News - page 1159

After a brush with cancer prompted me to take my health more seriously, I began using run trackers to start my journey from dad bod to six pack.

At first, running was the only exercise I did. It helped me lose my love handles, but I ended up looking too skinny. I decided it was time to put on some muscle. While Apple Watch and other wearables are great for running, they’re not much help when it comes to bulking up. As I soon discovered, some of the best fitness gadgets don’t fit on your wrist.

Why is Jony Ive’s big promotion so great for Apple? Find out what Leander thinks in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. In addition, meet the men filling the design guru’s shoes, see how Apple Watch apps will get a speed boost, learn how to beat the Unicode of Death and a ton more iPhone and Apple Watch tips, and see just how Google is challenging Apple on its own turf.

All this, and much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Apple has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to the incredible success of the iPhone. Over half a billion iPhones have been sold since the original was released in 2007, but do you ever wonder what the smartphone would look like had Apple made it back in 1984?

Pierre Cerveau reimagined Apple’s flagship product in his neat “Macintosh Phone Concept” that takes inspiration from one of Apple’s other killer products — the Macintosh 512k.

Take a closer look:

You know something’s up at Cult of Mac headquarters when you see Leander sitting with his fingers steepled, exuding an air of complete calm.

It’s like a zen garden around here ever since I told him about ASMR videos, the strangely addictive YouTube phenomenon that turns quiet sounds into something like an aural orgasm.

Now he can’t get enough of the weirdly creepy clips — and I feel a little like a guy who inadvertently turned his friend on to crack.

Okay, so it’s not really Apple news, but — honestly — who could complain about a robot cheetah on a Friday afternoon?

Given Google’s disappointing lack of killer robots at its oddly boring I/O keynote yesterday, MIT has fortunately stepped up to the plate by unleashing a new video of its metallic quadruped autonomously leaping hurdles like some kind of horse Terminator.

Check out the video below. Then start running.

Nerds and geeks alike are satirized and celebrated in CBS’s hit television show The Big Bang Theory, which has aired since 2007.

The very same intelligent kids that the show lionizes will now have a chance to study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects at UCLA, thanks to a new endowmnent from show co-creator Chuck Lorre and some of the cast and crew of the show.

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is. Maybe one of the recipients will become the next Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates.

Facebook and GIFs seem like they’ve both been fixtures of the Internet forever, but it has taken until 2015 for the two to finally hookup.

Starting today, Facebook users can annoy friends with the most amazing GIFs the web has to offer. Unfortunately, you can’t upload your favorite GIFs directly to Facebook but you can embed them from other websites.

Here’s how to do it:

7 of the 15 artists with an ownership stake in Jay Z’s troubled Tidal streaming music service may have their music pulled from it as a result of Jay Z failing to reach a music licencing agreement with Sony, which owns many of the streaming rights to the musicians in question.

Alicia Keys, Daft Punk, Jack White, Calvin Harris, J Cole, Usher have all released albums under one of Sony’s labels, while even Jay’s own wife Beyonce could see her music vanish from her husband’s attempt at a challenger to digital music giants like Spotify and Apple.

One man’s astonishing collection of Apple gear is for sale on eBay right now, making an instant Mac museum just a click away for the right bidder. The auction starts at $100,000, with a Buy It Now price of $300,000 — a drop in the bucket for a certain CEO who’s on his way to the billionaire’s club.

“I would love for Tim Cook to buy it all,” said seller Steve “Mac” Abbott in an email to Cult of Mac running down his list of ideal buyers. “First it means he would want to display it, unlike Steve [Jobs], and that Apple would sponsor its own history…. Next would be a well-heeled Apple guy, and after that whoever can convince me that it can be seen. Then, ‘Show me the money.'”

Chances are you’ve heard about the iOS bug that lets users send a string of text to another iPhone owner that causes their Messages app to crash and their iPhone to reboot.

Although Apple has yet to fix the Messages bug with a software update, it has published an official support document containing a temporary workaround for solving the problem.

Apple is such a strange and secretive company, the news that Jony Ive has been promoted is instead widely interpreted that he’s on his way out.

The Telegraph revealed Monday that Ive has been promoted to Chief Design Officer and freed from the day-to-day running of Apple’s Industrial Design studio.

This was greeted with speculation that Ive is actually stepping back. He’s taking it easy, many theorized, easing into semi-retirement. He’s already halfway out the door, and will soon move back to the United Kingdom, seems to be the consensus among pundits.

I think this is Kremlinology in the extreme. And a little perverse. Apple is often obtuse, and sometimes disingenuous or even dishonest, but I think this news should be taken at face value.

Apple has characterized the move as a promotion, and it is. Ive has been moved up into a rare position that gives him a ton of freedom. He now has the breathing room to be what he really wants to be: a pure designer.

In fact, the promotion allows him to take on an even stronger and more Steve Jobs-like role. We will see more design work from him, not less.

Google announced a new version of its low-cost Cardboard virtual-reality headsets today at its I/O developers conference, and it’s giving some attendees a wicked case of déjà vu.

Imagine exploring a creepy house full of eerie and unfamiliar sounds, supernatural horror dripping from every bannister and behind every mysterious, creaking door.

Now imagine entering such a disturbing environment when you’re blind.

Cassie is the blind young protagonist of Perception, a horror game from many of the folks that worked on Bioshock Infinite and Dead Space, and she’s been dreaming of this house for some time now. When she finally figures out it’s real, she heads off to investigate it, using only echolocation–sound into visuals–to confront and solve the ghostly mysteries within.

There’s a gloriously tense trailer, too, from the perspective of the wisecracking teen, Cassie. Check it out.

The best way to check the weather is usually pulling up an app or website, turning on a TV, or simply going to a window and looking outside. But what if you had a gorgeous device on your desk that could actually show you what’s going on out there?

Tempescope is that pretty little thing; it simulates present and future weather conditions inside of a clear acrylic case.

Stop taking pictures of your “stupid face,” Thomas Hurst says. Think history, legacy and every day, unposed moments.

Hurst believes he has the tool to help you make more meaningful photos and the veteran photojournalist is trying to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter to bring the COVR you need to snap candid photos with your iPhone 6.

Apple has finalized an acquisition for the augmented reality company Metaio in a move that could soon bring the German firm’s AR tech to iOS and other Apple devices.

Metaio, which specializes in creating augmented reality tools for other businesses as well as other computer vision solutions, mysteriously announced last night that it would stop selling its services, but filings with the German government reveal that the company has transferred all of its shares over to Apple.

Take a look at their incredible tech in action:

From smartphones to the Internet of Things, Google wants to be woven into the fabric of our lives.

The company detailed some of its latest hardware and software projects — some truly innovative, some strictly playing catch-up — during the annual Google I/O developer conference Thursday.

From the iterative improvements coming in Android M to the blue-sky thinking of Project Brillo, everything plays into Mountain View’s master plan, which Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Android, Chrome and apps described as “putting technology and computer science to work on important problems that users face” — and doing it “at scale for everyone in the world.”

Google’s goals are similar to Apple’s: Both companies are trying to integrate their products (and possibly their worldviews) into every facet of our lives to make tech personal and useful. In many ways, Google’s approach is far more ambitious.

Here are the six things you need to know from the Google I/O 2015 keynote.

When a camera bag claims to be water resistant, it feels a little like the brand is hedging its bets. It will protect your gear up to a point.

But the designers at miggo have a bag they declare confidently is storm-proof and all-weather. They even say with certainty the ironically named Agua will remain protective for five minutes in rain falling at 10 liters a minute with up to 22,000 pounds of force.

If you’re in a Biblical hard rain, you may have bigger problems then keeping your camera dry. miggo just wants you to feel comfortable with Agua if you’re out on a typical rainy day.

If you’re in and about New York after June 13 you’ll have an extra Apple Store to check out, since that marks the date when Apple will open its new retail location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Signage was put up overnight, revealing that customers have just over two weeks to wait until construction is finished on the impressive 4,000-square foot upmarket retail outlet.

Not that everyone’s happy about it, of course.

The best camera is the one that is with you, so the saying goes. But if that is indeed your iPhone, what is the best photo app? You have several thousand from which to choose.

This can be particularly maddening to older generations, for whom robust digital living seems foreign and frightening. They like the ease of the smartphone camera, but they just want to share their pictures with a few people and store securely without all the extras, like locators, timelines or random followers.

Sherish – an iOS app whose name combines the words share and cherish – was developed for the older user who just wants a few functions, a couple of screens, easy album management and, of course, privacy.

Apple just can’t get rid of its shady antitrust compliance monitor.

After making another appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to disqualify Michael Bromwich as its monitor, Apple was rejected by the federal court this morning, even though the judge said Apple’s allegations against Bromwich ‘give pause.’

The potato is one of the least colorful of the good Lord’s creations. But somehow, two French inventors figured out how the dud spud could help put color in our photographs using a process they called Autochrome.

 Before brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere tinkered with taters, photographers were shooting three different pictures of the same scene through colored filters — red, blue and green — and then sandwiching the images for projection.

In 1904, the Lumieres pulverized potatoes into a starchy powder, which they then divided into three separate batches for dying violet-blue, green and orange-red. When mixed together and applied to a glass plate, the microscopic grains of potato filtered the light, creating a negative that could produce a color photo. That was Autochrome.

Once, Jawbone was king of the fitness tracking set. Then, after a series of missteps and disastrous, half-baked product launches, Jawbone’s popularity waned in favor of Fitbit.

Now, of course, the Apple Watch rules the roost, but Jawbone and Fitbit are still at war… and Jawbone just dragged it all into the courts.

When Samsung dropped its Iron Man-themed Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge variant, I had a feeling I’ve never experienced in my days as an iPhone owner: Android envy.

Fortunately that brief emotional response can now be banished to the furthest limits of the Negative Zone courtesy of this gorgeous, metallic-flake-finish “Hero Collection” adhesive skin for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

No, it’s not Tony Stark’s titanium alloy, but in so far as it gives your iPhone the familiar metallic red-and-gold look associated with everyone’s favorite billionaire philanthropist superhero, it’s pretty darn good.