News - page 1372

While there may be plenty of games in the app store with complicated stories and features, sometimes the simplest of games can be the best. The new app Red Bit Escape is an application that has made it to the top of the charts with its addictive yet simple gameplay. Last as long as you can to get a high score, that’s all. Do you think you can get a high score?

Take a look at Red Bit Escape and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Red Bit Escape brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your turn to play Hearthstone, the new free-to-play digital card game from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, now’s your chance. The fast-paced strategy game plays like a simplified yet strategically challenging Magic: The Gathering, and it’s available for your Mac immediately.

The game is free to download from the Hearthstone website, and will install easily and quickly to your Mac.

Once downloaded, you’ll hop in-game for a quick couple of tutorials, and then you can either play AI opponents to hone your skills and learn the various hero classes, or you can jump right in to playing other human beings via Blizzard’s Battle.net game matching service, one of the most robust around.

The current Office for Mac hasn’t received a truly significant update since it came out in 2011. Now Microsoft is planning to finally release a new version of the software this year.

Ever wanted to hear Siri declaim “Luke, I am your father” in 32 different languages?

In a blog post by the developers behind the daily Spanish word app Vocab Ninja, you can click on all of Siri’s different voices — overwhelmingly female-gendered, interestingly enough — in both standard and enhanced audio resolutions.

The creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, has practically gone off the grid since he suddenly pulled his viral hit from the App Store last month. The 28-year-old Vietnamese developer said his game had become “too addictive,” and Flappy Bird was no more.

At the height of Flappy Bird’s popularity, the game was making Nguyen $50,000 per day in ads. Now about a third of all games submitted to the App Store are Flappy Bird knockoffs.

In his first interview since pulling Flappy Bird, Nguyen told Rolling Stone that he is considering bringing it back. The interview also touches on why Nguyen made Flappy Bird to begin with, what it was like for him when the game got successful, and what his plans are for the future. It’s a great read.

Source: Rolling Stone

I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.

Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.

“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”

Day One has been one of the most popular journaling apps in the App Store for years, and it has always stuck to its guns: privately storing your thoughts and memories. But what about when you want to share something with your friends?

Today Day One is introducing Publish, a way to do exactly that.

Apple’s five day music festival is set to start today at SXSW in Austin Texas, but rather than making content available only on iTunes or Apple TV, the company has partnered with Vevo to help stream the event live.

Music fans can plug into the event live on Vevo’s website, but you’ll have to use a Safari browser. Shows will also be viewable on iTunes, Apple TV, and the iTunes Festival app for iOS.

The free concert series kicks off tonight with Coldplay, and features acts like Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Schoolboy Q, Soundgarden, Pit Bull, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson and others throughout the week.

Up until now, iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 has been painful to use. The New York Times calls it “planned obsolescence,” but it’s really just old hardware having a difficult time powering new software.

The good news is that the newly released iOS 7.1 has noticeably sped up animations on the iPhone 4, reports Ars Technica. “iOS 7.1 solves the problem for people who don’t tweak their devices’ settings or for people who like the way the animations look but not how they feel,” according to Ars. “Animation durations have been shortened noticeably throughout iOS 7.1, and toggling “reduce motion” is now purely cosmetic.”

Apps open generally faster, and opening interfaces like Control Center feels smoother. Since iOS 7.1 will likely be the last major update that’s available on the iPhone 4, there is no reason to not download it.

Source: Ars Technica

Grabbing an Apple exec for your board of directors has become somewhat of trend lately among prominent companies. Nike, Ferrari, Goldman Sachs, and even Vail Ski Resorts have done it, and now GoDaddy is the latest to join the ranks.

iTunes Radio has barely been around for six months but after launching alongside iOS 7 in the U.S., Apple’s music streaming service has already knocked Spotify off the #3 spot among the most popular music streaming services in the country.

Apple has made some changes to its Customer Loyalty Program, adding new items and increasing the discount offered on existing ones.

The discounts — which quietly went into effect last week — are on offer to people who spend upwards of $5,000 on Apple products in a 12-month period, making this a loyalty program targeted predominately at companies and education customers.

Companies like Apple using specially commissioned shuttle buses to ferry employees back and forth from San Francisco have caused their fair share of problems in the past.

Wanting to find out just how often the buses traveled past his house, Wired writer Kevin Poulsen recently decided to start monitoring the local Wi-Fi environment to see how often the Wi-Fi equipped buses registered.

In a world in which the iPhone camera is good enough to be most people’s primary camera, the days of low-grade cellphones pics are a thing of the past (for Apple users at least.)

But it’s not simply a matter of megapixels, but about the other “value added” touches that truly make the iPhone a camera worth hanging up your SLR for.

One of those touches is Apple’s neat “tap to focus” functionality, which arrived with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009.

It’s a tale as old as time (and, perhaps, a song as old as rhyme): Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers immediately get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, eventually claw together a jailbreak, only for Apple to then find out about the flaws and fix them for the new iOS version.

Rinse and repeat.

Having released iOS 7.1, Apple has also released a list crediting the individual researchers and companies who helped spot security issues with the previous version of iOS — including jailbreak specialists Evad3rs, the team behind the iOS 6 and 7 jailbreaks.

We all know that Siri has some fun Easter eggs, but according to some Apple’s virtual assistant also has an entire backstory — unlockable by asking just the right questions.

“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” says Adam Cheyer, one of the chief engineers for the project. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”

As mentioned in our iOS 7.1 screenshot roundup, the new iOS update adds auto-HDR mode for the iPhone 5s, letting the camera’s brain decide whether or not to activate the High-Dynamic Range feature.

In theory, this should mean that your iPhone will switch to HDR when there is too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture in one exposure.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here: When we’re in the air, we don’t give a second thought to our luggage traveling in the belly of the plane just a meter or so below us. We don’t really start thinking about our checked bags until we’re standing at the carousel, as we’re wondering if it would look more suspicious to the customs officials if we visited the bathroom before or after picking up our suitcases.

So the Calypso Tag, which lets you know that your bag is about to exit the luggage conveyor, is probably a better option than a GPS tracking tag that you can’t follow when you’re in the air anyway.

If you replaced your first-gen Kindle Paperwhite with the new model just to get Goodreads integration, Cloud Collections and the cool new page-skimming feature, then you should look away now. An update pushed today to the first-gen Paperwhite has added all of these features to the older model.

Instagram has added a new “Lux” filter to its iPhone app, letting you “strengthen or soften your photos with a custom slider.” The slider affects the contrast of your image, but it does in in a way that actually looks good.

Growing up I was a huge fan of the game Asteroids.

Today Apple updated its Remote iOS app with some additional options for playing content through the Apple TV.

You can now control iTunes Radio like music played through a shared iTunes library. The ability to browse purchased movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store has also been added. Apple added the option to stream purchased content last September, and now it’s easier to navigate an online iTunes library from an iOS device.

Update 4.2 to the Remote app includes bug fixes as well. It can be downloaded for free in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Last week, the Churchill Club in Menlo Park, California gathered a small panel of journalists who all share something in common: they’ve written recent books about Apple.

Cult of Mac editor-in-chief Leander Kahney, author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, joined former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane, author of Haunted Empire: Apple after Steve Jobs, and Fred Vogelstein, contributing editor at Wired and author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. The panel was moderated by Adam Lashinsky, senior editor-at-large of Fortune Magazine and author of Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works.

The hour-and-a-half talk covered a wide range of topics, from Apple’s post-Steve Jobs identity to the products the company is working on for the future.

Along with releasing iOS 7.1 to the public, Apple also pushed out a firmware update for the Apple TV this morning. The update, labeled Apple TV 6.1, doesn’t bring any radically new features but it does make it easier than ever to hide your unwanted Apple TV channels.

After months of building and testing, Apple has finally taken the wraps off iOS 7’s biggest update ever, so to celebrate they’ve add a new iOS 7.1 section to homepage touting the update.

iOS 7.1 update https://t.co/0IJFsNWa8Z

— Philip Schiller (@pschiller) March 10, 2014

The long awaited update introduces CarPlay to the iPhone along with improved Siri controls, HDR Auto, an improved calendar, and lots of bug fixes

The new promo page gives an overview of some of the changes, but for a deeper look at all the design tweaks, check out our gallery of iOS 7.1’s new features.

Source: Apple