News - page 1213

If you’ve ever wanted to stroll through the streets of King’s Landing, gaze up at the icy Wall, or thrill to the giant statues of Dragonstone, now’s your chance.

Thousands of dedicated Minecraft players have set their minds to re-creating not just one or two cities from Game of Thrones but rather the entire continent of Westeros, the fictional world created by George R.R. Martin and given visual life by the folks at HBO.

They’ve completed about 60 percent of the continent so far, with no signs of stopping. The map itself is massive, with a relative size of 500 square miles, or roughly the size of Los Angeles.

Check out this overview video, narrated by actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays young Bran in the HBO show.

In the lead-up to the iPhone 6, everyone expected Apple to give it a sapphire glass display. Sapphire glass, it was said, would lead to nigh-indestructible screens: Scratched and shattered iPhone displays would become a thing of the past.

Of course, we all know what happened from there. Apple’s sapphire partner, GT Advanced Technologies, completely collapsed, and the iPhone 6 shipped with plain old Gorilla Glass. Yet even if it hadn’t, Apple might not have used sapphire glass, which was much more reflective and harder to read in ambient light than Gorilla Glass.

But here’s the key word: was. A new technology has emerged that might make sapphire glass every bit as good when it comes to viewability as Gorilla Glass.

Update: This story has been modified to more accurately describe the sync capabilities of Fantastical 2, and we’ll have a how-to up on getting Google and iOS to play nice soon.

Readdle’s calendar app, Calendars 5, brings all the natural-language and sync goodness of other high-end calendar apps, along with support for your Google or iOS calendar, to your iPhone and iPad at the same time in one $3 app. Plus? When you add an event to Calendars 5, it shows up on your Google Calendar (or iOS Calendar if you roll that way).

Two-way sync? Natural-language event creation? iOS Reminders support? Recurring events? Invitations? Apple or Google Maps integration? Works offline or online?

This is gonna be your new favorite calendar app, if it isn’t already.

Apple’s retail stores are one of Cupertino’s crown jewels, and the envy of pretty much every tech company out there. A new rumor suggests that online retail giant Amazon might soon be looking to replicate Apple’s success with its own line of brick-and-mortar stores. But how will they get them? By buying up old Radio Shack stores and rebranding them.

Apple has been working on iOS 8.2 for a while now. Just yesterday, they released iOS 8.2 beta 5 to developers, introducing new changes to WatchKit, the new API for Apple Watch developers.

Given how many betas of iOS 8.2 have come out so far, you might expect that its public release is right around the corner. But a new report suggests we have a long way to go, and the release of iOS 8.2 will be accompanied by an official Apple event — as well as the new MacBook Air.

When you consider their overall functionality, and just plain popularity among kids, it’s no great revelation that the iPad has a bright future in the education market. Apple clearly think so too, as it’s pushed for some big deals in the area, while also offering favorable rates to schools willing to adopt Apple’s tablet.

But while I can clearly how iPads could be great in a school setting, it’s all too rare that you truly see an app that makes you sit up and say, “That’s the future of education as we know it.” However, that’s exactly the feeling I got when I saw Earth Primer, an app which describes itself as “A Science Book for Playful People.”

Just as the iPhone made you sit up and realize that one day all phones would work like that (a mantra Xiaomi and Samsung took a little bit too literally), so Earth Primer represents the next step in textbooks. And as steps go, this one’s a pretty big one.

In a sea of tablets and smartphones, PC sales have been slowly sinking for years. Not so with Apple, however. In fact, bolstered by the growing “halo effect” from its other products, MacBooks and iMac sales have been buoyant for ages — and that trend isn’t likely to change in 2015.

According to sources on the supply side, Apple orders of Mac-series notebooks and desktops are set to grow between 10-15 percent this year, selling a hefty 20-23 million units.

PCs? Not so much.

Having gone “thermonuclear war” on Google after it discovered that it was following Apple into smartphones, Apple may be about to turn the tables on its Mountain View rivals — by entering the search engine business.

Apple is currently looking to hire an engineering project manager for something called Apple Search. The position would be based in San Francisco, and requires a program manager to oversee backend operations for a “search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users.”

The ad notes that the successful candidate will, “Play a part in revolutionizing how people use their computers and mobile devices.”

File this under “unbelievable,” but according to reports from the Bay Area, multiple black vans owned by Apple have been spotted driving around San Francisco with a fancy camera array on top that may indicate the company is developing a self-driving car.

The vehicles have also been spotted in Brooklyn and could be designed to create a competitor to Google Street View. But after looking at the camera array, which is much different than Street View cars, some experts are convinced it’s a self-driving car prototype.

Get a look at the vans in the video below:

The SXSW Film Festival lineup revealed today that Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney will show his latest film, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, for the first time next month in Austin, Texas.

Details on the documentary are scant, but the SXSW blurb describes Gibney’s creation as “an evocative portrait of the life and work of Steve Jobs that re-examines his legacy and our relationship with the computer.”

Here’s the official synopsis:

ARM holdings, the company behind the mobile processor architecture that powers the iPhone and iPad, unveiled its next generation processor blueprints today that it says will increase performance three fold compared to its current designs.

The new Cortex-A72 chips aimed at smartphone and tablets will make their debut next year — just in time for the iPhone 7 — and also use 75% less power while maintaining the same level of performance as today’s ARM processors, paving the way for thinner, more powerful iPhones in the future.

Almost three quarters of iOS users have upgraded to the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to the latest stats shared by the company.

As measured by visits to the App Store on February 2, Apple claims that 72 percent of active iOS devices are running iOS 8 — compared to 25 percent who are sticking with iOS 7, and a minuscule 3 percent using earlier iterations. It’s not quite at the 80 percent+ mark that iOS 7 was at this time last year, but next to Android’s pitiful numbers, it’s still got to be considered a runaway hit for Apple.

Read on to find out what’s driving the move.

We’ve known that a big redesign of Tweetbot for Mac has been in the works for awhile, and now Tapbots designer Mark Jardine has shared a little tease with the world.

You’ve surely seen the ultra-expensive Super Bowl commercials by now (and if you haven’t check out our round up), but I doubt you took time to recreate your favorites as stop-motion Lego animations.

That’s precisely what A+C Studios did, however, over the last 36 hours since the commercials aired.

Check it out below for some great Lego animation.

Luca Maestri controls the purse strings of the most profitable company in the world, so it’s no wonder why he was just named the most admired CFO in the world.

Apple’s money man won nearly one in four votes among top Fortune 500 CFO’s of the world in Model N’s annual rankings. His company announced last week that it made more profits in the last three months than any company in history.

Anyone holding onto the mistaken belief that Apple waited too long to launch a big-screen iPhone got their correction during Apple’s recent earnings call, when the company revealed it shipped a massive 74.5 million iPhones during the last three months of 2014 — representing more than half of Apple’s total revenue for the quarter.

iPhone 6 mania isn’t going away anytime soon, either, according to estimates provided by sources in Apple’s supply chain. Based on orders received, manufacturers reportedly expect Apple to ship more than 50 million additional iPhones by the end of March.

Apple may eventually merge OS X and iOS, but I can’t see it happening any time soon. In an interview last year, Phil Schiller dismissed the idea of combining both (exactly what Microsoft recently announced plans to do with Windows 10) as an enormous “waste of energy.”

If you’d like to see what an iOS/OS X mashup could look like, however — and you have a jailbroken iOS device, to boot — you can check out the latest tweak from jailbreak developer Evan Swick.

Called Harbor, the tweak is described by Swick as “the ultimate dock tweak” and brings the OS X Yosemite dock to any device running iOS 8 — offering you a whole new way of launching apps on your iPhone or iPad.

And you know what? It’s actually pretty great.

Apple still hasn’t opened an official store in the Middle East — and in Dubai that has allowed some otherwise past-it brands to not only eke out a modest existence but to thrive, complete with upmarket retail stores in shiny shopping malls.

Posted by Twitter user Mark McLaughlin during a sojourn in the UAE, the pictures portray a tranquil tech oasis as yet undisturbed by the disruptive forces of official Apple Stores. Like an island with no natural predators, that means that BlackBerry Stores, official Nokia outlets, and others can live together in non-threatened harmony.

But maybe not for much longer.

Apple already has its in-dash operating system CarPlay, which it hopes will make its way into more than 24 million vehicles over the next five years. But if a new patent published today is anything to go by, that’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Apple’s hopes for the car-world.

What Apple describes is a way of linking your iPhone to your vehicle by way of a Bluetooth connection, thereby allowing drivers to lock and unlock car doors, start up engines, establish personalized car settings, and even shut off engines during specific time windows.

It all sounds a bit like 1997’s (underrated) James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, where Bond takes his BMW for a backseat spin, via his Sony Ericsson JB988 cellphone. Implemented correctly, it could be another massive boon for Apple — which has already made clear its home automation ambitions with the arrival of HomeKit.

But how exactly would it work?

The fate of GT Advanced Technologies’ failed sapphire plant in Mesa, Arizona, has been decided. After committing to repurposing the 1.3-million-square-foot facility, Apple revealed today that it will invest $2 billion in making it a global command center for all of its cloud networks.

The company plans to have 150 full-time employees based in Mesa to operate the center once it’s built, and there will be an accompanying solar farm to power the facility with 100% renewable energy.

You’ve seen it before, of course: the parting of the clouds, the nuclear-reactor-powered city of Springfield, Bart’s varying chalkboard standards, Lisa’s inability to stay in key (so jazzy!) in orchestra, skateboarding past tons of regular characters through the streets, and the final landing on the living room couch.

But you’ve never seen the iconic television show intro like this before, decked out in deliciously retro pixel art, directed and animated by Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon, with music by Jeremy Dower.

Today Apple seeded the fifth beta of iOS 8.2 to developers. While nothing too significant seems to have been added, there are some updates to WatchKit.

We’ve seen a few pictures of filming underway for Sony’s Steve Jobs movie, but today we got the first look at Michael Fassbender as Jobs. Some on-set stills show the X-Men and 12 Years A Slave star in an outdoor scene with Seth Rogan as Steve Wozniak.

With “plane” in the name, you expect to see wings. But the European Space Agency’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle IXV, or spaceplane, will have to earn them.

A critical test takes place Feb. 11, when the spaceplane will get a push into space aboard a Vega rocket and splash down 100 minutes later in a vetting of the agency’s re-entry technologies.

About the size — and even look — of a small boat, the 2-ton spaceplane will keep an even keel as it re-enters at hypersonic speeds with the assist of thrusters and a pair of aerodynamic flippers on the back. Chutes will deploy to slow it down and give it a gentle landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Apple is reportedly planning to unload $5 billion worth of bonds in its fourth multibillion-dollar debt offering in two years, according to Bloomberg.

The news outlet is reporting that the deal could happen as early as today, with proceeds used for stock repurchases, dividend payments and debt repayments. Apple sold $17 billion of bonds in April 2013, in what was then the largest corporate bond offering of all time. Since then it has issued $32.5 billion of bonds in total.