News - page 1326

Cult animated faves the Powerpuff Girls are back in a new iOS game, published by Cartoon Network in association with JoyJoy and Fluid SE developers RadianGames.

Called Powerpuff Girls: Defenders of Townsville, the game sees the Powerpuff Girls blasted with evil simian nemesis Mojo Jojo’s Disremember Gun, which leads to them forgetting how to use their superpowers. In a Metroidvania/Castleroid-style adventure shooter, you start out playing as Buttercup, before rescuing Blossom and Bubbles. Once the heroic trio is united, you get to use each of their superpowers to battle Mojo Jojo’s evil robots, and unlock and discover new areas.

There are plenty of stories about iPhone thefts causing spikes in crime statistics, but according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman Apple’s introduction of an iPhone kill switch may be starting to turn around.

Measuring crime after the iPhone’s Activation Lock was first introduced in iOS 7, police in  San Francisco, London, and New York claim that San Francisco robberies fell by 38 percent, London robberies by 24 percent, and New York robberies by 19 percent — while grand larcenies in NYC including the iPhone dropped 29 percent in the first five months of 2014, compared to the same time period last year.

Looking for a little extra summer cash? It might be time to dust off your old iPhone.

Some hopeful eBay seller is hawking their “rare” mint-condition, first-generation iPhone with only 4GB of storage — and all they’re asking for is enough money for a down payment on a house.

The second beta of iOS 8 upgrades Apple’s mobile platform visually as well as functionally. Along with plenty of bug fixes, iOS 8 Beta 2 delivers a number of neat tweaks that make the upcoming mobile OS even better than before. See some of the new enhancements in action in today’s quick-look video.

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Apple is on a price-slashing spree this morning after taking down its online store for a few hours last night. Not only did Cupertino just release a cheaper low-end iMac, but it’s also dropping prices on the Apple TV and Mac mini across the UK and Europe.

Apple’s new headphone company has been spewing its love for the World Cup all over the internet with huge cinematic ads and exclusive Jay Z tracks, but there’s one place you won’t see a pair of Beats headphones – inside the actual stadiums.

FIFA has banned Beats headphones from the football pitch and official media events thanks to a licensing agreement with rival Sony.

Ben Heine is a magician.

Like David Blaine and Criss Angel before him, he has a special talent for blurring the line between reality and fiction. But instead of utilizing sleight of hand or his indomitable will to delight his audience, Heine keeps it simple by using just a pencil and camera to create his illusions.

Heine’s incredible art series Pencil vs Camera combines gorgeous landscapes and city scenes with hand-sketched drawings. The otherworldly images that result are both whimsical and intriguing, with a bit of mind-bending magic thrown in for perspective.

“I always try to express what I’m feeling,” Heine told Cult of Mac, noting that most of his inspiration for drawings come “mainly from people around me — friends, family, even strangers — and from every experience I live.”

Cult of Mac readers came through again: after our nominees, here are your semi-serious and sometimes outrageous picks for who should be coming up with the next big ideas at Apple.

One small footnote: Apple tweaked the job title on us. Now they are looking for a “business intelligence thought leader” rather than just a plain old “thought leader,” but the party game is still a fun one.

The online Apple Store is back up and, as many suspected, there’s a new low-end 21.5-inch iMac for sale.

Featuring a 1.4Ghz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB memory, a 500GB hard drive, and integrated Intel HD Graphics 5000, the iMac is available for shipping within 24 hours at $1,099. The specs were leaked earlier today when French Apple website Macplus posted the below image of a box for the new iMac.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sometimes even a great idea falls flat at first. Take Pump-Hub, a self-inflating bike tire gizmo. It was rolling along at trade shows and getting lots of good press before the financial crisis of 2008 sidelined the project.

Now its creator, engineer Kevin Manning, is getting back on track with a new team behind him and plans to expand his original idea — an automatic, adjustable, tire-inflation system housed in the hub of a bike wheel.

For cyclists, the Pump-Hub means no remembering to check the tire pressure or pack a pump, no fiddling around with the valve and then racing to put the cap back on before the air wheezes out and your aching arms have to start all over again. It inflates the tires to the proper pressure while you ride, making a gentle clickety-clack sound reminiscent of spoke cards from childhood days. When the tire hits the designated pressure, the fluttering sounds stop. If you get a flat, just upend your bike and spin the wheel until pressure is restored.

“It’s like how using a Macintosh is easier than using a command-line interface,” Manning says, turning his Gunnar bike upside down on the Embarcadero to show me how the Pump-Hub works. If you really boil down all the technology behind his invention, he adds, the main advantage basically ends up being “it’s easier.”

One week ago, the Taiwanese actor and racing car driver Jimmy Lin posted pictures of what looked to be a legit 4.7-inch iPhone 6. Today, he’s followed up by sharing a picture on his Weibo account depicting Lin sitting next to what appears to be the 5.5-inch iPhone 6.

While this could possibly be a dummy unit, Lin has a history of teasing images of future iPhone models — starting with last year’s image of him with an iPhone 5c. A recent report seemed to confirm that last week’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6 was, in fact, a beta unit that had been sent out for testing purposes.

eBay has expanded its Sell For Me service — in which valets will sell your stuff on eBay in exchange for a 30% commission — with the launch of a great new app called eBay Valet.

The process of using the app is very straightforward. Simply snap a picture of the item you want to sell, then enter (or speak) a description of it. Within 30 minutes, your “valet” will then respond with a valuation range. If you have a box to hand, eBay will then send you a shipping label. If not, the company will mail you out a free, prepaid box instead.

You’re then able to log onto eBay.com to watch the sale take place under your valet’s account. Once this process is finished, you get to keep 70% of the profits — which are deposited to your PayPal account.

From telling Tim Cook not to be dumb, to proclaiming himself the next Steve Jobs, Kanye West can always be trusted to chime in with a nuanced take on Apple business. Now the newly-married creative genius has offered his two cents on the reason behind Apple’s still-unexplained $3 billion acquisition of Beats Music.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions festival, West says that last year’s collaboration between Jay Z and Samsung — in which 1 million Galaxy owners were able to pick up free copies of the rapper’s Magna Carta Holy Grail album — pushed Apple to acqui-hire Beats cofounders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. Claiming that Apple has lost touch with its culture since Jobs’ death in 2011, West thinks that the Beats deal allowed Apple to buy back some of the cultural relevance it has lost.

And lo did news of the yonder Age of Empires game for iOS continue to flow!

Known as Age of Empires: World Domination, this is the forthcoming expansion of the award-winning (and much loved) Age of Empires series, which allows players to create an empire by pitting civilizations against one another. Developed by KLabGames, we’re promised a game that maintains the focus on strategy and tactics but is designed specifically for the touch gestures of an iOS device.

Facebook’s new Slingshot app takes aim at Snapchat by putting a new spin on photo-messaging. Instead of simply relying on disappearing pictures and videos, Slingshot promotes back-and-forth conversations.

How does it work? You must unlock “slings” you receive before you can look at them. You do this by sending your own sling to the sender. See how the just-released Slingshot app works in today’s quick-look video.

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While Amazon’s locked in an ongoing dispute with publishing house Hachette — which has resulted in the publisher’s books being pulled from Amazon’s shelves — Apple’s more than happy to take advantage of the situation.

Apple’s iTunes store is currently promoting a sale on digital versions of popular Hachette titles, which includes upcoming books from the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

Halfbrick Studios, the folks behind massively popular endless-runner Jetpack Joyride have decided that the best way to get you to play their games is to give them away for a grand total of nothing.

The Brisbane-based game development studio was founded in 2001, and has gone on to make a ton of popular games across iOS and other platforms, including fruit-slashing hit Fruit Ninja and tongue-in-cheek giant robot game Colossatron.

There’s also Fruit Ninja Puss in Boots, the endless-runner Monster Dash, the song-creation game Band Stars, dual-stick shooter favorite Age of Zombies, and the wacky Fish Out of Water, where you get to flick various marine creatures across the top of the ocean for distance and style-based high scores.

All of these games will work on your iPhone or iPad, and — since you’re buying them at the free price now — you will own them into perpetuity.

You can grab any one of Halfbrick’s premium games for nothing right now, so head on over.

Source: iTunes

Apple’s new beta for iOS 8 is stuffed full of bug fixes after most of the new features were unveiled at WWDC two weeks ago, but Cupertino still managed to surprise us today with a number of neat tweaks to iOS 8 beta 2 that make some of apps better than what was revealed at the Moscone Center.

We’re still combing through the beta for new features, but additions like QuickType for iPad, iBooks displayed as series and improvements to Photos are welcome additions before iOS 8 lands this fall.

Take a look at all the tweaks Apple added to the iOS 8 beta today:

Jose Torres, CEO of Boogio, wants you to track your fitness with the most obvious part of your body: your feet.

“We’ve got 60,000 layers of sensitivity in the Boogio,” he told Cult of Mac at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, “so we can track gravitational force, inner balance, and three different acceleration forces of your feet.”

The new trailer for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, starring Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana, has us chomping at the galactic bit for the full movie, due out in theaters August 1. There’s plenty of action in this new preview, along with some fantastic moments between our protagonists.

With Bradley Cooper as wisecracking badass raccoon Rocket and Vin Diesel as giant, flower-giving tree-thug Groot, the upcoming flick from the makers of Thor, Iron Man and The Avengers is promising a lot to moviegoers; let’s hope it’s worth the wait.

Snapchat’s pivot from a sleazy app for naughty pics to an actual messaging platform to rival WhatsApp is happening faster than its scandalous photos can disappear and its newest feature is going to make the party even bigger.

Today Snapchat announced its adding a new “Our Story” feature that will allow users who are at the same location to share snaps with each other, or view an event from afar so you can feel like you were totally there with your friends, 10 seconds at a time.

Along with this morning’s release of iOS 8 beta 2, Apple is throwing some love to Mac users as well by releasing the second preview of the OS X Yosemite beta.

Apple has promised to open the OS X Yosemite beta to the public but it looks like you still need to be a developer to grab Cupertino’s newest update which can be can be downloaded directly from the Mac Dev Center or via a software update in your Apple menu.

Apple also released a new beta for Xcode 6 this morning as well as a new developer preview for OS X Server 4.0.

Yosemite brings a revamped UI to OS X along with a host of new features aimed at making your iPhone and Mac work smarter together. No official word from Apple on what’s inside the new preview but we’ll let you know what we find as soon as its installed.

We’re still crawling through the myriad of new features Apple added to the first beta of iOS 8, but now we’re about to dive back in. Apple just released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers this morning a mere 15 days after dropping the new OS on devs at WWDC.

According to the iOS 8 beta 2 release notes Apple’s mostly filled it with a ton of bug fixes, but we’ll update you on all the new features, big and small, once we’ve got it on our test devices.

Developers can pick up the new beta as an OTA update, from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links below:

A simple glance at the stunning games perched atop the App Store game lists reveals we are experiencing a golden age for mobile gaming.

From the surreal, mind-bending Monument Valley to the Pixar movie brought to life that is Leo’s Fortune, 2014 has seen some of the most startlingly original gaming experiences in years arrive on iOS.

“I do feel like we are in a boom period,” says John Comes, design director at Uber Entertainment, the company behind games like the newly released Toy Rush.

Although Apple has been a hub of gaming going back to the glory days of the Apple II, today’s crop of hot titles are reshaping the landscape like never before. The present explosion of innovative iOS games results from several fortuitous factors coming together. Here’s why there’s never been a better time to be a gamer.

Apple is looking to hire a thought leader. While the actual job listing — blah blah blah “execution of critical sale reporting projects” blah blah blah — sounds about as exciting as a new ink cartridge, the idea of a thought leader role at a company like Apple is worth pondering.

Ever since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs, there’s been much speculation and hand-wringing over who could assume his role as Apple’s foremost visionary. Although no one can ever fill his New Balances, we’ve rounded up a short list of leaders who might kick the Cupertino company in a new direction.

Who do you think should drive Apple’s big ideas? Check out our picks in the gallery above, then nominate yours in the comments below.