iOS - page 53

The finishing touches are being added to Moscone West as WWDC 2013 draws closer. In just three short days Tim Cook and company will take stage at Moscone West to reveal a redesigned iOS, new MacBooks, and possibly a new iPad.

Apple’s WWDC keynote is slated to start Monday, June 10th at 10AM PST. Don’t want to miss all the juicy details as they’re unveiled? Well, here’s a handy infographic so you know what time to hop on and check the Cult of Mac liveblog for the full scoop on everything that goes down at WWDC 2013.

Image: Twitter

LEGOs and Apple products go together like celery and peanut butter. Tons of LEGO/Apple hybrid creations have graced the front page of Cult of Mac, but now there’s a small Taiwanese design group that created an iPhone 5 LEGO adapter that will allow you to morph you iPhone into a new LEGO creation.

The adapter plugs into your iPhone 5’s Lightning port and allows you to link your own LEGO bricks together with your iPhone or iPad, perfect for building your own LEGO iPhone case.

Here are some of the creations you can create with the LEGO adapter:

SwiftKey creator TouchType will be closely watching Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, hoping that the Cupertino company opens up its iOS platform to third-party keyboards for the first time. The SwiftKey keyboard has been exclusive to Android since its inception, but the company is itching to bring it to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

Hulu has unveiled a brand new Hulu Plus app for that’s been completely redesigned to focus on “discoverability, efficiency, and our overall user experience.” The company hopes that the change will make it easier for users to find their favorite shows and discover new ones.

Jason Citron is a veteran of both the console and gaming space, involved with developing Double Fine’s Brutal Legend in 2006, and then releasing one of the first hit iOS games in the early, heady days of the iOS App store, a match-three puzzle game with a twist, Aurora Feint. Soon after, he created OpenFeint, which was the de facto leaderboard and multiplayer matching system for Apple mobile devices long before Game Center.

After OpenFeint was sold to Japanese social-gaming company, GREE, in April of 2011, Jason headed out to engage his passion for video game development once again with a new company, Hammer & Chisel, and a new game, announced today, called Fates Forever, an iPad-only massively online battle arena (MOBA) game.

Citron took some time out of a busy schedule to talk to Cult of Mac about the new game, it’s mechanics and business strategy, and his own take on what iPad games should be.

T-Mobile U.K. has confirmed that BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS will arrive on June 27. That means we have exactly three weeks to wait until BlackBerry’s hugely popular chat service goes cross-platform, and you can see exactly what it will look like on Android in the photo above.

Mail Pilot, the email client that was born on Kickstarter and first hit iOS back in April, is coming to the Mac. We don’t have a release for it yet, but if you’re itching to get your hands on it, you can sign up for the public beta today. 

When we talk about the Android/iOS wars, we often talk about it as a purely binary conflict. If one side wins, the other side must lose.

According to the latest Flurry Mobile Report, though, that simply isn’t true. There’s room for two kings, and while Android has surpassed iOS in overall marketshare, people spend much more time in-app on iOS.

Casemakers are known to gamble on upcoming iOS product launches. Every day they can have their product on the shelves closer to launch is a day they have a leg up over their competitors in the hyper-competitive case market.

Case in point, here’s a story about Hard Candy Cases gambled (and lost) $50,000 on iPhone 4S moldings from China to get their cases first-to-market. When the iPhone 4S actually debuted, though, it looked identical to the 4, instead of the radical redesign the case makers expected. Oops.

Now the same case maker is doing the same thing, gambling on the iPad 5 launch. This time, though, Tim Hickman has less to lose.

Google’s YouTube apps for Android and iOS have helped the company triple advertising sales on mobile in the past six months, the company has said. Mobile ads now contribute an estimated $350 million to YouTube’s revenue, with around a quarter of the site’s 1 billion users accessing videos on smartphones and tablets.

https://youtu.be/2Azoteu5nzs

I am a snorer. This should not be taken to mean that I make soft, puppy-like growling sounds in the back of my throat as I sleep. In fact, if you happened to hold that puppy up within six inches of my face while I sawed logs, it is likely that all of the flesh, fur and musculature of that baby dog would be vortexed off its skeleton only to become lodged in the yawning chasms of my throat and nostrils. My snore is the sound of the Seventh Seal being opened, or the universe tearing itself asunder. In all probability? You have never heard anything like me.

So imagine my poor girlfriend, who sleeps next to me every night as the bed vibrates, the house shakes and the ceiling buckles with my snoring. As you might well imagine, she’s eager for me to do something about my snoring.

And what do you know? There’s a new app for just that. It’s called Snorelab.

Great news, FPS fans! Gameloft has today unveiled its first teaser trailer for Modern Combat 5, the next chapter in its hugely popular mobile shooter franchise. Check it out below.

Kindgom Rush has been one of our favorite tower defense games for the past two years, so we’re really excited to hear that Ironhide Game Studio just released the sequel, titled ‘Kingdom Rush Frontiers.’

The new game features all new levels as you defend your lands in the deserts, jungles, and even the underworld. You get some new customizable abilities along with a host of new bad guys and nine legendary heres.

We got the full release notes after the break, but if you’re already eager, you can pick up Kingdom Rush Frontiers in the App Store for $4.99.

Game Features:

The popular photo messaging application, Snapchat, just got a big update. Version 5.0 of the app was released on the App Store today and it comes with a bunch of nice improvements that will help users send messages faster than ever.

The overall design of the app has been cleaned up and streamlined. There’s a new swipe navigation feature that makes it a lot quicker to navigate around the app. Snapchat has also made it easier to find friends on the service, and there’s also new in-app profiles of all your contacts.

Here are the official release notes:

This just in: your iPhone (and iPad or iPod touch) is a marvel of engineering and does some amazing things, keeping you connected to the rest of the world with its super amazing technology. All that connectivity, though, can come with a price.

Push services are there to let you know when you have stuff to do, or emails to check. It’s pretty handy. However, when you need to conserve your battery, it’s probably time to turn them off. Here’s how, straight from Apple.

Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone and iPad got a great update today, which adds a couple of much needed features.

First, you can now set line spacing for your ebooks between three options: loose, normal and tight. Kindle has allowed you change the margins on e-books for a while, but this new option makes it even easier to change the settings for optimum readability.

A smaller change, but a welcome one, is that you can now highlight long passages that span multiple pages. I rarely use this functionality, but that’s still a level up.

You can download Kindle for iOS here.

A hacked carrier update that has the potential to deliver improved data speeds is now available to iPhone 5 users on Sprint. The modified update, which has previously been made available to devices on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, does not require a jailbroken device — just a Mac or PC with iTunes.

The makers of Floome, a new breathalyzer dongle that clips into a smartphone’s headphone jack, say their gadget is more accurate than the Breathometer breathalyzer we featured in March, because Floome is equipped with a key ingredient missing from the former: a flowmeter.

Following Gmail’s snazzy addition of categories for easily filtering your inbox mail, the Gmail iOS app has also been updated to support the functionality.

There are a number of tweaks you can install on your jailbroken iOS device that’ll add quick settings toggles to your lock screen, but some of them are far more complicated — and more ugly — than they need to be. LockscreenToggles takes the concept back to basics to ensure it isn’t one of them.

Byword, a wonderful Markdown editor for Mac and iOS, has today been updated to version 2.0. The release brings a number of new features to both platforms, with the most notable edition being the ability to publish directly to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and more.

BlackBerry announced last month that it will finally be bringing BlackBerry Messenger to Android and iOS this summer, and the news was welcomed by both existing BlackBerry users and those who have since switched to competing platforms.

Now it seems hackers are taking advantage of the excitement surrounding the app and releasing fake BBM betas for Android and iOS that could be harmful to your device.

Battery life, it’s the bane of every iPhone user’s existence, right? It’s hard to tell, really, reading the internet, which specific steps to take to make sure your battery is working at its most efficient, giving you the longest life without compromising performance.

One of the most misunderstood areas of managing battery life may just be the brightness settings. Here’s what Apple has to say about it.

Google just released Chrome 27 for iOS. The big update for Google’s third-party browser for iOS should have faster page reloading speeds as well as improved voice search.

Google included voice search in its Google Now app for iOS, but the conversational search tools are now being packed directly into Chrome as well. The update also gives Chrome the ability to speak search results back to you so you pretty much never have to look at your screen again if you don’t want to.

Here are the full release notes:

WordPress just released a new update for its iOS app that is sure to make WordPress bloggers happy. The new app features a overhauled UI that makes it easier and faster to blog from your iPhone than before.

The new update ditches the single pane view for a multi-pane view that users can swipe between to access different areas of the app (kind of like the Facebook and Rdio apps). WordPress also added a shortcut to the sidebar to make posting faster, there are also new translations for Russian, Danish, and Korean, improved Tumblr importing, and bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes: