We all know that teens are crazy drivers. But when you put phones in their hands, things get really bad.
AAA conducted video analysis of teenagers on the road and discovered that “distraction was a factor in nearly six out of 10 moderate-to-severe teen crashes.”
The video footage speaks for itself, so just watch:
Apple Stores won’t have the Apple Watch on display for a few weeks, but anyone eager to see what the world of wrist apps will offer can already download them to their iPhone.
The first wave of Apple Watch-supported apps started hitting iTunes today, with big names like Target, Evernote, WeChat and Expedia being some of the first out of the gate. You can’t actually use the Apple Watch functionality on the apps yet (unless Tim Cook hooked you up with an early unit), but you can get an early glimpse of how some apps will dramatically change your life.
Here are some of the first Apple Watch apps you can download and their features:
If you search long enough, you can find anything on eBay and Craigslist. That includes lost, expensive military equipment that helps soldiers find roadside bombs.
The Intercept, an investigative reporting website founded by Glenn Greenwald, obtained a Navy intelligence document detailing thermal-optic-imaging and night-vision devices that wound up on a number of websites for sale, including eBay, Craigslist, texasguntalk.com and sportsfisherman.com.
Indie developer Daryl Hornsby has a novel approach for getting kids engaged with educational games: Don’t dumb things down.
That’s the key to Machineers, the clever puzzle-adventure game his company crafted to to lead kids through various programming logic concepts.
“When you say you want to target 10 to 15 year-olds, you’re told you have to make it overly colorful and bubbly, and that no kids read text,” Hornsby told Cult of Mac. “We’ve been able to prove that this is not quite the case. We’ve found that kids want to be treated like adults, but it still has to be approachable.”
Tim Cook had enormous shoes to fill when he took over as Apple CEO. After Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, doubters questioned whether the Southern engineer could keep Apple relevant. But Cook has led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company — he might be even better at running the company than Jobs ever was.
Now Fortune has named Cook the “world’s greatest leader” and published a profile full of exclusive details about Cook’s journey as Apple CEO. In the interview, Cook reveals how he developed thick skin, why he’s giving all his money to charity, and the real reasons he opened up about his sexuality.
The massive profile is well worth a read, but we’ve picked out the most interesting bits for you below.
A game like Real Racing has sophisticated graphics that, combined with the motion sensors of an iPad, give you the sensation of being behind the wheel.
The only thing missing is the actual wheel.
Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev wants iPad users to have a more comfortable drive when they play anyone of the more than 450 tilt games.
The CEO of KOLOS, slavic for colossus, has developed a gaming wheel for the iPad that launches on Kickstarter today.
This post is brought to you by Jutiful, creator of REBUS.
You know what a rebus is — a graphic puzzle representing a word or phrase. An example would be a letter “M” sitting atop the word “day”: “M” on “day” equals “Monday.”
REBUS, a new “absurd logic game” from Jutiful, is an app containing more than 100 rebuses (with more on the way). Solve these stylish word puzzles to collect achievements you can share with friends.
If you’ve snatched up one of Nintendo’s nifty New 3DS handhelds, you’ll be glad to know the updated hardware will help you get a lot more out of the 3DS gaming library.
Here are four games you should check out now that you have the latest, greatest 3-D gaming gadget.
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of Meerkat: the live-streaming social media phenomenon. Well, Twitter has too, because today it launched its own would-be Meerkat killer: a standalone live-streaming video app called Periscope.
Currently available only for iOS devices, the app was acquired by Twitter back in January for a reported $100 million. Unlike Meerkat, which works on the same disappearing media idea as Snapchat, Periscope allows users to save live streams and then replay them later.
Transferring your WhatsApp data to a new device can be a pain — particularly if you’re switching from Android to another platform, or vice-versa. But WhatsApp looks set to make it a whole lot easier by giving users the ability to backup their messages to Google Drive.
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Take advantage of low prices and free US shipping for the Nifty MacBook MiniDrive, the ChugPlug Portable MacBook Power Pack, the Quirky ‘Space Bar’ Monitor Stand, and the Quirky Apple Accessory Bundle available now at Cult of Mac Deals.
Aaron Muderick is grateful to the anonymous pioneering office worker who thought to populate his or her desk with toys.
Muderick was a software engineer when his go-to desk toy, Silly Putty, gave him a whole new career when the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s and the company that employed him went under.
The story behind the unique beginnings of “Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty” is even crazier than the chemistry that creates the luminescent and magnetic properties of his product.
We turned up our noses at the first digital pictures because they didn’t look as good as film. The camera added to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1998 certainly didn’t make the case for a digital future.
The bulbous attachment recorded a fuzzy, postage-stamp-size, black-and-white image. That’s black and white with no gray shades in between.
If you wanted to share your photo, you could purchase a separate printing device that plugged into the Game Boy and spit out a tiny print. The printer took a little roll of paper and looked like one of those small credit-card-processing machines that spit out a receipt.
Today, several megapixels later, the look of the Game Boy camera is refreshingly vintage.
Steve Jobs was, of course, formative to developing the software for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, but he was also formative to the development of another company and its software: Pixar, the computer animation studio behind Toy Story, Ratatouille, Up and more.
Now Pixar has released RenderMan, the company’s in-house rendering software, to the public for free. It’s the tool that gave the world Toy Story and countless other modern day classics, and it is now totally free to download for non-commercial use on the Mac, as well as Windows and Linux.
Rightly or wrongly, iCloud is one of Apple’s most regularly criticized products (speaking personally, I’ve never had any major problems with it, but I use Google’s rival service far more.) It seems that Apple is more than aware of the negative feedback, however, because it’s in the process of improving the back-end infrastructure needed to support its cloud-based services.
Firstly, the company bought FoundationDB, a Virginia-based startup, which specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. Now a separate report claims that Apple acquired U.K.-based big data analytics firm Acunu sometime in late 2013, with the likely effort of using its database technology for providing analytics related to iCloud services.
Ever wondered what your favorite movies and shows would be like if the characters had iPhones?
The work of French photographer François Dourlen sort of touches on that subject, but with a subversive, whimsical twist that sees characters like Die Hard’s John McClane crawling out of microwave ovens, or the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies topping an industrial tower.
Note: Chosen is available for free right now but the ability to sing and judge is invite-only for now. As a special treat for Cult of Mac readers, however, the first 500 folks that enter the code 313 into the app after downloading it will be able to get in and participate.
David Hyman is no stranger to the music business, having sold MOG to Beats when the headphone company wanted a music subscription service. He was the CEO at Gracenote before that, and the director of ad sales at music blog Addicted to Noise before that. Hyman even served as interim CEO at Neil Young’s PonoPlayer.
At the Game Developers Conference this March, Hyman sat down with Cult of Mac to show off his latest music project: Chosen, a new game that marries the idea of fan-made YouTube music videos with the American Idol-style competition television, all on your iPhone.
We sat down with Hyman at the chic Hotel Zetta at the beginning of March in San Francisco, where he demoed Chosen, Hyman’s latest foray into making music accessible to all of us.
The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.
It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.
One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.
Apple’s doing everything it can to push its brand in China, which Tim Cook is convinced will soon take over from the U.S. as the company’s primary market.
Having recently taken the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, and also beaten out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand, Apple is now teaming with manufacturer Foxconn to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones — letting customers exchange their older iPhone handsets for credit against other Apple products.
The program is set to go into action next week, on March 31.
Whispers about three new iPhones set to arrive this September are emanating from Apple’s Chinese supply chain — suggesting that we may be set to receive the expected iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, alongside a 4-inch iPhone referred to currently as the iPhone 6c.
Check out details about internal components, possible pricing and projected sales below.
Apple is planning to unveil a hot new redesign of Beats Music at WWDC. The new streaming service is aimed at killing rival’s like Spotify and Pandora, but rather than relying on an Apple software veteran to redesign Beats Music, Nine Inch Nail’s frontman has been tapped to lead the redesign.
Nearly a year after acquiring Beats for $3 billion, Apple plans to overhaul its music strategy behind the Beats Music redesign, reports the New York Times. Reznor, who was the chief creative officer for Beats, has been made the point main for overhauling the iOS music service to include the streaming service.
The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, rests on the premise that Jobs’ wilderness years outside Apple somehow helped turn a once-reckless co-founder into a seasoned leader.
Just how accurate the book’s kinder, gentler portrayal of Steve actually is, is something that will be discussed over the coming days and weeks — but a new study from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management backs up the idea that brash, narcissistic qualities can be a “net positive” for CEOs, so long as they are counterbalanced by an added dose of humility.
The study’s illustration of the perfect mixture of these qualities? None other than Jobs himself.
What happens when your daughter is infected by the zombie virus? You love her, and you want to save her.
Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to kill her.
Action-hero and California governor Schwarzenegger stars in the upcoming Maggie, a gritty, realistic, and very human portrait of the possible zombie apocalypse.
New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?
It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.
In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.