Popcorn Time is Hollywood’s worst nightmare: a Netflix for torrents that streams the hottest movies right to your Mac or PC.
Now, it’s become even more nightmarish for the industry. It will now stream torrented movies directly to the Apple TV.
Say whatever you want about the cold reception afforded its Fire Phone, but Amazon’s had a pretty great year when it comes to its core business of selling books: first announcing the creation of its Kindle Unlimited scheme, and now updating its iOS Kindle app with a few nifty features.
Chief among these are Wikipedia integration, letting readers pick selected words from any text they’re reading and link to the relevant Wikipedia page — particularly useful in the case of non-fiction books.
The search for diversion leads to amusement parks and roadside wonders, roller coasters and stage extravaganzas. Kids can be kids, adults can be kids again, and sometimes, David Walter Banks is on hand to capture fantasy becoming reality with behind-the-scenes images that cast new light on tourist attractions.
Such moments of cognitive dissonance comprise The Fourth Wall. The entertainment industry takes in billions annually but even the most luxurious resorts and casinos provide an imperfect illusion. Visitors fill the gaps between animatronics and costumes with their own imagination, and the disconnect beats at the heart of Banks’ photo project.
“I love the idea of these places,” he says. “As adults, so many of us have lost our wonder and given up our urge to chase dreams. In a way, these places invite the adult population to chase an outlandish dream once more, even if only for a fleeting moment. Even if it’s plastic and cracked and they know it is all fake. They are still getting up, putting on their tennis shoes, and going out in search of magic.”
Back in the heady days of the early new Millennium I went out and bought a Sega Dreamcast (still a massively underrated console, in my mind) to play Crazy Taxi, one of the most original and addictive arcade games I’d played in forever.
Jump forward to 2012 and Crazy Taxi finally made its way to the iPhone as a $4.99 premium game, where it played better than expected, and (best of all) retained the nostalgic soundtrack that had helped make the original so much fun.
Leap forwards again to the present, and we’ve received word that Sega’s sequel, Crazy Taxi: City Rush is set for worldwide release tomorrow — bringing players more of the frantic passenger-pickup, traffic-dodging action they’ve been missing.
Flickr has just jumped into the photo licensing market with both feet, hoping to help you sell your stunning photos to a variety of “photo agencies, editors, bloggers and other creative minds.”
Image licensing isn’t a new idea for Flickr, long a repository for the best in high-quality photos posted by professional and amateur photographers alike. Flickr’s always allowed photographers easy access to creative commons licensing to tell editorial staffers which photos could be used, and for what purposes. It also allowed creators the ability to license their photos professionally via Getty Images and get paid, though the specific deal with Getty was discontinued back in March of this year.
Now, though, the list of places that you can sell the images you take on your iPhone to is even larger.
Instagram has begun rolling out a brand new app called Bolt. After the app’s name and icon recently leaked, Bolt has become available for download in the New Zealand, Singapore, and South African App Stores.
Bolt is basically a direct competitor to Snapchat, as it’s designed to send photos and videos to friends that disappear after viewing.
For at least the last year, rumor has had it that Facebook would soon require anyone who wished to message a friend through its official iPhone app to install a tertiary app, Facebook Messenger, instead.
Up until now, Facebook has held off on that threat. But as the social networking giant tries to spread its services across an entire ecosystem of apps, it looks like the House that Zuckerberg built might finally make good.
It was recently reported that Apple was buying Swell, an iPhone app that took a Pandora approach to playing podcasts. The acquisition was said to cost around $30 million, and the app has since been taken off the App Store.
Now Apple has confirmed the buy, which bodes well for its own Podcasts app.
Apple scored a major corporate client today in Ford, the second largest U.S. automaker.
Ford has announced that it is switching from Blackerry to the iPhone, and new iPhones will be in the hands of thousands of employees by the end of 2014.
Although Apple is still expected to unveil the iWatch to the world at an October event, the actual release of the wearable may coincide with the larger 5.5-inch iPhone 6 closer to Christmas.
A key parts supplier in Asia for the iWatch is forecasting weak profits until later in 2014, which means it won’t start making parts for the device until then. As a result, the leading investment firm in Asia has drastically lowered its forecast of how many iWatches Apple is expected to ship in 2014.
In an age in which the latest movies can be watched on your iPad or even iPhone, it’s questionable exactly what the point of going to an actual movie theater is. Unless you’re a fan of seeing movies projected, that is.
Well, soon Apple may be set to disrupt Hollywood in that area too — at least if you believe a patent published on Tuesday.
Describing a Video Delivery System Using Tablet Computer and Detachable Micro Projectors, the application asserts that future iPads may feature one or two detachable projectors, which users would clip onto (or otherwise sync with) their iOS devices to turn their front rooms, office walls, or even the back of a train seat into a miniature screening room.
Can you dig it? The second part of the new content update for EA’s Plants vs. Zombies 2: The Dark Ages, is now live and wending its way to your very own zombie-infested iPad, iPhone, or Android device.
This new content update has ten new levels and two new plants: the Magnet-shroom and the Pea-nut, which gets you both offensive and defensive capabilities. There are new Zombies as well, with the dastardly Wizard zombie, who turns your plants into sheep, and the King zombie, who can upgrade peasant zombies on the fly.
If you play through the extra levels, you’ll come across a new zombie boss, too, and there’s an additional Arthur’s Challenge to hone your old-school medieval skills with. Check out the trailer below to see some of the new content in action.
Equalizers haven’t been a fashionable tech feature since Boomboxes went out of style in the 90’s, but Spotify just released a major update to its iOS app and I can’t stop playing with its fun new equalizer.
Spotify’s 1.1 update includes a number of other new features like a redesigned Artist page on iPad and new Discover feature, but the simple equalizer is perhaps the most useful new addition, allowing users to customize presets with six sliders.
Apple added two new channels to Apple TV for customers in the U.S. on Tuesday, along with a few other additions for countries around the world.
Starting today, Apple TV users can access the new CNBC and Fox Now channels to watch on-demand video content from the company’s top programs like Cosmos & 24 on the Fox end, and uhhhh, American Greed and Restaurant Startups on CNBC.
Could Apple be working on a higher-resolution version of FaceTime for use in enterprise?
A new patent published Tuesday suggests that it’s at least something the company is looking at, as it describes a multi-view video conferencing camera system that uses scalable video encoding. The patented device, which was first applied for back in June 2012, could compete with Microsoft’s 360 degrees Roundtable conferencing technology, as shown below.
Given Apple’s recent deal with IBM to make hardware and software for businesses, and its successful focus on enterprise under Tim Cook, this could certainly be a valuable area for Apple to explore — particularly since it could conceivably work with a range of Apple devices, including Macs, iPads and iPhones.
Can’t get enough of NPR? Literally? Have we got an app for you. It’s called NPR One, and it’s an infinite stream of personalized radio stories that will keep you going all day long.
If you’re like me, you hate OS X’s Dock. While a useful UI innovation on Apple’s part, the dock takes up a surprising amount of screen real estate on what, in the end, adds up to a superfluous amount of visual fluff.
You can hide your dock, sure, but isn’t there a better alternative to dock? As it turns out, there is… and thanks to a cheap Mac app, that alternative is the Menu Bar.
Over the weekend, we saw some incredible trailers come out of Comic Con 2014, including the new Sin City and The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies trailer.
But if you ask me, the best trailer to come out of Comic Con was easily the trailer to the new Mad Max movie. Starring Tom Hardy as the titular character, Fury Road‘s trailer is so incredible… well, you just have to see it for yourself.
Ever wonder how badly graphics and gaming performance gets compromised in the hottest apps on older hardware? As it turns out, not very badly at all. Maybe that’s why iOS has become a major gaming platform.
Having recently snapped up book recommendation tool BookLamp and made moves to acquire podcast recommender startup Swell, Apple clearly realizes the importance of good recommendation algorithms.
In that vein, it’s well worth checking out a similar app called Newsbeat, which launched under the umbrella of the Tribune Company earlier this year, and which recently received a notable update.
We’ve seen a couple of videos purporting to show the display of the iPhone 6, but so far mostly just images of the handset’s back panel.
That’s apparently changed today, courtesy of a new video from Tech Tech Info jailbreak tutorial writer Tanner Marsh, who claims to have received an example of the iPhone 6’s back housing component from Apple’s supply chain in China.
The video — which can be viewed below — compares the back assembly enclosure of the 4.7-inch device to Apple’s current generation iPhone 5s.
Six months after being unceremoniously booted out of the App Store, popular bitcoin wallet app Blockchain is back where it belongs, with Apple having let it back in after seemingly changing its mind about the digital currency.
Blockchain was removed from the App Store back in February this year, having briefly been excised and then re-accepted before that. It followed in the footsteps of fellow wallets BitPak and Coinbase, which were also removed by Apple.
We've got lots of creative apps in the hopper this week, from the comic-book-artist-friendly Procreate 2.1 to the art-sharing app August. There's also stuff for metadata-hungry photographers, as well as a note-card app for screenwriters. Get to work.
Popcorn Time is a fantastic — albeit questionably legal — Mac app that allows you to treat BitTorrent like Netflix, searching for movies and TV shows on sites like The Pirate Bay that you want to watch and then streaming them directly to your computer.
It’s a great app, but it has at least one glaring problem: You can’t stream a movie over Popcorn Time directly to your Apple TV using AirPlay. Luckily, thanks to a new Mac app, you can.
As expected, Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro line received its first refresh since October — adding speedier Haswell chips to its 13-inch and 15-inch models. The 13-inch notebooks now boast 8GB of RAM as standard, while the 15-inch models feature 16GB of RAM.
The minor refresh, which comes right in the middle of Apple’s back to school season, is to tide customers over until the arrival of the more significant Retina MacBook line refresh, which is expected in 2015 when Intel’s next gen 14-nanometer Broadwell processors are ready.
The new model Retina MacBook Pro specs can be seen after the jump: