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Apple’s spaceship campus gets flyover treatment in new renderings

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Construction of Apple’s new headquarters is still underway as Cupertino braces for the mothership to touchdown sometime in 2016, but if you want to know what the glass and aluminum ring will look like during a flyby, Technology Integration Services just published a gorgeous rendering of Apple’s campus.

Other than showing yet another render of Apple campus, the new video also gives a nice layout of the dozens of other buildings that will makeup the new campus, as well views of the surrounding streets and houses.

Take a look at the full video below:

Apple gets ready to pull trigger on 2.5-inch iWatch

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We’ve been trudging through a toxic hellstew of iWatch rumors for more than 18 months, but if rumors are to be believed, the world is about to finally see the fabled iWatch.

Production on Apple’s first smartwatch is set to begin next month, with Taiwan’s Quanta Computer handling production, says Reuters, who says the iWatches display will be a little bigger than expected.

Apple should steal this brilliant concept for social app discovery

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App store discovery would be completely different with this adfiajdofija Photo: Andy Baio
App discovery would be completely different if Apple stole Andy Baio's concept.

Apple has the best App Store on the planet. Thousands of developers.  Millions of apps. Billions of sales. But no one can find a damn thing.

Since 2008, iOS users have downloaded more than 75 billion apps. How we locate a winner from among the App Store’s 1.2 million apps hasn’t changed much, but Andy Baio thinks Apple could revolutionize the way we discover and consume apps. And he’s got a brilliant concept Apple should borrow.

Hands-on: Evolve releases the Kraken in monstrous new game

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Evolve

In 2K’s upcoming game, Evolve, I was a monster.

It was my job to stalk the surrounding map, eating smaller creatures in order to build up my armor and get evolution points, which would let me add and strengthen my special monstrous abilities.

I had to do this while being hunted by a team of four humans, each with their own specialty: the heavily armored, damage-dealing Assault class, the crafty Trapper with her energy-field dome to fence me in, the Support class, with a variety of ranged weapons, and the Medic, who kept healing those bastards as I hit them with my own smart bombs, electric attacks and sharp claws.

It was a heady, scary time, but I persevered. I flew up to the sky, hurling furious attacks upon their heads. I ran away, hiding behind huge rock columns to avoid their deadly assault. I ate and evolved.

Then, after about 20 minutes of furious action, I died, the victim of their unwarranted greed and violence.

I loved playing Evolve, and so will you. Check out the trailer below to see the Kraken, the second monster revealed for the upcoming console and PC game.

Adobe Creative Cloud just got truly awesome (with 1 tiny problem)

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I was all set to pull the trigger on Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives subscribers access to Lightroom and Photoshop as well as Lightroom Mobile for the iPad and iPhone.

After all, it’s just $10 per month, right? (or €12.29/$16.71 in the EU). That’s about what I spend on Rdio, or Dropbox, and I get Lightroom on my frickin’ camera.

But I decided to hold off and see if one huge doozy of a design problem is fixed before my 30-day trial of the service finishes up. This will also give me time to check out the amazing new Adobe Photoshop Mix, which is what Photoshop for iPad should have been all along.

And the little problem that could be a deal-breaker? You’re gonna love it…

Hidden flyover city tours unlocked in iOS 8 beta 2

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Apple didn’t tell anyone during WWDC, but it wants iOS 8 to be the ultimate city tour guide.

Cupertino is adding a new Flyover City Tours feature to its Maps app. And even though the code has been hidden, developer Pierre Blazquez managed to unearth it from the latest iOS 8 beta release to give us a preview of the new feature that’s still in development.

Flyover tours are currently only available for Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris and a few other cities, but in a video posted by Mac4Ever, we’ve been given our first glimpse of the tours in action.

Hatch pocket pets can now play in the Pocket God universe

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Hop from one virtual pocket to another.
Hop from one virtual pocket to another.

Chances are you’ve heard of Tamagotchi, the little handheld virtual pets that took over the world during the first decade of the 2000s, selling more than 76 million little egg-shaped devices as of 2010.

Hatch is one of the many virtual pet apps out there, but it’s an adorable one. You may even recognize the little Fugu creature from its own Facebook Messenger sticker series.

Virtual pets aren’t anything new to the iOS ecosystem, but this new collaboration between Hatch and super-popular video game Pocket God is something new. If you’ve ever thought about doing more with that little digital pal in your pocket, now might be the time. Check out the launch video below for more.

How Fire Phone’s fancy features might take on iPhone 6

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After years of work on its first mobile phone, Amazon has finally revealed the Fire Phone. Boasting an extensive recognition system known as Firefly and 3-D features powered by something called Dynamic Perspective, the device is now available for pre-order.

In today’s video we give you an overview of the flashy new device, which was unveiled Wednesday by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and compare Fire Phone to Apple’s mobile offerings (both the current iPhone 5s and the upcoming iPhone 6).

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Intelligent sensors will make the iWatch even smarter than you thought

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An iWatch concept by Todd Hamilton
An iWatch concept by Todd Hamilton

Based on the massive number of hires they’ve made in the field as of late, it’s no mystery that Apple is interested in biometrics and biosensors. However three new patent applications published Thursday shed a bit more light on what Apple has up its sleeve, and make us feel even more excited about the possibility of an iWatch (and future iPhones) later this year.

Comics’ best supervillains (and not just the obvious ones)

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Mr. Freeze has been an enduringly chilly presence in the Batman universe since his first appearance (as Mr. Zero) in Batman #121, back in February 1959. The most famous take on the character was the one engineered by Paul Dini in the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Heart of Ice.” That story introduced us to Freeze’s terminally ill, cryogenically frozen wife Nora, which both explained Freeze’s obsession with cold and turned him into a tragic character in the process.

But while Dini’s animated version of Freeze was good enough to become the standard portrayal of the character in most forms of media, more recently I’ve been loving the reinvention of Mr. Freeze seen in DC’s New 52. (SPOILERS) You see, in this universe it turns out that Nora was never Freeze's wife at all, but rather a woman born in 1943, who was put into cryogenic stasis at the age of 23 after being diagnosed with an incurable heart condition.

Writing his doctoral thesis on Nora, Freeze fell in love with her, and became obsessed with finding a way to bring her back to life. One cryonic chemical accident later, and the already unhinged Dr. Victor Fries is transformed into Mr. Freeze. It’s a clever re-imagining of Freeze’s origin which makes him less sympathetic, but a whole lot creepier.


Who’s the baddest of the bad?

Got your own favorite underappreciated supervillain? Let us know in the comments below.

Apple just obsoleted the Mac and nobody noticed

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Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, unveils OS X Yosemite to the world at WWDC 2014. Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple is finally showing us its idea of how we’ll compute in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, this pristine vision of our computing destiny — unveiled after years of secret, patient and painstaking development — aligns perfectly with how we currently use our computers and mobile devices.

The keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month not only showed off a new way to think about computing, based on data not devices, but also silenced pretty much every criticism leveled at the company over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s new way of doing things, which fulfills Steve Jobs’ post-PC plan by minimizing the importance of the Mac.

Yo! Check out this crazy messaging app with a unique twist

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You know those ideas that are so simple you feel like you really could have come up with them yourself? Yo is one of those apps.

Launched on April Fools’ Day, it has recently become inexplicably popular — with 2 million messages sent over just the past month. If you haven’t used it, the idea behind it is simple: like Snapchat, you establish a username inside the app and can then send push notifications to friends reading “Yo” and featuring audio of a voice saying the same thing. Oh, and did I mention that it’s creator has just raised $1.2 million in funding?

Save the day once again with Powerpuff Girls: Defenders of Townsville

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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.

Activation Lock responsible for massive drop in iPhone thefts

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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.

Pencil vs Camera blurs line between reality and whimsy

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Ben Heine's
Ben Heine's amazing Pencil vs Camera series artfully blends photographs and drawings.

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.”

Your picks for Apple’s next ‘thought leader’

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Guy Kawasaki
Apple reaching a $1 trillion value gives Guy Kawasaki a lot to think about.
Photo: Guy Kawasaki

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.

Apple’s new 21.5-inch iMac starts at $1,099

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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.

Pump-Hub, an ingenious system that keeps bike tires inflated, is ready to roll again

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Kevin Manning has the idea for a hub system which inflates your tires as you ride, eliminating the  need for a bike pump and making sure you have proper inflation every time you hit the street. Manning has the idea the prototypes, but lacks the funds to move into production.
Kevin Manning's ingenious Pump-Hub system inflates bike tires as you ride. Photos: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

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.”

Renowned leaker posts picture of the massive 5.5-inch iPhone 6

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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 Valet sells your unwanted goods on your behalf

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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.