News - page 1348

Google Glass wearers who also use an iPhone will get a convenient update later this week.

As per a new post on the Google+ page for the device, the update will let iPhone users see text messages directly on Glass — without having to take the phone out of their pocket first. In Google’s words:

iOS fans, by popular demand you can now get texts from your friends on Glass. Get started by going to your iPhone’s Bluetooth settings and turning on “Show Notifications” for your paired Glass. When you receive a new text message, it will appear as a notification on Glass. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to reply from Glass due to some limitations with iOS. (Android fans, don’t feel left out – you’ve got SMS on Glass already.)

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If there are two things you’re likely to hear from Monument Valley players it’s this: “Wow, what an incredibly original game” and “That didn’t take long to complete.”

Both statements are totally factual. Ustwo’s puzzle game masterpiece is one of the most original games of the year, but also an experience that flies by all too quickly.

With that in mind, the developers have confirmed that they are, in fact, working on extra levels to bolster the game.

But they’re not just doing this for the sake of doing it. According to Neil McFarland, ustwo’s director of games:

Duck Dynasty fans rejoice, you can now binge on all the splendors America’s favorite hillbilly family has to offer from your Apple TV, but you’ll still need a cable subscription.

An Apple TV update this morning added new channels for the History Channel, Lifetime and A&E offering cable subscribers full access to a catalog of shows from Duck Dynasty, American Pickers, Vikings, Pawn Stars, and yes, even Project Runway.

Along with the new Apple TV app the History Channel and A&E apps for iOS were updated to include live-streaming of TV shows for subscribers, but if you don’t have a cable TV, Verizon FIOS or Direct TV subscription you can still enjoy previews of great hits like Dance Moms.

A video detailing the creation of Apple Campus 2 was released this morning featuring glimpses of the Spaceship’s architectural achievements in natural ventilation, renewable energy, trees regrowth, and other revolutionary tech that’s will make it one of the best office buildings in the world.

The video also features interviews of the people behind the campus, like architect Norman Foster, who tells the story of how Steve Jobs recruited him for the job of building Apple Campus 2 and how the project didn’t start as a circular building but grew into that as the intensive project progressed.

Check out the video below, before Apple takes it down:

Apple has released its latest commercial, and it’s a doozy.

Called “Better,” the ad (which is narrated by Tim Cook) refers to Apple’s work in terms of its environmental efforts — describing the company’s push to reduce its carbon footprint, conserve resources, and inspire others to follow suit.

Come July 1, Mac users running various older versions of OS X won’t have the ability to use their mac.com and me.com addresses to log into the AOL Instant Messaging service via iChat.

Apple says that users who want to take advantage of the service must upgrade to at least OS X Lion 10.7.2.

iOS devices might be ruining your child’s ability to play with building blocks, according to a recent report.

Members of the UK’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers claim that addiction to iPad and iPhones mean that children aged between 3 and 4 have no problem swiping a screen, but have difficulty understanding real space, and possess “little or no” dexterity in their fingers.

“I have spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks or the like, or the pupils who cannot socialize with other pupils but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone,” says teacher Colin Kinner.

If you’re the owner of a jailbroken iOS device, a new tweak can give you a wealth of better power down options… and even graft iOS 7.1’s new power down slider onto stock iOS 7, or give you back iOS 6’s power-off slider. Keen!

Apple has turned even the most modest weekend strummer into a guitar hero.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, our games editor and disco band frontman (!) Rob LeFebvre takes you on a magical mystery tour of Garageband’s latest and greatest features. He’ll walk you through a shiny new piece of kit called Drummer, plus get you ringtone making and learning from the pros in the Lessons store.

Rob has also kept his ear to the ground for all the other great gear you need to make your homegrown music making hit the right notes and, well, sound better. And definitely louder. Whether you’re rocking at home or taking your iPad with you on stage.

So. The beat goes on with Charlie Sorrel sifting through MacBook stands to single out the best, plus his picks for the best Apple-related gear and Buster Hein’s top choices from iTunes for music, books and movies you’ll be grooving to all week.

Cult of Mac Magazine

First unveiled in iOS 6, Apple Maps has been known to distort reality before, but can it conjure a mythical prehistoric beast from the waters of Loch Ness?

Cryptozoologists are saying yes. They are claiming that Apple Maps has finally located the elusive Loch Ness Monster!

Wall Street consensus is that when Apple announces its Q2 2014 quarterly earnings on Wednesday, Apple’s year-over-year iPad numbers won’t look good. On the low end, at least one Wall Street analyst says that Apple will have sold 23% fewer iPads this year than last year in the same quarter; on average, Wall Street expects Apple’s iPad sales to have declined 0.7% year-over-year.

How can this be? This is the year that Apple unveiled the Retina iPad mini and the beautifully redesigned iPad Air, after all. How is it possible that these iPads can be selling worse than the inferior iPads a year ago?

Ex-Apple exec Jean-Louie Gassée has a theory, and it’s not one that Apple fans are going to be happy to hear: the iPad is a big tease, and fundamentally less useful than both a smartphone or a laptop.

Every aspect of Facebook’s entire business is essentially designed to target ads. Is anyone surprised, then, that the social networking giant intends on launching its own mobile ad network, similar to Apple’s iAds?

One more way that Apple is challenging Google is by pushing for exclusive games on iOS, claims a new report.

The Wall Street Journal reports that as Android’s influence has grown, Apple has been offering games developers promotional perks — such as premium placement on their app store home pages — in exchange for first rights to particular titles.

Last August, Apple struck a deal with EA to receive a two-month exclusivity window for Plants vs. Zombies 2, which did not arrive on Android until November.

A similar deal saw the popular sequel to ZeptoLab’s puzzle game Cut the Rope arrive on iOS in December — but not make it to Android until late March this year.

Back in September, popular Youtuber Lewis Hilsenteger released a hands-on video of what he believed to be the outer shell of the iPad 5. The video exploded on the Internet, and six weeks later when Apple announced the iPad Air, it confirmed the parts were spot-on.

So how does someone get their paws on the parts of one of Apple’s most anticipated gadgets weeks before it’s announced? On this week’s CultCast, Hilsentenger is our guest — and he’s going to tell us exactly how he did it.

To be or not to be? That’s the question posed by Sometimes You Die, a game powered by existential angst that’s tearing up the charts.

The game — which is based on the question of how much of the gaming experience you can strip away and still have the end result be fun — has become the surprise hit of 2014, despite (or perhaps because of) its unusual take on life, death and the meaning of video games.

Now Philipp Stollenmayer, a 22-year-old developer who lives in the Netherlands, has opened his sketchbooks to show Cult of Mac how Sometimes You Die came to life.

A new malware campaign targetting users of jailbroken iOS devices has been discovered by reddit users.

Called “Unflod Baby Panda,” the malware hooks into all running processes of jailbroken devices and tries to steal their Apple ID and corresponding password.

Security firm SektionEins had the following to say about the malware:

[It] appears to have Chinese origin and comes as a library called Unflod.dylib that hooks into all running processes of jailbroken iDevices and listens to outgoing SSL connections.

From these connections it tries to steal the device’s Apple-ID and corresponding password and sends them in plaintext to servers with IP addresses in control of US hosting companies for apparently Chinese customers.

Nike is dismantling the hardware team behind its FuelBand fitness tracker, according to a new report from CNET.

The sportswear company, which features Tim Cook on its board of executives, reportedly fired between 70 and 80% of the 70-person hardware team on Thursday.

Despite being Cult of Mac’s resident comic book fan, I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

It has been nearly three months since Facebook launched Paper for iPhone, a cutting-edge experiment in what it means to use Facebook. Today Paper received its first big update in the App Store, and a few of the elements that were stripped out of Facebook in the original release have been added back.

Apple is still waging a legal war with Samsung, but the company is already bracing for a new battle that threatens to entangle Apple with its foes Google, Adobe and Intel against a pack of angry tech workers who say the four companies were in cahoots on a no-hire agreement.

According to the latest court filings, the 64,000 tech workers represented in the class-action lawsuit claim that Apple and the other companies should not be allowed to limit evidence about Steve Jobs in the upcoming trial, no matter how unsavory it may be.

Swann’s bottomless lineup of security and wifi cameras — the company even sells a camera that isn’t actually a camera — has just added a new model, with a unusual twist.

In addition to all the high-tech bells and whistles one might expect from a high-end wifi camera (like the ability to view the feed from an iOS or Android device through an accompanying app) the new SwannSecure also eddddcomes with its own wireless, 7-inch touchscreen monitor.

iPhone 6 component leaks have begun erupting up like wildfires the past week, setting the web ablaze with promises of a bigger iPhone, but according to some new leaked photos Apple is also tweaking the design of the iPad Air to be thinner than ever.

It’s looking like it might be a dreary quarter for Apple. Not only has iPhone growth pretty much leveled off, but most Wall Street analysts believe that when Apple announces its quarterly numbers, iPad sales will have actually declined year over year. Is Wall Street wrong?

It’s not often that a company announces that they’ve figured out a way to make people stop paying for a piece of hardware by purposely making it obsolete, but that’s just what Sonos has done.

Sonos has just announced that thanks to clever programming, they have figured out a way to make their $50 Sonos Bridge device — a gadget that plugs into your router to allows you to stream music in perfect sync to the Sonos speakers throughout your house — completely obsolete.

As a guy running upwards of seven miles a day to get in shape for his imminent nuptials, Runkeeper is my favorite exercise tracking app, but you have to consciously remember to use it. But Runkeeper now has a new trick up its sleeve: Breeze, an activity tracker that taps into your iPhone 5s’s M7 motion processor to subtly guide you into living a more active life.