News - page 1405

Cult of Mac has long had a thing for standup desks – for years, publisher Leander Kahney has written posts great and small at an Ikea kitchen table propped up on canisters. His DIY version outlines the basic problem: a desk where you can stand up is useful, but they tend to be pricey.

We’ve reviewed NewHeights, for example, which will set you back over $1,300, so we were eager to try an option with variable height that didn’t break the bank.

Enter the Varidesk.

Having just crawled out of its smackdown from Google, Rap Genius is back with a new app for iOS that gives you access the site’s breakdowns and explanations on all those pop songs you just don’t understand.

The Genius app lets you swim in the all the annotations for song lyrics, poems, and news articles provided by the Rap Genius community. Once you install the app it scans your iTunes Library to prep all your song lyrics. There’s also a Shazam like function that can find lyrics for any song that’s playing around you.

The app is only available on iPhone with no word on an iPad version or upcoming support for Android, but you can grab it for free on iTunes starting today.

Here are the full release notes:

Last week Steven Troughton-Smith treated us to the first screenshots of iOS in the Car, an upcoming feature that integrates your iPhone with a vehicle’s in-dash system. Now the developer’s digging though iOS 7.0.3 has  resulted in a video of iOS in the Car in use on an iOS Simulator.

According to Steve’s findings, iOS in the Car supports multiple resolutions and touchscreens to allow for different hardware buttons, wheels and touchpad. Right now it only works with certain whitelisted Apple apps as there’s no public API for developers yet, and rather than including an onscreen keyboard the UI only accepts voice recognition input. 

Check out the video below:

A new Apple patent awarded this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests future MacBooks could be powered by the sun. In its filing for an “Electronic device display module,” which was first submitted back in 2010, Apple describes a notebook with a double-sided display that has photovoltaic cells on its back for solar charging. 

I always know when it’s going to rain. It’s not because I’m psychic, but because of Dark Sky, which I can confidently call one of—of not the—best weather apps in the App Store. Originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign, the success of Dark Sky has brought about Forecast.io and a robust weather platform for other great apps.

What does two years of development and going back to the drawing board get you? A complete redesign of Dark Sky for iOS. I’ve been using it for months, and it’s finally available in the App Store as a free update.

Yahoo is reportedly in talks to acquire business app developer Tomfoolery for around $16 million.

Tomfoolery is most notably the developer behind Anchor, a social network for coworkers, which we have previously written about at Cult of Mac.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts has begun a pilot program in two of its major hotel locations in Manhattan and Silicon Valley, which does away with keycards altogether by allowing guests to enter their rooms using just their smartphones.

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year all now firmly in our rear-view mirrors, Apple is focusing on the next big sales holiday of the year: Valentine’s Day.

Describing the iPad Air and iPad mini as “two ways to your valentine’s heart”, Apple has posted a new ad campaign on the main page of its online store — advising that users take advantage of Apple’s free custom engraving to “include a few love letters on any iPad”.

Steve Wozniak has been announced as the headline speaker for next week’s Apps World North America event in San Francisco.

Running February 5-6, Apps World is an event presenting the latest insight into the multi-platform app ecosystem, expected to attract more than 8,000 attendees.

If you’re a movie nerd, then you’re going to freak out about Yeah! Movies. It’s an iPad app which lets you stream many great films (Kill Bill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Caddyshack and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. You also get around 500 “curated extras” with every movie purchase.

Top-grossing iOS developer ComiXology has just updated its popular Comics app with several improvements — including the addition of a highly-requested “Wish List” feature.

The feature lets users build their own list of ComiXology wants by tapping a Wish List button, which saves the book for later. Wish Lists can be accessed in the app’s Purchases section.

Do you hear that tinkling, rattling sound? That’s the sound of a million teeth skittering across the floor tiles as their previous owners relax their legs after smashing the teeth out of their own skulls with their own knees.

What the hell am I talking about? The absurd, almost violent knee-jerk reactions to Apple app updates that pare back functions in order to provide a clearer path for future updates. It’s like these folks never heard of pruning a rosebush to promote better growth.

And the news: Applescript is back in Numbers.

The much-leaked Fujifilm X-T1 is now officially official, and will surely be a sell-out success when it goes on sale next month for $1,300 (body only). It’s an SLR-style camera with an electronic viewfinder, Fujifilm’s trademark (16.3MP) X-Trans sensor, a metal body and a whole mess of mechanical knobs and dials.

Dark Sky, the Instapaper of weather apps, just hit v4.0. It’s still only available in the U.S and the UK, and it still gives you accurate, hyper-local predictions for rain, but just about everything else has changed. For the better, I might add.

Today the U.S. Department of Justice gave permission to companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to share previously classified details regarding requests for customer data from the government.

Tim Cook recently said in an interview that Apple has a gag order preventing it from disclosing what exact information it has given over to the NSA. Now Apple and other companies that have fought for greater transparency from the government can share more about what they’ve had to share. Apple has posted a revised list of the information requests it received between January and June of 2013.

More money than a lot of countries, really. If you look at a list of the Gross Domestic Product of countries around the world, you see that Apple’s first quarter revenue, reported today in an earnings call, places it quite high, if it were a country, of course.

Flying Experience by Umoove isn’t really a game in the strictest sense of the word. As the title implies, it’s really more of an “experience” — although it may wind up changing the way games are played on your iOS device all the same.

What gameplay there is is straightforward. You play an unnamed character flying over a desert settlement. A little bit like Crazy Taxi, or a similar title, the clock is ticking down all the time and it’s up to you to collect power-ups which give you more time to explore. The power-ups are glowing magic potions, which hover in mid air, and you collect them by flying into them. That’s it really.

Apple just announced the results of its Q1 2014 holiday quarter and while sales records for both iPhone and iPad were demolished, the reaction from Wall Street was less than enthusiastic.

Amid weaker than expected iPhone sales Tim Cook reassured investors that Apple’s objective “has always been to make the best, not the most. And I feel like we’re doing that.” Today’s earnings call was devoid of big spoilers on future products – no surprise there – but there was plenty of valuable information to be gleaned about the future of Apple.

Here are the five of the juiciest tidbits we heard in today’s call:

Once again, Apple has announced a blockbuster quarter — the biggest ever in Apple’s history. And the pundits say the company is in trouble? The numbers are huge though, and difficult to process.

Here’s what it all means, as a series of easy-to-understand charts.

Apple has announced its earnings for this past holiday quarter, and the results are a doozy. The company reported $57.6 billion in revenue, which is an all-time record. 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads were sold, which are both records as well.

This quarter’s results are particularly important for Apple because of all the new hardware it announced before Christmas. The iPhone is obviously selling well, but the iPad’s growth is insane when you consider that Apple only sold 14 million units in Q1 of 2013.

Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer are set to get on the phones at 2 p.m. Pacific to tell investors all about Apple’s incredible holiday-quarter earnings. We’ll be right here, liveblogging the whole thing.

Rather than busting out a tsunami of posts, Alex Heath and I are going to test out the new Cult of Mac liveblog. Bookmark this page, come back, and grip up for what’s sure to be one of Apple’s best quarters ever. 

We all know someone who is still complaining about the UI changes made in iOS 7, but iOS 7’s growth has remained strong with the latest measurements from the App Store boasting that iOS 7 adoption just reach 80%.

If Apple sticks to pattern, the iPhone 6 will be unveiled in September this year, and it’ll be the first major redesign of the flagship smartphone since 2011. So what does Apple have in store for us this year?

Most rumors so far have focused on the possibility of a larger display size, but a new rumor suggests that there might be more that is new about the screen than that: not only might the iPhone 6 feature a sapphire glass display, but it could also charge just by being laid out in the sun.

When Jony Ive ousted Scott Forstall as Design King of iOS, he made a lot of changes, most of them for the better. One of the tinier — and for the worse — changes, though, was removing the ‘Now Playing’ icon from the iOS 7 status bar. Now a new jailbreak tweaks brings it back.

The Retina MacBook Pro comes in both 13-inch and 15-inch varieties, but when will the MacBook Air go Retina? Analyst Daniel Matte speculates that it could happen soon, and when it does, there will be three MacBooks with Retina Displays: the 13-inch and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and a 12-inch MacBook Air with Retina Display. Twelve?