Apple and Tesla are in the midst of an intense bidding war for each other’s employees, according to Bloomberg. Tesla has so far poached more Apple staffers than any other company at 150, and Apple has tried to unsuccessfully lure Tesla’s people with big paychecks.
Tesla’s obsession with stealing Apple’s talent is mainly due to one man: Elon Musk.
Twitter announced its fourth quarter earnings today, and while the social network beat its revenue estimates, it failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations for monthly active users.
The company only added an extra 4 million users in the quarter, bringing the total number of monthly active users to only 288 million. That figure was much lower than analysts’ predictions of 292 million, but according to CEO Dick Costello, Twitter’s slower-than-expected growth was mostly because of a bug in iOS 8.
Apple is finally letting developers get their hands on Photos, the long-awaited successor to iPhoto. Revealed at Worldwide Developers Conference 2014, the new app is a complete revamp of iPhoto, allowing Mac users to organize, edit, share and print their favorite photos. It packs powerful new tools into a gorgeous, OS X Yosemite-style user interface.
The public launch of Photos isn’t expected until spring, but we took the beta for a spin today to get acquainted with the future of Apple photo software. We found eight new features you’re going to love.
Take a look:
When Apple killed development of iPhoto and Aperture last summer, it promised a replacement that would blend the best of the two apps into one solution: Photos for Mac.
Originally promised to arrive in “early 2015,” Photos for Mac is available for the first time in a new developer-only beta of OS X Yosemite. Unfortunately, everyone else will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it.
One of the biggest shockers of Super Bowl 2015, other than Malcolm Butler’s phenomenal interception, was the number of app companies willing to shell out $4.5 million for 30-second ad slots.
Clash of Clans, Game of War and Heroes Charge all paid up to get their games in front of the estimated 112 million live viewers during Sunday night’s game, but was it actually worth it?
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is redefining high tea.
Drones are taking to the skies in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to deliver tea to a test group of 450 shoppers using Alibaba’s website Taobao. The three-day trial of drone delivery service in the Chinese cities ends Friday as Alibaba continues to push its might across the globe.
Swatch Group AG isn’t planning to just roll over dead now that Apple is entering the timepiece market. Swatch announced today that it’s preparing its own smartwatch to take on Apple Watch, and it’ll be ready to launch in just three months.
Swatch CEO Nick Hayek was originally skeptical of the smartwatch revolution two years ago, but in an interview with Bloomberg, Hayek said his company is ready to throw its numerous patents into a smartwatch that won’t need daily recharging.
To get a “thumbs-up” from art directors, photographer Justin Poulsen provided the thumb.
In an act of creative expression that Van Gogh would appreciate, the Toronto-based Poulsen sent out his work on thumb drives that he made to look like realistic severed thumbs.
After the initial shock, who wouldn’t want to plug it in and have a look at the contents?
Comic books are insanely great, and so are video games. Put them together and what do you get? Well, aside from one of the most ardent combined fanbases in existence, the answer is some damn fine games.
Having recently reinvigorated my love for both mediums (a.k.a. lost several full days playing through the below titles), I felt like it was high time that we gave Cult of Mac readers a definitive list of the greatest games to ever come out of the comic book universe.
What follows after the jump are eight titles which not only represent superb gaming fun, but also do justice to their four-color characters, and the comic book medium as a whole.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.
Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.
But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.
Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.
Steve Jobs famously hated styluses — but as of late there’s been more and more to suggest that the forthcoming 12-inch+ iPad Pro could sport an optional, Apple-created pen to help act as an input device.Today, there’s a bit more fuel to the fire in the form of a newly published Apple patent application, describing an “active stylus” concept.
And, you know what, the more I hear, the more I’m convinced this could wipe away the bad memories of the dumb styluses of old.
Remember Typo? They were the Ryan Seacrest-backed company that released a case that gave your iPhone a BlackBerry-like QWERTY keypad.
Not so surprisingly, BlackBerry wasn’t happy. The company sued Typo for “blatantly copying” the BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard.
Now there’s good news for BlackBerry. The beleaguered smartphone maker is getting a much-needed cash injection as a result of the lawsuit, because Typo has been ordered to pay a nearly $1 million fine.
While most of us focus on the consumer, education or enterprise applications of Apple’s devices, there’s another huge market where Cupertino’s products are making waves: the medical profession.
According to a new report from Reuters, 14 out of the United States’ top 23 hospitals have already rolled out a pilot program for Apple’s HealthKit service, which acts as a one-stop shop for compiling everything from blood pressure information to heart rates.
An app manipulation farm sounds like someplace developers would go for a weekend retreat, complete with chiropractor sessions. In fact — according to a photo which has gone viral on social media in China — it’s a place where devs can pay for their apps’ download numbers to be artificially inflated.
Why would anyone want to do this? Simply put: because more downloads (perhaps accompanied by positive reviews) enhances apps’ chart position, thereby raising their discoverability level, and hopefully prompting people to download them.
The photo in question appears to show a worker at one such place, sitting in front of what look like around 100 iPhone 5c units. Reports claim that her job is download, install, and uninstall specific apps repeatedly to boost their App Store rankings. Another similar table can be seen opposite her.
The image is accompanied by a second one, showing the alleged prices being charged to get your app to the top of the App Store rankings. Here’s how much you need to pay to secure a no. 1 rated app for yourself:
I love iOS games and firmly believe that we’re currently going through a golden age of mobile game development, a bit like what happened for PCs in the mid-1980s, where small development teams can compete on a global scale, simply by way of a great idea and strong word-of-mouth marketing.
But there is a downside to mobile games, and last year one of the top grossing titles epitomized everything true gamers detest about these titles: namely lazy gameplay, tons of greedy in-app purchases, and a celebrity license instead of originality to bring in the punters. That game’s title? Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Its 2014 earnings? Around $200 million.
With that kind of cash being raked in, it’s little wonder that developers Glu Mobile would be willing to try their luck a second time at bringing about the app-ocalypse. Their celebrity endorser this time? Girl-kissing, Russell Brand-marrying, teenage-dreaming songstress Katy Perry.
The rumor mill has been quiet as of late regarding Apple’s plans to disrupt the TV industry. But now Recode is reporting that Apple is in talks with programmers about doing its own Internet-based TV service for cord-cutters.
Similar to the way Dish’s Sling TV bundles channels together at an attractive cost, Apple would design its own experience around delivering content without the use of traditional cable companies.
I don’t watch cable TV. I pay a little more each month to purchase stand-alone Internet from my provider. I watch Netflix, Amazon, stream via my PS4, Apple TV and on my iOS devices. I hate commercial TV with a passion.
In 2013, 6.5 percent of American households quit watching cable or satellite TV, instead opting for a streaming-only experience, a 4.5 percent jump over the number of households that cut the cord in 2010. This is an audience that continues to grow.
Now Reuters TV, a fascinating new service from a reputable news outlet, promises to provide mobile TV news via an iOS app. Will other news empires follow suit?
What’s better than buying one of the most beloved calendar apps for mobile? Buying two of them.
After snatching up Acompli in December, Microsoft has acquired Sunrise, another popular calendar app on iOS and Android.
Apple has been trying to wean itself from being dependent on Samsung’s smartphone components for years, but breaking up is proving nearly impossible to do.
According to a report from Recode, Apple is turning back to Samsung to make the next-generation A9 processors that will make their way into the iPhone and iPad later this year.
We’ve been waiting nearly three years to get a glimpse of Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic, and while filming is just getting underway in California, Universal Pictures has finally announced when we can expect to see it on the big screen.
Soda Drinker Pro lauds itself as “the original FPS (first-person soda) simulator,” and that’s probably true because that description is mad specific.
The weirdo game, which looks straight out of Cartoon Network’s stoner-centric programming block Adult Swim, just landed a spot on digital-distribution platform Steam after a successful Greenlight campaign. Greenlight lets the Steam community vote on which indie games earn a place in the store, and developer Snowrunner Productions celebrated by releasing a brand-new trailer (below) that looks like the kind of soda commercial that surrealist filmmaker David Lynch would make.
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.