t come across it before. I’m guessing that might mean some of you haven’t, either.
If you’re one of those amazing folks who have seen this already, then feel free to check out all our other OS X tips; it’s possible there’s something in the list you didn’t know about already.
For the rest of you, if you want to disable the translucent menu bar on your Mac, it’s relatively simple. Check it out.
Originally planned as a June 11 release, Sim City is now going to release on August 29, 2013, according to a tweet today from EA’s official SimCity Twitter account.
Joining another hotly-anticipated game release for the Mac, Bioshock Infinite, SimCity will hopefully be ready for prime time and not delayed again.
My kids and I have been watching episodes of Adventure Time, Cartoon Network’s disturbingly funny cartoon show. The adventures of Finn, Jake and a cast of crazy characters is compelling television, and hilarious on many different levels.
Legends of Ooo – Adventure Time originally launched for iOS last year in June, and while it provided some of the same fun and voiceover work as the cartoon show in a goofy little iOS package, it only came with one episode, “The Big Hollow Princess.”
This oversight has been corrected this past weekend with the release of the second episode, “The Library of Doom,” an all-new story and adventure game with new voice overs for the characters within. Even better, Episode 2 is absolutely free for a limited time as an in-app purchase. Shmow-zow!
If you haven’t gotten to check out The World Ends With You: Solo Remix yet, it’s completely understandable. Publisher Square Enix has a reputation for charging much more than the typical iOS game when it releases its popular games onto Apple’s touchscreen platform. It totally makes sense you might not want to pick it up for $17.99 for your iPhone, let alone $19.99 for your iPad.
If I said that the game, originally released to the dual-screen Nintendo DS, is completely worth every penny of the asking price, would you pick it up? Probably not.
But what if I said that both versions are now much less expensive, with the iPhone version in the App Store at $9.99 and the iPad version at $10.99? If you love innovative, brilliant gaming on the go, you’ll go grab a copy right now. Who knows how long the sale will last?
UPDATE: As Cult of Mac reader lepht points out below, there are contrasting opinions on whether push actually saves battery life. Check out his post here to see a different point of view. Also note tordofm’s comment below, and the original article I linked below, both of which support the push as battery saver idea.
You have a couple of options when setting up your email accounts on an iPhone or iPad: Fetch and Push. While Push is only available to more modern email accounts like Gmail, most of us have at least one account that can utilize this email service.
But what’s the difference, really? And how do you set it up on your iOS device? That’s why we’re here.
The endless runner genre continues to iterate across a variety of gaming apps for iOS, with clones and actual, unique ideas vying for the same space. Knightmare Tower, from Juicy Beast Studio, is one of the latter: a vertical endless runner with a twitchy, compelling take on the genre.
Players take on the role of a Knight, whose gameboy gaming session is interrupted by a letter from the local king. All of the king’s princess daughters have been captured by an evil skull, and must be rescued (sigh). Tired trope aside, the Knight leaps into action astride a wooden rocket ship, intent on flying to the top of the evil castle tower and rescuing a princess per level.
Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.
Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:
In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.
Feedly, the company that picked up the Google Reader API, cloned it, and made it available for all and sundry, just announced their first attempt at monetization: Feedly Pro.
Coming in at a very affordable five dollars per month, Feedly Pro gets paying members more features than the standard Feedly, with promises of more to come, sourced from Feedly users themselves.
Have you ever lost your user account password for your Mac? You know, the one which lets you get into your Mac at login, or install software, or delete stuff from the Applications folder? You haven’t? Well, you’re a better person than I am, because I’ve forgotten mine (usually on older Macs I haven’t used in a billion years, but still) and had to pop in a Mac OS X CD and go through the recovery process.
While that’s not too big of a pain in the butt, it does take some time. Time which could be better spent drinking beer, or solving a Rubik’s Cube, am I right?
If you’re running Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, you can assign your Apple ID to your user account, which can help when you need to reset your password. You know, if you forget it or something. Ahem.
When the Podcasts app showed up a bit after the release of iOS 6, we were all excited that Apple was taking its unintended creation of a new media form seriously. While the app is fairly simple to use, there are subtleties that we might miss.
Let’s take a look at some readers’ questions about this Apple-created app and go a bit deeper into using it on our favorite iOS devices.
Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.
Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.
I play a lot of iOS games on iPhone and iPad. There are so many games out there, so much content, that it can be extremely difficult to find something you’ll like without having to download a ton of apps, try them out, and then discard them as they don’t quite scratch the itch you’re needing, well, scratched.
Free apps or paid apps, both cost something to download in time, cash, or both. So, I figured, why not start doing some of the heavy lifting here, and help you find fantastic games to play, without all the work?
That said, I found a gem of a game this week, and it’s only $0.99, with no further in-app purchases (IAP) to sully the experience. Blitz Block Robo is a fantastic little game that hits all the right notes.