Like Nests’s futuristic thermostat, its iPhone-controlled smoke/carbon monoxide detector looked like the perfect replacement for the antiquated systems used in most homes today. It turns out that the Nest Protect was a little too good to be true.
Since the device went on sale in November of last year, Nest has discovered that one of the Protect’s hallmark features can malfunction. And that happens to create big safety concerns. Until the issue is resolved, Nest Protect sales have halted.
For those who thought Office for iPad was too late to the party, the numbers tell a different story. Today Microsoft announced that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote combined have been downloaded a staggering 12 million times in one week.
If you doubt that number, then just take a look at the App Store charts.
Vine has added video messaging. After today’s update, video messages (or VMs) can be sent to friends on Vine or through SMS and email.
A six-second message can be sent to more than one person, but not as cleanly as Instagram Direct works. A new conversation thread will be opened for each person you send to, meaning you have to send the same video multiple times.
Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android has thrown the company into the courtroom more times in the last five years than ever before, so in an effort to make U.S. patent laws bend to its will, Apple has joined forces with some some of its old enemies, IBM and Microsoft to form a U.S. lobbying supergroup to fight patent trolls and push new legislation through congress.
Today Facebook Messenger was updated with the ability to make free voice calls over WiFi both domestically and internationally. Making calls over a cellular connection uses data. The features works similar to FaceTime Audio, which is natively baked into all iOS devices and Macs.
Facebook Messenger technically added VOIP (voice over IP) calling in January 2013, but the feature has been limited to the US, UK, and Canada until now. Facebook users with the Messenger iOS app installed can be called with a new phone icon at the top right of a conversation thread. The calling interface looks almost identical to Apple’s stock Phone app in iOS 7.1.
Messenger was recently updated with group messaging and forwarding. After WhatsApp was bought by Facebook earlier this year, it was revealed that VOIP calling is coming to that app as well in the coming months.
Source: App Store
Sure, we all love a good game of Civilization V, but we also all know that the epic turn-based strategy can really suck up our time.
That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about Hero Generations, a Rogue-like strategy game with a unique, personal question at its core: what will you do with the limited time you have left?
You’ll have plenty of choices, but your character will age one year for each turn in the game. If you want to truly influence the kingdom, you’ll need to find a mate, settle down, and have a child.
Your offspring, then, becomes the next controllable character in the game, with all the experience and items that you amassed before you died.
If that doesn’t intrigue you, I’m not sure what will.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.
One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.
If you haven’t been using If This, Then That (IFTTT) on your iPhone or iPad, you really ought to be.
It’s a really amazing way to connect up all the things you do on your devices, putting them together in new ways for new uses.
Want to send all your iOS photos to OneNote or Evernote? There’s a recipe for that. How about making your Phillips Hue lightbulbs flash a specific color when you pull up into your driveway? There’s an IFTTT recipe for that, too.
Chances are, if you can think of it, you can make it happen, connecting different services and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your iOS Photos app, location services, and the like in fantastically useful new ways.
There’s a new update for the iOS app, and it’s got some pretty spectacular new stuff to check out.
The iPad is four years old today and my mom hates it. Maybe not hate. Dislikes. Loathes. I don’t know the right word but for two weeks it sat in Apple’s pristine white box, unwrapped, unlocked, setup and then discarded; snuggling in its brown leather SmartCover completely untouched.
After dismissing it as “just a big iPhone” it’s grown on her in four months, just like it’s grown on us since 2010. Now it’s the only place she watches YouTube, looks at pictures, reads websites, FaceTimes and gets down on Solitaire like Kim Jong-un at a nuclear buffet.
It’s the best damn thing to ever happen for children with tech-illiterate parents.
Apple has today announced that this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off on June 2 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The five-day conference will give us a glimpse at “the future of iOS and OS X,” and the star of the show will almost certainly be iOS 8.
Quick, think of two classic game franchises that make perfect sense as a mash-up! Give up? How about Street Fighter II and Flappy Bird? Not convinced of the brilliance of this idea? Well too bad — someone’s done it anyway.
Joining the plethora of Flappy Bird clones to arrive in the App Store since Dong Nguyen’s hit original, Street Flapper lets you take your favorite Street Fighter characters and guide them through an “endurance training” setup composed of the stretchy arms and legs of character Dhalsim.
The year might only be three months old but there’s already a contender for ‘most visually striking iOS game of 2014.’
Launched today, Monument Valley looks to combine the gameplay of hit indie game Fez with the brain-twisting art of M.C. Escher.
As can be seen from the above trailer it looks stunningly beautiful, and with developers Ustwo (the team responsible for Whale Trail and Blip Blup) behind it, hopefully the gameplay will be every bit as great. The trailer depicts Princess Ida climbing through landscapes of shifting geometric shapes, optical illusions, and hidden paths — all the while avoiding and outsmarting the enigmatic Crow People.
When Pebble’s last iOS update essentially bricked the smart watch, leaving it capable of only (shock horror) telling the time, we knew that something needed to be done in a hurry.
Fortunately Pebble realized that too, since the company has rushed out a new update for its official iOS app — fixing the bug users had complained about which stopped the Pebble from connecting to an iPhone via Bluetooth.
Logitech’s cool-looking X100 “donut” speaker has a few things going for it. First, it’s small. Second, it’s cheap, and third, it has a hole in it that looks totally satisfying to stick your finger in and wiggle it around.
Photojojo’s new iPhone Lens Wallet is a safe place to store the entire Photojojo lens lineup, and it’s small enough that it can live in your daily murse/purse. It even holds a tripod, and can be bought either empty or fully loaded.
Spotify seems to have solved one major problem with its apps. Until now, the music streaming service has been focussed on playlists, forcing you to organize your music in order to “save” it for later.
Compare this to Rdio, which concentrates on albums and songs, letting your save them to an iTunes-like collection.
Spotify now offers “Your Music,” which is pretty much a copy of Rdio’s collections, and is a very welcome addition.
Lensbaby’s new iPhone lens looks awesome. Or it would, if it didn’t attach with magnets. Yes, it’s a super-strong magnet and might therefore avoid the problem suffered by all other magnetically-attached iPhone lenses: they are hell to keep aligned.
But you still have to glue a metal ring onto the back of your iPhone.
Apple is awarded a lot of patents, many of which it never does much more than sit on top of. After all, in the high stakes (and highly litigious) world of mobile, it’s better to patent a potential innovation than let a potential enemy do so.
Even so, today was a banner day for Apple. In just a single day, Apple was granted a whopping fifty-one different patents, ranging from older products like the unibody MacBook Pro to some much wilder stuff, like a possible 3D Apple TV remote control system.
UpTo’s original take on the iPhone calendar was fairly unusual. the app allowed you to follow the calendars of friends or organizations, whose events then appeared on your calendar; you could the interact withe the events more or less the same way you would a Facebook post: There were likes, comments and a handy “I’m in” to signify attendance.
The problem is, in order for anything with a social twist to work, lots of people need to use it — and based solely off my observations while using the app, that didn’t seem to be the case. Also, some users may have found the app overly complicated.
So now, UpTo has been radically redesigned with a focus on layers instead of social connection. But is it better?
Historically, Greenpeace hasn’t been very happy with Apple. In the past, they have scored Apple last in reports on green-friendly data centers, called the iCloud one of the dirtiest things on the planet, and called Apple less green friendly than Dell, HP and Nokia.
But things have seemingly changed. In a new report on renewable energy used by major Internet companies, Apple came out at 100%, thanks to the wind farms and solar arrays that now allow Apple’s data centers to run on 100% renewable energy. What’s the dirtiest thing on the planet now?
When Apple starts sniffing around, looking to buy a company, it’s time to pay attention. That goes double if they make chips. Back in 2008, Apple purchased P.A. Semi, a low-powered chipmaker, whose acquisition soon paved the way for an entire series of revolutionary ARM based chips. And recently, Apple purchased a low-energy chip maker who could help power the iWatch.
Now Apple’s out to do it again, this time with Renesas SP, if reports can be believed. But what for?
The jailbreak tweak called Auxo did card-based app switching in iOS 6, and then Apple came along and fully implemented the idea in iOS 7. Auxo, which started as a concept that went viral online, was suddenly obsolete.
A successor to Auxo has been in the works for quite some time, and now it’s available for jailbreakers to install in Cydia. Auxo 2 doesn’t reinvent iOS 7 multitasking, but the tweak builds upon it by adding more controls and customization.
After a disastrous Windows 8 launch that saw Microsoft embrace a new tiled user interface, the company announced today that it’s backpedaling and resurrecting popular Windows 7 features like the Start Menu.
Twitter was abuzz with the news of Start Menus with the majority of tweets cheering the return, but after closer inspection of the Franken-hyrbid interface we think they should have left it to rot in a tomb.
From lakes to oceans, people everywhere can be found fishing. With busy workdays and full weekends, it can be hard to find the time to go out and cast your reel. The new app Ace Fishing: Wild Catch brings the thrill of fishing to all iPhones and iPads for free. Explore the world and catch over hundreds of different types of fish right away. Do you think you can catch even the most rare fish?
Take a look at the video and find out what you think.
This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Ace Fishing: Wild Catch – Com2uS USA, Inc., brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.
Everybody is making emoji video interpretations of pop culture nowadays, but with Game of Thrones season 4 premiering in just four more days we’re particularly fond of this video, Game of Phones.
The clever video brings you up to speed on the basic drama of seasons one through three, culminating in a fantastic rendition of the Red Wedding.
Via: Deadspin