Kanye West is reportedly distancing himself from Jay Z’s Tidal music service and set to launch his next album — his seventh solo studio album — on Apple’s refreshed Beats Music service, rumored to arrive at this year’s WWDC in June.
Called SWISH, Kanye’s album currently has no official release date, although Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) claims it will drop on June 1. WWDC kicks off one week later on June 8 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Apple issued its first Apple Watch software update this week, adding new emojis, fixes for Siri and more. Unfortunately, hidden among the positives is one fairly big negative: Multiple users are complaining that the 1.0.1 update stops the device’s much-touted heart rate monitor from running as it should.
Console game developers are trying to break into mobile, and they’re using casual genres to break into the scene.
For instance, when gamers hear about Insomniac Games, they might think of classic platform games like Ratchet and Clank, first-person shooters like Resistance: Fall of Man or next-gen console title Sunset Overdrive. What those hypothetical gamers might not think of is a match-three or endless runner iPhone game. But game makers can’t afford to ignore the mobile scene these days and Insomniac is no different, as evidenced by the company’s new tower-defense game, Bad Dinos.
“It’s obviously a huge market,” Brian Hastings, chief creative officer at Insomniac Games, told Cult of Mac, “and we’re seeing an entire generation of players who are getting into mobile first, before anything else.”
The Apple Watch won’t be available in stores for at least a few more weeks, but if you want to get a head start on your collection of band color options, hurry to your local Apple Store now. They’ve finally got Apple Watch bands!
I ordered an extra Sport band weeks ago after deciding the white I got wasn’t for me. I’m still waiting for it, and figured I’d probably be waiting for weeks. So as soon as I heard that some stores have bands in stock, I jumped in my car and sped to my Apple Store faster than Mad Max Rockatansky fleeing from Immortan Joe and the War Boys.
Unfortunately, bands are in pretty limited supply and only a few colors are available, but I lucked out and they had just what I needed. Here’s what it’s like to buy an Apple Watch band at the Apple Store:
Adobe is killing off its mobile version of Photoshop, doubling down on its strategy of creating simpler photo apps focused on specific tasks rather than all-in-one photo-editing software.
In a blog post detailing its strategy for mobile apps, Adobe said Photoshop Touch will be taken off the App Store on May 28. A new retouching app codenamed “Project Rigel” is in the works and will be released later this year.
Instagram users, adjust your privacy setting and remember the name Richard Prince.
Should he request to follow you, he could one day “appropriate” your pictures and make thousands of dollars off you.
Prince featured 38 screenshots from his Instagram feed in a show in New York City last fall and at the Frieze Art Fair earlier this month, and some of the people featured are just now finding out about their pictures appearing in giant form on gallery walls.
If flowers are your photographic muse, you use a macro lens to create pictures from a bee’s-eye view.
But consider what a bee sees when it flies. Voormedia in the Netherlands did, flying a drone and filming over breath-taking flower fields in bloom that may have you wanting to give your macro the day off.
Shooting is easy in Keukenhof or Noordwijkerhout in the spring where acres and acres of vibrant pinks and purples bloom at once. Watch the short YouTube video below and you’ll make room in your bag for a quadcopter and GoPro camera.
Apple might finally be ready to upgrade the storage on the cheapest iPhones 6s model later this year, and it could happen sooner than expected. As someone who upgraded to the 64GB 6 Plus only because 16GB is just not enough, this is great news.
iPhone 6s rumors are starting to pick up steam this week and new research report is backing up two previous rumors that Apple’s newest iPhone will enter mass production in June, with the baseline model getting a storage upgrade to 32GB.
Is Apple preparing to deliver a refreshed iPhone 5c? A product image on its own online store shows what could be a new iPhone 6c sitting atop the new Lightning iPhone dock. The device carries the same plastic back we’re already familiar with, as well as a Touch ID sensor.
If you wonder how the Apple Watches on display in retail stores differ from those you can buy, some new photos that surfaced online answer the question.
And it involves a built-in Lightning charger.
In hockey’s early days, if you took a puck to the kisser you got stitched up and put back on the ice. No goalie would dare wear a protective mask — fans considered it unmanly. Coaches worried their netminders would lose their courage. Reporters echoed these judgments in their stories.
But after stopping a hard wrist shot with his face early in the first period of a game against the Rangers in 1959, Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante refused to return without the crude, flesh-toned fiberglass mask he used in practice.
The press fussed at him, but Plante believed playing without a mask was like a skydiver jumping without a parachute. Plante’s ghoulish face cover went on to win over goalies, became an enduring symbol of the game and even evolved into a high-tech artistic statement for today’s goaltenders.
We may only have to wait until August to get our first official glimpse of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, according to a new research note by well-connected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Don’t get too excited though — even though Kuo thinks the iPhone will be unveiled a month earlier than usual, he says it will be released in its usual September slot.
The respected KGI Securities analyst also sheds light on who is set to build the new iPhones, a few of the devices’ key features, and some details about the forthcoming 12.9-inch iPad. Check them out below.
If the multiple worlds theory of quantum mechanics is correct, there is a universe out there somewhere in which Apple slavishly copies every move Samsung makes in the handset department.
A new iPhone 7 concept by designer Hasan Kaymak shows us what that parallel world would look like by demonstrating an iPhone with an edge-to-edge display much like the one Samsung uses for its current Galaxy S6 Edge.
As pointless gimmicks go, it’s actually a pretty neat one.
If you’re having problems with Apple’s iCloud services, don’t worry — you’re not alone!
On its status page, Apple is currently showing yellow alerts for Back to My Mac, Find My iPhone, iCloud Account & Sign-In, iCloud Backup, Drive, Keychain, Mail, iMovie Theater, iWork, and Photos — meaning that services are either running slowly or are down. While not all users are experiences these problems, Apple acknowledges that many are.
When Icelandic developer Thorsteinn Fridriksson unleashed QuizUp on the world in late 2013, the last thing he expected was that the trivia app’s questions would turn into the nerdy equivalent of Cupid’s arrows. However, a surprising number of people who fell in love with the app also fell in love with each other.
“Very soon after we launched, we started hearing about people connecting on the platform,” Fridriksson told Cult of Mac. “You’d be amazed at how many QuizUp couples there are — people who literally met each other because they shared interests in the game.”
Now QuizUp is poised to pivot, taking advantage of its innate ability to connect players — whether for love, friendship or just a killer trivia smackdown. Today’s update marks the biggest and riskiest change in QuizUp’s history, as the multiple-choice game relaunches with a new focus on social networking.
Crazily enough, it just might work.
Promising users access to as many free movies as they wanted via a torrent-streaming website, Popcorn Time’s newly-launched web app was as sweet as a bag of popcorn — and lasted about as long.
Launching just this week, Popcorn Time on Your Browser’s servers were apparently overwhelmed as the site went viral quicker than anyone had anticipated.
Yes, a site offering high quality streaming Hollywood movies for no money whatsoever proved popular — we’re shocked too!
Photo-hosting site Flickr is taking some heat today over some unfortunate tags automatically showing up on users’ pictures. Specifically, the auto-tagging program has described people (of various races) as “animals” and identified concentration camps as “jungle gyms” and “sport.”
The auto-tag system remains in place, but some users want it gone.
The researchers at Yahoo labs have just quantified the use of filters on digital photos. Say what you want about the death of the art of photography – filters will get your photos noticed.
“We find two groups of serious and casual photographers among filter users,” write the researchers at Yahoo Labs. “The serious see filters as correction tools and prefer milder effects. Casual photographers, by contrast, use filters to significantly transform their photos with bolder effects.”
The best filters for engagement, however, tended to be the ones that increase warmth, exposure, and contrast, rather than the cooler, more obscuring ones.
This is big news if you’re looking to get popular on sites like Flickr and Instagram.
Apple Watch hasn’t even been out for a month yet but it may have already claimed its first victim in the war for your wrist.
Smartwatch maker Pebble is in big trouble and has applied for a $5 million loan from a Silicon Valley bank to stay afloat, according to a new report that claims the company is having a hard time maintaining growth.
Short on room space? LG has just busted through the thinness limit on massive screened television sets and unveiled its proof of concept HDTV that’s as thin as paper.
Sure, it’s not in production yet, and will likely cost way too much for the average person to buy at first, but a press-on wallpaper television set is pretty high on our list of wants.
An iOS developer claims the latest version of their app has been rejected by Apple solely because a screenshot dared to mention the forbidden word “Android.”
It’s hardly noticeable — you’ll need to squint to see it — but Apple allegedly wants it gone just in case it reminds iPhone and iPad users that other platforms are available.
Apple is expected to unveil its huge overhaul of Beats Music in just a few weeks at WWDC but Spotify is firing shots first in the battle for music streaming dominance with a huge update for its iPhone app.
Spotify took the wraps off its new music experience at a keynote this morning, revealing a new Now start page for music discovery to go along with additions such as podcasts, video clips, original content, and an awesome new feature for joggers that matches songs to your running tempo.
Here’s a rundown of the new features:
Just when you thought you were safe from ceaseless notifications from Farmville players, Facebook has let it be known that it is planning to add gaming apps to its secondary Messenger app. You know, the one you had to install on your iPhone because they took messaging functions out of the main Facebook mobile app.
Facebook is actively talking with game developers about using the Messenger platform to deliver gaming experiences, which would then lead to more interactions with the Messenger app, and probably revenues, as most of Facebook’s non advertising revenue comes from third-party games.
The only Apple Watches I’ve seen in the wild so far have been strapped to men’s wrists, and according to one of the world’s top Apple analysts, that could be a bad indicator for the digital timepieces’ popularity.
In a new note to investors, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has cut his 2015 expectations for Apple Watch sales from 30 million down to just 15 million after research found that Apple Watch has attracted mostly men.
The biggest city in Silicon Valley is about to land the world’s biggest tech company.
Apple is considering expanding into north San Jose to lease more office space, even though the company’s gigantic space ship campus is scheduled to be completed next year and house more than 13,00 employees.