After launching first in Japan on July 15th, Apple has brought its iTunes Pass functionality to the United States. The feature allows you to store iTunes Store credit on a digital gift card in Passbook that can reloaded by an Apple retail employee in-store.
Here’s an explanation of how it works from Apple:
About a month ago, I said on Twitter that I was looking for a new podcast app to try. I’ve been a user of Instacast on iOS and OS X for a long time, but recently the app’s cloud sync has become too unreliable and glitchy.
I got a lot of suggestions, but ended up settling with Apple’s own Podcasts app. It didn’t address several things I wanted out of a podcast client, but it was the most reliable and easy to use option from what I came across.
And now, lo and behold, the most highly-anticipated new podcast app in a long time has come out. Today Marco Arment released Overcast, a simple and yet powerful podcast app for the iPhone. I’ve given it a test run, and although there is plenty of room for improvement, I’m pretty impressed.
The squads of the NFC and AFC are gearing up for training camp in just a few weeks, and the NFL is ready to make a killing by feeding your leather and spandex addiction with an NFL Sunday Ticket package that stream every game to your iPad, even if you don’t have a satellite subscription.
In a huge victory for cord-cutters, DirecTV is finally ready to loosen restriction to make it easier for non-subscribers to pay for the NFL Sunday Ticket, but it’s not going to be cheap.
Apple has added extra protection to iCloud’s outgoing email, making it harder for hackers, the NSA, or any other malicious spying groups to get their digits on your messages.
While the iPhone 6 has sparked tons of speculation in the tech world, rumors regarding the alleged Apple smartwatch have as well. All the gossip and leaks about the long-rumored device, popularly referred to as the “iWatch,” have created big expectations for the company to meet.
In today’s video we take a look at all the rumors and get a good feeling of what an iWatch might look like when it’s revealed (possibly this October). If the reports are true, you’ll enjoy more than the average smartwatch as you track blood pressure, hold FaceTime calls and more, all on an amazing device that redefines wrist wear.
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Unlimited music streaming services are still struggling to make a profit, but Amazon is turning to its bread and butter for its next subscription service: Books.
Amazon is testing a new ebook and audiobook service that will give subscribers unlimited access to over 600,000 titles, according to spotting by Kindle Book forum users, but it won’t come with your Amazon Prime subscription.
Airbnb is poised to completely disrupt the hotel industry, and today’s rebranding of the startup makes it even more obvious.
Like Uber and TaskRabbit, Airbnb is all about using technology to make a seamless experience in the real world. You can look up a place to stay in the iPhone app, communicate with the owner, and book it without ever having to be put on hold or wait in line at a front desk.
With a redesigned interface focused on simplicity and discoverability, Airbnb is making it easier to find places to stay. But sadly all of that is being ignored because of how ridiculous that new logo looks.
You should be able to easily switch carriers in the U.S. once you fulfill your two-year contract, but most of the time it’s easier said than done. A new bill being reviewed in Washington plans to let you unlock your phone to take it to any carrier after your contact is over.
The Rickrolling meme will never die, and if Dan Petro has his way, you may soon be able to drive down your neighborhood and rickroll every TV on the block in seconds.
After finding a vulnerability in Google’s Chromecast Wifi implementation, Dan Petro built a device for less than $100 out of a Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, wireless cards and 3D-printed pastic case. It’s name: The Rickmote Controller. It’s superpower: Takes over any Chomecast-equipped TV within Wifi range and plays Rick Astley’s legendary “Never Gonna Give You up.”
Check out this video of the Rickmote in action:
After Apple acquired Beats, it wasn’t going to be long before Samsung was selling expensive audio accessories of its own. Rather than buying an already well-established brand, however, the South Korean company has today launched its own. It’s called Level, and it currently boasts three sets of headphones and one good-looking wireless speaker.
This may be the last time you feel good about walking half a mile to get a cronut: a calorie-counting food scale and fitness tracker are on to you.
Smart food scale Prep Pad now synchs with Jawbone Up, keeping track of what you’re eating and how many calories you are burning.
It’s latest buddy system in the quantified self movement, where, as we reported earlier, your car is already conversing with your fitness tracker about how much you should be hoofing it instead of driving. Sales of fitness gadgets like the Jawbone Up, Fitbit and Nike + are over the previous year, leaving us with 19 million trackers and trainers strapped to our wrists.
One year after being found guilty of e-book price fixing, Apple has reached a conditional settlement with the U.S. State to pay $450 million for its role in the price fixing conspiracy that involved five major publishers.
Apple’s settlement could bring $400 million back to consumers’ wallets, reports Reuters, but the court documents filed on Wednesday reveal that the company isn’t quite ready to throw in the towel yet, with hopes that its appeal will shrink that fee down to just $70 million.
Magic Radio, the music streaming from DoubleTwist that boasts more than 13 million tracks, finally supports AirPlay streaming thanks to a new update that’s available now in Google Play. The release also adds Qualcomm AllPlay integration, but strangely, support for the Google Chromecast is still missing.
Doxie One: Scan Documents Anywhere, Anytime (US)
With Doxie One, it’s easy to go to paperless. You can scan everything from bills and receipts to reports, drawings, recipes, notes, business cards, photos, and everything else. Plus, no computer is required, so you can scan from just about anywhere! Doxie One will then sync to your Mac or PC and help you organize your scans.
Pick up the Doxie One for just $99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Dropping cash on a new iPhone dock each time Apple decides to change the form factor can get pretty annoying, but if you’re down with rolling your own home brewed solution, you can actually create a sturdy dock for your iPhone 5s or iPod Touch using nothing but the LEGO blocks laying around your house.
We’ve seen a few LEGO docks over the years, but a YouTuber has created a simple step-by-step tutorial that teaches everyone how to build their out of three parts – a top segment, cable holder and a base. The dock in the video only uses black and white LEGOs for a sleek look, but we’d love to see it with a splash of color.
Watch the full tutorial below:
Just because people are expecting Apple to revolutionize wearables with its long-awaited iWatch, doesn’t mean that there aren’t already some interesting developments going on in the wearable tech field.
I’m a massive fan of Jawbone, which has just updated its UP by Jawbone iOS app with a new fitness-oriented update — designed to focus on food-related goals, such as weight and calorie intake.
The Flappy Bird phenomenon will never die. Although the game has been pulled from the App Store, the addictive little Bird has spawned a million clones, and been ported to all manner of devices, including Android and Windows Phone smartphones, as well as the Mac.
But what you’re about to see might just be the ultimate Flappy Bird port. It’s Flappy Bird running on a vintage Apple IIc, at an astonishing 60 frames per second.
So long as we live in a world where WhatsApp can be bought for $19 billion and even an ultra-simple novelty app like Yo manages to scrape together $1 million in venture funding, people are going to go right on creating messaging apps.
One of the latest is La-La Messenger, which promises users the possibility of conducting entire conversations out of song snippets. A greeting, for instance, might be “Hello” by Lionel Richie, while “the world is a dark place if this is the future of communication” could be Sean Paul’s “Gimme the Light.”
I’ve been a runner for a long time. I trained for (and ran) the 1994 Los Angeles Marathon. I’ve run 5K races, half marathons and relays for full marathons up here in Alaska, too. I find that running gives me the best bang for my buck: All I need is a pair of running shoes, some appropriate clothing (it gets cold up here), and some music to keep me getting out there.
Recently, though, I’ve been playing with a new bit of gear: the Pear Sports heart rate monitor, paired with a set of earbuds engineered to stay in your ears while working out, plus a pretty fantastic mobile app to make sense of the heart rate data.
Smartphone user habits may change depending on where you are in the world, but one thing remains largely the same: the iPhone (and Apple brand) is a status symbol.
With that in mind, Apple is tapping FPT Corp., Vietnam’s biggest listed information and communication technology company, to help grow its market share across Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
As with China, developing markets such as Vietnam represent important potential hotbeds for Apple to target, and establishing a presence early is of the utmost importance. According to Lam Nguyen, Ho Chi Minh City-based country director at International Data Corp, Vietnamese smartphone sales will increase by around 56 percent to 12 million units in 2014 alone — and Apple should be in a position to get a large chunk of those sales.
Photos have surfaced on French Apple website Nowhereelse.fr that purport to show the Touch ID sensor for Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6.
While at first glance, the images look identical to the sensor embedded within the iPhone 5s — Apple’s first smartphone to feature the Touch ID technology — upon closer inspection some tiny differences in design can be spotted. These predominantly relate to the edges of the sensor where the tiny screws will attach it to the device’s metal housing.
The two sensors can be seen next to one another in the image below:
From personal computers and smartphones, to tablets and wearables, half the fun of following Apple is trying to figure out where it's going to go next.
Looking back through the Cult of Mac archives, a lot of the rumors we've brought to light over the years did hint at innovations that eventually found their ways into the sweaty hands of excited customers. But every once in a while a rumor comes along that's so ridiculous it can't possibly be true. And more often than not, that's exactly the case.
Check out our gallery for our picks of top Apple rumors that turned out to be totally wide of the mark.
Photography is all about light, and photographers are all about light painting. There are many tricks to try, from isolating objects with incandescence outside the frame to shining light directly at the camera as in Janelle Pietrzak’s Bambi series, created using light stencils.
Creating this interesting analog photo effect doesn’t require any special equipment, just a detachable flash, some craft materials and a lot of imagination.
But Colorado artist Janelle Pietrzak spends hours cutting light stencils with a razor blade, then uses a shoebox and long-exposure photography to bring Bambi and other cuddly creatures to life inside her home.
“If you look at my photographs there is fantasy world full of mythical creatures, floating orbs, ghosts and goddesses, all created by manipulating light,” Pietrzak tells Cult of Mac. “The catch is that I hardly use any Adobe Photoshop. What you see in the images is basically what I saw on the back of my camera.”
While Google has Nest Labs and Apple has HomeKit, Samsung is reportedly looking to enter the home automation space by acquiring Internet of Things company SmartThings for $200 million, according to TechCrunch.
SmartThings is a home automation platform that allows users to connect devices such as lights or doorlocks to a system controlled by their smartphone. It has previously raised over $15 million from investors.