Cult of Mac

When I reviewed the first-generation JBL Charge back in 2013, I called it a “colorful pill of a speaker that looks almost like, as an accessory, it leaped out of a new iPod touch commercial.” I loved it for its clear, crisp sound that was loud enough to shake most rooms: It delivered the sound volume of the Big Jambox in the original Jambox’s form factor.

If it’s not plenty clear, I loved the JBL Charge. It ended up being my go-to kitchen speaker for over a year, until I accidentally knocked it into the sink while doing my dishes. As a sign of its quality, it actually kept working, but never sounded quite the same.

Now I’ve tried out the JBL Charge 2. And I’ve got to say, if the JBL Charge was good, the Charge 2 is even better, fixing some of the first model’s oversights. It’s a solid choice if you’re looking for a portable Bluetooth speaker that can do more than just play music.

Devilishly bonkers new game Saints Row: Gat out of Hell features a final boss fight against the Prince of Darkness himself. That’s pretty satisfying, despite the fact that this version of Satan possesses a beautiful singing voice.

But not all video-game devils have redeeming qualities. Here are four demonic bad guys so devious, difficult and/or annoying that it’s not enough to defeat them in the game — you will wish you could rip them out of your screen and smack them until they can’t damn straight.

In my experience, Apple Store employees are some of the hardest-working, most reasonable and (despite the fact they’re employed to sell you things) trustworthy people in retail. According to Manhattan district attorney, however, that description isn’t universal.

The DA is indicting four former Apple Store employees, plus a dental office receptionist, for an Apple-related scam that ultimately defrauded Barclays Bank of $700,000, using ill-gotten Apple gift cards.

Here’s how it happened.

It’s time for another weekly dose of all the great stuff from our intrepid news hounds and reporters within the digital confines of Cult of Mac Magazine.

Buster has the lowdown on eight of the hot new features in Apple’s upcoming Photos for Mac, and he also takes a good long look at the mysterious vans owned by Apple that have been spotted around the San Francisco area. If you need to protect your precious new iPhone, Stephen drops a video spotlight on five cases you’ll want to consider for your fancy Apple smartphone. Rob digs deep into a new digital comic — companion to the Midnight Star video game — and how the award-winning team brings the game world to life. Jim drops in on a hip retro gaming shop in Portland, too, coming back with some stunning pictures of this old boys (and girls!) club.

All that and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine – check out our top stories below, and then click on through to get your own copy for free.

Chris Toy was an Everquest geek in the early days, playing the addictive open-world video game somewhat obsessively.

It wasn’t slaying the monsters or leveling up that really motivated Toy, but the social aspects of the game.

“I was honestly pretty isolated,” the Hong Kong native told Cult of Mac by phone, “and talking to people via Everquest or World of Warcraft felt better than talking to real people.”

That’s when he realized that being able to text chat with other people wherever they were was the future of messaging, and perhaps even communication itself. Fast-forward to now, and Toy and a high-tech team living in San Francisco have created Bindle, a new group-messaging app designed to create this very same future.

Move over Xiaomi! While it’s easy to claim that China’s biggest smartphone upstart holds the crown for boldest Apple ripoff artist, Xiaomi has nothing on the Suwen University of Hong Kong.

If you haven’t heard of Suwen University, don’t worry: You’re not alone. It’s a fake, selling false diplomas and bachelor’s degrees online through China’s largest shopping website, the Alibaba-owned Taobao.

So what makes this a story about Apple? Well, take a look at the university’s impressive computer science lab, as it appeared in photos posted to the fictitious university’s Facebook page. For those unfamiliar with Hong Kong, it’s a photo of the city’s flagship Apple Store — albeit with a dodgy, Photoshopped logo to replace the instantly recognizable Apple one.

Apple needs to go a long way before it thinks about launching its own search engine. Smartphones? Sure. Tablets? Absolutely. Search? Fuggetaboutit!

As much as we all love Apple, nobody can deny that its search products are oddly bargain basement in quality. iTunes discovery is horrible, the App Store is abysmal and Siri’s painful.

Could Apple fix it? Sure it could, but it’s going to take a lot more than one poor new employee to do it. Here are the worst offenders when it comes to all things Apple Search:

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m excited about upcoming movie Steve Jobs, written by one my favorite writers, Aaron Sorkin.

Early photos suggest lead actor Michael Fassbender doesn’t look that much like Steve Jobs, and I’d be a bit more psyched if David Fincher was directing, but I firmly believe this is the theatrical movie about Jobs that could finally do justice to its main character.

Ahead of the movie’s October 9 release (which should put it squarely between the iPhone 6s release and the next iPad announcement), we have a few more details about the movie that shed some extra light on how we can expect things to play out onscreen.

Apple and Tesla are in the midst of an intense bidding war for each other’s employees, according to Bloomberg. Tesla has so far poached more Apple staffers than any other company at 150, and Apple has tried to unsuccessfully lure Tesla’s people with big paychecks.

Tesla’s obsession with stealing Apple’s talent is mainly due to one man: Elon Musk.

Twitter announced its fourth quarter earnings today, and while the social network beat its revenue estimates, it failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations for monthly active users.

The company only added an extra 4 million users in the quarter, bringing the total number of monthly active users to only 288 million. That figure was much lower than analysts’ predictions of 292 million, but according to CEO Dick Costello, Twitter’s slower-than-expected growth was mostly because of a bug in iOS 8.

Apple is finally letting developers get their hands on Photos, the long-awaited successor to iPhoto. Revealed at Worldwide Developers Conference 2014, the new app is a complete revamp of iPhoto, allowing Mac users to organize, edit, share and print their favorite photos. It packs powerful new tools into a gorgeous, OS X Yosemite-style user interface.

The public launch of Photos isn’t expected until spring, but we took the beta for a spin today to get acquainted with the future of Apple photo software. We found eight new features you’re going to love.

Take a look:

When Apple killed development of iPhoto and Aperture last summer, it promised a replacement that would blend the best of the two apps into one solution: Photos for Mac.

Originally promised to arrive in “early 2015,” Photos for Mac is available for the first time in a new developer-only beta of OS X Yosemite. Unfortunately, everyone else will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it.

One of the biggest shockers of Super Bowl 2015, other than Malcolm Butler’s phenomenal interception, was the number of app companies willing to shell out $4.5 million for 30-second ad slots.

Clash of Clans, Game of War and Heroes Charge all paid up to get their games in front of the estimated 112 million live viewers during Sunday night’s game, but was it actually worth it?

Time is money. There’s only so many hours in a day, so you need to work as efficiently as possible if you want to accomplish all your work and still have time for the things that really matter to you.

Increase your work efficiency and give yourself more time with The Five Star Productivity Pack, discounted by 71% for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is redefining high tea.

Drones are taking to the skies in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to deliver tea to a test group of 450 shoppers using Alibaba’s website Taobao. The three-day trial of drone delivery service in the Chinese cities ends Friday as Alibaba continues to push its might across the globe.

Swatch Group AG isn’t planning to just roll over dead now that Apple is entering the timepiece market. Swatch announced today that it’s preparing its own smartwatch to take on Apple Watch, and it’ll be ready to launch in just three months.

Swatch CEO Nick Hayek was originally skeptical of the smartwatch revolution two years ago, but in an interview with Bloomberg, Hayek said his company is ready to throw its numerous patents into a smartwatch that won’t need daily recharging.

To get a “thumbs-up” from art directors, photographer Justin Poulsen provided the thumb.

In an act of creative expression that Van Gogh would appreciate, the Toronto-based Poulsen sent out his work on thumb drives that he made to look like realistic severed thumbs.

After the initial shock, who wouldn’t want to plug it in and have a look at the contents?

Comic books are insanely great, and so are video games. Put them together and what do you get? Well, aside from one of the most ardent combined fanbases in existence, the answer is some damn fine games.

Having recently reinvigorated my love for both mediums (a.k.a. lost several full days playing through the below titles), I felt like it was high time that we gave Cult of Mac readers a definitive list of the greatest games to ever come out of the comic book universe.

What follows after the jump are eight titles which not only represent superb gaming fun, but also do justice to their four-color characters, and the comic book medium as a whole.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.

I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.

Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.

But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.

Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.

Steve Jobs famously hated styluses — but as of late there’s been more and more to suggest that the forthcoming 12-inch+ iPad Pro could sport an optional, Apple-created pen to help act as an input device.Today, there’s a bit more fuel to the fire in the form of a newly published Apple patent application, describing an “active stylus” concept.

And, you know what, the more I hear, the more I’m convinced this could wipe away the bad memories of the dumb styluses of old.

Remember Typo? They were the Ryan Seacrest-backed company that released a case that gave your iPhone a BlackBerry-like QWERTY keypad.

Not so surprisingly, BlackBerry wasn’t happy. The company sued Typo for “blatantly copying” the BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard.

Now there’s good news for BlackBerry. The beleaguered smartphone maker is getting a much-needed cash injection as a result of the lawsuit, because Typo has been ordered to pay a nearly $1 million fine.

While most of us focus on the consumer, education or enterprise applications of Apple’s devices, there’s another huge market where Cupertino’s products are making waves: the medical profession.

According to a new report from Reuters, 14 out of the United States’ top 23 hospitals have already rolled out a pilot program for Apple’s HealthKit service, which acts as a one-stop shop for compiling everything from blood pressure information to heart rates.

An app manipulation farm sounds like someplace developers would go for a weekend retreat, complete with chiropractor sessions. In fact — according to a photo which has gone viral on social media in China — it’s a place where devs can pay for their apps’ download numbers to be artificially inflated.

Why would anyone want to do this? Simply put: because more downloads (perhaps accompanied by positive reviews) enhances apps’ chart position, thereby raising their discoverability level, and hopefully prompting people to download them.

The photo in question appears to show a worker at one such place, sitting in front of what look like around 100 iPhone 5c units. Reports claim that her job is download, install, and uninstall specific apps repeatedly to boost their App Store rankings. Another similar table can be seen opposite her.

The image is accompanied by a second one, showing the alleged prices being charged to get your app to the top of the App Store rankings. Here’s how much you need to pay to secure a no. 1 rated app for yourself:

I love iOS games and firmly believe that we’re currently going through a golden age of mobile game development, a bit like what happened for PCs in the mid-1980s, where small development teams can compete on a global scale, simply by way of a great idea and strong word-of-mouth marketing.

But there is a downside to mobile games, and last year one of the top grossing titles epitomized everything true gamers detest about these titles: namely lazy gameplay, tons of greedy in-app purchases, and a celebrity license instead of originality to bring in the punters. That game’s title? Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Its 2014 earnings? Around $200 million.

With that kind of cash being raked in, it’s little wonder that developers Glu Mobile would be willing to try their luck a second time at bringing about the app-ocalypse. Their celebrity endorser this time? Girl-kissing, Russell Brand-marrying, teenage-dreaming songstress Katy Perry.

The rumor mill has been quiet as of late regarding Apple’s plans to disrupt the TV industry. But now Recode is reporting that Apple is in talks with programmers about doing its own Internet-based TV service for cord-cutters.

Similar to the way Dish’s Sling TV bundles channels together at an attractive cost, Apple would design its own experience around delivering content without the use of traditional cable companies.