“I guess I’m known as that firmware-poking guy,” says Hamza Sood, the young hacker who most recently found a way to create and add custom watch faces to Apple Watch.
Cult of Mac chatted with the London-based 19-year-old via email to find out more about what makes him tick.
Taking iPhone video is usually a pretty manual affair. You try to hold your hands steady, but eventually some shudder creeps in. Trying to maintain a steady focal point can be tricky, especially if you’re filming a larger scene, like a concert or play.
You could use a tripod, but they’re big, bulky and require some setup. You don’t want to move around with a tripod.
Monopods, however, offer the stability and easy-panning joy of a tripod without all the fuss. Manfrotto’s monopod (the aptly-named 562B-1) is a solid, tall, adjustable, simply fantastic accessory to make all your videos, iPhone or otherwise, look much more professional.
In support of the Apple Watch’s increased availability in the U.K., Apple has taken over all 24 windows at the iconic Selfridges’ shopping center in London to promote the new timepiece.
Apple opened a store within a store concept a Selfridges’ earlier this year. The gigantic new displays mimics the Apple Watch’s floral clock faces, with some flowers reaching up to 1.8 meters in height.
Here’s another look:
The latest “flagship killer” from Chinese startup OnePlus is getting even more attention that its predecessor. And rightly so: The OnePlus 2 is better looking and more advanced than the OnePlus One, with a faster Snapdragon 810 processor, up to twice as much RAM, and a new 13-megapixel camera sensor.
The device also comes with OnePlus’ latest OxygenOS software pre-installed, which offers a pure Android experience with some added extras.
All these things come in a pretty package that costs just $329 with 16GB of storage and 3GB of RAM. (You can bump up to 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM for $389.) But is this a great smartphone that’s worth waiting for?
Seminal magazine-style news aggregation app Flipboard is aiming to compete with Apple News by introducing a system that lets users rate stories and ultimately adjust the mix of their home feed.
“No matter where you are on Flipboard, if you see something you like and want to get more of it in your Cover Stories, tap ‘More like this,'” says the Flipboard website, “If you’d rather see less of something, tap ‘Less like this.’”
Dust off your father’s Miami Vice suit and start growing a mullet. (Get it permed in back, too.) A new app turns your iPhone’s camera into a 1985-style VHS camcorder, complete with terrible quality and a date stamp.
If you’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser on Mac, you’ve been missing out on some serious performance gains made by Apple with its Safari browser: Not only is Cupertino’s favorite browser faster than Chrome, it also saves battery power.
But Chrome is looking to catch up with a coming update that some Mac users are raving about.
Too often, portable speakers are all about the convenience of wireless audio, and less about killer sound. That’s why we were excited to find out about the Sound Step Lightning 2, a sleek, feature rich Bluetooth sound station that’ll still blow the walls off the place. And right now they’re going for a whopping 60% off, just $59 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Sony’s second-generation SmartBand 2 is here, and it’s a big improvement over its predecessor. The wearable’s new design packs an intelligent heart rate monitor that constantly measures your excitement and stress levels throughout the day.
Apple could release its 4-inch iPhone 6c in November, according to a new rumor coming out of the supply chain in China.
The report claims that the handset is being assembled by regular Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn, which has started “mass-increasing” its workforce to deal with the task of building not one, not two, but three different iPhone models.
Sometimes trademarks are about defending brand names you’ve spent years and millions of dollars building up. Other times they’re meant as jealous, petty ways of striking back at people who are doing better than you.
Guess which category Swatch’s decision to trademark Steve Jobs’ iconic “One more thing” signature phrase falls under.
In a world filled with frothy pop songs and multimillionaire musicians, it’s not often that a song goes to the top of the iTunes chart based purely on ethical reasons.
That’s exactly what’s happened in Austria, however, where a recorded minute of silence in honor of asylum-seekers trying to escape from countries of conflict has shot to No. 1 on the iTunes music chart — with the money raised going to a local refugee project.
While some are writing the eulogy for email, Erik Lukas has worked for the last two years trying to make it relevant again.
His mobile app, Geronimo, takes its first public leap Aug. 27 for iPhone and the Apple Watch with an interface that involves gestures and uses the four corners of an iPhone screen for quick and easy management of your email.
Responding to the existential threat posed by Apple Music and Spotify, old-school streaming music service Rhapsody has completely overhauled its mobile app. The revamped Rhapsody comes with a fresh design and new features to take things up a notch — although some of these things look mighty familiar.
Will this redesign be enough to take on the newcomers that are eating Rhapsody’s lunch? Check out what Rhapsody brings to the table and see for yourself.
Apple Music cranked up the volume on music streaming, turning an insider topic into water-cooler fodder as musicians, industry bigwigs and tech analysts weighed in with questions about the future of the music industry.
Seemingly everybody is suddenly talking about Apple Music subscription numbers and the chances of competitors like Spotify and Pandora. But in all the media buzz about who’s winning and who’s losing, almost everyone is disregarding another major player — Rhapsody, the streaming music service that just happened to spark the streaming revolution.
The confetti from Apple’s splashy launch of its music streaming service has barely finished falling. Now comes startup Geekin Radio, with a streaming service that debuts today. It seems like odd timing.
How will it ever emerge from the shadows of Apple Music? CEO Gavin McCulley is aware of his timing and likes his company’s chances because Geekin Radio’s mobile app is the only streaming service that is an actual social network, offering a shared listening experience, perfectly synced, with back-and-forth chatting in real time.
Close to two decades after it first burst onto our PlayStations and PCs, Square Enix’s RPG masterpiece Final Fantasy VII has finally landed on iOS in its original form.
Celebrate the great news by checking out the trailer below:
Smartphone sales may be slowing down worldwide, but try telling that to Apple!
According to a new report by research firm Gartner, iPhones sales increased by an impressive 36 percent in the June quarter this year — representing a 2.4 percent increase in total market share.
Apple is turning to Sharp to provide the displays for its upcoming 12.9-inch iPad Pro, according to a new report, claiming that the device will go into production by the end of this year’s third quarter — with mass production following shortly thereafter.
Sharp is said to be providing Open Cell LCD displays, while GIS will be responsible for the super-sized tablets’ touch modules, lamination and LCM assembly.
Looks like we’ve got some wear issues on the Apple Watch, especially the Space Gray ones. There are posts on Reddit and the Apple Discussion Forums that show both the Apple logo and actual text etched into the back of the watches peeling off.
Apple Discussions user dougie70w says that he bought his Apple Watch at the beginning of June “and the band started to peel part so bad that I replaced it with an after market metal band that I purchaced on Amazon.”
He’s got an appointment at a local Apple Store today and hopes that having Apple Care will let him get a replacement.
Apple’s fifth El Capitan public beta was quickly pulled yesterday after its release, but the company is ready to give developers a taste of the newest fixes in its upcoming operating system with the release of El Capitan beta 7.
Good news: the official Twitter app for Mac finally got some attention today for the first time in almost a year. It now supports direct messages without the 140-character limit. Bad news: that’s the only feature added in the update, rendering it so totally insignificant you’re probably considering donating a new coffee machine to the Twitter for Mac team.
Closed captioning is useful to those with a hearing impairment to make the audio of videos accessible. Subtitles help those who speak a different language understand what’s going on in a film not in their original language.
You can enable these features on your Apple TV, but it’s not super-intuitive — there’s no single button to make it happen.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t easy. Here’s how to turn on Apple TV subtitles, even if you just want to watch a scary movie at night and have the sound turned down.
Kansas City Royals coach, Ned Yost was been slapped on the wrist by the MLB for wearing his Apple Watch during games, even though they’re the ones that gave it to him.
Yost received the watch as a gift from the MLB for serving as the American League manager in the All-Star Game, but after the manager was repeatedly seen wearing the device in the dugout, the MLB decided to step in and try to stop him from using it in games.
Apple is hoping to avoid another Bendgate controversy by using a new aluminum shell for the iPhone 6s that’s twice as strong as the iPhone 6 version. We got our first look at the super-strong iPhone 6s last week, when Lewis Hilsenteger got his hands on a leaked shell that indicates Apple will use series 7000 aluminum for the upcoming model.
Hilsenteger’s latest video puts the new and improved iPhone 6s aluminum frame to the bend test. Only this time, instead of using his bare hands like he did with the original Bendgate video, Hilsenteger uses sophisticated equipment to give us extra insight into the new case’s super strength.