News - page 1482

Wondering what Spacetime Games is up to these days? After a successful launch of free-to-play Battle Dragons this past August, the team has turned its attention to a new combat strategy game with the same branding: Battle Command!

In this new game, you’ll take command of a small group of soldiers and try and shape them into a crack team of military force. You’ll collect resources, construct bases, recruit troops, form alliances, and fight on the battlefield (obviously). Battle Command! will have a bunch of single player missions to help hone your skills, and then some serious global multiplayer, something Spacetime has been getting right for years.

After selling a record-breaking number of iPhones during the recent launch weekend, Apple is now ready to pummel magazines with it’s trademark brand of clever yet simple ads extolling the iPhone’s virtues.

The first print ad for the iPhone 5s hit newsstands today in The New Yorker with a full-ad on the back page touting Touch ID. The ad features a huge closeup of the still-oh-so-hard-to-find Gold iPhone 5s, with the tagline “Your finger is the password at the bottom.

Here’s a closer look:

Until two days ago, Apple had been without a head of retail for nearly a year. As part of the upper-management reshuffling Tim Cook oversaw last October, John Browett was let go after filling the role for only six months. Apple executives reportedly clashed with Browett, who previously had been the CEO of British retailer Dixons, and he didn’t seem to leave Apple on the best of terms.

After a year of searching, Apple has finally found a Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Stores: Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry in Britain. She’s coming to Apple at a very crucial time in the company’s development post-Steve Jobs, and although she’s worked in fashion most of her life, she looks like the perfect fit.

Here are 10 things to know about Angela Ahrendts:

Apple has quietly bumped up its iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c prices in France less than four weeks after they first went on sale. Customers will now have to pay $10 more for the 16GB devices, and $12 more for the 32GB and 64GB devices.

One of the few issues facing owners of the new iPhone 5s is the compass and built-in level: they are woefully off, leading to drifting issues in games that require the accelerometer for steering. How could Apple mess up something so fundamental? According to a new teardown, it looks like the culprit is a new chip supplier.

Here’s something pretty incredible. This newly surfaced photo shows the original batch of Apple I computers as they are about to be sent out to customers. The photo is believed to have been taken by Steve Jobs himself, in his bedroom.

There’s a couple of things I really love about this photo. For one, note how similar the packaging on the original Apple I is to the white box packaging of, say, a MacBook Air. Things haven’t changed much, have they? Second, with Apple I’s now going for over $676,000 at auction, that’s quite the nest egg Steve is sitting on back in 1976, isn’t it?

Via: Daily Mail

If you love the Amazon Video app on your iPhone or iPad all the more now that it can stream AirPlay video to your Apple TV, great news: a new update to the app has just made AirPlay even better.

Ever wanted a pair of speakers that look like old-school toasters? (And I mean old-school: the kind of toaster that had bare, easy-to-touch elements and metal sides that were more likely to burn your hands than burn the toast.

Well, reader-with-oddly-specific-desires, we have you covered. For the Timbre Speakers are just what you’re looking for.

Just as soon as I can work out which box I packed my camera in, I’ll be putting the finishing touches to my TriggerTrap review. In the meantime, the folks behind the iPhone camera-triggering gadget have managed to invent yet another TriggerTrap. And this one is even more awesome. Why? One word: Lasers.

You should really stop reading here and check out the video of the FlyKly Smart Wheel, which is utterly hilarious. In i you’ll see an urban-warrior type taking his bike up into his beautifully-designed apartment and swapping out his back wheel for the FlyKly. This is fine, until you see him lowering the monstrosity into the rear dropouts of his frame.

The big, ugly plastic wad at the wheel’s center reminds me of nothing so much as generic prosthetic limbs: paint this thing ‘skin’ color and you’ll be done.

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However, it’s this wad which holds the key to the FlyKly’s mysterious iPowers.

Anti-aliasing filters are the new, uh, thing that’s not popular any more. Ever since Fujifilm redesigned it’s sensors so that they no longer need a blurry filter in front to smooth out jaggy moiré patterns, everyone has been jumping on the anti-anti-aliasing wagon (not to be confused with the AA wagon, which is where inveterate boozers go to reduce their own blur).

The latest of these is Nikon, which has taken the AA filter out of the new D5300.

Speaking of iPhone cameras being awesome, photographer Austin Mann is so taken with the quality of his new 5S that he left his regular work DSLR at home. And Austin wasn’t just taking the dog out for a walk. He was taking a trip to Patagonia.

Let’s make a little wager. I’ll put a $1 on the fact that most people who buy the tiny new Panasonic Lumix GM1 will never change its lens, instead opting to use it as a rather cool little compact. Not that this is a bad thing entirely – having a Micro Four Thirds sensor in a body smaller than that to the sensorially-challenged Pentax Q10 is great. But it’d be a shame not to stick Panasonic’s near-legendary 17mm ƒ1.7 lens on this baby and drop it in your pocket.

If there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s Angry Birds, am I right? No?

Well, either way, it doesn’t matter: you’re getting more of them. Rovio just announced the pending release of Angry Birds: Go!, a kart racing iOS game set to go live on the App Store December 11, 2013, which is–not too coincidentally–the Finnish studio’s fourth birthday birdday.

Love Dropbox, but hate the mobile app on your iPhone? Join the club; while having access to my Dropbox folder on all of my iOS devices is a fantastic productivity booster, the user experience of the default app is pretty bare bones.

What’s a Dropbox loving tech writer to do, then, to enjoy his Dropbox experience even more? Boxie thinks it has the answer, with a brand new Dropbox client app. Boxie connects to Dropbox, lets you access and use all the files in there, and promises to be much prettier and intuitive than the official app.

Sounds good, right?

I don’t know about you, but I love Control Center in iOS 7. I don’t know how I managed without it before (or why it took Apple so long to introduce it). And I’d love to see a similar feature brought to the Mac that would allow me to control my music, adjust the brightness of my display, and toggle things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for Apple to create it, because it’s already here, thanks to Controls+ for Mac.

Not all iOS games are business ventures; some strive to bring awareness, educate, or do some good by supporting charitable causes.

Here are five of the nicest iOS games ever created.

TweetDeck for Mac, the free Twitter client from Twitter that’s not the official Twitter client, has been updated to make it easier for users to tweet, send DMs, and preview images before you share them. Composing, publishing, and replying to tweets is now faster than ever before.

In case you’re not from around here, you should know that I’m a huge fan of Scottish game developer Lucky Frame, what with their weird, wonderful visual and musical sensibilities that result in games like Pugs Luv Beats and Gentlemen!, a Victorian-themed Joust-like game.

They’ve just announced that one of their most award-winning games, Bad Hotel, is coming to the Mac and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.

Dan Whisenhunt was visibly moved when speaking of his former employer Steve Jobs in front of the Cupertino City Council.

“A little more than two years ago, Steve shared his excitement about this project,” said Whisenhunt, Apple’s director of real estate and facilities, his voice breaking slightly. “It’s a campus to inspire innovation and collaboration between some of the finest engineers in the world.”

Just 10 days after the anniversary of the co-founder’s death, the giant “spaceship” campus is closer to landing in the city of Cupertino, which has a population of just over 60,000.

Whisenhunt’s speech enlivened a meeting that dragged on over four-and-a-half-hours–much longer than usual, Mayor Orrin Mahoney said–where locals fretted over the minutia of every intersection that might tangle the already clogged Silicon Valley commute. In the end, the council unanimously voted to OK the project. It still has one more hurdle to clear before Apple can break ground.

Path — the mobile only social network that I don’t understand, no one at Cult of Mac uses, and which recently started selling stickers to support itself — has laid off 13 staff members, or 20% of its total staff, in what CEO Dave Morin is calling a “realignment of the company.”

More than six months before Apple unveiled the new Mac Pro, we correctly predicted that it would be made exclusively in the USA. Now, as the Mac Pro gears up to start shipping in the coming month, a Texas newspaper is reporting that up to 1,700 workers are being hired near Austin to push the Mac Pro out the door.

Only three weeks have passed since the iPhone 5s and 5c became available for sale, but already, total webshare traffic of the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s are up 4% to 40.6 percent.

The iPhone accounts for most of Apple’s business, but can the success of the iPhone accurately predict Apple’s stocks? No, but the iPad might be able to.

Remember those swivel-screen ultrabooks? The MacBook Air knockoffs with a screen and keyboard that could be twisted and refolded to make the device into either a slimline notebook or a really fat iPad copy? Well, now you can do the same thing to your actual iPad with the iHome Type Pro Bluetooth Keyboard Case.