News - page 1329

The proper iOS Game of Thrones was a bit rubbish, with a whole lot of sitting and waiting around unless you were happy to shell out money for in-app purchases. Fortunately the good folks over at Vulture have created a free-to-play game, which is a whole lot more fun.

You play the “Littlest Lannister” Tyrion Lannister, and the aim is to get as drunk as you can in a great approximation of an old-school arcade game. As games go, it’s a whole lot simpler than capturing the Iron Throne. You guide Tyrion back and forth across the screen using the arrow keys of your computer (or virtual controls for your iOS device) to catch as many goblets of wine as you can.

If you’re a fan of Disney’s Oscar-winning animated smash hit Frozen, you may experience excited chills at the news that you can now sing along to all your favorite songs from the movie on your iPad using the new Disney Karaoke: Frozen app.

As apps go, it’s pretty darn (n)ice, with nine songs and music videos from the film on which you can either listen to the original vocal performances, or mute the voices to sing by yourself.

When the Microsoft Surface was first unveiled, one of its “iPad killing” features was splitscreen app support. Just by dragging an app to the edge of the screen, you could dock it, and run another app to the left or right… for example, playing a game while watching a movie in the corner.

It was a move designed to make the Surface more laptop-like… and one that Apple has been heavily rumored to copy in iOS 8, as tablet sales flatline. But don’t expect to see splitscreen multitasking at WWDC on Monday. Apparently it’s just not ready for showtime yet.

Take this with a grain of salt, but an Australian iPhone repair site with a proven history of leaking upcoming iPhone and iPad parts early has posted what they are claiming is our first look at the aluminum rear shell of the upcoming iPhone 6.

The album is dead. So dead Amazon thinks customers won’t even care if all the songs in its new music-streaming service have been spun out of tune by DJs across the country for months.

To boost its digital offerings, Amazon is planning to launch its own music service, reports BuzzFeed, but rather than stocking up on the latest hit songs, Prime Music will shun new releases in favor of a potluck offering of songs and albums that are at least six months old.

The smartwatch race is on, and Microsoft has its own contender in the works.

Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch lineup is widely considered a dud, and many are waiting to see what Apple has up its sleeve with the iWatch. Not to be left behind, Microsoft is gunning for the fitness market with a wearable of its own that could arrive as early as this summer..

Perhaps most surprising of all is that Microsoft’s device will reportedly be platform agnostic, meaning it would work with Android and even the iPhone.

The real reason behind Apple’s $3 billion buy of Beats may be a plan for an epic mashup of music and tech by combining the hardware of headphones and Beats Music software.

Two notable patent applications published Thursday suggest that Apple could be thinking along exactly these lines.

Rumors of Apple’s upcoming “Made for iHome” API in iOS 8 sent fanboys rocketing with excitement that Cupertino might be launching a makeover in the living room, but expectations are about to get dashed when Apple presents a much simpler system on Monday.

The move to home automation will be more about fighting fragmentation, reports GigaOm, than creating an entire home experience. Apple’s home efforts will just focus on easily connecting devices to Wifi and tossing in voice control over Bluetooth.

There will be no central control center. No asking Siri to turn off your Hues and lock the door. But the report does have some interesting details on what Apple will announce:

Apple has a proud tradition of cannibalizing its products before someone else does, but in the case of the iPad mini, Cupertino might start eating its rotting corpse as soon as the 5.5-inch iPhablet is announced.

The latest projections from IDC claim that tablet sales are starting to level off even faster than expected with only 245.5 million units forecasted to sell in 2014 – a palty 12.1% year-over-year growth rate after tech companies just feasted on 51.8% YOY in 2013.

During Apple’s last earnings call Tim Cook boasted that iPad is the fastest selling product in Apple history, but IDC gives two major reasons why that could soon change:

24 hours haven’t even passed since Apple announced it scooped up Dre’s bass-loving headphone company but that’s not stopping the Dr. and Iovine from busting out an encore to their most successful headphones yet.

This morning Beats revealed its replacing its popular Beats Solo headphones with the new Beats Solo² that not only offer better sound, they’re the most Apple-like set of cans we’ll see before Jony Ive gets his team on them.

Readdle today rolled out its biggest update yet for PDF Expert 5, one of the finest PDF editing apps for iOS. It adds support for continuous scrolling and calculations, improves performance, and makes PDF Expert a universal app — so you only have to buy it once to use it on both iPhone and iPad.

Apple is busy putting the finishing touches on WWDC before the invasion of 5,000 developers destroy the corridors of Moscone West, but even if you didn’t get a ticket to the hottest developer event in the world, you can still enjoy WWDC like you’re actually there by sporting some of this gear from the comfort of your couch.

Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple gang are coming straight out of Cupertino on June 2nd to kick off WWDC with the first keynote of the year. iOS 8, OS X 10.10, a home automation platform, new iMacs and possibly even an 8GB iPhone 5s are rumored to make an appearance.

We’ll be covering the action on our liveblog starting at 10AM PDT, Monday June 2nd and won’t let up until WWDC finishes on June 6th, but to get yourself ready for the assault, here are eight things you should buy to get your WWDC on.

With Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy in the bag, hits like X-Men: Days of Future Past ruling the box office, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy surfacing on the horizon, we’re living in a Golden Age for comic book movies.

But even with Hollywood seemingly buying up the rights to anything it can get its hands on, there are still some fantastic comic book series yet to make the transition to the silver screen.

Which comic book adaptations would we put down our hard-earned bucks to enjoy at the multiplex? Read on to find out…

Write, the distraction-free note-taking tool that’s been a great success on iOS, is ready to make writing easier on your Mac.

Whether you’re a student, a blogger, a novelist, or simply too forgetful to remember what you need to pack your holiday, Write’s incredibly simple design and clutter-free user interface can make writing a more enjoyable experience. But don’t let its minimal beauty fool you — Write is packed with handy features.

The Guardian — a.k.a. the British newspaper known for breaking news of the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013 — has just launched its new and improved iOS app.

The upgrade adds a cleaner design, alongside a more personalized user experience for iOS users. What this means is ramped-up interactivity, thanks to the integration with GuardianWitness, the newspaper’s user-generated content platform which allows readers to contribute comments, photos, and videos.

From a rare Apple Lisa computer to the original rainbow-colored signs from the Cupertino offices there have been some great Apple items up for auction as of late. Now you can add “rare Mac prototype” to that list.

A prototype model made out of painted foam, this alternate Macintosh LC model was built in 1989 by Apple’s Industrial Design Group and Matrix Product Design (which later became IDEO). Unlike the actual Mac LC that shipped it has a vertically-oriented screen: possibly targeted toward the business world, rather than the artistic, publishing and educational markets that the Mac traditionally sold to at the time.

I’m a streaming music junkie. I’ve subscribed to Rdio, Spotify and Slacker to rein in my tendency to hoard (and then not back up) music.  Putting a tenner on monthly subscriptions for an all-you-can-listen auditory buffet model appealed to me more than an album-binging approach, too.

Still, the Apple and Beats acquisition rumors (now fact) struck me as tone deaf – what does Beats bring that the other services don’t? So I decided to take the Beats app on my iPhone for good long spin.

Anyone who read my review of Jurassic Park Builder for iOS knows that I’m a fan of the Jurassic Park franchise — and like a lot of fans of the series I’m eagerly awaiting Jurassic World, the forthcoming movie sequel set to stomp into movie theatres June 12, 2015.

For those of us craving plot details like a t-rex craves human-sized snacks, director Colin Trevorrow recently shed some light in an interview for SlashFilm.

Despite the fact that Steve Jobs didn’t want Apple to become a company in which people were constantly asking themselves “What Would Steve Do?” after his death, it was inevitable that people would compare Apple under Tim Cook to Apple under its legendary co-founder.

Asked about that topic during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at yesterday’s Re/code Code Conference — and specifically whether there had been a “reset” period following Jobs’ death —  Eddy Cue commented that:

If you’re a fan of RPGs you’ll be instantly familiar with Square Enix’s superb series of Dragon Quest games. Among those games, the most famous is Dragon Quest VIII — a game which has sold 4.9 million units (and counting) worldwide since its launch in 2005.

Close to a decade after landing on video game consoles, an iOS port of Dragon Quest VIII was given a soft-launch in Japan five months ago, and now it’s available internationally via the App Store.

If you love Reeder 2 on your iPhone or iPad, great news: the best news reading app out there has come back to the Mac, after almost a year being MIA.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is usually as reliable a source as it gets when it comes to what’s in the works with Apple’s supply chain. The analyst has correctly predicted countless major new Apple products months in advance, just by tracing the threads in the supply chain spider web.

But not even Kuo is infallible. Notable Apple journalist Jim Dalrymple has shot down Kuo’s latest report, suggesting that Apple will introduce a new iMac and a lower-capacity 8GB iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference, with just a single word: “Nope.”

Now that Apple’s acquisition of Beats has finally been made official, Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine took the stage at the the inaugural Code Conference tonight to give a peak behind the scenes of deal, as well as glimpse at what’s to come in 2014 – including the best product pipeline the company has seen in 25 years.

The interview comes as Apple is preparing for its annual developer’s conference in San Francisco next week where it’s expected to announce new versions of iOS and OS X, and while will have to wait to see if any hardware will come out as well, Eddy Cue is already hard at work hyping Apple’s upcoming products.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg led the conversation with Eddy Cue starting things off by parroting Tim Cook’s statements that Apple acquired Beats for three reasons: Talent, Headphones, and a Music Subscription Service, before revealing these eight new tidbits on the deal as well as the future of Apple:

Three weeks of speculation and rumors have led to this. Apple is finally buying Beats for $3 billion.

News of the deal broke weeks ago but the tech world is still scratching its head, wondering why Apple decided to buy a company that peddles overpriced plastic headphones and is co-anchored by one of hip-hop’s most notorious MCs.

Forgetting the fact the fact that Beats has captured 60% of its market, makes over $1 billion in sales and has one of the fastest growing music subscription service in the U.S., the acquisition is the most perplexing Apple purchase since NeXT, but now that Tim Cook has broken the silence on why Apple bought Beats we finally answers you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

Beats Music is now officially being bought by Apple, and to celebrate, the streaming-music service is extending its free trial and lowering the cost of a yearly subscription by $20.