News - page 1260

Having been an avid Sim City player going back 20+ years, I will never not be excited about a new game in the franchise.

EA has just released a new trailer for its upcoming SimCity BuildIt worldwide launch, and it has to be said that it looks pretty darn fantastic.

Letting you do all the building, demolition, micro-management and, err, UFO survival the game series is known for, the mobile-only title incorporates full 360° controls, which means that you can explore your beautiful 3-D city from an angle you want.

Is there anything more punk rock than spending loads of money on in-app purchases for iPad games? If your answer is a resounding “yes, of course there is,” prepare to argue with former Sex Pistols screecher John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon.

Speaking with the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, Lydon claims he spent “10,000 f*cking pounds” (around $15,600) during a two-year app-buying bender on his iPad.

“I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante,” he said, making downloading apps sound like the new version of throwing TVs out of hotel windows. “[L]ike an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve been checked now. But there’s a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken from me and I’m determined to bring it back.”

Apple plans to repurpose its factory in Mesa, Arizona, following the spectacular implosion of its relationship with sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies.

A report from Bloomberg cites Mesa City Manager Christopher Brady as the source of the information. Apple, for its part, has said that it wants to focus “on preserving jobs in Arizona” and will continue to “work with state and local officials as we consider our next steps.”

Google’s new Inbox app is a godsend for people like me who seem to teeter on the brink of inbox bankruptcy weekly, but there’s one problem with the killer Gmail manager: it’s not only available on iOS, Chrome, and Android.

The Inbox team might not be in a hurry to bring its service to Safari, but if you want don’t want to defect to Chrome just manage play with Inbox, our friend Rishi at Zinx has discovered how to access Inbox from Safari.

Here’s how to do it:

One of the first arguments that springs up in the many debates of Mac versus PC is cost. Traditionally, Apple computers come with premium price tags, which are almost always well-deserved. But there are a handful of Apple machines that were priced well above what you would normally expect to pay, even for Cupertino’s latest computer.

In today’s video, we take a look at the five most expensive Macs of all time — and tell you how much they would cost today with their price tags adjusted for inflation. You might think the new Retina 5K iMac is outrageously expensive, but compared to some of Apple’s older machines, it’s not that pricey.

It’s been decades since pagers played a central role in our tech lives, but the beeper is causing some headaches for Apple lately. A federal jury just slapped Apple with a $23.6 million fine for infringing patents related to ’90s technology.

Mobile Telecommunications Technologies sued Apple last year for violating several of its patents that govern two-way exchanges of data. Apple services such as iMessage, calendar invitations and emoji allegedly violated the patents, and after six hours of deliberation, the jury found Apple was guilty of five out of the six charges.

Another day, another app from Facebook.

That seems to be the trend lately for the social networking giant, as seemingly every aspect of its service has been siloed into its own app. The latest is Facebook Groups for, you guessed it, managing and interacting with different groups.

With the Apple Watch release still months away, plenty of details — like the timepiece’s price and battery life — remain unknown. But the release of WatchKit this morning sheds new light on Apple’s most personal product ever.

We dug through the new WatchKit programming guide and Apple Watch human interface guidelines this afternoon and found a few details that weren’t mentioned in the keynote, such as a special new font designed to look good at any size on the Apple Watch’s tiny face.

Here are five new Apple Watch details buried in the WatchKit SDK:

The mad dash to develop the first wave of Apple Watch apps has just begun, and to go along with the new WatchKit for devs, Apple has also released the first iOS 8.2 beta this morning.

iOS 8.2 beta 1 includes support for WatchKit, which allows Apple Watch apps to connect to and run processes on your iPhone in the background. In a press release announcing the update’s availability, Phil Schiller said, “With the iOS 8.2 beta SDK, developers can now start using WatchKit to create breakthrough new apps, Glances and actionable notifications designed for the innovative Apple Watch interface and work with new technologies such as Force Touch, Digital Crown and Taptic Engine.”

Release notes for the beta don’t mention other major new features, but we’ll report on any surprises we find, once we get it installed. The iOS 8.2 beta is available to registered developers in the iOS Dev Center, along with a new Xcode 6.2 beta as well.

You can also grab iOS 8.2 from the direct download links below:

As promised, Apple has given third-party developers tools to start making apps for the upcoming Apple Watch. Today the company announced the availability of WatchKit, its new SDK for creating app experiences on the wrist.

With WatchKit, developers will be able to make actionable notifications, Glances “for timely information accessible by an easy, quick look,” and eventually full-fledged apps. Early WatchKit partners like ESPN, Instagram, and American Airlines have already tested the new APIs for future versions of their apps.

We got a lot of great feedback from last week’s minimal iPhone 6 case roundup. Many of you suggested other cases to check out, and we got so many good recommendations that we decided to share them with everyone.

Not all of these cases are necessarily super slim and minimal, but they’re worth checking out if you’re in the market for something stylish and functional to cradle your precious iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.

“A million dollars isn’t cool,” says Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker during one scene in The Social Network. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

If that’s the case, then people are going to need to come up with new words to describe Apple, because according to some of Wall Street’s best and brightest, the company could hit a trillion dollar valuation as early as next year.

Pulling up apps and finding files is super easy on OS X Yosemite thanks to the new Spotlight feature, and thanks to GitHub user slong1987, you can now use Spotlight shortcuts to shutdown, restart, logout and put your Mac to sleep.

The clever workaround uses four small apps that you can download from GitHub and then add to your Applications folder. Once installed, all you have to do is pull up Spotlight (CMD+SPACE) type in Restart, hit Enter and you Mac will reboot.

I’ve found the Sleep shortcut especially useful at coffee shops when you have to step away for quick second. Slong1987 says shortcuts for Empty Trash and Securely Empty Trash are also in the works.

Intel is losing against ARM when it comes to mobile. This is incontrovertible. In smartphones and tablets, Intel’s chips just haven’t been able to compete with the likes of Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia…. despite the billions of dollars Intel has spent trying to heavily subsidize things like Atom-powered Android phones.

Not so surprisingly, Intel’s mobile and tablet business isn’t profitable. But Intel’s about to do a little bit of creative accounting to make it’s mobile and tablet divisions profitable: merge them into the PC division.

Every once in a while an anecdote comes along that so perfectly describes the late Steve Jobs’ vision, that it’s a perfect metaphor for Apple as a whole. This might be my favorite of those anecdotes.

The Mac Pro is one of the most beautiful and powerful computers ever created, but it remains beyond the reach of many small developers due to a price tag that’s bigger than a car down payment.

That could change this week when MacStadium brings the world’s first Mac Pro data center online, giving anyone the ability to rent server time on the high-performance Apple computers for just a few bucks a month.

MacStadium CEO Greg McGraw said the company originally set out to address the needs of small developers with Mac mini hosting. “We had great success with the Mac mini and we’ll continue to use it,” McGraw told Cult of Mac. “But the Mac Pro is an enterprise-class data center appliance. It’s going to open up a whole new market.”

A new Apple Store opening up is always something of an event. But over the weekend, a one-of-a-kind Apple Store opened in London, and I guarantee you’ve never been to one quite like it.

It looks like an Apple Store. It even sells various Apple products. But not the kind you’re thinking of: not Macs, but Macintosh apples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc-OQQBkbeE

If you’ve ever used Tinder, the swipe-to-reject dating app for iPhone, you know there can be a lot of a creeps on the service, especially if you’re a woman. The Grade is a new Tinder-like app that aims to change all that by booting the creeps off the service by examining their behavior in real time, and grading it.

Cupertino has its chic Apple Watch, Redmond has its Microsoft Band, and now Intel has unveiled its own female-friendly take on the wearable phenomenon with a $495 smart bracelet — which will allow users to receive and respond to text messages, emails and other notifications.

Called the MICA, the fashion-conscious bracelet boasts a sapphire 1.6-inch, 256 x 160 OLED curved screen on the inside of the wrist. As with the Apple Watch there are multiple styles available — ranging from black and white water snake skin, Chinese pearls, Madagascan lapis stones, South African tiger’s eye, and Russian obsidian.

The only time Apple publicly acknowledges the jailbreak community is when, semi-tauntingly, it lists the people responsible for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in iOS that have now been patched.

In the aftermath of its just-released iOS 8.1.1 update, Apple adds a mention to its security logs of the China-based PanguTeam, who discovered three vulnerabilities fixed in the latest update of Apple’s mobile OS.

Although tech watchers have known about Apple Pay for some time now, for a large percentage of the general public the concept of NFC transactions is still new — and potentially scary.

Hoping to change that perception, Eddy Cue made an appearance on KTLA’s Tech Report yesterday, where he took host Rich DeMuro on a “shopping spree” to show off Apple’s “new way to pay.”

Want to see one of Apple’s top executives buy oatmeal and Frozen toys using his iPhone? Well, now you can.

One way you can tell a technology is becoming mainstream is when it starts to have brushes with the law. We saw it in the 1980s with the first computer hacker trials, more recently with the appearance of Google Glass, and now with fitness trackers — courtesy of a personal injury suit taking place in Canada.

In what is thought to be the first ever case of data from a wearable device being used in court, a female Calgary plaintiff is using information gathered by her Fitbit device to demonstrate that her activity levels have dropped dramatically following an accident.

The data is being analyzed by a third-party analytics firm called Vivametrica, which will make its findings known to the court.

The iPad is great for making music, but the lack of physical keys can be a drag for keyboardists. That shortcoming prompted Adam Kumpf to hack together a miniature piano attachment for the tablet using nothing more than wooden clothespins, aluminum foil, a few pieces of stiff cardboard and some rubber bands

Total cost? Less than $5.

Despite his creation’s humble DIY origins, Kumpf thinks the idea of iPad add-ons has the potential to take touchscreens to the next level.

“There’s an innate desire that users have to go beyond what the screen can usually do,” the 31-year-old MIT graduate tells Cult of Mac. “I strongly believe that there’s a world of accessories relating to capacitive touchscreens that’s just waiting to be explored.”

Apple didn’t give the iPhone 6 camera a big update this cycle, but next year could be a revolutionary leap forward for iPhotographers if Apple upgrades to the new sensor its camera supplier just unveiled.

Sony announced today that its Exmor RS IMX230 camera sensor will be ready to ship in April 2015, and along with packing a 21MP CMOS sensor, it could bring DSLR-quality auto-focusing and 4K video recording to your next iPhone.

Take a look at this crazy comparison image:

Snapchat has become the go-to method for sending naughty nudes to your friends, but with a big update released today, the app is hoping you’ll start using it to send something a little more valueable: money.

Snapchat announced today that it’s partnering with Square to bring Snapcash to its ephemeral messaging platform, giving the ability to wirelessly transfer money directly from a bank account. And all it takes is a single snap.

The company even made a whacky 60’s style commercial to promote the new feature: