Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been working on a big-budget Steve Jobs biopic for awhile now. Not only will it have way less zero Ashton Kutcher, but it will be funded by Sony and probably go down as the Jobs movie of record.
Sorkin was confirmed to write the script back 2012, but there’s been little news out of the project since then. Today it was reported that the script has finally been turned into Sony, which means that production is just around the corner.
Google has bought Nest Labs, the hot startup co-founded by the father of the original iPod, Tony Fadell, for a hefty $3.2 billion. Nest has been making forward-thinking gadgets for the home, like its popular thermostat, since 2011. The Nest Protect smoke detector was just announced in October of 2013.
Interestingly, Google has promised that Nest will remain its own distinct brand and operate under the leadership of Fadell.
Ylvis’s song “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” quickly became one of the most popular internet memes of 2013 thanks to its crazy weird but uncontrollably catchy video.
Just how popular has the meme become? So damn popular that Apple decided to add it as a Siri easter egg.
You can now cackle “What does the fox say?” to Siri and she will answer back with one of four secret sounds of the fox hiding somewhere deep in the woods – ‘Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!’ or “Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!” or “Chacha-chacha-chacha-chow!” or “Ring-ding-ding-dingeringeding.”
Via: BI
After coming under fire over the holidays for being the victim of a massive hack that leaked phone numbers and Snapchat usernames of over 4.6million of its users, Snapchat is back in the hot seat as many of its users are complaining of a being suddenly assaulted by Snap Spam.
Snapchat has been quick to put out the flames by publishing an open letter on its blog, claiming that the wave of spam is totally unrelated to the holiday hack that exposed users’ info. Instead, Snapchat blames the Snap Spam on the rising popularity of the service.
Here’s the full apology:
SimCity has been plagued by server problems since the day it arrived last March, and despite a series of updates and patches, EA still hasn’t been able to find a complete fix. As a result, the company has reversed its always-online policy and announced it will be adding an offline mode.
On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh. On January 25, 2014, in Cupertino, California, the public will be invited to celebrate the extended team whose efforts popularized the graphical user interface and WYSIWYG software, defining computing for the rest of us. In honor of the 30-year anniversary of the Mac, the Computer History Museum, Macworld/iWorld and All Planet Studios are planning a celebration of this seminal computer and the original Macintosh development team.
The Mac 30th Celebration will be start at 7 p.m. on January 25. The Flint Center venue is just a few miles from the Apple campus, and the event is being held in the same 2,300-seat auditorium where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac back in 1984!
It’s already received a soft launch in New Zealand, but future Mega Jump 2 gamers elsewhere will have to make do with this trailer, ahead of the iOS game sequel’s official launch this Thursday.
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” the titular Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
But there’s no love lost between the two. If you ask Siri about ‘Her’, she’ll claim that Johansson’s “portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” and “gives artificial intelligence a bad name.”
Looks like Scarlett Johansson caught wind, and now, her feelings are hurt by Siri’s harsh words.
Last year, Apple made an important change to 80 percent of their Mac line-up, including the new iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac Air, and Mac Pro, that changed the type of flash storage of each of those systems to incorporate a PCI Express (or PCIe)-based storage system. It’s a much faster technology than the Serial ATA based storage Apple was using before, but there’s a rub: it also uses a non-standard connector, making upgrading any of these Mac’s flash storage impossible up until now.
At CES this year, however, it looks like Other World Computing (OWC) has made important strides to cracking the problem. They showed off flash storage prototypes that should enable users to upgrade their newer Mac’s SSDs.
If you tried to use Dropbox this weekend, chances are you noticed that the usually reliable cloud-storage service experienced an extended outage. What happened?
As large cities go, the Big Apple is a pretty safe place to live these days — unless, ironically enough, you’re the owner of an Apple iDevice.
According to new data released by the New York Police Department, while New York has seen dramatic decreases in the majority of major crimes in recent times, the theft of cellphone and other electronic devices has meant that the category of grand larcenies remains almost unchanged.
I’ve got a confession to make. I don’t like iOS 7’s new app switcher. Sure, it looks pretty, but the screenshots it provides are functionally useless, and closing apps is a much finnickier and hit-or-miss proposition than in iOS 6. It’s one of my least favorite changes in iOS 7.
But now that we’ve got a proper jailbreak thanks to Team Evasi0n, there’s no reason to live with any aspect of iOS 7 you don’t like. So I’m delighted to know that a new jailbreak tweak by iOS Developer Thomas Finch called ClassicSwitcher has brought the good old iOS 6 app switcher back, without its useless screenshots and “swipe up to close” functionality.
Days is a free iPhone app that uses your photos to create a journal of your adventures. The twist is that it takes your pictures and turns them into animated GIFs.
A new Kickstarter project aims to solve the annoying problem of running out of smartphone charge. The solution? A pocket-size USB charger called the Popcord.
Youtopia is a new YouTube app for the iPhone, from serial entrepreneur and friend of Cult of Mac Dotan Saguy. It lets you browse for more videos even as the current video is playing on your tiny iPhone screen.
Have you decided that 2014 is the year in which you finally quit the job you hate and move on to greener pastures? Well, as with so many other things, it seems that there’s an app designed to help with just that.
Recently launched in the App Store, the Quit Your Job app takes users through a series of questions to determine why they are thinking of quitting, before crafting a bespoke text message to be sent directly to their boss.
If you thought that turning the iPad into a laptop by putting it in a case with a hinged keyboard on the bottom was ridiculous, then you’re going to love/hate the ClamCase Pro mini, which turns Apple’s littlest iPad into a tiny MacBook Air. Because why not right?
A new patent filing suggests that Apple might be looking to integrate optical image stablization into its new iPhones.
The feature would help improve overall camera performance by allowing for better low-light imaging, while also stablilizing the image to avoid shaking.
What if your iPhone charging cable could charge your phone even when it wasn’t plugged into a charger? It’d be pretty neat, right? Well, that’s what Native Union’s Jump does, and it does it all while being the best-looking Lightning cable yet.
We know how to grab our location in plain text on the iPad, using Editorial and some Python voodoo (Python Voodoo could be a great name for a band). But what about the Mac? Easy. Using TexExpander and some AppleScript, you can easily turn a few keystrokes into longitude and latitude, without too much attitude (Python Voodoo will be a and 8-bit rap band).
Cult of Mac has reported on Xiaomi — the multi-billion dollar tech company commonly referred to by the Chinese media as “the Apple of the East” — before.
I just got through uploading every last one of my photos to Flickr over the weekend, with an Ethernet cable snaking across the floor from the router to my iMac, and a new app on that iMac to do the work. The app is called F-Stop, and while it’s a little glitchy in its UI, it was rock solid where it counted: pushing around 22,000 JPG files up to Flickr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyIcz7wUH0
During the NFL playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Carolina Panthers today, Apple has posted a new advertisement for the iPad, emphasing their tablet’s creative powers and the iPad’s ability to inspire and create.
The tagline is “What will your verse be?” The notion is that all of human life is a poem, and our individual lines are a verse in that poem. Depending on your own predisposition, you’ll likely either find it a little sappy and breathless or moving, but either way, Apple is right that far from just being for media consumers, the iPad is a profound creator’s device which can be used for filming, writing, 3D prototyping, and more.
There’s also a new Your Verse microsite, explaining the uses depicted in the commercial in greater detail. What do you think? How are you using your iPad to write your verse?
When the first series of benchmarks for the new Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench in early 2013, people were initially disappointed that Apple’s Vader helmet of a desktop didn’t have benchmarks that were much better than a top-of-the-line 2012 Mac Pro.
But as we cautioned at the time, the benchmarks reflected the performance of a prototype Mac that was still six months from release, and the version of Geekbench being run against it was 32-bit, not 64-bit, all of which could result in lowered performance. In fact, we said it was likely that when the new Mac Pro was actually released, it would break 30,000 on Geekbench’s benchmarks… making it a staggeringly fast machine almost 25% faster than the previous generation was capable of.
Over the weekend, the late 2013 12-core Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench, and what do you know: it comes in at an impressive 32,912 in Primate Labs’ metrics. To clarify, that means that the new Mac Pro is over six-and-a-half times faster than the latest MacBook Air. Not shabby.
Source: Geekbench
Between iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio, do you feel as if you don’t have enough options for streaming music? Well, good news: Beats Music — the new streaming service previously known as “Project Daisy” by the most overrated headphone manufacturer out there — will reportedly launch on January 21st.