News - page 1381

If you’ve read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, you possibly know the name Ronald Wayne. That’s the investor who dropped out of Apple 12 days into its existence as a company — losing around $35 billion after selling his shares for just $800.

In the wake of a reported deal with Beats, we have a repeat of that story — courtesy of the one key party that won’t see a scratch from the rumored $3.2 billion acquisition.

Although Iovine and Dre get all the credit for Beats, it was Monster CEOs Noel and Kevin Lee who designed and developed the world’s very first pair of Beats headphones, and did the engineering and technology distribution for the company’s first five years.

If you’re even slightly pop culture savvy, chances are that you’re a fan of The Walking Dead. If that’s the case, you’ll be happy to known that the latest episode of Telltale Games’ superb The Walking Dead adventure game series is set to appear on Mac and iOS this week.

New images, reportedly showing the new 4.7-inch iPhone, have hit the Web, offering more details about the smaller of Apple’s next generation smartphones.

The images are renders and supposedly hail from parts unknown key Apple supplier Foxconn. They depict a longer, wider 4.7-inch handset with dimensions of 138 by 67 mm. As with recent reports, the pics suggest that the iPhone 6 will feature smoothly rounded corners and a relocated power button. They also makes us think that the iPhone 6 will feature an all-aluminum rear shell.

Since the release of the Apple TV back in 2007, it’s evolved into an essential gadget for all media streamers, and with that, Apple has invented some competition with the likes of Amazon Fire and the Roku. This week Cult of Mac puts the $99 Apple TV against the entry-level $49 Roku 1.

With yet another week in the past your host Joshua Smith is here to give you a wrap-up on some of the latest and biggest news features. Touch iD coming to the iPad, Apple to buy Beats by Dre and more iPhone 6 rumors are among just some of the featured stories in today’s rundown. Take a look at the video and be sure to return next week for another.

Subscribe to CultOfMacTV on youtube.com to catch new episodes of the roundup and other great video reviews, how-to’s and more.

At the giant Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, the exhibit halls were packed with wireless audio products. It’s all thanks to the mobile revolution. These are the listening devices of the future.

But future speakers and headphones will be quite different, predicted Matthew Paprocki, co-founder of Soundfreaq, a Southern California company that makes a range of critically acclaimed speakers.

Paprocki’s predictions may have implications for Beats, which Apple is rumored to be buying for $3.2 billion. Beats, of course, makes headphones and has a subscription based music streaming service, but Apple’s plans are unclear.

“They could take all the ingredients that Beats has and bake it into a new cake,” Paprocki said.

This time on The CultCast: No, those rumored new EarPods won’t measure your pulse. Last week’s biggest Apple rumor was a fake made up by a guy on a toilet! Plus, why you shouldn’t expect new hardware at June’s WWDC; iPhone warns you when the NSA wants you for drug trafficking; Apple’s newest executive gets a HUGE payday; Katie Cotton, Apple’s long time PR lead and Steve Jobs confidant, calls it quits; Cupertino will take on Samsung with more Guerrilla-style marketing; and since you asked, we reveal the jobs we’ve always wanted on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.

Have a few LOLs while we catch you up on 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!

Our thanks to Smile Software for supporting this episode! If you haven’t tried TextExpander from Smile software, you’re missing out on one of the most useful apps available for the Mac. With TextExpander, you’ll save time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures. Try it out yourself for free at smilesoftware.com/cultcast.

Click on for the show notes.

Both Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will take senior positions at Apple as part of the Beats Electronics deal, according to people close to the matter.

While neither would move to Cupertino, they would reportedly commute to Silicon Valley (or wherever is needed) from Los Angeles. Although it’s currently unknown what role Iovine and Dre would fulfill at Apple, it is thought that Iovine might become a “special adviser” to Tim Cook on creative projects. Dre was recently seen celebrating becoming “the first billionaire in hip-hop.”

So who are these two possible new members of the Apple brain trust, and what would they bring to the table?

Thank goodness for a game with just a few things to learn how to do.

Too many environmental puzzle games try to do too much, packing in all sorts of stuff you have to figure out to solve the ever-increasingly difficult levels.

Not so with Kiwanuka, an elegantly smart game that only has a couple of mechanics, but tons of fun levels to solve with them.

Oh, and it’s a little bit weird, too.

I’m constantly checking out new photography apps for the iPhone, and like many out there, my favorite remains VSCO Cam. There’s a new contender on the scene that was released this week, and it’s definitely worth trying if you like experimenting beyond VSCO’s filters.

A new video app from the Hipstamatic team also just came out in the App Store, and it has some of the best filters for mobile video I’ve come across.

Remember Facebook Poke? It’s become nothing more than a faint memory since its introduction in December 2012. But for some reason the iPhone app has stayed on the App Store until now.

Today Facebook decided to do some spring cleaning in the App Store by pulling not only the Poke app, but Facebook Camera as well.

They say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. I’d disagree. I think it’s the perfect place. After all, most of my tasks come in via email, and any app that can share information can share it via email. Why bother dickering with an extra app, keeping all that important stuff in two places, when it can all be easily managed in one spot?

I’ve been doing exactly this ever since I ditched OmniFocus, which is so long ago I can’t remember how long ago it was. With a little bit of setup in your everyday news and browsing apps, you can turn your inbox into a proper universal task list. Here’s how.

What would it look like if Apple let you work in multiple apps side by side on the iPad? Apple’s competitors like to poke fun at the iPad’s lack of desktop-class multitasking. But plenty of people are using the iPad to get work done, which begs the age-old question: is less really more?

Imagine OS X’s Mission Control ported to the iPad, and you’ve got the jailbreak tweak OS Experience. It’s an ambitious idea that is executed with surprising finesse.

If the rumors are true, Apple’s forthcoming purchase of Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion is all about one thing — making wearable technology fashionable.

Apple is poised to introduce a line of wearables that likely goes beyond the long-rumored iWatch. While the technology Tim Cook’s team is cooking up might be amazing, getting people to wear it — especially cracking the crucial mass market — will be one of the biggest challenges Cupertino has ever faced.

Injecting style into wearable tech notoriously difficult. Even Nike got flustered and discontinued its FuelBand fitness tracker. So far, no company has really cracked the code and turned gear into a fashion statement for the cool kids, with one giant exception: Beats, a phenomenally successful wearable technology brand that dwarfs the rest of the industry because it’s pulled off the hardest trick in the book.

With the global reach of Twitter, it’s totally possible you’re following a few folks that don’t necessarily Tweet in your native language.

When that happens, it’s TweetDeck to the rescue with its very useful translation function.

Here’s how to make that work.

Angry Birds is coming to a big screen near you. Rovio Entertainment is taking the epic battle of birds-versus-pigs from your iPhone to the cinema, in 3-D, and launching it into the wide, wide world in July 2016.

We’re aflutter with anticipation: Can they actually make a movie based on a video game worth watching? It’s happened time and time again that our favorite living room brain-cell killer was transported to the land of plush seats and buttery popcorn only to disappoint.

Most video games turn into celluloid duds even though we stupidly paid to see them; Rotten Tomatoes gives Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within only a 44 percent approval rating. The rest go down from there.

In the gallery above, you’ll find a brutal rundown of the best of the worst video game-cum-movies that Rovio should watch — as a reminder of what not to do.

Notorious vegetarian Steve Jobs had few weakness. Black turtlenecks were one. The other was an extreme love of sushi.

Some of the West Coast’s best sushi places dotted Steve’s backyard, but Kaygetsu, a small sushi spot in Menlo Park, held the key to Steve’s heart stomach so tightly that Silicon Valley’s most impatient CEO could be spotted waiting up to 30 minutes like a normal pauper just to get his tongue on some hamachi.

Jobs loved the place so much he had a surprise birthday party for his wife there and even crammed Apple’s board of directors into the tiny restaurant for board meetings.

Reports of Apple’s pending Beats Electronics acquisition has left the vast majority of us scratching our heads, but if you thought this was just another spurious claim from anonymous supply chain blabbermouths, you can think again. Not only did the story come from reputable sources, but it has been all but confirmed by Dr. Dre himself.

In the short video below, a drunk Dre proclaims himself “the first billionaire in hip-hop” as he celebrates with friends.

Nokia’s incredible PureView camera technology is one of the reasons why so many Android users were desperate to see the Finnish firm ditch Windows Phone and bring Google’s platform to its flagship smartphones instead — and you could soon see the same technology in future iPhones.

Apple has used Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Nokia’s handset business as an opportunity to poach executives who are seeking new challenges, and the Cupertino company has just hired Lumia engineer and PureView camera expert Ari Partinen.

If you’re counting down the seconds until you can lovingly hold the iPhone 6 in your sweaty palms, you may have less time to wait than you thought, according to sources within Apple’s supply chain.

As per Taiwanese media reports, Apple might be set to drop the first incarnation of its next generation iPhone in August instead of the expected September.

If true, this would likely be 4.7 inch version of the iPhone 6, while the reported 5.5 inch model would follow in September.

More details are trickling out about Gameloft’s eagerly awaited first-person-shooter Modern Combat 5: Blackout, which is set to arrive on mobile later this year.

The first big reveal concerns a new unified progression system, which will aim to bring together the single-player campaign and online multiplayer modes by letting experience earned in either contribute toward your character’s overall level. This will also hold true for the game’s weapon mastery system also, meaning that whether you unlock a new weapon in campaign or multiplayer you’ll be able to use it in both.

Beats Electronics boss and music industry veteran Jimmy Iovine is in talks to join Apple as a “special adviser” to Tim Cook on creative matters, according to sources.

Along with his role as co-creator of Beats with business partner Dr. Dre, Iovine is also chairman of Universal Music Group’s Interscope, Geffen and A&M labels, which is home to artists including Lady Gaga and Eminem.

Protecting user privacy and sensitive information might drive Snapchat’s disappearing messages, but the Federal Trade Commission is keeping its eye on the company just in case!

The FTC has announced that it is settling with Snapchat after an investigation into the company’s privacy practices. The reason? The number of work arounds that allow photos and videos sent via Snapchat to be covertly captured.

“If a company markets privacy and security as key selling points in pitching its service to consumers, it is critical that it keep those promises,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez says. “Any company that makes misrepresentations to consumers about its privacy and security practices risks FTC action.”

The first impression upon seeing Satechi’s new GoRemote Bluetooth remote-controller for the iPhone is oh man, that’s really freaking cool! Followed rapidly by wait, what am I going to do with this thing again?

This probably isn’t the “iRing” you’ve been waiting for — assuming you’ve been waiting for the mythical (One) Ring, forged by the skilled elves of Logbar, that wants to control, well, pretty much everything in your life.

No, this particular ring — IK Multmedia’s iRing — won’t control your TV, your phone or your wallet. But it is imbued with the power to create music on your iDevice.