Cult of Mac

More details are trickling out about Gameloft’s eagerly awaited first-person-shooter Modern Combat 5: Blackout, which is set to arrive on mobile later this year.

The first big reveal concerns a new unified progression system, which will aim to bring together the single-player campaign and online multiplayer modes by letting experience earned in either contribute toward your character’s overall level. This will also hold true for the game’s weapon mastery system also, meaning that whether you unlock a new weapon in campaign or multiplayer you’ll be able to use it in both.

Beats Electronics boss and music industry veteran Jimmy Iovine is in talks to join Apple as a “special adviser” to Tim Cook on creative matters, according to sources.

Along with his role as co-creator of Beats with business partner Dr. Dre, Iovine is also chairman of Universal Music Group’s Interscope, Geffen and A&M labels, which is home to artists including Lady Gaga and Eminem.

Protecting user privacy and sensitive information might drive Snapchat’s disappearing messages, but the Federal Trade Commission is keeping its eye on the company just in case!

The FTC has announced that it is settling with Snapchat after an investigation into the company’s privacy practices. The reason? The number of work arounds that allow photos and videos sent via Snapchat to be covertly captured.

“If a company markets privacy and security as key selling points in pitching its service to consumers, it is critical that it keep those promises,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez says. “Any company that makes misrepresentations to consumers about its privacy and security practices risks FTC action.”

The first impression upon seeing Satechi’s new GoRemote Bluetooth remote-controller for the iPhone is oh man, that’s really freaking cool! Followed rapidly by wait, what am I going to do with this thing again?

This probably isn’t the “iRing” you’ve been waiting for — assuming you’ve been waiting for the mythical (One) Ring, forged by the skilled elves of Logbar, that wants to control, well, pretty much everything in your life.

No, this particular ring — IK Multmedia’s iRing — won’t control your TV, your phone or your wallet. But it is imbued with the power to create music on your iDevice.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to buy Beats Electronics, the headphone manufacturer co-founded by Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine that has also spun off a streaming-music service.

The deal could cost $3.2 billion, according to The Financial Times, and would give Apple full control of the brand that’s made gigantic flashy headphones the trendiest thing to hit kids’ heads since backward baseball caps.

Does this mean Dr. Dre is about to become the newest Apple employee?

If you’ve ever wanted to tap nervously on the screen, listen to repetitive dubstep, and watch colorful pills fall in front of your eyes, now there’s an app for that. Intake: Be Aggressive is a self-described “psychedelic shooter” for iPad that carelessly toys with the concept of club drugs, but without the trippy fun.

I expected more from Cipher Prime Studios, the makers of Splice: Tree of Life and Pulse: Volume One. Intake: Be Aggressive is a very simple tapping game where two different colors of pills fall from the top of the screen, and your job is to tap on them to chain together a combo. You can tap the space at the very bottom to switch colors and prevent the chain from breaking.

Saunter up to the bar, pardner, and we’ll tell you all about our little town here.

We need a sheriff around these parts and you look like you’d fit the badge nicely. Here’s a gun; get out there and collect rewards, shoot wild animals and round up the bad guys.

Oh, and don’t mind the funny green light ’round these parts. It’s just how we get things done.

The CAZLET from KYNEZ is an iPhone wallet case like no other. It’s the only one I know of that provides military-grade protection for your beloved smartphone, and it’s one of the few that allows you to use your device — and almost all of its features and functions — without having to open the wallet up.

CAZLET’s design leaves your iPhone’s display exposed yet protected, so as soon as you pull it out of your pocket, your device is ready to be used. It’s made from gorgeous leather sourced from boutique tanneries in France and Southern Germany, and it boasts some nifty features you don’t normally get with smartphone wallet cases — including dedicated pockets for a spare nanoSIM and SIM eject tool.

KYNEZ also offers a number of add-ons that you can buy separately, including a coin pocket, a card band, a hand strap, and an ID sleeve. The wallet itself comes with a $65 price tag, which I think is very reasonable. Let me tell you why.

The smartphone wars are two company race and it’s not even close.

Apple and Samsung are dominating the competition so badly that a new report from Canaccord Genuity claims the two tech giants account for 106% of global smartphone profits.

Take a look at this chart:

Your usual prepackaged USB charging cable gets the job done for a short time. But after a month or so of life on the go, you find it damaged, knotted and unreliable. Cult of Mac Deals has a cable that will help you make that inconvenience a thing of the past.

The 10Ft Bungee Charging Cable features resistant nylon material is strong enough to keep damage away and the cord from tangling, so you won’t get the mess or the headache from for all your wild times. And Cult of Mac Deals has this cable available for only $11.99 for a limited time.

Sir Jonathan Ive’s list of accolades is already longer than any other contemporary designer, but he’ll be adding a new award to his mantle this fall with a lifetime achievement award coming from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The museum is in the midst of a massive Snøhetta-designed expansion but the absence of an HQ won’t stop it from honoring Jony’s work at the intersection of technology and liberal arts with the the 2014 Bay Area Treasure Award, says SFMOMA director Neal Benezra.

Nintendo refuses to bring its immensely popular games to smartphones and tablets for fear of damaging its own hardware sales, but the Japanese gaming giant isn’t against building mobile companion apps. The much-anticipated Mario Kart 8 will be accompanied by Mario Kart TV for Android and iOS, allowing players to replay their favorite races, view screenshots, and share gameplay with their friends.

TextSync is kind of a confusing app, and it took me a while to figure out what the point was. It lets you link your computer and your iPhone or iPad over Wi-Fi so that whatever you type on the big screen appears on the smaller one. You can then copy that text to paste elsewhere or save it as a note.

But what’s the point? Well, it’s a good workaround if you don’t want to spring for a Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s handy for these really long and tedious iMessages that I send all the time.

They’re epic, people. Blue boxes for days.

Source:TextSync – Free | Notable Group

Once again, I’m here to tell you about a little minimalist game that has completely kicked my ass.

It’s called Lumena, and it doesn’t look like much until you play it and fail in like two seconds. And then you try again, and again you fail because the game is, in fact, so minimal that it doesn’t even bother to tell you how to play it. But after a while, you figure it out (it’s not really that complicated), and with newly found confidence, you give it another shot. And you lose in five seconds.

But stick with it because it’s way better than I’m making it sound.

Progress on Apple’s forthcoming “spaceship” campus continues to march on, as new aerial photos taken by AppleToolbox show.

The photos clearly illustrate how the site is taking on its circular shape, with plenty of work being done by construction workers and heavy machines.

Oh, you wacky Samsung-ites — will you never learn?

Samsung was somehow recently granted a design trademark for a “display screen with icon” and, wouldn’t you know it, it looks almost exactly like the icon Apple currently uses for Siri.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even in a town populated by ninjas, gurus and rockstars, Mario Estrada may have the coolest job around.

He’s the Director of Fun for digital photo app Hipstamatic and hopes you won’t hate him for it.

“Most people don’t believe that’s my job, but a lot of thought went into the title,” he says, enjoying the sun from the rooftop lounge of the startup’s SOMA headquarters. “Someone asked once why I wasn’t the VP of fun, but that implies there’s someone more fun than I am. And you can’t be the president of fun, because, actually, being president is never fun.”

Despite all efforts to the contrary, email is still the default way to shift files, photos and – yes – mail around the internet. Even when you share a file using Dropbox, the link goes via old-fashioned email. And yet email clients are still awful. They’ve gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, on both iOS and the Mac, but we’re still stuck without a proper task manager that integrates with the native iOS/OS X Calendar and Reminders.

What’s going on?

When photojournalist Scott Strazzante planned a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., with his daughter Betsy in 2011, he was intent on leaving his cameras at home.

They were visiting colleges and he wanted it to be a “daddy-daughter” weekend. But the prolific, award-winning photographer gets anxious when he is not creating, so there was a point in the trip when he commandeered her iPhone, downloaded Hipstamatic and started making pictures.

As soon as he returned home, he purchased his own iPhone and it wasn’t long before the news photographer began making pictures for the first time that were truly about him.

His Instagram feed, a body of street photography images that grows larger by the day, has more than 19,000 followers. He loves how Instagram allows him to send pictures directly to people waiting and wanting to see them.

For many users, the quality and accessibility of the iPhone camera means that it is the only camera we need on a regular basis. It may be about to get a whole lot better, too, according to a patent application published by Apple on Thursday — describing a new “super-resolution” mode.

What makes the patent interesting (apart from that it promises higher quality images) is that it suggests that picture resolution could be ramped up without needing more megapixels.

Adobe has launched an intriguing new iPad app called Adobe Voice. Designed to help users “create stunning animated videos in minutes,” the app lets you record an audio message, and then quickly and easily turn it into a slick animation. All you have to do is match your words with a library of 25,000 images, and then Adobe Voice does the rest by adding in transition animations and a backing track.

Ever since the Edward Snowden revelations, the question of how companies like Apple respond to law enforcement and government requests for user information has taken on a new level of importance.

In a new document added to its website, called Legal Process Guidelines U.S. Law Enforcement, Apple provides an overview of how it deals with such requests in North America.

After the retirement of Katie Cotton, the PR who helped craft Apple’s air of mystique, Apple has announced another departure: that of Zane Rowe, who served as the head of North America sales.

The reason for the departure isn’t yet known, but it comes weeks after former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts took over as the new head of retail and online stores. Rowe joined Apple in 2012 from United Continental, where he had been the chief financial officer.

He will be replaced by Doug Beck, who has been key in growing oversees sales in Japan and Korea.

Apple has regained its crown as J.D. Power’s top tablet maker in the world, according to the company’s latest U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.

Samsung knocked the iPad off the top post last year, but after surveying 2,513 tablet owners Apple came out on top in 2014 with a score of 830, dominating in every category except cheapness.