News - page 1455

Apple has bought Topsy, a San Francisco-based firm that offers Twitter analytics to companies. The deal has closed at over $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“It’s unclear how Apple plans to use Topsy,” says the report. “There may be opportunities to link Topsy’s technology with Apple’s iTunes Radio, an online-streaming-music competitor to Pandora Media Inc. and Spotify AB. One possible scenario would use data from Topsy to alert listeners to songs that are trending or artists being discussed on Twitter.”

A report from a few months ago said Apple was beefing up its iAd team prior to the launch of iTunes Radio. Topsy’s expertise in social marketing could certainly come in handy when trying to sell iAds.

Here’s what Topsy is about:

TextExpander, the amazing utility that allows you to type a quick shortcut (or “snippet”) and have it expand into any text you want, has been in a bit of trouble with Apple recently. The maker of TextExpander, Smile Software, was informed a couple of weeks ago by Apple that the iOS version of its app was sharing snippets between apps the wrong way.

Now TextExpander for iOS has been updated with a fix, and it breaks the best thing about the app.

Second Gear, maker of the popular iOS text editor Elements, has announced its next app, Photos+. Pitched as “the best way to manage photos on your phone,” Photos+ looks like it’s trying to take on Apple’s default Photos app.

The app has been submitted for approval in the App Store, and it looks promising. 

When it comes to Christmas shopping, procrastinating is a long standing American tradition. So to let you know how long you’ve got until you absolutely have to place your Christmas orders, Apple has posted a new guide detailing the estimated shipping times on all of its products.

Apple announced that the Online Apple Store will be offering free shipping on all orders from now until December 22nd, but according to the guide many of Apple’s most popular products need to be ordered a full week before the 25th if you want it to be waiting under the tree on Christmas morning.

According to a new report from IBM, the greed consumer-driven shop-fest known as Black Friday.

The report shows a new high for online sales for this 2013 reporting period, as well as a soaring rate of mobile shopping, in which folks used smartphones to browse for deals while people were more likely to complete purchases with tablets.

The most interesting finding, however, was how much more iOS users spent than those on Android. Take that, Google!

Fingerpainting on an iPad isn’t taken too seriously by most the world but iPad artist Kyle Lambert has blown us away with some us his creations, and now he’s back with one of the most detailed iPad finger paintings we’ve ever seen.

Kyle’s incredible painting of Morgan Freeman took over 200 hours of work and an astonishing 285,000 brushstrokes to complete using just his fingers and the app Procreate. To give you a sense of the amount of detail that went into the project Kyle recorded a time lapse of the creation process so you can see each freckle and grey hair sprout up.

Take a look:

Developer Frogmind has just updated its award-winning iOS game, Badland. The update is the conclusion to the Day II story-based levels, with 10 new levels and 30 new missions to accomplish, along with seven new Game Center achievements.

The final tally, then, of levels in Badland is now 80, fully double what the game started with back in April.

Look: We know that not every iOS game is perfect. They all have their little quirks and irregularities, and some are flat-out broken. But among those that are actually playable, some contain a core mechanic that stumbles somewhere along the way. And maybe it’s a cool idea, but it feels like it could just be executed a little better.

That’s where this series comes in. We round up games that are not necessarily bad but just fall short in some area, and we suggest other titles that do it better.

We’ve seen the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros go Retina. When will the iMac get ultra high resolution screens, though?

It’s unknown, but it looks like we’re edging closer. Dell — the company whose founder once laughingly suggested that Cupertino return all of its money to shareholders — has just posted details for a new 24-inch monitor sporting a 3840 x 2160 4K display.

As a great man once said, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Sadly when you’re talking about tech companies, and products worth billions of dollars, the answer is a resounding “no”.

Amazon Prime delivery is pretty fast. As long as you pony up $99 every year, you can have pretty much anything shipped to you overnight — even iPhones and iPads — for just $3.99.

But what’s after Prime? According to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on a 60 Minutes interview last night, it’s PrimeAir, a new service in which Amazon will deliver your goods to you via drones within half-an-hour.

Attention, number crunchers and bean counters! Thanks to an inadvertent slip of the webmaster’s finger, Apple may have just unwittingly revealed the semi-imminent release of Filemaker Pro 13, Apple’s in-house database software for Mac, PC, Web and iPad.

Wireless phone carrier Consumer Cellular has announced a deal that will allow it to start carrying the new model iPhone 5c and 5s.

Breaking with the tradition of Friday launches in India — and despite rumors that it would take place on November 29 — Apple has announced that customers in India will be able to buy the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display as of Saturday, December 7.

We’ve seen roughly one zillion iPhone wallet cases passing through the pages of Cult of Mac, and like neutrinos there are surely untold others which we never even detect. And yes, the Access Case is another wallet case, and yes, it’s even a Kickstarter project. But it has one thing none of the others do: it has a sweet-looking sister that fits the iPad, and which knows how to suck…

Liquid looks set to be a fixture on my Mac. It’s an app which lets you carry out transformations and operations on any selected text, which doesn’t sound like much unless you write for a living, or just have to wrangle lots of letters. It’s actually been around for quite a while (the current version is 4.3), but I figured that if I hadn’t heard of it yet, then maybe you hadn’t either.

When University of Michigan medical student Paul DeWolf was shot to death earlier this year, police had few leads.

That all changed when a stolen MacBook Air revealed a key piece of information — and helped police track down the alleged killers.

Lost for photo inspiration? Fear not. Instead of just firing up Instagram and looking at great photos taken by other folks, you should launch the new OKDOTHIS app and follow along. The app tells you what to take a photo of, right there, and you just have to do what you’re told.

I love this case: It’s a plain old polycarbonate shell for the iPhone 5/S, but it comes with a bunch of handy pull-out tools in embedded into the plastic itself. It’s like the pen and tweezer tools from Swiss Army Knives, only all of the tools are like that.

The euphoria of Black Friday is over, and like the comedown after any spend-heavy holiday it’s time to look at the receipts.

According to analytics firm InfoScout, the iPad Air and iPad mini were two of the day’s big winners.

If I cut out the middle of a sentence from the Indiegogo page for the Apple Worm case, I get the following nugget of comedy gold:

You may need a phone holder […] at any time when you […] go to toilet, etc. Our “Apple Worm” can meet all your needs.

But aside from the toilet/worms gags, the case looks pretty handy.

I love Cyber Monday, but not for the reasons you think: I don’t give gifts, not do I buy yet more crap to fill my apartment. I love it because it’s the only place that the word “cyber” can still be used without people ridiculing you. Hell, I even cringe when I read Neuromancer these days.

By way of celebration, we bring news of the Apps for Snaps Cyber Monday deal, a collection of iOS photo apps which can be bought today for just a buck apiece.

Amazon has a new ad out for the Kindle Fire HDX that uses the new iPad Air as a scapegoat. It brags about how the HDX has more pixels (hardly any more), weighs less, and costs less.

Ho-hum. Microsoft, Nokia, and every other competitors make plenty of ads based on practically the same formula. What makes this new one from Amazon special is the iPad Air’s narrator. “This is the magical new iPad Air,” says the male voice with a slightly British accent—perhaps a subtle dig at Sir Jony Ive?

There are far more egregious examples of anti-Apple ads from other tech companies, and Amazon does make good points about the HDX weighing and costing less. Not sure why the narrator for the HDX has such a weird twang, but oh well. At least Amazon won’t have to pull this ad out of embarrassment.

We are marking #World AIDS Day by turning Apple’s logo red. Together we can achieve an AIDS free generation. pic.twitter.com/3kdx9UZr9f

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) December 1, 2013

December 1st is World AIDS Day, a movement that raises awareness for the fight against HIV. Apple is honoring the cause by tinting Apple store logos around the world red.

“We are marking #World AIDS Day by turning Apple’s logo red,” tweeted Apple CEO Tim Cook. “Together we can achieve an AIDS free generation.”

Kim Dotcom’s questionably-legal controversial cloud storage service, Mega, now has an official iPhone app. Designed specifically for iOS 7, the new app lets users manage their accounts and files on the go.

Not only can you see your files in a Dropbox-like interface, but you can export and import links to share with others. You can view and stream supported file formats and save them for offline viewing.