News - page 1579

Heroes and Castles, Foursaken Media’s mix of a third-person shooter with the castle defense genre, is a heck of a lot of fun to play, and today the iOS game has gotten a big old update, with a ton of great stuff to extend the fun, possibly enticing new players to try it out as well.

There are three new characters to play and level up: a stealthy (and free) Assassin, a natural-magic Druid, and a brawny Barbarian character. You’ll be able to put each through their paces in a brand new single player campaign, available as an unlock upon completion of the original campaign, with an entirely new environment and a ton of new enemies to battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XEh-Q_7VuGk#!

Microscope-like macro lenses are super neat — and not just because they let you see the little hairs on a ladybug’s leg. No, macro lenses can show you a whole new world. Or macro lenses can spark (or rekindle) a love affair with photography. Heck, at the very least, they’re good for hours of amusement.

There’s no shortage of macro lenses for the iPhone: There’s the high-end Olloclip, which also comes with a fisheye and a wide-angle lens; then there’s also this rubber-band macro from Photojojo, and these magnetic specimens.

Add to the list the new Carson ML-515 LensMag, a pair of iPhone macro lenses that clip magnetically onto the iPhone 5 — pretty standard fare. Only there is something different.

So far, it’s been an interesting few weeks for digital publishing. Late last month saw the introduction of Flowboard, a digital publishing platform centered around an iPad app.

Now Disney has come out with their (highly simplified) take. Disney Story is a free iPhone app that lets you easily create a storyboard from photos on your iPhone, with accompanying text, which you can then share via email or on Facebook.

If you hate remembering and entering passwords, then you’re probably intimately familiar with 1Password. If you’re not, then you really should give the app a try because it just got a meaty update in the App Store.

1Password 4.2 was just released on the Apple Store today and it comes with a ton of new features, including the ability to share items through Messages, search for vault items by URL, lots of bug fixes, and more. The app will set you back $17.99 but the peace of mind it will bring you is well worth it.

Here are the release notes:

If you’re a Daft Punk fan who can’t wait to hear the random access beats of their latest album, Random Access Memories, it’s now streamingfree and live on iTunes here on a computer or iPad. You can also preorder the entire album for $11.99.

I’ve got to say, between this and David Bowie’s latest album, I’m liking this streaming trend Apple’s started.

Source: iTunes

iPhone theft has become a huge issue in big city like New York City. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg says the iPhone was responsible for New York City’s first increase in crime in 20 years.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is supposedly pretty tired of his constituents getting their iPhones stolen from them, so he’s written a public letter to Tim Cook asking why Apple isn’t doing more to stop iPhone theft.

T-Mobile had that slamming deal on the iPhone 5 to kick off its rebranding as “The Uncarrier” but those fun and happy days are all gone.

The Uncarrier has decided to bump up the down payment price of the iPhone 5 from $99 to $149 without ever really telling anyone that the $99 price was just a promotion.

Every major television network in the U.S. has its own iOS app that lets users watch episodes of their favorite TV shows, but ABC is revolutionizing its iOS app this week by offering live TV streaming.

ABC’s iOS app will be updated later this week to include a button called “live,” which will allow users to press it at anytime to view a live-stream of ABC’s local stations in the area.

Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn, has long been Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner, with around 60-70% of its revenue coming from the Cupertino company. But local rival Pegatron is hoping to change that.

By offering Apple more competitive prices and sacrificing its profit margins, Pegatron appears to be securing iPhone and iPad assembly orders that would have normally gone straight to Foxconn.

Killing iOS apps — not just closing them, but killing them completely — is nowhere near as simple as it should be.

First you have to double-tap the home button to open the multitasking tray, then you have to tap and hold the app’s icon, and then you have to close it by tapping the tiny circle. That’s a pain if you have several apps you wish to kill at once.

But with a new tweak for jailbroken iOS devices called Slide2Kill, you can completely kill iOS apps with just a swipe.

Todd McLellan is an artist whose forte is taking things apart and arranging them neatly, peeling back the layers of an everday object and allowing you to see the shocking mechanical complexity within. He’s like one part Andy Warhol, one part .

This is McLellan’s dissection of a Macintosh Classic, every single piece separated from one another and neatly laid out for your examination. It’s part of his Things Come Apart series, in which “fifty design classics—arranged first by size and then by intricacy—are beautifully displayed, piece by piece, exploding in midair and dissected in real-time, frame-by-frame video stills.” You can see more of McLellan’s work here.

In addition, McLellan has a book coming out at the end of the month called Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. The cover art for the book is actually the striking image above. If you want it, you can preorder it online from Amazon.

Source: Todd McLellan

Steve & Steve, an online graphic novel being undertaken by Patrick Sean Farley, has got to be the trippiest thing you’ll ever read about the friendship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their early HP/Atari days.

How trippy? Well, in the graphic novel, Steve & Steve drop acid in a strange geodesic dome in the middle of the woods, where they begin to debate the origins of technology, Steve Jobs called Arthur C. Clarke a degenerate, Wozniak eludes to a strange criminal past and fantasizes about kissing a girl in his chess club. Then, a Russian nuclear weapon is fired straight at Silicon Valley… or is it?

And that’s just the prologue. It’s beautifully illustrated and written, with some incredible typography. We’ve included a few panels after the jump, but check out the official Steve & Steve site for more. This is already shaping up to be the best Steve Jobs comic we’ve ever seen.

There’s a lot of talk about Apple going back to plastic for the budget iPhone, and while we’ve already seen some very attractive ideas about what that could look like, concept designer Ran Avni has another notion: an iPhone 6 that keeps the stark classicism of the current monotone iPhone color schemes, but adopts a plastic back which borrows design elements from the iPad mini. It’s an interesting look, and very Apple-like, but only time will tell how close this is to what Apple actually delivers.

iTunes users spend an average of $40 a year on digital content, according to the latest report from Asymco’s Horace Dedio. And with more than 500 million users, Apple is raking in over $5.5 billion in iTunes sales revenue every single quarter.

That’s more than some technology companies see in total, and Apple’s making it on just one service.

Flipboard for iOS has received a number of new features in its latest update, which is available to download from the App Store today. Users can now enjoy profile pages with readership and curation statistics, as well as a new Friends category in the Content Guide. There’s also the ability to share stories via SMS.

For a long time, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were two of the biggest competitors in the technology industry. They were both early pioneers of desktop computing, and their companies were battling each other for every ounce of market share they could get their hands on.

But those shared experiences eventually led to the two becoming good friends. In a new interview for CBS’ 60 Minutes, Gates fondly remembers his old foe, and emotionally recalls his last visit to Jobs’s Palo Alto home before he passed away in October 2011.

With over 500 episodes of The Simpsons aired on TV, and tons of Apple links, even a hardcore Simpsons and Apple fan might have missed this tribute to Apple. In episode #497 “The D’oh-cial Network” Lisa builds a social-network called SpringFace. The computer behind Lisa’s coding prowess was a Lisa computer by Mapple at the Springfield High School computer lab.

The Apple nod is a reference to the Apple Lisa which was released in 1983, and is named after Steve Jobs’ first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. The logo on the Simpsons’ Lisa computer is the Mapple logo which is just an apple that has been bitten on both sides.

Source: Reddit

If there’s one part of iOS that Apple needs to be paying more attention to, it’s the lockscreen. Case in point: jailbreak developers and concept designers are coming up with some really innovate ideas for making use of the first screen we all see when we check our iPhones.

Axis, a new jailbreak tweak that began as a simple concept some months ago, is another great example of doing more with the lockscreen. Apps can be assigned to the bottom of the screen and quickly opened with a swipe gesture.

When you die as a billionaire who created one of the most influential companies in modern history, people automatically assume that you were pretty smart. And smarts mean good grades in school, right? That’s what your teachers want you to believe.

Mr. Stephen Paul Jobs was a genius, but not at getting As on his report card.<!–more–>

It’s common knowledge that Jobs was a college dropout. He left Reed College after only six months and ended up getting a job as a low-level technician at Atari. He would then go on to create the Mac with Steve Wozniak, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Atlantic did some digging through Jobs’s recently released FBI file and found a great nugget of history: his high school GPA. During his years at Homestead High School (1968-1972), Jobs averaged a 2.65 GPA, meaning he got mostly Cs and Bs. So he wasn’t a bad student, but definitely not the scholar you would expect from a future industry titan.

Source: The Atlantic

Image: AP

Notification Center, introduced with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, has quickly become an integral part of the Mac OS experience, replacing third-party apps like Growl and the like with a built-in system for notifying you of system and other events on your Mac.

Let’s take a look, then, at five tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your use of Notification Center, including getting rid of it all together, if that’s your thing.

iOS 7 concepts are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone is coming up with short video walkthroughs of what they think the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system will look like.

Rumors say that Apple is making iOS 7 “flatter” and less skeuomorphic (no pool table felt in Game Center, for example). That has led a lot of concept creators to what I think are, frankly, some overdone conclusions. Yesterday on Twitter I made the comment that, “My gut somehow tells me that all of these iOS 7 concepts are horribly wrong.” I haven’t seen a single iOS 7 concept that actually looks believable, well… until now.

Oddly named social photo sharing app, Oggl is available now in the App Store. It’s currently invite-only, so you’ll need to download the app and request an invite. Once you do that, you’ll be in line to get a spot in this new experiment from Hipstamatic, one of the first “put a filter on it” photo app developers in the iOS space.

Hipstamatic wants to position this app as more than just a way to snap retro-looking photos of your dinner, but a way to capture and curate some of the best iPhone photography around.

Hero Academy is a pretty fantastic iOS strategy game that plays out like a cross between chess and a tactical role playing game (RPG), played against a single opponent in asynchronous turns. Developer Robot Entertainment has created an experience that’s equal parts dead easy to learn and super fun to play, with a depth of tactics and strategy gameplay that hits the sweet spot for a fun on the go game.

Well, Hero Academy is now available on the Mac App Store, and it’s free to download and play.

This week on The CultCast: Adobe goes rental, Bill Gates gets crazy, Nintendo doesn’t come to the iPhone, 5S begins productio, Buster gets hit on by a goat, and the other fun Apple stories from the week. Baaaah!

All that and more on this week’s CultCast! Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now in iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Click through for the show notes!

If you’re looking for a new solution to back up your iPhone’s photos to the cloud and access them on other devices, Amazon has a new solution for you. The company just launched it’s new iOS app, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, that lets you upload your photos to Cloud Drive.