Apple announced HomeKit to developers at WWDC last year. Photo: Apple
Apple’s plans for HomeKit to become the de facto platform for the connected home is taking longer than expected to happen because of the company’s obsession with security, according to a recent report.
Why so introspective, Mr. Bond? Photo: Columbia Pictures
Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as famous super spy James Bond looks to take a darker, more roguish turn than ever, with Bond looking to “disappear” from the British spy agency that gives him the “00” license to kill rating.
The new trailer has all sorts of dramatic moments interspersed with the action, gadgetry, cars, women, overly-confident villains and explosions fans want to see.
Check it out below and be ready to see your first glimpse at the big bad behind the scenes of anti-spy organization, SPECTRE, which seems to be aimed squarely at Bond, James Bond’s broad shoulders.
Dreamscope lets you do this kind of nightmarish stuff to your own face. Photo: Google
Remember when Google announced, probably from within a heavily fortified and Skynet-proof bunker, that its artificial neural networks were “dreaming”? And then we saw the above picture of a squirrel ravaged by a computer’s best and most terrifying guesses at what things look like, and we all peed a little?
Well, the company has released that code to the public, and now some Scarecrow-esque villain has provided us with Dreamscope, a way to turn your beloved pictures into extensions of a neurotic computer’s twisted psyche.
When it comes to smartwatch mind share, Apple Watch is killing the competition.
That’s just one of several key takeaways from an interesting new study that digs into the public’s perception of smartwatches in general and Apple’s wearable in particular.
Select a pre-written message and send it straight from Notification Center. Photo: George Tinari/Cult of Mac
“I’m leaving” is a message I probably send way too often, but not as often as “I’m here.” It’s just become routine whenever I’m making plans or picking someone up. It’s not necessarily a burden, but it’d be a nice luxury to be able to quickly send friends these repeat messages automatically to save a little bit of time. You’re smart so I bet you know where I’m going with this.
Yes, Written is a new app for iPhone that lets you write out five of your most commonly used phrases and save them for easy access in Notification Center. Then when you pull down the Today view from the top, you see the Written widget with your five messages. Tap one to send it along to your favorite contacts. It works with the Messages app and even WhatsApp.
Video game streaming juggernaut Twitch.tv is stepping up its HTML5 game today with a move to get rid of buggy and overly-patched Flash in Twitch’s website.
The move today is only for the player part of the equation, but a full HTML5 solution should be forthcoming.
“Today’s redesign moves half of the video player – specifically the controls – from Flash to HTML5 and Javascript,” Twitch writes on its blog page. “The video itself is still in Flash underneath the controls. However, this is an important step to releasing the much-anticipated full HTML5 player.”
Can you even see this unofficial iPhone 7? Photo: Mesut G Design
We aren’t going to find out what the next iPhone looks like until Apple shows us (probably in September), but that isn’t stopping designers from dreaming up some concepts.
Here’s a pretty bold one that imagines the next Apple smartphone as a mix between a Samsung Galaxy Edge and a Club Cracker. You can check it out in the video below.
The carrier that’s built up quite an army of discontent from its customers over the years probably didn’t win over anyone with its latest announcement. AT&T is raising its upgrade fees for postpaid customers and tacking on a weird, unnecessary activation fee for new AT&T Next customers.
iOS 9 beta is out with new features and UI tweaks.
Apple is giving the public another taste of the future today by seeding the second public betas of iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan to testers this morning, just a day after releasing iOS 9 beta 4 and EL Capitan beta 4 to developers.
Send is part email, part instant messenger. Photo: Microsoft
The Microsoft Garage has churned out a new iOS productivity app aimed at streamlining the email experience so users can get in, get in contact, and get on with their work lives as quickly as possible.
The new iOS-only app, Send, aims to make email threads more like short IM messages by stripping out the hassle of finding your contacts, writing subject lines, and keeping tabs on your inbox.
iOS 9 is still in beta, but you can get ahead of the curve and under the hood of Apple’s powerful new mobile OS before its official launch. In a Cult of Mac Deals exclusive, the iOS 9 Swift Coding Course is just $59, a full 80% off the normal price.
Elon Musk could find himself even richer, if Gene Munster has his way. Photo: Zobacz Zasady/Wikipedia CC
Apple should buy Tesla from Elon Musk — or so thinks Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, speaking in a recent interview with Bloomberg Radio.
“The big thing they could buy that I would be impressed with is Tesla,” Munster said, referring to how Apple could spend its $203 billion in cash. “To me, when you think about that absurd amount of cash, you have to go after opportunities, and I think automotive fits within that camp.”
Yesterday, we reported that Snapchat was starting to lock out jailbreakers.
Today, the popular video messaging service is locking out users who are on an out-of-date version of the app. It’s a move aimed at jailbreakers that’s going to catch some people who are slow to update in the crossfire.
One of the best RPGs just came to Mac. Photo: Obsidian Entertainment
If you game on a Mac, or an iOS device, you’ve probably never played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. But that’s something that has now, quite miraculously, changed: After more than a decade, KOTOR 2 is finally available for Mac, and the game is (quite literally) better than it has ever been.
We’ve already got one “must see” tech-themed movie coming up this year with the Aaron Sorkin-penned Steve Jobs biopic, but Hollywood’s not done when it come to giving technology the big screen treatment.
In a deal reported to be worth close to seven-figures, Sony Pictures Animation has reportedly beaten out two other major studios to win the rights to a movie based on none other than emojis.
Android’s Lollipop and iOS 8 were announced at virtually the exact same time, but iOS 8 is obliterating it in terms of user adoption.
According to figures released by both Apple and Google, iOS 8 has 85 percent adoption among eligible iPhone and iPad users, while Lollipop is struggling its way to a mere 12.4 percent.
In what will surely be met with a sigh of relief from developers, Apple has stopped people running beta versions of iOS from writing reviews of apps in the App Store.
Many of these reviews tend to be negative because developers have yet to optimize their apps to run the latest prerelease software version. As a result, apps run on a beta version of iOS are far more likely to crash, or feature bugs.
Were you interested in Znaps, MagSafe adapter for Lightning connectors that we posted yesterday? You might want to hold off on ordering them. There’s a big possibility that patent issues could derail them from being delivered as promised.
It's nuts how far the original iPhone was ahead of the competition. Photo: CNET
It seems like just yesterday in many ways that Apple released the first iPhone, but it was actually the better part of a decade ago. Even so, it took the better part of that “better part of a decade” for the competition to catch up, as this great video, showing the evolution of smartphones, shows.
You know who had it much, much worse, though? One-time rival Microsoft, which reported its highest-ever net loss for the quarter after writing off billions for the failure of its Nokia handset division, and witnessing plummeting demand for PCs.
Photographers assigned to Taylor Swift concerts will be greeted by a friendlier photo contract. Photo: GabboT/Flickr CC
The Bad Blood between singer Taylor Swift and concert photographers is history – unless she writes a song about it.
Swift’s legal team has agreed to revise the photography contact for her 1989 World Tour after a widely reported backlash from photographers and boycotts of some of her shows.
They were reacting to Swift’s open letter to Apple complaining about its initial decision to not pay artists during the trial period of Apple Music. Apple backed down. Photographers, however, called her a hypocrite because of an overreaching photo agreement that gave her unlimited free use of any photos taken at her show, plus the right by members of her team to forcibly remove images from their cameras.
We didn’t get Apple Watch numbers, but Tim Cook and Luca Maestri delivered plenty of good news about Apple’s current financials and future prospects during Tuesday’s earnings call. Amid all the canned statements and bewildering biz speak, they dropped some tantalizing tidbits.
Cook and Maestri teased us with plenty of bullishness — and a little debunking — about impressive Apple Watch sales and consumer responses to the new device. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Apple hit record numbers again this quarter, with massive sales of both iPhone 6 and Macs across the globe.
Here are the highlights from today’s third-quarter 2015 Apple earnings call.
Wall Street isn't too happy with Apple this quarter despite strong revenue. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Apple’s stock is taking a hit after today’s Q3 2015 earnings call. At the time of writing, AAPL is down 6.72 percent in after-hours trading to 121.97. Yikes.
iOS 9 beta 4 is out with some new features and UI tweaks.
iOS 9 beta 4 is out for developers two weeks after beta 3’s release as expected. It’s time for the usual roundup of new goodies in the latest beta and beta 4 doesn’t shy away from the tradition. It’s not nearly as big of a release as last time with Apple Music and Apple News both making their debut, but beta 4 still brings some nice improvements and tweaked features. Let’s get right into it.
Apple didn’t officially announce any Apple Watch sales numbers during today’s earnings call, but according to Tim Cook, the company has already beat its own internal expectations.
While the official number of units sold remains a secret, the Apple exec said the number of Apple Watches sold in the first nine weeks was greater than the number of iPhones or iPads the company sold in the same period after they launched.