News - page 1226

The future of automobiles is getting closer every day.

German auto maker Mercedes Benz showed off a “car of the future” prototype self-driving car in California on Wednesday and futurist and Steve Jobs wannabe Elon Musk’s new Tesla Model S is getting an autopilot mode within the next few months.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re all sitting in a living-room style automobile, sipping slow-brewed coffee and reading the latest social news from our iPads as we zip along to our next appointment or meeting, right?

Because as Musk famously said: “Someday, driving a car will be illegal.”

Tim Cook touted Apple Watch’s supreme timekeeping capabilities at last week’s Spring Forward event, but Rehabstudio plans to give wearers a unique look on time — by counting down to their death.

Life Clock is an upcoming Apple Watch app that’s like the reverse of an activity tracker. Rather than giving you a readout of actions you did in the past, Life Clock tracks all the positive and negative actions you take throughout the day to calculate when you’re going to kick the bucket.

It’s tough at the top.

Mobile video game publisher Rovio Entertainment detailed Thursday its first revenue drop since the Finnish company hit it big with the Angry Birds franchise in 2009.

Perhaps the saturation of the market with no less than 11 Angry Birds-themed games since then (and three spin-offs) and way too many toys and animation projects has something to do with the loss of revenue, down 9 percent to $170.6 million in 2014.

Of course, as Rovio’s mobile gaming business did rise a bit (16 percent), making the overall drop in revenue that more incredible, the company seems to be focused on doubling-down on its mobile game offerings.

“2014 results show that steps in the game portfolio, free to play competency building and advertising are going in the right direction. I am confident that with new simplified organisation and clearer vision, we will be back to the path of growth in 2015,” said CEO Pekka Rantala in a statement.

Apple officially joined the Dow Jones Industrial average today, placing the world’s most valuable company among historic brands like Coca-Cola, Boeing and 3M. But Apple’s first day with the big boys isn’t getting off to a great start.

We have Apple products atop our desks, in our pockets and, soon, on our wrists. As if there aren’t enough Apples in our airspace, one man is nudging his favorite company to design a quadrocopter. He’s even taken a stab at designing his dream Apple drone — and was careful to remain faithful to the Jony Ive aesthetic.

Eric Huisman presents his Apple drone concept like a classic Apple ad, with the product photographed on a seamless white background, perfectly lit, with a subtle shadow.

There was a time when a device that had more than one function was something to behold.

It took a real feat of engineering to make a machine that could do several things without taking up a good chunk of your living room.

I don’t know if the Answer ATR-102 Triplecorder can be considered such a marvel of technology, but it is awfully cool to look at.

Having to do your background reading just to go and watch a movie sounds a whole lot like schoolwork, but thankfully when it comes to the world of comic books things ain’t so bad!

With theaters set to play host to a gorgeous buffet of superhero flicks over the next year, Cult of Mac took it upon ourselves to play teacher and instruct you on exactly which graphic novels you should be chowing down on before walking into Avengers: Age of Ultron or Batman V Superman.

Now you too can be the snide guy (or gal) in the back row, telling everyone why it wasn’t as good as it was on the page…

Apple’s magical Force Touch trackpad — which uses haptic technology to make the new MacBook trackpad feel like it’s clicking, even when it’s not — was unveiled at the company’s recent “Spring Forward” event.

But a patent application published today suggests that this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the interest in haptic technology on the part of Tim Cook and Co. The application describes a whole virtual keyboard for the iMac, meaning that users could type onto a flat glass or metallic plate, but would still be able to feel the individual keys.

When it comes to almost everything Apple does (except for iPhone sales, of course) you could characterize the company’s approach as “Slow but steady wins the race.” That’s certainly what’s happened with iOS 8 adoption, which started out sluggishly, but has slowly continued to climb upwards in the months since.

According to Apple’s latest developer stats, a solid 77 percent of eligible iOS users are now upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system: a not inconsiderable 5 percent rise from early February, when the company last shared its adoption figures.

A few days before he died, Steve Jobs asked Tim Cook over to his house to watch a movie together.

The movie he selected was Remember the Titans, a football drama starring Denzel Washington. It’s set in the South, and concerns the struggles of integrating a racially mixed team during the civil rights’ era. Cook was surprised by Jobs’ choice of movie — Jobs had little interest in sports — but he said they talked about it afterward.

Why would Jobs, who had recently stepped down as Apple CEO and appointed Cook in his place, want to watch this movie with his successor just a few days before he died? Was he trying to pass on some crucial knowledge?

I re-watched the movie last night and have a pretty good idea.

“Fun” isn’t often a word I’d use to describe the ability to check the weather forecast on your iPhone. Thanks to a new app from developer Brian Mueller, however, that’s exactly what it now is. Mueller’s CARROT Weather app is an eerily accurate weather app which serves up twisted meteorological predictions.

Powered by existing weather app Dark Sky, CARROT Weather serves up hilarious weather scenes with its predictions, so that cloudy weather is accompanied by dancing nuclear smokestacks (of course!), snow unleashes evil penguins (what else?), and tornados are signified by flying sharks (is there any other choice?).

Check out more of the deets below.

Are you still trying to work out how to scrape together enough money to buy a $349 Apple Watch, let alone a $10,000-plus Apple Watch Edition? If so, an answer could be the neat solution dreamed up by Chris McVeigh: Build one out of Lego.

Rather than waiting until April 24, by following master builder McVeigh’s instructions you can have the joy of building a Lego Apple Watch from the privacy of your own home, even putting up “Do Not Enter” signs and making your spouse sign nondisclosure agreements to achieve that fully authentic Apple effect.

Check out the details below:

“I believe men of talent have a part to play in the war to come,” says spymaster Varys to Tyrion, the Lannister least likely to beat anyone in a duel.

That’s the takeaway line from one of a pair of new clips out today from HBO’s hotly anticipated Game of Thrones Season 5 premiere, which is slated to air April 12.

Isn’t that (and the newly announced cable-free HBO Now) why you all got a new Apple TV? I know I did.

Apple is preparing a complete revamp of Beats Music that will directly integrate the streaming service into all of its products. The timing could not be more perfect, because streaming subscriptions like Spotify have finally overtaken CD sales.

Braun’s lauded designer, Dieter Rams, has long been cited as an inspiration behind Apple’s classic design. Nearly everything Rams touched, from calculators tape recorders, radios, and even infrared emitters, have inspired Apple’s products, and according to Dieter himself, it’s a huge compliment.

In a recent interview with Fast Company, the prolific designer said if he had to do it all over again, he “would not want to be a designer.” However, if he were forced to take out his sketchpad and design a computer, it’d probably look just like Apple’s.

We got our first look at Apple Watch knockoffs at CES earlier this year, and while those junky devices were about as basic as they could be, more advanced knockoffs have hit the market since.

From right out of China, behold this shameless Apple Watch clone running Android:

Apple TV’s big redesign has been rumored for over a year now, but the long wait might pay off big time, for shareholders at least.

By blowing up the cable industry with its subscription TV streaming service, Apple could add up to $30 billion in global annual revenue to its bottom line, according to projections released by Baird Equity Research.

Sure, it’s an Adam Sandler/Kevin James summer blockbuster with a ridiculous premise: the Earth is besieged by huge video game characters bent on destroying everything by turning stuff into pixels.

While Peter Dinklage and Jane Krakowski might elevate this potentially awful movie, Pixels, to something more cult status than forgettable popcorn fodder, it’s the nostalgic use of Pac-Man himself that made us watch the trailer in the first place.

First up, we’ve got the Mini Coopers all painted up to look like the iconic Pac-Man ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, which is all kinds of awesome. However, it’s the lovely tribute to Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani, portrayed by Denis Akiyama (Johnny Mnemonic, Dead Ringers) at about 1:52 in.

Apple’s new open source platform, ResearchKit, could change our lives more than Apple Watch, and according to a report from Fusion detailing the inside story of ResearchKit, Apple may have got some outside inspiration for the project.

A lecture given by renowned medical researcher Dr. Stephen Friend was possibly the driving force behind Apple’s push into the industry. During a presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Friend asked attendees to imagine a future where researchers could run ten trials, with several thousand patients.

“Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries,” Friend told the crowd, completely unaware that Apple’s newly appointed VP for medical technologies, Mike O’Reilly, was among those catching Friend’s vision for a medical research utopia.

“I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” O’Reilly told Friend after his presentation.

Do you remember the first time you saw one of these cool “Silhouette” commercials for iPod and iTunes? Surely you were impressed with the motion, the cool white earbuds on the silhouetted dancers, and the hip soundtrack pulsing out from your TV. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.

Chiat/Day’s iconic “Silhouette” ads for Apple captured the cool of the iPod brand without trying to make us identify with any specific actor or band (at least at first). The iPod came out in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2004 that the device achieved any kind of mass-market success.

That resulted from two things: iTunes went PC and these ads captured our collective imagination. Now you can now watch all 22 of these iconic ads in one long stretch.

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There’s been a lot of talk that Apple invented USB-C, even though the company hasn’t made any official claims yet. The evidence is already compelling, but here’s another sign Apple had its hand in USB-C: It looks just like the company’s Cinema Display power cable.

Check out the comparison below:

An Australian indie developer who was flown to Cupertino by Apple to work on an Apple Watch app alongside giants like Twitter and BMW has come under fire for reportedly falsifying a story about suffering from terminal cancer.

Created by healthy-living proponent Belle Gibson, iPhone food app The Whole Pantry has been pulled from the App Store, while an accompanying Apple Watch app has vanished from Apple’s list of “coming soon” apps for its upcoming wearable.

Cameras and sensors assist us with backing up, parallel parking and eliminating blind spots, but technology that makes sure drivers don’t nod off still hasn’t found traction.

Australian company Seeing Machines wants to change that with its dashboard device that pays rapt attention to a driver’s head movements, blinking patterns and eyeball rotations, then alerts the motorist if a dangerous “microsleep event” is imminent.

“Unless you are a soldier, driving is the most dangerous thing we do day-to-day,” Rama Myers, business development manager for Seeing Machines, told Cult of Mac.

The more we hear, the more Apple’s reported web TV service sounds like a dream come true for cord-cutters!

With previous reports suggesting the subscription service will offer around 25 channels in total, a new Wall Street Journal report claims Apple is busy talking with both Discovery and Viacom about the venture. Deals with those companies could bringing channels including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon to viewers.

My Cult of Mac colleague Buster Hein recently wrote that the new impossibly-thin, gorgeously Retina displayed MacBook “isn’t for you, it’s for the future” — meaning that it’s there to show us where the MacBook will go in the next few years, rather than being 2015’s “must own” notebook.

That may well be true, but according to supply chain sources, it’s still likely to make up a pretty sizeable slice of Apple’s overall Mac sales in the year to come.

Citing panel supply chains, the 12-inch beauty is expected to represent between 15-20 percent of Apple’s overall MacBook shipments this year: making it the single largest source of growth in the MacBook series throughout 2015 in the process.