News - page 1369

Apple and Google aren’t the good friends they used to be thanks to the rise of Android as the iPhone’s main competitor. Ever since Apple axed Google Maps in iOS 6, it has been clear that Google’s days in Apple’s software are numbered.

The hardest Google service for Apple to replace is undoubtedly search. Siri is slowly becoming its own search engine of sorts that draws from multiple services like Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia, but Google has remained the standard for traditional web search.

In iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Google is still set as Safari’s default search engine. But with the introduction of more search partners in Apple’s new software, it’s hard to believe that Google search will enjoy its prominence for much longer.

Apple’s WWDC keynote just days ago brought us many new iOS 8 features to look forward to downloading this Fall. Thanks to an immediate downloadable beta version open for developers, many have found even more useful features and changes not mentioned on Apple’s big stage. In today’s video your host Joshua Smith introduces eight of his top hidden iOS 8 features.

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

On the back of the most eventful WWDC keynote in recent memory, and Eddy Cue claiming that Apple has its most exciting product pipeline in 25 years, there have been few better times to invest in AAPL shares. With that in mind, Apple has just given an overhaul to its Investor Relations minisite, giving it a long overdue spit shine.

The website features sections advising on Apple stock prices, financial information, SEC filings, and leadership and governance, alongside relevant press releases and financial news related. Notably the website’s graphical overhaul brings its into line with Apple’s current design preferences, with an abundance of thin fonts and white space.

When the walls and pottery starts shaking in spooky ways, newlyweds Donna Johnson and Carol-Anne decide to call the Paranormal Investigation Team, or P.I.T. This ragtag team of ghost busters, led by Connor, the lovelorn managing director, must prove themselves as professionals to keep the gig, and save the day.

This new web series, part of geek-favorite Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry media collective, is surprisingly well written and acted, and is as well-produced as any new TV show, even though it’s only on the web.

The first episode (embedded below) shows a lot of promise and anyone with an interest in geeky television shows about ghosts and goofy nerds should take a look.

Apple is finally going to open OS X Yosemite betas to the public, but when it comes to iOS 8, Apple fanboys desperate for a sneak peek at Cupertino’s upcoming software have been left out in the cold.

Luckily, if you’re willing to give a little info and some cash to certain “developers” you too can become an official iOS 8 beta testers and reap all the new benefits and bugs of iOS 8 as Apple puts the finishing touches on the biggest iOS release ever.

Here’s how to do it:

You could run to the sun and back 160 times with the total meters run in Imangi Studio’s award-winning iOS games, Temple Run and Temple Run 2. Or you could fill 300 Olympic swimming pools with the number of gold coins collected in game (147 trillion of them, to be exact).

One billion downloads worldwide can bring a lot of success, like winning a BAFTA and Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award in 2012. And, if you’re the company behind two of the biggest indie-hits of the last couple of years, you’re going to want to shout it from the rooftops.

“Having Temple Run reach the one billion downloads mark is a milestone we couldn’t have imagined when we first started out,” said Imangi co-founder Keith Shepherd in a press release. “We’re incredibly grateful to all the Temple Run players and our wonderful team.”

The world’s fastest keyboard is speeding onto iOS 8 faster than Jony Ive’s fabulous Bentley.

Third-party keyboards were only revealed two days ago for iOS 8 but it is taking developers no time at all to piece together some working betas amid the coding-fest at WWDC.

First up to the plate is Fleksy, who has already started teasing their upcoming keyboard for iOS 8, and if you’re lucky, they’ll might let you take it for a spin.

With iOS 8, Apple is bringing a multitude of exciting new features to iPhone and iPad. In some cases, Cupertino is playing catch-up as it tries to match what’s currently available in KitKat; in others, Apple’s next-generation mobile operating system is about to blast past the latest version of Android.

Android and iOS will secure a staggering 95 percent of smartphone market share between them in 2014, according to the latest research from IDC. While it’s strictly a two-horse race, Google’s platform is currently far out in front when it comes to number of users, with Android’s market share expected to reach 80.2 percent by the end of the year.

Google has a new Android update up its sleeve that will be announced this summer, but while Apple posts impressive upgrade percentages, Android fragmentation typically slows deployment of Google’s latest, greatest mobile OS.

If you watch Netflix on your iOS device or game console, you know that the browsing function on those apps is a pain to use. And unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, it can be annoying to find something new.

So as a service, we’re going to recommend some things you can watch on Netflix right now. This time around, we have three fascinating documentaries about the horror genre. But even if you’re not a fan of scary monsters and super creeps, they still have plenty to offer.

Apple has made yet more improvements to AirPlay in iOS 8 by enabling compatible devices to make direct connections with each other for content streaming. This eliminates AirPlay’s reliance on a Wi-Fi network and fixes one of its biggest limitations.

When it comes to Hollywood badassery I’m most excited about here in 2014, few flicks match up to Hercules — starring none other than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Directed by Brett Ratner, and co-starring John Hurt, Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell and Joseph Fiennes, the movie looks leagues better than the disappointing Legends of Hercules film released earlier this year. The new trailer contains some great (if potentially spoiler-filled) moments: showing Hercules face off against all manner of mythological nasties, in addition to a PETA-baiting scene in which he kills an attacking lion and makes a stylish hat out of him.

Given that it’s only been around since Monday, it’s still early days for iOS 8. But that doesn’t mean the jailbreak community is resting — and if early indicators are to be believed, we might see a jailbreak for Apple’s latest mobile operating system sooner than expected.

While there are still no concrete examples of someone jailbreaking their device on iOS 8, well-known hacker i0n1c claimed in a recent tweet that the first beta of iOS 8 “doesn’t fix anything” and should therefore be breakable.

Microsoft has issued a system update to Xbox One which includes support for external storage, the ability for players to use real names on Xbox Live, and superior SmartGlass integration. To coincide with this, the company has also dropped a major update to Xbox One SmartGlass, its official iOS companion app of the latest generation of its video game console.

The update redesigns the Home section to make it more engaging for players. It additionally lets you see all your TV and app channels in the OneGuide, as well as giving you the ability to control your cable or satellite box and TV with a brand new universal remote control feature.

Back in the day it would have been entirely possible to draw a direct line between Apple and Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series: both superb products with passionate fanbases, but largely ignored by the masses.

That might not be true for Apple today (or for Joss Whedon either), but when you’re dealing with two subjects like tech and sci-fi, some overlap is expected. That appears to be the case at Apple, where a member of the Swift team is clearly something of a Firefly fanboy — hiding a reference to the cult show in its documentation for Apple’s new programming language.

Apple might have been planning its entry into health-tracking for quite some time, but it may not have given quite so much thought to the name of its HealthKit platform, as recently announced at WWDC.

That’s because an Australian health startup with the same name has come forwards, and it’s none too pleased about Apple apparently borrowing its name for the API of its Health app.

“It is very flattering that they like our name, but I’m a little let down because how hard would it have been to spend five seconds to put HealthKit.com into their browser and find us?” Alison Hardacre, co-founder and managing director of HealthKit told Wired. “Everybody worries that Google or Apple will come into their space and their business will die, but no one thinks that company will come into that space and use the same name!”

Buzzwords fly in this 90-second recap of Apple’s impressive WWDC 2014 keynote, which offered a tantalizing glimpse at where the company plans to take us with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.

For more great WWDC video coverage, check out Cult of Mac’s YouTube channel. Subscribe for all the best Apple-related videos.

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest complaints about smartphones in the days before Apple created the iPhone was that they all had keyboards which were there whether or not you wanted them. Much the same has previously been true of previous iOS gamepads — which have either been clip-on phone cases in style, or else wireless controllers you need to carry around with you if you want to use them.

It’s this problem that Razer is attempting to solve with its new Junglecat accessory. Snapping onto your iPhone, the Razer Junglecat adds a slide-out gamepad that connects to your mobile device by way of the lighting port. While it adds a bit of heft to your ultra-thin iPhone (and obviously means that your lightning port remains occupied), it does mean that the gamepad itself can remain safely tucked away until you feel like using it.

We’re still busying digesting all the new stuff Tim Cook and Craig Federighi announced yesterday with iOS 8, and even though we’re ridiculously excited about major backend features like HomeKit, iCloud Photo Library and Metal, 24 hours of tinkering around with the OS has revealed a lot of hidden gems that went unmentioned.

Along with the host of new iOS 8 features, Jony Ive and the Human Interface team have been busy adding dozens of tiny tweaks to the UI as well as tossing in a few smaller features you probably didn’t notice.

Take a look at these 11 tweaks Apple sneaked into iOS 8 without telling anyone:

As a professional game developer, the big news coming out of Apple’s WWDC keynote wasn’t Swift or iCloud Drive — it was Metal.

In an onstage demo, Epic showed off the power of its Unreal engine after it had been modified to make use of this new Apple framework. Hundreds of fish reacted dynamically to a finger drawn on the screen. Leaves were shaken from a tree, and butterflies flew through the screen.

It was a very pretty demo. But what does it mean for the games you’ll be playing on your iOS device?

In all the recent Batman games (Arkham City, Arkham Asylum, Arkham Origins), I’ve always thrilled to Bat-grapple my way to the rooftops, occasionally base-jumping down to glide-kick some nasty thug just asking for that special brand of Bat-justice.

There’s always been one thing missing, though: The Batmobile.

The folks at Rocksteady Games have remedied this sad fact in the latest game in the series, Batman: Arkham Knight, and are showing off a car-porn-filled new trailer to whet our appetite. Check out this bad boy below.

In the not-so-distant future, we’ll use smartphones to control nearly everything around our homes. We already have smart light bulbs, thermostats, locks and appliances, but we lack a central platform for all these devices.

That’s all going to change this fall when Apple releases iOS 8 with HomeKit, an important new protocol for developers. This will create the kind of universal platform that could revolutionize home automation.

Instagram was the golden standard for not only sharing, but shooting mobile photography in its early days. But since then, more complex tools like VSCO Cam and Camera+ have come onto the scene. Nowadays, getting the perfect photo isn’t often as simple as just tapping a filter.

Today Instagram is releasing a big update in an attempt to tap into the evolved state of iPhoneography it has been missing out on. New editing tools are being added that let you adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and more.

Monday’s fantastic WWDC keynote was the most significant product introduction since Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPad in 2010. But this time, the revolutionary product wasn’t hardware — it was software.

The surprisingly well-executed event demonstrated two things:

1. Steve Jobs’ greatest product wasn’t the iPad or the Macintosh, but Apple itself. He created a company that can very clearly innovate without him.

2. Although there was no new hardware (for now), Apple’s trajectory is clear: It’s getting into some very big things.

Apple finally fixed photography on iOS. Or rather, it’s fixed organizing your photos, wherever they might be. The iPhone is already a great camera. The problem was everything that happened after you tapped the shutter.

Now, in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, you’ll never have to worry about organizing your photos again — they’ll be everywhere, all the time. And best of all? It looks like you’re never going to need iPhoto again, on the Mac or on your iPad.

Thousands upon thousands of apps get submitted to the App Store each year, but only a select few end up being honored with an Apple Design Award. The most beautiful, well-designed apps get crowned by Apple annually at WWDC.

“The developers of these exceptional apps combined design and technology in creative, compelling and powerful ways,” according to Apple. 2014’s winners include games we’ve featured on Cult of Mac like Leo’s Fortune and Monument Valley. If you’re looking to try some new apps, these 12 are the ones to get.