News - page 1514

MyShoebox is yet another cloud photo storage service which syncs your pictures between all of your devices. It’s been around for a little longer than newcomer Loom, and also goes up against Everpix.

Here’s a great idea for an iPad accessory – just kidding: it’s terrible! No, just kidding again. The idea is sound, but the implementation doesn’t really get past the lazy-computer-render stage.

It’s called the iBackPack (really) and it’s a way for cyclists to communicate with people behind them.

Foxconn is looking to add another 90,000 people to its workforce as it prepares to take on mass production of the iPhone 5S, Focus Taiwan reports. The Taiwanese publication, citing sources in Apple’s supply chain, claims Foxconn has already completed testing assembly of the next-generation device, and is now gearing up to fill the “massive orders from Apple.”

I’m a sucker for satchels. And with this beautiful canvas Mission Rucksack from Toffee, I can be a seersucker for satchels, because it also has a beautiful blue and white pinstripe lining.

I know what your asking yourself. You’re asking whether I really decided to write up this bag just so I could use that lame, alliterative gag about seersucking satchels. And the answer is yes. But the bag’s pretty cool anyway, right?

IOS7 beta 4 continues to impress, and it seems that Apple has now ironed out a lot of the bigger bugs, leaving time to polish the smaller things. In just a few hours of use I have noticed a couple of very helpful additions: one to Spotlight and one to the snooze function of the alarm clock.

The UK power plug (and its matching socket) is incredibly safe, just as you’d expect from a country that only allows half-voltage sockets in bathrooms (bathrooms also get string-activated light switches lest your wet hands come near dangerous electricity). The problem is that it’s also big and bulky thanks to the mandatory inclusion of a fuse and an earth (ground) prong in every plug, even those meant for low-power use.

The Thin Plug aims to fix that.

Good news for Brits: the new iOS 7 beta 4 has changed the colors of motorways and A-roads to match the long established scheme used in all other UK maps. Now the motorways (freeways) are drawn in blue and the A-roads (main roads, with one or two-lanes) are green.

If you haven’t gotten enough zombie survival horror action on your iPhone or iPad, here’s some great news for you: 2013 Infected Wars is a new entry to the genre, and it uses Epic’s gorgeous Unreal Engine for mobile to bring you what looks to be a solid 3D third-person zombie shooter with all the trimmings.

In what may be a first for a mobile game, 2013 Infected Wars developer, Action Mobile Games, is promising co-op multiplayer for the full story campaign, which could be a great way to get with your sisters and bros and just mow down the reanimated undead.

Check out the gameplay trailer below to see what we mean.

This frantic, wacky 2D endless runner from Illinois-based development studio High Voltage Games (Zoombies, The Conduit HD) has just been chosen as the iTunes App Store’s Free App of the Week. To celebrate, Le Vamp is now completely free to download and try out for the next few days.

Hurry, though, the special offer only lasts through August 1 at 11 pm Central US time.

The budget iPhone 5 is definitely happening, and with the seemingly infinite amount of rear–case leaks we pretty much already know what it’s going to look like before Apple even announces it. But, what if those questionable ‘iPhone 5C’ cases weren’t just packaging?

Introducing the iPhone 5’s obese evil twin: the iPhone 5C.

The screen is definitely an upgrade from the original iPhone 5C prototype.

Source: Ferry Passchier

Apple released the fourth beta for iOS 7 to developers today, and there are quite a few UI tweaks and additions that have been made under the hood. We’ll probably see a couple more beta releases before Apple ships the final version of iOS 7 in September, so the OS is starting to mature quite a bit at this point.

This list doesn’t include everything that’s new, but we’ve collected 11 notable changes Apple made in iOS 7 beta 4:

Along with the iOS 7 and iTunes beta releases published this morning, Apple has also seeded a the fourth beta build of Apple TV 5.4.

The new update is slim on new features, but includes a ton of bug fixes and gives iOS 7 devices the ability to set up an Apple TV after restoring or resetting all settings.

Here are the full release notes:

Former Apple Store employees from New York and Los Angeles filed a complaint in San Francisco federal court that claims Apple workers are being shorted around $1,500 a year in unpaid wages while they wait off the clock to have their bags searched.

The class-action suit claims that Apple’s “personal package and bag search” policy can cause staff members to stand around for 5 to 15 minutes every time they clock out to leave on a lunch break or at the end of a shift:

Looks like iOS 7 Beta 4 just conclusively outed the fact that Apple is planning on putting a fingerprint sensor underneath the home button of the iPhone 5S: strings found in iOS 7 Beta 4’s BiometricKitUI.axbundle make reference to an iOS 7 tutorial which will reference a “photo of a person holding an iPhone with their right hand while touching the Home button with their thumb” and “a fingerprint that changes colour during the setup process.”

When a user of an iPhone 5S is setting up their iPhone to recognize their fingerprint, they will get a message saying that “Recogition is X% complete”, where X% is presumably a progress bar filling in.

Hamza Sood has found a lot of hidden iOS settings in the past, so he’s got a good track record. This looks pretty legit, and we all knew Apple acquired Authentec for a reason, and that fingerprint sensors were coming to iOS devices. This is our first peek, though, at how they will be realized, with typical Apple simplicity.

Source: @hamzasood

There is an ocean of fitness trackers out there, but not many you can take into the ocean with you. There is still a large pool of sports MP3 players out there, but not many that can go swimming. We take for granted the reason for this sad set of affairs. Water may be the giver of life to this planet, but it is the supreme enemy of gadgets everywhere.

That’s an annoyance even for the best of us. How many times have you been jogging, only for your MP3 player to get shorted out in the rain, or for your headphones to short out from your own sweat? And it’s doubly annoying for swimmers like me, who not only can’t take an iPod into the pool with us when we’re swimming laps, but who can’t even track our swims using fitness trackers like the Nike+ Fuelband.

That’s where WaterFi comes in. A Californian company, WaterFi specializes in taking other company’s gadgets and waterproofing them with a dual-coated, patent-pending process. WaterFi’s promise is that their process will make any gadget utterly resistent to even the most through dunking, but how well does it work in practice?

WaterFi was kind enough to send Cult of Mac two of their products for review: their waterproofed iPod Shuffle swim kit and their Waterproofed Nike+ Fuelband. But how well does it actually work?

Continue reading

Along with today’s release of the fourth iOS 7 beta, Apple has also seeded a beta build of iTunes 11.1 to developers that includes the new iTunes Radio feature.

Apple unveiled iTunes Radio at WWDC 2013 last month. The new streaming music service allows users to create radio stations based on artists or songs, similar to Pandora. iTunes Radio will be free with ads, but if you have an iTunes Match subscription, there are no ads.

Developers can download the new preview directly from the iOS Dev Center.

Right on schedule, iOS 7 Beta 4 has been released to registered developers.  It’s being shot out to developers on iOS 7 through a 264MB over-the-air updates, or through the Dev Center, featuring “bug fixes and other improvements.”

Here are the direct download links:

You know the document you’re looking for, but you can’t remember where it’s saved. Did you upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, or was it sent to you in an email? Fortunately, a new iPhone app called FindIt lets you quickly search all three — all at once.

August is upon us, and that means it’s time once again for a number of U.S. states to hold their annual sales tax holidays. If you’re in the market for a new Mac and reside in one of these states then consider the following tips – especially if you’re thinking about buying a new MacBook Air.

Thanks to Samsung and the International Trade Commission, Apple will be banned from importing the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 into the United States from Sunday, August 4. The Cupertino company has been trying to fight the ban since it was confirmed last October, but it’s had little success.

Now it is seeing unlikely support from Microsoft, Intel, and Oracle, which all agree that the use of standards-essential patents to ban products should not be allowed.

In case you had any doubt that iOS 7 Beta 4 was dropping today (probably around 10AM Pacific time), Apple has already uploaded at least one build of Beta 4 to the Developer Center: specifically, for the AT&T iPhone 5 with a build number of 11a4435d. The Verizon iPhone 5 also has a related download.

You can’t download these betas yet — instead, you just get a “session expired” message — but all that means is Apple hasn’t “turned on” the download yet. So start your engines, gentlemen: iOS 7 Beta 4 is coming.

Via: Redmond Pie

There was always a good chance that that image showing a bin of empty iPhone 5C packaging was bogus, and now Steve over at Nowhereelse.fr is positing just that, saying there’s a lot of noise around the iPhone 5C logo that might be consistent with Photoshopping.

Apple’s under fire again for labor abuses by one of its manufacturing partners again, this time Pegatron. Bizarrely, though, the report incriminating them also confirms the plastic “budget” iPhone, the so-called iPhone 5C.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a popular academic quiz show called Quiz Kids that airs on local public-access television. In each show, local high school teams of three players each compete for a $1,000 per-student scholarship based upon who can answer the most quiz questions correctly.

It’s a cute show, but of special interest to Cult of Mac’s readers is Episode 1110, in which the Mercy High School Crusaders competed against the Crystal Springs Griffins. The captain of the latter team? No less than Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, who talks about some of his extracurricular work helping out at Stanford, trying to assist finding new gene therapies for colon cancer. And Steve himself can be seen in the back at around the 2:53 mark, cheering Reed on.

That Reed Powell kid sure seems like a chip off the block, huh?

Source: Vimeo
Via: Reddit

It’s hard to make a buck, especially in China. It’s also hard to get an appointment at the Genius Bar. It’s hard, then, to know where our sympathies should lie in this story: Chinese scalpers are apparently booking up all of the Genius Bar appointments in China and then selling them online at huge premiums. Oh wait, no, it’s not. Those scalpers are scumbags.