Swann’s bottomless lineup of security and wifi cameras — the company even sells a camera that isn’t actually a camera — has just added a new model, with a unusual twist.
In addition to all the high-tech bells and whistles one might expect from a high-end wifi camera (like the ability to view the feed from an iOS or Android device through an accompanying app) the new SwannSecure also eddddcomes with its own wireless, 7-inch touchscreen monitor.
iPhone 6 component leaks have begun erupting up like wildfires the past week, setting the web ablaze with promises of a bigger iPhone, but according to some new leaked photos Apple is also tweaking the design of the iPad Air to be thinner than ever.
Bluetooth Guitar Pedal Will Thrill Your Ears But Hurt Your Brain
IK Multimedia is responsible for a veritable boat-load of music peripherals and apps, like the hard-rocking guitar crunch of effects app Amplitube and the portable MIDI keyboard iRig Keys. If you’re a musician interested in working with iOS devices on stage, IK Multimedia is the place to go.
It was with excitement, then, that I opened the latest review gadget from the musical company, the iRig BlueBoard, a small footprint Bluetooth-enabled pedal board meant to help you switch effects in a guitar app like Amplitube or piano sounds in something like iLectric Piano, both IK Multimedia apps.
The BlueBoard is a great idea, especially if you’re working with a guitar or keyboard hooked up to an iPad or iPhone. Being able to switch settings on the fly with a foot-operated switch is something I do all the time with my analog guitar foot pedals. Having it do so via Bluetooth is even better, as it won’t take up the 30-pin or Lightning connector, leaving that free to connect a guitar or MIDI interface, like the iRig HD guitar adapter or the iRig Keys.
Unfortunately, that’s where the great idea stops and the difficult to figure out begins.
Garageband has forever changed the way weekend headbangers create music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs and available in the Mac App store for free, it gives brand new as well as seasoned musicians a way to record all kinds of music, letting them connect real instruments, MIDI devices and microphones to the Mac for easy music sessions.
It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.
The latest version of Garageband, 10.0.2, offers an amazing new piece of kit called Drummer. This one deserves a standing ovation. For years, I’ve used Garageband to mock up demos for my disco band. (Yes, we do weddings.) Anyway, the software makes putting together a quick multi-track song super simple and I’ve always enjoyed making sound loops–especially drum loops–to give my demos a more professional feel than I’ve ever been able to with a drum machine or synthesizer module.
I’m a guitar player who understands vocals, bass, and drum parts, so it’s usually pretty simple to drag Garageband loops to the editing area then let the software make everything sync up easily. The Smart features of Garageband have made it chimp simple for me to create an entire song without touching an instrument besides my guitar.
Garageband’s latest feature, though, way above what drum loops could ever do — it’ll make you want to sway with a flickering lighter like a stoned fanboy in utter appreciation.
So. Drummer offers several ways to make it sound as if Neal Peart is banging on his 360-degree drum kit from your humble home studio. Simply click on a drummer profile to customize the sound and feel of that virtual drummer’s playing in real time with just a few clicks and drags. What would take quite a bit of time with drum loops is now seamless and simple. Garageband is simply taking care of changing drum loops in the background, but what comes out of the speakers will be music to your ears.
You’d be playing a different tune (probably to the ca-ching of several thousand dollars) to get this kind of subtlety from a drum machine or drum loops — or giving it up for your own damn drummer. Garageband’s new Drummer feature gives all of that to us for free. Free!
Ok, so the basic package comes equipped with one drummer (Kyle), but still. TK KYLE’S DRUMMING STYLE. But an entire troop of 18 timpanists will set struggling musicians back just $4.99. Heck, Apple just added three new ones (plus a seriously useful MP3 export function) just last month, FOR THE SAME IN-APP PURCHASE?
All of this to say: you’ve now got a fully responsive session drummer with personality, style, and variety sitting on your Mac, just waiting for your latest song idea. Each drummer gets their own custom kit with its own specific sound, just like a real drummer.
While the latest version of this fantastic (and free!) music production suite has lost some functionality like podcasting and Magic Garageband, it still has plenty to recommend it for those new to music or old vets alike.
One of these cool features is the Learn to Play function, which has some pretty good basic music tutorials baked right in, along with the capability to purchase videos from hit artists like Sting and Norah Jones, who teach you how to play some of their famous songs.
It’s a pretty heady set of music learning; here’s how to access it. Getting really good at your instrument will take more than watching a video or three, but this is a great start if you want to try your hand at the guitar or piano.
When you travel with a Mac laptop, whether a Macbook Pro or Air, you may be leaving it open to malicious users to get into your machine.
One of the things you can do to keep them out of your precious files is to turn off File Sharing completely. Then, if you still want to share files with other Mac users, you can use AirDrop, which is more of a temporary opening of the security gates than File Sharing is.
Note that you can indeed improve security while using File Sharing on and setting up your Firewall with specific ports, but that’s the subject of a different tip.
Enter another dimension in the new app Unpossible. Dodge all incoming obstacles as you use tilt or touch controls running your way along a 3D pipeline. Avoid hitting obstacles at all costs as speeds increase and obstacles get harder to see. Do you think you can dodge your way to the top of the high-score charts?
Take a look at the video and see what you think.
You can also check out an interview with the developer behind Unpossible here: https://www.cultofmac.com/270311/play-cult-mac-game-developers-conference-liveblog/#liveblog-entry-157439
Apple revolutionized your iPhone’s camera with the introduction of the 5S, but you can unlock its full potential with this deal from Cult of Mac Deals.
The Ultimate iPhone Lens Kit arms you with six different lenses so you can take virtually any kind of photo in any imaginable situation – from microscopic organisms to full-blown landscapes. And Cult of Mac Deals has this incredible iPhone 5S accessory for 65% off the regular price for a limited time. That’s right. You can get The Ultimate iPhone Lens Kit for just $69 through this offer!
If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.
It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.
Nevermind; just use it for intervals.
If you like Threes but wish it was less numbery and more Tetris-like, SideSwype might be for you.
It’s a puzzler in which you, you know, swipe. To the side. And when you do that, you move every block on the board as far as it can go in that direction. So you might want to plan ahead a little.
Your goal is to line up three or more blocks of the same color to clear them, and it throws in some complications and special pieces too because otherwise it would be boring. But luckily, it has those things, and it is not boring.
The Hitman series has always alternated between vicious and silly, with a stern protagonist who will wear any kind of ridiculous costume, from ice-cream man to Mardi Gras costume, in order to murder his target. Hitman GO, a new turn-based puzzle game from Square Enix, doesn’t give you extensive dress-up options, but it is a refreshingly smart take on the series.
Hitman GO sanitizes the series’ violence by turning it into a simulated board game, with a satisfying number of missions and challenge. Presented as a collection of boxed sets with very little background audio, it’s a dramatic departure from the console games’ over-the-shoulder view and stealthy gameplay. You don’t creep in Go, but instead slide your Hitman game piece along grooves in the board, toppling other pieces when their backs are turned.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a digital collectible card game in the vein of Magic: The Gathering, only set in the high-fantasy World of Warcraft universe. The Mac and PC version came out last month after an extended open beta period.
What may not be apparent from the above is that Hearthstone is hands down the best card battler I’ve ever played. Putting it on iPad makes it that much more habit-forming. The game is full of awesome and bad Scottish accents, which makes it all the better. (“UUUUUUUUUther versus Jaaaaaaynuh.”)
It’s really not fair — I was just starting to leave the iPad at home in favor of only the Macbook Pro in my bag. Now I need to take the tablet with me once again.
One of Apple’s most famous patents is slide-to-unlock, a method of waking up a touchscreen smartphone that has proven to be one of the most valuable in Apple’s arsenal. Now, Apple is trying to patent a similar system that would use gestures to unlock an iPhone. And if that sounds familiar, it should, because Android already does it.
It’s looking like it might be a dreary quarter for Apple. Not only has iPhone growth pretty much leveled off, but most Wall Street analysts believe that when Apple announces its quarterly numbers, iPad sales will have actually declined year over year. Is Wall Street wrong?
It’s not often that a company announces that they’ve figured out a way to make people stop paying for a piece of hardware by purposely making it obsolete, but that’s just what Sonos has done.
Sonos has just announced that thanks to clever programming, they have figured out a way to make their $50 Sonos Bridge device — a gadget that plugs into your router to allows you to stream music in perfect sync to the Sonos speakers throughout your house — completely obsolete.
As a guy running upwards of seven miles a day to get in shape for his imminent nuptials, Runkeeper is my favorite exercise tracking app, but you have to consciously remember to use it. But Runkeeper now has a new trick up its sleeve: Breeze, an activity tracker that taps into your iPhone 5s’s M7 motion processor to subtly guide you into living a more active life.
Well-known Dutch designer and concept artist Martin Hajek has created a new iPhone 6 rendering, which might just be the most accurate one to date.
Hajek had previously teamed up with Nowherelse to create a stunning mock-up based on the recently leaked schematics discovered by Macotakara apparently showing the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch variants of the iPhone 6.
With the recent case leak, Hajek revised his designs to show everything we currently know (or think we know) about Apple’s next iPhone.
Move over FarmVille, Candy Crush and all those other freemium games whose developers (presumably) sleep on top of a pile of money with beautiful ladies in it — we may have a new contender for app overlord of 2014.
Blizzard’s turn-based iPad game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was released Thursday, but already it’s the No. 1 most downloaded game in 36 countries, and the most downloaded app overall in 34 countries.
Apple isn’t being valued as a creative leap company so much as it is a predictable cash machine, says former CEO John Sculley.
Speaking with India’s Economic Times about the launch of his latest venture, pCell — a technology that allows huge amounts of data to travel on spectrum-crunched wireless networks, while offering faster speeds and fewer call drops to customers — Sculley gave his opinion of Apple’s current situation:
“Google and Apple are like ATMs, they just keep generating cash. Google takes more risk than Apple. Apple tends to stay the course, and this year is a very big year for Apple in terms of products. It’s not clear that they’re going to demonstrate a creative leap this year despite the products, like they did when Steve Jobs was leader. I think it’s probably unfair to expect them to have a creative leap every five years.”
One of the cool things about the era of over-the-air updates is that developers can add tweaks and features specific to certain times of the year, without having to build them in from the start.
That’s what EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game has done for Easter, adding in features specific to this time of year as a way of giving a seasonal nod to Simpsons’ fans. In the same way that the game was overrun with snakes for Whacking Day, so too for Easter has Springfield been overtaken by bloodthirsty bunnies, which players must stun into submission.
Remember that old slang phrase from the 90s: “Talk to the hand, because the face ain’t listening?”
Apple seems to be taking a similar tack — except that you can substitute “talk to the hand” to “upgrade to iOS 7,” and “because the face ain’t listening” to “because FaceTime is no longer working on iOS 6.”
First spotted in a thread on the Apple Support Communities mini-site, a number of users running iOS 6-powered devices have reported an inability to either make or receive FaceTime calls. According to them, this problem dates back to April 16.
Like its predecessor, the new prototype Linkase Pro LTE iPhone case supposedly boosts your iPhone’s ability to connect to the Internet. But where the previous version was claimed to strengthen the iPhone’s wifi radio, this new LTE version is supposed to boost, you guessed it, your iPhone’s LTE data radio. Absolute Technology, the company behind the case, also claims it will add 20 percent to your battery life due to less power wasted while trying to send and receive data.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
Enjoy!
The Afghan Whigs – Do To The Beast
The Afghan Whigs haven’t released an album in over 16 years, but that streak finally dies with the release of Do to the Beast. Rather than picking up right where they left off, the Whigs have shunned 90s nostalgia and leaned on influences in R&B, soul and funk, for an album that’s rich, dark, and raw even if it misses the mark as a true rock album.
iTunes – $9.99
August Alsina – Testimony
August Alsina first broke big when his single “I Luv This S**t” became a viral hit in 2013, and although some fans are worried he might be coming on too hot, he’s ready to mine his hip-hop connections for gold in his debut album, Testimony, that features appearances by Young Jeezy, Pusha T, Rick Ross, B.o.B., Chris Brown, and Yo Gotti. But August is never overshadowed by his rap overlords, thanks to his sweet evocative vocals that are something of a mashup between Usher and Omarion.
iTunes – $13.99
Chet Faker – Built on Glass
Melbourne-based Chet Faker established himself as one of the most alluring voices in electro-soul thanks to his cover of “No Diggity” in 2012 and the series of sultry singles that followed. Built on Glass, his first full-length album, is a swirl of blues-inflected ruminations on love, loss, desire and emotional desolation. Combined with spare beats, hypnotic samples and yearning melodies, Built On Glass is an imaginative, soulful delight.
iTunes – $9.99
Creativity Inc.
by Ed Catmull
Thousands of books have tried to formulate the secrets of creativity, but as one of the co-founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull is uniquely positioned to dispense advice on creativity in business. In Creativity Inc., he explores the lessons learned while creating some of the most beloved animated films of the last 20 years and the ideals and techniques that made Pixar so widely admired – and so profitable.
iTunes – $11.99
Can’t and Won’t
by Lydia Davis
Rick Moody once called Lydia David “the best prose stylist in America,” but you can make that judgement for yourself as her fifth collection of stories Can’t and Won’t hits iTunes this week, demonstrating all the power of her sly humor and finely honed prose, as her stories seek to untangle the predictable patterns of daily life.
iTunes – $12.99
WAR! What Is It Good For?
by Ian Morris
Ian Morris’s new book makes our list for its excellent title alone (seriously, no one else thought to name a book after the popular song?), but there’s more to WAR! than just its catchy title as Morris explores one of history’s greatest paradoxes to see how war has changed our society for the better. With all of those unmarked tanks edging towards chaos in Ukraine, it’s a timely read.
iTunes – $12.99
The Unknown Known
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the most powerful men behind the scenes in Washington for over three decades. In this shocking documentary about the use and abuse of American power, Academy Award winner Errol Morris sits down with the former United States Secretary of Defense to discuss his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
iTunes – $6.99
Joe
Nicholas Cage is the probably the most hit-or-miss Academy winner of all time, which makes recommending any movie he’s in tricky. This one, however, is a safe bet: Cage has his best role in years with a film about a hard-living ex-con who inexplicably becomes a role model to a 15-year old homeless boy as he teeters between redemption and ruin.
iTunes – $6.99
Beneath the Harvest Sky
Fans of Game of Thrones will enjoy seeing Aiden Gillen (who plays sinister Little Finger in the HBO series) put his devilish charm to good use in Beneath the Harvest Sky. Here he plays an outlaw character teaches his struggling teen son the business of smuggling drugs in an indie film that was all the hype at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
iTunes – $4.99
RadioShack has one of those deals coming tomorrow that’s just too good to pass up. Starting April 18th, the 16GB iPhone 5s will be sold in RadioShack stores for only $99 with a two-year contract on AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. That’s a 50% discount off the retail $199 value.
And that’s not all; iPhone 4s owners get an even sweeter deal. If you’re upgrading from eligible an iPhone 4s, you get a $100 trade-in credit on top of the $99 5s price. So you could effectively get a 5s for free.
No word on how long the promotion will last, so head to your local RadioShack tomorrow if you’re interested.
Source: RadioShack
Flickr’s redesigned mobile apps, which are out today, look very much Instagram. And I think it’s safe to say that the design decision was intentional. The question now is whether Flickr can set itself apart with its pro-friendly features and more free cloud storage than most know what to do with.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include _____, _____, and _____.
Here you go:
This new self-improvement app from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance has a simple premise: Trying to do everything is hard, but doing one thing isn’t.
Sounds obvious, but what you do here is select a few habits you’d like to form; pre-loaded examples include drinking more water, inviting friends over, and going to bed early. You can also devise your own if you want to do something that isn’t on the list. The app sets goals, and you check them off when you do them. Eventually, you can “commit” to doing a thing without prompting and start on something else.
Do One Thing by SCCA – Free | 2Morrow Mobile
I know that your iPhone already has a calculator in it, but here’s a specialty app for people who suffer from the curse of Man Thumbs.
SwipyCalc is a basic calculator that gives all the screen space to the numbers. Only the numbers. You enter your basic functions — adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing — with swipes in one of four directions. It’s fast and easy, especially once you realize that the comma in the lower left corner is what you use for a decimal point.
Unless you’re in one of the 60+ countries that uses the decimal comma. That won’t slow you down at all.
SwipyCalc – Free | Domenico Scalambrino
Spring is here, and–holy crap, do you see that bird? No, the other bird. It’s over by the tree. No, the tree by the shrub. Yeah. That bird there. Do we have those here, or is it some kind of bird-stranger?
Local Birds will help keep inane, interminable thought processes like that one from happening. You tell it your location, and it shows you birds in order of commonality to your region. So when I told people the other day that I saw a Western Scrub Jay, and they were like, “Nuh-uh,” and I was all, “Uh-huh”?
I can totally prove that that was possible now.
Local Birds – Free | Thomas Benner
This isn’t the most practical app for everyone, but it’s certainly interesting to look at.
Re(play) features six clips of athletes being all athletic and stuff. High-speed cameras captured the footage at 236 frames per second, and you can either watch the maneuvers play out or scrub back and forth to study the movements in detail. That could be nice for people studying movement for art or animation.
But even if you don’t have any professional or artistic need for Re(play), it’s really just kind of hypnotic to watch.
I don’t know if I’m just ridiculously clumsy or what, but I’ve had times where I saw something happening that I wanted to record, and by the time I got my camera app up and switched over to video, that thing had stopped happening. And regret is a powerful thing.
So Blink (or [Blink], if you’re super fancy) is a new app that starts recording the instant you open it; it also lets you take still photos while capturing with a single button press. And that’s slightly faster than opening your iPhone’s camera and then fumbling my stupid, giant thumb around trying to switch to video.
I feel like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial when that happens.