Tiny Death Star may in fact destroy my free time if I keep playing it like I have over the last week. It’s a collaboration between Disney Mobile, Lucasarts, and Nimblebit–and the quality shines through as a result.
Built your Death Star, level by level, with residential, service, retail, and Imperial levels where you can interrogate those nasty Rebel scum. The game is packed with Star Wars references and a great sense of humor; the interaction between the Emperor and Darth Vader is particularly funny.
It’s a free-to-play app, it’s in the App Store right now, and it’s got 8-bit Princess Leia and Boba Fett. What more do you need? Go check it out now.
Apple has seeded the first developer beta of OS X Mavericks 10.9.1. This will be the first incremental update to Mavericks when it ships to the public. Apple has released a fix for Gmail in the Mail app on Mavericks, but the OS remains at version 10.9.
It’s currently unclear when 10.9.1 will be available for everyone, and there are no known issues with this first beta.
Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is ready to shake up the advertising world
Since Apple won a $1 billion lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement last summer, both companies have been fighting to determine how the ruling will actually unfold. In March of this year, the presiding judge for the case subtracted $450 million from what Samsung owed Apple due to the jury’s miscalculations for damages.
The Apple vs. Samsung retrial kicked off earlier this week in California court, and Apple requested an additional $380 in damages from Samsung on top of the $600 million already owed. Samsung believes it should only have to pay Apple $52 million for infringing on five patents related to the iPhone.
Today Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, took the stand in court to talk about the iPhone’s importance to Apple, calling it a “bet-the-company” product. He also got pretty snarky about Samsung copying Apple.
Schiller began his testimony by recounting the original iPhone’s launch and the product’s success to date. He expressed frustration that Samsung started making phones that looked just like the iPhone after Apple started seeing success in the smartphone market. Schiller said he was “quite shocked” when he first saw the Samsung Galaxy. “My first thought was, ‘They’ve copied the iPhone.'”
These first few years of the iPhone’s existence have been “an incredibly important time” for Apple, said Schiller. And Samsung’s infringement has made it “harder for us to get new customers and bring them into our ecosystem.” The iPhone is Apple’s biggest money-maker by far. “At this point, it’s fair to say that most everyone at Apple works on iPhone,” said Schiller from the stand. “It’s our biggest product.”
While being cross-examined by Samsung’s lawyers, Schiller gave off a little Jobsian snark with his responses:
Schiller on Samsung gaining while other android makers lost share. “One is copying. the other are not copying… as much.” #icourt
Slip Stopper bySlipStopper Category: Cases Works With:iPads Mini Price: $29
When I opened up the package containing the SlipStopper, there was a little card inside from my contact Mark. It read “Try sticking your iPad mini on a window, great party trick :)”
I don’t go to may parties these days, but I tried it at home and in the office and there reaction was the same both times: amazement — quickly followed by fear.
Nothing can touch the Fallout series of role-playing games for post-apocalyptic immersion; the ’50s, atomic-era nostalgia and post-nuclear holocaust loneliness and horror that the games simulate have gained the series a huge and devoted following. But none of it would have been possible without a breakout 1988 computer RPG called Wasteland.
Edifier is a lesser-known company with roots in China, and a design lab in Vancouver, British Columbia. While Edifier speakers have seen table time in Apple stores in the past, they seem to be making a bigger push here in the States within the last year or two.
Their latest set is the e25 Luna Eclipse, Bluetooth-equipped speakers stuffed with some trick tech and 74 watts of power per channel — at the upper end for a set of desktop media speakers.
An official Google Play Music app is finally available on iOS, bringing Google’s All Access music streaming service to your iPhone. Users can listen to millions of tracks on demand and enjoy custom radio with no limits, as well as access to the music they’ve uploaded to Google’s cloud-based storage service.
Remember Apple Tracker, the web app that checked Apple’s inventory in order to help you find new iPhones and iPads in your area? Apple killed it off ahead of the iPad mini Retina launch , but now it’s back… just not on the original site.
Do you remember how last week, the iPad mini with Retina Display was said to have been delayed to November because of LCD burn-in issues with Sharp’s IGZO display panels? It appears the rumor was true, because the iPad mini does have image retention issues.
Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS, there’s a good chance they have broken existing jailbreak techniques with it. If a public jailbreak has already been released, it means your jailbreak has gone away; if a public jailbreak hasn’t yet been released, an update can kill an exploit that will delay a public jailbreak by months.
Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7.0.4, but did they break the possibility of an iOS 7 jailbreak? Are you safe to update?
Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.
While it isn’t strictly Apple news, I thought I’d let you know about Amazon’s cool new feature for Kindle covers anyway. After all, plenty of us have Kindles to read when we leave out nerd caves and head out into the sunlight, right?
So what has Amazon done that’s worth writing about? Exactly what Apple should do: Covers personalized with your own photos.
It’s hard to describe Curator for iPad as anything other than a digital scrapbook… In a good way. It lets you pull in snippets and content from pretty much anywhere, presenting them in a clean grid layout. If you ever used Evernote to collect a stuff together on one place for a project, you might consider Curator instead.
HopTo is a great version of Microsoft Word for the iPad. And that’s because it is MS Word, up in the cloud, driving a native iPad app. And you know what? If Microsoft just made the exact same app only with the Word part running locally on the iPad, I’d be happy. It really is nice enough to let you forget you’re using Word.
What if you could condense all of the credit, debit, membership, and gift cards in your wallet down to a single card? Companies like Apple and Google have tried to give us digital wallets, but nothing has really caught on. People still feel tied to their physical wallets.
Coin is a new product that became available for preorder today. It looks like a normal credit card at first glance, but Coin is much smarter than your average piece of plastic. A small display and a fancy magnetic strip let you choose from a range of your cards and memberships before paying.
iWork for iCloud is technically still in its beta phase, but Apple pubilished an updated to its suite of productivity apps this afternoon that will certainly make it more appealing for those looking for a Google Docs alternative.
The new iWork for iCloud update includes a number of features that focus on giving users more tools to collaborate with each other – many of which we heard about at Apple’s iPad keynote. The update includes new features for both Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes that come with some of the same features including the ability to see cursors and selections for everyone in a spreadsheet, as well as an option to view a list of collaborators working on a spreadsheet.
Users can access the new features for free over at iCloud.com and will also find a new option to print docs directly from the Tools menu and the ability to organize documents in folders.
Maybe the coolest, most tech savvy president ever. Photo: The White House
To ease the minds of millions of Americans worried about their health insurance, Obama held a press conference today and admitted that his administration fumbled the launch of Healthcare.gov. Continuing his speech with optimism, Obama then turned to his favorite tech company – Apple – as an example, saying everybody needs to chillax and that buying health insurance won’t ever be as easy as purchasing a song from iTunes.
The Obama Administration has been under heavy fire the last few months thanks to the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and has pulled a couple Apple metaphors out of his hat to cope with the mess.
Obama’s not the only one in Washington looking to Apple for inspiration with the Healtcare.gov mess though. The GOP released a series of attack ads that spoof Apple’s famous “Mac vs. PC” campaign. Take a look:
Hot on the heels of the iBooks de-Forstallization for iOS 7, Apple has released iOS 7.0.4 with “bug fixes and improvements.” The update also addresses “an issue that causes FaceTime calls to fail for some users,” according to the release notes. You can download 7.0.4 as a 37.6 MB update.
iOS 6.1.5 has also been released with the same FaceTime fix for the fourth-gen iPod touch, a device that can’t run iOS 7.
Apple released iOS 7.0.3 with iCloud Keychain, improvements for iMessage, and other bug fixes last month.
Continuing its slow purge of felts, leathers and woodgrains the UI of iOS 7, Apple released an iBooks for iOS update today that finally dismantles the woodgrain shelves championed by former iOS Cheif Scott Forstall, and tosses them in the woodchipper.
The update features the same minimalist UI that Apple has embraced throughout iOS 7 and its other apps, though it doesn’t look like Apple actually added any major new features. Apple also released an update for iTunes U today with an all-new look and feel. Both app updates are available for free in iTunes now.
The official Google Music app for iOS, which will allow Google Play Music All Access subscribers to enjoy the music streaming service on iPhone and iPad, is now “imminent,” a reliable source reports.
One of two "Apple" bags found in the Ladies Market. @Nicole Martinelli for Cult of Mac.
Once I started iSpying in the crowded, bustling streets of Hong Kong, it was hard to stop. (Also, the IP lawyers must be seriously busy in these parts.)
These are some of my favorite finds of Apple-esque products and signs — minus the pics that didn’t turn out because my travel companions were trying to stop me from lagging behind or getting run over.
We’ll have more reporting from Hong Kong soon; a special thanks goes out to Truman Au for showing me around.
The holiday shopping season will be starting a little earlier this year for Apple, as sources are now claiming that Apple will keep several of its U.S. Apple Stores open on Thanksgiving Day.
Customers might avoid this delightful eye-candy to save a few bucks.
What store sells the most iPhones every year? If you named, oh, the 5th Avenue Cube, or the Grand Central location, you’d be wrong, asserts ABC News. Instead, they identify an obscure Apple Store in a shopping mall in Delaware as being the likely contender for selling the most iPhones every year. What wizardry is this?
