News - page 1346

Like the world’s largest therapy session, social media is all about sharing our emotions. The team behind new Kickstarter project The Feeling Skin are hoping to build on that idea by combining a new social network based on emotion with a funky smartphone case, designed to help you stay in touch with friends.

The app lets you record short Vine-style videos, to which you can add either a “Mood Up” or a “Mood Down” emotion. A Mood Up, for instance, might be arriving at the airport for your holiday, while a Mood Down could be trudging to work in the rain on a Monday morning.

These videos can then be posted to the app’s network, along with Twitter and Facebook, for your friends to see.

What makes The Feeling Skin a bit different is its accompanying case designed for the iPhone 5/5s — which works with the app and glows different colors depending on your friends’ mood, thanks to a built-in LED. In addition you can ask your friends how they’re doing throughout the day by touching a “pulse” button on the back of the case.

Apple plans to add another iconic location to its list of NYC real estate properties, according to a new report from Gary Allen at Ifo Apple Store.

The newest store location will be at a magnificent former bank building on the Upper East Side of New York City that was designed by architect Henry O. Chapman and offers over 9,000 square-feet of space, plus a vault in the basement – perfect for storing early iPhone 6 shipment.

Imagine a game that mashes up the best of a classic strategy game like speed chess and a modern hit like League of Legends. If you do, you’ll probably come up with something like Aerena: Clash of Champions, a steampunk-themed turn-based strategy game that uses the hero mechanics of other massively online battle arena games like Dota 2 in a painstakingly created digital board game arena.

The game will go free-to-play this Wednesday on Steam (it’s already out for Android tablets — iOS versions to come soon), and is a great new gaming experience — we’ve been playing it all morning. It takes only a short while for the casual gamer to learn how to play, but there is enough strategy and balanced mechanics to give core players a ton of depth.

If you’re super savvy, though, you’ll grab the early access copy today for $10, which nets you a full $30 worth of downloadable content, extra heroes and more. Either way, Aerena is a brilliant game and deserves your attention.

A new exploit has been discovered in iOS 7.1.1 that lets anyone access your full contacts list and send an email, text or call — just by chatting with Siri.

Egyptian neurosurgeon and part-time hacker Sherif Hashim, apparently the first to discover the security hole, posted a YouTube video detailing the steps of the exploit.

Check out how easy it is for a prankster to hack your phone in the video below:

Mobile gaming is an ephemeral thing.

The unending stream of iOS games runs too fast and too fat for any individual to figure out which ones are worthy of your time and/or money. Freemium games? Check. Casual games? Sure. Hardcore games ported to your iOS device of choice? Plenty.

But which ones should you sit down and play right now? Our crack team of reviewers took a moment to call up the games they return to, day after day, when they feel like experiencing the finest the mobile gaming world has to offer. Above are the eight best iOS games you should download at this very moment.

The iOS App Store gold rush might be played out for all but the luckiest developers, but there’s another part of the Apple empire where coders can find breakout success: the Mac App Store.

“Compared to iOS, it’s definitely easier to have a hit in the Mac App Store,” says Andreas Hegenberg, the creator of successful gesture-based Mac app BetterTouchTool. “I think it’s still pretty easy to develop a Mac App Store app that can feed you very well. But it all depends on how you define a ‘big hit.'”

While games rule the increasingly cluttered roost in the iOS store — with many unimaginative developers looking to get rich quick with yet another Flappy Bird clone — the Mac App Store is home to more pedestrian offerings like accounting software and productivity tools.

The Mac App Store might not mint a new millionaire each day, but the developers we spoke with said writing this type of bread-and-butter software can provide a reliable source of income. Here’s why.

If you thought LinkedIn had cornered the market when it comes to employment social networks, think again!

New iOS app Jobr hopes to make careers by letting you “Swipe, Chat, & Discover Your Dream Job!” Instead of searching for positions online, sending in resumes, and then waiting for someone to call you back (or not), the app brings together job applicants and hiring managers in more of an informal social network-type environment.

If video killed the radio star, then the iPod helped kill the cassette tape.

Although perhaps not permanently enough.

According to new reports, Sony has developed a new magnetic tape capable of holding 148GB of data per square inch — meaning that if spooled into a cartridge, each tape would boast an astonishing 185TB worth of storage. To put that into context, it’s the equivalent of 3,700 dual-layer 50GB Blu-rays.

Are you sitting down? Because this news may shock you.

With the iWatch reportedly set to arrive later this year, noted original thinkers Microsoft recently published a patent related to its own dive into the Wonderful World of Wearables™.

Amazingly enough, Microsoft’s plans suggest the company is planning to take on the previously uncharted waters of fitness tracking — with a somewhat familiar-sounding device capable of keeping tabs on the wearer’s pulse, displaying the number of calories burns during a workout, and measuring distance traveled.

Telltale Games has released the first in-game screenshots of its upcoming Borderlands spinoff, Tales from the Borderlands, and do they ever look pretty!

A mash-up of first-person shooter and adventure game, Cult of Mac last shared details on Tales from the Borderlands earlier this year, when we reported on an announced panel with its creators taking place at SXSW.

What is known about the game is that it takes place after the events of Borderlands 2, and also from the point of view of two characters: Hyperion employee Rhys and con-artist named Fiona.

Like other Telltale games it will be an episodic release, with individual episodes setting you back $4.99 each, or less if you choose to buy a season pass. How you act in individual episodes of the game will influence how the overarching story plays out, while loot collected in the game will also reportedly be available in “other areas of the Borderlands franchise.”

It’s been a long wait for Angela Ahrendts to finally join Apple, but as the new VP of Retail just took office last week, Apple decided to make her move from fashion to tech much sweeter by granting her stock options worth a whopping $68 million.

Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs console game is hoping to upend the traditional boundaries between single- and multi-player gaming, allowing you to hack into other players’ games on the fly, earning experience and renown points which you can then use to level up your own character’s skill levels.

The game was a huge surprise at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and has since been getting a ton of attention from gamers and the press as the May 27 release date looms.

Even better, you’ll be able to interact with the very same game and players via a free mobile app, letting you increase the heat on rogue players, as you can see in this fairly long and detailed play through video below. Sure, the video is ridiculously longer than most gamer’s attention spans, but it’s well worth a look.

For the second time in a row Samsung has been found guilty by a U.S. court of ripping off Apple’s patents, but according to the jury foreman in the latest Apple vs Samsung case, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence or testimony that sealed Samsung’s fate.

Jury members met with the media after being dismissed Monday morning, including ex-IBM executive and jury foreman Thomas Dunham, who said the revelation that Google agreed to protect Samsung from damages on a couple of patents in the trial was the biggest shocker of all.

AAPL shares have been extremely undervalued for years, according to CEO Tim Cook, but it looks like Wall Street is starting to warm on Apple as the share price crested above $600 this afternoon for the first time since 2012.

After hitting an all-time high of $702.10 in September 2012, Apple’s stock has failed to regain its old luster despite record iPhone sales and earnings. Tim Cook announced last month that the stock would be split 7-to-1 in June, sending shares prices on a steady climb since hitting $524 per share the day after the announcement.  

Tweetdeck, now an official Twitter app, is one of those social networking clients with a ton of features that may be a bit of overkill if you’re a casual user. It’s got a columnar interface with tons of customizability, letting you decide what, specifically, shows up in each column.

If you’ve got multiple accounts on the big bird service you might want to save some column space by merging all your accounts into the columns you’re interested in.

A story was widely circulated throughout the blogosphere last week about a rumor that Apple’s next EarPods would feature biometric sensors for reading health vitals. The “leak” was originally posted on Secret, an anonymous sharing platform, by someone claiming to be an ex-Apple employee.

The info had no way of being verified, but that didn’t stop it from appearing in everywhere from major U.S. tech blogs to news outlets in the U.K. Now the creator of the rumor has come out and admitted that he made it all up while on the toilet.

Apple came out on top of its legal battle against Samsung in U.S. federal court last week, and even though the iPhone-maker was ordered to pay a small fee to Samsung, the jury came back to the courthouse in San Jose CA this morning to award more damages to Apple.

The federal jury awarded Apple $4 million in additional damages this morning, after it was discovered last week that one Samsung product violated one patent, but the jury failed to award damages.

Despite Apple’s claims that email attachments are safely locked away with data encryption in iOS 7, a new report has found that all your email attachments have been vulnerable and unencrypted for months.

What Amazon taketh away, Amazon also giveth.

One week after enraging comic nerds everywhere by removing the option to purchase titles within its ComiXology iOS app, Amazon has made it easier than ever purchase products thanks to a snazzy new Twitter feature.

From this point on  — provided you live in either the U.S. or UK — whenever a customer discovers a tweet from their favorite artist, brand, friend, etc. featuring an Amazon product link, they can simply add “#AmazonCart” to their reply and that product is added to their Amazon.com Shopping Cart. (UK customers must add #AmazonBasket instead.)

This week we check out the best iPhone cases for using underwater. And seeing as the only reason to take an iPhone underwater is to snap pictures, we’re looking specifically at the camera capabilities.

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

Every week, we serve up the best of the website as a magazine so you can download an read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.

This week Buster Hein foraged for the best in movies, books and music in the iTunes store, his picks include an album of flamenco-rockin goodness, plus a haunting Southern drama and a riveting nonfiction book how the modern office got “cubed.” We also review the best in apps as well as take a look at the best minimalist iPhone cases and the most awesome Apple-related gadgets we found this week.

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

Want a wacky stat to start your Monday? According to a new poll by YouGov, iPhone owners are the most likely smartphone users to send “sexts.”

Apparently, more than 30% of iPhone users have sent explicit messages at some point, compared to 21% of Blackberry users, and 17% of people with a Samsung device.

Apple has donated $500K to the anti-poverty initiative SF Gives, according to people close to the matter.

Launched in March this year, SF Gives is the joint venture of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Daniel Lurie, CEO of the nonprofit Tipping Point. Their goal is to get 20 businesses to contribute $500,000 each to fund local charitable programs.

Of course, when you’ve got more money in the bank than the gross domestic product of the whole of Luxembourg, giving $500K to charity isn’t exactly breaking the bank. But it’s interesting because it shows a public commitment to charity in line with Tim Cook’s vision for Apple as a philanthropic “force for good” in the world.

Have you ever dreamed of swiping up instead of across on your smartphone to unlock it — a whole new way of doing things that is totally unlike the iPhone standard?

No, this isn’t a leaked memo from Samsung’s R&D department, but rather a new tweak available to jailbreakers free of charge in the Cydia Store, optimized for iOS 7 and ARM64-devices.

Called SlideUP2Unlock, the tweak more or less does what it says on the tin: getting rid of the Lock screen camera shortcut in favor of allowing you to use upwards swipe gestures to unlock your iPhone.

Most people these days have a spare, old and unused iPhone or iPod touch gathering dust somewhere in a drawer, but it’s time to breathe new life into your retro Apple device by updating it to iOS 7 … almost.

Cult of Mac’s Ste Smith shows you how to install Whited00r onto your Apple device to bring it back to the future so you can use your iPhone 2G or 3GS as a spare, or an old iPod touch as your main MP3 Player.

Make sure to subscribe to the Cult of Mac YouTube channel for all the new videos coming seven days a week.