December is a month when most people can’t avoid shopping. You may have skipped Black Friday, but the holiday season is a different beast altogether, with gifts from loved ones, friends, and people you barely know coming at you from all angles.
Maintain lots of holiday cheer by shopping wisely with our December buying guide. We’ve pored over the extensive DealNews archives from years past to guide you in your quest for the most savvy purchases in December.
With over 1 billion downloads, Temple Run and it’s sequel, Temple Run 2, are the very definition of mobile gaming success.
It’s even better that husband and wife developers and co-founders Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckyanova are such incredibly nice people. Their startup, Imangi Studios, has found the gold at the end of the rainbow, and they’ve no intention of stopping.
“Frozen Shadows” is the latest (and largest) free update to the franchise yet, giving you new characters like Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox to run through a brand-spanking-new ice world. You’ll also get new artifacts, winter costumes, and an absolutely terrifying new demon monkey to run from. Yikes!
“We’re really trying to expand the Temple Run universe,” Shepherd told us on the phone, “in much the same way as a novelist or storyteller would.”
Once Apple brought games to the Apple TV, it was a no-brainer that we’d all want to play them together on the couch in our living room.
Apple requires developers to support the new Siri Remote, but they can also allow third-party game controllers to move stuff around on the screen, too.
Crossy Road, the excellent Frogger-like hit iOS game with the seemingly endless supply of cute creatures to play as (that was also an Apple TV launch title), goes one step further. If you want to play with a buddy and don’t have a second gamepad, you can have your pal play Crossy Road on Apple TV with just their iPhone.
Here’s how.
Apple has a range of different Apple Watch straps available — but, aside from letting you pick the perfect strap to suit the rest of your attire, they all serve exactly the same function: keeping Apple’s debut wearable safely strapped to your wrist.
That may change in future iterations of the Apple Watch, with a new patent application published today describing how future Watch straps (or straps for other Apple devices) may include flexible displays woven into the material, offering another way of presenting user messages or notifications.
Apple hasn’t released a new printer since the heady days of the LaserWriter 8500 in 1997, but a new patent application suggests the company is working on a new printer — and it’s no ordinary one, either.
Published today under the name “Method and apparatus for three dimensional printing of colored objects,” the patent application describes a 3-D printer capable of not only printing amazing three-dimensional structures, but doing so in multiple colors.
A group of authors and booksellers are standing by Apple in its decision to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling stating that Apple conspired to fix eBook prices when it launched its iBook store way back in January 2010.
The Authors Guild, Authors United, the American Booksellers Association, and Barnes & Noble have all banded together to file an “amicus brief” in the United States, arguing that the belief that Apple was taking place in “anti-competitive activities” was “misplaced.”
If you’re hoping to stream games from Steam to your new Apple TV, developer Kevin Smith (no, not the Clerks guy) has shown it is possible by modifying the Moonlight iOS project — which lets users stream Steam games from a desktop computer to their iOS device — so that it works with tvOS.
Check out the videos below.
New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton has taken aim at Silicon Valley in his latest column — attacking it for helping to bring down Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic, which so far has earned just $18 million at the box office in its first seven weeks.
Cloud storage has matured into a reliable and sensible solution for keeping data secure and accessible. Also reliable is the high cost of that storage. Thankfully there’s a way to significantly drop the price just by reducing the access speed, like with Zoolz Cold Storage. They’re offering a terabyte of storage for life for just $39.
Logging into any service on Apple TV is a pain. The text-entry field is one long line, and if you’ve got a particularly lengthy username or password for apps on the Apple TV, entering them can take much longer than it should.
Twitter-owned Digits is offering its own take on a solution with an SDK that tvOS developers can implement in their apps and let users type in a short string of numbers and letters that they get from their iPhone, rather than the full-on username and password combination.
This could solve the problem altogether, and it’s not much more tricky than using an app for Two-Step Authentication, which we all do now, anyway (or should).
The iPad has helped airlines replace the outdated paper flight manuals pilots used to lug around. Now Apple’s first phablet is ready to help revolutionize the way United Airlines provides customer service.
United Airlines revealed today that it plans to distribute over 6,000 iPhone 6 Plus units to customer service representatives at its hubs across the US, as part of the company’s effort to give employees better tools to provide faster service.
Boxing Day. What the heck is it? Traditionally, it’s the day that British servants and tradesmen, busy servicing the upper class on Christmas Day, got to take the day off and open their gifts. But in the context of modern society, it’s mostly notable for being the week when Apple launches its annual Boxing Week sale for customers in Canada and the UK. Which is now live!
Online dating services promise plenty of fish in the sea. They just can’t stop the catfish from biting.
But the pretenders might not have the same luck with the new dating app Blume. Once a match is made, the two users must exchange selfies, using the smartphone camera in-app, before any communication can begin.
Apple’s iPhone family becomes even more successful every year, and the latest models aren’t just a hit with faithful fans. According to new research, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are attracting Android switchers at an unprecedented rate.
Sometimes you just need a solid, great-sounding set of wired headphones. They don’t need to charge up like my Bluetooth favorites do, nor do they require pairing (or repairing, like several models I’ve used).
Earbuds are great, too, but for extended listening sessions, I prefer on-ear headphones. They are less sound-isolating — I don’t need to hear my own breathing all the time.
When it comes to innovation, American-based corporations are pushing the envelope more than any other nation and Apple is leading the charge.
According to the latest rankings from Boston Consulting, Apple was the world’s top innovator for the tenth year in a row, followed closely by Google.
If you spend any time behind the keyboard (and let’s be honest, if you’re reading this you probably do), you’re probably wasting a lot of time. The wide menu of commonly used terms, names, phrases and information that we take time to type out add up to minutes and hours that can be saved by using TextExpander. It turns your most regularly used terms into quick keystrokes for populating documents and images, an invaluable time saver that you can get for just $22.
After the “chipgate” event of the iPhone 6s — in which Samsung-manufactured A9 processors were rumored to perform worse than those built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) — a new report suggests that Apple may give its South Korean frenemy the boot, and award 100 percent of its iPhone 7 A10 chip orders to TSMC.
Google has been accused of breaking its student privacy pledge by collecting data and browsing habits from Chromebooks used in schools and Google Apps for Education.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called upon the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Google’s conduct, and to prevent it from using the data it has collected so far.
Excuse the dad for checking his Instagram feed when the nurse brings the newborn into the room. He might be trying to find a name for the kid.
Naming a baby after an Instagram filter is a hot trend according to the annual Baby Names Survey, sponsored by the Baby Center.
The whole tech world is losing its mind with Star Wars mania, and Apple’s no exception. Hidden within Siri is a neat reference to George Lucas’ epic space opera — accessible when you use the iconic “I am your father” line from the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
Check out some of Siri’s best responses below.
Apple is once again supporting Code.org’s “Hour of Code” initiative by offering a range of workshops and other special events for kids aged 6 and above at Apple Stores around the world.
Other participating tech companies include Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Apple is presenting a range of interesting sessions, including a free one-hour introduction to the basics of computer programming taking place on December 10 at local Apple Stores.
Apple Watch is becoming second nature to me after several months of owning it. It’s gotten to the point where I feel like something’s missing when I don’t strap it to my wrist in the morning before starting my workday.
Thing is, the Apple Watch has so many animations on it that I sometimes feel like getting things done takes too long. I just want to find and use apps, with a minimum of fuss and bother.
Luckily, you can turn off those animations on Apple Watch to make it all feel a bit snappier.
We’ve seen so-called “working” iPhones created in Minecraft before, but they pale in comparison to this one, created by Verizon: It’s a towering, skyscraper-size smartphone that allows you to make video calls and even browse the web!
Apple may have kicked butt on Black Friday, with reports of its strongest Friday sales in history and more online purchases made using iOS devices than Androids by a giant margin.
There was one area of Apple’s business where Black Friday wasn’t a day of triumph, however, and that’s Apple Pay. According to a new report, only half the total percentage of Apple customers who used Apple Pay at last year’s Black Friday used it during this year’s sales bonanza.
