SAN FRANCISCO — You can buy and sell a lot of things in this boom town, just not public parking spaces. All three parking apps called out by the city attorney for auctioning or selling public spaces have backed off.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera slapped MonkeyParking with a cease-and-desist on June 23 and mentioned that similar apps Sweetch and ParkModo were next in line. Each took a different tack — defiant, conciliatory, quiet — but in the end, all three are on hiatus.
SAN FRANCISCO — There’s a new kind of gold hidden in the hills of this city: A mysterious Twitter account is leading locals on a treasure hunt for Bitcoin.
The folks behind @SFHiddenBitcoin, which has been active since July 1, are hot on the heels of @HiddenCash, the Twitter account that made news doling out the dough of a real estate mogul.
While judges debate whether Bitcoin is money and crashing economies around the globe fear the virtual currency’s wake, it’s the coin of the realm in certain circles here. If you can handle being a “cyphervegan,” you can basically already live on Bitcoin.
Back in 2012, Sharp’s Kameyama Plant No. 1 switched from making larger TV panels to smaller screens for smartphones. Apple became a key partner, and now the plant is at 90% capacity making displays for the iPhone 6.
You’d think that such strong business would keep Sharp happy, but that isn’t stopping the Japanese company from wanting to distance itself from Apple. The main thing Apple seems to be concerned with is that Sharp could end up doing business with Samsung instead.
Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre just made billions off Apple’s acquisition of Beats Electronics, but the company is ready to squeeze out a few billion more from a ring of Chinese knockoffs.
Legal filings from Beats claim that cheap counterfeit headphones are screwing the company out of billions of profits by using the company’s popular “b” logo to rake in an ungodly $135 billion in sales. Now the doctor wants his cut.
Steve Jobs may have been part of some of the biggest tech revolutions of the past forty years, but he was also part of an illegal attempt to suppress employee wages by way of a massive no-poaching agreement with other tech giants.
Another of the companies accused of similar actions by former employees was Pixar, the company Jobs purchased a majority interest in after being booted out of Apple in the mid-80s. In 2011, Pixar’s John Lasseter described Jobs as “forever…part of Pixar’s DNA.”
As it happens, that may not be entirely for the best.
With the iPhone 6, the long-rumored iWatch and possibly a revamped Apple TV expected to be released this year, it’s safe to say Apple is hard at work. As the talk heats up regarding these new products, rumors and leaks spill into the mainstream, making it hard to keep up with it all.
Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about Apple’s product pipeline. Catch the rundown for details on endurance-testing a sapphire display that’s supposedly for an iPhone 6, smart sweat sensors that might get added to the iWatch and the rest of this week’s big stories.
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Swift, a completely new programming language for the App Age, was one of the biggest announcements that come out of WWDC and now it’s also got its own blog.
Apple launched a new blog dedicated to the development of Swift on its developer site this morning to educate coders on the new language that has replaced Objective-C to build iOS and Mac apps. The blog will give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Swift from the very engineers who created it. News and hints will also spill over the blogs’ pages to help devs become more productive with the Swift language.
Here’s the first post:
The back of your iPhone is about to get a little more minimalist.
Thanks to a new bill introduced in the Senate, manufacturers may soon be allowed to use digital stamps on smartphones, laptops, and other gadgets, instead of using the strange symbols etched onto the back of your iPhone.
People who work in creative industries know that the best media creation software is products made by Adobe. Whether it’s getting pictures just right with Photoshop or putting together a whiz bang digital newsletter with InDesign, Adobe makes software to tackle just about any creative dilemma.
While Adobe products are the industry standard in creativity software, they can also be complex and frustrating for novice users. That’s why Cult of Mac Deals is offering Lifetime Access To Over 5,000 Adobe Authorized Training Videos for the remarkably low price of $79.
Someone looking for a meme worthy video could do worse than overlaying the soundtrack of a Savannah wildlife documentary with footage of tech companies vying for users to buy their next big smartphone.
Just like a lion feeds first, while the scavengers hang around and wait for scraps of spare meat to show up, so a new report from Digitimes claims non-Apple smartphone vendors looking to release high-end models in the second half of 2014 are getting increasingly worried that there aren’t going to be enough component supplies available. The reason? Component makers are all working on the iPhone 6.
And that’s just the start of it.
Spend any time watching trailers for new iOS games, and quickly you’ll find that one merges into the other: all stock music, quick gameplay snapshots, and (if the title’s any good) a stream of title cards reading things like “Brilliant” and “You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before.”
Inventive platformer Leo’s Fortune has just received a new trailer and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s every bit as original as you’d hope for from the recipient of a 2014 Apple Design Award. In fact, dare we say it, it’s worth watching even if iOS gaming isn’t really your bag.
Luca Redwood, the creator of the super-addictive sliding tile game 10,000,000, has been working on a sequel to that game called You Must Build A Boat for the last year, but that’s not the only app he has up his sleeves.
Yesterday, Redwood announced that he had another game in the pipeline. Called Smarter Than You, it’s a modern take on rock, paper, scissors, but with subterfuge and a malevolent A.I. named M.E.T.I.S. mixed in.
While Apple is making money hand over fist today, it’s not that long ago (OK, 37 years) that it was a new business with the same cash-flow problems faced by all small companies.
To help speed up its business transactions, Apple today will officially sign up to a new White House initiative called SupplierPay, a voluntary program in which companies commit to pay small suppliers faster, or else aid them in getting access to lower-cost capital.
The rumormill is reaching a fever pitch when it comes to Apple’s upcoming iPhone 6, and one of the hottest new reports concerns the handset’s alleged A8 chip.
While we’ve been seeing a new A-series processor each year, there’s still been no definite confirmation that Apple plans to include the A8 chip in its next generation devices, especially since developers have yet to push the A7 to its limits.
With that being said, the Chinese media is claiming that the A8 will not only happen, but that it will blow the current A7 out of the water: boasting frequencies of 2.0 GHz or more per core (compared to the 1.3Ghz A7 SoC found in the iPhone 5s and Retina iPad mini, or the 1.4 GHz found in the iPad Air).
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
iPhone 6 rumor season is in full bloom this week with a rash of rumors spilling new details on everything from improved battery life, sapphire displays’ extreme durability, SIM trays, and even the robot army that will help assemble Apple’s newest smartphone.
This week we were also treated to new tidbits on the production schedules of the iWatch and next-gen MacBook Airs, but you’ll have to step right up to our crystal ball to see which of these rumors are the real deal, and which are just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
When it was first released on iOS devices in 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was just a shadow of what it was on the PC. Where as the PC version contained infinite worlds, Pocket Edition’s worlds were tiny and self-contained. There were no monsters, nor underground chasms. And so on.
For Minecraft fans hoping to play the game on the go, these omissions were disappointing. But over the years, slowly but surely, Pocket Edition has caught up with the features of its progenitor, and the 0.9.0 updated, released yesterday, makes Minecraft: Pocket Edition almost indistinguishable from having the PC version in your pocket.
Sure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a movie that became a TV show that ended up as a comic book, but it’s a fine example of the cross-media value of certain nerdy properties. Comic book movies and television shows are all the rage right now, with Marvel and DC superheroes packing the theaters and shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Arrow filling the little screen.
But there are plenty of comic books that don’t feature superheroes, and we think they’d be a great match for the home television market, as they have less reliance on big-budget special effects and can sustain longer story arcs than a movie can. With that, then, here are our picks for the best non-superhero comics we’d really like to see come to a television screen near you. Or us.
The Brompton’s not a new bike. It’s not even new to me. But it is the best folding bike around, and it will change how you travel long distances, too. I’ve had mine ever since I recovered enough from a broken leg (busted playing bike polo) to hobble up to the local bike shop and order one. That was a few years ago, and since then the bike has come with me to three different continents, traveling on planes, trains, trams, automobiles and buses.
You can even ride it to the airport and pack it up when you get there.
The iPhone brings untold billions of dollars of industry into China thanks to the manufacturing jobs it creates, but that hasn’t stopped the Chinese Government — through their state-controlled media mouthpieces — from calling the device a “national security concern.”
Why? Because iOS can track your location, which according to a China Central Television report, could be used to betray Chinese state secrets to the rest of the world.
Apple sure is making us wait for the iWatch, and if recent rumors are to be believed, that wait isn’t about to end any time soon. If you’ve decided to spend your cash on an LG G Watch or Samsung Gear Live instead, then why not add a touch of iOS to it yourself with the free iWatch theme for Android Wear.
Will Apple have iWatches ready to hit the shelves when it announces the wearable at its rumored event in October? Probably not.
Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, who is undoubtedly the most accurate Apple analyst on the planet, is saying that Apple won’t begin mass production of the iWatch until November. He has also lowered his sales projections considerably because of “complications” Apple has to deal with concerning new materials like sapphire.
As user-friendly as they are, Macs are complex machines. They’re absolutely loaded with features, some of which might not be obvious from the start. In today’s video, we take a look at five basic tips that can help make everyday use of your Mac much more enjoyable. Find out how to clean up your desktop, customize your Dock, tweak audio settings and more with just a few quick clicks.
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iTranslate has been one of the most popular language tools on iOS for a long time, and today it comes to the Mac.
With support for over 80 languages, voice output to help with pronunciation, and a clean menubar app design, this is an app definitely worth checking out.
With Uber or Lyft, you can summon a car to pick you up with a tap on your iPhone. TaskRabbit makes it that easy to find someone to do your grocery shopping or even stand in line all day for the new iPhone.
Until today, TaskRabbit has operated on an auction-like bidding system for handling tasks. Not only is TaskRabbit killing that model, but it’s releasing a redesigned app with automatic Client and Tasker pairing, one-click hiring, and its own messaging platform.
After today’s changes, TaskRabbit has become a blend of two things. It’s a more evolved, mobile-friendly version of the jobs section of Craigslist, and it’s applying the on-demand aspect of Uber to just about any kind of errand or odd-job you could hire someone to do.
If you want to delve into the deep end with a massively online battle arena game, you can head on over to Riot Games’ League of Legends or Valve’s own Dota 2 with your computer, download a free copy of each game, and then dive in.
Or, you can grab a copy of Fates Forever, a surprisingly well-tuned and deep version of the popular game genre and eSports phenomenon. It’s been over a year in development by the team led by the founder of proto-Game Center Open Feint and one of the first hit game devs on the iOS platoform (Aurora Feint), Jason Citron.
When we spoke to Citron last summer, he was full of excitement about his promising game-in-development. The wait has been worth it, as Fates Forever puts on an impressive show, squeezing a fully-realized MOBA game complete with distinctive heroes and cunningly designed infrastructure that can encourage and include everyone, from those brand new to the genre to the more veteran MOBA players, all on the iPad.
This is a fantastic game, and you’ll want to check it out right now.