Apple’s Tim Cook has been very public about his stance on gay rights.
Now he’s calling out the state of Indiana’s highly controversial “religious freedom” bill, which Governor Mike Pence signed into law yesterday.
Slack, the cool new communications app that many of the world’s top companies have flocked to, just revealed that it’s been hacked.
Attackers were able to access a Slack database, the company said Friday morning. There’s no indication the hackers were able to decrypt passwords stored on the server, but Slack is immediately ramping up security efforts in response.
About the only thing you can’t print on a 3-D printer is a time machine. However, the creators at Formlabs have managed to bring forward a staple from many 1950s living rooms.
OK, so 3-D printing a miniaturized replica of a Philco Predicta television isn’t exactly time travel, but you can ignore that when you realize the TV actually works.
This week, Alex has a quick look inside Apple’s secret health lab, Leander has some of his own thoughts about the hot new Becoming Steve Jobs book, Luke has important info about how hackers are brute-forcing simple passwords, Rob gives you a quick how-to on marking all those unread iMessages as read, and David has a pretty neat story about Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty. Wild, fun, and all Cult of Mac — that’s what we have for you in this edition of Cult of Mac Magazine!
iOS 8.2 was released to the public over a week ago, and already, jailbreakers are champing at the bit for a jailbreak solution that works with the latest and greatest version of Apple’s new operating system. Now it seems as if TaiG, the Chinese jailbreaking team that cracked open previous versions of iOS 8 to the public, could release an iOS 8.2 jailbreak as early as today.
If you’re in the market for an Apple Watch, and you live in London, Paris or Tokyo, consider yourself in luck: Apple will be opening mini store-within-store kiosks in luxury local department stores, dedicated to selling its eagerly-anticipated smartwatch.
The pop-up stores are planned to open Friday, April 10, when the Apple Watch first goes on preorder, which means you can be among the first to see the Apple Watch in person.
If you haven’t used Instapaper for awhile, it might be time to dig the app out again. It’s just received a great new update to version 6.2, adding some slick features like speed reading, the ability to tweet screenshots of text, and more.
This weekend is WrestleMania and, even as a kind of lapsed fan, I still can’t help but be excited about the prospect of Daniel Bryan, Brock Lesnar, Antonio Cesaro, Dolph Ziggler and pals plying their trade on the grandest stage of ’em all.
Which, of course, makes this the perfect time for Warner Bros. Interactive and WWE to update its WWE Immortals card-based fighting game for iOS — adding the characters “Macho Man” Randy Savage and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, plus an all-new Events System, to what was already a fun gaming experience.
When I think of young Steve Jobs, I typically picture the long-haired hippie who worked at Atari or the brilliant-but-immature co-founder who started Apple with Steve Wozniak. But here’s something I’ve not seen before: a photo of Jobs as a cherubic-but-undeniably-recognizable high school freshman.
The photo comes from the Homestead High yearbook from 1969, when Jobs was 14, and is far less well-known than the high school senior picture with which I’m already familiar.
Much has been made of the managerial differences between Tim Cook and predecessor Steve Jobs, and unsurprisingly that extends to their respective approaches to recruitment, too.
Jobs famously recruited Apple engineer Bob Belleville by telling him that, “Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit, so why don’t you come work for me?”
Tim Cook, on the other hand, takes a slightly softer tack — as evidenced by a new Fortune article, revealing how Cook recruited Apple’s retail guru Angela Ahrendts to join the company from her previous prominent role as CEO at Burberry.
Steve Wozniak seems to have a complex relationship with both modern-day Apple and, particularly, the Apple Watch. In an interview at the Automate/Promat Show in Chicago yesterday, Apple’s co-founder said Apple’s foray into high-end wearables marks a very different turn for the company he helped to found.
“It didn’t seem like the company we started,” he said. “That’s not the Apple that moved the world forward.”
We all know that teens are crazy drivers. But when you put phones in their hands, things get really bad.
AAA conducted video analysis of teenagers on the road and discovered that “distraction was a factor in nearly six out of 10 moderate-to-severe teen crashes.”
The video footage speaks for itself, so just watch:
Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.
The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.
Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:
If you search long enough, you can find anything on eBay and Craigslist. That includes lost, expensive military equipment that helps soldiers find roadside bombs.
The Intercept, an investigative reporting website founded by Glenn Greenwald, obtained a Navy intelligence document detailing thermal-optic-imaging and night-vision devices that wound up on a number of websites for sale, including eBay, Craigslist, texasguntalk.com and sportsfisherman.com.
Indie developer Daryl Hornsby has a novel approach for getting kids engaged with educational games: Don’t dumb things down.
That’s the key to Machineers, the clever puzzle-adventure game his company crafted to to lead kids through various programming logic concepts.
“When you say you want to target 10 to 15 year-olds, you’re told you have to make it overly colorful and bubbly, and that no kids read text,” Hornsby told Cult of Mac. “We’ve been able to prove that this is not quite the case. We’ve found that kids want to be treated like adults, but it still has to be approachable.”
Tim Cook had enormous shoes to fill when he took over as Apple CEO. After Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, doubters questioned whether the Southern engineer could keep Apple relevant. But Cook has led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company — he might be even better at running the company than Jobs ever was.
Now Fortune has named Cook the “world’s greatest leader” and published a profile full of exclusive details about Cook’s journey as Apple CEO. In the interview, Cook reveals how he developed thick skin, why he’s giving all his money to charity, and the real reasons he opened up about his sexuality.
The massive profile is well worth a read, but we’ve picked out the most interesting bits for you below.
A game like Real Racing has sophisticated graphics that, combined with the motion sensors of an iPad, give you the sensation of being behind the wheel.
The only thing missing is the actual wheel.
Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev wants iPad users to have a more comfortable drive when they play anyone of the more than 450 tilt games.
The CEO of KOLOS, slavic for colossus, has developed a gaming wheel for the iPad that launches on Kickstarter today.
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of Meerkat: the live-streaming social media phenomenon. Well, Twitter has too, because today it launched its own would-be Meerkat killer: a standalone live-streaming video app called Periscope.
Currently available only for iOS devices, the app was acquired by Twitter back in January for a reported $100 million. Unlike Meerkat, which works on the same disappearing media idea as Snapchat, Periscope allows users to save live streams and then replay them later.
Aaron Muderick is grateful to the anonymous pioneering office worker who thought to populate his or her desk with toys.
Muderick was a software engineer when his go-to desk toy, Silly Putty, gave him a whole new career when the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s and the company that employed him went under.
The story behind the unique beginnings of “Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty” is even crazier than the chemistry that creates the luminescent and magnetic properties of his product.
We turned up our noses at the first digital pictures because they didn’t look as good as film. The camera added to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1998 certainly didn’t make the case for a digital future.
The bulbous attachment recorded a fuzzy, postage-stamp-size, black-and-white image. That’s black and white with no gray shades in between.
If you wanted to share your photo, you could purchase a separate printing device that plugged into the Game Boy and spit out a tiny print. The printer took a little roll of paper and looked like one of those small credit-card-processing machines that spit out a receipt.
Today, several megapixels later, the look of the Game Boy camera is refreshingly vintage.
Steve Jobs was, of course, formative to developing the software for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, but he was also formative to the development of another company and its software: Pixar, the computer animation studio behind Toy Story, Ratatouille, Up and more.
Now Pixar has released RenderMan, the company’s in-house rendering software, to the public for free. It’s the tool that gave the world Toy Story and countless other modern day classics, and it is now totally free to download for non-commercial use on the Mac, as well as Windows and Linux.
Rightly or wrongly, iCloud is one of Apple’s most regularly criticized products (speaking personally, I’ve never had any major problems with it, but I use Google’s rival service far more.) It seems that Apple is more than aware of the negative feedback, however, because it’s in the process of improving the back-end infrastructure needed to support its cloud-based services.
Firstly, the company bought FoundationDB, a Virginia-based startup, which specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. Now a separate report claims that Apple acquired U.K.-based big data analytics firm Acunu sometime in late 2013, with the likely effort of using its database technology for providing analytics related to iCloud services.
Ever wondered what your favorite movies and shows would be like if the characters had iPhones?
The work of French photographer François Dourlen sort of touches on that subject, but with a subversive, whimsical twist that sees characters like Die Hard’s John McClane crawling out of microwave ovens, or the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies topping an industrial tower.
Note: Chosen is available for free right now but the ability to sing and judge is invite-only for now. As a special treat for Cult of Mac readers, however, the first 500 folks that enter the code 313 into the app after downloading it will be able to get in and participate.
David Hyman is no stranger to the music business, having sold MOG to Beats when the headphone company wanted a music subscription service. He was the CEO at Gracenote before that, and the director of ad sales at music blog Addicted to Noise before that. Hyman even served as interim CEO at Neil Young’s PonoPlayer.
At the Game Developers Conference this March, Hyman sat down with Cult of Mac to show off his latest music project: Chosen, a new game that marries the idea of fan-made YouTube music videos with the American Idol-style competition television, all on your iPhone.
We sat down with Hyman at the chic Hotel Zetta at the beginning of March in San Francisco, where he demoed Chosen, Hyman’s latest foray into making music accessible to all of us.
The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.
It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.