Fotobit is a 4.25 x 4.25-inch frame designed for wall-mounting your Instagrams. It’s modular, so you can slot the frames together to cover the wall with an Insta-mural, and the frames themselves are a handsome matte black or white. But there’s more.
Sharebox adds a feature to Dropbox that should probably already have been there: it lets you drag and drop files onto the Dropbox icon in your Mac’s menubar, and have them upload to Dropbox. The neatest part is that it works using the existing icon, keeping your menubar clear.
Twitter will now let you attach up to four images to a Tweet, and tag the people in those photos, all without counting towards your 140-character limit. This is a pretty obvious attempt to beat Instagram and make Twitter your go-to sharing service.
When Facebook snapped up virtual-reality company Oculus VR this week, it got us wondering what other interesting startups Apple might want to buy before Mark Zuckerberg can get his hands on them.
While Oculus is most well known for its Rift gaming headset, Zuckerberg sees a far more wide-ranging application for the company’s VR tech, envisioning it as a futuristic communications platform. “One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people,” he said in his post about the acquisition.
That’s the kind of big thinking Steve Jobs brought to the table when he talked about the way the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad would change the way people interact with technology. While Apple rarely dips into its $150 billion cash hoard to buy other hardware firms, here are seven awesome companies whose technology could help Cupertino enhance and improve its existing devices — as well as build entirely new ones.
We all have busy days, and going to sleep at night is the perfect remedy for having to do it all over the next day. While regular alarm clocks can serve their purpose in waking you up, they can’t ensure they’ll do it at the most convenient time in your sleep. The app Sleep Cycle strives to wake you up while you’re in your lightest sleep, resulting in a better awakening. Simply place your phone on your bed and let the app do the rest. Will Sleep Cycle become your go-to alarm clock?
Take a look at the video and find out what you think.
This is a Cult of Mac video review of the iOS application Sleep Cycle, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.
It’s not that often that the Mac gamers out there get to download new content for a big title game like BioShock Infinite on the same day as their Windows-using brethren, but here it is.
Well-known Mac gaming company Aspyr has done just that, announcing on Wednesday that the latest and final episode of BioShock Infinite’s story-driven “Burial At Sea” module has just dropped on the Mac.
Disruptor Beam and HBO revealed on Wednesday the debut of Game of Thrones Ascent on the iPad. It was originally released in 2013 as a Facebook game, making last year’s Facebook Games of the Year list to boot.
Now you can play Game of Thrones Ascent on your iPad, leading the life of a noble in Westeros, collaborating and conniving with other players in a persistent online world.
Tiny portable bluetooth speakers are all the rage these days, and we’ve seen our fair share of them.
Trouble is, the smaller the speaker, the worse it sounds. Honestly, if your bluetooth speaker sounds worse than the built-in speakers on your iPhone, you’ll likely not want to go through the trouble of even pairing the thing up.
The Music Cup bluetooth speaker is small, shaped like a mug, and it sounds pretty darn good.
For the company behind Candy Crush, developer King Digital don’t exactly seem to be crushing it in their public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares in the popular developer — which grossed $1.88 billion last year — were valued at $22.50 on Tuesday. They then debuted at $20.50 on Wednesday, before quickly dipping to $19.06.
I should warn you now, the iOS version of Shin Megami Tensei is perhaps the most bewildering game you’ll play on your phone. The game world is unforgivingly nondescript, and you navigate it in first person. It’s very easy to get lost indoors and bypass important people and doors until you get the hang of navigating. I recommend you pause briefly before entering any room to see if a nameplate appears — otherwise you’ll be running in circles. Also, Atlus’ strange control panel shell for SMT is a little unwieldy. I played in landscape mode in order to take screenshots, but I highly recommend playing in portrait mode as the interface buttons are smaller, easier to reach, and not covering the game screen.
You start off in the midst of a terrifying dream where spirits are being tormented by demons. You rescue your future teammates by saying their names, which breaks the demons’ hold. And suddenly, you wake up. A ghastly murder in a parking lot has set your bustling city on edge and a weird man named Steven is constantly sending you information about a demon summoning program. Yet your mother still wants you to go out and get coffee.
I don’t have a lot of time to read, so it’s always nice to find an app to help me out there. SprintReader employs rapid serial visual presentation to let you read one of a selection of classic (i.e. public-domain) works with haste.
You get a box, and the words appear one at a time. They always appear in the same place, so you just plunk your eyes there and let the text come to you. The selections are a bit limited right now, but if you’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now might be a good time.
Developer Parsec Productions’ PC horror title Slender: The Eight Pages was one of my favorite games of 2012. It packs an impressive amount of horror and suspense into a very simple idea — being lost in the woods while an unbeatable enemy relentlessly pursues you — and it was one of the few games I’ve ever played that really and truly terrified me.
It makes sense that others would want to get in on that action, and while you have plenty of Slender Man games to choose from in the App Store, Dead Room: The Dark One takes the same basic concept and puts its own creepy spin on it.
And as fairly overt copies go, it’s pretty good.
Realmac Software today confirmed that the much-anticipated update that will bring reminders to Clear for iOS will arrive in April. It was originally due to arrive this month, but the company has been working hard to ensure everything’s just right before it goes live.
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s that time of year when the biggest Apple fans in the world congregate on Moscone North for a three day celebration of all things Apple. This year’s Macworld/iWorld show offers a little something for everyone from hands-on tutorials for taking better iPhone photos or live-recording with an iPad, to parties, tons of exhibitors, games, and more.
Cult of Mac will be covering all the Macworld festivities starting today on our live-blog, but if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about for Macworld, an event that even Apple doesn’t attend anymore, here six things that you won’t want to miss this year:
HTC finally made its much-anticipated HTC One M8 official today. In addition to a gorgeous aluminum unibody design, it boasts all-new internals, a larger display, improved BoomSound speakers, and HTC’s latest Sense 6 user interface.
But how does it stack up against competitors like the Samsung Galaxy S5, the Sony Xperia Z2, and even the Apple iPhone 5s? Our in-depth comparison chart makes it all clear — and helps you decide which of today’s flagships is worth your hard-earned cash.
Guitar Hero will vanish from the App Store at the end of this month.
Not the best rhythm game available, but still a lot of fun, we praised Guitar Hero back when it first arrived on iOS in 2010. With its price now reduced to 99¢ as a parting gift, it’s absolutely worth picking up if you’re interested in the genre.
It’s been almost two years since Apple announced the Retina MacBook Pro, and it’s still the only Mac with a Retina display. But according to sources in Apple’s supply chain, that’ll change this summer when the Cupertino company finally unveils the Retina MacBook Air.
Ultra-addictive iOS game Dots has just received a major update, adding a significant new feature.
Called “Challenge Mode,” the addition circumvents the hassle of taking screenshots of individual dots counts — or else comparing scores via social media — by letting players face off in real-time, head-to-head competition.
Following news of Facebook’s surprise acquisition of Oculus VR for $2 billion, Mark Zuckerberg shared some impressive numbers regarding the social network’s sustained mobile growth. Facebook has an “active” mobile user base of 1 billion, Zuckerberg announced, while the Facebook-owned Instagram has 200 million active users of its own.
This means that Instagram has added 100 million users since Facebook acquired it back in April 2012. Under Facebook’s control the Instagram iOS app has been regularly updated, much like Facebook’s own iOS app.
In the fourth quarter of 2013, Facebook had 945 million active mobile users, out of a total of 1.23 billion users.
iPods are being used in a nursing home pilot program designed to help rekindle the memories of residents with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
The program uses iPods, equipped with personalized playlists, to help improve the mood and interactions of residents. It is also replacing the need for medication in some cases.
Paper? In the age of the iPad? Unthinkable! Ink from a pen? Inconceivable! And yet that’s what the new Booqpad for iPad Air promises us, a case that both protects the iPad and gives you a pad and paper to write on. Not only that, but it does it all with magnets.
Ahead of the next round of the Apple vs. Samsung legal battle, one of the original iPhone engineers, Greg Christie, spoke to the WSJ about the development of Apple’s breakthrough smartphone.
Much of what he discusses in the Apple-approved interview is already well known, but a few neat details emerge.
At one point, Christie says that Jobs gave the team a two week ultimatum, after which he would move the project to another team if they were unable to create what he was after.
“Steve had pretty much had it,” said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple’s user-interface team. “He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts.”
I use flash thumb drives for precisely one purpose these days – taking a PDF boarding pass to the local print shop. That doesn’t stop me being impressed with Edge’s new DiskGo Sonic USB 3.0 Flash Drive, though, which is a super-fast SSD drive in the form of a USB stick.
Back when I wrote at Wired, I called Waterfield’s keyboard case a “signal of the end of civilization.” Who needs a coddling cover for a keyboard that is so tough it can keep working even after you have a tantrum and smash it on a marble topped table? Repeatedly? (Like a friend of mine did one time).
Now I actually use that same cover whenever I travel, so I’m a little more accepting of the new “CitySlicker for the Jawbone Mini Jambox,” a case for the toughest little speaker on the market.
Uber, the app-based alternative to traditional taxi services, is reportedly considering switching its drivers from iPhones to Samsung-manufactured Android handsets.
Uber has previously purchased tens of thousands of iPhones, which are used for receiving and tracking rides. Although customers can use Uber on either an iOS or Android handset, the drivers’ systems runs only on iOS.