Kris Van de Sande’s distorted pictures of Dadipark, an abandoned Belgian amusement park, weren’t made under ideal circumstance, but they capture the distressed carnival atmosphere of the decaying attraction perfectly.

The look comes from a stroke of bad luck: While on a 2011 photographic pilgrimage to the modern ruins, Van de Sande’s gear crapped out and he was forced to make due with a loaner.

“I was limited very much with the equipment so I borrowed a fisheye lens,” he says over FaceTime from his home in Hasselt, Belgium. “I’m not a big fan of the fisheye thing but I tried to shoot as if it was just a wide-angle.”

A new survey, reportedly taken from a sample of 50,000 smartphone users around the world, reveals the reasons consumers made the phone purchasing decisions they did.

According to IDC’s findings, battery life is the number one most important factor when it comes to choosing a smartphone — coming above ease of use, screen size, camera resolution, and touch screen. When asked, almost half of all iPhone owners quizzed named battery life as the main reason for their selecting the device.

As if the reported $3.2 billion Beats deal isn’t enough evidence, Apple seems to be quite big on this “music” thing.

According to new reports, Apple will introduce high definition audio playback in iOS 8, alongside new versions of its In-Ear Headphones. The iOS rumor corresponds with earlier reports that Apple will announce high-fidelity iTunes music downloads at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). As it currently stands, iOS 7’s standard Music app can’t play high quality 24-bit audio files which contain a sampling frequency beyond 48 kHz.

Apple might be among the companies which settled the Silicon Valley anti-poaching dispute out of court last month, but one plaintiff isn’t happy — calling the $324 million settlement “grossly inadequate.”

The trial was supposed to begin at the end of May, which would have potentially led to months of revelations about Apple’s anti-poaching practices. Ultimately the four tech companies involved, including Apple and Google, settled for $324 million: a figure substantially lower than the $3 billion in damages requested by the suit, or the $9 billion which could have been awarded if the defendants were found to be guilty in court.

Microsoft Office for iPad only landed six weeks ago, but Microsoft claims it’s already been downloaded a whopping 27 million times.

The figure was thrown out by Julia White, the general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, who mentioned it during a keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s TechEd customer conference in Houston.

Look, making an app that will run on your iPhone is hard.

Luckily, adsy.me just made it chimp simple for normal folks like you or I to make a mobile app right on your iOS, Android or computer. You don’t need to download anything, learn to code, or even leave your touchscreen.

Make an app to show off your disco band, complete with links to Soundcloud, or share recipes with your friends, linking them to your favorite chef sites. Explain your passion project and connect your Twitter followers to a wealth of knowledge that you can curate on your very own mobile app.

Seriously, if you want to make a mobile app and have no clue about C++ or Xcode compilers or other such fooferaw, adsy.me is your best bet.

The iWatch may be set to mark Apple’s debut into health and fitness tracking, but one company is taking the concept of wearables a step further.

The forthcoming $199 OMsignal shirt promises to be the gym wear of the future — featuring a ton of health sensors sewn into its fabric, which constantly monitor the condition of the wearer. Sensors are capable of tracking heart rate, breathing rate, breathing volume, movement (including steps and cadence), movement intensity, heart rate variability, and calories burned.

“The data is sent via Bluetooth to a specially developed iPhone app, which lets you see all of it in real time,” says Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the firm’s Chief Medical Officer. “Your iPhone beams the data up to the cloud, and algorithms we’ve developed then push back various metrics — showing you information about your breathing during workouts, and information like that.”

Apple’s biggest acquisition ever is all the tech world can talk about, and Apple hasn’t even confirmed the news yet.

Last week it was reported that Apple has plans to acquire Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. Shortly after the news broke, Beats co-founder and legendary producer Dr. Dre called himself the “first billionaire in hip-hop.”

Now Dre and music industry tycoon Jimmy Iovine are rumored to appear onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next month. What exactly the future holds for Apple and Beats remains unclear, but here are five things to know about the monumental deal:

It’s easy to quickly fill up your camera roll on your iOS device with tons of different photos. While you have photos of different types and categories, creating albums is good to maintain a sort of organization and sanity on your device. In today’s episode of Cult of Mac’s how-to learn how to add new photos to your existing albums and more.

Take a look at the video to see what to do.

The icon-tiled interface of iOS could use more than just a flat facelift from Jony Ive to feel more modern and even though jailbreakers have enjoyed widgets for years, maybe it’s time Apple added them in Control Center.

This iOS 8 concept from Ryan Gilsdorf envisions widgets coming to iOS 8 through Control Center where users can swipe between music, calendar, weather and third-party widgets to control apps from the homescreen.

Take a look at the full concept video below:

We’ve all got them: the freaky friends. Those who comment on and like every. single. status update.

Those who post long, ranting political polemics to your happy cat poster images. The friends that creep you out in a subtle, yet plausibly deniable way.

Or maybe there’s the friends you want to get your freak on with who really don’t need to see you in those embarrassing photo updates that you send to your frat brothers.

However you rank your friends, Facebook has some non-intuitive list tools to help you finely tune your groups of friends. Here’s how to use them, and then how to view your profile through the lens of any specific person on your friends list, to make sure your list tweak was effective.

I have a confession to make: I wear socks with sandals.

That’s not so bad in itself — I live in Germany, where otherwise-rational men wear socks, sandals and fanny packs all at the same time, and women still talk to them.

The kicker is that I started this habit when I lived in Spain. The reason? Keen’s amazing outdoor Clearwater CNX sandals.

Have you ever experienced that giddy feeling of good fortune when a slot machine starts pouring out quarters, or a winning poker hand lets you put your arms around a big pile of chips and pull them towards your side of the table? Dragon Coins, a combination arcade “coin-pusher” and casual RPG, recreates that feeling every time you play.

It’s a dangerous precedent. Dragon Coins literally piles on the treasure when you’re on a roll, emulating the psychological appeal of casinos. As long as you are able to put the game down from time to time, or grind out low-level battles to earn extra experience, you probably won’t end up mortgaging your home or draining your kid’s college fund to pay for this game.

If silence is golden then Twitter’s new mute feature is like King Midas, turning every annoying miscreant and troll in your feed into an unseeable nothing.

The new mute feature is rolling out today for people who use Twitter on iPhone, Android, and Twitter.com. Mute let’s you take more control of the content in your feed by completely banning some users from showing up in your timeline.

Apple is planning to rollout a new 8GB iPhone 5c in India starting this June in hopes to turn the country into it’s next booming market.

India was one of the few places you could still buy an iPhone 4 until last week when Apple pulled phone from the country. A cheaper iPhone 5c will aim to boost Apple’s marketshare in a smartphone market dominated by Sony and Samsung.

Square has been at the forefront of mobile payments for years now, thanks largely to the popularity of its white card reader that’s used by merchants everywhere.

Now the company is debuting a brand new app called Square Order, and it does away with the need for a cash register completely. The introduction of Square Order also means the death of Square Wallet, a failed experiment that Order hopes to correct.

We’re excited to bring you 15 web design and online marketing e-books, written by some of the world’s most respected web designers and entrepreneurs in this packaged of resources we’ve dubbed The Dream Big Entrepreneur E-Book Bundle.

Featuring Digging Into WordPress by WordPress all-stars Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr, plus 3 best selling e-books by SmashingMagazine, 3 e-books by Learnable, Mastering App Presentation, Conversations with Design Entrepreneurs, and more – this is a hand-picked collection of some of the best-selling e-books on the web. This anthology of literary greatness would typically cost over $400, but it’s yours for just $25 during this limited time offer.

Instapaper v5.2 adds familiar yellow-marker highlights to your saved articles. This doesn’t sound like much, but it will change how you use the read-later service. Instapaper is the O.G read-it-later app, letting you save those longer articles you find on the web, in Twitter, in your RSS reader or anywhere else. You send these articles off to Instapaper via a bookmarklet (or using the third-party integration from many apps), whereupon they are cleaned of clutter and saved for you to read off line.

This seemingly small update changes the game. Before, Instapaper was a transient place for long-form articles — you’d read them and then archive them. Now it’s a place to organize and revisit articles, turning your collection of clippings into a library of annotated notes. And for the makers, it represents a way to make more money for the app, by finally adding a killer reasons for us to buy the $1-per-month subscription.

Apple is making it quicker than ever to return unwanted iPhones and other gadgets purchased online with a new policy that gives customers refunds twice as fast.

In an effort to boost direct sales from its website, Apple has decided to take a big upfront cost on returns, according to Reuters, but the small move could give it the boost it needs to compete with Amazon and Best Buy online.

HYPER by Sanho – the company behind the Hyperjuice batteries for Macbooks and iPads have just launched their latest creation to the world through Kickstarter.

The iStick is essentially a USB stick with the dual use of connecting it to your iPhone 5, 5s, iPod Touch and iPads with it’s Apple certified lightning connector, which is great if you have a internet connection that is too slow in the office for cloud based storage, or if you’re on the road and want to watch a couple of movies without eating into your data plan.

Maybe you’re trying to quit smoking or drinking, or maybe you’re just curious how much coffee you drink or how often you go to the gym. You have to track all that stuff somewhere, and Countability wants to be that place.

You can add anything you want to keep track of and tick them off with just a swipe and a tap. It’ll handle the graphing and numbers for you, and you can look at daily, monthly, and annual numbers.

I haven’t really had that many bikini waxes, by the way. That’s just the number of times I’ve overheard people discussing them in public.

Source:Countability – $0.99 | Bobinair

If you like rhythm games at all, stop reading right now and go download Record Run.

I can elaborate if you insist, but here’s what you need to know: It’s from the developer of Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central. It’s a colorful runner with simple gameplay and personality for days. And with a few taps, the game will make a level from any song stored on your iOS device.

Oh, and it’s free. Just go get it right now.

To me, the 1976 Gibson Explorer means lust at first sight, love at first feel and that rarest of man-machine crushes: an enduring passion that persists long after I plunked down my hard-earned cash.

Gibson’s luthiers prototyped the Explorer (alongside pointy siblings the Flying V and the apocryphal Moderne) in the ’50s. The space race was on, rock ‘n’ roll was coming into its own and cars boasted bold curves and sci-fi fins. The Explorer and Flying V were released in 1958, a year after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. (The Moderne didn’t makes its official debut until 1982.)

Like the beautiful but doomed Power Mac G4 Cube, the radically shaped guitars were clearly ahead of their time: These pointy instruments, which years later would become staples of heavy metal and hard-rock style, flopped hard. Gibson discontinued both lines within a few years.

In 1976, spurred by the success of competitors’ Explorer clones, Gibson came to its senses and reissued the Explorer. The natural mahogany finish on the best of these, much like the lighter Korina of the original models, gave the strangely shaped guitars a retro-futuristic look. That marriage of old and new is coming back into fashion now as designers tumble to the innate beauty of natural materials.

Bouncing, huffing and puffing through a beautifully-rendered cartoon world, avoiding jagged rolling wheels and collecting coins, Leo’s Fortune may just be the year’s most lovable iPhone game. But which games did its creators fall in love with?

Following our exclusive look inside behind the scenes of Apple’s iPhone “game of the month,” we asked Leo’s Fortune designer Anders Hejdenberg to name his current top five iOS games. He said he’s most impressed by titles that pair intriguing artwork with novel gameplay mechanics.

The highly imaginative Monument Valley, for instance, won him over quickly. “It didn’t take long to finish,” says Hejdenberg of his experience playing the game, “but during that time I experienced quite a few moments where I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ That rarely happens when I play games, so it was definitely worth the price of admission.”

Here are the other iOS games currently taking his breath away. (You’ll find download links available below the gallery.)

iMacs are an investment, but when year after year newer, more powerful iMacs are released it can make you feel a little disheartened. In this quick and simple Sunday Tips video, Ste Smith will show you how upgrade your iMac’s (2009-2011) ram so it’s faster and more powerful than the day you brought it home.

Crucial Ram Scanner