The developers behind Rubber Bandito, an upcoming retro-styled platform game for Android and iOS, want it to mean something when you beat their game. They envision a world where gaming is so much more than clicking trees in endless social games in a web browser.
They want you to play Rubber Bandito, and they want you to help fund it. On Kickstarter, of course.
Since I’m sure you all stay awake at night worrying about the latest developments in ITC complaints and patent disputes, you’re all probably dying to know that Motorola has withdrawn a complaint it made against Apple back in mid-August. We have absolutely no idea why the sudden change of heart, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. The web is abuzz with theories, but the truth is most likely much less controversial.
Though, seriously, this is why we want to play the game, right?
Feral Interactive is finally getting around to releasing the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham City for the Mac. The second installment of the critically acclaimed Arkham series, which started with Batman: Arkham Asylum, itself released on PC and console versions in 2009. The Mac OS X version of Arkham Asylum came out in November of last year, and now, a year later, we’ll have the pleasure of playing this fantastic game on our Macs.
Watch out, you might find yourself gaming before too long.
The Walking Dead: Episode Four – Around Every Corner is coming this month to Mac, PC, and consoles like PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Publisher Telltale Games promises only a short lag before the final episode is released, thereby capping the entire five episode series.
The video game is set in the same Walking Dead universe you know from the comic books and AMC television show, but follows different characters, including Lee Everett, the main protagonist for the episodes. The new trailer takes the cast, many of whom will change due to a persistent game system that forces players to live with their own tough choices in each episode. Who did you save? Who got killed? The survivors and mounting dead characters are your own fault, a result of your own heroism.
There really aren’t that many home automation products that blow my mind, but Lockitron has got me drooling. I want to live in the future. A place where my cellphone is the only thing I need to carry with me. I hate carrying keys, and Lockitron just might help me ditch them completely with its simple keyless entry beauty that’s something out of Star Wars or Minority Report or any other sci-fi movie.
Before the touchscreen iPhone was revealed at MacWorld in 2007, Apple had a team of engineers working on a click-wheel phone that was kind of like a mashup of an iPod and a phone. It was never released, but the work that went into it is pretty fascinating.
In an interview with TechCrunch, former Apple engineer and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers talks about what it was like to work on the click-wheel iPhone when no one else at the company even knew Apple was developing a phone.
There’s so much wordplay to be had in this post that if I start now, I might just forget to write about the product itself. So if you want dick jokes and Star Wars references, you’ll find them at the end of this post. In the meantime, let’s take a look at Richard Solo’s horribly-named FreeWheelin Audio System For Helmets.
Steve Jobs’s life was full of lessons on how to be successful, as well as the pitfalls to avoid when pursuing your dream. Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs has had a huge impact on people across the globe, so THNKR sat down with some of the journalists, authors, and tech entrepreneurs to get their thoughts on Steve Jobs one year after his passing.
Steve Jobs: Life & Legacy Reexamined features interviews with Walter Isaacson, Steven Johnson, Guy Winch, Steve Kroft, and many more, including our very own Leander Kahney. You can watch the episode above, or go to BOOKD’s YouTube page to find out more about Steve Jobs’s legacy.
The rumor mill is churning out iPad Mini like a savage beast now. Yesterday we got word on the date of the iPad Mini announcement along with some new mockup pictures, but today we’re finally getting to see some leaked iPad Mini parts that we haven’t seen before.
UkrainianiPhone has some leaked photos of the iPad Mini that show what the black casing will look like. Most mock ups have shown the iPad Mini to have the same grey aluminum back casing as the new iPad, but these new images make the iPad Mini look a lot more like the Nexus 7 because the back panel uses the same iPhone 5 anodized aluminum material.
Steve Jobs was always a deeply private individual. Even though he gave Walter Isaacson access to his life for the official Steve Jobs biography there are a lot of stories about Steve that have never been told. With the anniversary of Steve’s death coming this Friday, October 5th, a collection of untold Steve Jobs stories coming from friends and colleagues has been rounded up by Forbes.
One of the funnier stories in the collection comes from Randy Adams, former Apple and NeXT employee. Adams and Jobs both bought Porsche 911s during the early days of NeXT and parked next to each other at the front of the office to avoid car-door dings. Then one day Steve came rushing in and told Adams he needed to hide his Porsche.
Google has started to index the contents of your e-mail attachments, and you can now search on them in the Gmail interface. This is new, and pretty great.
But if you’re using the iOS Mail app to wrangle your Gmail accounts, it works there too. I discovered this in the process testing out the browser version and — as you might expect — Apple’s version is both more elegant and less useful.
iOS 6 is spreading like wildfire across Apple’s iDevices. Within two days of its release a quarter of all iOS devices had adopted Apple’s newest mobile operating system, and its use continues to grow. Chitika Insights has released their new data on iOS 6 adoption rates and they’ve found that 60% of iPhone users have already installed iOS 6, but only 39% of iPod touch users are on the new iOS.
Sick, enraged or just plain glum about the fact that your new iPhone 5 won’t work with your multiple and expensive speaker docks? Then you should probably lose that sense of entitlement.
Or you could move to Brazil (where an iPhone costs the same as a small private plane, more or less) and start buying paper magazines. Because a recent Coca Cola ad turns a copy of Capricho magazine into a passive cylindrical speaker dock.
Remember those novelty retro cellphone handsets? The ones with curly cords that attached to your handset’s proprietary connector and made it look like you were making a call on a rotary telephone circa 1970? In the pub?
Well, the Swissvoice ePure is something like that, only more useful, and way, way cooler looking.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent that covers its controversial iTunes logo that first made its debut with iTunes 10 in September 2010. The company’s late co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs is credited as one of the logo’s designers, and the patent covering its design first filed for in October last year.
The New York Times has today launched a new, “experimental” web app designed for optimal reading on the iPad. Built using HTML5, the app is available exclusively to digital subscribers with tablet access, as well as home delivery subscribers who link their account for digital access.
The app boasts a number of unique features, including four new ways to read the NYT, new “swipe-friendly” navigation gestures, and more.
Cheap Android tablets are stealing the iPad's market share.
A study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found a massive boom in tablets over the last 12 months, with 25% of American adults now owning a tablet of their own. As you might expect, the iPad is the most popular device out there at the moment, claiming more than 52% of the market. But that may not be the case for too long.
Android tablets are rapidly catching up, and in the not-so-distant future, there’s a good chance they will be king.
“Father of the iPod” Tony Fadell’s company Nest has released version 2.0 of its Apple-like thermostat. And like any good Apple update, the Nest 2.0 is thinner, better and good-looking-er.
To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Slashdot persuaded former Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak to answer some questions thrown at him by the site’s readers. Woz took the time to answer a number of questions on Apple and his thoughts on how the company is doing without Steve Jobs at the helm, jailbreaking, the iPhone, and more.
It’s pretty much an open secret that I can’t stand Twitter, and about the only thing I really like about Facebook is photo sharing, so I really love Instagram. In many ways, it’s against my better instincts, since I’ve always hated the romanticizing of Polaroid and other low-grade cameras of the 1970s by millennial hipsters… a romanticizing Instagram is pretty much built around.
But Instagram’s a lot more than that, and I think this video by Casey Neistat nicely illustrates why: regardless of what filters you use, Instagram is about sharing your life openly, honestly and without being disingenuous. While Twitter is all bluster and sanctimony, and Facebook is all mindless affirmation, Instagram at its best is about sharing the essence of your life.
There are also some great tips in Casey’s video on how to not be an annoying jackass on Instagram, so that helps too. If you love Instagram, check it out.
If someone told you that iOS 6 Maps had one advantage over Google Maps, and that it was 80% more efficient in using data, you’d probably quip, “That’s because it’s 80% less accurate” then do an air drum roll and punctuate the whole thing with the sound of a cymbal crashing that you made with your mouth.
Joking aside, though, it’s true. iOS 6 Maps uses way less data than Google Maps, and it has nothing to do with accuracy, but with its beautiful new vector graphics.
Conan O’Brien loves to do bits on the latest Apple product, and the latest iPhone 5 feature to become the fodder for laughs is the new Panorama feature, which Chris Parnell & Deon Cole says is the perfect photographic equipment for the well-endowed male. While Deon Cole’s delivery is perfect, it’s Chris Parnell’s matter-of-fact dissection of the joke — “that Deon is implying that his penis is too large to be capture in a normal camera aspect ratio’s field of view” — that pushes this bit over the top for me. Tell me about it. Just don’t shoot it in bright light or it’ll get a purplish hue, although chances are, if you need to shoot your penis in panorama, it’s already got one.
We had a sneaking suspicion Samsung would add the iPhone 5 to its patent infringement complaint against Apple shortly after the device made its debut. And the Korean electronics giant has now done exactly that, asking Judge Paul Grewal for permission to include the device in its latest countersuit against Apple.
Lex from Modahaus got in touch to let us know about this post on their blog, comparing the macro photography capabilities of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.
It won’t add transit directions, nor will it stiffen those melted roads which are draped, Dalí-esque, over the underlying terrain. But this simple, one-setting tweak will make iOS 6’s beleaguered maps app a whole lot more useful.