Passwords are easy to forget. They’re even easier to steal. Now Yahoo has unveiled a new scheme to make permanent passwords as outdated as Morse code.
Yahoo is rolling out its “on-demand” email passwords that utilize phone notifications so you’ll never have to memorize a password again. It works kind of like two-factor authentication, except you don’t ever have to type in your primary password.
Apple has released the fourth beta of OS X 10.10.3 to both developers and the public this morning, less than a week after the company seeded the third beta.
The new beta is pretty much identical to the third beta released last week, but adds a fix for the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that prevented it from working with those machines previously.
Designer, artist and feminist Molly McLeod has an iPhone problem. It’s one we probably all share: We spend too much time staring at it. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get when we replace our neurotic iPhone obsession with an Apple Watch.
McLeod created four delightfully playful designs that we could use to remind us (with a healthy dose of irony) to stop staring at our tiny screens for a moment.
“I find myself habitually looking at my phone when I’m commuting or idly waiting for something,” she writes on her website, “so I thought I would make my phone give me this gentle reminder. There are always other interesting things to look at if you look up!”
It’s that time of year when office work comes to a standstill for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather and nylon nets. The brackets have been set and teams are en route to play the 67 basketball games that will take place over the next few weeks, with Kentucky being the undisputed favorite to walk away with a perfect season.
Thanks to the glories of technology, you can follow all the action this year even if you don’t have a cable subscription. With the right combo of apps, you can get expert insight into your favorite Cinderella team, watch every game — and maybe even pick the perfect bracket.
Dominate March Madness this year with these apps for Mac and iOS:
There are millions of asteroids in the Solar System and relatively few astronomers to track them. They’d hate to miss that one dangerous rogue headed on a collision course with Earth.
So NASA has made it easier for the amateur stargazer to record and compare their discoveries and put extra eyes on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
NASA and Planetary Resources Inc. have developed a computer program that is based on an algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. The new asteroid hunting application, available for free download here, was announced Sunday by NASA at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
Beats Music is due for a big redesign come WWDC. Hopefully that means a native Mac app is on the way, as well as a web player that doesn’t use Flash.
While we’re waiting for Apple to trash its use of the web plugin Steve Jobs loathed, Chris Aljoudi has solved the problem with a brilliant Safari extension that brings Beats Music playback to your browser using HTML5.
The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, promises plenty of fascinating tidbits about the life of Apple’s co-founder, some of which we’ve revealed here.
But the real thing I’m excited about, that I hope the book does a whole lot better than its predecessor by Walter Isaacson, is answering the question of how exactly Jobs went from being an impulsive, hard-to-work-with co-founder to the cool, collected digital emperor who barely put a foot wrong just over one decade later.
To mark the release of Becoming Steve Jobs, a new Fast Company article written by veteran journalist Rick Tetzeli grapples with that very question. One of Tetzeli’s conclusions? It was all about Pixar.
Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs debuted at the South by Southwest film fest in Austin this weekend, and the first reviews have called film a “coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur.”
Eddy Cue took to Twitter this morning to blast the Oscar-winning director’s film, saying he was “very disappointed in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”
Here’s what Cue had to say about the documentary:
Whether it’s the iPhone 6, the Apple Watch or some other hot piece of tech, battery life is one of the most commonly criticized aspects of today’s devices.
That may be about to change, however, courtesy of a University of Michigan spinoff company called Sakti3, which has developed a new type of solid-state battery capable of storing twice the energy of traditional liquid-based lithium rechargeable batteries.
Considering that the Apple Watch goes on sale in a little over one month, Apple has still provided relatively few details about how exactly it’s going to be selling its upscale wearable devices.
Some images posted by Japanese Apple blog Macotakara offer a few hints, however. The photos show an Apple Watch booth or mini-store at the upmarket Isetan department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The sign reads “WATCH: Coming Soon.”
Like a Terminator in a downhill marathon, the runaway sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus aren’t slowing down in a hurry.
Analysts expect Apple’s smartphone to trample all competition in its path this quarter, with massive sales of more than 50 million units.
Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuted over the weekend at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival in Austin, Texas.
Financed by CNN Films, the 127-minute doc was described by its maker as delivering a “far more complex interpretation” of Jobs than any of the previous movies depicting the life of Apple’s iconic co-founder.
But what did the press think? Well, the first reviews are out and, while they’re generally strong, they certainly don’t describe a documentary that paints Jobs in a favorable light — or one that contains too many revelations that will be new to anyone who read Jobs’ maligned 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson.
First released in 1990 for the Macintosh Platform, Photoshop 1.0 turned 25 years old last month. To mark the occasion, CreativeLive asked eight Photoshop professionals to try to do their jobs — on camera, of course — on the original 1.0 version of Photoshop.
Spoiler alert: they didn’t have an easy time. “Only one level of Undo? No live preview? Is this even real life?”
During last week’s Apple Watch event, Apple brought our 46-year-old Glamour supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to stand alongside Tim Cook and explain a little bit about how she’s using the Apple Watch to train.
After the event, Vogue caught up with Turlington Burns to talk to her in more detail about what it’s actually like to use the Apple Watch. And while there’s no new details, it’s still interesting to hear someone who is so influential in the fashion world have such a “gee whiz” moment about Apple’s new wearable.
Back in the good old days of jailbreaking, your first step before upgrading to the latest version of iOS was to plug your device into an app called TinyUmbrella and save your SHSH blobs.
What are blobs? Simply put, saving your blobs gave jailbreakers the possibility of downgrading their devices to a previous version of iOS. Unfortunately, with iOS 5, Apple caught up with the way jailbreakers were using blobs, making TinyUmbrella virtually useless.
Now that’s changed. Three years later, it finally appears that the blobby wind is blowing in the opposite direction, and a new TinyUmbrella beta has been released that once more allows jailbreakers to save their SHSH blobs.
How much do you love the Apple Store? Enough to drop $495,000 to buy an apartment right above one? Then boy, do we have the right real estate deal for you.
It’s the weekend again, and Cult of Mac is here to bring you all the app awesomeness you might have missed throughout the week.
Nokia has its own maps app for iPhone, a hot new photo editor has arrived, Google Calendar gets a sexy iOS app, and more.
Without further ado, here are this week’s awesome apps!
This week: we break down all that we know (and still don’t!) about the Apple Watch, and Leander says why the $10,000+ gold editions are totally opposite Steve Jobs’ vision for the company he co-founded. Plus: Apple quietly kills their iconic glowing logo; what we love and don’t about the new Macbook, and why some are not thrilled with its new “butterfly” keyboard; and with HBO Now coming exclusively to Apple… could big AppleTV changes be on the horizon?
Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. It also makes tax time a cinch. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.
Full show notes ahead!
The viral video hit “Apple Engineer Talks,” which mocks the new MacBook, is a scream. I nearly died laughing — along with millions of other people.
The clever parody was crafted by somebody who clearly has a deep knowledge of Apple, so I was surprised to discover its creator is actually an Android user.
Here’s how he did it, and why he didn’t make any money off his wildly successful Apple viral video.
No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.
For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.
Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.
If it seems weird to you that Apple abandoned Thunderbolt, its all-in-one connector created just a few years back, in favor of USB-C for the new MacBook, you’re not the only one. It is weird. But there might be a more straightforward explanation for that than you think: According to a new rumor, Apple effectively invented USB-C.
The director of a new documentary about Steve Jobs says his film won’t be a straightforward biography of the late Apple leader. Instead, Alex Gibney says he “set out to do an impressionistic film, structured in a way like Citizen Kane.”
He also says his film, titled Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, will delve into Jobs’ character and whether he abandoned his counterculture values after turning Apple into a tech behemoth.
Apple is making some big changes to emoji with the inclusion of racially diverse characters in iOS 8.3, but the company has been hiding an emoji secret under our fingertips for years.
A startling emoji discovery was made this week by Peter Miller, who realized that the poop emoji is almost identical to the ice cream cone emoji — minus the cone and plus a splash of color. On Android, the poop and ice cream icons are pretty different, but it looks like whoever created Apple’s has been regurgitating old designs to save time.
You’ll never look at ice cream the same again. Sorry.
Apple is placing a lot of its hopes for the future on the Apple Watch, but a new survey indicates Cupertino is looking at a big uphill battle.
More than 50 percent of Americans say they think smartwatches are a passing fad.