News - page 1406

Mega Jump 2 is a game about jumping. Forever.

There was a rumor early this morning that iOS 7.1 beta 4 was coming to developers to tomorrow, but it looks like it’s here now. Apple just made iOS 7.1 beta 4 available to developers as an OTA update. You can also grab it from the Dev Center.

Along with the iOS 7.1 beta 4 release, there’s a new beta for Apple TV as well. We’ll update you with all the new changes once we get it downloaded on our devices. Feel free to yell at us on Twitter (@cultofmac) if you come across anything yourself.

In the meantime, get to downloading. Here are all links:

Apple will hold its quarterly earnings call next Monday, which means analysts are beginning to weigh in on how many iPhones Apple sold during the holiday quarter. Although Apple’s new sales with China Mobile didn’t make it into the quarter, Apple still had a ton of pent up demand to go along with a set of new phones, plus its was the holidays. All those conditions should make for a perfect storm of sales, and so far top analysts are predicting Apple sold a record-shattering 55.3 million iPhones.

On Friday, January 24, 2014, the Mac turns 30 years old. As we look back on three decades of Macintosh, there are some stories that have largely avoided the light of day for some time. One of these tales involves the production of the Macintosh Business Plan back in the early 1980s.

The tale was told by Mac design team member Joanna Hoffman to Bruce Damer, curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum. In 1981 Apple was beginning development on their new product lines, Lisa and Macintosh, and Hoffman was helping develop the business plan. She presented multiple drafts for Steve Jobs to review, but Jobs repeatedly kept sending her the plan back saying he didn’t like it.

After a few rounds of this Hoffman realized that it was not the contents of the business plan that Jobs objected to but rather the appearance of the document itself. What he was reviewing looked just like every other business plan, nothing special. Jobs wanted the pages of the Mac business plan to look like the screen of the computer they were creating – WYSIWYG graphics, fonts, and pages with menus and submenus for section headings. The problem with this request was that Apple did not yet make any computers or printers which could produce the document Jobs desired.

Apple has reportedly seeded its fourth iOS 7.1 beta build to testing partners ahead of a possible developer release tomorrow. The update is said to include “various fixes” for keyboard issues and problems with the Contacts app, as well as some more changes to the user interface inside the Phone app.

VLC, a popular third-party video player for iOS, today received a major update that introduces a swanky new design and lots of new features. The app now looks right at home on devices running iOS 7, and it has the ability to stream videos from Google Drive and Dropbox. You can even download videos from UPnP media multimedia servers on your local network.

Apple has chosen LG Electronics as its sole manufacturing partner for the iWatch, according to a new report from Korea. The device is expected to use the same curved OLED display technology LG recently debuted with its G Flex smartphone, and production could begin during the third quarter of this year.

Most people were suitably impressed when the iPhone 5s allowed the Camera app to use a “slo-mo” recording mode — shooting video at a smooth 120fps, and producing some astonishing images in the process.

Now a new jailbreak tweak called Slo-mo Mod is letting the owners of older iOS devices manually configure a similar recording feature.

Remember the uber-popular Megaupload?

Kim Dotcom — the controversial entrepreneur behind that site — is soft-launching his long-discussed music service Baboom. Described as a cross between iTunes and Spotify, the site will feature a combination of paid content alongside content available free to those who install an ad substitution browser plugin.

Quantified Selfers in the Apple community have a new app to download, in the form of lifelogging app OptimizeMe, which recently launched in the App Store.

A single iOS app that tracks all of your daily activities, OptimizeMe allows users to log mood, stress level, health status, quality of sleep, weight, and a number of other variables. With the addition of activity tracker Moves installed, it also automatically tracks Running, Cycling, Walking, Steps, Calories and Location (Foursquare).

With season three having come to an end, fans of the BBC’s Sherlock series will be happy to hear that today marks the launch of a new game app — featuring new footage starring actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.

Fujifilm, arguably the company that started the current (and very welcome) trend of putting proper manual knobs and dials back on cameras, is currently teasing what looks like an SLR-style model for its outstanding X-Series lineup. Likely to be named the XT–1, the camera might take over the role of the current top-of-the-line X-Pro1.

Apple fans with a penchant for gaming have been able to use their PS3 controllers on the Mac for a while. A new jailbreak tweak now adds that functionality to iOS devices.

Called Controllers for All, the $1.99 jailbreak tweak is available in the Cydia Store, and adds iOS 7 gamepad compatibility to Sony’s PS3 DualShock 3 controller.

The Snap Strap does away with the annoying problem of your earbud cables ending up in your mouth when you’re just trying to enjoy a delicious hamburger and listen to some music at the same time. It’s a clever little strap that clips to the left and right cables of your ’buds and then sits across the back of your neck, keeping the cables away from your gnashing maw.

This lovely retro-style bag is made to carry over your shoulder, or on your bike. Made by the Goodordering Company of Hackney, East London (in England, for those of you who may still be half asleep), the bag can be quickly converted between shoulder bag, pannier (“saddlebag”) or handlebar bag.

Having relaunched the iPhone 4 to help grow market share in India, new reports are now suggesting that Apple is also slashing the price of its 2012 iPad mini in an effort to make inroads in India’s mid-range tablet market.

The iPhone’s LED lamp is a handy as hell. I never, ever use it for photos, but I use it as a flashlight all the time, and I have it set to flash when my iPhone gives me an alert (usually it makes my jeans pocket flash alarmingly).

Now I can use it to light up my iPhone’s whole back, if I choose to put it in the curvy Theo Light, a case that works like the Kindle Paperwhite’s magical light-up screen. And I might even start using it for photos.

This tiny $7 dongle looks essential for anyone who uses a case on their iPhone or iPad. It’s a Lightning to Lightning adapter that does one thing: move your iDevice’s Lightning port a centimeter (0.033 feet) down from the bottom its host.

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.

Cult of Mac Magazine

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.