Apple announced Logic Pro X last week, and alongside it an iPad companion app called Logic Remote that allows users to record, mix, and play virtual instruments remotely. The Cupertino company has now moved to trademark the app’s icon.
Apple has refunded Briton Lee Neale £4,000 ($6,131) after his 8-year-old daughter Lily spent the cash on virtual items in her favorite iPad game. Lily knew the password for her father’s iTunes account, but no one expected her to use it to rack up a huge bill on in-app purchases.
UPDATE: Lucky Frame has provided us with some updated stats: Gentlemen! now has over 6,000 players on Android, with just 50 paid downloads.
Gentlemen!, a brand new title from Scottish development studio Lucky Frame, made its debut on Android and iOS last week. It’s been a pretty big success so far, with plenty of acclaim from reviewers, a mention in a British newspaper, and thousands of players worldwide.
But it’s not all good news for Lucky Frame. You see, only 20 of the players on Android actually paid Gentlemen!’s $4.99 price tag, the company revealed to Cult of Android.
The other 3,000 stole it.
Manything turns a spare iOS device into a cloud-connected security camera. Install the app, sign up for an account and leave the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with its camera pointing at your desk, your yard or hidden in a plastic bag and pointing up from the bowl of your toilet.
For any unsuspecting visitors, it will be too late. You’ll have seen everything.
This week on The CultCast: Logic Pro gets Pro’er with new features and iPad controls; Google Maps finally comes to iPad; Apple hunts for iWatch engineers; more iPad Mini retina rumors; Apple slangin’ TV deals with studios to kill commercials; we dish great computing tips on Tips Ahoooy!
Have a few laughs and get caught up on this week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.
Back in 1989, I was a young punk in college who read science fiction voraciously and had a history of playing Dungeons and Dragons. I know, slow down ladies, what a catch.
Anyway, it was with unreserved glee that I started playing Shadowrun in those days, a table top role-playing game in the vein of D&D that included computers, hacking, and all sorts of megacorps, like a William Gibson novel gone magical.
Flash forward to now, and–after a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign–Shadowrun Returns is headed to iOS, Mac, Android and PC. There’s a sweet launch trailer that just came out today, and a release date of just one week from now, on July 25th. Holy smoking dragon hackers!
Dyslexia is a disability that likely affects 70 – 80 percent of people with poor reading skills, with one in five students having a language-based disability that could include dyslexia.
Many folks with dyslexia have trouble differentiating between different letters of the alphabet, many of which–especially in digital text form–look very similar. Many of the letters in our alphabet, like ‘i’ and ‘j’, or ‘n’ and ‘u’ can be mistaken for each other, especially if someone has a visual processing difference and reverses or rotates the letters when reading.
There’s a new font that aims to help, and a great eBook reader, vBookz PDF Voice Reader, has recently inclded that as a font choice in its iOS app.
Some space geeks are calling today “The Day the Earth Smiled,” because the Cassini probe is set to take a picture of our planet as seen from Saturn later this afternoon. To honor this momentous occasion, the maker of astronomy software SkySafari is giving away basic versions for iOS and OS X (and discounting the Android version) through Sunday.
Rovio Account has been a work in progress for a couple of months now but it looks like it’s finally ready for prime time. This morning Rovio announced that its game syncing feature – Rovio Account – is finally available worldwide for both iOS and Android devices.
VLC made a comeback on iOS today, but if you didn’t get it within a few hours after it became available, then you’re out of luck, because it has disappeared again. But don’t worry — it hasn’t been pulled; an App Store issue is preventing it from being found.
Apple has acquired Locationary, a small Canadian startup that crowdsources location data, according to a report from AllThingsD. Apple has refused to comment on its plans for the company, but the acquisition will undoubtedly help improve Apple’s widely criticized Maps service.
We’ve seen lots of demand for BBM on Android and iOS since BlackBerry announced in May that the service would finally go cross-platform. And the Canadian company has promised us that the app will be here by the end of summer. But how long is BlackBerry’s summer?
According to one company executive, we could be waiting up until September.
There’s a great little trick with the latest Google Maps for iOS (the v2.0 that shipped earlier this week). Just by typing a magic phrase into the search box, you can cache the current map view for online use.
VLC, the popular open-source media player, has made its comeback on iOS and is available to download now from the App Store. The release comes more than two years after VLC was pulled from iOS due to licensing issues, but this time it’s back for good — with lots of improvements.
The official Evernote app for iOS now allows you to mark up images, PDFs, and notes thanks to the Skitch integration added in its latest update today. The release also brings shortcuts, recent notes, the ability to submit support requests, and more.
Gather up a substantial clump of geeks in any one place and you’re bound to get some interesting concoctions. In this case, two Comic Con pilgrims have taken a certain favored S-themed superhero and combined it with a certain favored S-themed smartphone. Behold, the Superphone.
If you like flight simulators, especially those of the more arcade variety, the Sky Gamblers series is a great place to start.
Originally published by Namco Bandai Games, the last couple of installments have come directly from California-based developer Atypical Games. Sky Gamblers: Cold War is, appropriately enough, set in the 1980s with all the weaponry and aircraft that implies. Your task will be to learn how to fly a Cold War-era fighter plane, head out on covert and not-so-covert ops, and blow stuff up. Sounds fun, right?
New Zealand-based games developer Ninja Kiwi just released Bloons TD Battles to the iOS App Store. It’s a faster, more multiplayer take on popular Bloons TD, a single-player fixed path tower defense game with loads of depth, with wacky monkeys that stand in for towers as well.
The new, free Bloons TD Battles lets you go head to head against other random or known opponents on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, while using ninja monkeys, sniper monkeys, and helicopters (among other equally bizarre characters and items) to keep your enemy’s “bloons” from making their way to your base.
UpTo might be the best social calendar app ever made. I’ve never really seen anything like it; so if it isn’t the best (or really the only) social calendar app around, whatever else is out there must be perfect — because UpTo is pretty damn fantastic.
The whole point of UpTo is to create a social experience around calendars, in a way that’s at once instantly recognizable and ridiculously simple to use.
Not satisfied with the 100 million download whooping it laid down on the App Store and Google Play, Rovio is taking Angry Birds Star Wars to almost every major gaming console for a scheduled launch of October 29th, 2013.
You’ll be able to flick lightsaber-wielding birds across your HDTV’s screen to your heart’s delight on Playstation 3, Playstation Vita, Xbox 360, Wii U, Wii, and the Nintendo 3DS. Rovio is adding 20 exclusive levels to the game, along with some cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes, to make things a little extra special for those wanting to conquer the galaxy again.
Here’s the trailer:
Our iDevices have become an essential part of our digital lives. Don’t they deserve a little bit more protection when (and where) you can get it? Cult of Mac Deals has both the “when” and “where” covered with the latest offer: The Mini Utility Mac Bundle.
With this bundle, you’ll get 3 apps that will take the protection of your data on your iPhone, iPod, and iPad to a whole new level. For a limited time, you can get that protection for just $19.99 from Cult of Mac Deals!
Social weather iPhone app Weathermob has just seen a big, fat update, which Weathermob‘s PR people describe as “a deeper, more delightful and safer understanding of weather.”
With new activity-based (surfing, hiking, golfing, gardening) channels and additional detail added to the realtime weather trends aggregated from its users, this is social weather, and unlike anything else available at the app store.
Apple has today announced Logic Pro X, the most advanced version of Logic Pro to date, which boasts a new interface, new creative tools for musicians, and an expanded collection of instruments and effects. Logic Pro X also introduces new features like Drummer and Flex Pitch, and Logic Remote, which lets you play and control Logic Pro X from your iPad.
Ole Zorn, the super-villain[1] behind the amazing Pythonista for iOS, has just started teasing his newest app – a Markdown text editor for the iPad. Only unlike all the other Markdown editors, this one is looks like it’s as programmable as Pythonista. I’m getting pretty excited.
The words “fun” and “email” probably don’t belong together. But of the small handful of email apps available for the iPad, Birdseye is certainly the most fun. It’s also the most dynamic, with some cool tricks that should come standard with the stock iPad Mail app.