In early 2012, Apple acquired Chomp, largely to fix the broken search, recommendation and discovery features of the iOS App Store.
Two years later, app discovery on the iOS App Store remains pretty much as broken as ever. Maybe that’s why Cathy Edwards, Chomp’s co-founder who went on, post-acquisition, to become Director of Evaluation and Quality on Apple Maps, is leaving Apple come April 11.
When it comes to emoji, Apple supports everything from a smiling pile of feces to intricately detailed sunset landscapes. But if you’re looking for racial diversity there’s not a black person to be found and we’re not sure if the dude with the thick mustache is supposed to be latino, but if you scroll through the collection you’ll get the point.
The lack of racial diversity in emojis was not lost on MTV Act’s Joey Parker who decided to email Tim Cook about the controversy and was surprised to get a response the next day about Apple’s efforts to make emoji more diverse.
Here’s what Apple PR Queen Katie Cotton had to say about the emoji controversy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1yW4n17lhc
Hate iOS 7’s visual aesthetic, but have apps that require iOS 7 to function? You should do what famed jailbreaker winocm did — hack his iPad 2 so it triple boots between iOS 5.1, iOS 6.1.3 and iOS 7.0.6!
Well, okay. You got us. The elite skills necessary to hack your iPad to dual boot operating systems is beyond the ability of most of us mortals, and it’s unlikely winocm will ever make this process friendly for the everyman. Still, wouldn’t you love if your iPad could do this?
Source: YouTube
We’re still months away from the big reveal of the iPhone 6, which means concept designers still have plenty of time to toss around fanciful dreams of what Apple might do for the redesign of the iPhone.
Teaming up with Martin Hajeck, iCulture created the following concept mockups that would see the iPhone taking some design cues from the iPod Nano, with curved edges, a narrower bezel, and larger screen to boot.
Take a look:
Today Apple updated its iTunes Movie Trailers app with a couple of cool features, including the ability to receive push notifications when movies marked as favorites arrive in theaters or on the iTunes Store. While you could previously only see overall Rotten Tomatoes ratings for movies, the app now lets you read individual reviews from critics.
Here’s the full list of changes:
Apple has bolstered its online retail ranks by hiring former Delta vice president Bob Kupbens. Kupbens joins Apple as its new Vice President of Apple Online Retail.
At Delta, Kupbens was involved with the company’s marketing and digital commerce strategies. Prior to that he pioneered the e-commerce operations at Target.
Twitterrific, the oldest Twitter client in existence, changed its business model today in the App Store. Instead of charging $3 to download, Twitterrific 5 is now free and ad supported.
The app store has found another craze almost as popular as Flappy Bird. Developers everywhere have been releasing their own versions of the hit app Threes, a tile-based game that has players swipe to add numbers. 2048 is an application that features this same addicting gameplay with its own twists and no cost. Can you reach the score of 2,048 or even higher?
Take a look at 2048 and find out what you think.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application 2048, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.
Selling a half-billion of anything is impressive, especially when you can do it in less than seven years. That’s exactly what Apple has managed to do with the iPhone.
Apple had sold 472 million iPhones in total at the end of 2013, and given analysts estimates of 38-42 million units sold this current quarter, the 500 million milestone has most certainly been reached.
iOS 7 changed the visual palette on our favorite Apple mobile devices, and it may not be to everyone’s liking.
If you want to tone it down a bit, consider darkening the colors up, and reducing the white point on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to make things just a little bit less intense.
I’m typing this review on the Filco Majestouch 2 Tenkeyless keyboard. It has blue Cherry MX switches, and a standard ISO layout with UK English markings. It is the best keyboard I’ve used, but despite that this won’t be a regular review – a million people have already written about this keyboard.
Instead, I’ll tell you what I like and then tell you how I made this Windows keyboard play well with my Mac. Warning: includes nerdy hacks.
Next time you are traveling somewhere or commuting your way to work, look around you. It’s evident that the number of book lovers who have taken to reading on a digital format has risen significantly over the years. In 2011 and 2012, Amazon said it sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, excluding free eBooks.
Though it has become apparent in recent years that there is a slight fall in the growth of eBook sales (particularly so in 2013), eBooks are still far too compelling to die out, and today we tend to use more than one medium to consume the same thing. So next time you’re hesitating to pull out your Kindle or iPad mini on the bus or train due to the watchful eyes of a “book snob,” just remember that it’s not possible to please everyone, and that there are still thousands of benefits to the electronic book format.
Finnish developer Supercell has a huge hit on its hands with Clash of Clans, and they’re releasing a brand new follow-up that looks surprisingly similar: Boom Beach.
In Clash of Clans, you build a base and defend it with your medieval warriors. You can also go out and attack other people’s bases.
In the trailer for Boom Beach, you might notice a familiar mechanic at work.
Today you may have noticed a little teaser page from Flexibits, makers of the beloved calendar app Fantastical.
“Fantastical 2 for iPhone on your iPad is good,” reads the teaser. “Fantastical 2 for iPad on your iPad is even better.” There’s a mailing list where you can sign up to get notified when the app arrives.
We’re itching to tell you more, like exactly when the app is coming out and why it’s awesome, but you’ll have to be patient. All that’s being said at this point is that Fantastical for iPad will be a separate download from the existing Fantastical for iPhone. That means new and existing customers will need to pony up a little change.
Stay tuned for Cult of Mac’s full review.
Source: Flexibits
I’ve been on a zombie movie kick as of late, and once I’d caught up on Walking Dead and vintage George Romero films, I expanded my sights towards the App Store, where I discovered Useless Creations’ delightful Zombies Everywhere! Augmented Reality Apocalypse.
As its name suggests, Zombies Everywhere is an augmented reality game. What that means is that you play the game by holding up your iPhone (or iPad — although iPhones tend to work better) in front of you as if you’re taking a photo. The device’s rear-facing camera is then activated, and the images that are recorded are pulled in as the game’s background.
MacWorld/iWorld 2014 is less than a week away which means the Cult of Mac team is gearing up to descend on Moscone North for three days of non-stop Apple-related gizmos, speakers, workshops and other nonsense.
We’re bringing the best 30 minute Apple conversation you’re going to hear aaaaaaaall week long to the event live on Thursday, March 27th at 8pm. Come join us for our live CultCast recording party at The Box SF for a night of prizes, Apple conversation, drinks galore and hopefully a couple surprises.
Erfon, Leander, Buster and Alex will be hanging out all night bringing out the laughs and immature humor along with the rest of our SF staff. Hopefully we’ll get around to talking about Apple too thanks to our hosts DigiDNA and MacUpdate.
Entry is free and we’ll be grooving all night thanks to music from producer Egadz and his funky arcade electro button box – a must hear for electronic music fans and geeks.
And beer will flow like wine. (Shhh… yes you know: open bar!)
Today Spotify announced a killer deal for college students: it’s cutting the cost of its Premium subscription in half from $10 to $5 per month. The discount will work for up to four years, and all you have to do is verify your name, date of birth, and college you attend.
A Spotify Premium subscription gets you unlimited access on any device to the service’s 20 million songs. We recently called it the best all-around music subscription service money can buy. Apple is even rumored to be building its own Spotify competitor. Spotify has apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and web.
Claiming your college discount is pretty easy through the Spotify website. The cost will be reduced for the next month’s billing cycle. Existing Premium subscribers can get in on the discount as well.
Source: Spotify
Ashton Kutcher’s role as Steve Jobs didn’t exactly set the box office on fire when it was released last summer despite Kutcher deep diving into the former Apple CEO’s life.
If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who still hasn’t seen Jobs you can finally steam it for free on Netflix Instant.
Your days of endlessly hitting “Refresh” to see if a price has come down may be over (unless you like that sort of thing). Punchr is a new app that will monitor any part of a web page for updates and then let you know when it happens. You just navigate to the site and then select the part of it you want to look out for, and it’ll send you a push notification if something changes.
So now you can spend less time refreshing Twitter when it’s down and more time taking pictures of your lunch to post on Twitter when it returns.
If you’ve spent enough time messing around in Terminal, you’ll know one thing for sure: re-typing the stuff you’ve laboriously typed in with only minor differences is tedious. And it happens more often than we’d like.
The Terminal does, however, keep a history of all the commands you’ve typed into it. To see this in action, you can cycle through the last few commands you’ve typed in, simply hit the arrow keys up or down when in Terminal.
There are a few more less intuitive commands to make the best use of your Terminal history, however.
Penguins are pretty amazing.
Maybe you’ve seen March of the Penguins, and maybe you haven’t, but they’re brave little creatures who just happen to be food for some terrifying creatures. But they don’t let that get them down because they’re penguins, damn it, and that means something.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but Adventure Beaks is a really fun new free-to-play iOS game where you lead an elite squad of penguins through a platforming adventure for fortune and glory. And you can jack some seals up while you’re at it, so that’s like icing on the cake.
But it’s the Antarctic, so it’s basically all icing, but you get my point.
Want to know how the iOS and Android battle is playing out around the world?
Mobile technology firm dotMobi has created an infographic dividing 101 countries around the world into either the Apple (black) or Google (green) camp, based on device browsing. (Grey countries are not included in the dataset.)
Apple didn’t infringe on Samsung patents, and therefore won’t have to pay any damages, a Tokyo District Court said Tuesday.
Apple had been accused of infringing on data communication patents belonging to Samsung, which featured in Apple’s iPhone 4s, iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
Apple was granted a patent on Tuesday related to a GUI modified for disabled users of iOS devices and MacBooks.
Entitled “Devices, Methods & GUI’s for Accessibility using a Touch-Sensitive Surface,” the patent describes several methods for allowing a person with impaired vision to use a touch-sensitive surface, including a touch screen display or a track pad.
A new high quality video was posted online Monday — showing the demolition of a building on the site of Apple’s forthcoming Campus 2.
The video was uploaded to YouTube by an anonymous user under the name Apple Internal. It depicts the destruction of a building along Ridgeview Ct., one of the main arteries running through the 100-acre plot of land Apple will use to build its new 2.8 million square-foot “spaceship” headquarters.