Square Cash is one of those few apps I can show my non-techy friends and immediately get a wide-eyed, “whoa” kind of response. Its ability to quickly send and receive money is super slick.
Today two big changes to Square Cash will make it an even more attractive peer-to-peer payments service. First, anyone can now create a web profile for accepting money without needing a standalone app. Second, businesses and nonprofits can get in on the action.
You may have suspected that the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs had Apple’s official endorsement the moment it was revealed that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, offered their participation.
However, with just one day to go until the book’s release, the word is now officially out: This is Apple’s sanctioned version of the Steve Jobs story.
“After a long period of reflection following Steve’s death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We decided to participate in [the] book because of [author Brent Schlender’s] long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve’s life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we’ve seen, and we are happy we decided to participate.”
Sure, Steve Jobs might not have been quite the one-man-temper-tantrum he was portrayed as for much of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, but he still wasn’t someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.
According to authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli in their new book Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, Jobs flipped out after former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein decided to join Palm in 2007: never again speaking with a person he had been close to for years.
Ahead of the April 24 launch of the Apple Watch, Cupertino’s debut wearable continues its world tour with a new style guide in Australia’s Elle magazine — advising on how Apple’s smartwatch can be used as a chic wearable everywhere from cocktail parties to the workplace.
For a cocktail party, for instance, the magazine suggests that you might want to pair it with a “tuxedo suit and sexy heels (think Le Smoking Saint Laurent style with Alexander Wang black heels), or if you have the legs for it, a killer cocktail dress.” For the weekend, meanwhile, you can “Wear it with trackies, your boyfriend’s shirt (worn cuffed and loose) and a chic cashmere overcoat.”
The tech world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Apple Watch and Siri, it seems, isn’t any different. With the launch of Apple’s debut wearable just a month away, the iOS virtual assistant is apparently just as obsessed with the device as we are — as a simple “What are you doing now, Siri?” question will attest.
Check out some of the amusingly geeky responses below.
We’re all looking forward to the Apple Watch, but there’s one thing I’m definitely not looking forward to: the ability to answer phone calls on my wrist. And this clever video shows exactly why.
This week: it’s kind of a big deal—the wonderful world of Nintendo is coming to iOS. Plus: the reviews are in, people are loving the new Force Cluck Touch Trackpad; Apple’s rumored streaming TV service might land in June; and why the new Macbook hails the end for the Macbook Air.
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!
First introduced in 2006, shortly after Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel-based chips, Apple’s Boot Camp multi-boot utility is the secret sauce that has allowed the Mac to be the best-selling PC on Earth.
The proposition Boot Camp offers to would-be Mac buyers is simple. If they buy a Mac, they can run any OS they want: OS X, Windows, or Linux. But if they buy any other laptop, they can never run OS X.
With the release of the latest MacBook Pros, though, Boot Camp just got a little less flexible. Apple has dropped support for Windows 7 from the 2015 MacBook Pro.
If you’re on a Mac, and use Chrome, and if you’re not sure if you have Assyrian turned on, definitely don’t click this link. Just doing so could cause your whole browser to crash, and the culprit is a 13-character snippet that couldn’t seem any more innocuous.
It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to catch up on all of the hot new apps you might have missed throughout the week.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Can reading the Bible be sexy? There’s a new app from an ex-Apple designer that argues it can. We’ve also got the snakiness weather app you ever did see, the long-awaited return of an App Store reject, and other indie goodies you don’t want to miss.
Without further ado, here are this week’s awesome apps!
With high development costs and uncertain prospects, now is a risky time to build Apple Watch apps. But like many other indie developers, I’m working on one anyway.
The Apple Watch gold rush is about more than money.
Steve Jobs didn’t like Neil Young.
That much is evident from an excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs, a highly anticipated book on the late Apple co-founder that comes out Tuesday. Jobs’ hatred for Young was so strong that he even refused a peace offering from the multi-Grammy-winner.
Steve Jobs planned to boot Jony Ive out of Apple the very first time he met him, according to an explosive new revelation from the forthcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs.
“He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive told the book’s authors, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, in an interview.
Hell just froze over.
Nintendo has finally given in to the fact that smartphones have dealt its handheld gaming business a huge blow; the only way they’re going to stay relevant is to release their immensely popular gaming characters and game franchises onto the devices we all have in our pockets.
Whether you’re a Nintendo super fan or just looking at the gaming history this venerable Japanese company represents, you’ll be excited for this new era in which Nintendo partners with social and free-to-play juggernaut DeNA to bring it’s valuable content to mobile devices.
Even though Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata insists that the company has no intention of porting existing games to mobile devices, he said nothing about not brining the incredibly popular and cash-generating characters and franchises that have become synonymous with the company, and with video gaming in general.
Here, then, are ten of our top wishes for the characters and franchises Nintendo should bring to the iPhone or other smartphones.
Apple rarely gives tours of its facilities, but it showed ABC News the inner workings of its top secret health lab for the purpose of hyping the upcoming Apple Watch.
Located in an unassuming lot near its Cupertino headquarters on 1 Infinite Loop, Apple employees have been working out for years in secret to collect valuable health and fitness data.
A new Apple TV set-top box is set to arrive this summer at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, according to a new report citing sources familiar with the situation.
The upgrade would represent a much-needed “significant overhaul” of the device, letting it go far beyond Apple’s current TV offering and crossing over into other areas such as music, apps and even home automation — with a nifty Siri-based interface, to boot.
Did you roll your eyes when you saw the latest MacBook had a new kind of USB port?
So did the website College Humor, which went to work satirizing Apple’s pride in its product design.
Under the headline Why Every New MacBook Needs a Different Goddam Charger, College Humor released a new video that pokes fun at the latest Apple laptop.
We grew up in homes with robust photo albums, reels of 8 mm home movies and stacks of VHS tapes. These represent the branches and blossoms of our growing family trees.
In the digital age, we’ve filled out the branches, capturing millions of pictures and video clips almost out of concern we will miss something.
And we rarely look at any of it.
Mok Oh wants to change that with Moju, an iPhone app that distills the essence of a life moment by taking a sequence of photos and creating seamless motion in a file that comes to life with a simple twist of your phone.
This week, Luke gives us a sneak peek inside the new Steve Jobs biography, Alex takes a good look at the upcoming Apple TV service, Leander helps us decide whether the new gold in Apple Watch is anything special, John figures out who invented USB-C (hint: it’s Apple), and Leander checks in with an Android user who made the funniest Apple parody video we’ve seen in a long time. All that and more in Cult of Mac Magazine, free to download (and subscribe to!) right now.
Touch ID might be a more convenient and secure security implementation than PIN codes, but for now at least PINs are sticking around — which makes your iPhone vulnerable to anyone who gets their hands on it.
Of course, your iPhone only gives you a certain number of failed guesses, which means that unless the hacker somehow quickly guesses the correct code out of the 10,000 possible combinations, your iPhone’s contents remain safe.
A new video which has surfaced online, however, shows off a brute-force machine capable of trying every possible four-digit numerical combination in turn, while also resetting your iPhone to try again when it runs out of attempts. You can check it out below.
Although the App Store is still full of freemium games like Angry Birds, Apple is pretty great when it comes to highlighting some of the more unusual titles that pop up on iOS — from the M.C. Escher gorgeousness of Monument Valley to the nihilistic weirdness of Sometimes You Die.
The company continues that trend with its latest pick for App of the Week, which would normally set you back a couple of bucks, but can be downloaded completely free of charge for the next seven days. It’s Dark Echo, a uniquely twisted puzzle game by RAC7 Games — and I’m here to tell you it’s excellent.
Check out the trailer and a description below. Trust me, if you like unusually minimalist puzzlers, you won’t be disappointed.
Given everything we know about him, you wouldn’t have ever expected Steve Jobs to tweet out his hotel room number, details of a greasy meal at Chili’s Grill & Bar, or brag about winning $300 at blackjack in Nevada.
That, in short, is what separates Jobs (and, indeed, Tim Cook) from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Woz recently took a road trip to Reno with his wife in his $100,000 Tesla — pausing only to send out a string of entertainingly wacky tweets to his 370,000 Twitter followers regarding hamburgers, Segways, an unnamed “blackjack system” he’s been working on and, naturally, a number puzzle that revealed exactly where he was staying.
Apple is beefing up its iAd network for iTunes Radio by making it easy for advertisers to target certain customers. Like iAds for apps, advertisers can also buy their own audio ads without having to go through Apple’s sales team.
The change seems geared towards making advertising on iTunes Radio a more attractive opportunity, especially now that brands can use Customer Match, Apple’s ad-targeting system.
Developers are making a mad dash to finish their first Apple Watch apps before the wearable goes on sale in April. Yahoo is among those looking to make a big splash with must-have apps, and when it comes to bringing you the news, the company is hoping you’ll want it in bite-size chunks.
Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio sat down with Bloomberg today to talk about how digesting the news is going to change once you slap a tiny Apple Watch screen to your wrist. To bring long-form news to wearers, D’Aloisio says Yahoo Digest will focus on giving you the most salient pieces of a story, accompanied by little visual elements called atoms.
Watch Nick explain the news revolution Yahoo plans to unleash:
Have you always wanted to own a piece of Steve Jobs history, while also disposing of $13,000 in a hurry?
If so, you may be the perfect buyer for an eBay copy of the high school yearbook for Steve Jobs’ graduating class, in which the long-haired future Apple co-founder looks more on course to be voted “Most likely to start a progressive rock band” than “Most likely to become CEO of the world’s most valuable company.”
Carrying a Buy It Now price of $12,999.98 (or an opening bid value of $4,999.98), the book currently belongs to a fellow student at Homestead High School, who spoke with Cult of Mac about the sale.