Cult of Mac

The creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, has practically gone off the grid since he suddenly pulled his viral hit from the App Store last month. The 28-year-old Vietnamese developer said his game had become “too addictive,” and Flappy Bird was no more.

At the height of Flappy Bird’s popularity, the game was making Nguyen $50,000 per day in ads. Now about a third of all games submitted to the App Store are Flappy Bird knockoffs.

In his first interview since pulling Flappy Bird, Nguyen told Rolling Stone that he is considering bringing it back. The interview also touches on why Nguyen made Flappy Bird to begin with, what it was like for him when the game got successful, and what his plans are for the future. It’s a great read.

Source: Rolling Stone

I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.

Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.

“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”

Ever wonder what’s going on in the skies above you at any given time? If you’re interested in airline flights in the air over your head, you can just ask Siri.

The personal digital assistant will check WolframAlpha for you and drop you a great little chart of the planes in the air overhead.

Wireless charging is a beautiful concept that fails to live up to its promise in reality. That’s not to say it’s unusable – far from it. I’d put wireless charging pads in the same place as Wi-Fi was some years back – useful when it works, but frustrating to get working properly.

The little iQi panel goes some way to fixing up the main problem of wireless charging on the iPhone. Because it’s not built in, you usually need a bulky case to pair with the charger itself. The iQi is so tiny it can be used with any case.

Day One has been one of the most popular journaling apps in the App Store for years, and it has always stuck to its guns: privately storing your thoughts and memories. But what about when you want to share something with your friends?

Today Day One is introducing Publish, a way to do exactly that.

Apple’s five day music festival is set to start today at SXSW in Austin Texas, but rather than making content available only on iTunes or Apple TV, the company has partnered with Vevo to help stream the event live.

Music fans can plug into the event live on Vevo’s website, but you’ll have to use a Safari browser. Shows will also be viewable on iTunes, Apple TV, and the iTunes Festival app for iOS.

The free concert series kicks off tonight with Coldplay, and features acts like Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Schoolboy Q, Soundgarden, Pit Bull, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson and others throughout the week.

Up until now, iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 has been painful to use. The New York Times calls it “planned obsolescence,” but it’s really just old hardware having a difficult time powering new software.

The good news is that the newly released iOS 7.1 has noticeably sped up animations on the iPhone 4, reports Ars Technica. “iOS 7.1 solves the problem for people who don’t tweak their devices’ settings or for people who like the way the animations look but not how they feel,” according to Ars. “Animation durations have been shortened noticeably throughout iOS 7.1, and toggling “reduce motion” is now purely cosmetic.”

Apps open generally faster, and opening interfaces like Control Center feels smoother. Since iOS 7.1 will likely be the last major update that’s available on the iPhone 4, there is no reason to not download it.

Source: Ars Technica

Now that you know where to find all those DVDs, video games, and CDs with Shot and Find, you might want something to read. All Librarist needs is an ISBN, a keyword, or a quick scan of a barcode, and it’ll let you compare prices from stores all over the world.

The scanning works really well, and it includes an impressive selection of stores to choose from. Now if only it actually had some way to give me more time to read, it would pretty much be the perfect app.

Source:Librarist – Free | Droid Ltd

Grabbing an Apple exec for your board of directors has become somewhat of trend lately among prominent companies. Nike, Ferrari, Goldman Sachs, and even Vail Ski Resorts have done it, and now GoDaddy is the latest to join the ranks.

Wave Wave reminds me of the end of a story called “Blind Alleys” from an old Tales from the Crypt comic. It’s about the residents of a home for the blind seeking revenge on their unscrupulous caregiver by setting him loose in a maze lined with razor blades with a starving dog. He’s running from the beast, slashing himself to ribbons but still staying ahead, “And then some idiot turned out the lights.”

Why does this twitchy arcade game remind me of that sadistic story? Because it hates me in the same way, starting me out at a disadvantage and then continuing to throw in sudden changes until I lose.

It’s a random, cruel, mechanical bull of a game, and you should absolutely play it.

We all love our music and MixTape is all about that elusive perfect mix.

MixTape Pro will help you create, experiment, and publish the results onto the web or directly into iTunes. You can share your pro creations with friends or jam out by yourself. And right now you can save a bunch of money on MixTape Pro because Cult of Mac Deals has this simple and elegant app available for 50% off during this limited time offer. That’s right – you can get MixTape Pro for just $24.99!

iTunes Radio has barely been around for six months but after launching alongside iOS 7 in the U.S., Apple’s music streaming service has already knocked Spotify off the #3 spot among the most popular music streaming services in the country.

Apple wants Samsung to pay a $40 license fee for every smartphone and tablet it sells after the South Korean company infringed five patents with a number of Galaxy-branded devices.

That’s right… just five patents, $40 for every device. It’s a pretty surprising demand — especially after Apple recently stated that monetary damages were “not an adequate remedy” for Samsung’s patent infringing ways.

Apple might have added a bunch of new features for iOS 7.1, but not all of them are available in every single market.

Thanks to Apple’s “iOS 7 Feature Availability” webpage, however, it is possible for international users to easily check which features are supported in which countries. Apple’s CarPlay, for example, is currently available in just thirteen markets, while Siri’s more advanced features — included restaurant and movie reviews — to limited to even less than that.

Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age. Launching and switching programs takes longer, simple tasks become arduous, and the dreaded beach ball of doom appears more often. The Operating System just starts to feel crufty, and can get worse over time. I see these issues in my IT consulting business regularly.

You may be asking, why does this happen? There are many reasons, but some are more common than others. Sometimes your hard disk (or SSD) gets too full and interferes with normal computer operations. Crashes or misbehaving programs can corrupt the disk directory or application cache files. Remnants from old software may still be running behind the scenes, or you don’t have enough RAM to deal with your OS and workflow.

OK, so is there some sort of tune up or spring cleaning you can do that sorts it out? Your tech always tells you to just reboot the computer, but there’s got to be more than that. The good news: yes, there are some things you can do. And, perhaps, adopt some more efficient computing practices for yourself along the way.

Apple has made some changes to its Customer Loyalty Program, adding new items and increasing the discount offered on existing ones.

The discounts — which quietly went into effect last week — are on offer to people who spend upwards of $5,000 on Apple products in a 12-month period, making this a loyalty program targeted predominately at companies and education customers.

Companies like Apple using specially commissioned shuttle buses to ferry employees back and forth from San Francisco have caused their fair share of problems in the past.

Wanting to find out just how often the buses traveled past his house, Wired writer Kevin Poulsen recently decided to start monitoring the local Wi-Fi environment to see how often the Wi-Fi equipped buses registered.

In a world in which the iPhone camera is good enough to be most people’s primary camera, the days of low-grade cellphones pics are a thing of the past (for Apple users at least.)

But it’s not simply a matter of megapixels, but about the other “value added” touches that truly make the iPhone a camera worth hanging up your SLR for.

One of those touches is Apple’s neat “tap to focus” functionality, which arrived with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009.

It’s a tale as old as time (and, perhaps, a song as old as rhyme): Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers immediately get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, eventually claw together a jailbreak, only for Apple to then find out about the flaws and fix them for the new iOS version.

Rinse and repeat.

Having released iOS 7.1, Apple has also released a list crediting the individual researchers and companies who helped spot security issues with the previous version of iOS — including jailbreak specialists Evad3rs, the team behind the iOS 6 and 7 jailbreaks.

We all know that Siri has some fun Easter eggs, but according to some Apple’s virtual assistant also has an entire backstory — unlockable by asking just the right questions.

“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” says Adam Cheyer, one of the chief engineers for the project. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”

As mentioned in our iOS 7.1 screenshot roundup, the new iOS update adds auto-HDR mode for the iPhone 5s, letting the camera’s brain decide whether or not to activate the High-Dynamic Range feature.

In theory, this should mean that your iPhone will switch to HDR when there is too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture in one exposure.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here: When we’re in the air, we don’t give a second thought to our luggage traveling in the belly of the plane just a meter or so below us. We don’t really start thinking about our checked bags until we’re standing at the carousel, as we’re wondering if it would look more suspicious to the customs officials if we visited the bathroom before or after picking up our suitcases.

So the Calypso Tag, which lets you know that your bag is about to exit the luggage conveyor, is probably a better option than a GPS tracking tag that you can’t follow when you’re in the air anyway.

If you replaced your first-gen Kindle Paperwhite with the new model just to get Goodreads integration, Cloud Collections and the cool new page-skimming feature, then you should look away now. An update pushed today to the first-gen Paperwhite has added all of these features to the older model.

Instagram has added a new “Lux” filter to its iPhone app, letting you “strengthen or soften your photos with a custom slider.” The slider affects the contrast of your image, but it does in in a way that actually looks good.

Growing up I was a huge fan of the game Asteroids.