A new patent, published Thursday, describes a method for carrying out wireless pairing and communication between Apple devices using biometric data.
The patent was filed August 31, 2012, and features several possible implementations of the technology, designed to increase security on Apple products.
Amid a slew of weird design and censorship choices, Pictorl for iOS, Android and PC (!) has one standout feature that sits above the sea of confusion: a fantastic non-destructive editor that uses your online images as its source.
It’s also a rather beautiful app, presenting photos with almost no chrome or clutter.
AtmoBar is Mac app that works with the NetAtmo weather station you have in your back yard (or on your balcony, for city dwellers). It sits in your menubar and gives readouts and graphs with just a click.
It sure beats just looking out the window.
It’s only been available for a couple of weeks, but iOS 7.0.6 already represents just over half of all iOS traffic.
The data was provided by Onswipe, a mobile publishing and monetization platform, and reveals that as of March 3, iOS 7.0.6 makes up 50.06% of traffic on all iOS platforms.
I won’t lie. The main reason I checked out Upword Notes is that it sounds like Upstream Color, Shane Carruth’s amazing movie about pigs (some are calling it Babe 3).
But underneath this strange coincidence (surely just another of Carruth’s crazy web of mystery) lies a solid note-taking app, one with some genuinely clever features.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley is one of the principal investors behind a new smartphone brand set to launch in India.
The as-yet-unnamed brand is being funded by the investment and acquisition company, Inflexionpoint, for which Sculley serves as a founding partner.
The brand is set to be led by Ajay Sharma, who was previously head of HTC’s India operation. The company will launch a series of smartphones, which will debut in April this year.
Apple has been accused of shifting close to $8.1 billion in untaxed profits from its Australian operations to Ireland over the past ten years.
An investigation by the Australian Financial Review got hold of a decade’s worth of financial accounts for the Irish-based “Apple Sales International” — which supposedly show how Apple shifted untaxed profits from Australia to Ireland, where the company pays just 0.7% tax on its turnover.
If non-clicky keyboards are what you’re after, and you don’t like the free one that came with your Mac, then Logitech offers some of the best options around. I own two, that I’ve bought with my own cash money, and if I had an Apple TV or Media Center setup, I’d be seriously considering the new Harmony keyboard and hub, which doesn’t work quite how you think.
Any technology maker — let alone one the size of Apple — is going to have various moral predicaments to deal with.
Recently Apple was accused of showing an “utter lack of understanding and discretion” after refusing to unlock a dead woman’s iPad for her two grieving sons.
Use Google’s Chrome on your Mac but Safari on your iPad? Do you wish you could use iCloud tabs to open that browser tab that’s open on your iPhone? You need CloudyTabs, a Mac app that puts iCloud Tabs in your menubar, and opens them in your default browser.
Mines of Mars is a fantastic mining and crafting game with a mysterious story, developed by WickeyWare and published by Crescent Moon Games. It’s along the lines of Super Motherload or SteamWorld Dig, in that you must manage your fuel and cargo space while you dig deep into the crust of the Martian planet to find ores, gems, and other secrets.
You’ll come up to the surface to fuel up, exchange ores for ingots, play some fun mini-games based on arcade classics like Berzerk.
It’s a game full of mystery and atmosphere, mostly due to the creepy storyline and amazingly atmospheric soundtrack by composer Evan Gipson. Check out the trailer below to see what it looks like.
Apple is working on a smarter version of Siri that can interact more closely with third-party apps and services, according to The Information. Right now, Apple has struck deals with partners like Yelp and OpenTable for Siri, but the goal is for the person assistant to work with just about any app.
The report mentions how Siri can’t do things like call a cab or book a hotel room, both of which are common duties of real, personal assistants.
What Apple is allegedly working on would allow Siri to send a message through an app other than iMessage, or look up weather from a different source than Yahoo. The improvements Apple is making to Siri would also work well alongside the rumored iWatch:
Those devils at Oscar Mayer have found a way to wake you up in the morning and torment you at the same time. They have created an iPhone alarm clock that plays sounds of bacon sizzling and emits the associated smell of deliciousness.
You got hungry by just reading that didn’t you.
Popcorn Time is an open source app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that acts essentially like Netflix for streaming video torrents. The project is “the result of many developers and designers putting a bunch of APIs together to make the experience of watching torrent movies as simple as possible.”
Yes, it really works. Is it legal? That depends.
Apple is planning to bring fullscreen video iAds to iOS, according to a new report from AdAge. The ads will be interstitials, meaning that they will interrupt whatever you’re doing to briefly take over the screen.
In the past, iAds have only been displayed as small banners that can be tapped to bring up fullscreen adverts. Newsstand publications can already do this on the iPad, but in the future fullscreen interstitials could be in any kind of app, including games.
AdAge has previously reported that Apple is hiring executives left and right from the advertising industry to beef up its iAds division. The same site also recently reported that Apple is building its own ad exchange to sell iAds to the highest bidder. When you put the pieces together, it looks like Apple is gearing up for a heavy iAds push for developers.
Source: AdAge
I’ve had my eye on Celsius Game Studios since I first heard about their in-development space simulator game, Drifter, back in 2012. Since then, developer Colin Walsh has continued to pour on the awesomesauce to create a game that–while still in active beta–impresses on every level.
Drifter takes place in a procedurally-generated galaxy that contains 100,000 light years worth of star systems to explore (that’s a lot of star systems–tens of thousands). The soundtrack is by indie-darling composer Danny Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, The Blinding of Isaac) and it will thrill you in all the right places. Take a look at the trailer below to get a sense of how it looks and sounds.
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!
Rick Ross – Mastermind
It’s hard to believe that the Teflon Don is already onto his sixth album, but here it is, Mastermind, and it’s Rick Ross at his best. The rap version of the Wolf of Wall Street embodies excess thanks to his obsession with wealth, and while there’s nothing truly groundbreaking about the production of Mastermind, tracks like Devil Is A Lie, Sanctified and Thug Cry feature brutal beats and the albums carries enough starpower to take out Alderaan with guest appearances from Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz and Jeezy.
iTunes – $13.99
Eagulls – Eagulls
I’d love to recommend Pharrell’s new album G I R L, but it’s not as stellar as I was hoping – and this is coming from a dude who danced his butt off to Happy, alone, more times than should be legal. However, Eagulls’ debut self-titled album is a spectacular cacophony of punky post-rock tunes that will get you moving just as much as Pharrell’s beats.
iTunes – $8.99
Real Estate – Atlas
While the Eagulls are full of energy, Real Estate’s third full album Atlas features delicate guitar melodies and swaying vocals. Real Estate borrows sounds from The Shins and Yo La Tengo while still maintaining their unique sonic footprint full of songs the capture feelings of separation, uncertainty, but most importantly, exploration.
iTunes – $13.99
The Enchanted
by Rene Denfeld
For her debut novel journalist, Rene Denfeld channels her experience as a death penalty case investigator into a gut-wrenching, spelling binding debut novel. Set deep inside a decaying prison, The Enchanted features the story of York, a death row inmate on the verge of execution and “The Lady,” an investigator who dives into his history in an attempt to get his sentence reduces, but what she finds is an ugly past with parallels to her own awful history.
iTunes – $10.99
Redeployment
by Phil Klay
Many Americans find it hard to connect with the wars half a world away in Afghanistan and Iraq, so Phil Klay’s book of short stories grabs readers into the frontlines of the wars, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. The short stories are interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival as the characters struggling to make meaning out of chaos.
iTunes – $10.99
Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
by Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman
Learning quantum mechanics doesn’t register high on most people’s to-do list, but if you’re ever been curious to learn the behavior of subatomic objects through mathematical abstractions, Leonard Susskind’s new book provides a great introduction to the difficult field. Other writers shy away from quantum mechanics’ weirdness, but Susskind and Friedman embrace the utter strangeness of quantum logic but present their understandings in crystal-clear explanations that let you sink into the field at your own pace.
iTunes – $9.99
Short Term 12
Written and directed with undeniable vitality by Destin Cretton, Short Term 12 depicts the lively yet wounded intersection of messy, broken humanity at a foster-care facility for at-risk teens. Brie Larson stars alongside John Gallagher JR from The Newsroom as a boyfriend-girlfriend duo working at the center, who are tested by two troubled yet fitted residents as the struggle to contemplate their future together.
iTunes – $12.99
Oldboy
After being held captive in solitary confinement for 20 years, former advertising executive Josh Brolin is inexplicably released one day without ever getting a glimpse of his captors or their motives. With his newfound freedom, he sets off on a mission to figure out who kidnapped him and how to find salvation.
iTunes – $14.99
Genius On Hold
Steve Jobs and Woz got their start in consumer electronics by hacking together Blue Boxes for cheap, but if it weren’t for Walter Shaw the two might have never gotten the business bug. Who’s Shaw? Genius On Hold tells the story of Shaw, a telecommunications inventor who invented features like call-forwarding, touchtone dialing, speakerphone, voice recognition and many other creations we still use to this day, but he was held back by corporate greed and government monopolies and ended up working for the mob to create the infamous black box.
iTunes – $19.99
When going into the App Store it’s inevitable to find clone applications everywhere based off of the late “Flappy Bird”. While many clones can feel exactly like the original experience, the new app Jumpy Jack has taken a new twist on the gameplay genre. Are you up for the challenge in this fast paced game?
Take a look at Jumpy Jack and find out what you think.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Jumpy Jack brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
Google released a new update for its Gmail iOS that makes it getting email faster than ever thanks to a new background refresh feature.
The Gmail 3.0 update will now retrieve your mail while the app is not open so you don’t have to keep refreshing to see if your boss finally replied to that important email in the last 5 minutes.
Also included in the update is a new simplified sign-in feature that automatically signs you into all of your Google apps once your login to just one. The free update requires iOS 7.0 or greater and is available now in the App Store.
Here are the release notes:
Alright, so your iPhone already has a compass built right into it, but if you want a little more information in your orienteering, you might want to look into this app.
In addition to the standard “North is over there” bit, DueNorth will also give you your latitude and longitude, and plunking your finger down anywhere on the screen will tell you which direction and heading you’re prodding. Plus, the display has a Night Mode, so you can figure out how to get out of the woods without every bear in the vicinity knowing that you’re lost.
You know how it goes: You’re up late, feeling a little peckish, and you don’t have anything in the fridge. What do you do?
I mean, I’d go to the store down the street and get some sour bears. And if you’re Draku, the star of Midnight Bite, you do the same thing. Except substitute “store down the street” with “village at the base of the mountain,” and substitute “sour bears” with “blood of the sleeping townsfolk.”
But he’s a little guy, and the humans are prejudiced against vampire children who stalk up in the night and murder them, so he has to be careful. And as the one controlling him, you also have to be careful because the controls are apparently also racist against the undead.
The perfect presentation is something that has eluded professionals all over the world. Fumbling around with different technology trying to give your presentation that special edge is annoying and can fail miserably. This Cult of Mac Deals offer puts professional presentations at your fingertips.
The iPin Lazer is powered by your smartphone and engineered to fit right inside the earphone jack. iPin allows users to be presentation-ready anytime and anywhere. And Cult of Mac Deals has this little device available for just $46.99…but only for a limited time.
Twitch, the hugely popular video streaming service for gamers, today announced a new SDK that will allow Android and iOS developers to integrate Twitch into their games. It will give users the ability to broadcast, capture, and archive their gaming sessions on their smartphones and tablets.
Sometimes, you might have a certain someone who gets a little, shall we say, overzealous in trying to message you. Since your iPhone and Mac can both receive iMessages, you might get interrupted by the flurry of messages from this certain contact.
While you can block iMessage senders on your iPhone or iPad, it hasn’t been possible in Mac OS X Mavericks until the latest update to 10.9.2, available through the Software Update panel of the Mac App Store.
Now, though, you can block and unblock any contact in your Contacts app with aplomb, right from your Mac.
Flipboard has today confirmed its acquisition of rival news reader Zite from CNN. The company plans to integrate Zite’s technology into its existing service, while Zite as we know it will be killed off.