Not all of us have the chance to head to Europe, what with the cost of airfare these days.

Luckily, we’ve got the Internet, and amazing videos like this one from filmmaker Andrew Walker at 599 Productions. He filmed the various time-lapse images while exploring Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic last September using a Canon 5D Mark III and several Canon and Ziess lenses.

Check it out, and be sure to strap on a pair of high-end cans or route the audio through your huge Bluetooth speaker to hear the epic soundtrack.

When it comes to photo-editing apps on the iPhone, VSCO Cam has pretty much been the gold standard for the last few years. But to make the experience even better, the app is finally coming to the iPad.

VSCO 4.0 was released today with a redesigned look just for the iPad. Previously, iPhotogs could use the popular photo editor/social network on their iPads as a blown-up iPhone app, but the fresh design and new features will make you want to ditch your iPhone altogether. Take a look:

Samsung just can’t leave Apple alone. When it’s not mocking the Cupertino company in ads, or pleading for its chip-making business, it’s stealing its ideas.

Today, Samsung announced two new creations rolling off its Xerox machine out of its R&D labs: an iBeacon-style proximity beacon technology, and an OS X Yosemite Continuity-inspired feature that lets users sling webpages, phone calls and much more from one device to another.

Jony Ive made a rare public appearance at the Design Museum in London yesterday, where he discussed a range of topics with museum director Deyan Sudjic. Everything from the future of design, to Jony’s work at Apple popped up in the conversation, but the most intriguing parts where the insights into Jony’s design process.

Sir Jonathan told hopeful designers that great design requires you to reject reason and comes with an enormous amount of failure, but he also shared some insights on how he’s become so successful as Apple’s Senior VP of Design.

Here are 12 secrets for designers Jony spilled last night:

Apple chipmakers are gearing up to start production of the Apple Watch, according to a new report. Orders for the chips suggest that the initial production run is likely to be between 30-40 million units.

If accurate, these figures fall in the middle of previous guesstimates regarding how many Apple Watches Cupertino plans to sell in 2015.

One recent report claimed that Apple has placed orders for shipments of up to five million AMOLED panels per month, which would suggest sales of 50+ million units next year. More conservatively, Gene Munster has predicted that Apple’s first year sales for the new device will come in at around the 10 million unit mark.

This post is brought to you by RealPlayer Cloud via Syndicate Ads.

Do you have videos on your phone that you want to share with friends? Memories you’ve been meaning to transfer to your computer for safekeeping? Or maybe you’d just like a little more free space on your device.

With RealPlayer Cloud‘s newly launched app for Mac, you can store and transfer your videos across all your devices via the cloud. All you have to do is open the app and let it find your videos, then choose to upload some or all of them.

Want to read an impartial, in-depth review of Samsung’s latest Gear S smartwatch? Why not read one from your old trusty friends at Samsung itself.

In an hilarious titled “unofficial” review, Samsung’s official blog takes a few minutes out of its busy Samsung-promoting day to, well, promote Samsung.

Describing what sounds like the world’s best ever gadget, Samsung’s Corporate Communications team try their damndest to turn out a 1,000-word review which doesn’t make the Gear S sound like Samsung just threw everything smartwatch-related at the wall and hoped something would stick.

Read on to find out what they concluded. (Spoiler: they really, really liked it.)

Cult of Mac Deals makes it their priority to offer awesome products at heavily discounted prices. Sometimes, though, they have the opportunity to present a chance for a lucky person to win something particularly breathtaking.

Today, we are featuring two such opportunities. Cult of Mac Deals presents The Golden Apple Giveaway and The Mega Dropbox Pro Giveaway.

Apple’s gigantic 12.9-inch ‘iPad Pro’ could be facing serious production issues, according to top Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who believes the tablet won’t enter mass production until the second quarter of 2015.

In a note to investors this afternoon, the KGI Securities analyst revealed that his sources say Apple will use an oxide display panel on the iPad Pro for a higher resolution, better color saturation, and quicker response, but putting that type of screen on the iPad Pro will take more time.

Apple is looking to open a flagship store in downtown Los Angeles’ historic Broadway Trade Center, reports the Downtown LA Examiner, which claims its heard whispers that Cupertino plans to invade the massive building that nearly occupies an entire city block.

The Broadway Trade Center building was recently purchased by New York real estate firm Waterbridge Capitol earlier this year for around $130 million, but it the company may have already scored its first tenant.

Apple’s introduction of widgets in iOS 8 has already created some great new tools for iPhone users, but if you’d like to add a little fun to your Notification Center, Overglide has a widget adds a widget to the boring place where you usually just get calendar and email notifications.

Overglide for iOS 8 turns your Notification Center into a game by embedding its simple paper airplane game into the Today pane, giving you instant gaming access no matter what app you’re in.

The YouTube music streaming service you’ve been hearing about for months is finally here. It’s called YouTube Music Key, and it lets subscribers stream and save high-quality music and music videos on the web and on Android and iOS devices. For now, however, you’ll need an invite to use it.

Things get weird when Samsung stops copying Apple and tries to do its own thing, and as if to remind us of that salient fact, the company tapped famed Korean rapper Mad Clown, to blast out rap on its new corporate sustainability animated rap video.

The Samsung rap video highlights the company’s positive stats on diversity on work-life, but fails to mention some of the grimmer facts that were discovered in its sustainability report that was published earlier this year.

Samsung posted its bizarre rap video this morning, boasting sick statistic-laced rhymes like “Samsung, we 280,000 humans, 40 percent 112,000 women. You don’t have to worry after giving birth.” If that sick line doesn’t make you want to sign up to build the next Galaxy S6, just listen to the rest of the catchy raps in the video above.

Beats Electronics today announced it’s releasing its first new headphones since officially Apple-owned company earlier this year. The new headphones are an updated version of the Solo2 headphones, that brings wireless capabilities to the popular headphones, so you’re no longer tethered to your iPhone when kicking out the jams.

No pun intended, but coffee is hot stuff in Silicon Valley, where overworked engineers rely on cup after cup of the black stuff to keep them focused on building amazing products.

If you too are a bit of a tech-loving caffeine fiend, you may be interested in the new Mr. Coffee Smart Coffeemaker, a gorgeous new smart coffee-making device programmed and controlled remotely from your iPhone.

Using the dedicated iOS app, users can schedule up to a week’s worth of coffee brew times — meaning that your morning pot of joe can start being brewed while you’re still asleep, so that it’s all ready for sipping the moment you arrive in your kitchen.

If you got one of those amazing new iMacs with the crazy 5K pixel resolution, you’d be crazy not to watch this stunning animation of the sun by YouTuber James Tyrwhitt-Drake. You can gaze at the star at the heart of our solar system for a full eight minutes, using YouTube’s new 4K resolution setting and that killer new Mac.

This timelapse covers about 16 days of solar activity, focusing on the largest sunspot in the last 22 years (about two solar cycles), which is cleverly named AR 2192.

Check it out and enjoy.

Thanks to Pangu, we have all been able to jailbreak our iPhone 6’s far earlier than most of us thought possible. Unfortunately, though, Apple has been moving to close the loophole that makes the iOS 8 jailbreak possible with the iOS 8.1.1 beta, which is currently snaking through developer channels. When it arrives, poof, no more jailbreak.

Unfortunately, it seems like the iOS 8.1.1 update could arrive soon, perhaps as early as today. Better jailbreak now, people

How big of a success is Apple Pay? Just three weeks after its launch, Apple’s mobile payment system is already a player at Whole Foods, where it represents almost 1 percent of all transactions.

Apple could find itself facing a class action lawsuit over the loss of “countless” text messages, courtesy of its iMessage service.

California resident Adrienne Moore filed a case against Apple back in May this year, saying that she missed out on receiving text messages after giving up her iPhone 4 and moving to a Samsung Galaxy S5.

Moore’s victory in court means that she now has the ability to pursue a class action lawsuit against Apple. She is also seeking unspecified damages.

Having not worn a watch regularly since my high school days, I recently took the plunge and bought my first “adult” watch, a self-winding automatic Swiss timepiece.

I had several criteria I wanted to meet. Firstly I wanted a self-winding automatic, because I liked the idea of owning a Swiss watch and I wanted one that, at least in theory, has a longer lifespan than a battery-powered quartz timepiece. Secondly, I wanted to keep my purchase sub-$2,000. Thirdly, as a watch novice, I was looking for something that would be as multipurpose as possible.

After some research, I settled on a watch from the Longines Master Collection — buying it in a dedicated brick-and-mortar store rather than online, so that I could try it out in person before buying.

Of the many podcasting apps available for iOS, Overcast on iOS is one of our favorites. Programmed by Instapaper and The Magazine founder Marco Arment, it’s a slick podcasting app with some unique tricks up its sleeves, like smart speed, voice boost, and variable playback speed. We love it. There’s only one problem. It’s been iPhone-only. At least until now.

iOS 8 adoption rates have been a bit of a disappointment for Apple up until now. Things may be starting to turn around, however, with the company’s latest figures showing that its latest mobile operating system is now running on 56% of active iOS devices.

True, that’s still less than the adoption rate of last year’s iOS 7, but the gap is narrowing.

iOS 7, meanwhile, is running on a reported 40% of devices, while earlier iOS versions account for just 5%.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPad, there are a fair number of apps you can download for free: Pages, Numbers, iMovie, GarageBand and so on.

But did you know there’s a secret cache of Apple apps that no one but Geniuses can download? There is, and they range from a basic flight sim game to a tank battler to an internal newspaper only Apple employees can read!

The excellent strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Within, is out now for mobile devices as an entirely new standalone game for $12.99. If you haven’t played an XCOM game yet, this is a fantastic place to jump in – the graphics are stunning and the gameplay is addictive; like Civilization, you’ll battle it out with alien invaders in turn-based, tactical maps that offer some thrilling alien-busting fun.

In the new game from developer Firaxis and publisher 2K Games you’ll manage the XCOM global headquarters and send your troops out to fight, dealing with both battle mechanics as well as resource allocation and research into new weapons and gear for your soldiers. The new game adds a “rogue” human faction, EXALT, that will offer even more battles and maps.

“XCOM: Enemy Unknown for Mobile proved that turn-based strategy games are a natural fit for touch interfaces,” said lead designer, Firaxis Games’ Ananda Gupta in a statement. “In XCOM: Enemy Within, players can return to the XCOM universe, where they’ll encounter an assortment of new content including powerful new weapons, abilities and strategies, and confront a host of dangerous new alien threats.”