News - page 1231

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.

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.