I’m a sucker for old school platformers in the vein of Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia, and upcoming iOS game Escape from the Pyramid certainly fulfills those criteria.
Set across 45 levels — representing three worlds in all — the game borrows from ancient Egyptian art to create something that definitely looks like it could stand out in a year already full of interesting-looking iOS titles.
Apple sure is looking friendlier these days.
This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference was geekier, more welcoming and less locked-down than any in recent history. Apple also bid farewell to Katie Cotton — the much-feared queen of PR, whose frosty relations with journalists made her only slightly less terrifying than an angry Steve Jobs — with a call for a “friendlier, more approachable” public relations face to warm up the company’s relationship with the press.
“For the past few years it’s felt like Apple’s only goal was to put us in our place,” Panic’s Cabel Sasser recently tweeted. “Now it feels like they might want to be friends.”
These recent moves represent a major change in the way Apple does business, even as the company sits atop a $150 billion war chest amassed thanks to innovative products, ruthless leadership and heavy-handed policies that fostered a culture of secrecy and utter domination. But in a world where it’s drummed into our heads that nice guys finish last, does Apple’s approach risk killing the company with kindness?
CEO Tim Cook certainly doesn’t seem to think so.
A new exhibit showcasing hundreds of original Apple patents has opened in Denver.
Entitled “Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World,” the display offers a rare opportunity to look over some of the most influential and important patents in recent tech history — ranging from the original Macintosh through the iPhone.
Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet says that the exhibit, “provides a unique glimpse into one of our country’s most iconic innovators, highlighting Jobs’ wide-ranging portfolio and lasting influence on modern technology.”
Foxconn and Pegatron — the two leading manufacturers set to produce the iPhone 6 — have been on a massive hiring spree as of late.
According to Taiwan’s Economic Daily News, Foxconn will recruit in excess of 100,000 new workers in mainland China to help assemble Apple’s much-anticipated next generation iPhone. It had previously been reported that the company was opening up new factory space to carry out the work.
Rival Taiwanese assembler Pegatron will also be upping the workforce in one of its factories by 30 percent in order to meet the demand the influx of new work will place on it.
Sookie, Bill, Jason, LaFayette, Sam, and Jessica are back in the final season of True Blood, HBO’s killer vampire drama that’s in its seventh and final season.
We’re here to watch the writers and actors raise the stakes for the residents of Bon Temps as they try to make sense of a world terrorized by infected Hepatitis V vampires and the human bigotry of the small southern town in the series inspired by Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries novels.
If you missed the first six seasons, be warned: there’s a ton of spoilers here. If you want to catch up on the basics, though, head over to our monstrous six-season recap and then come on back, y’all, hear?
Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress and telepath who can read your every thought. This hasn’t made her feel welcome in the tiny Southern town full of bigots and racists where she lives. Worse yet, she’s fallen for a vampire, Bill Compton, who’s a champion for other vamps to “come out of the coffin” and live peacefully alongside humans. Oh, and werewolves, shape-shifters, witches and fairies are real, too.
HBO’s True Blood is a fun, sexy romp through an engaging universe of characters and supernatural goings on. Based on the best-selling novels of Charlaine Harris, True Blood heads into its seventh and final season tonight, and we don’t want to miss a minute.
If you’re a New York-based coder or wannabe coder looking to learn Apple’s new programming language Swift, you may want to check out an upcoming evening tech workshop organized by software development firm TurnToTech.
With the next session taking place Monday at their 5th Avenue offices, the number of spaces available has just been upped to allow more people to attend.
There’s a fire in the Amazon! I’m so sorry. Bad jokes aside, on this week’s CultCast we’ll tell you what we love and don’t about Amazon’s much-buzzed debut mobile phone. Plus: the iMac just got a lot cheaper… and slower; another Weibo leak reportedly shows a huge 5.5-inch iPhone 6; the cool additions to iOS 8 and Yosemite’s 2nd betas; this summer’s hottest mens’ bathing suit attire; plus, you asked, we answer—it’s an all-new CultCast Q&A!
Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
Click on for the show notes.
If you like the look of Adobe’s new Creative Cloud apps Sketch and Line, but don’t fancy buying the $200 official stylus to use with them, you should pick up Adonit's new Jot Touch instead. It has a tiny “Pixelpoint” tip instead of a disk or fat rubbery point, and it works just like Adobe’s Ink stylus, letting you copy and paste to/from the Creative Cloud as well as access files and Kuler color palettes. Best of all, it’s just $120.
LOS ANGELES — Free-to-play games don’t enjoy the same cache as games that cost money right out of the gate. Sure, they’re at the top of the “making money” charts, as gamers download freebies by the bucketful (and apparently purchase loads of virtual stuff from them), but ask any gamer what they think of them and they’ll typically give you a blank, slightly annoyed stare.
So I honestly didn’t hold out much hope that I’d see anything super-interesting at an Electronic Entertainment Expo luncheon sponsored by free-to-play mobile game maker DeNA last week.
However, the developer showed off a couple of pretty damn good games at the event. We saw the recently released Transformers tie-in game and several others, including Peter Molyneux’s latest effort, Godus. But what really stuck out for me were Royal Defenders and WARP.
No one has seen a single hardware leak of the iWatch but that didn't stopped the rumor mill from going ape-shit crazy for Apple's future wearable device this week. We saw whispers of sweat sensors, problems with the feds, and even celebrity athletes testing Apple's future fitness device.
Once again, we're taking the black cloth off our crystal ball and shining it up to see if we can spot what Tim Cook really has in store for the future of Apple. Come see which rumors are guaranteed to materialize and which are about to vanish like ghosts.
Stare into our crystal ball to see past the rumors and into the future...
A cheaper iMac that proves you get what you pay for, fresh beta updates for iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, and a “rare” iPhone with a $15,000 price tag. You’ll get these stories and more in Cult of Mac’s video rundown of the week’s biggest Apple news.
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Custom keyboards are landing on iPhones and iPads this fall after Apple finally decided to give users more options than Jony Ive’s horrible shift key.
We’re still a few months away from finished keyboards being ready for the public, but this morning we got our first taste of using a custom keyboard on iOS 8 thanks to the guys at TouchPal. My fingers still need a lot of training before I’m able to sweep words together faster than an Android user, but the future of iOS keyboards promises to be swift, swipeable and super-simple.
Here’s what it’s like to install and use iOS 8 custom keyboards:
One victim of the larger size of the iPhone 6 is the on/off switch, which has reportedly been moved from the top of the phone to its side to make it easier to operate with the larger form factor. The twin volume buttons have also supposedly been unified into a single rocker.
SAN FRANCISCO — James Armstrong might be one of the few iOS engineers who loses weight while on a coding bender.
Armstrong is lead developer at The Orange Chef Co., the company behind a smart kitchen scale called Prep Pad. It weighs your food and, based on the nutritional profile you set, gives you a more accurate idea of how much you should eat. While working on a companion iPad app called Countertop, Armstrong beta tested his meals and realized how super-sized they were. So he cut the portions and shed 30 pounds.
“I had to buy new clothes twice,” he says.”I bought a bunch of clothes, then I had to buy ’em again — it’s made that much difference.”
Yesterday we wrote about Yo, the messaging app which has become inexplicably popular over the past month, and has netted $1.2 million in venture funding.
Less than 24 hours later it seems that Yo has hacked by a Georgia Tech student, together with two of his room mates. The hack allows for them to access any Yo user’s phone number, spoof Yo messages from any user, spam users with multiple messages, and even send push notifications featuring any text they want. Another hack appears to let hackers Rickroll users with the infamous Rick Astley song.
While some reports are claiming that Apple is still finalizing the specifications for its first generation iWatch ahead of the supposed October launch, another set of reports — supposedly backed up by insider sources — put forward another theory.
And it makes a lot of sense.
I’m a massive fan of SNK’s King of Fighters franchise, to the point that I own a 4 CD compilation of the series’ soundtracks over the course of its lifetime. Which is why I’m incredibly happy to hear that SNK Playmore is working on a rhythm game based on the King of Fighters fighting game franchise “packed with legendary SNK tracks!”
We’ve written a lot about how there’s no shortage of great games in the App Store, and just to gobble up even more of your time this summer, Electronic Arts has just staged a massive sale on some of its most popular titles — discounting them by as much as 90 percent in some cases.
Some of the company’s hottest games are included, so this is a great opportunity if you’re looking to pick up some worthwhile bargains.
Here’s the complete list of titles on sale for just $0.99!
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh may reject a plea put forward by Apple, Google, and two other companies following a lawsuit which accused Apple of participating in anti-poaching practices.
As previously reported, Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar all stood accused by former employees, although Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar quickly agreed to settle — paying a collective $20 million.
The remaining companies — Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe — faced a possible damages payout of $3 billion, although this could potentially rise to as much as $9 billion under antitrust laws. After an appeal refusal, the companies ended up settling for the comparatively small tiny of $324.5 million.
Understandably, not everyone was pleased with the result: with plaintiff Michael Devine calling the sum “grossly inadequate,” and demanding that it be rejected. Now it seems that he could get his wish.
Apple is set to unleash multiple versions of its long-awaited iWatch this fall, according to a new report from the the Wall Street Journal.
Coming in multiple screen sizes, and boasting more than 10 sensors to track health and fitness data, Apple seems set to go way beyond the current smartphone accessory functionality seen in present generation smartwatches.
Yosemite is one of the biggest updates to OS X we’ve seen in recent years, bringing fresh looks and a slew of new features. This video takes a look at how Notification Center looks and works in OS X Yosemite, which is resembling iOS 8 more and more.
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Every once in a while, it’s good to take a step back from the more intense flavors of gaming available on your iPhone or iPad and just play a game that’s pure fun.
Grub, sequel to the hit game from independent game studio Pixowl, Greedy Grub, is one of those purely fun experiences that just begs to be played.
Last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, I got a chance to try this delightful little Snake-style game out on the developer’s iPad, and was enchanted by the visuals right off the bat.
Take a look at the video below to see what I mean.
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: