Cult of Mac

Getting your game featured by Apple is the best way to jumpstart your indie game success. Sometimes, even games that seem rather basic at first glance can become powerhouses.

Mr. Jump is seeing some phenomenal success with five million downloads in the last five days since its release. It’s shaping up to be another Crossy Road-style success story, and the developers at 1Button games attribute the game’s instant success to Apple.

“I think that being featured by Apple in most countries has initiated the buzz,” says
Jérémie Francone, one of the co-founders at the studio. “That’s what really launched the game.”

Tech pioneers like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk have warned humanity of the dangers of AI for years, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s finally a beliver in the doomsday scenarios.

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Woz told the Australian Financial Review in a recent interview from his US home.

The man who sparked the personal computer revolution with the invention of the Apple II says ‘the future is scary and very bad for people’ because computers will eventually get faster than us and wipe us out.

Nathalie Lawhead speaks swiftly, a gentle European lilt in her accent. On the screen behind her is a random-seeming collection of internet memes rendered in outsider art chic. At first glance, her games look absolutely absurd, random, and ridiculous.

“If Monty Python made games, the Orange County-based developer told Cult of Mac at the Game Developers conference last month, “this is what they would look like.”

Separating kids from their iPhones and iPads can be a big struggle for most parents, but for one mom in Boulder Colorado, things got down right deadly after her daughter tried to poison her for taking away an iPhone.

Two charges of attempted first degree murder were eventually filed against the daughter, who mixed household bleach into her mom’s drinks trying to kill her.

Boulder County’s sheriff office detained the 12-year-old girl at a juvenile center after her mother noticed a bleach smell in her smoothie a few days earlier. Officers say the mom thought the daughter had just cleaned the glass and that there was a lingering bleach sent. Then she got sick.

One company suggests you could use their product to keep the neighbors on edge while the competition promises “endless possibilities of entertainment.”

Gosh, they’re both right. I need a flamethrower.

Two companies with very different designs are working to meet the needs of a public clamoring to clear brush or light their bonfires from a distance with devices that look like like the tool soldiers once used to clear jungles and machine gun nests during times of war.

Apple redesigned the LED backlights for the new MacBook keyboard, and it appears a similar update could be coming soon to the Apple Wireless Keyboard.

Several images of an updated keyboard appeared on the online Apple Store for the Czech Republic as well as an Arabic keyboard in the U.S. store. Some of the images of the keyboard have already been pulled, but the redesign adds toggles for brightness to the F5 and F6 keys, as well as a power button on in the upper right corner.

Apple may not sell close to the number of Apple Watches it wants to in the coming months — and it’ll have nothing to do with lack of demand on the part of customers.

According to a new report, Apple’s plans to manufacture between 2.5 and 3 million smartwatches every month could be cut by as much as half thanks to supplier yield problems, which mean that only 1.25 – 1.5 million watches are being churned out every four weeks.

No matter who you are or what you do online, internet security should be of great concern. If some of the largest corporations in the world can get have their networks compromised, so can you.

You have only a short while longer to protect yourself from the criminal elements that dwell on the internet, get peace of mind, and save $185 with a 3 year subscription to Anonymizer Universal VPN, at Cult of Mac Deals.

Square Cash is one of those few apps I can show my non-techy friends and immediately get a wide-eyed, “whoa” kind of response. Its ability to quickly send and receive money is super slick.

Today two big changes to Square Cash will make it an even more attractive peer-to-peer payments service. First, anyone can now create a web profile for accepting money without needing a standalone app. Second, businesses and nonprofits can get in on the action.

You may have suspected that the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs had Apple’s official endorsement the moment it was revealed that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, offered their participation.

However, with just one day to go until the book’s release, the word is now officially out: This is Apple’s sanctioned version of the Steve Jobs story.

“After a long period of reflection following Steve’s death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We decided to participate in [the] book because of [author Brent Schlender’s] long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve’s life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we’ve seen, and we are happy we decided to participate.”

Google’s official Android Wear app for iOS could be right around the corner if you believe the reports, but one developer has been proving that the two platforms can already be forced to play nicely together without any jailbreaking.

We’ve seen Wear receiving iPhone notifications and taking calls, and in the latest video from Mohammad Abu-Gabreyyeh, we see that watches like the Moto 360 and the LG G Watch R are capable of controlling music playback, too.

Sure, Steve Jobs might not have been quite the one-man-temper-tantrum he was portrayed as for much of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, but he still wasn’t someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.

According to authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli in their new book Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, Jobs flipped out after former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein decided to join Palm in 2007: never again speaking with a person he had been close to for years.

Ahead of the April 24 launch of the Apple Watch, Cupertino’s debut wearable continues its world tour with a new style guide in Australia’s Elle magazine — advising on how Apple’s smartwatch can be used as a chic wearable everywhere from cocktail parties to the workplace.

For a cocktail party, for instance, the magazine suggests that you might want to pair it with a “tuxedo suit and sexy heels (think Le Smoking Saint Laurent style with Alexander Wang black heels), or if you have the legs for it, a killer cocktail dress.” For the weekend, meanwhile, you can “Wear it with trackies, your boyfriend’s shirt (worn cuffed and loose) and a chic cashmere overcoat.”

The tech world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Apple Watch and Siri, it seems, isn’t any different. With the launch of Apple’s debut wearable just a month away, the iOS virtual assistant is apparently just as obsessed with the device as we are — as a simple “What are you doing now, Siri?” question will attest.

Check out some of the amusingly geeky responses below.

Complement your Apple user experience with a hot, new product from Cult of Mac Deals where you’ll always find cool gear and awesome prices.

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We’re all looking forward to the Apple Watch, but there’s one thing I’m definitely not looking forward to: the ability to answer phone calls on my wrist. And this clever video shows exactly why.

This week: it’s kind of a big deal—the wonderful world of Nintendo is coming to iOS. Plus: the reviews are in, people are loving the new Force Cluck Touch Trackpad; Apple’s rumored streaming TV service might land in June; and why the new Macbook hails the end for the Macbook Air.

Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. It also makes tax time a cinch. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.

Full show notes ahead!

Amazon is preparing a new app service for Android. It’s called Unlocked, and think of it as free Amazon Prime for apps. But there’s a catch. Apps that are given freely can also be taken away again.

Cult of Mac Deals is all about giving readers killer bargains on sweet tech products that you can really use.

Today we put a spotlight on several deals that are coming to a close very soon to make way for new and exciting products. Don’t miss out. Get these before they’re gone.

First introduced in 2006, shortly after Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel-based chips, Apple’s Boot Camp multi-boot utility is the secret sauce that has allowed the Mac to be the best-selling PC on Earth.

The proposition Boot Camp offers to would-be Mac buyers is simple. If they buy a Mac, they can run any OS they want: OS X, Windows, or Linux. But if they buy any other laptop, they can never run OS X.

With the release of the latest MacBook Pros, though, Boot Camp just got a little less flexible. Apple has dropped support for Windows 7 from the 2015 MacBook Pro.

If you’re on a Mac, and use Chrome, and if you’re not sure if you have Assyrian turned on, definitely don’t click this link. Just doing so could cause your whole browser to crash, and the culprit is a 13-character snippet that couldn’t seem any more innocuous.

With high development costs and uncertain prospects, now is a risky time to build Apple Watch apps. But like many other indie developers, I’m working on one anyway.

The Apple Watch gold rush is about more than money.

Steve Jobs didn’t like Neil Young.

That much is evident from an excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs, a highly anticipated book on the late Apple co-founder that comes out Tuesday. Jobs’ hatred for Young was so strong that he even refused a peace offering from the multi-Grammy-winner.

Steve Jobs planned to boot Jony Ive out of Apple the very first time he met him, according to an explosive new revelation from the forthcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs.

“He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive told the book’s authors, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, in an interview.