News - page 1345

HTML5 is a language that is designed to work on all platforms. That means you can code your app or website and it will work on mobile devices, tables and computers. The best part is that you can put these HTML 5 apps right into an Xcode project – meaning you can design and program an HTML 5 app and upload it to the App Store – without having to write more than a couple lines of code in Objective-C. You won’t find a more efficient way to publish your hit app idea – and Cult of Mac Deals has a video course on sale that will help you deliver the goods!

With over 12 hours of content, the Master Web Apps Video Course will show you how to code in HTML 5 and deploy it to a native environment. Right now you can can get this course from Cult of Mac Deals for just $69 – a savings of 86%!

For the moment, the Apple doom-mongers have been silenced by another record quarter. But there’s one area where things are down, and still dropping. It’s the iPod division, and it’s the closest thing Apple has to a dead man walking.

Sales of the music player continue to plummet as more people buy iPhones than ever, and listeners move away from music downloads toward streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and iTunes Radio.

Should Apple ditch the iconic product line that first signaled Apple’s expansion beyond computers — or is there some way the business can be turned around?

Read on to find out where things currently stand.

Take this with a pinch of iSalt, perhaps, but a new set of alleged iPhone 6 renderings have surfaced online.

Hailing from the Ukrainian website UkrainianiPhone, they confirm a lot of what we’re already expecting — including the relocated sleep/wake button (moved to the side to make it more easily usable with the larger form factor) and a circular iSight flash.

One notable difference between this design and the mock-ups we’ve seen in the past, however, relates to the device’s rear shell. While previous renderings show a solid back cover, these shots suggest that Apple is leaving breaks in the chassis for the antenna.

We never thought they’d do it, but Apple is splitting their stock 7-to-1—and on our newest CultCast, we discuss that and other surprising (and non-boring) notes from their recent financial call. Plus, the best way to get the Apple stuff you want at lower prices; OS X betas now available to all; Apple Maps spots Nessie; Apple celebrates Earth Day with some great new marketing; why we’re crazy about Apple Campus 2; and forget Ashton, how about Leonardo DiCaprio as the next Steve Jobs?

LOL your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!

And thanks to our friends at New Relic for sponsoring this episode. Yes, New Relic, the all-in-one web application performance management tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code. Put simply, New Relic helps the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them. If you’re ready to make your software run better, head over to https://newrelic.com/cultcast for a free 30 day trial.

Click on for the show notes.

When Nike announced it was shutting down its FuelBand division and exiting the hardware business, many speculated that the company would be teaming up with Apple for the long-awaited iWatch.

Nike didn’t exactly do much to cool the rumors either — issuing a statement that claimed the two companies would “continue to partner on emerging technologies to create better solutions for all athletes.”

Now Nike Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker has poured more fuel on the fire, saying that sportswear company is committed to focusing on software, and is “excited” about its relationship with Apple.

SITU — a smart food scale created by a former Apple employee — is close to reaching its Kickstarter goal, and there’s still time to get involved.

An attractive Bluetooth scale which talks to your iPad, SITU works by showing you the exact nutrition content of any food you place on it — letting you see the exact number of calories, sugar, salt, protein, vitamins and minerals of whatever it is that you’re about to eat.

With just six days left to go, and £32,124 ($54K) already raised of the £35,000 ($59K) target, creator Michael Grothaus spoke with Cult of Mac about the project, and his history with Apple.

Does your iPhone 5 suffer from a dodgy power button? If so, Apple will repair it free of charge, according to a new announcement made by the company.

“Apple has determined that the sleep/wake button mechanism on a small percentage of iPhone 5 models may stop working or work intermittently,” Apple states. “iPhone 5 models manufactured through March 2013 may be affected by this issue.”

iPhone users experiencing the problem can visit Apple’s website, enter their phone’s serial number and — hey presto! — see if their device is one of the faulty ones Apple is referring to.

You know what time of year it is? Spring. And you know what kind of product is perfect to launch in your store during spring? According to the folks at Reign23 who sent me the PR email, the perfect spring accessory is gloves. Warm, hand-toasting gloves.

Or rather, a dab-on liquid which turns any gloves into touchscreen-friendly gloves.

I kinda like the little Modulo. It’s a set of battery packs for charging your gadgets, with the gimmick that they are stackable and work on concert, letting your tune the weight/power ratio depending on which gadgets you’re using, and how long you’ll be away from mains power.

They also look cool, like little game carts from the 1980s.

Wood. It’s just better.

This portable bluetooth speaker uses sustainable bamboo to wrap a pretty great little speaker up in the warm resonance of wood. Kickstarted and made by the folks at Otis & Eleanor, the Bongo portable bluetooth is capable and beautiful at the same time.

There are Bongo designs for everyone, some with dark brown stain, some with black, and some with no stain at all. The speaker grilles come in a variety of ’60s and ’70s-inspired fabric with colors straight out of your mom’s old living room. The unit we got to spend time with comes with brown, copper, gold and red tweed covered speakers and fits in just about any decor we can throw at it around the house. It also looks stunning in a hotel room, what with its classic retro look.

Remember the Slate Mobile AirDesk, which I described as resembling a “neatly-drilled chopping board”? Did you look at it and think “I like that. I could see myself using one of those, if only it was a little smaller, so I could carry it in my bag.”

If the answer to either of these is yes (or to the second question, mostly), then you will be ecstatic at the news of the SlateGo, a slightly smaller version of the laptop lap-desk.

You know the old saying: “Give a man a router, and he’ll turn a piece of wood into a perfectly-designed desk for the iPad-toting Mac user”?

Or was it “Give a man a router and he’ll set up a wireless network in your home office”?

No, wait, it was “Offer a man a router, and he’ll be forced to infer from context which device you mean to give him.”

Anyway, it’s a good saying, and it might apply to Artifox’s Desk 01, a desk which is equal parts beautiful and functional.

The Mobile Home is a one-thing-well kind of product. It connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth and lets you trigger Siri remotely. Which brings me to that excellent name – this is literally a mobile home button.

The portable battery from Halo is perfect for those times when I want to go stealth, keeping my iPhone 5 as free of those bulky, heavy battery cases as possible.

Between running levels of Hodappy Bird and checking Twitter for any vanity retweets, slapping photos of my meals up on Instagram and surreptitiously reading Facebook posts from ex-girlfriends, I am a battery killer.

With the Halo charger available, I found myself grabbing it and a lightning cable on my way out the door all the time, whether heading to the coffee shop or just for a quick bike ride along the Coastal Trail in Anchorage. It’s a perfect way to ensure I have the power I need on demand without strapping my iPhone into some fat case like the Mophie.

This is Leica’s new T, a camera with just a few buttons, and which is milled from a solid block of aluminum. Sound familiar? Hell, it even comes with a Smart Cover.

Specs-wise, this thing looks great, with Wi-Fi and a very clever way to add GPS. But I do worry about that lack of buttons.

Yesterday, often reputable Japanese Apple rumor site Macotakara reported that like Marilyn Monroe, the iPhone 6 could be curvy.

Specifically, they said that the iPhone 6 would have curved edges, compared to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5’s squared edges, as well as a curved display. The result would be a device that felt almost organic in the hand: an important consideration, given that, at 4.7-inches, the iPhone 6 will be more difficult for people to hold.

Today, famed Apple concept artist Martin Hajek has updated his iPhone 6 render based upon the ‘curvy’ rumor, and my god, does it look gorgeous. Check out more images after the jump.

In the past, we’ve seen at least one madman use his iPad as a cutting board. While the guy was clearly senile, it does raise an interesting point: the design of many Apple products, from the iPad to the Mac, look like they might have been inspired by cutting boards in Jony Ive’s kitchen.

If you’d like to show solidarity with the Cult of Mac in your kitchen, consider this: a cutting board made of Apple wood that is identical in shape and design with the unibody MacBook Pro. For a cutting board, it’s not cheap at $110, but on the positive side, that’s at least a grand cheaper than you’d buy a working aluminum MacBook Pro for.

More pics after the jump.

Remember the olden days when you had to phone up and order a pizza — or worse still, trudge down the road to go and pick one up in person?

Thankfully that dystopian past will be well and truly over come Monday, when Domino’s Pizza launches its new iPad app — which lets you build your own custom pizzas, and then order them for take-out and delivery from the comfort of your own couch.

Making this app particularly nifty is that the 3-D pizza builder uses rendering application OpenGL to give you a realistic photo-effect image of what your final pizza will (or should) look like upon delivery.

If you’re a Pinterest user, you may be interested in a new mobile app feature being rolled out by the photo-sharing site.

Called ‘Guided Search,’ the tool makes it easier to explore Pinterest when you’re not exactly sure what it is that you want to find.

Forget about a close run race — the iPad is absolutely obliterating Android tablets when it comes to web traffic stats.

The data, which comes from Chitika Insights, looks at the distribution of Web usage across leading tablet devices for early April 2014.

Based on a sampling of tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian tablet-based online ad impressions, it leaves no question who’s ruling the tablet roost.

Frogmind’s excellent Badland has just been updated — adding ten new levels to what was already a fantastic game.

For those who haven’t played it before, Badland is well worth downloading. It’s a flapping game, but one that will cleanse your palate of the sour (if slightly addictive) taste of Flappy Bird, thanks to its gorgeous graphics and well-designed level layouts.

Having turned over a new leaf when it comes sustainability, Apple is rightly proud.

So proud, in fact, that it made the surprisingly un-Apple move of opening the doors of its North Carolina data center to NBC’s show, to shine a focus on the building’s pioneering use of renewable energy.

Facebook has been on quite the buying spree lately. After snatching up Oculus VR, the social network is now acquiring a popular fitness tracking app for the iPhone. ProtoGeo Oy, the Finnish app maker behind Moves, announced today that it is joining Facebook.

The third episode in acclaimed adventure game The Wolf Among Us has just dropped on Steam, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and iOS, and –if the trailer below is any indication — it’s a doozy. Titled ‘A Crooked Mile,’ the new episode looks to raise the stakes for its main character, the detective in a city full of ex-patriate fairy tale characters.

It looks like Bigby Wolf is really working on the “bad” part of his better known moniker (The Big Bad Wolf) in this video game series based on the Eisner Award-winning Fables graphic novels by Bill Willingham and published by Vertigo Comics.

The trailer (below) is short on details but long on accolades as it shows Bigby tearing through the magical side of New York, dropping the F-bomb and getting very, very angry. Those red eyes aren’t a good sign for anyone.

Apple hasn’t shied from going toe-to-toe in a heavy legal battle for months or years if need be, but rather than seeing its latest class action lawsuit go to trial, Apple has relented to settle instead.

Four major tech companies including Apple and Google reached a settlement this morning with the 64,000 tech workers who filed a class action lawsuit on the grounds that the Silicon Valley firms had conspired to keep wages artificially low through no-hire agreements.