News - page 1398

Now that Apple is making products in the U.S.A., every state wants to be in on the action. Especially Arizona, who was so determined to get Cupertino to choose the pretty town of Mesa as the location of its upcoming sapphir glass factory that they offered significant benefits — including tax breaks — to get Apple to move in.

For the iWatch, many expect Apple to unveil the next big thing, the true successor to the iPhone in the wearable age. But a new report citing “limited by direct knowledge of Apple’s plans for the iWatch” claims that Apple’s wristband will be a much simpler affair, more akin to a Nike Fuelband or a FitBit than the standalone “holy grail” device previous reports have indicated.

Borrowing its premise from the Jet Li-starring cult martial arts actioner The One, Only One is a retro-styled arena slasher that pits a sword-wielding hero against waves of enemies on what looks to be a giant floating platform in the sky.

Sure, the Camera app that came with your iPhone has a few filters, but we all know they’re pretty lame.

Instagram (and before that, Hipstamatic) made the quick filter process a no-brainer and popular to boot.

Jelly Bus’ Rookie, though, has all of them beat, with a veritable boat load of filters, effects, and all the settings you can possibly handle. If that’s not enough, there’s a bunch of stickers and text effects you can add to your photos to make even the most ordinary snapshot into a work of art.

Once you tweak and tap your way to photo-nirvana with Rookie, you can save your photo to pretty much every other photo sharing service out there, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Best of all? It’s a universal app and it’s free. Check it out now.

Source: App Store: Rookie – Photo Editor | Free | Jelly Bus

Apple announced this morning that its iTunes Radio music service has finally branched out from being available only in the U.S.

Starting today iTunes users in Australia can start using Apple’s free Internet radio service, after iTunes Radio originally debuted in the U.S. last September alongside iOS 7. 

The Flappy Bird saga will not die thanks to one question still on the minds of Flappy Bird fans – how did Flappy Bird’s wild success ruin creator Dong Nguyen’s life?

Nguyen removed the game from the App Store and Google Play on Sunday despite making $50,000 a day off it, saying the game is a success, but it also ruins his simple life.

I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.

— Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) February 8, 2014

Theories are boiling as to how the game ruined Dong’s life. Did Nintendo complain? No. Did he sell it? Nope.

Perhap his pockets are simply running out of room for those fat stacks, but a new theory emerged this morning, maybe Dong Nguyen cheated the App Store with bots.

After enjoying a wild ride as one of the most popular iPhone games ever, Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen removed the game from both the App Store and Google Play yesterday, but if you missed the rise of Flappy Bird without getting to actually play it, there’s now a web game to give you a taste of the addiction.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine

I was almost out of gas. I was also almost out of cash. I needed to find the cheapest source of fuel for my beat-up ride so I could get downtown to meet a friend for coffee. I pulled up GasBuddy, and within one tap I found the closest, cheapest gas station near me.

Once I gassed up, I hit a sweet parking spot just a few blocks away from the coffee shop. I launched Honk, swiped across the top to set the time on the meter, and took a photo of my car to make sure I could get back to it.

Sure, fine, it’s not a flying car, but this is as close to the future as this old beater is going to get, and it’s all thanks to my iPhone and a suite of apps.

To celebrate 50 years since The Fab Four appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Apple TV has been quietly updated with its own Beatles channel, which streams the band’s famous debut performance on U.S. shores.

In addition to streaming all 14-minutes of the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the new Beatles channel also allows you to purchase all of Steve Jobs’ favorite band’s U.S. albums.

Don’t have an Apple TV? You can check out the same content on your Mac or PC through iTunes here.

Popular universal iOS journal app My Wonderful Days has been given an update, adding several notable features.

First and foremost is the ability for users to now add videos to their multimedia journals — either shooting one themselves, or else adding an existing video from their iOS device’s library.

iPhone manufacturer Foxconn has signed a letter of intent promising to invest up to $US1 billion in Indonesia.

The $1 billion investment would be carried out in between three and five years, and will cover areas including R&D, electronics software design, manufacturing and assembly of electronic products.

For the most part, iOS 7 controllers are still pretty expensive and a bit of a luxury. If you already own one, however, and have a taste for retro video games, you’ll be pleased to hear that Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic CD have now received updates adding controller support.

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) has recommended that shareholders vote against Carl Icahn’s share buyback proposal for Apple.

According to the ISS report, “[The Apple board] has returned the bulk of its U.S.-generated cash to shareholders via aggressive stock buybacks and dividends payouts. In light of these good-faith efforts and its past stewardship, the board’s latitude should not be constricted by a shareholder resolution that would micromanage the company’s capital allocation process.”

iPhones with the deleted smash hit iOS game Flappy Bird still installed are garnering bids of up to $99,900.00 on eBay.

Leading the way is eBay user pindrus who is selling his used 16GB iPhone 5s (“The item may have some signs of cosmetic wear, but is fully operational and functions as intended”) with the game, and has so far attracted more than 70 bids.

Just a few months after its launch, LinkedIn has made the call to kill controversial feature LinkedIn Intro — which embedded LinkedIn profiles inside your iOS Mail app.

Despite being a cleverly designed solution, LinkedIn Intro was cricitized almost immediately for being invasive and a potential security risk. Security firm Bishop Fox described the service as “a dream for attackers.”

Here’s a little squirt of nostalgia into the brains of our (slightly) older readers: it’s an iPad app called Light Pad HD, and it exists to help you view your film slides and negatives by turning your iPad into a light-box. Instead of having to find a brightly lit piece of wall, or a window without distractions behind it, you can just launch this $2 app and drop your film strips on top of the iPad’s screen and use its screen.

The FAVI may look kind of dumb, but I have a use-case for it right now: Whenever I play music or podcasts in my kitchen, I use a Bluetooth speaker. This means first getting the speaker to talk to the iPhone, and then it means finding a safe spot in the kitchen where my iPhone won’t get killed by spills.

The FAVI solves both these problems, by being a stand which connects wirelessly to your iPhone when you set it down on the cradle.

If you’re going to stick your beautifully slimline iPhone inside and external battery case, then why not make it a battery case with wireless charging built in? That’s the thinking behind the new Unu Aero case, a slimline (15mm) case that doubles the battery life of your iPhone 5, and frees you from ever plugging it in ever again.

You know how it goes: you and your adventure buddies are standing around in the middle of the arctic, or atop a high-altitude jungle, and you’re all bored stiff. The campfire is burning down, you’ve all told your best ghost stories, and all you want to do it Tweet that awesome photo you just took of a penguin kissing a polar bear.

What’s the answer? The Iridium Go!, a kind of satellite MiFi that brings a data and voice connection down from the heavens and shares it between up to five devices via Wi-Fi. Never suffer the boredom of nature again.

We’ve seen several horn speakers here on Cult of Mac, and made at least as many schoolboyish horn jokes. But to my knowledge this is the first speaker that looks like an acoustic amplifying horn, but is in fact just a regular novelty speaker. It’s also probably the only gadget we’ve featured that has “trendy” as a bullet point on its feature list.

And finally, it looks like a snail.

IDraw, the iPad vector-based drawing app, has just gone v2.0, and turned from a great drawing app into a crazy full-featured pro-level app. Here’s a taster of the new features:

Photoshop PSD Import/Export:

• Import layered PSD files with vector paths and effects
• Shape layers are imported as editable vector paths
• Layer effects are imported as fully editable drop shadows, glows, etc.
• Export designs as layered PSD files

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNGm7te6qdU

iMessage, Facetime, Siri… what will Apple’s next innovation be? This video humorously speculates that for the iPhone 6, Apple might take a page from Emmett Brown’s book with the iFlux Capacitor, an app that will allow any car to travel back in time, take photos in another century, as well as let you send messages to yourself in the past and track the stock market of the future. The English ain’t great, but the humor is.

Source: YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GVHj4c2iE

It feels like it’s taken forever for Siri Eyes Free — the in-car Siri functionality first unveiled in 2012 — to actually start popping up in a meaningful number of cars, but the new ad for the Chevrolet Equinox highlights Siri Eyes Free functionality in the wild… and shows how it can go horribly, horribly wrong for you.

Via: iClarified

Following his comments that he would be pulling his wildly popular, $50,000-a-day game Flappy Bird from the App Store, developer Dong Nguyen has actually gone through with it, removing the game from both the App Store and Google Play Store.

We’ve seen concepts of the iPhone Air before, but I can’t think of one I like more — or that I think looks more plausible — than Joseph Farahi’s 5.1-inch iPhone 6 concept. This actually looks like a device Jony Ive could design.