Cult of Mac

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says we are witnessing a huge shift in the way people buy things in America, and even though his brick and mortar Starbucks stores aren’t supporting Apple Pay right now, he still thinks it’s great for business.

Schultz appeared on CNBC this morning to talk about Starbucks’ mobile payments where he was taken to quipped by Jim Cramer for bragging in March that Starbucks had a big lead in mobile payments with its Starbucks app, only to get leap frogged by Apple Pay this month.

The Java King was adamant Stars’ currency would be relevant ‘at some point in the future’ but admitted there’s no other company that can get shoppers to change their behavior like Apple.

Facebook apps for the Mac have come and gone over the years, but none have managed to capture much attention. A new contender has the goods to stick around.

After working at Apple as an engineer on WebKit and iAd, Scott Kyle decided to get into indie app development. His first stab at it is Current, a new Facebook app for OS X that lives primarily in the menubar. With quality design, notifications, a classic chat interface, and some other tricks up its sleeve, Current makes Facebook feel at home on the Mac.

Smartphones and other assorted mobile devices are great tools for keeping us productive and entertained. The batteries inside those devices, by contrast, sometimes leave us frustrated and wanting more.

Do you find that your device’s limited battery life plays a role in how you use your phone? Constantly afraid you’ll run out of power before the day is out? Then say goodbye to your worries forever with The BookMark Battery, just $34.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Jony Ive has designed someone of the worlds most iconic tech devices, but when it came time to revolutionizing the wrist watch, Ive says it was even more challenging to make than the iPhone.

Speaking to an audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Thursday night, Ive said that societal expectations for a wristwatch posed some serious challenges when creating the Apple Watch, but he believes with “every bone in his body” that Apple will usher in an entirely new computing device category.

Beamdog Entertainment is a team of ex-Bioware and Black Isle developers who specialize on taking classic Infinity Engine RPGs and updating them for modern devices, like the Mac or iPad. First, they did it for Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II. Now they’re doing it for Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, which has just been released on the PC and Mac.

The world is a big, scary place, and you can learn a lot about a culture from what its people use to scare the crap out of each other for entertainment.

Cult of Mac’s weeklong festival of horror movie recommendations wraps up today with a selection of horrifying international films. (We hope you’ve found a new favorite among our classic, monster, anthology and trope-twisting suggestions.)

Now it’s time to see what gives people in other countries the heebie-jeebies. Halloween is just beginning, after all.

On my aging 2009 iMac, one of my favorite apps is iStats Menu, which lets me see at a glance which of the various programs I have running has slowed my desktop down to a crawl. And I have to admit, it’s gotten me a little performance obsessed: I spend a bunch of time every day checking out iStats Menu, just to see if there’s something I can close to maybe drop CPU usage another half-a-percent.

Because of this, I’ve always sort of wished that there was a similar program for iPhones and iPads. And now there is.

HealthKit’s supposed to make it easier to stay healthy. This app doesn’t care about your health. It wants you to die, and it’s going to tell you exactly when that will happen.

One of the big pluses of iOS 8 has been the security measures Apple has taken, meaning that the company can no longer bypass security passwords to access your data if it’s requested by law enforcement. While viewed as a definite negative by the FBI, the emphasis on keeping user data safe has been a hit with customers.

A related feature has now been the subject of a court case in Virginia, however, with the judge ruling that cops can legally force suspects to manually unlock their iPhones using Touch ID.

It’s been a full week here at Cult of Mac, so we’ve once again put together a special Newsstand issue — all of the best news stories and features compiled in one place to read through easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some fantastic coverage of Tim Cook’s historic coming out letter, reviews of the iPad Air 2 (and our reasoning for skipping that iPad mini 3 review), some more great tips for your new install of OS X Yosemite, and some scary horror flicks that you’ll want to watch all weekend long. That and more, as always, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 31 Edition, Free on iTunes

Back in May, Apple’s iPad regained its illustrious titles as the top tablet according to the J.D. Power’s U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.

Fast forward five months, and Apple’s lost the title… to Amazon, of all companies. Is this even real life?

If dressing up as a ghost and going to a party doesn’t quite give you the fright you were hoping for on Halloween, how about staying in and scaring yourself silly with some of the most terrifying games you’ll ever play? We’ve picked out eight classic horrors that are guaranteed to give your the creeps, whether you’re playing on console, PC or smartphone.

So, turn off the lights, wrap yourself in your favorite blanky, and tell your neighbors to ignore your screams.

It was only a matter of time. Just a few hours after Tim Cook bravely and historically made his sexuality open, the gay-bashing has already begun.

Where? In Russia, where Vitaly Milonov, the politican behind Russia’s anti-gay laws and the politican who threatened to arrest gay athletes at the Sochi olympics, argued that Tim Cook should be banned from Russia because he could be a carrier of AIDs or Ebola.

What were you doing when you were 17? Probably not publishing a book on how to program 3-D terrain in video games.

Game developer Trent Polack did just that. He’s been playing games since, well, forever.

“My mom says I’ve been playing games since I was 2,” he told Cult of Mac, “but I don’t think that’s possible.”

That lifetime of experience is paying off for Polack, creative director of Team Chaos, a small game studio based in Austin, Texas. His team’s latest project is a collaboration with Rooster Teeth, a video production house beloved by gamers for its hilarious machinima, or films created using video game engines (most notably Red vs. Blue, based on the best-selling Halo series).

In the Rooster Teeth vs. Zombiens, which should hit mobile devices in late November, the Rooster Teeth crew gets turned into cannon fodder as they face off against a swarm of zombie aliens. Cult of Mac talked with Polack about that noteworthy project, his gaming roots and his knack for crafting crazy publicity emails.

Andy Rubin, co-founder and former head of Android, has left Google to start up a hardware incubator dedicated to building robots.

Rubin helped establish Android as the world’s most widely-used mobile operating system after it was bought by Google in 2005, before switching to run Google’s robotics business last year.

For the last year or two, Spotify’s iPad app has been sadly, pathetically ignored. Like Twitter for Mac and Tweetbot for iPad, the app has lagged behind the iPhone version so badly that it almost feels like using a different service.

So the use of the word finally is very fitting when describing Spotify’s big update today on the iPad.

Yesterday Apple notified indie developed James Thomson that he would have to remove the iOS 8 widget from his calculator app, PCalc. After the news received a good amount of backlash and press attention, Apple has reversed its stance on the issue.

Gay rights are the civil rights issue of our time, whether in the marriage chapel, the emergency room or the workplace.

That’s why Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to proclaim he is “proud to be gay” in a powerful personal essay is an important and truly historic act.

Seth Rogen just landed the role to play Christian Bale’s sidekick in Sony’s upcoming biopic on Steve Jobs.

Rogen will reportedly don the mantle of Steve Wozniak, according to Variety, in the film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle.

We’re all concerned about our privacy lately. Using a different strong password for all our banking and website activities is the best way to keep malicious hackers from getting all up into our grill.

Rapper MC Safesearch, though, needs to remember not to post his passwords in the music video he’s doing about privacy and security.

Check out how this socially-conscious musician gets totally hacked during his own music video.

The launch of Apple Pay was met with resistance by retailers hoping to kill the new payments solution, but after just one week of waging a war on Apple Pay, MCX is already starting to see its death grip on CurrentC supporters begin to weaken.

Meijer, a popular supermarket chain in the Midwest, says it has no plans to stop accepting Apple Pay at its 213 stores, even though its a member of the MCX consortium backed by Walmart, Target, BestBuy, Gap, and over 50 other stores that want to replace your wallet the unlaunched CurrentC service.

In an interview with Michigan Live, Meijer spokesman Frank Gugielmi confirmed that the company supports both Apple Pay and other solutions, despite reports that MCX members receive steep fines for accepting anything other than CurrentC.

PanguTeam’s iOS 8 jailbreak happened much quicker than many people expected, but for most users it wasn’t worth installing since its lack of Cydia meant that most users wouldn’t have the ability to find and install software packages.

That looks set to change tomorrow, however, as the PanguTeam has announced that it plans to release an updated stable version of the Pangu8 jailbreak, bundled along with Cydia. tomorrow with Cydia included.

Tim Cook squashed years of speculations and rumors this morning, only instead of doing it with an iPhone announcement, he made his first public declaration that’s he proud to be gay.

Cook never denied his sexuality, but the letter marks a huge moment for the LGBT community, equal rights, and society in general, as the world’s most powerful CEO committed to being an example and inspiration to those wanting to rise above adversity and bigotry.

The world’s reaction to Cook coming out like a boss has been overwhelmingly positive. Yes, the trolls and bigots have crawled out of their dark places to admonish Cook, but their voices have been refreshingly blasted out by accolades and congratulations from the world’s top CEO’s, celebrities, and activists applauding Tim’s courage.

Here’s how the world turned Tim’s coming out party into a celebration:

For anyone who shoots a lot of videos, having the option to shoot at 60fps is one of the most satisfying parts of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, making your footage as silky smooth as a Barry White pickup line.

If your aim was to put up those videos online, however, until now there’s an excellent chance you were wasting your time, since YouTube was only equipped to handle 30fps.

Fortunately that’s now changed, courtesy of a YouTube update that brings 1080p 60fps to your monitor — provided that you’re using an appropriate browser, which according to my tests includes Safari and Chrome.

No matter what kind of business you are in, it pays to have a well constructed website. Well constructed websites these days are designed using content management systems like WordPress and Drupal and consider important things like search engine optimization and web security.

For a limited time, you can learn how to design websites like a pro with OSTraining: Lifetime Training To Become An Expert Web Developer for 96% off the regular price, just $79, at Cult of Mac Deals.