As a massive soccer fan, I love EA Sports’s FIFA Soccer series. So imagine my delight when I opened up the App Store this morning to find FIFA 13 staring back at me. This is the FIFA game I’ve been waiting for for iOS. Why? Because it’s the first to boast online multiplayer, allowing you to play against your friends over the Internet.
Having a tough time remembering your iCloud password? Do you rely on iForgot a bit too much? Well, according to a new post at MacRumors, you may be in for a world of hurt should you try and call Apple to get your iCloud credentials reset.
In the wake of the Mat Honan hack last month, Apple responded with both temporary and more permanent security rules to make sure users aren’t taken advantage of in a similar way again. However, according to some Apple customer support representatives who spoke to MacRumors, this is making it hard on legit users, too.
When Apple launched iCloud last year, it killed off MobileMe and provided paid subscribers with 20GB of free iCloud storage when they migrated to the new service. Most of us have been using that storage to back up our iOS devices, but like most good things, it’s coming to an end. The company has now begun emailing previous MobileMe customers to inform them that their free storage will be no more come September 30.
Along with iOS 6, and a Mountain Lion update, Apple has just pushed out an update for their new Podcast app for iOS. The update allows users to keep subscription up to date between iOS devices using iCloud. iOS 6 support has also been added to the app, along with a few other improvements.
Here are the full details for what’s new in Podcasts version 1.1:
We’ve all been itching to get our hands on iOS 6 since it got its first unveiling at WWDC back in June, and today, three months after that announcement, the software finally gets its public debut. Apple’s packed a ton of new features into this update, including some major new features like Map and Passbook, plus some enhancements to existing apps and features, such as new Siri capabilities and a VIP inbox in Mail.
Apple’s been promoting some of these features on its website, but there are tons you may not have heard about. With that said, here’s your comprehensive guide to everything that’s new in iOS 6.
One of iCloud’s biggest problems comes from its iOS origins: There’s no easy way to open, say, a TextEdit document in another app for viewing and editing. To do this, you need to either open the source app (TextEdit, in this case), use the iCloud document picker and then drag the file to the target app, or you need to go digging around inside your (hidden) Library folder to find the local copies of your iCloud documents.
The first is a real pain. The second is — as anyone who has ever dug around inside an iPhoto bundle will tell you — a really, really bad idea. Luckily, for LaunchBar users, the answer is (literally) a few taps away.
An iCloud outage affecting Apple’s Mail service is now leaving users without email for the second day. Apple has acknowledged that access to the service is “slow or unavailable,” but the number of users affected continues to rise, and there’s little sign that a fix is on its way.
For me, one of the most annoying tweaks in OS X Mountain Lion was the change of the default save location for many of apps I use on a regular basis. Any app that uses iCloud now displays its save dialog box differently than it would have before its integration into OS X. Due to this, upon saving files in many applications, instead of being presented with a view of the filesystem, the default save location is now just “iCloud”, and saving the file anywhere else has become somewhat of a chore. Thanks to some Terminal commands, though, this behavior can be reverted to its pre-Mountain Lion state, as i’ll show you in this video.
If you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion, you’ll have realized as soon as you launched Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, that the default location for saving files is iCloud. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?
Nope, of course not! Why would we even be writing this tip if you were?
There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of the cloud, via iCloud. You can still save to iCloud; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while in Text Edit (or in other iCloud-enabled apps).
The Genius Bar is a great way to get help and support for the problems you’re having with your Mac and iOS devices. The problem is, with only 375 Apple stores worldwide, you usually need to live close to a big city to be close to a Genius Bar. But that’s no longer the case, because you can now speak to am Apple specialist from the comfort of your own home, via the company’s online store.
It’s been over two years since Apple unveiled iOS 4 with mobile management features designed to make the iPhone and iPad a significantly better corporate citizen. During those years, the landscape of business and enterprise mobility has changed dramatically. RIM has collapsed and will never truly recover, Microsoft has doubled down on the interface it launched late in 2010 with no guarantee of success, and Android has become much more enterprise friendly. Perhaps more important is the fact that idea of mobile management and security has shifted from a focus on devices to a focus on securing data and managing mobile apps.
As all this has happened, Apple’s mobile management framework, which is the system that all mobile management vendors plug into in order to secure and manage iOS devices, has essentially stagnated. With iOS 6 on the horizon, lets look at the areas that Apple needs to address if it wants iOS to remain one of the preferred mobile platforms for business.
I don’t use iCloud too intensively, mostly because I’d have to pay for extra storage and I already got 50GB on Dropbox. But if I were an Apple employee I’d probably use it until the wheels fall off because now Apple is giving all of their employees a free 50GB upgrade for their iCloud strorage accounts.
The release of iOS 6 just weeks away. The new release includes a range of new features. Some seem tailor-made for business use like the new VIP contacts feature in Mail. Others are clearly designed for a mass-market consumer audience. Even those consumer-oriented additions have a lot of potential for use in the office, however.
I have to admit, I’ve been a big fan of the Stickies app that Apple has included with its operating system since way back in System 7.5. It’s fantastic to be able to have a little floating place to type notes and keep track of things right on the Mac, without having to resort to anything as mundane as an actual sticky note.
The one thing Stickies hasn’t had was a good way to access those notes when away from the computer. With OS X Mountain Lion, however, you can make this happen using Notes and iCloud.
Pixelmator, a wonderful image editing app for Mac OS X, just received a major update that introduces some great new features. As well as Retina graphics for the new MacBook Pro, version 2.1 brings iCloud syncing, a new Effects Browser with new effects, OS X Mountain Lion support and more.
Have you ever watched your iPhone attempt to load a webpage with a poor Wi-Fi connection, and wondered why it doesn’t just switch to 3G automatically? In currently iOS releases, your device can’t do that. If you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, it will only use the Wi-Fi network. But iOS 6 changes that. You’ll soon be able to use “Wi-Fi Plus Cellular” connections, which allows apps to switch to a cellular data connection automatically when Wi-Fi is poor.
Last week, Wired columnist Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed by hackers who were able to connect to his Apple ID and remotely erase all of the data on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
Apple responded today to Honan via a spokesperson, Natalie Kerris. In a statement to Wired, where Honan posted an account of his experiences, Apple promised to look into how users can protect their data and security better when they need to reset their account passwords.
See that big building right there? It’s part of Apple’s huge new data center over in North Carolina that powers all the iCloud magic that makes your iOS experience possible. Apple’s data center compound is massive. It comes with a 500,000 square foot data center, a 100-acre solar farm, a 4.8-megawatt fuel cell array, and a few other little buildings sprinkled all over.
The little 21,000 square foot building in the picture above is what Apple’s calling a “tactical data center.” No one knows just what it’s supposed to be, and of course Apple’s not going to tell anyone. So Wired jumped in their spy plane to get a closer look, and this is what they found out:
Don’t you just love iCloud and how it seamlessly keeps all of your information synced up, making you feel all warm and light and free? Don’t you just want to marry it, or maybe live inside a nice fluffy iCloud synced world? Maybe not. But now you can, if you move to Melbourne, Australia and buy this gorgeous house that’s shaped like the iCloud logo.
Do you see it? How the structure makes an iCloud shadow there on the pool? Ok, we put that there to help you visiualize it, but seriously, this house looks almost exactly like the iCloud logo, and it’s just as crazy on the inside as the outside.
Apple has issued iWork.com users with a final reminder to warn them that the service will be closed down on July 31. The company states that as of this date, “you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com public beta site or view them on the web.”
Various iCloud users are reporting that 20th Century Fox movies are now available for re-download via iTunes in the cloud. As Cult of Mac reported mid-March, Universal and Fox studios weren’t able to close a deal with Apple for iCloud availability due to licensing conflicts with HBO.
Universal Studios content was released for iCloud availability soon after, in April. Now it’s Fox Studios’ turn.
In putting together the various features of Mountain Lion, Apple may end up encouraging business and enterprise customers to actually make their Macs less secure instead of ratcheting up security as some key Mountain Lion capabilities are intended to do.
There are a handful of technologies involved, but they center around iCloud and Apple’s requirement that apps sold in the Mac App Store support Apple’s application sandboxing technique.
iTunes Match has expanded its reach in Europe today as Apple brings the music matching service to Hungary and Poland more than 18 months after it made its debut in the United States. The Cupertino company is yet to add these countries to its iTunes Match availability page, but users report that the service is now appearing in iTunes.
Along with today’s launch of iOS 6 Beta 3, Apple has started to roll out iCloud.com email addresses to developers. When iOS users signed up for iCloud in the past they received an email address @me.com. Now that MobileMe has been shut down, Apple is starting to transition over to @iCloud.com email addresses.
I love having my photos on my iPad, but I hate using iPhoto to get them there. To be honest, I just hate iPhoto, along with its more complicated and even more sluggish cousin, Aperture. I use Lightroom, and up until last week I was exporting photos from there into iPhoto just to sync them. Not only was this a headache, but it was a waste of space.
Now, you can tell iTunes to sync any folder of photos to the iPad, but with a little bit of effort things can be made much more elegant. By setting up Lightroom correctly, we can have any changes to our photos mirrored to the iPad at the touch of a button, and the whole process is near-automatic.