News - page 1495

If you’re anything like me, you spent several months play Blizzard’s latest hack-and-slash action RPG, Diablo III, back in the latter part of 2011. During that period (again, if you’re anything like me), the skin on your back probably slowly grew into the fabric of your computer chair, your complexion became a shade best described as translucent, you bathed with a rag on a stick, and your eyes became the size of a lemur’s… all because you couldn’t tear yourself away from the game.

You might want to tie another rag to a stick now and save yourself the trouble later. Blizzard has just announced the first Diablo III expansion, Reaper of Souls.

Phlo is a handy little Universal iOS app which lets you search a bunch of different search engines simultaneously. Just tap in your search term and then hop between various sites using the popover sidebar list.

Just to put the following report in the proper perspective, let’s start out by saying that two months ago — just two days after Apple debuted iOS 7 at WWDC 2013 — we predicted that the iPhone 5S would be released on September 20th later this year, after debuting ten days earlier.

How did we come up with that date? It was easy. We looked at what Apple had done in previous iPhone launches, and then took a look at the calendar for 2013. No soothsaying, no mysterious sources. It was as simple as that.

So when Japan’s largest industry newspaper, Nikkei, starts reporting that Apple will release the iPhone 5S and 5C on (yup) September 20th, you have to ask yourselves. Do they actually know? Or are they just fudging it?

Protex’s new iPad case is a big improvement on the original – aesthetically, at least. The folks at Higher Ground (the company that makes the Protex) sent me the original and I couldn’t bring myself to review it as it looked like a rubber boot with a stripper’s underwear sewn to the back.

The new one keeps the rugged design, but swaps out the stretchy, satiny X on the back for a cross-shaped silicone grip.

Remember the Area Ware wooden iPhone dock concept that we saw back in May? No, neither do I, a problem not helped by the fact that Google insists on searching for “are aware” when I tap in “Area Ware”. Either way, that neat design has been, uh, redesigned and can now be almost bought: it’ll be shipping on November 1st.

I never thought I’d describe a camera and iPhone accessory as “creepy,” but here we are. The Keizus is a quadropod (four-legged tripod) which looks like somebody ripped the skeleton out of one of those cymbal-bashing monkeys beloved of 1970s and 1980s horror flicks. Shudder.

It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”

But is it too late?

I’m always surprised how much bigger and louder stereo speakers make music sound. It might be the fact that the 3-D space it creates fools our stupid brains into thinking that the music is surrounding us, but the difference is huge. Try it: take a device that’s hooked up to actual separate stereo speakers and flip between stereo and mono with your source.

And so I expect the Earshots Stereo Speakers to sound a lot bigger than their 34mm diameter would suggest.

Federico Ciccarese is an Italian designer whose Apple concepts have been seen on Cult of Mac many times. He has hit it out of the park with his most recent creation, the rumored iWatch running iOS 7. This is definitely the best looking iWatch concept we’ve seen to date.

Twitter’s video sharing app, Vine, has been overshadowed by the addition of video to Instagram, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from signing up for Vine. Vine announced this afternoon that it just hit 40 million registered users today — a huge jump from the 13 million users it announced in June.

The launch of Vine’s Android app in June is likely one of the main contributors to the recent boost, but Twitter hasn’t said how many of its users are on Android, or how are even active., but with amazing videos like this, it looks like Vine might be hard to kill.

Source: Twitter

When Apple’s Developer Center was hacked and went down last month, a Turkish security researcher by the name of Ibrahim Balic took credit for the scare. Balic claimed that he was able to get ahold of Apple ID logins, and Apple spent over a week rebuilding the Dev Center to fix whatever was specifically causing the security compromise. Since Apple never confirmed or denied that Balic was the culprit, his actual involvement in the incident hasn’t been clarified — until now.

Apple has listed some of the security flaws that have been reported to the company recently, and it looks like Balic was likely not responsible for the Dev Center outage after all.

Apple’s Pandora-like competitor, iTunes Radio, is gearing up for a fall launch, but before Apple can stream songs to iOS devices across the U.S. for free, it’s got to find someone to help pay for it all, so it’s recruited some of the biggest brands in the world to supply it with ads.

The list of brand partners participating in the iTunes Radio launch will include McDonalds, Nissan, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble — all of which get exclusivity within their industries until the end of 2013.

Google announced a new version of its YouTube app for iPhone and iPad is hitting the App Store today. YouTube 2.0 includes a bunch of new features, including the ability to watch a video while searching for the next great thing to watch.

The app sports better Chromecast integration as well, complete with a new preview screen that lets you queue up videos to push to your TV. There’s also a “play all” feature that allows users to watch every single video in a playlist without having to queue anything up.

The free update is available now in the App Store and Google Play.

Here’s a video of the new features:

Remember the AmpJacket for the iPhone? It’s an awesome little rubbery case which uses passive horn-speaker tech to amplify the iPhone’s already-capable speaker, making it louder and clearer.

The AmpJacket for iPad mini is the same thing, only bigger and designed for the iPad’s stereo speakers. It’s also great, but for different reasons.

For the past two years it’s seemed that the Mac was invulnerable to the sudden drop in PC sales that have plagued other OEMs, but things aren’t looking too rosy for the Mac anymore either.

A new study from NPD Group found that Mac sales were flat year-over-year during July, and if things keep going at this rate, Apple’s domestic Mac sales will be down 5% year over year for the September quarter.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully found a way to sneak malicious iOS apps past Apple’s strict App Store review process that is designed to prevent such software from making its way onto our devices.

The technique used a seemingly innocent app called “Jekyll” that could be updated after approval to carry out harmful actions without triggering security alarms.

This morning TiVo unveiled its newest lineup of DVRs, and rather than trying to kick your iOS device out of the living room, the new DVRs will stream TV straight to your iPad or iPhone, even if you’re not at home.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 hasn’t even been available to download from the U.S. App Store for a full week yet, and it has already seen over 16 million downloads, making it the “biggest mobile game launch” in EA’s history. It’s no wonder the company is already planning a new “Far Future” update that will bring new content to the free-to-play title.

The high cost of Apple’s iPhone means that it struggles to compete in China, with rivals like Samsung offering a whole range of devices designed for different budgets. But a low-cost iPhone 5C could change that.

One analyst believes that as long as Apple prices it right, the device could help the Cupertino company become the number one smartphone vendor in China, crushing Samsung on the way.

Even as it stands, Thunderbolt is blisteringly fast, allowing up to 10 Gbps per lane, for a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. Intel, though, has already upgraded Thunderbolt with the new Thunderbolt 2 spec, which not only doubles the possible transfer speed on a single lane to 20 Gbps (although not increasing total maximum throughout), but enabling 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously.

Since Thunderbolt debuted on the Mac, you’d probably expect Thunderbolt 2 to show up first in an Apple product, right? Maybe an updated Retina MacBook Pro? Alas, it’s not to be: the PC motherboard you see above is the first Thunderbolt 2 compatible product.

If you believe recent scuttlebutt, one of the reasons Apple is looking to release a gold iPhone 5S later this year is because gold is a color that sells really well in China. Is that supposition even remotely true though? If it is, it should be quantifiable.

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt went looking for data to see if Chinese buyers really do like gold. Data’s actually pretty slim, but if the cars Chinese consumers buy are any concern, not only is gold not their favorite color… it’s only slightly more popular than puke green.

If you use Luxogram, or Webstagram, or any other Instagram compatible app, prepare yourself for the possibility of some change. Instagram has started approaching app developers and services, telling them that if they have “Insta-” or “-gram” in their names that they can expect to have their access to the Instagram stream cut off.

One of the brilliant ways in which Dropbox sort of ingratiates itself to users is the way it hands out extra storage for various tasks. For example, you might get extra Dropbox storage by allowing Dropbox to automatically upload your iPhone photo roll to their servers, or by recommending a new user.

Technically, Dropbox could pretty easily just give everyone a massive amount of storage — say, 100GB — and not impact their business model much (this is the strategy Flickr uses), the gaming aspect of Dropbox is part of its charm. It’s more fun to earn more storage than to simply have storage.

So here’s a nice trick on earning your next Dropbox level up. You can easily add 1GB to your Dropbox account just by linking it to the popular email app, Mailbox.

Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink is a System Service for OS X which automatically generates links from your text, without you having to bother to look anything up on Google first. It’s like having an unpaid intern inside your Mac.

And Editorial is that fancy new iPad text editor that incorporates workflows that you can roll yourself.

Now the two have been combined into one amazing iPad ball of goodness.

Paperback is a minimal read-later service that uses your Pinboard account as a source for articles. Any time you check the “Read Later” box when saving bookmarks to your Pinboard account, these items are added to a rudimentary queue. Paperback uses this list to provide you with a nice, clean, Instapaper-like web view of these links.