Apple Watch can help improve your race time (but watch where you're going!) Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac
With Autumn rapidly approaching, marathon season is almost upon us. So if you’re planning on running a race, now’s the time to ramp up your training.
Whether you are doing a full marathon, a half-marathon or a 10K race, here are my top 10 tips for using your Apple Watch to achieve a new personal best.
Apple's doing great under Tim Cook... or is it? Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
If you ignore its share price, Apple is doing incredibly well under Tim Cook, thanks in large part to the success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. But its newest offerings, Apple Watch and Apple Music, may be off to rocky starts.
This leads us to ask, once again, whether Apple has lost its spark without Steve Jobs. Is the company as exciting or as innovative under Cook? If Apple Watch can’t get us all to wear smartwatches and Apple Music doesn’t put Spotify out of business, does Apple have what it takes to revolutionize another industry?
Join us as we battle it out over those questions in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac.
Cult of Mac is proud of its new magazine app on iTunes. Photo: Cult of Mac/YouTube
I am super-psyched to introduce you to a new app coming soon to iOS: the Cult of Mac Magazine app.
The new version of our magazine app will be published every Saturday. I think it’s a really great way to read all the stuff we publish here during the week.
The Alarm Clock app is in there somewhere ... Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
We love how easy it is to set up an alarm from the Apple Watch. All you have to do is say, “Hey Siri, wake me up at 7 a.m.,” and the digital assistant will put that order in for you.
But this comes a slight inconvenience: What happens to alarms after you’re done using them? Well, if you’re like me, you just turn them off to stop the horrendous buzzing on your wrist and then forget about them. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Here’s how to clear off all of those old, unused alarms with a quickness.
The nondescript exterior of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium doesn't give an inkling what Apple's up to inside. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
SAN FRANCISCO — Just how big is Apple’s next product reveal going to be? All signs point to it being a massive blowout of an event — far bigger than the standard iPhone “s” upgrade the world is expecting.
Apple will host its fall media reveal at the same place it unveiled the Apple II computer. Photo: StadiumUSA
When Apple takes the stage at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco for the fall media reveal, company execs will walk knowing they are in a sacred space.
Sure the building is 100 years old this year and is part of the city’s renaissance following the devastating 1906 earthquake. But the ground at the auditorium really shook in 1977, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak brought the Apple II computer to the West Coast Computer Faire.
Instagram adds portrait and landscape support. Screenshots: Instagram
Instagram is no longer a photo sharing service just for squares. The company today announced that it will finally support portrait and landscape photos and videos with its latest updates on Android and iOS.
Don't even bother asking Siri for a hint. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Apple just confirmed its big iPhone 6s event will take place September 9, and while the art on the invite didn’t offer any clues, Apple did give us one tip: Try asking Siri for hint.
Tim Cook’s not about to let his digital assistant leak details of the big event, but we decided to give it a try anyway. After begging Siri to give us a hint, a tip, anything, all we got back was more shade. But at least the replies were pretty funny.
IPhone 6s parts are leaking like crazy. Photo: Cult of Mac
The iPhone 6s keynote might be less than two week away, but we’ve already seen a bunch parts leak out of upcoming smartphone. A source provided Cult of Mac with the images above of an iPhone 6s screen assembly. The new assembly is slightly thicker than the iPhone 6 screen assembly, which is in line with previous rumors that the new device won’t have the same width as the iPhone 6.
We haven’t been able to take a closer look at the screen assembly, but another leak this morning takes a closer look at a mysterious new chip on the iPhone display that appears to confirm Force Touch is coming.
An early radar gun used by a Dodgers scout during the 1970s. Photo: efastball.com
Michigan State University baseball coach Danny Litwhiler was reading the campus newspaper one day in 1974 when he decided to call the cops on some of his pitchers.
An article and photo of campus police showing off the department’s new radar gun to catch speeders caught Litwhiler’s eye and he wanted police to swing by the ballpark with the new toy to see if it could read the speed of a pitched baseball.
Litwhiler – a flawless defensive player in the bigs who evolved into a beloved college coach – changed the game of baseball that day. No longer would myth and mystery surround the fastball. Pitchers, for better or worse, would be scouted and evaluated based on a new number – miles per hour.
You're about to murder so many snakes, you have no idea. Screenshot: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac
I’m anxiously awaiting Lara Croft’s next outing on consoles this fall with Rise of the Tomb Raider, but in the meantime, developer Square Enix is tiding us over with Lara Croft Go, a miniaturized adventure starring the iconic graverobber and dinosaur fighter. It’s out now for iPhone and iPad (reviewed version), and like its predecessor, Hitman Go, it’s more about strategy than all-out action.
This game diverts slightly from Hitman, however, doing away with the board game/diorama theme and just sticking our hero into an ancient, turn-based ruin. But that doesn’t diminish its charm or fun at all.
Apple is working on cutting-edge noise cancellation tech. Photo: USPTO/Apple
Apple’s EarPods could be about to get much smarter, thanks to a newly-published patent application which describes how a wireless headset could use sensors to determine which sound data to pass along to a listener.
Apple Watch’s Force Touch is coming to iPhone. Photo: Apple
The addition of Force Touch on the next iPhone has been churning through the rumor mill practically since Apple unveiled the technology with the Apple Watch last year. We’ve yet to see any component leaks that confirm the tech is actually coming to the iPhone 6s, but one developer may have just found evidence that it’s definitely on the way.
iOS developer Hamza Sood discovered key references to Force Touch in iOS today that appear to confirm the iPhone 6s will indeed come with pressure sensitive technology, and it may also add the new trackpad gestures that Apple is adding to iPad with the release of iOS 9.
There they are! Hello, contacts! Screen: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
iOS 8 introduced the idea of showing your most-contacted contacts in the multitasking screen. You’d simply double click on the Home button to see the list of the most recent apps as well as a row of the folks you contacted the most across the top.
If you’re looking for that feature in iOS 9, you might have noticed that the contacts are no longer in the multitasking screen. Never fear, though, they’ve just moved.
After years of speculation, we’ve finally gotten the official movie poster for the forthcoming Steve Jobs biopic — and, man, does it ever look great!
Keeping to the same minimalist style as the Walter Isaacson book jacket it’s based on, the poster shows Michael Fassbender striking a typically Jobsian pose, complete with plenty of white space.
The Note 5 has super specs, but can’t match iPhone 6’s speed. Photo: Samsung
The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is one of the most beefed up and powerful smartphones the world has ever seen. In terms of raw specs, the Note 5 blows the 2014 iPhone 6 out of the water with 4GB of RAM and a zippier processor, but as Apple has taught us for so many years, specs don’t always translate into better performance.
To see how fast the Galaxy Note 5 is compared to last year’s iPhone hardware, DroidModderX pitted the two devices against each other in a speed test designed to mimic everyday use, and the results were quite surprising. The iPhone is running on weaker hardware, but thanks to Apple’s software it managed to blow the Note 5 out of the water, thanks to Samsung’s horrible TouchWiz UI that bogs down all the memory.
Who better to turn to in your moment of need? Photo: Burning Man: The Musical
If you ever find yourself asking “What would Steve Jobs do?” in a bleak moment of crisis, you may well find yourself enjoying the latest would-be viral video.
Called Burning Man: The Musical, the short music video portrays the excitement around the annual Burning Man hippie-fest-turned-tech-networking-event, where zillionaire CEOs get together and pretend to be penniless beatniks for a couple of days, while staying in air-conditioned wigwams and attending $15,000-per-head parties.
Oh, and the video’s got a great Steve Jobs-themed song, too.
Here's how to put the tap back into "taptic." Photo: Apple
Taptic feedback on the Apple Watch felt a little weird at first, but we’ve come to love its gentle nudges to let us know something is going on. But some Cult of Mac staffers have noticed that after time, the taptic feedback has started to feel not so … tappy anymore.
If you’re having this problem, here are a couple quick and easy ways you can try to put the pep back on your wrist.
The new Alchemy synthesizer is center-stage in today's updates to Logic Pro X and MainStage 3. Photo: Apple
Apple released updates today for Logic Pro X and MainStage 3, adding a famous synthesizer and other fun goodies. This synthesizer, called Alchemy, for the most part isn’t an Apple original – it was previously an award-winning piece of software from Camel Audio, which Apple acquired at the beginning of the year. Now it has officially resurfaced in Apple’s professional audio apps.
Game developer Pixeljam is changing crowdfunding for the better. Photo: Pixeljam
Pixeljam is no stranger to making iPhone and Mac games, but now the studio is taking on another challenge: transforming the way crowdfunding works to make it better for game developers and other creative types.
Company co-founder Miles Tillman describes the crowdfunding project as an “experiment” that’s an alternative to popular services like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Pixeljam’s new platform lets backers donate money just like the others, but prioritizes transparent communication, instant gratification and actually making the game ahead of crowdfunding staples like producing slick videos and stressing out over fundraising goals and deadlines.
So much sound in such a small package. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Now that we’re in the era of the portable Bluetooth speaker, it’s hard to justify spending money on a stereo that just sits on a shelf at home.
That perception is exactly what this tiny stereo system from German audio giant Thonet and Vander aims to fight, though. The Rätsel brings old-school stereo sensibility to the modern age, with an absolutely room-filling sound in a tiny, tiny package. Why not have something that sounds this great right there on your shelf?
You may not get a whole lot of use out of a single SmartPlug. Photo: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac
Home automation, specifically Apple’s HomeKit framework and its compatible accessories, is the latest Thing We’re Supposed to Get Excited About™. And it has a lot of promise for convenience, time-saving, and just generally feeling like you live in the future.
The first HomeKit-compatible smartplug is upon us, courtesy of iHome. The ISP5 SmartPlug is a $40 device that plugs into your wall outlet and lets you run whatever you plug into it from your iPhone, using either Siri or the companion app.
It does everything it says it will: You can set up rooms and zones, and control individual appliances or whole groups of them with a tap or quick voice command. It also lets you build “rules” to make your stuff turn on and off without your input. All of this is cool, but when you actually have one, you might struggle to think of useful ways to use it.
This might be the best way to experience Instagram on your Mac. Photo: Photoflow
Instagram is great on the iPhone. It kind of sucks on the iPad. And it’s nonexistent on the Mac. But Photoflow aims to change the latter.
It’s a beautiful new Instagram client, just for the Mac. And while Photoflow won’t ever replace Instagram on your iPhone, it does supplement a lot of the app’s features for power users.