Instagram already gave us the heads up that it’s introducing ads in the coming months, and now the Facebook-owned app is giving us a preview of what “Sponsored” posts will look like.
You’ll start seeing the above image in your feed in the “coming week.” It’s a “one-time ad from the Instagram team that’s meant to give you a sense for the look and feel of the ads you will see.” Tapping the Sponsored label will teach you how ads will work.
There you are, listening to your favorite song, when you just want to get to the good part. So you look at the Music app that’s playing that favorite song, and you wonder, “How on earth am I going to scrub through the song to move to where I want to?”
In iOS 7, the visual upgrade gives us a red line in the track being played. You can definitely tap, hold and drag that red line along the track for some high-speed scrubbing, but what if you want to move along the track more slowly, or have a more fine-grained approach?
Here’s how to do just that.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99
Halloween is just a week away, and here’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications, and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.
It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?
Well, you do now.
Airmail, the wonderful third-party email client for Mac, which we’ve written about a number of times here on Cult of Mac, has today been updated with a whole host of new features and improvements for OS X Mavericks. In addition to quick reply from notifications, the release also adds new icons for the Notification Center, offline editing, local drafts and sent folders, and lots more.
Last night, Apple released four new videos, including ads for the iPad mini with Retina Display and the iPad Air. One of those ads, Pencil, Apple used the width of a pencil as a reference point to just how light and magical the Air actually is.
If you paid close attention to the ad, though, you might have been surprised who voiced it: none less than Heisenberg himself, Bryan Cranston, also known as Walter White on TV’s Breaking Bad.
For those of us who have been running OS X Mavericks since it was announced at WWDC in June, it’s been obvious for a while that OS X Mavericks is a complete miracle when it comes to battery life. Installing Mavericks on any MacBook is enough to eke an hour or so more battery life out of it, but especially when running on MacBooks boasting Intel’s power-sipping Haswell processors, it’s a game-changer.
What kind of battery life increases are you looking at on, say, a 2013 MacBook Air? Up to 30% improvements, according to legendary Apple OS reviewer John Siracusa.
For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.
In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.
Blackberry’s in trouble. Ever since the iPhone’s debut in 2007 blindsided them, the once-dominant smatphone company has been struggling to recover its mojo. Who can save the floundering Canadian company from ruin? Former Apple CEO John Sculley to the rescue!
If you’re hoping to get your hands on the new iPad mini with Retina display next month, then you’ll want to be one of the first in line at the Apple store when it goes on sale. According to one tablet industry expert, supply of the new device will be “ridiculously tight” at launch, likely leading to long delays for those who aren’t lucky enough to bag one on day one.
BlackBerry has today updated its new BBM app for iPhone, addressing an issue that caused it to crash under Apple’s latest iOS 7.0.3 firmware. The update also brings a number of new features, including contact categories and list sorting and filtering in BBM Groups.
Written by Greg Keonig, product designer and publisher of Atomic Delights.
As a product designer, one of my favorite parts about any new Apple product launch is the inevitable “How it’s made” video. The Mac Pro incarnation did not disappoint.
What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things – even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.
ForeverMap 2’s brand-new update is ostensibly an iOS 7 makeover. But if you’re a regular user, one look at v3.3 will tell you that it has been improved almost everywhere.
Tublme is possibly the stupidest name for a thing, ever. But it’s also a fantastic name if you think about anagrams, lost vowels, Tumblr and .me domain suffixes. It’s got em all.
Tublme is also an OS X Tumblr app, and it’s pretty gorgeous.
Here’s a neat tip for OS X Mavericks users. It lets you choose how long a Notification Center alert goes away for when you snooze it.
It happens to all of us at some point: you get a little tipsy, you open up your computer and you’re trying out some fancy new contacts app; or you’re just not really paying attention to what’s happening in your browser. And then BOOM, you’ve signed up for a LinkedIn account. Good luck. You have now ruined your e-mail forever.
We all hate the seemingly unstoppable spam that LinkedIn loves to spray all over our inboxes almost daily, but now the company has gone one better, able to inject its insidiousness right inside the native mail app of your iPhone, using a kind of “plug in.” How is this sorcery done?
Hazel users who have already installed OS X Mavericks have reason to be cheerful today: An update to the app brings support for Mavericks Finder tags, letting you do all kinds of neat things with your files, automatically based on how you tag them.
Mac gamers rejoice, as Mac game port superstar Aspyr just announced the fantastic news that the latest hilariously bloody Borderlands 2 downloadable content (DLC), “TK Baha’s Bloody Harvest,” is available for Mac on the very same day it is available for PC gamers, bringing us all closer together in our need to blast each other away in 2K Games’ brilliant first person shooter game.
T-Mobile is bringing its “Uncarrier” strategy to tablets with the upcoming launch of Apple’s new iPads. Yesterday we reported that T-Mobile will offer 200 MB of free (yes, totally free) data to iPad Air and mini owners. But that’s not all.
Yesterday Apple announced that all of its consumer software, including OS X Mavericks, is now free. Customers who buy Apple’s hardware will have full access to the completely new versions of iLife and iWork at no additional cost. It’s a bold move that The New York Times called a direct attack on Microsoft Office.
The decision to make iWork free wasn’t Apple’s only jab at Microsoft during yesterday’s keynote, and now the Redmond giant has gone on the defensive.
During yesterday’s iPad keynote, Apple showed several new videos to the audience. Now four of those videos have been uploaded to Apple’s official YouTube channel.
Apple unveiled the new iPad mini with Retina display yesterday along side the iPad Air, and while we were expecting a bump up in resolution, we also got some nice internal hardware upgrades in the form of the A7 processor, M7 co-processor, improved cameras and faster WiFi.
We still think the iPad mini is the best 7-inch tablet on the market but the number of competitive Android tablets keeps growing every year, each with their own set of compelling features and ecosystems. To sort out whether the iPad mini really is the best purchase for you, check out the chart above that breaks down the iPad mini’s specs compared the Kindle Fire lineup, Nexus 7 II and the Galaxy Tab 3.
Source: BI
We’ve been trumpeting the tale of a fantastic game in development from the all-star team at Industrial Toys for a while now. Titled Morning Star, it had some serious pedigree and promise.
A sci-fi themed first-person shooter from Alex Seropian, the dude that co-created Bungie (Marathon, Halo) is huge news in the first place. A game that includes author John Scalzi and artist Mike Choi among many other hugely talented folks that will launch exclusively on mobile? That’s ginormous news.
Color us fascinated when President Tim Harris penned a blog post on gaming site Gamasutra about why the team had to rename the game, and how they went about it. It’s a super interesting behind-the-scenes look at the very real business side of game development, and it’s worth a look.
Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free
Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.
Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.
The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.
After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.