UPDATE: Shortly after posting this news item, Ive’s photo appeared back on the U.S. Executives Profiles page.
In a strange move, Jony Ive’s picture has vanished from Apple’s online list of executives – although his profile page is still accessible to users who type in the address.
While it would be a massive mistake to jump to conclusions, this change has previously signaled the departure of an Apple Senior VP — as it did when former iOS head Scott Forstall left the company in 2012.
Musical video sharing app Mindie has received a significant new update.
Similar to (non-musical app) Vine, Mindie lets users select a backing track, and then record and share a looping music video of up to 7 seconds.
Apple opened its first store in Brazil over the weekend — with around 1,700 impatient South American Apple lining up to be the first through the doors.
The Apple Store, located in Rio de Janeiro, holds the (dubious) distinction of offering the highest priced iPhone 5s currently available on the market. The 16-gigabyte, contract-free model is selling for 2,799 Brazilian reals — a figure that translates as $1,174.
MarginNotes is an interesting app that may just be a little too confusing to use, or may be the perfect document markup app ever. I still can’t figure out which.
The app will open EPUB and PDF files and let you mark them up, adding comments, margin notes, sketches and anything else, and also lets you add entire outlines, or turn the document into an outline – I’m not quote sure. Let’s take a quick look:
Successor to Steve Jobs, BFF of Steve Wozniak, and all-around “creative genius” Kanye West had some harsh words for Tim Cook over the weekend.
Speaking/singing on stage at a Saturday night show in Newark, NJ, West blasted the Apple CEO for allegedly asking him to perform for free at an Apple event.
How about an iPad accessory so dorky, so unashamedly utilitarian that even the Android-using Killian Bell just dared me to wear one around this year’s Mobile World Congress? Interested? Good. It’s the Survivor Harness from Griffin, and it is so named becasue if you wear it, you’ll struggle to survive the taunts and humiliation it will surely bring.
Apple is reportedly looking into developing a device capable of predicting heart attacks.
The medical sensor device — possibly a feature for the long-reported iWatch, if previous rumors are to be believed — would listen to the sound blood makes as it flows through arteries, and use this to predict irregularities.
Between your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac, it’s hard to imagine a time when you’d be online and need to edit a photo, but somehow not have access to an app like Snapseed (which has its own browser version BTW).
But should you find yourself trapped at a PC, while nestled deep in bowels of a government building that has confiscated your iPhone and iPad at the gate (to be root-kitted and infected with spyware no doubt), and with a desperate need to add some pop to that cute cat photo you found, then head for Pics.io.
The BluCub is a lot like the Tempo pebble I reviewed a few weeks back, only instead of measuring just temperature, it also measures humidity, adding another feather to your home-weather-station cap. If you wear a cap and put a feather in it when you buy a Bluetooth sensor, that is.
Lightroom Analytics is a plugin that breaks down the metadata in your Lightroom library into all kids of neat and interesting charts and graphs. Want to know what lenses you use the most? Or which setting you always tweak? Then you need LR Analytics.
Snippefy takes the almost-useless highlights from your Kindle and syncs them to Evernote, Dropbox or anywhere that’ll accept text. It’s an iPhone-only app, but as it’s only really there for processing your snippets to use somewhere else, it’s fine for the iPad too.
Apple fans may argue that from a bang-for-your-buck perspective, an iPhone is one of the best smartphone deals around. If you’re judging simply by how much screen proportionally makes up the front of your device, though, this chart makes a strong case that the iPhone is a pretty bad deal compared to various Android phones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s7v0F_oaZQ
How bad does the other half — those who have never owned a MacBook — have it?
Pretty bad, as this hysterical video showing what Macgasm (tongue-in-cheek?) says are a trio of Norwegian Microsoft employees hurling around a MacBook Pro between themselves like the early hominid apes in the Dawn of Man section of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
So oblivious are they to the fact that this shiny wedge of unibody aluminum is a laptop, that they blindly destroy it, hooting and hollering as if they could never even envision a laptop that wasn’t made of cheap black plastic. Which, surely, many PC owners can’t.
Via: Macgasm
We’ll never stop Flapping! On this CultCast, we investigate the worldwide obsession with the iOS wünder-game, Flappy Bird, and the bizarre stories of why the game’s developer pulled the wildly popular game so abruptly from the App Store. Plus, some new iPhone 6 rumors surface, and a Macintosh super-grid you’ve never heard of is hunting down a cure for cancer.
Softly giggle 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 audio adventure begin.
And thanks to Lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.
Electronic Art’s recently released update of Peter Molyneux’s Dungeon Keeper has garnered a lot of criticism for its shameless destruction of the gameplay of a strategy classic. But hey, why play that cynical piece of freemium crap when you can play the original for free?
For the next 24 hours, GOG.com is having a great promotion capitalizing upon the nigh-universal hatred for the Dungeon Keeper iOS remake. Just go to their site and sign up for an account to download the original classic Dungeon Keeper game for your Mac for free. Although seventeen years old, the original game still holds up, and runs just great on modern Macs. If you want to know why people are so honked off about the new version, look no further.
Source: GOG.com
Periodically, Best Buy has been known to offer $50 discounts on select iPhones and iPads. If you’re looking to save a few bucks on an Apple product, Best Buy’s deals are a good, regularly occurring window to buy the device you’ve had your eye on.
If you’ve been waiting for that window to open again, good news! Starting this Sunday, February 16, and going to February 22nd, Best Buy will be taking $50 off the purchase of any iPhone with a two-year contract on any carrier.
You can also get $50 off the iPad mini with Retina Display, but only if you hop to it: that deal ends today. And if you trade in your old iPad while you’re with it, you can get a Best Buy gift card worth up to $200… probably not the best value for trading-in an old iPad, but a deal that could possibly influence some President’s Day weekend impulse shoppers.
Via: CNET
We’ve been hearing tell that Microsoft will release a version of Office for iPad “soon” since at least February 2012, but instead of a native version, the only thing Microsoft has released so far is Office 365, a cloud-based version of the Office suite that works on mobile devices.
According to some well-connected insiders, though, the wait is almost over, and Microsoft could launch Microsoft Office for iPad in the next three months.
Chalk it up to the state of modern life if you want — where we’re much more comfortable looking at an iPhone screen than building fires and hunting wild animals — but there’s something undeniably manly about the idea of cleaning your iMac with something called a Screen Cleaning Blade.
Okay, so things get less rugged individualist when you hear that this is a scented, anti-bacterial Screen Cleaning Blade, and still less so when you hear that it features a “vibrant satin finish” — but, hey, at least it’s something, right? Coming packaged with another cleaner designed for your keyboard (the Keyboard Blade?), these two handy gadgets promise to keep your Apple products looking as shiny as the day you first unboxed them.
So do they live up to their word?
This week saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most recognizable patents.
Arriving with iOS 3 in June 2009 was the ability to select, copy, and paste text using two draggable selection handles displayed on screen. Miles ahead of what other smartphones were offering at the time, Apple’s solution was a neat way of transferring to mobile a tool that was a key part of the personal computer user experience.
To celebrate the publishing of this historic patent, Cult of Mac spoke with one of its inventors, user interface designer Bas Ording, about the development process.
With popular music streaming apps like Spotify and Pandora already popular and on devices all over the world, any newcomers are faced with an immediate challenge. The makers behind the popular headphones and speakers Beats By Dre are taking their crack at the genre, with their new app and service Beats Music.
Take a look at the new Beats Music app and see how it compares to the competitors.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Beats Music” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
The famous Macintosh “Picasso” trademark logo was developed for the introduction of the original 128K Mac back in 1984. A minimalist line drawing reminiscent of the style of Pablo Picasso, this whimsical graphic implied the whole of a computer in a few simple strokes. It was an icon of what was inside the box, and became as famous as the computer it represented.
The logo was designed by Tom Hughes and John Casado, art directors on the Macintosh development team. Originally the logo was to be a different concept by artist Jean-Michel Folon, but before launch it was replaced by the colorful line drawing. It’s been famous ever since, and the style has endured across decades.
Casado recently attended the 30th Anniversary of the Mac celebration, and emailed Cult of Mac to shed some light on the history of this famous graphic. It turns out Picasso was not the primary inspiration for this after all – rather, it was Henri Matisse!
With rumors of the iWatch and future Apple products focusing on health continuing to swell, Apple has hired yet another medical device expert.
Marcelo Malini Lamego joined Apple at the end of last month, having previously spent 8 years as the CTO of Cercacor — a medical device company, based in Irvine, CA, involved with the development of non-invasive patient monitoring technologies, including medical devices and sensors.
The popular Hitman franchise will finally break away from consoles and make its way to iOS with a forthcoming game called Hitman GO.
Created by the Square Enix Montréal team, Hitman GO features a turn-based gaming experience, set in the Hitman universe.
Today sees the iOS launch of Deadman’s Cross, a zombie-themed collectible card battle RPG from Square Enix, the company behind Final Fantasy and the multimillion-download hit Guardian Cross.
Set sixteen years in the future, the game takes place in a zombie apocalypse in which a rampant virus has turned large numbers of people into the walking dead.
Phil Schiller and possibly Scott Forstall are expected to make witness appearances for the next round of the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the two companies return to court in California in late March.
As Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Schiller was the highest-profile witness to take the stand during the first jury trial in the patent case between Apple and Samsung in August 2012.