News - page 1350

Don’t Starve is a brilliant yet brutal video game that will not hold your hand as it leads you inexorably toward a messy, starving death.

Until now, it’s been a single-player affair, which just reinforces the theme of loneliness present in every ticking second of each of the in-game days and nights.

Klei Entertainment, at the frantic urging of its fan base, is finally bringing a final feature to the game that we all wanted: a shared experience.

This summer, we can huddle together with other players, avoiding the rampaging hounds of doom and giant tree monsters bent on our destruction in ecstatic togetherness.

Katie Cotton, the woman in charge of Apple’s worldwide corporate communications is undocking from the mothership after nearly two decades of service at Apple, according to a report from Re/code.

Cotton has been one of Apple’s top ranking female VPs since joining the company 18 years ago and has been crucial in shaping the media narrative around pretty much every product from the iPod to the iPad.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling had the following to say about Cotton’s departure:

Thanks to its gorgeous aluminum construction and Gorilla Glass display, the iPhone 5s is one of the strongest, most robust flagship smartphones money can buy. If you drop it from a reasonable height, there’s a good chance it will remain in one piece — even if it’s not wearing a case.

But Jony Ive’s aluminum is no match for the crushing machine in the video below, which uses 40,000 pounds of force to make a sturdy iPhone 5s crumble like cookies.

Hollywood loves Apple almost as much as it loves itself.

The passionate affair burned for decades before Samsung came snapping celebrity selfies with Ellen at the Oscars and dishing out enough paid endorsements to finance the next Star Wars trilogy.

Apple plans to fight back with its own buzz marketer in New York to keep its products in the hands of the elite and glamorous. But Cupertino has never had a problem getting its products on the big screen and into the coolest TV shows — even though Apple swears it doesn’t pay a dime for product placements. Here are 18 of the most iconic Apple cameos to hit the screen.

Do you work in tech? Then why are you wasting your time on a blog rather than doing what you should be doing: coming up with “fresh” new ways to parody Apple.

To prove it is one of the boys, San Francisco ride-sharing service Lyft just dropped its latest commercial, featuring a “me too” impression of Jony Ive.

When the iPhone 5s was announced as featuring Touch ID, you could have been forgiven for assuming that the iPad Air and iPad mini would naturally follow suit. Like original thinking from Samsung, however, it never quite materialized — and to this date Apple’s flagship iPhone is the only Apple device to incorporate the technology.

That may be set to change with the arrival of the next generation iPad Air and iPad mini, though.

Every year at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, a million and one business cards get handed out. Most end up in a desk drawer or, worse, the circular file. But last year one card stood out.

This glass business card is made from an actual iPhone screen, sourced from Foxconn’s factories in China. The lettering is laser-etched into the hardened Gorilla Glass — a very complex process.

The card belongs to an Apple engineer, who hung it on a lanyard around his neck. Everywhere he went, people pawed at it.

“Everyone was grabbing it asking him, ‘How the heck did you do that?'” said the card’s creator, who made a batch of 10 for the engineer.

The first question we had when we got our hands on one was, where do we put in our order? Unfortunately, that ain’t gonna happen.

Less than four months after relaunching the iPhone 4 in India, Apple has decided to ditch the strategy and take the phone off the market again.

The January move had made the iPhone 4 one of the cheapest unsubsidized iPhones in the world, with the aim of growing market share by appealing to a percentage of the population who would not usually be able to afford iPhones.

If you’re a fan of strategy simulation games, you’ll probably already know the Anno series, which arrived on PC back in the heady days of 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise since then.

Developers Ubisoft recently announced that they will be bringing an original entry to the series to iPad, later this year. Called Anno: Build an Empire, you’ll begin by colonizing an uninhabited island, which you then harvest for resources, eventually building your way up to fully-fledged civilization — with various colonized islands under your control, which you can trade between.

Leo’s Fortune is one of those games that just makes you feel good. 

It definitely gave Apple the warm fuzzies: they chose the game, which looks like a mashup between a Pixar movie and a classic platformer from the Super Mario World era, as their first “game of the month” for iPhone.

Still reeling from the breakout success of the $4.99 game, designer Anders Hejdenberg spoke about the origins of Leo’s Fortune, why passion projects are best, how market research ruins creativity, and the reason the best teams are small ones. He also gave us exclusive access to pictures showing the game’s journey from page to iOS screen.

Want to find out more? In true platformer style, there’s more after the jump…

Pegatron has reportedly received orders from Apple to start production on the iPhone 6. According to Taiwan’s Industrial and Commercial Times, the supplier will be producing around 15% of Apple’s upcoming 4.7-inch handsets, ahead of their launch in September.

As good as the experience of shopping in a physical Apple Store undoubtedly is, Apple’s also making major leaps in its online sales business.

According to new data released by e-commerce research firm Internet Retailer, Apple had a great 2013: not only overtaking Staples to become the No. 2 online retailer, but actually growing faster than Amazon.

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.