Aside from the gorgeous new 12-inch MacBook Air, the part of today’s Apple keynote that excited me the most was the announcement of what Apple is calling ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS software framework designed to crowdsource volunteers for medical research studies.
Using the tool, researchers can tap into Apple’s massive iPhone user base to recruit people for medical data-gathering. Users sign up with a digital signature, and can then instantly begin recording data.
The biggest surprise about today’s big Apple Watch event? That Cupertino’s upcoming wearable didn’t really steal the show.
We got a few new details about the smartwatch, but Tim Cook and crew really blew our minds with several other big announcements. Here are the most important revelations from the show at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
If Jony Ive sometimes missed out on getting his rightful credit while Steve Jobs was steering the ship at Apple, that same accusation can’t be made today. Following on from the recent superb New Yorker profile about Ive and the Apple Watch, Apple’s superstar design guru is the recipient of another profile (complete with interview), this time with the Financial Times.
The story’s not nearly as in-depth as the 10,000-word New Yorker piece, but it still has a few interesting observations about Ive’s approach to technology and the unique design challenges of working on the Apple Watch — including why the Apple Watch was a very different prospect for Ive than working on the iPhone.
Highlights can be found after the jump.
SAN FRANCISCO — Whether they’re in town to pitch products, apply for jobs or ponder the next big thing, the Game Developers Conference is an annual rite of passage for gaming geeks of all sizes, shapes and economic persuasions.
More than 24,000 game developers, publishers and journalists cram into Moscone Center for a weeklong dive into the latest gaming trends. In between panels like “Adventures of a Video Game Drag Queen,” “How Players Engage with Morality” and “Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret,” they mix and mingle — at least the ones who don’t have VR goggles strapped to their heads.
Here’s a taste of the action on the ground.
In the summer of 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog was, quite simply, the greatest thing Simon Thomley had ever seen.
At the age of 11, Thomley had graduated to the SEGA Genesis gaming console after years as a Nintendo Entertainment System player. Sonic had lured him to SEGA’s system, and he wasn’t alone: The spiny blue speedster captured the hearts of gamers everywhere. By the end of the year, SEGA had sped past Nintendo on console sales.
A series of sequels followed. While many people remember the Sonic games primarily as a relic of the ’90s, they become an unlikely career for Thomley and his developer friend Christian Whitehead. Better known as Stealth and Taxman, they brought remastered versions of classic Sonic games to iOS for a new generation of gamers to enjoy.
“This has always been my hobby, but I’m lucky enough that this has now become my full-time job,” Thomley tells Cult of Mac. The pair brought finely tuned official versions of Sonic games to iOS — although recent turmoil at SEGA has thrown the future of their highly regarded work into doubt.
Even in the wake of an uber-popular device like the iPhone 6, which sold upward of 10 million units in its first weekend alone, it’s fascinating to see analysts hedging their bets when it comes to the Apple Watch. The spread of predictions from these professional prognosticators might as well have been generated at random.
The latest group to weigh in is Strategy Analytics, which is predicting that the Apple Watch will sell (or at least ship) 15.4 million units worldwide in 2015, which would still make Cupertino the world’s No. 1 smartwatch vendor, but with a much smaller market share than others are predicting.
How do you make Apple Watch apps without access to the actual device?
For many developers, it doesn’t get better than the simulation tools Apple provides and some cardboard cutouts. But for a select few, Apple has given the opportunity to test the unreleased Watch in person at a top secret lab.
Apple’s March 9 “Spring Forward” event is just around the corner, and its tagline can only mean one thing: Apple Watch news galore.
Scheduled for the day after daylight saving time kicks in, we expect Apple to shower us with details about the upcoming wearable, including pricing and availability. Select Apple Watch apps from App Store developers will likely be shown off as well to whet our appetites for what’s to come.
While there’s a chance some new Mac hardware could share the stage Monday, we expect the event to focus mostly on all the unanswered questions surrounding the Apple Watch.
What are those questions? Glad you asked:
SAN FRANCISCO — Crossy Road developers Andy Sum and Matt Hall never set out to rake in a pile of cash. They did, however, want to create a popular game.
“We wanted to make the next Flappy Bird,” said Sum at the duo’s Game Developers Conference session here Tuesday.
“But our goal wasn’t to make money,” added Hall.
And yet make money they did. While Crossy Road hasn’t hit Flappy Bird levels of success (or notoriety), it pulled in 50 million downloads — on iOS, Android and Amazon — during the game’s first 90 days. It also generated $10 million for Hipster Whale, Sum and Hall’s development company.
Not bad for a game that was originally named Roadkill Simulator 2014.
Apple will reveal pricing details on its long-anticipated smartwatch in less than a week, but if the stainless steel version costs upward of $700, I’m definitely going the cheap route with the Apple Watch Sport.
The $350 timepiece isn’t as fashionable as its expensive gold and stainless-steel siblings, a point Apple’s website emphasizes by only showing Sport units with Sport bands. But if you pair the Sport with pricier bands, you can barely tells its the el cheapo option.
iOS developer Nick McCardel created mockups of the Apple Watch Sport with bands for the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition. Despite its less luxe finish, the Sport’s silver and space gray aluminum cases still look great no matter what you pair them with.
Take a look at some of the configurations below:
Salavat Fidai is working proof that artists need not create large pieces to make a name for themselves.
Much of what he creates is no bigger than the tip of a pencil — literally.
Under the glow of a single work light while his family sleeps, Fidai uses a craft knife and 4x magnifying glass to create tiny sculptures out of pointy pencil lead.
The Apple Watch isn’t even out yet, and already it’s picking up major design awards. The award in question here is the prestigious 2015 iF Design Gold Award, a prize sometimes referred to as a “Design Oscar.”
The awards were first introduced in 1954, and attract more than 2,000 product entries from 37 different nations — with expert judges ruling based on outstanding design quality.
Whether Apple is actually building a car, or it’s just a controlled leak to show that the company has more planned after the Apple Watch, isn’t known yet. What is sure, though, is that Apple is now legally covered if it wants to slap its name and logo onto an automobile.
Using its regular law firm Baker & McKenzie in Zurich, Apple recently expanded its corporate description to not just include the current array of watches, smartphones, tablets and computers, but vehicles, too. And Apple’s lawyers aren’t taking any chances, either. Apple aircraft, anyone?
Apple’s new ad campaign might be its best yet, especially if you’re one of the iPhone owners that’s about to have your photo on a billboard.
Simply called “Shot on iPhone,” it’s hard to call Apple’s campaign an ad at all — at least in the traditional sense. Apple crowdsourced photos shot with the iPhone by normal people around the world, and the result is a testament to just how incredible iPhone photography has become.
During his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been leaving little breadcrumbs of Apple Watch revelations.
There was the confirmation that the Watch will be showerproof in Germany, and now Cook has said it will eventually replace your car keys.
République Remastered is the gorgeously rebooted Mac and PC version of Seattle-based Camoflaj’s intriguing episodic stealth video game that originally came out for iPad and iPhone in December of 2013.
The development team took the opportunity to completely revamp the game within the updated game engine, Unity, moving the entire project from Unity 4 to Unity 5. By making this the first game release ever with the Unity 5 engine, they got early access to the engine in return for documenting their process.
“When Unity 5 was announced we saw our chance to make good on our two-year old promise to make a PC and Mac version of République,” writes the team on the Unity blog. “In addition to spending months completely reworking the game’s controls and UI, we knew we’d benefit from an increased wow factor on this new platform. From our dumpy office in downtown Bellevue (surrounded by industry titans like Bungie and Valve), we’ve put our heart and soul into this ambitious and at times, difficult, project.”
Check out the official game trailer below to see how they succeeded in making this already stunning game even more gorgeous.
Valery Rozov is running out of mountains off which to jump.
The Red-Bull-pedaling daredevil added Mount Kilimanjaro to a recent jump in a wingsuit, traveling a horizontal distance of nearly two miles in a minute-long free fall before pulling his parachute to safely land at Barranco Camp. He was greeted by several Africans, who hoisted him on their shoulders.
“The locals had heard what I was up to and were pretty impressed,” Rozov, 50, told redbull.com.
If you plan on seeing Focus starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie this weekend, you will be watching the first major studio film edited entirely with Final Cut Pro X.
Originally criticized as “iMovie Pro” for its incredibly simplistic interface and feature set, Final Cut Pro X has managed to start wooing Hollywood filmmakers by slowly adding back missed tools along with new ones. Now the directors behind Focus think it’s the future of movie editing.
From minor controversies like Antennagate to being kicked out of his own company and then returning triumphantly, Steve Jobs got out of plenty of tight squeezes in his life.
Now that he’s gone, it seems that that same spirit of near-misses and daring triumphs is left to Venus, Jobs’ 256-foot, $120 million super-yacht.
Having visited Montenegro, Palma, Gibraltar, Horta Azores and many other exotic locations since Jobs’ death in 2011, the yacht recently had a close call while passing through a bridge in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 185 miles east of Puerto Rico.
Check out the video after the jump.
Tonight, history is made as Modern Family becomes the first major TV show to ever air an episode shot almost entirely using Apple products — ranging from the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 to MacBook FaceTime cameras.
But while Apple products are famously easy to use, the episode itself contained numerous challenges: taking more than three months to complete, and a variety of nifty filmmaking tricks. To find out more details, BuzzFeed News reached out to the show’s executive producer and co-creator, Steve Levitan, to get some added insight about the challenges of making this unusual show.
The behind-the-scenes video is available to watch online, or download via iTunes.
When you’re a company the size of Apple, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Having recently paved the way for racially diverse emoji by adding them to both Mac and iOS, Apple is now being attacked for the shade of yellow used for its Asian faces, which some critics claim is borderline racist.
Picture this: You’ve lost your iPhone somewhere, but it’s run out of juice and it’s not ringing or vibrating when you call it.
You might think you’re out of luck, but there’s one function you can enable (or disable if you’re into privacy) that will keep track of your iPhone’s last location, even when the battery’s dead.
Had he lived, today would have marked the 60th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.
While most of the tributes to Jobs will no doubt highlight later events in his life — the unveiling of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad — I instead wanted to mark the occasion with one of the lesser-known Jobs videos: his first television interview, recorded around the time the Apple II was making waves.
If you never thought you’d see the day when Jobs would geek out over seeing himself on a television screen, check out the video after the jump.
Apple paved the way for racially diverse emoji to come to the Mac two week ago, and now with the release of iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple has added access to 300 new emoji for iPad and iPhone users.
With iOS 8.3 beta 2 Apple now allows users to choose between five different skin tones for 60 different emoji. Switching between the different skin tones is just as easy as adding an accent mark to letters: simply press and hold an emoji to reveal the the entire palette of color options.
Here are some of the new emojis in action:
You may have noticed recently that the Facebook app makes sounds. Like a post? Chirp. Refresh the news feed? Swoosh. It’s like your iPhone got suddenly chatty and wants you to know that you’re tapping on the screen with every blip and bloop.
Surely you’d like to turn these things off. You could just mute your whole iPhone with the sound toggle button, but if you want to have other audio come through, like video, music, or (gasp) phone calls, you can dip into your Facebook app settings and soon experience the bliss of a blip-free Facebook browsing experience.
Here’s how.