News - page 1250

Maci Peterson made a Christian man blush with a text message she sent to plan a first date.

“I wanted to know where to meet, D.C. or Maryland,” she told Cult of Mac. “So I typed, ‘Are you in DC or MD?’ and AutoCorrect changed it to, ‘Are you in D.C. or Me?’ I was so embarrassed.”

Peterson recovered and hopes she is on the verge of saving us all from stumbling fingers, drunken texts and the bewildering algorithms of AutoCorrect. Her new app, On Second Thought, launches this week for Android devices with a version for iPhone users due out early next year.

Third-party developers are already making apps for the Apple Watch, but they’re doing so with one hand tied behind their backs.

Coders that Cult of Mac spoke with are pleasantly surprised by the opportunity to bring apps to the Watch so early, but many note they must abide by severe limitations to get their apps ready for the Apple wearable’s launch next spring.

We don’t know when Apple Watch will hit stores, but if you can’t wait to strap your wrist with the most luxurious Apple product ever created, Mervis Diamonds has the perfect band to match the 18k gold Apple Watch you’ve been lusting after. And it’ll only set you back $30,150.

The battle for your eardrums is about to heat up in 2015, as a new report suggests Bose is planning to take on Beats with its own music streaming service next year.

Bose is quickly trying to transition into a media company, according to Hypebot which reports the company is readying its own “next generation streaming music platform” to take on Apple, Pandora, and Spotify. Details of Bose’s music streamer have been kept secret, but it isn’t being shy about its ambitions to poach some of Apple’s top designers.

The latest App Store rejection controversy has surrounded a critically acclaimed game called Papers, Please. When developer Lucas Pope finally brought the title to iPad, he was forced by Apple to remove all nudity, no matter how pixelated.

Never mind that the nudity in question was not “pornographic content” as Apple billed it, since it only showed when people went through body scanners in the game. After talking with Apple, Pope said the decision was chalked up to a “misunderstanding,” and he’s been allowed to add nudity back to Papers Please in the App Store.

If only we could float above the noise, the dirt and the concrete. What we would see is something peaceful and beautiful.

A graphic designer from Brazil is serving up that kind of serene macro view of the world as wallpaper for our smartphones. His Tumblr blog, Aerial Wallpapers, is loaded with a wonderfully curated collection of satellite photography images.

Joao Paulo Bernades looks for colorful, graphic, Creative Commons-licensed images of Earth from NASA and Airbus Defense and Space, then crops and scales them to fit the iPhone 6. The images appear to be scalable for other devices.

Apple was found guilty last year of colluding with publishers to raise ebook prices, but now that the antitrust case is being heard by the Second U.S. Court of Appeals, two out of the three appellate judges are starting to see things Apple’s way.

The appeals case kicked off this morning with Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart attempting to compare Apple to a driver taking a narcotics dealer to a drug pick up. The analogy was supposed to make the point that if Apple knew publishers were conspiring to fix ebook prices, it was just as guilty as them for facilitating the conspiracy. However, Fortune reports that Judge Denis Jacobs laughed off the analogy, pointing out that drug trafficking is one of the few “industries in which the law does not look with favor or new entrants.”

The comment drew a chorus of laughs in the courtroom, but Judge Jacob’s concerns went even further, as the the judge questioned whether the government should have even brought the case to court.

Can you hit your targets when playing an Xbox shooting game? If so, the Navy might just want to put a video-game-like controller in your hands. Except this version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will have you aiming a ship-mounted laser at real enemies.

A Navy video shows a new laser weapon system successfully zapping a small target on a moving ship, shooting an unmanned aircraft out of the sky and picking off other targets at sea.

Star Trek Captains Picard and Kirk could talk to any alien, no matter how different it was from humanity, thanks to the universal translator, a magical sci-fi device that explained away why strange civilizations in far-away solar systems all spoke English.

That future just got a little less far-fetched, thanks to Skype Translator, a new preview service that uses technology from Microsoft Research to translate two different languages back and forth in real time.

This is heady stuff, as school kids in Seattle and Mexico City seem to instantly recognize when they chat back and forth in English and Spanish via the Skype service in the video below.

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak revolutionized the computer world with the invention of the Apple II, but back in 1977 when they created the unbelievably simple home PC, few people realized the enormous impact it would have on the “small computer field.”

Case in point, look at this article from the Homestead High School newspaper talking about its alumnus’ new company Apple Computers, in a ‘aww isn’t that cute, they sold 200 computers’ sort of way. The article above was published in the The Epitaph on May 20th, 1977, just a few weeks before the first Apple II units went on sale, and went on to become the first computer to sell 1 million units.

At the time of publication Apple had just moved out of the garage and into an office in Cupertino with eight total employees. One of Apple’s first employees, Chris Espinosa was still in high school at the time and was interviewed by the paper for the article on Jobs and Woz’s new company. Along with revealing that you used to be able to get Apple’s top software engineer to build you a custom app to do whatever you want, the high school junior presaged the idea of a Genius Bar, decades before the first Apple Store opened.

You can read the full article below:

What do you get for the Apple nut in your life? You know the type. They live and breathe Apple — but they already have every Apple product under the sun. Plus all the accessories.

iPod? Got it. iPhone wallet case? Got it. Steve Jobs bobblehead? Got it.

Well, I’ll bet a testicle they don’t have some of this stuff.

How to become the highest paid musician of the year: profit from a multi-billion dollar buyout of your company.

That’s the lesson to be learned from Forbes Magazine’s tally of the top paid musicians of 2014. Dr. Dre, or just “Dre” as he’s affectionately referred to by Tim Cook, amassed a whopping $620 million before taxes this year, giving him “the biggest single-year payday of any musician in history.”

Apple is back with a new tearjerker of a Christmas ad, entitled “The Song.” Like last year’s Emmy-winning TV spot for the holidays, the company has chosen to showcase how its products make people feel, rather than what they do.

This time around, a young musician uses Garageband on her Mac to make a song for her grandmother. Expect to start seeing this on TV quite a bit over the next couple of weeks.

This week: the Sony hack reveals all sorts of juicy Jobs movie tidbits; HBO uses Game of Thrones to break big cable’s iron grip; iPod Classic prices skyrocket as fans scramble to buy them; we’ll tell you how to get some fantastic iOS games absolutely free; and then we pitch our favorite tech and vote on which is best… it’s an all new Faves ’N Raves.

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

We all know that cats love playing with iPads. It turns out they’re not the only ones: the penguins at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California love playing with iPads so much it can help them get pregnant.

We never cease to be amazed at all the amazing DIY projects that Mac fans do with old Apple hardware. Case in point: see this vintage Apple Extended Keyboard? It’s not hooked to a computer. It is a computer, thanks to the embedded Rapsberry Pi inside.

It’s the holiday season, and every buck counts. So if you’re in the market for an iPhone to put under the tree, here’s a great reason to head over to Walmart: they’re slashing prices on the iPhone this weekend.

We all like wearing cool clothes and accessories, and some prudish police officers actually insist that we do. And if you’re conscious of your duds’ impact on the environment or history, you want to make sure that the stuff that makes you look good will also make you feel good about where it came from.

Here are three neat Kickstarter projects from companies with that in mind. This is where I was going to make a joke about “wearing your eco-friendliness on your sleeve,” but one of these projects is for shoes.

If you needed any more confirmation that Windows Phone is dead in the water, two of its most high profile supporters have abandoned it for the iPhone.

Veteran Microsoft journalists Ed Bott and Tom Warren both published essays this week in which they criticized Windows Phone for its shortcomings and announced that they’ve stopped using Windows Phones personally. Citing a lack of carrier and third-party app support, both agreed that Windows Phone has missed its shot at being a real competitor in the smartphone market.

Apple scooped up a couple architectural awards this week for the stunning engineering behind its magnificent Glass Lantern store at the Zorlu Center in Istanbul Turkey.  The judges said it ‘takes structural glass technology to a new dimension’, and even though we’ve never been inside the Zorlu store it’s not hard to see why it’s getting showered with awards after looking at these pictures.

The Zorlu Store is the first Apple Store created by the same architectural firm behind the new spaceship campus in Cupertino, and it looks like the same amount of attention to detail and minimalist thought that goes into the creation of an iPhone was also poured into the new award-winning Apple temple.

Take a tour of the exquisite store below:

We’ll admit it: we were all squeeing like fanboys when we saw the official trailer for the upcoming sequel, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We may have watched it quite a bit more than once, but the YouTubers below have taken their fandom to another level, with some really well crafted remixes of the official short film.

Check out trailers below starring the cast of (and scenes directly from) the original trilogy, the trailer as Wes Anderson would do it, and a bizarre rendering of it all with pets in place of human actors. Oh, and there’s also the obligatory Lego version, as well, so be sure to scroll all the way down.

Apple’s splash into home automation with addition of HomeKit to iOS 8 is expected to have a huge impact on sales of smart home devices in 2015 according to a Park Associates report that found 37% of U.S. households plan to purchase one or more devices next year.

The rising popularity in smart home device sales has been aided by both Apple and Google introducing new solutions in 2014. The research firm discovered retailers are getting ready for smart home devices to hit the mainstream by expanding shelf space for items like Nest thermometers, Philips Hue bulbs, smart door locks and other items.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a music video, and maybe you shouldn’t be. Turns out, rocket scientists can’t dance.
NASA released a parody video on YouTube Thursday called “All About That Space,” designed to raise excitement about Orion’s recent first test flight.

The lyrics of Meghan Trainor’s monster hit “All About That Bass” were re-engineered by the Pathways Interns of NASA’s Johnson Space Center to lead the viewer on a behind-the-scenes look at the men and woman hard at work on space travel.

Apple has won another architectural award for the innovative glass engineering used to create its impossibly perfect glass lantern store in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Apple Store at the Zorlu Center in Turkey took home the Supreme award for structural engineering excellence from this year’s Structural Awards, and was also honored for its excellence in structural design for a retail building.