News - page 1358

Faster than a speeding bullet, ComiXology has scaled the ranks in the App Store in what seems like a single bound.

As one of last year’s top-grossing iPad apps, the digital comics platform has sold an astonishing 6 billion comic book pages since its 2009 debut — 4 billion of those coming in 2013 alone.

In helping revive an industry that was almost dead on its feet, ComiXology has done for comics what iTunes did for legal music downloads.

At the height of its success, it’s now been snatched up by Amazon for an undisclosed amount of money — prompting the question of whether Apple has missed out. (Particularly when taking into accounts the reports that Amazon is reportedly set to debut a smartphone of its own — capable of busting out 3-D.)

After all, ComiXology’s CEO David Steinberger has always had big ambitions. He once wrote that his “crazy goal” was to turn everyone on the planet into a comic reader. Sounds just like Steve Jobs.

Before the acquisition, CEO David Steinberger told Cult of Mac ComiXology’s backstory and its deep ties to Apple.  Sometimes the Cupertino company has acted as its Krypton-esque home planet, and other times more like its Lex Luthor-style nemesis.

Ready for ComiXology’s secret origin story?

By now you’ve heard all about the catastrophic Heartbleed bug and how it has siphoned passwords, credit card numbers, emails and other data to the vampires who would drain all of us dry. From your love life (OKCupid) to your tax returns, there’s a lot at stake.

Since 66% of web servers are vulnerable to the bug, that means you’re faced with only task more fun than decluttering the garage: changing your passwords.

To help you on your password resetting chores, we’ve compiled the best tools to make the process as quick and painless as possible. Also, they’ll sync your new passwords to your iPhone — all in under 10 minutes. Leaving you time to watch Silicon Valley again.  You’re welcome.

Here’s how:

Imagine a world where you can summon a drone from your iPhone like an Uber car. Flying minions help you navigate traffic and find where to eat. It’s a futuristic kind of reality that feels pretty cool and scary at the same time.

Gofor was created as a concept to explore what an on-demand drone service would look like for normal people. While the service is obviously not real, the finished product is packaged together so well that it almost seems possible.

It has been months since I opened Reeder, my longtime app of choice for RSS. I don’t have anything personal against Reeder, it’s just that RSS has lost a lot of its appeal for me. Twitter is where I mainly get my news now.

Reeder 2 for Mac, which launches as a public beta today, might just make me give RSS a second chance.

I’m not usually a big fan of the whole “do it over and over until you get it right” genre of games typified by the Trials series of games, but this one has me hooked. Developed by RedLynx and now published by Ubisoft, the latest version of the game is also the first on mobile: Trials Frontier. You can grab it for free now for your iPad or iPhone.

Like all of the other installments in the series, Frontier is all about piloting a motorcycle with a rag-doll rider through increasingly intense tracks with jumps, loops and environmental hazards.

Here’s a quick gameplay video to show you how it works.

A good challenge every now and then is great to keep your mind fresh and alert. While many developers release new games every week, only some are able to give players the difficulty their minds ask for. Sinkers is a new strategy puzzle game where players have 20 moves to try and obtain the highest score removing colored cube like bits from the screen. With bits turning hollow and players having to sink them to keep moving, do you think you can play well enough to top the high-score charts?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

Queue the spy music, cause on this week’s CultCast, our very own Buster Heine sneaks into Apple’s under-construction Arizona Sapphire Crystal factory and reports back what he’s found. Plus, WWDC dishes out golden tickets like they’re Willy Wonka; what you can do about HeartBleed; all that’s been revealed in the ongoing Apple V. Samsung trial; and you asked, so we answer: why we love Apple but would never want to work there.

Hem and haw 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 our thanks to iFixit for supporting this episode. You’ve seen iFixit’s amazing tear downs of the hottest tech and gadgets, but did you know you can use their free step-by-step repair guides to fix virtually anything? Check them out at iFixit.com/cultcast, and save $10 off their excellent Pro Tech Toolkit with code “CultCast” at checkout.

Click on for the show notes.

Technology group Kudelski has become the latest company to file a patent lawsuit against Apple.

Kudelski’s OpenTV and Nagravision subsidiaries are claiming that Apple is infringing on five of its U.S. patents in pretty much every product under the sun — including iOS devices, Apple TV, the App Store, iTunes, iADS, Safari, and Macs running OS X.

Back in the heady days of 1996 — when Apple shares were worth less than the cost of a VHS tape of Independence Day — one of the many awful ideas the company came up with was to latch onto the then-popular trend for theme restaurants, by announcing the debut of Apple Computer cybercafes.

These were supposed to start in Los Angeles, before eventually spreading over the entire world.

Needless to say, they never happened — but if they had done, they may have served pizzas bearing the face of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. (Or possibly not, since he wasn’t with the company at the time.)

Either way, if you’ve been waiting for the past two decades to finally have an edible snack in the form of Apple’s late co-founder and CEO, you may want to buy a plane ticket to take you to Papa’s Pizza restaurant in Puerto Rico, where pizza artist Wilhelm Rodriguez can whip you up a pizza pie like the above.

Have a great app idea written down in a notebook that would make you a millionaire if only you could turn it into a working prototype? (Sure you do!)

Marvel is a great iPhone app that lets you take sketches and turn them into a free prototype, by applying “hotspots” to your images and then letting you link these hotspots with other photos to create a demo you can tap your way through.

Got a tough, possibly life-changing ethical decision to make? Why not make your iPhone part of the decision-making process?

A recently released app called Ethical Decision Making lets you work through your options by prompting you to identify the people who have a stake in your decision, consider your options through five different ethical perspectives, weigh different approaches, and score and rank potential decisions.

When last summer solstice we heard tell of the legend that Microsoft was planning to bring ye olde strategy franchise Age of Empires to iOS, we did rejoice greatly.

Today scouts from the Pacific Northwest (read: Redmond, WA) have traveled to bring tidings, and moving pictures, of the game known as Age of Empires: World Domination.

I like this Hammerhead Lightning cable for two reasons: it’s red, and the cable is flat. Actually, make that three reasons – it’s called the Hammerhead, like the frikkin shark.

Gusto is yet another iPhone email app that promises to fix your email, and it looks pretty good. It’s Gmail-only and iPhone-only, and its gimmick is that it separates your mail messages into categories according to their attachments. It also has killer search capabilities.

There’s something totally perverse about putting a crappy Lomo lens on your Leica M-series camera. After all, the Leica might be a glorious box which makes it super easy to take great pictures, but it really is just a box for holding Leica’s extraordinary lenses.

Thankfully, the new Lomo Russar+ also fits other bodies, using adapter mounts.

Ever looked at a column of numbers on your Mac’s screen and wished that they would just add themselves together already? I do. Ever since my “special” cat died, I’ve been adding things up manually.

My cat, who was called “Rain Cat,” used to take one look at a page full of numbers, twitch its cute little head a few times, and then tap out the answer with its paw. Admittedly, getting the answer usually took longer than doing it myself on a pocket calculator, and sometimes Rain Cat would fall asleep in the middle of a particularly long answer, but it was pretty convenient most of the time.

Now, Rain Cat can be replaced with Brett Terpstra’s Total Number service.

Here’s how to do Spotify voice search on the iPhone or iPad.

1. Tap the search field in Spotify
2. Tap the Siri dictate button on the keyboard
3. Say the name of whatever you wan to hear
4. Tap Siri button again
5. Browse results.

Alternatively you can buy the new Vela app for $0.99, and skip all the tedious screen tapping.

Oh man, I just can’t wait for this week to be over. First the entire Internet turns out to have been broken for the last two years. Then Dropbox hires Condoleezza “Cruella de Vil” Rice to help out with security. And now Amazon has bought out ComiXology, the digital comic book store/platform.

I’m ready for the weekend.

T-Mobile’s new deal on LTE iPads is a doozy. The ‘Uncarrier’ is shaking things up again by offering LTE iPads for the price of their WiFi-only counterparts. And on top of that, more free data is involved.

Apple released a new update for its iMovie for Mac video editing software today that adds a number of tweaks, bug fixes, and a small sampling of new features.

iMovie version 10.0.3 is the third small update since the app was received a big update last fall, but new improvements are mostly minor with new sorting options, adjustable font sizes and colors, and better speed effects.

Here’s a rundown of the changes:

Heartbleed sent the web reeling with the discovery that the catastrophic security hole quietly left passwords and other private data open for the taking on nearly 66% of the Internet’s servers.  Luckily for Apple customers, iOS and OS X were never vulnerable to Heartbleed but some of the most popular sites and services on the Internet weren’t so lucky.

Many companies are still working to patch their hole, but Mashable has compiled a list of the biggest sites hit by Heartbleed. There’s no way to tell if your info was actually snatched by attackers, but if you have account on the following sites that were affected and subsequently patched, you should change your password ASAP:

Fancy building your own glittering high-tech utopia, or a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis?

Either way, gamers will be happy to know that SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition today became available for download, exclusively in the Mac App Store. Combining both SimCity 4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack — which adds bonus disasters like UFO attacks and Autosaurus Wrecks — the game is a steal at $19.99.

Apple has confirmed that none of its products, including web services like iCloud.com, are vulnerable to the nasty Heartbleed web bug that was recently uncovered.

Heartbleed allows hackers to intercept sensitive traffic and steal information like logins from websites using OpenSSL encryption. So when you visit a website with a little padlock in the address bar and think you’re safe, you maybe aren’t.

Monument Valley is one of the most original iOS games ever. A triumph of isometric design, it’s a trippy puzzle game in which you guide a white-clad princess through a series of twisting, turning structures, inspired by the mind-bending art of M.C. Escher.

Creating a world of this complexity might sound like a nightmare project, but for the UK-based game developers at ustwo, coming up with such an audacious creation was something of a dream.

“One of the first things we did when designing Monument Valley were to try and come up with images that seemed impossible,” says lead designer Ken Wong.

Still reeling from the success of the game — priced at $3.99, it was the top paid iPad app in its first week of release — Wong cracked open his sketchbooks to give Cult of Mac readers a glimpse at how Monument Valley‘s breathtaking designs came to be.

Here’s what we found.

We’ve heard multiple reports that Apple will release a larger-screen iPhone 6 (possibly in two different sizes), but who really wants a bigger iPhone with a larger screen anyway? Actually, a lot of people: as much as 40% of prospective smartphone buyers are chomping at the bit for a bigger iPhone.