Amazon today introduced Whispersync for Voice to its Kindle apps for Android and iOS, allowing users to switch between reading and listening inside just one app. The feature combines Kindle ebooks with their companion Audible titles using Amazon’s one-click Matchmaker service, and upgrades will cost as little as $0.99 per title.
Oh wait. Apple did the trash can, but not a genuine rubbish bin with a matching toilet brush, like the purple beauty in the Hackintosh gallery above.
These homemade Macs, built from non-Apple hardware, come in a thousand different shapes and sizes, built by legions of dedicated, ingenious hackers. In the nine years since Apple switched to Intel processors, a DIY subculture dedicated to building alternative Mac hardware has steadily grown. It’s not a strictly legal endeavor — Apple’s EULA forbids OS X from running on non-Apple hardware — but Cupertino turns a blind eye to hobbyists.
“You know what? We’ve never gotten anything from Apple other than a few anonymous employees asking for help :),” said Tony, who runs Hackintosh website tonymacx86.com, in an email to Cult of Mac. “It’s clear that tonymacx86.com doesn’t sell hardware. I would think that they’d understand that we are promoting the purchase of OS X and Apple peripherals and laptops, and have zero tolerance for piracy.”
SAN FRANCISCO — You created an app. You think it’s awesome. Your friends say so too. Something nags at you, though: You have zero reviews, your downloads don’t outnumber your Facebook pals, and you need to make rent.
There’s a fancy name for your problem: “discoverability.” Millions of good apps face it, gathering dust between bogus fart apps and Flappy Bird clones.
“It’s hard to make a living in the App Store,” says Michael Yacavone, founder of Individuate, which makes personal-development apps Ace It! and Affirmable.
But there is definitely money to be made in the App Store, to the tune of $15 billion Apple has paid developers so far. Apple recently vowed to improve discoverability by adding an “explore” tab to the App Store, but whether users will search for new and exciting apps remains to be seen. The basic problem remains for most developers: Nearly everyone is ignoring you. Journalists can help, but you have to know how to deal with them.
Apart from letting you quickly edit and share photos (and always sitting, ready to go, in your pocket), the iPhone camera has one other great feature: It geotags every photo and video you shoot with the place you captured the imagery. You might not care about that now, but in the future when you wonder, “Where did I take that naked self-portrait?” or decide to take a look at your old vacation snaps, you’ll love geotagging.
Hell, half the time I use a map to find a photo — I can usually remember where I was better than when I was.
Lack of geotagging is perhaps the main reason I don’t take my regular camera out as often as I’d like, so I decided to do something about that. I’m using a combination of the iOS GeoTagr app on iPhone and iPad, plus a Fujifilm X100S camera and a Garmin EDGE 500 GPS bike computer.
Let’s take a look.
Mojang has rolled out its “biggest update ever” for Minecraft: Pocket Edition, adding unlimited worlds, tons of new content, and a multitude of tweaks, fixes, and improvements. Players will be able to enjoy a plethora of new blocks, mobs, blomes — and a new AI that brings spiders, leaf rendering, drip particles, and an “immersive mode.”
Last month, a number of Apple users in Australia woke up to find that their iOS devices had been locked by an “Oleg Pliss,” and that they needed to pay a ransom if they wanted to continue using them. While a few people thought iCloud could have been hacked, Apple denied those rumors.
Now it seems that the hackers involved with the ransom demands have been detailed by authorities in Russia, according to a new report from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Aged 17 and 23, the alleged hackers are both residents of the Southern Administrative District of Moscow, and one has been previously tried for a similar case.
Apple TV may have a new competitor in the form of Sony, which unveiled its PlayStation TV at Monday’s E3 event — showcasing a TV set-top box which features a strong emphasis on gaming.
Released as PS Vita TV in Japan, PlayStation TV will arrive in the U.S. and Canada this fall. It will allow users to stream games from their PS4 to other TVs in the house, thereby extending the gaming experience. It will also let you stream PS3 games and older classics via the forthcoming Playstation Now, which will presumably require no PS4. On top of this it will provide all the streaming services you’d expect from a set-top box, such as Netflix and Hulu.
A new patent published Tuesday suggests that the iWatch may be able to able to detect if the user is lifting a weightlifting bar, and count and display the recorded repetitions. Metrics related to intervals between movements could be compared against previous sessions and displayed on an iOS device so that the user could track their progress over multiple sessions.
Interestingly the patent — which was filed in 2012 — specifically mentions a shoe-based sensor, similar to fitness-tracking sneakers like the Nike Hyperdunk+ basketball tracking shoes. In the years since then, however, Apple has pulled back on patent references to shoe wear-out sensors and unitless measurements, but kept the body-bar sensing system and associated watch readout. Other possible devices named in the patent include potential future generation iPods and iPhones.
The App Store is constantly evolving as both Apple and individual developers struggle to get the most out of the experience as possible. The latest change in this vein appears to involve App Store moderators cracking down on apps which incentivize or reward users for enaging in a range of activities — many related to advertising.
For an example of what we mean, consider a game which gives users more lives when they die in exchange for sharing to Facebook. Several mobile apps have recently been rejected for using these techniques, alongside offering virtual currency or additional game play for asking viewers to watch video “app trailers.”
For years Apple has taken the view that you tell customers what they want, rather than waiting for them to ask. In terms of UI, this meant picking out the “right” option for interface elements, as opposed to allowing users the ability to edit them themselves.
That may be changing in iOS 8, as the beta code of Apple’s new mobile operating system suggests that Apple may also be including a funky variant UI — complete with alternate font and orange and purple color scheme.
LOS ANGELES — Microsoft has faced a perception problem ever since last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. At this year’s E3 media briefing, however, everything the company said, did or showed was aimed squarely at fixing things.
“We listened to you, the gamers,” said Xbox director Phil Spencer to the crowd gathered here Monday. “This year, we’re only focusing on games.”
The next 90 minutes brought a fast-paced, booming litany of games, games, games. The wristbands given to every attendee at the Galen Auditorium flashed with colored lights to complement the onscreen demos and video game trailers. The speakers filled the room with so much sound that the hairs on the sides of my head moved when the explosions happened. And there were a lot of explosions.
Apple will be working closely with the Food and Drug Administration on future products related to the health industry, according to new information provided by the government.
Back in January, The New York Times reported that Apple had met with the FDA to discuss “mobile medical applications.” The talk was believed to center on the company’s rumored plans for health-tracking software in iOS 8 and maybe even the iWatch. HealthKit and the new Health app were announced at WWDC last week, and an iWatch announcement is expected in October.
Now more of the details from Apple’s meeting with the FDA have been disclosed. Apple said it may have a “moral obligation” to do more with health-related sensors on mobile devices.
Apple poured a ton of love into the iOS 8 Camera and Photos apps, but one feature that did not get enough stage time during last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference was the incredible time-lapse video feature.
The new feature lets you create videos of accelerated sequences of photos over time with stunning simplicity. I finally got around to trying it myself by sweating and wheezing my way to the top of Hayden’s Butte to capture the summer sun setting over Tempe, Arizona, last night.
I only took one run at it, but the results were unbelievably cool:
With all the new features coming to iOS 8 this fall, many Android users have commented that Apple’s upcoming update acts a lot like KitKat. In today’s video, see some of the new features of iOS 8 go head-to-head with similar iterations in Android to see which comes out on top.
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One of the videos Apple played during its WWDC keynote last week was a visual tour of the new OS X Yosemite. It’s only a minute long, but it showcases the overall design changes in the new OS quite nicely.
Apple has made the video available on YouTube, where it joins the other keynote video that looks at how developers are changing the world with their apps.
WWDC came and went without a single breath mentioning the split-screen multitasking mode in iOS 8 that was rumored to be on the way, but iPad users hoping for more productivity features might be in luck after all.
Developer Steve Stroughton Smith says he’s been digging around in the iOS 8 beta files and noticed a new “main-screen-canvas-sizes” option that wasn’t in iOS 7, but will add multi-tasking to the iOS 8 SpringBoard, and it’s more advanced that we hoped for.
Starting with iOS 8, Apple is making it impossible for marketers to track you based on your iPhone’s MAC address.
When you walk around a store with your iPhone’s WiFi on, you’re are unknowingly transmitting your MAC address, a unique identifier for your device. Routers need the identifier to join you to a network. Ad agencies and retailers have been tracking these addresses to help offer personalized advertisements to customers based on where they’ve been.
Apple is putting a stop to this practice with MAC address scrambling in iOS 8, which could turn out to be a big win for iBeacon.
Now that Katie Cotton, Apple’s longtime head of corporate communication, has retired, Tim Cook is on the hunt for a “friendly, more approachable” face to head its PR going forward.
According to Re/code, Apple is looking outside the company for high-profile candidates to fill Cotton’s role. Depending on who replaces her, Apple’s relationship with the media could begin to warm up considerably.
The code was written. The world (possibly) changed. The banners are gone and Apple is nowhere to be seen at Moscone West after a marathon week of coding and partying with the top software engineers in the world.
If you weren’t lucky enough to make it to this year’s WWDC you can still enjoy all the coding education that came with the show now that all 107 video sessions have been posted on Apple’s developer site. It’s a world class coding education that rivals anything you can pay for at university.
Here are some notable session to get you primed for iOS 8 and Yosemite:
The Skype team at Microsoft has been hard at work on a complete rewrite of their iPhone app, and it’s arriving in the App Store next week.
Version 5.0 of Skype for iPhone looks very similar in some ways to the existing Windows Phone and Android Skype clients, but its developers promise that they have built it to “fit iOS best.”
While smartwatches are currently a niche product, they may not stay that way for long, says USB analyst Steven Milunovich, who predicts that the iWatch could match sales of Apple’s iPad — unloading 21 million units in fiscal 2015 and a further 36 million units the following year.
The iPad, by comparison, sold 19.5 million units in its first year, rising to 47.6 million in its second. (The iPhone moved a relatively paltry 5.4 million units in its first year of sale, since it was still establishing Apple’s mobile platform.)
Let’s be honest, charging your iOS lightning-compatible devices with Apple’s standard 3 foot lightning cable doesn’t cut it. When we charge our devices, we want the freedom to interact with them as well, and this is exactly what you get with this 10 foot (3 meter) MFi-certified charging cable.
Unleash yourself from that standard 3 foot charging cable and feel the freedom to work, play, and talk while you charge – and for just $21.99!
Cult of Mac Magazine June 9 Edition, Free on iTunes
Every week, we serve up the best of the Cult of Mac website as a magazine so you can download and read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.
Do not adjust your sets: Despite finishing Friday at $645, Apple stock will open today at around $92. This is the result of a 7-to-1 stock split, which will see the price of the stock divided by seven and shareholders of record awarded six additional shares on top of their existing holdings.
Apple announced the split earlier this year in what we referred to at the time as an “earth-shattering earnings call.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Victor Broido has an enviable lifestyle. He lives and works 200 yards from a sun-kissed beach. He often kitesurfs before work. Sometimes he surfs during work.
“It was my dream, as a kid, to surf for an hour before going to the office,” Broido said. “That’s my life. It’s happening right now.”
You might want to punch Broido in the face upon hearing this, but he’s the nicest, most self-deprecating guy. You can’t begrudge him anything. Plus, he worked to attain this way of life.
Broido and his colleagues run DigiDNA, an eight-person company based in Geneva, Switzerland, with a satellite office in Geraldton, a small city in remote Western Australia with a reputation for world-class water sports.
DigiDNA is one of thousands of small, independent software developers spawned by the mobile revolution. In 2013, Apple’s App Store revenues topped $10 billion, and a lot of that money flowed to small startups. There are small indies in every category, from games to databases. Lots of them flocked to San Francisco last week for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. DigiDNA was a gold sponsor of last week’s AltConf, the alternative conference that ran parallel to Apple’s event. (DigiDNA has also sponsored Cult of Mac’s Cultcast in the past.)