There’s been a lot of hoopla today about Rockmelt, a free new iPad app for browsing the web. Everyone keeps calling Rockmelt a browser, but I disagree. This is not what I call a browser. It’s a feed reader.
The two main questions I always get asked about jailbreaking are, “How do I jailbreak?” and “Can my iPhone even be jailbroken?” Because a jailbreak usually has to be manufactured for each new release of iOS, there’s a good chance that certain version of iOS are jailbreak friendly while others are not. For instance, there’s no public jailbreak for iOS 6 yet.
So, how do you check to see if the iOS device you use is jailbreakable or not?. You could search Google for a few minutes trying to find the right tool, or you could visit a handy web app called JailbreakStatus.
This is Dolphin. It’s a neat web browser for iPhone. You could easily be forgiven for saying: “What’s the point of having an extra browser? Mobile Safari does everything I need.”
Which is true. Safari does everything you need. But try Dolphin for just a few minutes, and you’ll discover a browser that does everything you need but in a totally different way. A way that’s much better suited to using on your phone while you’re moving around.
Instapaper developer Marco Arment has announced The Magazine for Newsstand, a new publication that’s “loosely about technology, but also gives tech writers a venue to explore other topics that like-minded geeks might find interesting.” The Magazine will get four articles every two weeks, and it costs $1.99 per month to subscribe with a 7-day free trial.
Say what you want about Rovio, that Finnish firm sure knows how to milk a good cow. It’s been nearly three years since Angry Birds made its debut on iOS, and since then we’ve seen a handful of sequels reaching numerous platforms — plus the spin-off, Bad Piggies — Angry Birds plushes and toys, costumes, books, amusement park attractions, snacks, and even an Angry Birds cartoon (coming soon).
Now Rovio is tackling… cookbooks! Announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair today, Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes is a new interactive cookbook packed full of egg recipes that’s available now on the iPad.
Google has updated its official Google+ app for iOS to deliver support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5’s larger 4-inch display, and to add a number of new features — including the ability to view, post, and comment on Google+ pages, and save images to the camera roll.
Google has just made its “biggest ever update” to Street View, adding over a quarter of a million miles worth of roads around the globe.
In remarks about Microsoft Office across a variety of platforms, a Czech executive told a local website that Microsoft Office for iOS and Android was coming in the first quarter of 2013. Quickly thereafter, A US Microsoft representative, Frank Shaw, denied the dates in a tweet, saying, “the information shared by our Czech Republic subsidiary is not accurate. We have nothing further to share.”
Just retooled for the iPhone 5, Vlock is a free app that displays a bold Android-ish clock, with date, on your iPhone. It’ll also let you play videos through the clock in a kind of video version of the iPad’s Picture Frame mode, complete with loop and transitions. Combine this with the app’s lockscreen feature, and you’ve got a faux animated Android-y lockscreen. All without a jailbreak.
There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!
EA announced back in June that Need For Speed Most Wanted would be coming to Android and iOS by the end of October. Well, that day is slowly approaching, and EA is reminding us by flaunting more in-game footage of this action-packed open world racer.
It’s been nearly three years since Rovio’s first Angry Birds game made its debut on iOS devices, and you might have thought that interest in the series may have died down a little in that time. But you’d be very wrong indeed. According to the Finnish firm, Angry Birds games still see more than 200 million active users every single month.
There’s been plenty of debate over whether or not Microsoft will ever bring its Office productivity suite to Android and iOS devices. Many reports have claimed it will, while Microsoft itself has denied the rumors. But now product manager Petr Bobek has confirmed that it will happen next year.
OS X developers are reportedly becoming frustrated with the lengthy delay they must endure to have their applications approved for the Mac App Store. Average wait times have increased to 27 days over the past month, whereas approval for the iOS App Store takes just 7 days on average. Some are blaming the influx of iOS updates for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, but claim that Apple should be over the worst of it by now.
The SlingPlayer app for both Android and iOS has been discounted to $14.99 (50% off) after receiving a long-overdue update. SlingPlayer is one of the more expensive apps so grabbing it while it’s half-off is a must for anyone considering the purchase of a Slingbox. The SlingPlayer works in conjunction with a compatible Slingbox and smartphone or tablet, allowing users to watch live or recorded TV while on-the-go.
Reliving your childhood with retro games on iOS is, I find, one of the best ways to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon — until you get frustrated with the virtual controls that keep getting you killed and you threaten to throw your iPad out of the window. But thanks to the iCade 8-Bitty, a new Bluetooth control pad for iOS, you can now play your favorite titles with real controls.
Sure, Rovio just announced its new Star Wars Angry Bird iteration, but they certainly haven’t forgotten about the OG Angry Birds that started it all. Today, Rovio has updated the original Angry Birds with a ton of new content. Chock full of new power-ups, this update includes 15 new Surf & Turf levels as well as 15 pig themed levels.
I hope you haven’t grown tired of dismembering the undead because Gameloft plans on unleashing another horde of zombies onto Android an iOS this Halloween. You’ll soon have the opportunity to play the part of Stuntman/Movie Star extraordinaire, aimed with ridding the entertainment capital of the world of walking corpses (and I’m not talking Joan Rivers). Arm yourself with weapons sporting wacky names like “Widow Maker” and the “Cyclops,” then annihilate anything without a pulse (pretty much all of Hollywood).
So, when you use OS X Dashboard widgets for a while, chances are you’ll download a few of them that might fit together into categories. In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple set the “Add More Widgets” screen to look a lot like iOS, as we showed you in a previous tip. The cool thing is that you can create iOS-Style folders in here, too, and add a bunch of apps to one slot, thereby organizing your Dashboard in a similar way to that of an iOS device screen.
Apple has released a new digital user guide for the fifth-generation iPod touch, which was announced alongside the iPhone 5 back in September. The 138-page eBook covers “everything you need to know” about the device, and is available to download now — for free — from the iBookstore.
In addition to this, the new iPod touch has now received its first benchmarks, which reveal it’s packing an 800MHz dual-core A5 processor.
Sega has announced that arcade classic Crazy Taxi is coming to iOS devices this month. It hasn’t given us a whole lot of information on the game — none at all, in fact — but it’s expected that the title will be a complete port of the original Dreamcast hit, with the original (and awesome!) Offspring soundtrack.
If you haven’t had the chance to play Pocket Planes on an iOS device, you really should. If, however, you live in a world where games cannot touch your iPhone or iPad (you poor, sad creature), then here’s some great news: Pocket Planes is coming to the Mac on Thursday.
Better yet, if you do own the game on your iOS device, you’ll be able to quit playing on your iPhone or iPad, and pick the game up on your Mac (or vice versa).
Apple won’t let you put the iOS Newsstand icon in a folder for some ridiculous reason. It’s annoying. A lot of people don’t use Newsstand on the iPhone, and after awhile that wooden bookshelf icon seems to just sit there, mocking you. Wouldn’t it to be nice to hide it in a folder with all the other stock apps you don’t you use, like that stupid Compass app?
There was a trick discovered in iOS 5 that lets you hide Newsstand with some finger magic, but the process is a little tedious. A new utility app for the Mac called StifleStand puts Newsstand in an iOS folder for you, no jailbreak required.
Headquake is a music sound enhancement app for iOS. It claims to “flat narrow sounds to an enormous yet perfectly balanced 3D Sound experience surrounding your head.” But hearing, like music, is a very individual thing, and Headquake’s efforts aren’t always much of an enhancement.
We don’t often praise Microsoft here at Cult of Mac, but with this game they’ve got almost everything right. It’s a cool action-adventure romp with great visuals and a sense of humor. The only thing that leaves me boggling is the ridiculous name: “Tentacles: Enter the Dolphin.” I beg your pardon?