Alien Blue, the most popular third-party Reddit client for iOS, has been acquired by Reddit itself. To celebrate, the ‘Pro’ upgrade in-app purchase is available for free instead of $2. The iPad app is also free to download.
Developer Jason Morrissey has joined Reddit, and he will continue to develop Alien Blue and add new features.
Apple’s new headphone company received an official ban from the NFL this season, prohibiting the Beats cans from being worn at games or official press conferences, and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine couldn’t feel more lucky.
Iovine was the keynote speaker today at the University of Southern California’s Global Conversation, and according to Business Insider, he told the audience that the NFL’s decision to ban Beats at the behest of Bose was an inept move that’s turned Beats into a superhero.
Find My iPhone has been used hundreds of times to find stolen Apple devices, but police in San Jose found a new use for tracking app yesterday: rescuing a crash victim after her car plunged 500 feet down the side of mountain.
Melissa Vasquez was stranded for over 17 hours after her car flew off the side of Mt. Hamilton, and into a ravine, ejecting her from the vehicle in the process. Police were notified of the crash Monday afternoon, after the car’s OnStar program detected a crash, but when they turned up to the location they saw nothing.
12 hours later, Vasquez’s family reported her missing, but it took a tech savvy officer to figure out he could use her iPad to find her if only he knew her iTunes password.
Entertainment insiders are saying that Oscar-winner Christian Bale will start filming Jobs this Spring as Apple’s late CEO and wonder-boy, Steve Jobs.
According to Variety, Bale is in talks to star as the mercurial tech leader in the movie based on the biography by Walter Issacson and a script written by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network).
Fitbit’s lineup of activity trackers may soon get exiled from the Apple Store, sources have told Recode, as Apple prepares to launch its own lineup of wearables next year.
It’s unclear whether other activity trackers will suffer the same fate, but the move comes just days after FitBit announced it has no plans to support iOS 8’s HealthKit in the near future, which makes it easy for iOS users to track all of their fitness data in one app.
Nobody would ever call Amazon’s Fire Phone a hit, but even the company’s most loyal shoppers are apparently avoiding the phone like the plague.
A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says that while the Amazon Prime subscription service continues to attract new members, the Fire Phone “has achieved virtually zero market share.”
The death of cable TV bundling is nearly upon us, as signaled by HBO’s announcement today that it will offer an internet-based streaming subscription in 2015.
“That is a large and growing opportunity that should no longer be left untapped,” said HBO CEO and chairman Richard Plepler. “It is time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO.”
That’s big news in an industry that has been incredibly resistant to disruptors like Apple. And the Apple TV specifically stands to gain immensely from this shift towards Hollywood finally selling premium content unbundled.
As Apple’s preparing for its second big event in as many months, Google just quietly unleashed an arsenal of new products to push it past Cupertino, including the first real Android TV that will have you ready to ditch your Chromecast, and your Apple TV — at least for a day.
Google’s first Android TV set-box, the Nexus Player, is a four-inch hockey puck shaped device that not only plays all your favorite movies and TV shows like on Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV, it also plays games.
At a Time Warner investor meeting on Wednesday, Warner Bros. Chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara laid out his company’s plans to plaster movie houses with big DC-themed movies over the next six years, starting with Zach Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, set to release in 2016.
Disney-owned Marvel already dominates the box office with its comic-book team-ups like The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy as well as movies based on top characters like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America.
It’s going to be a tough job for Warner Bros. to catch up to Marvel, which has already laid a ton of groundwork in it’s previously released films for the ongoing cinematic dynasty, but this new list promises to please fans new and old.
Handsome Jack, the erstwhile villain of Borderlands 2, had to start somewhere. It’s not easy taking over an entire corporation, let alone a whole planet.
His story begins much more humbly, however, with Jack working as a programmer at Hyperion Corporation. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, in some part at least, aims to tell the story of this psychopath’s rise to power.
What’s even better is that this newly released game, available on all the consoles and PC on Steam, is also available for Mac thanks to the tireless efforts of the best Mac game publisher around, Aspyr.
That means that if you rock a Macintosh computer as your main gaming device (and why not, it’s a fantastic machine!), you’ll be able to shoot your way across the moon of Hyperion, floating through the air with every low gravity jump and using new awesome weapons like the ice and laser weapons.
Check out the trailer below, starring Mr. Torgue High-Five Flexington and Sir Hammerlock, for more hilariously over the top details.
Apple’s unveiling of its new iPad lineup is set to take place in less than 24 hours, but someone at Apple HQ just accidentally leaked some of the biggest details, including the names of Apple’s newest tablets.
Google’s long-awaited flagship smartphone, the Nexus 6, has finally been announced, and it’s a 5.9-inch gorgeous monster.
Nexus 6 will be the first device to ship with the new Android operating system Lollipop, so that you know you’re getting the the purest Android experience on the new phablet that’s so big, even the iPhone 6 Plus just got size envy.
Great Scott! We highlight a lot of bundles here and they’re all really awesome, but today we profile a bundle that, hands down, you absolutely need to have.
In The Mac To The Future Bundle you get 8 elite Mac apps plus 25 comprehensive OS X and web development courses with a combined value of over $950. For a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals, though, The Mac To The Future Bundle can be yours for a paltry $29.99.
Autobirds, roll out! Fans of the Robots in Disguise will be pleased to hear that today marks the worldwide availability of Angry Birds Transformers, following its soft-launched in New Zealand, Finland, Canada and Australia last month.
Following the well-received Angry Birds Star Wars, the game takes another beloved childhood property and applies the popular Angry Birds formula, with an added 2D run-and-gun dimension that keeps the title feeling fresh.
Check out our above video by Cult of Mac’s own Joshua Smith for first impressions.
In a game where you can build anything you want, it was only going to be so long before someone constructed an iPhone in Minecraft.
Even with that said, however, the version of Apple’s iconic handset which one player put together is impressive; being not just a block-based reconstruction of the iPhone’s outward appearance — but a slavish recreation of the iPhone UX, complete with iOS apps.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is one of the most reliable analysts out there when it comes to predicting upcoming Apple products.
Ahead of tomorrow’s Apple media event he’s tapped whatever sources he has, to unleash a new research note to clients about what it is that they (and Apple fans in general) should be expecting.
Until September, 2014 was a pretty quiet year for new Apple products. But the drought is over.
After announcing new iPhones and the Apple Watch last month, another media event is being held October 16th at Apple’s Town Hall auditorium on its Cupertino campus. “It’s been way too long,” joked Apple in its invitation to select members of the press. For those itching to see new iPad and Mac hardware, indeed.
While Town Hall is only a fraction of The Flint Center’s size, October 16th’s event shouldn’t be viewed as any less important. iPad sales are stagnant, and Apple’s desktop displays have been needing an upgrade for years. Apple Pay, an entirely new venture for the company, is expected to come out any day now. And then there’s always the chance that Apple still has at least one surprise up its sleeve.
Apple is reportedly upgrading the technologies used for printing its logo onto devices, using new laser-cutting and embedding technologies that will give the logo a 3-D appearance that will “shine at the edges.”
This logo is apparently set to feature on all new Apple products from next year, beginning with the the next-generation iMac.
There have been plenty of reports lately about Apple’s plans to unleash a giant-sized 12.9-inch iPad early next year, and according to a new report from Digitimes, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has landed the orders to make its soup-up processor.
Steve Jobs wasn’t in the habit of dancing at Apple events. But in 2010, prior to a press conference where he addressed concerns about the new iPhone’s antenna, a song lampooning the controversy got Jobs dancing in the wings before he faced off with journalists.
The song in question, which played on a big screen to kick off the event, was the work of YouTube musician and Apple fan Jonathan Mann, who has spent the past five years composing a new song each day and posting it online.
“I heard later on from an Apple PR person that Steve Jobs was bopping along in the wings as the song was playing” at the Antennagate press conference, says Mann, speaking with Cult of Mac. “It was a surreal moment in my life.”
Antennagate went away, but Mann became the go-to guy for jingles about all things Cupertino. To date he has written 38 songs about Apple, touching on everything from Craig Federighi’s WWDC performance to the unveiling of the Apple Watch. His clever ideas and quick turnaround times have turned him into YouTube’s premier Apple songsmith.
Although we’ve yet to see a truly mass-market wearable device sweep the world, most people working in high tech believe that devices like smartwatches represent the next big frontier.
With that in mind, Samsung has debuted a potentially transformative creation at the ongoing InterBattery 2014 exhibition being held in Seoul, Korea: a rollable, flexible battery.
Although not too many details are known yet about the exact materials and structural design advances used to create it, it is reported that the battery can function even when bent in half, or rolled up into the shape of a paper cup.
Is there anything cooler than images of our solar system? Especially ones of the actual Sol, or, our sun. No, there is not.
This fantastically seasonal Halloween image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which does nothing but stare at the sun all day and night in complete disregard of what its mother told it not to do.
Regardless, this image is amazing.
“The active regions in this image appear brighter,” writes NASA on its website, “because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.”
This image blends the images taken with two different ultraviolet wavelengths highlighted, one at 171 and the other at 193 Ångströms, to create this one-of-a-kind jack-o’-lantern sun.
Whatever — this thing is just creepy cool and I want a giant poster of it.
Source: NASA
Imagine this: Tim Cook walks out on stage to introduce a special musical act at the end of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event last month.
Instead of trotting out “aging Irish rockers,” though, imagine if the Foo Fighters came out. Then Zach Brown. And then they launched into the killer rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” you can see below.
Imagine that.
The sudden collapse of GT Advanced Technologies surprised everyone last week, including Apple, but according to new info obtained by the Wall Street Journal, key executives at GTAT knew its sapphire production deal was in trouble as early as February of this year.
Apple’s third payment of $103 million, which was due in February, wasn’t paid to GTAT on time according security filings which reveal GTAT faced sapphire production problems just months after inking its exclusive deal with Apple.
A few years ago, Portland resident Sam Beck built a bike-powered speaker that wouldn’t cut off when he stopped pedaling at stoplights. He accomplished such a feat with an amazing new technology: supercapacitors.
Instead of stopping there, however, Beck decided to bring his vision to the portable bluetooth speaker market, and his company — Blueshift — was born. Crowd-funded and open sourced, these gorgeous bamboo speakers charge in minutes and sound amazing for hours. The original unit, called Helium, is a big, bold bamboo speaker that packs a ton of sound.
Beck is releasing a second generation speaker called Hydrogen on crowd-funding site Crowd Supply. This new boombox is smaller and a little less loud, but it’s the same quality and design as its larger sibling, and a little less pricey.
Part of the appeal, for Beck, of figuring out this entirely new way of powering a speaker was the inherent challenge of doing something that no one else had.
“It seemed like such a good idea,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone, “I wondered why no one else was doing it. I saw that there was another way to do things that no one else was doing.”
Check out the video below for more details on this gorgeous high-tech portable speaker cabinet.