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.
When you’re choosing between Android and iOS, you also have to choose between the App Store and Google Play; apps are so important to us these days that they must come into consideration when we’re buying new mobile devices.
Android has caught up with and even overtaken the App Store in sheer number of apps, but Apple’s marketplace continues to rake in lots more revenue. But which offers better titles, a greater user experience, and more features?
In this week’s Friday Night Fight with Cult of Android versus Cult of Mac, we pit the App Store against Google Play to find out which is the best mobile marketplace.
Apple makes it easy for iPhone users to share their data with their Mac, but it’s not quite as simple for those of us with an Android. Thankfully, there’s now a handy third-party Mac hack called HoRNDIS that makes it incredibly easy to share your Android’s data connection over USB.
An upcoming improvement to Google’s web browser will empower it to “intelligently pause content” that isn’t crucial to the page, therefore saving your laptop battery a whole lot of grief.
You don’t need a formal photography education to make a pretty good snap. But sometimes, it would be nice to have a simple fix for a technical challenge without requiring a textbook or expensive software.
Take noise. In non-scientific terms, it’s the appearance that your pictures were taken in a sandstorm. It generally happens when you are shooting in low light. Lots of microscopic bits of colorful grain across your images.
The team at Macphun has created new software for Mac users with a series of simple sliders that let you take noise out of your photos. The aptly named Noiseless can have photos looking better with just a couple of intuitive steps.
During his January conference call with investors, Tim Cook said that 2015 would be ‘the year of Apple Pay’, and while Apple’s mobile wallet has already leapfrogged rivals like Google Wallet, a new survey of the top 100 retailers in the country found that Apple Pay still faces a long uphill battle.
Can’t Apple’s design guru catch a break? After Jony Ive received a well-deserved promotion to become Apple’s chief design officer, some pundits misinterpreted the happy news as a bad omen.
Our own Leander Kahney reads the tea leaves completely differently: Ive’s promotion is nothing but good news for Apple.
Here at Cult of Mac Deals, we rely on VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for ensuring that our online activity stays private, browsing securely even on public Wi-Fi, and accessing any app or video no matter where we are in the world. To that end, we’ve put together a collection of deals on some of our favorite ones. Keep reading to see which ones get our stamp of approval, and save up to 77%.
We’re just three days away from Tim Cook and the gang taking over San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Preparations for the big event have been underway all week, but crews are starting to wrap up pre-production — and the final WWDC 2015 banners are being unfurled.
Take a look:
The NBA Finals started last night, with LeBron James taking to the court in search of yet another championship ring. His team is taking on the Silicon Valley Golden State Warriors and, while Apple Senior VP Eddy Cue was all too happy to cheer on LeBron during the last two NBA championships, this year he’s defected to the home team — and giving King James hell.
If you need a solid gold smartphone to go with your Apple Watch Edition, look no further than HTC’s limited edition One M9.
Made out of 24-karat gold, the one-of-a-kind handset has been made to celebrate this weekend’s UEFA Champions League final — and it was photographed with an iPhone.
Apple is planning to use WWDC to spotlight the new streaming music service its been working on for year. It could be Apple’s biggest play in the music industry since the launch of iTunes, but according to a new report, Apple is still struggling to ink its deal with record labels.
Looking to buy a new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus from Apple on AT&T but don’t want to sign up for the carrier’s Next plan? Too damn bad.
Just days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega promised subsidized phones are going away, the company has completely removed subsidized options for the iPhone from the Apple Store as well.
Already bored of the band that came with your Apple Watch? Now’s the time to get a new one, because almost every band available from the Apple Online Store is now shipping in just one business day.
You’ve probably heard — repeatedly, from us — that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is happening in San Francisco next week. But that’s not the only show in town. The Alternative Developer Conference, aka AltConf, is running at the same time, right around the corner from the Moscone Center at the AMC Metreon.
It’s a more open and accessible convention than Apple’s, and that’s not just because it’s free.
“Alt has great information, but it has a lot more community feel where it’s not getting talked down to from the lectern and Apple, you’re getting talked to by your peers,” Jeff Kelley, iOS developer for Detroit Labs and author of Developing for Apple Watch, told Cult of Mac. “And everybody there is kind of on the same foot. Especially because it’s free. You can pay to get a reserved ticket this year, but you don’t have to pay to get in. Everybody is there because they love this stuff.”
A manic new music video called “Apple Watch Song” turns all the anticipation and angst surrounding the hit wearable into a geeky anthem for Apple fans awaiting delivery of their precious wrist gadgets.
From the Apple Watch Edition’s exorbitant price tag to the fabricated health scare of “cancer wrist,” the wacky song turns the dreams and doubts about Apple’s smartwatch into a cavalcade of comedic riffs.
Ahead of WWDC 2015, Apple’s lawyers have demanded AltConf organizers refrain from streaming or displaying any video or display any video content from WWDC. As a result, the conference has decided to cancel its annual viewing of the Keynote and State of the Union stream on Monday that has been a staple of the event for the past few years.
In a letter to AltConf, Apple’s lawyers maintain that the company has the right to “exercises control over not only the content of its messaging, but also the manner in which those messages are packaged, distributed and delivered,” and that the AltConf’s big party of developers watching the keynote together “would strip Apple of exclusive control over one of the most anticipated events of the year, and could deprive Apple of potential revenue generated from its exclusive rights.”
Keyboards are great for typing numbers and letters and stuff, but don’t they seem a little static sometimes?
This awesome-looking Bluetooth peripheral aims to solve that problem you may or may not actually have, and it does so with a lot of style and a crisp, simple design.
My Apple Watch is getting a little crufty. I wear it every day, including when I sweat a lot — like during a run, for example.
Recently, the Digital Crown started to get a little tough to turn. It took extra effort to spin the darn thing, and I wasn’t able to rotate it smoothly anymore.
Luckily, Apple had me covered — but I wasn’t prepared for what I had to do to get this Digital Crown fix to work.
A social-media campaign hopes to put pressure on Apple to release the Pebble Time smartwatch app for iOS.
The to-do started after an update on the Time’s Kickstarter page yesterday.
At its I/O conference last week, Google laid out the roadmaps for its most important platforms. It has already made its way into your pocket, but over the next few years, the search giant hopes to find a place on your wrist and in your home as well.
Things aren’t so straightforward as that, though.
Apple is fighting Google for territory in a variety of areas, with iOS competing with Android, Apple Watch battling Android Wear, and HomeKit trying to beat out Brillo.
But which one has the edge that will help it reign supreme? Here’s how they stack up against each other.
An upcoming mobile game will throw players into the struggle immediately following the death of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: Uprising, which is due out later this year for iOS and Android, is a real-time strategy game that picks up after the destruction of the second Death Star at the end of the third film as the decapitated Empire struggles to maintain control over the galaxy.
Check out the announcement trailer below.