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.
Apple will finally discontinue the non-Retina MacBook Pro later this year, according to sources in its supply chain. Production is expected to come to a halt during the second half of 2014, reducing Apple’s notebook lineup to just the MacBook Air and the newer, thinner MacBook Pro with Retina display.
We drooled over Dutch designer Joseph Farahi’s iPhone Air concept last month, and now Farahi is back with a beautiful concept for Apple’s next generation iPhone 6c.
According to Farahi’s concept, the next iteration of Apple’s “affordable” iPhone model would come with a 4.7 inch Retina Display, and be just 7.1mm thick, while weighing only 116g.
In addition, he notes that he would opt to include an 8 mega-pixel camera with “True Tone Flash” able to record 120fps video, and Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor: both innovations currently reserved for Apple’s flagship 5s model.
We’ve seen a number of classic patents published recently, referring to iconic Apple inventions, and this week is no different.
The recently published “Multi-Button Mouse” patent refers to Apple’s first steps away from the single-button mouse that Steve Jobs had insisted on ever since the days of the Lisa computer in the early 1980s.
The patent describes what would eventually become the Apple Mighty Mouse, which shipped with iMacs from 2005, before being replaced in 2009 by the multi-touch Magic Mouse currently used.
BlackBerry has confirmed that sponsored content will soon be coming to BBM Channels after ads were spotted in its latest BBM beta release. The Canadian company also insists, however, that it will not be inserting advertisements into your instant messages, and that it will be “very strict” about the amount of content that is pushed to the BBM community.
An investigative magistrate in Belgium reportedly considered forcing Internet service providers to block Apple’s website, after claims that the company is misleading customers over warranty options.
Apple has been involved with a long-running dispute with the European legal system over its one-year limited warranty, which it offers as standard to consumers around the world — but which is in conflict with European regulations that allows buyers a minimum of two years’ free protection.
Topeka Capital Markets’ report that, by now, we’d all be using finger rings to control our Apple televisions may have added up to precisely nothing (even being mocked by Tim Cook) — but one company is trying to make the so-called iRing a reality.
The company is called Logbar, and it’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund an “Ring: shortcut to everything.” When paired with your mobile device, this ring will let you use gestures to send texts, control your home appliances, and carry out a variety of other tasks.
In news that will come as a shock to absolutely no one, it seems that Corning Glass (makers of Gorilla Glass) aren’t big fans of Sapphire glass.
Asked by Morgan Stanley analyst James Fawcett his thoughts about “one large handset and device maker” planning to use Sapphire in its products, Tony Tripeny, a senior vice president at Corning Glass, responded that:
The Tylt Vu wireless charger looks like it would make a great iDevice stand, even if it didn’t have an induction charger hidden inside. The idea is that it not only charges your iPhone, but the shape of it means that the iPhone is always positioned in just the right spot to let the magnets do their thing, even if you just toss it into the cradle.
Watching so much True Detective — among other shows — that you need an iOS app to track what it is that you’ve already seen?
To help with this very quandary, and generally to help you sift through the television trash pile for the hidden gems, TV-tracking app Trak TV Show has just received a major update — adding universal support for optimizing the app for iPad and iPad mini, in addition to iPhone and iPod touch.
They say cellphones have ruined dramatic fiction. Next time you watch a TV police procedural or read a modern novel, check how many times the characters stray out of cellphone range, or lose their handsets altogether. The truth is that – in fiction just as in real life – the cellphone is just too useful, too good as a means of rescue.
Would Stargate have worked so well if James Spader could have just snapped a photo of those runes and used Google Translate? No. Would Marty McFly have gone back to 1955 if he could have just FaceTimed Doc Brown when he woke up late? Of course not.
And yet it gets worse. Now there’s a case which will let TV characters –and you – get rescued every damn time.
Nikon might be content to lose out to its competitors in every field except SLR bodies and lenses, but it beginning a big comeback, starting at the very top – literally. Two new camera straps – the Quick-Draw and the Quick-Draw S – are made in partnership with Black Rapid, and promise to let you never buy a third-party camera strap ever again.
The Baron Fig Confidant notebook started out on Kickstarter, and is today available to buy for just $16 – $4 less than the original price. I have one here on the desk, laying open at a fresh two-page spread without anything to weigh the pages down and stop the book from closing (that’s a Baron Fig feature by the way).
This isn’t a review – that’ll come later when I’ve filled the book with words and doodles. I just thought you’d like to know you can buy one, becasue it’s a pretty amazing notebook. In short, Moleskine can go suck it.
Neglected iOS and Mac app The Hit List has been snapped up by Karelia software, promising to breath life into a pretty great to-do app. One look at the iOS version of The Hit List tells you all you need to know: it still sports an aged iOS 6-style interface, and there is still no iPad version. That’s pretty bad for an app that costs $50 on the desktop, and requires a $2-per-month subscription to sync with the $10 iPhone app.
Hopefully that’ll be fixed soon now the app is in better hands.