Cult of Mac

Father’s Day is fast approaching…but there’s still time to get your audiophile Dad an awesome gift. We’re partial to the Sound Kick Bluetooth speaker—and we’ve got it for $49.99 at Cult of Mac Deals right now, with guaranteed free shipping in time for Father’s Day.

After getting an ear-full from Eddy Cue during Game 1 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James single handedly carried his team to a win last night to even the series at game a piece.

LeBron’s leadership has been unparalleled this season, and that extends on and off the court. Before the Cavs vs Warriors series kicked off last week, insiders revealed that LeBron gathered his teammates at the Four Seasons in downtown San Francisco for a bonding session and presented everyone with their own Apple Watch.

Apple is going to kill off its Newsstand app for iOS and replace it with a Flipboard-style news reader, according to a new report. The new service will be free, and it is expected to feature sample content from partners like The New York Times, ESPN, and Conde Nast.

Before Craig Federighi and Apple’s other software gurus unveil the future of iOS and OS X, let’s take a minute to appreciate Scott Forstall. If Scott hadn’t been kicked out of the company three years ago we would probably still be stuck with leather and felt interfaces.

Getting removed from Apple has paid off for Scott too. He’s helping Snapchat suck less, and last night, he won an award Tim Cook and Jony Ive will never be nominated for: The Tony award for Best Musical.

Forstall has been serving as a producer on the Broadway musical “Fun Home” the past year and last night the effort paid off big time, with ‘Fun Home’ sweeping up and taking home a whopping five awards, including best new musical, best book, best original score, best direction, and best leading actor.

Check out Scott with the rest of the team on scooping up an award:

Apple is souping up its internal network and data centers ahead of its new streaming music service and upgraded Apple TV, according to a new report.

We’re eagerly counting down the last hour until Apple unveils its new lineup of magical software and other goodies, but Simon Pierro is ready to reveal some of the magic that’s already inside your Apple Watch.

The iOS magician released a new video for WWDC fans that goes through the features of the Apple Watch by bending reality with the same type of clever tricks that landed him on The Ellen Show earlier this year.

Watch his new Apple Watch routine below:

A new Xposed module for rooted devices brings Apple’s new Force Touch gesture to Android-powered smartphones and tablets.

Dubbed Force Touch Detector, the mod offers 7 different force gestures, and users can customize each one to perform different actions, such as opening up the app launcher, expanding the notifications pane, or navigation back to previous pages.

Attendees of WWDC 2015 have started picking up the jackets and backpacks that Apple gives out to developers ahead of the event. This year’s black jackets look quite similar to ones distributed last year, except Apple made an interesting change to the font.

With San Francisco expected to replace Helvetica Neue as the default typeface of iOS and OS X, Apple has hinted at the change by using the font on the front of the jackets. The company also added a little Swift joke on the inside of the garments.

Take a look at the size tag:

Apple officially only streams its WWDC keynote to its own platforms and devices — iOS, OS X, and Apple TV. But you can easily tune in on Windows PCs and tablets, Android smartphones, and other devices.

So if you don’t have an Apple device handy, but you still want to watch WWDC, here’s how.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is ready to kick off and Cult of Mac will be here ready to liveblog all the action and glory as it happens.

We’re expected to get our first glimpses of the new and improved iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, both of which will supposedly feature a bunch of performance improvements, but could some major new features surprise us? Apple’s new music streaming service will also premiere at the event, and Apple Watch apps are about to get their own SDK.

Come enjoy the show with us as we break down all the awesome new features and products Tim, Craig, Jony and the rest of Apple’s team drop on us. The action starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, but we’ll be cranking up the liveblog around 9:30 a.m.

With the Worldwide Developers Conference less than a week away, we’ve already got a pretty good idea about what Apple will reveal at this year’s conference.

The company focuses on developer-related products at the conference, but there are plenty of goodies that normals will go crazy for too, like the bevy of improvements coming to iOS 9, a new Apple TV and maybe even a new music streaming service.

Here’s what to expect from WWDC 2015, which runs June 8 to 12 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. (Cult of Mac will be liveblogging the Apple keynote, which starts at 10 a.m. Pacific next Monday, so be sure to check back then for news and instant analysis.)

Apple is expected to announce its long-awaited music streaming service during the WWDC keynote later today, and despite tough competition from the likes of Spotify, the company has incredibly ambitious plans to sign up 100 million subscribers.

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When Apple unveils its revamped music service Monday, it will mark a “tipping point” for mass acceptance of streaming over downloads, predicts Sony Music CEO Doug Morris.

The new streaming service, which Morris says will be unveiled tomorrow at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, will challenge on-demand streaming services like Spotify and Rdio thanks to a very particular set of skills Cupertino has acquired over the years.

This week: We’ll tell you why the 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference may be one of the most mundane on record. Plus, Apple pretty much confirms Apple TV will be your home’s digital hub; Facebook’s an impenetrable fortress with too much power; and the tale of a Bay Area woman who unknowingly junked her $200,000 Apple-1 computer … whoopsie!

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Show notes ahead, compadre.

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I saw my six pack for the first time at the age of 40. Prior to that, my abs had been hidden behind a thick layer of fat that I’d built up over years of living a sedentary geek lifestyle. The only exercise I got was racing to be first in line at the Apple Store for a product launch.

Then one day, a doctor told me I had cancer and my whole world changed. There’s nothing like a brush with death to make you take your health more seriously. Suddenly, I wanted to get fit, but true to my geek heritage, I would do it using my iPhone. Abs? There must be an app for that.

Download the latest Cult of Mac Magazine to find out what we’re all expecting from next week’s WWDC 2015, why we’re waiting for HomeKit’s killer app, what Kahney’s Korner has to say about the big Jony Ive promotion, a bit on our epic journey from hacked Facebook page to recovery, and check out an ‘Apple Watch Song’ fanboy anthem for the ages.

All that, plus product reviews, helpful tips, and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Tumblr has come up with its own version of Reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview series.

The new feature, called Answer Time, will let users ask anything they want of musicians, actors, activists, and other celebrities, with the replies appearing on the subject’s Tumblr page.

Pebble Watch fans have been absolutely freaking out on Twitter the last few days due to a delay with the Pebble Time app for iOS getting delayed in the App Store approval process.

After sitting in ‘pending approval’ since May 22nd, Pebble fans rallied around the #FreeOurPebbleTime hashtag to get their voices heard by Apple, but everyone can stop their whining, because the Pebble Time app for iPhone is finally available for download.

Starting today, Skype users in the U.S. and U.K. can start making calls directly from their browsers.

The Skype for Web beta makes the chat program available without having to download and install the program’s dedicated app.

To fly a drone, it can’t be too windy. But a windmill looks its best when wind is spinning its sails.

So the filmmakers at Voormedia in the Netherlands had to be patient for a perfect, cooperative wind — and they were rewarded on a recent sunny afternoon, filming the beautiful windmills near the Zaanse schans from the DJI Inspire drone.

Apple and Google boasted that they paid over $17 billion to app developers over the last year. What they left out is that they also made a tidy $7.3 billion off those sales, thanks to the 30/70 split pioneered by Steve Jobs with the launch of iTunes in 2003.

That split could coming to an end soon, though, according to a new report claiming Apple plans to make a departure from its old pricing formula in an effort to make Cupertino’s devices more appealing to media companies.

If you’re one of those word game fiends that has a list of Words With Friends games as long as your arm, you now can actually use that long arm to wear your games on your wrist.

Zynga just updated its hugely popular Words With Friends app to include Apple Watch features, so you never have to go another second without knowing when it’s your turn to spell “ZA” or “MUZJIKS” for the win.