News - page 1359

While iOS 8 has seen tons of improvements — from FaceTime call waiting to the ability to purchase iTunes content using Siri — there’s one area that hasn’t seen a major overhaul: Apple Maps.

Although the new version of Maps does now offer vector maps and other improvements in China, as well as a feature designed to give owners the ability to add more indoor positioning data, this was reportedly nowhere near what Apple originally had planned for the next version of its mobile OS.

Over the past year we’ve reported on various map-related patents which seemed like they would land on iOS before long, related to innovations such as user customizable maps. There’s also been plenty of talk regarding major under-the-hood changes to improve map accuracy; adding more points of interest; overhauling labels to make locations like airports, highways and parks easier to find; changing the overall map interface to make it cleaner; and adding public transit directions.

So why didn’t anything like this happen? According to sources the problems may have been the result of internal politics and generally chaotic project management.

More pictures of what is allegedly a shell for the upcoming iPhone 6 have surfaced, and if legitimate, they show the exterior design of the device in more detail than we’ve seen before.

There have been rumors, leaked design schematics, and more recently a single shot of another shell that was purportedly for the unreleased device. These new photos show not only the back, but the side of the shell in detail. It looks like Apple is making some design changes to accommodate a larger display.

The Kickstarter campaign for Hyper’s iStick, which surpassed an original goal of $100,000 in just three hours, is currently racing toward $1,000,000 with only eight days left.

With so much interest in the iStick, a USB flash drive with a Lightning connector, we had to take it for a test drive. Watch our video to see what you think. You can keep an eye on Hyper’s Kickstarter, which ends June 17, here.

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Based on the sheer amount of biotech experts it’s been hiring, the fact that Apple has its eyes set on the health and fitness tracking sector is one for the “Cupertino’s Worst Kept Secrets” file. But after tons of speculation about the iWatch, Monday’s WWDC keynote provided a first glimpse of an actual Apple creation in this category with its upcoming Health app for iOS 8.

Then Apple dropped a brand new ad for the iPhone 5s, adding a sporty spin to the company’s current trend for showing Apple products used in real-life scenarios in its commercials. If you’re anything like us, it makes you think two things. Firstly, that Apple will revolutionize the health tracking field like it did the personal computer, music player, smartphone and tablet market. Secondly, that we need to hurry up and drop the flab for summer.

With that in mind, here are our picks for the best iOS-compatible fitness devices currently on the market — including the skinny on specific gadgets from the latest iPhone ad (which, incidentally, had fitness-tracking watches conspicuous by their absence.)

Let us know in the comments what tracking gear you’re using and what you hope Apple will provide next.

Apple could be looking to make the Maps app more of a social experience. TechCrunch reports that Apple has bought Spotsetter, a service that let users search for places based on recommendations from friends.

Spotsetter worked kind of like Foursquare, expect that it pulled from a host of other social networks, including Twitter and Facebook. The startup allegedly had big plans for wearables as well, which could bode well for an imminent iWatch.

Wow! This year’s WWDC keynote was one of the most important in years, and on this week’s CultCast, we unpack all the new features announced for Yosemite and iOS 8, and tell you which ones we can’t believe we ever lived without. Plus, with so many new developer APIs and a whole new programming language, we think Apple in on the verge of something big, and if you thought they had cool products before… well, hold on to your butts.

Snicker 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 uproarious good time commence.

And thanks to Lynda.com for supporting this episode! Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

When my kids and I walked into a coffee shop one sunny day last month, we were greeted by a row of tables holding laptops with gaming demos.

My son gravitated toward the biggest display, a huge TV screen with a giant, face-obscuring set of goggles set in front of it. This was the Oculus Rift, the latest fad gaming device that places two stereoscopic images in front of your eyes to simulate virtual reality.

He slid the massive black eyewear onto his face, picked up the connected Xbox controller, and started moving his head around. The rest of us could see the game on the TV — an abstract shooting gallery in three dimensions, with my boy at the center, first-person style.

After about five minutes of waving his head around and pressing buttons on the controller, my son pushed the goggles up and off his head and said, “Dad, I think I’m going to be sick.”

Gameloft’s previous Spider-Man games have been pretty fun, even if they’ve also been plagued by enough in-app purchases to well and truly set off our spider-sense (or, at least, overdraft fee alerts). With E3 coming up next week, Gameloft and Marvel have announced a brand new Spider-Man game called Spider-Man Unlimited, based on the Marvel comic of the same name.

This game is set to take the character of Spider-Man and place him into an endless runner scenario, with the developers promising that:

Before fingers throbbed from marathon Candy Crush sagas, before Flappy Bird zoomed across iPad screens from Palo Alto to Manila, there was Tetris — and Stephen Gary Wozniak was its king.

Thirty years ago today, a Russian programmer named Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov created the massively popular and horrifically addictive game that became the first U.S.S.R. video game export to the United States. In a recent Gizmodo article celebrating Tetris’ popularity, Woz jumped into the comments to wax nostalgic about his love for Game Boy Tetris and shot of a little brag on his wizard-like skills at the game.

Just how damn good was he? I’ll let the champ speak for himself:

Brothers Denis and Davor Mikan make it look easy. They created a memorable and graphically beautiful puzzler called Blek that rocketed to the top of the paid game chart in the iOS App Store, making them millions in the process. Deceptively simple — with a nod to 60s pop art — the game caught the attention of Apple, too, which recently handed them a Design Award in recognition.

“It may sound simple, but it’s the Apple kind of simplicity that actually takes a lot of work,” Denis Mikan says of the game he co-created.

“It may sound simple, but it’s the Apple kind of simplicity that actually takes a lot of work.”

The idea behind Blek is ingeniously straightforward. At its simplest you draw a line on screen, and then this line repeats itself over and over until it encounters a black dot, or goes outside of the screen borders and resets. Draw the line slowly and it moves slowly, draw it fast and it moves fast. Your aim is to clear the screen of colored dots without accidentally touching a black one. But from small acorns grow mighty oaks, and since Blek arrived in the App Store a few months ago it has received close to a million downloads at $2.99 each.

Still reeling from their breakout success, Mikan told us about Blek‘s unlikely odyssey from the brothers’ hometown of Vienna, Austria, into the hearts of iOS gamers around the world. Befitting the game they brought into the world, their journey was hardly a straight line.

As months have passed since Apple’s last keynote revealing any official news to look forward to, this week they’ve broken their silence. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and many other official representatives revealed details on upcoming software, in the forms of OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. Take a look at the video to see a complete guide to of all of this week’s news and be sure to return next week for another.

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The sad part of buying a new console is not having enough games to play on it. That’s been the case with all three new next generation gaming machines released recently, but the trend is perhaps most noticeable with Sony’s new box, the PlayStation 4.

I purchased Sony’s hot new console on the day it came out, but the number of big new games I can run on it can easily be counted on one hand.

Sony looks to fill this gap next week at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and it’s just released a staggeringly huge list of games (much bigger than the usual console-style announcement we’ve seen in years past) that we can look forward to seeing at their booth on the show floor, including over 40 games for the PlayStation 4 console itself.

Imagine calling into AppleCare, pissed off that your iPad’s display is freezing, again. You’re ready to obliterate the schmucks at the call center with a hadouken ball of fury, but when the line is finally answered, you’re disarmed by the sweet southern charm of Apple’s lovable CEO.

That’s what happened to a couple of customers calling into AppleCare yesterday in Austin, Texas as Tim Cook and Eddy Cue took a tour of the new facilities, fixed up some Mac Pros, and even fielded a few calls themselves.

Get ready, because the iWatch is coming this fall—October, to be exact.

Corroborating another report from earlier today, Re/code confirms that Apple’s “first, long-in-the offing foray into wearable devices” is indeed slated for October of this year. The publication’s sources have been spot on with future Apple event dates in the past.

Six years after Apple pioneered what it means to be a mobile app, the company has reinvented the concept in iOS 8.

Thanks to what the company calls Extensibility, iOS 8 can let apps talk to one another and work together like never before. Once developers figure out how to implement their newfound flexibility, apps won’t just be apps anymore. They will become tools and services. Not just silos that can’t communicate, but pipes feeding into each other.

“Extensibility is tremendously interesting, and it’s fair to say developers have hoped for something like this practically since day one,” said David Chariter of AgileBits, makers of 1Password. Developers like AgileBits see iOS 8 as a sign that mobile apps will become not only smarter, but more powerful in their ability to aid users.

OS X Yosemite is the biggest visual overhaul Apple’s made to the Mac in years, but developers at WWDC seemed most excited about one tiny UI tweak – dark mode.

Beta testers eager to try out the the new OS X 10.10 feature were disappointed to find out it didn’t make it into the first Yosemite beta, but our friend Jean-David Gadina, from the DiskAid developers team, has done some digging into the OS X Yosemite beta and discovered a new file not present in Mavericks that can be manipulated to enable the hidden dark mode feature.

Here’s how to do it:

Apple’s long awaited and heavily rumored iWatch is set to land in stores and on wrists this October, according to a new report from Japanese business newspaper Nikkei.

Unnamed sources tell the paper that Apple has begun finalizing specs for the device, which will feature a curved OLED touchscreen and run a version of iOS 8. In keeping with Apple’s push into fitness and health tracking, as seen through the announcement of its upcoming Health app and API for iOS 8, the device will allegedly use biometric sensors to collect health-related data such as calorie consumption, sleep activity, blood oxygen levels, and more.

A Twitter account claiming to be run by superstar Apple exec Craig Federighi has been tweeting and retweeting as if it’s run by Hair Force One himself during WWDC. It has amassed more than 14,000 followers in less than two weeks and looks legit at first glance, but don’t be fooled.

We’re pretty sure it’s a fake — and we’ve seen an email that appears to confirm our suspicions.

Eric is a Stormtrooper who escaped the exploding Death Star and wound up on Earth.

Now he wears jeans, enjoys lavender-scented bubble baths, drinks Johnnie Walker whisky and sings a song about his tomato allergy.

No longer a member of the Galactic Empire guard, Eric serves as muse to British photographer Darryll Jones, a self-described 39-year-old child who has turned his fondness for toys — especially Star Wars action figures — into a Force on Instagram.

“I have always loved toys,” said Jones, a food and lifestyle photographer who does work for the Tesco supermarket chain when he’s not taking pictures of toys. “I recall quite vividly setting up little dioramas in my room or in the garden and playing out the scenes in my mind, imagining that the little plastic figures could come alive.”

Although we’re living through something of a golden age for original iOS games (think Monument Valley and Leo’s Fortune), it’s also a great time for iPhone gamers because we’re seeing ports of so many classic games making their way into the App Store. The latest is Capcom’s tremendous 2008 video game Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, which has just been announced as being set to arrive on iOS in the near future.

Promising a near-exact replica of the PSP title, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite will nonetheless optimize the monster-slaying experience for touch controls, as well as offering support for MFi (Made for iPhone) gamepads and improved graphics. In addition there’s set to be an online multiplayer mode, which is a big part of the game’s appeal.

Since the airing of Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial to launch the Macintosh, tech companies have had a special relationship with the Super Bowl. Now Apple is one of several tech giants — including Google, Yahoo and Intel — which have chipped in $2 million each in cash and services to help offset taxpayer dollars involved with bringing the historic 50th Super Bowl to the San Francisco 49ers stadium in Santa Clara, California.

Carriers in Mexico are no longer allowed to make use of the word “iPhone,” according to a new report from the Mexican publication El Universal. The news outlet reports that the ruling comes from the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI)and is based on the fact that the phonetically identical sounding “iFone” trademark is already owned by a small call center in Mexico. The trademark has been held since 2003 — four years before Apple released its first generation iPhone.

While Apple was acquitted as being at fault in the case, due to the fact that it is not considered a telecommunication services provider, Mexican carriers did receive blame, on the basis that they do provide such services.

China is an important market for Apple, and while the company now has deals like the one with China Mobile that help distribute hardware in the country, that is only half the battle. According to new reports, Apple has recently been focusing on wooing Chinese appmakers to get them to develop for iOS.

“Two years ago there was no developer support in China,” Chinese developer Woody Wan told Bloomberg in a recent interview. “There’s been a significant improvement.”

According to the report, Apple has been taking various steps to win over Chinese app developers — including beefing up developer relations by allowing new apps to be approved in the country, opening up a new office in downtown Beijing where the China App Store is located, and building new Chinese-language-specific software to benefit developers. At WWDC this week, Apple held several sessions and social gatherings for programmers visiting from China.