Lightroom might be coming to the iPad sooner than your think, if this accidental posting of the photo-editing app is anything to go by. Oddly, it shows “Adobe Lightroom for Mobile, Annual” at $99 per year, which would suggest that this is a landing page for a service, not an actual app as one source of the story believes.
This time on the CultCast: Google buys Nest and their 100 ex-Apple employees, but why? Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs biopic finally gets a script, Kutcher’s Jobs just gets a Razzie nod; plus, iOS finally gets a full-size gaming controller!
Enjoy a few laughs whilst getting caught 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.
Thanks to Ting for sponsoring this episode! Finally, a straight forward wireless carrier who doesn’t overcharge. In fact, did you know 98% of people who switch to Ting save money? See how much you could be saving on your wireless bill at cultcast.ting.com.
This week, Cult of Mac Magazine explores how Apple will reboot China, and why you, the aficionado, should care.
2014 is the year of the horse: seen as an auspicious symbol for swift success, it bodes well for Apple. The Cupertino company launches its deal with China mobile around the same time as the year changes over, a deal Tim Cook called a “watershed” moment.
Author and reporter Luke Dormehl delves into the factors that will shift Apple’s strategy there as it hopes to reach over 700 million potential fanatics and why this year we may begin to see the transition into “designed in California, built for Asia.” Hong-Kong based tech reporter Truman Au takes a look at local iPhone culture and why the gold iPhone is the choice of device – and matching cars, bags and shoes — for the country’s new rich.
As always, we’ll have the best in new apps, music, books and movies plus answers to your most pressing Apple-related questions from an actual Genius.
It’s the weekend tomorrow, which for most people means that you can ignore the alarm when it goes off in the morning: hitting the snooze button on your iPhone and treating yourself to a few more hours of well-deserved rest and recuperation. Thanks to designers Distilunion, you can do it in style too — courtesy of their former Kickstarter iPhone alarm dock, the Snooze.
Here’s how it measures up.
Crescent Moon Games and Dead Mage have created a great action platformer here with Shadow Blade, available now in the App Store for an affordable $1.99.
It comes with Game Center Achievements and iOS 7 controller support, and a touch screen capable control scheme that works fairly well. You can read our review of the game after you watch the video below.
Steven Sande and Erica Sadun have been working on the third-edition of the book Talking To Siri (Amazon), and posted this great example of Siri’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor over on TUAW. Siri might not tell you one, but she’s certainly good at dissecting a lightbulb joke.
Source: TUAW
If you have a 2011 MacBook Pro that is wonking out like it was haunted by a Japanese ghost, you’re not the only one. It appears that a massive number of early-2011 MacBook Pro owners with AMD graphics are having issues with system crashes and hardware problems, with failure rates reaching a critical mass in recent weeks.
Are you ready to access your Mac Chromotely? No, doubtlessly not. None the less, you will soon have the option to do just that from your iOS device, if an online document from Google is to be believed.
The arbitrary 140 character limit of tweets can oftentimes seem as maddeningly arbitrary as it is maddeningly short. It’s not arbitrary, actually: Twitter was originally designed to work over dumbphones as an SMS service, and 140 characters is the maximum size of a single SMS (longer SMSes are actually sent as multiple messages and pieced together by your phone). In turn, the reason SMSes are 140 characters is that’s the maximum amount of information that fits into the small pocket of bandwidth that is left over with all the cellular voice calls whizzing through the air.
Interesting, huh? And, of course, Twitter’s cultural tersity has its benefits. Still, sometimes you just want to send a longer tweet, only to be thwarted by Twitter’s hardline stance. For just those moments, a new jailbreak tweak called Infinite Tweet 2 has come to make things easier for you.
Creepypasta meme Slender Man is back again — this time in an official sequel to 2012’s Slender Rising called, imaginatively enough, Slender Rising 2.
For those unfamiliar with the game, it pits you against the so-called Slender Man in four different horror movie-style locations, including the fan-favorite Mansion and Ghost Town. Your task is to rescue lost souls and pick up signs along the while, all while defending yourself with a shogun.
Following yesterday’s report that the official iOS Starbucks app was storing users’ credentials, passwords and GPS location in plain text — a big security no-no — the Seattle coffee maker has quickly pushed an update that seemingly resolves the issue. Or does it?
A new Apple Store has opened in Brisbane, Australia — representing the fourth to open in Queensland, and the largest in Australia’s Sunshine State.
Around 500 fans queued up for the grand opening ahead of time, with some camping out all night. The second person in line was Apple Store aficionado Gary Allen, who had traveled from California for the opening — which represents his 38th store opening.
Most musicians I know are struggling to buy a new set of guitar strings, let alone a new iPad Air. But if you are a music-making, iPad-toting, live-gig-playing musician, then you might be interested in IK Multimedia’s new iKlip 2, and the accompanying iPad Adapter.
News Republic — the iOS app which describes itself as the “definitive news app” — has received an upgrade, including several significant improvements.
Version 4.0 boasts a fresh, iOS 7 optimized look featuring a new icon and added space in the layout for easier browsing and reading of the news.
Imagine that your devices could send you a push notification asking if they could switch themselves off. That you could switch appliances on and off remotely to stop them drawing power in standby mode. That would be neat, right? Well, that’s exactly what the energy-saving Parce plug will do.
Last week we saw Command-C, a super-useful app that uses Wi-Fi, iOS 7 multitasking and push notifications to easily send your clipboard between devices. Now, there’s Scribe, which goes one better by ditching the Wi-Fi sending the clipboard between devices using low energy Bluetooth.
Apple has been accused of censorship in the past when it has been a little heavy-handed (to say the least) about banning content in the App Store.
With that being said, few were upset to hear that Plastic Surgery for Barbie — a game which asks players of 9 years+ to perform liposuction on Barbie-styled characters to make them “slim and beautiful” — has been pulled from the App Store. Google has similarly pulled the app from its own Google Play store.
Today is turning out to be photo-journal app Friday, with the latest entry in the list from iOS developer Manton Reece. It’s called Sunlit, and it’s a way to put together a journal of your daily meanderings with photos, text and check-ins. And here’s the twist: the free app uses App.net as it’s storage backend, so you can finally get some use for that account you signed up for but never use,
While Touch ID saves you the pain of writing in a passcode to unlock your iPhone, until now Mac users haven’t been afforded the same ease of use.
A new jailbreak feature is looking to change that, however, since it gives users the opportunity of using their iPhone 5s’ Touch ID feature to unlock their Mac computer.
Just the other day I asked my Twitter followers to recommend me a good app for making animated GIFs out of my photos. The response was stunning in its silence – not a single reply. But I don’t care. I now have PicGIF, a Mac app that does one thing: Turn Pics into GIFs.
After years of speculation — and some incredibly drawn-out contract negotiations along the way — China Mobile finally began selling iPhones today.
Tim Cook was in Beijing for the launch, where he handed out autographed iPhones to customers, alongside China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua. Cook tweeted the following:
Storehouse is today’s big app story. It’s an iOS app that lets you take text, pictures and video and combine them into great-looking stories. It’s kind of like a cross between iPhoto’s Journals and a printed magazine, only better than both.
Smartphone crime has become an epidemic. Especially in places like New York City where the crime rate went up for first time in twenty years thanks to thieves mugging people for their iPhones.
As a response to the iPhone crimewave, Apple added some significant improvements to iOS 7, including a new Activation Lock feature, but according to the New York Police Department’s new commissioner, Bill Bratton, that’s not enough. Not only that, Bratton is pretty sure Apple and other U.S. smartphone makers are in cahoots with insurance companies to make a fortune by not installing a kill switch.
Today Skype updated its iPhone and iPad apps with two-way HD video calling. The enhanced resolution is only available on the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and Retina iPad mini.
Chatting over text has gotten much better with today’s release. Skype has integrated with Apple’s Notification Center to show incoming messages even when the app is closed. In the past, Skype had to still be running in the background for push notifications to work. Group chats will be receiving the same upgrade in a future update.
Source: Skype
Apple released the second beta build OS X 10.9.2 to developers today, nearly a month after the first beta was released. Developers can grab Build 13C39 from the Mac Dev Center, or by running a software update if you’re already running the first beta.
The seed notes don’t list any new features, but ask devs to focus on Mail, Messages, graphics drives, VoiceOver, VPN and SMB2. The last beta added FaceTime over audio to the Messages and FaceTime apps. Apple also seeded the first beta of Safari 6.1.2 to developers that looks like it’s mostly filled with bug fixes.
Source: Apple