Today AT&T announced that it will be completely doing away with traditional data plans for new customers on October 25th. The carrier has been transitioning to its pooled, “Mobile Share” plan options since it introduced them last summer.
New and existing customers have still been able to choose from a Mobile Share plan or a traditional data package, but that luxury will be gone for new customers in two weeks.
Apple’s new, multi-billion dollar campus has been in the works since Steve Jobs proposed the project to the city of Cupertino back in the summer of 2011. Construction on the 175-acre site, dubbed “Apple Campus 2.0,” is projected to begin by 2015-2016. The plan for the project will get the final vote of approval from the Cupertino City Council on October 15th.
We’ve seen mockups of what the UFO-like campus will look like already, but now Apple’s incredibly detailed model replica of the campus has been published online.
We posted all about NASA engineer Mark Roper’s gruesome, iPhone-augmented Halloween shirts last year. Since then, Mark has quit his job at NASA to focus on Halloween. The result is more designs and, even better, both an improved t-shirt and a horribly gruesome effect worthy of being designed by someone who worked on the Mars Curiosity rover.
Robots are pretty cool, but have you ever wanted to create your own iPhone controlled cyborg? Backyard Brains is banking that a lot of kids are interested in cyborg technology and neuroscience (ethical dilemmas be damned), so after three years of R&D they’ve come up with the RoboRoach – a small electronic surgery kit that lets you turn a real-life cockroach, into an iPhone-controlled cyborg for a few minutes.
The kit comes with a backpack that contains a battery and receiver you superglue to the cockroach after sanding down a patch of shell. You have to jab a groundwire into the cockroaches thorax, and then after that you carefully trim the antenna so you can stick some small electrodes onto both of them and receive signals from your iPhone. Don’t worry, the iPhone app and the cockroaches come free with the $99 kit, so you don’t have to go hunting for some behind your supermarket’s dumpster.
If there’s one group of people who could seriously do with less wires — or in this case, cables — it’s guitarists. Walking around with two grand worth of Fender in your hands, trying avoiding a snake-pit of cables and simultaneously tapping out Van Halen’s Eruption probably takes some concentration (I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been on stage with anything but an air guitar, which was completely wireless).
IK Multimedia’s new four-pedal iRig BlueBoard pedalboard de-clutters the floor a little, as it’s the first completely wireless pedalboard for iOS and Macs. The board connects to its companion app on an accompanying iDevice (or to a Mac) through a Bluetooth connection.
When you spend thousands of dollars on a new Mac, you don’t want to take it home and put it on anything — you want the desk beneath to look just as good. So, wouldn’t it be awesome if the Mac’s designer, Jony Ive, designed the perfect desk to accompany it.
Well, he has — but you won’t be able to purchase it. Like the special edition Ive-designed Project (RED) Leica unveiled earlier this week, the solid aluminum (RED) Desk is a one-off created by Ive and industrial designer Marc Newson for a charity auction. And it’s likely to fetch a fortune.
Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles almost all of Apple’s most popular devices, has admitted that it has forced student interns to work illegal shift patterns.
Thousands of students from the Xi’an Institute of Technology were made to work overtime and night shifts at the plant in violation of company policies. And if they refused to do so, they were in danger of losing their degree certificate.
Thanks to the iPhone, it seems there’s little hope left for BlackBerry these days. Apple has stolen most of its market share, and now it’s stealing its employees, too. The Cupertino company has reportedly been contacting BlackBerry staff via LinkedIn and inviting them to recruitment events in Cambridge, Ontario.
Your swanky new iPhone 5s may be significantly faster than its predecessors, but it’s twice as likely to crash when running third-party apps as the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 5c. New research from Crittercism, a company that monitors mobile app performance, has found that apps crash around 2% on the iPhone 5s, but under 1% on its siblings.
Although Doctor Who is now a cherished cultural icon, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, many episodes of Doctor Who’s earliest adventures have been lost, thanks to the BBC’s tendency to simply record over the archival tapes. Occasionally, though, “lost” episodes are found, either because someone at home recorded the episodes by pointing a camera at their screens, or because the BBC shipped a copy of the tape to some international affiliate.
That’s how two lost stories from Doctor Who were just recovered. The BBC just discovered a small cache of Second Doctor episodes in Nigeria. And they’re now available on iTunes!
What exactly is the iWatch going to be? A tiny smartphone screen on your wrist that shows you notifications? The Pebble watch shows that such an approach can be popular, but it’s not going to set the world on fire the way we expect from Apple.
So what will it be? One analyst has an interesting theory: it’ll be a home automation gateway that controls all the smart objects in your house.
Way back in 2009, I reviewed the Lightscoop, a miraculous mirror which reflects your camera’s built-in flash up an off the ceiling, effectively turning the whole top surface of the room into one giant soft light source. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the fact that it was bulky and tricky to carry with you.
Now there are two new Lightscoops, both of which are a little more portable,
Crypstagram is a neat service for encrypting messages inside your photos. And as an added bonus it also ruins those photos along the way by adding glitches to them. You probably won’t want to actually use it for good (or evil) though, as the images you use are posted right there on the site in a gorgeous glitchy gallery.
Tick is a brand-new ToDo app (yup, another one) that offers one big feature not found in the built-in Reminder app: Color. Actually, that;s not quite true; Tick offers bright, 1980s-style neon color, unlike the tastefully bright hues built into to iOS 7.
Love Pad&Quill’s sweet bookbindery iPhone cases, but don;t love the big Baltic birch frames that bulk them up? You’re in luck! The new Bella Fino is a leather taco for your iPhone 5/S/C that does away with the frame in favor of a reusable, re-stickable 3M “clean release” adhesive panel.
Today Contrast (formerly called App Cubby and maker of Perfect Weather) released Launch Center Pro 2.0 for iPhone with a new interface and app icon for iOS 7. If you aren’t familiar with Launch Center Pro, here’s the basic rundown: it’s a tool for quickly launching common actions in one place.
Ok, still confused? I’ll let Contrast explain it better:
Today Apple released EFI firmware update 2.7 for the 2013 MacBook Air that addresses an issue with installing Windows in Boot Camp. The update is recommended for all MacBook Airs released after Apple’s hardware refresh over the summer at WWDC. Grab it now in the Mac App Store.
This update addresses an issue which may cause a black screen to appear when installing Windows 7 or Windows 8 using Boot Camp Assistant if both an external optical drive and USB thumb drive are connected to the system. This update also ensures that the system will boot by default into OS X after installation of Windows 8.
Source: Apple
Still haven’t been able to get your hands on the iPhone 5s model you want? If you didn’t wait in line on launch day or order online already, chances are you’re going to have trouble finding any 5s for awhile, much less your desired color and capacity.
The same guy who created this handy website for checking 5s stock at nearby Apple Stores has a new service that will email you an alert the moment the iPhone 5s you want is available at your local Apple Store. Eureka!
A couple days ago we showed you a custom Leica camera designed by none other than Jony Ive. The camera will be auctioned to raise money for Bono’s Product (Red), a campaign Apple has partnered with for years to fight the spreading of H.I.V. in Africa (if you’ve ever bought a red iPod, you’ve helped contribute).
Ive and legendary designer Marc Newson have created their own designs of over 40 products for the auction, including a Steinway grand piano. The two men also designed a desk from scratch that looks like an extension of the iMac.
Ive and Newson recently sat down with Vanity Fair for an extensive interview about designing for the Product (Red) charity auction, and as you can imagine, it’s a great read.
GMIC – Silicon Valley’s largest mobile internet conference – is about to get underway in just a few short weeks. Over 10,000 developers, executives, entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world will descend on San Francisco’s Moscone Center on October 21-23 to talk about all the latest changes in mobile. Attendees will get to listen to speakers from Facebook, Qualcomm, Y-Combinator, PopCap, and many more, as well as party as hard as some Silicon Valley nerds can muster.
To hype up the conference GMIC hooked us up with two Golden Tickets (valued at $599) which we can’t wait to send to two lucky readers. But first, we just launched our awesome Cult of Mac Magazine in Newsstand a few weeks ago and would much rather promote it instead, so here’s how to enter our contest to win one of the GMIC tickets:
Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.
Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.
Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.
This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.
Readdle has this week updated two of its most popular productivity apps for iOS, adding next-generation image processing to Scanner Pro, and a number of new features to Calendars 5. You can now enjoy much-improved scans with better legibility in the former, as well as task creation and an app icon badge in the latter.
Just like those isolated soldiers that used to be discovered from time to time thinking that WWII was still on, years after it had ended, there’s a designer hidden deep in the offices of Porsche who thinks we still need to use USB thumb drives. Yes, it looks beautiful, just like Hiroo Onoda’s doubtlessly crisply-pressed uniform, but that doesn’t make it right.
This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine.
Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.
Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.
You’re probably sick of Kickstarter projects that turn your iPad or iPad mini into a giant camera, so here’s something a little different. It’s an iPad mini camera rig, but this one is actually available to buy. Now. From Amazon.