iBeacons are pushing to become the big new retail trend of 2014. The tech debuted last year with a demo by the MLB, before launching in Apple Stores nationwide as well as some Macys stores. You can add American Outfitters to the list too as ShopKick announced this morning that its partnered with the clothing company to bring iBeacons to 100 locations.
Let’s admit it. You’re the best goddamn drummer your bus stop has ever seen. When “Hot For Teacher” rounds the corner on your iPhone, you transform into a radiant drumming beast. Sadly, all of your gut-busting drum sessions take place right there in your lap. Nobody can hear the majesty of your air drum solo, but thanks to the latest advances in drumming technology, now they can!
That’s pretty much the pitch for DrumPants, a set of Bluetooth LE-enabled sensors that capture triumphant thigh thumping to play more than 100 different sounds controlled by your iPhone or iPad. They’re kind of like those ridiculous Keyboard Jeans, except the sensors aren’t a part of your clothing, allowing you to attach DrumPants to anything you’re wearing. They come as both drum pads and foot pedals, so you can take your customized instrument wherever you go.
Check out the promo video below:
We got a sneak peek at Codename Cygnus, a Kickstarter-funded interactive radio drama game for iOS, at PAX this last fall. Developer Reactive studios has just updated the app with more than 20 Game Center achievements, improved voice recognition, VoiceOver features, and a redesigned iOS 7 friendly interface.
Oh, and it’s cheaper, too.
Autism is an epidemic that can’t be overstated. The disorder is really a spectrum of behaviors and needs, and it affects about one in every 50 children in the US alone.
The Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) has developed an app that puts its research-based interventions into an educational iPad app with mini games for reinforcement. The app, titled Autism Learning Games: Camp Discovery, provides children ages two to eight with direct instruction on topics that kids with Autism have trouble sorting out.
“The idea here is that there are so many things a kid needs to learn, to ‘catch up’ with their peers,” CARD’s chief strategy officer, Dennis Dixon told Cult of Mac during a phone call. “Autism has a number of skill deficits. ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) targets those skills one at a time.”
Camp Discovery, then, is like having a behavior intervention teacher on the iPad, presenting lesson after lesson with 100 percent accuracy. But will kids play with it?
While Microsoft and BlackBerry are still trying to piece together a decent mobile user base in the U.S., Apple and Samsung managed to widen their lead against the competition in terms of smartphone marketshare in the U.S. Both companies experienced a significant bump in 2013, but Apple claimed the largest increase despite murmurs that the company is getting out innovated by Google.
An iOS version has been available since last year, but today sees the official launch of popular email client (and former Kickstarter project) Mail Pilot for Mac.
If you’re particularly concerned about the security of your passwords, you might want to stay away from Starbucks’ official iOS app: the Seattle-based coffee maker has just confirmed that passwords, credentials and location in the company’s app are stored in plain text, and are not hashed or encrypted at all.
For those of us who live the lives of professional bloggers, here’s a common occurence. You wake up in the morning and load up a bunch of tabs of stories you want to read that day. Soon, you have two or three dozen tabs open, one of which has an auto-playing video. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t bloody find the thing!
Yeah. Chrome just fixed that.
With the next Worldwide Developer Conference a few months away (good luck getting tickets), it seems a little strange that Apple would go through the trouble of updating last year’s WWDC 2013 app with some fixes, but delve a little deeper and it makes sense.
It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally here! Long months after it hit the Mac, Beamdog Entertainment’s update of Bioware’s classic RPG set in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, is finally available on the iPad.
Another day, another new iOS game is launched toward the back of the App Store net!
Given a soft launch last week in the Australian App Store last week, Football Kicks: Title Race is now available to download internationally.
If I was trying to sell you this backup battery, I probably wouldn’t need to do much more than tell your its name: The Darth Vader Lightsaber Portable Battery Charger. Because really, who wouldn’t want to juice their iPhone with Vader’s laser sword?
Soon after Tim Cook took over running Apple, we reported that he was following the example of predecessor Steve Jobs in terms of responding to customer emails.
Two-and-a-half years on, it seems nothing has changed.
The trouble with Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects is that they take so damn long to arrive. They need to get funded, they need to get made, and only then will they be shipped. In the meantime, you’ve forgotten about them, or – worse – you bought something and now, six months later, you no longer want or need it.
What if there were a way to browse and buy only successful, shipping products, and buy them as God intended – with immediate shipping? Well, now there is. It’s a web store called Tiny Lightbulbs, and you’ll recognize a lot of what you see there.
Box has updated its iOS apps for iOS 7, and seems to have gotten a little drunk at the celebration party: Box is giving a free 50GB storage to anyone who downloads the new app in the next 30 days. Or 29 days, I guess, as the announcement came yesterday.
It may not be close to what it was in its heyday, but the news that The Simpsons is set to finally be available for legal streaming in the U.S via iOS devices is enough to have most people saying “Mmm… Apple” — followed by a gargling sound.
Bem’s upcoming Wireless Speaker Duo is great in all kinds of ways. First, it looks like an old-timey radio, complete with rounded edges and simple bent-metal handle. Second, it has proper playback control buttons on the top. And third, it contains two speakers which can be popped out and separated to make a stereo pair, before being returned to the base for charging.
Probably the last thing you want to admit in your app’s release notes is that you’ve integrated Appirator, the annoying “please rate me, please please please” popup that makes your paying customers hate your app. But we’ll give NexTiga’s Smart Photo Album a pass, becasue it also adds some great new real features.
Google has finally released its official iOS app for the Movies & TV section of its Play Store. The universal app is available for free in the App Store, but it comes with several severe limitations.
First off, you can’t buy content through the app due to Google not wanting to give Apple a 30 percent cut of all in-app purchases. Another con is the lack of offline playback, meaning you can’t cache a video to watch later when Wi-Fi isn’t available. And for some odd reason, video only plays back in standard def on the iPhone.
The app is pretty barebones, but it is nice for the Chromecast, Google’s little streaming dongle that plugs into the TV. Chromecast users with iOS hardware have previously been limited to Netflix and Hulu Plus, but Google Play offers more recent movie and TV selections.
Source: App Store
More than 30 years old as a concept, and one of the very first iOS games to be released in the App Store back in the day, Pac-Man is a genuine O.G. of the gaming world.
With Apple currently giving it away for a limited time as part of its “App of the Week” promotion, we at Cult of Mac thought the time was right to pay homage by revisiting one of the all-time-greats.
So how does it measure up here in 2014?
The City College of New York is investigating its use of former Apple exec Scott Forstall’s photo in advertisements for the school’s student ID card.
Cult of Mac contacted the college Wednesday afternoon about Forstall’s strange appearance on the promotional materials. “I’m not commenting,” said Ellis Simon, City College’s public relations director, who added that he was aware of the situation but needed time to “get all the facts straight” before talking about the apparent mixup.
The Los Angeles Board of Education has voted to continue its efforts to provide every student and teacher in the L.A. Unified school district with a computer by approving a new $115-million proposal to distribute iPads to 38 more campuses. The proposal also calls for the purchase of laptops for every student at seven high schools, and picks up a couple thousand extra iPads for new state tests in spring.
Overall the board thinks it will buy somewhere around 67,500 new tablets just for the spring testing, even though an oversight committee recommend only purchasing 38,500. The board decided getting everyone the same model at the same time is of the utmost importance for revolutionizing education, even though the $1-billion effort is expected to exhaust all their tech funds made available by voter-approved school-construction bonds.
After negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission for months regarding the use of in-app purchases in the App Store, Apple has reached a consent agreement with the agency, according to a company-wide email Tim Cook just sent employees.
Apple’s in-app purchases practices have frustrated regulators since debuting in the App Store back in 2009. In his letter to employees, which was obtained by Re/code, Cook says a host of complaints from customers led Apple to investigate its practices. Last year Apple emailed 28 million App Store customers regarding their in-app purchases and subsequently refunded more than 37,000 in-app purchases that parents claim were unauthorized. The FTC announced that Apple will refund $32.5 million to customers as part of the settlement.
The settlement also requires Apple to change its billing practices by March 31 to ensure customers give their informed consent before billing them for in-app purchases. Apple also has to add an option for customers to remove that consent at any time.
Cook says “it doesn’t feel right for the FTC to sue over a case that had already been settled. To us, it smacked of double jeopardy,” but the FTC’s deal isn’t going to require Apple to do anything extra, so they decided to sign it and move on.
Here’s the full letter:
I can think of one reason, and one reason only, to take my iPhone into the shower, and that reason is YouPorn. But maybe you’re waiting for a call from the delivery man or a visit from the plumber, and you’re all sweaty and dirty and you need to strip off all your clothes and get in the shower right now. In that case, you need the cool new HoYo, an easy-to-access waterproof cellphone pocket for the shower.
The iOS gaming experience is about to get a whole lot more interactive, thanks to Israeli startup Umoove.
With its new app Umoove Experience, downloadable free of charge from the App Store, gamers can have a go at piloting a 3D avatar flying over a village — enabling them to control navigation entirely by face and head gestures.