Cult of Mac

For each noble house in the Seven Kingdoms, the choices that leaders make often lead to tragedy and ruin. In Game of Thrones: Ascent, you play as an up-and-coming noble who, through endless decision-making and item crafting, can move a bit closer to the Iron Throne. However, failure and death aren’t a real option in Ascent; instead, it’s all about waiting and paying.

Game of Thrones: Ascent originally launched on Facebook, and it’s a free to play game, so you can expect two things right off the bat. First, this casual game is so basic that you can’t possibly lose — the only consequence for making poor decisions is that you’ll waste some time. Second, there’s a lot of waiting involved, and even the most basic actions can take hours to complete.

How do you convince a jury you’re owed $2 billion in damages? If you’re Apple you hire an MIT-trained economist to do it for you.

While the patent war between Apple and Samsung continues to rage, Apple on Tuesday called economist Chris Vellturo to spell out exactly why Apple is asking to be paid $2 billion in damages ($2.19B to be exact) from arch-rival Samsung for infringing on five of its utility patents.

Editor’s Note: Due to the sheer size of Elder Scrolls Online, we’re publishing our hands-on impressions of the game in three chunks. Part one is here. What follows is part two.

Queen Ayrenn is a modern monarch. She’s definitely trying to do the right thing, but I can hear the weariness in her tone when she tells me about the endless rituals she must complete in order to be accepted by her subjects.

I’m not sure what happened to her during her 17-year absence, nor why she returned to the kingdom at age 28 to inherit the throne of Alinor. Honestly, I don’t much care. What I do care about is that she is tired. She knows these rituals and adventures are necessary, but she finds them tedious, if dangerous.

She’s always glad to see me. I always want to help her. I’ve bonded with Queen Ayrenn, and she’s not even real.

That’s one of the real triumphs of impressive new MMO Elder Scrolls Online: It’s a virtual world, but the individuals you meet there somehow can, at times, seem more realistic than the people you might spend your day next to on the subway.

As ever, take this with a grain of salt, but a new rumor from Taiwan’s Industrial & Commercial Times claims the iPhone 6 will come in two flavors: a 4.7-inch version and a 5.5-inch version. But one of those devices could launch well outside Apple’s customary September window.

Here’s one major way the Samsung Galaxy S5 is superior to the iPhone 5s: If you boil the upcoming Android phone in hot water for two minutes, it’ll still work, while the iPhone 5s will crap out within 30 seconds or so.

Spotlight is crazy useful to find stuff on your Mac. Just hit Command-Space on your keyboard and type in the name of files, words from in text files, the kind of document you want, or even the date when you think it might have been created or modified, and you’ll find it in an instant.

I rarely organize stuff into fine-grained folders anymore due to the power of this one simple to use feature in OS X.

Sometimes, though, I want to know where a found document is — here’s a cool trick to do just that, sent to us from Cult of Mac reader Ivan Manzanilla.

Well, here’s one major way in which the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S5 is superior to the iPhone 5s: if you boil it in hot water for two minutes, it’ll still work, while the iPhone 5s will crap out within about 30 seconds.

Kicking off this Friday, the Coachella Music Festival will become the latest event to use iBeacons to provide proximity-specific information to attendees.

Coachella’s iOS app has been updated with a new Version 3.0 which enables on-site iBeacon notifications for users who enable Location and Bluetooth services.

Are we getting closer to the long-awaited iWatch?

According to a new report, three Apple suppliers have delivered samples of flexible circuit boards for the iWatch — with the device now expected to be unveiled in September.

Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service is on fire in the United States — and that growth happened before Amazon even introduced its $99 Fire TV set-top box.

According to a new report from online-video delivery and caching solutions provider Qwilt, streams on Prime Instant Video have almost tripled over the past year — and in the process have passed both Apple and Hulu in terms of volume of video streaming traffic. The data was gathered from MSO broadband providers that use the Qwilt systems.

PhotoFlip has the beginnings of a great idea, let down by poor implementation. Here’s the idea: The app lets you add notes to the photos you have in your iPhone camera roll, without copying those images. That is, the pictures stay in your regular photo library, and the app just displays them with your text note added underneath.

It’s a great idea right? It uses almost no storage, and doesn’t double up on picture libraries. You can even snap photos from within the app and they’re saved ion the regular camera roll, and everything is synced via iCloud (if you want anyway).

So what’s wrong?

Ever been on a plane and seen some suit squished into his chair, browning his ThinkPad’s screen with his office breath and lining up some pictures and text on a PowerPoint slide? “Jeez,” you think. “Not only is this dork-o inflicting yet more PowerPain on the world, but he thinks it’s important enough to do on a plane.”

Next time you see one of these sad specimens, you might point them in the direction of Deckset, a slideshow maker that works using Markdown.

Would you pay $39 for the convenience of a front-facing USB port in your iMac? If so, you’re gonna love the iMacompanion, which is simultaneously one of the neatest widgets ever, and one of the worst-named gadgets in history.

The little Luxi turns your iPhone’s front camera into a light meter. A what? A light meter, a device that measures the amount of light falling on a subject so that you can set the exposure correctly on your camera.

But wait, doesn’t you camera already set its own exposure? Doesn’t it have a light meter built in for when i want to kick it old school in manual mode? Yes and yes, but this $30 widget might still be handy.

If you’re a Klout user, you’ve probably noticed the service’s huge switch in February: Instead of simply measuring your social-media popularity and throwing you free goodies when you’re ranked up, Klout now actively guides you on your way to Internet stardom by providing more insight and nudging you in the right direction through suggested shares.

Today the Klout iOS app followed suit, bringing all the service’s new features to the iPhone in a major update.

Steve Ballmer. A total doofus, right? The man who said the iPhone was destined to be a failure, who thought the iPad was a dud, who stood in the way of Office being released for the iPad long after it was clear that Windows 8 was a total bust.

Okay, sure, Microsoft’s sweatiest ex-CEO was a bit of an idiot. But to be fair to the man, he did make his amends before he was forced out by incumbent CEO Satya Nadella. In fact, Ballmer’s last oleaginous act as CEO appears to have been greenlighting the release of Office for iPad.

The Tao WellShell is probably unlike any iOS-connected fitness device you’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t simply track steps, or heart rate, or weight, or any of the other standard metrics tracked in dozens of other connected fitness devices. Instead, this little guy actually acts as the fitness device itself, rather than simply a tracker (though it does indeed also track heart rate, steps and sleep patterns).

Office for iPad hasn’t been in the App Store for very long, and it has already done surprisingly well. Microsoft recently bragged that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote have been downloaded 12 million times combined in a week.

Microsoft won’t say how many Office 365 subscriptions have been bought through its new apps. Anyone can download them for free to view documents, but the editing features have to be unlocked with an in-app purchase.

The team behind Office for iPad took to Reddit today to answer questions about how the suite of apps was made, what took so long, and what’s planned for the future. Here are the five most interesting revelations:

Tablets are fantastic little things, right? They entertain us, help us work, make life easier. But if distilled down to its purest essence, a tablet is simply a personal computer neatly tucked away behind an exceptionally portable screen. And if that’s true — that what makes the tablet so amazing is an amazingly portable screen (that, unlike a phone’s screen, is big enough to actually use for things like work, and movies) — then the fully-articulated Flote m2 tablet stand must be the most fantastic accessory you can buy for your tablet. Why? Because it delivers on the promise of being able to position a tablet screen anywhere and any damn way you please. With a few caveats, of course. And if you can afford it.

You may have heard that Comcast wants to buy Time Warner. In a proposal published today that pitches the merger to the FCC, Comcast drops a hint about Apple’s future plans for the TV.

Although by no means a definite indication beyond the previous rumors that something new is coming, Comcast says that Apple is working on a set-top box. Given that Apple and Comcast have been in talks, the cable giant would be in a position to know.

The newly discovered Heartbleed bug is being called the Web’s worst security bug ever.

It allows hackers to steal passwords and login details when users visit vulnerable sites — undetected. That’s the bad part: affected sites probably have no idea they’re vulnerable. The bug is subject to an emergency security advisory. Some experts are estimating that up to 66% of the Internet’s servers could be affected. Each server has to be fixed manually. So it could take a while.

In the meantime:

• Don’t log into any sites until you’ve officially been given the all clear.
• Change all your passwords for websites and email. Especially for sensitive sites like banks, credit cards and webmail. However: wait until you know a site has been patched before changing passwords. Sites like Tumblr and Yahoo sent out warning emails earlier today telling users to change their passwords.
• Apple.com and iCloud appear to be unaffected, according to this (unofficial) list on Github.
• Install the Chromebleed Checker for Google’s Chrome browser — it pops a warning if a site is vulnerable (Cult of Mac is not. See screenshot below).

We’ve reached out to Apple’s PR department for comment. No reply yet. We’ll update if Apple makes any statement or issues an advisory.

Back in the early 1990s there was a series of handheld games consoles made by Japan’s Epoch company. Called Barcode Battlers, they let you enter the numbers from real world barcodes to generate characters, monsters, and power-ups, which could be used as part of in-game battles. Novelty aside, they were never much good, but they were certainly popular — and the idea was intriguing enough that the Barcode Battlers are still remembered today.

If you didn’t win the lottery for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, you’re in good company. For the third year in a row, AltConf is hosting a get-together for the rest of us.

Formerly called AltWWDC, the conference will boost Fog City’s already-high nerd quotient by hundreds of developers who didn’t get the golden tickets. AltConf will be held in parallel to WWDC at the Children’s Creativity Museum in Yerba Buena Center near Moscone West — which means that haves and have-nots will be waiting at the same stoplights and heading to the same bars after hours.

The hit game Doodle Jump was one of the first and most popular games to hit iOS in 2009. Since then many updates have been made to the app enhancing and continuing its platform hopping and monster obliterating gameplay. Just recently the very same developers behind the famous Doodle have released a new app for their fans called Doodle Jump Race. Go head-to-head in online races as you help your doodle come across the finish line first. Do you think you have what it takes to win?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

Yes, we’re reviewing a paper notebook. The thing is – spoiler – this one is awesome. Forget Moleskine, which is nice marketing wrapped in faux leather wrapped around thin, porous, easy-bleeding pages. The Baron Fig Confidant is what you want.

It’s packed with clever “features,” and yet you don’t notice the book at all when you’re using it. Does any of that sound familiar to you Apple users?