The OS X app Most Likely to Induce the Beach Ball of Death, aka iTunes, was updated this afternoon to be slightly more crash-friendly.
iTunes version 11.1.5 was released by Apple as a minor update aimed at putting an end to iTunes quitting unexpectedly. The tiny update also comes with compatibility improvements for iBooks for Mac on OS X Mavericks.
Here are the skimpy release notes:
Those hoping for a little more rock and roll at SXSW will be amped to hear Apple just added Soundgarden to the lineup of bands schedule to perform at iTunes Festival during SXSW this year.
You know how it is; as a brimming young tech-savvy hipster, you need to carry a lot of gear with you as you cycle from the coffee house to the park bench, writing your magnum opus and staying in touch with your iPad, Macbook Air, and iPhone.
The thing is, that gear usually comes with a ton of support gear, with all sorts of plugs, wires, battery packs, extra mice, point-and-shoot camera and the like. You’ll be awash with the detritus of your modern monadic life in no time without some sort of organizational system that you can strap to your back while on the go.
Kastel thinks it has the answer with a Kickstarter project to fund a new line of functional, good looking bags for your gear, soon to be available in three savvy material choices, including leather and blue and grey linen.
Oscar-nominated director David Fincher is in talks to direct Sony’s upcoming biopic about Steve Jobs, according to Variety. If Fincher did direct, it would team him up yet again with writer Aaron Sorkin. The last time the two worked together was on The Social Network.
Fincher is currently finishing up post-production on his latest movie, Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck. He directed the first two episodes of House of Cards and is an executive producer for the show. The last project he directed for Sony was 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Aaron Sorkin finished his script for the Jobs biopic earlier this year. He has said in the past that the story will be divided into three distinct acts, and each act will take place backstage at an Apple keynote. No rumors on casting yet.
Source: Variety
The tale of Flappy Bird is almost unbelievable. A frustratingly simple iPhone game from an indie game dev in Vietnam with no prior notoriety becomes an overnight success. It dominates the App Store charts and starts making $50,000 per day in ad revenue. Then, out of the blue, the dev decides to pull it from the App Store at the height of its popularity.
It was a story too good to be true. Except that it was true.
In the wake of Flappy Birds’s removal, countless knockoffs have tried to fill the gap. “Flappy Bird being taken off the App Store has created this vacuum,” says Jeremy Olson, founder of the award-winning app studio Tapity. In an effort to make a worthy successor to Flappy Bird, Olson and his small team have created Buffalo Wings.
Instead of a bird, you guide a flying buffalo over and under walls by tapping the iPhone’s screen. Hit a wall at any point and you have to start over. The gameplay mechanics may be the same, but Tapity is hoping that Buffalo Wings has what it takes to capture lightning in a bottle twice.
In the ephemeral world of Internet memes, gamers have already moved on from Flappy Bird and on to the next thing. But that doesn’t mean that developer Dong Nguyen was wrong when he claimed that the game was proving “addictive” to players.
In a new YouTube Sci Show episode, host Hank Green explains why a game that even its staunchest defenders would admit is pretty stupid proved so crazily addictive.
Popular numerical puzzle game Threes! has received its first ever update, adding several player-requested features.
For those who haven’t played Threes!, it’s a game which challengers players to come up with multiples of 3 by sliding and matching pairs of cards. The object is to gain the highest score possible by combining numbers to first make 3s, then 6s, then putting those together to get 12s, and so on.
It’s surprisingly fun and addictive, and has been met with a number of positive reviews since its release earlier this month.
Apple has filed an appeal related to last year’s verdict stating that the company violated U.S. antitrust laws by conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices.
The appeal — which was filed Tuesday with the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York — calls U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote’s ruling “a radical departure from modern antitrust law and policy,” and argues that it will “stifle innovation, chill competition, and harm consumers” if it is followed.
The company behind Candy Crush Saga has withdrawn its controversial trademark application for the word “Candy” in the United States, according to documents filed with the U.S. Trademark Office early on Monday morning.
With the tech world still buzzing over Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition, business insurance provider Simply Business has put together a fascinating infographic.
Showing 15 years of acquisitions by Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, the chart lays out in visual terms when tech giants were at their purchasing busiest, as well as how much they typically spend on deals — with the size of individual dots representing the price paid for each startup.
We’ve seen a few great Flappy Bird machines before, but nothing as incredible as this robot that flawlessly plays Flappy Bird using a web cam, a robotic arm made from an old hard drive, and the tip of a stylus.
It was created by two Chinese developers, Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun, who live in China’s Shaanxi province. According to the duo, it took four days to create the robot, which is probably 3.99 days more than Dong Nguyen originally spent programming the game himself.
Now can it beat Flapthulhu?
Apple was responsible for 15% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and as much as 56% of all the profit. Sony, on the other hand, accounted for only 3.8% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and is barely ekeing out a profit company-wide.
Despite all of this, Sony mobile chief and European president Pierre Perron told The Inquirer that Apple is “missing out” by only releasing yearly iPhone freshes, instead of flooding the market with incremental updates every few months.
Despite the fact that this year, as every year, Apple failed to show up at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the iPad Air still managed to win the award of 2014’s Best Mobile Tablet in the 19th Annual Global Mobile Awards.
I know we’ve talked about Flappy Bird a lot over the past month… but forget that stupid bird. You have a new god now. Meet Flapthulhu.
Up to this point, the term “iBeacon” has been used to describe just about any location-aware transmitter that can send data to a device over Bluetooth. But now it’s going to get harder for companies to market their products as iBeacons.
Apple is clamping down on its iBeacon trademark by adding specifications for the technology to its ‘Made for iPhone’ (MFi) program.
Including iBeacon in MFi gives Apple complete quality control over where the iBeacon name can be used. When a Bluetooth speaker maker wants to be approved by Apple, it has to go through the MFi program. And now the same process will be required for iBeacon.
Apple just finished patching the nasty goto fail bug in iOS 7 and OS X, but a report shows another vulnerability in iOS has been discovered that gives attackers access to every single touch you make, including your keystrokes.
Apple has added a dedicated channel to the Apple TV for TV4 Play, the country’s largest commercial broadcasting network.
Live broadcasts and original programming are available for free. Full episodes of TV4 Group shows are available for playback up to seven days after their release. Premium TV4 subscribers get access to additional content, and the window of availability for TV shows is longer.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.
Anyone who’s done their time babysitting knows the pain of kids wanting to watch the same Disney movie over, and over, and over, all in one day. To make Little Mermaid marathons that much easier/bearable, Disney’s got a new iOS app that lets you watch all your Disney, Pixar and Marvel movies from anywhere without using iTunes.
Apple has released an new update for Mavericks that fixes the goto fail SSL vulnerability that was patched up on iOS last week with the iOS 7.0.6 update.
Along with fixing SSL/TLS vulnerability, the update brings in a couple of new features such as FaceTime audio calls, call waiting for FaceTime, the ability to block incoming iMessages, not to mention numerous bug fixes.
The update is available by going to Apple menu () > Software Update to check for the latest Apple software using the Mac App Store.
Here are the release notes:
Internet Radio has some fierce competition. Since the launch of iTunes Radio in 2013, it became much harder to single out one service in particular that reigns supreme. Does the popular US service Pandora still have what it takes to surpass all others? Is Slacker Radio more your personal preference?
Either way, following on from last week’s column where we compared on-demand music services, we have taken it upon ourselves to narrow down the competition, including iTunes Radio, Pandora, Slacker Radio, iHeartRadio, Last.fm and TuneIn Radio; see the table below. We’ve also done some hands-on testing and in-depth research in order to determine just who has the leading edge and what they offer in terms of functionality, catalog size, features and usability.
What connects Apple to crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford?
The answer is that the company has reportedly been called in to help Toronto police access Ford’s cell phone data for an ongoing investigation (nicknamed “Project Brazen 2”) into the controversial politician’s secret life.
In a new blogpost, New Zealand security consultant Aldo Cortesi notes that it took him less than one day to develop a proof of concept for the critical OS X SSL/TLS bug, known as “goto fail”.
By doing this Cortesi has confirmed in practice what people were already worried about in theory: that thanks to the bug — thought to be the result of a line of erroneous code — almost all encrypted traffic, including usernames, passwords, and even Apple app updates can potentially be captured.
With yesterday being Steve Jobs’ birthday, Apple fans chose to mark the occasion in different ways. Marketing agency Easy Explain Video celebrated the life of Apple’s late CEO by creating an animated version of Jobs’ iconic iPhone introduction at the 2007 Macworld San Francisco.
Speaking with Cult of Mac, Easy Explain Video emphasized the enormous impact Apple has had on creatives.
Apple has updated the retail section of its website with a new look more closely resembling the design aesthetic of iOS 7.
As can be seen from the comparison above, where previously the page featured content boxes, borders, and gradients, the new version of the page employs plenty of whitespace and a thinner typeface.