Cult of Mac

With teens and young adults leaving Facebook in droves, it’s up to social networks like We Heart It to pick up the slack.

The new image-centric app is gaining a ton of traction with this highly-coveted target demographic, breaking the 25 million user mark and pulling in over a million new users monthly.

CEO Ranah Edelin spoke with Cult of Mac on the phone, and attributes this incredible growth to one thing: We Heart It is a safe space.

“Social networks mimic what happens in the real world,” he said. “There is a ton of bullying on them and they mimic popularity contests. Our users tell us they love We heart It because they can express themselves authentically without having to brag or worry about getting bullied.”

Did you watch that? It’s total crap.

The security expert quoted in the piece, Kyle Wilhoit, has just written a blog post that calls out the report, essentially saying that the hacks shown in the video can happen anywhere, and require some risky user behavior to even happen.

That’s a long way from “if [tourists] fire up their phones at baggage claim, it’s probably too late to save the integrity of their electronics,” as Brian Williams claims in the clip above.

Talk about fear-mongering.

Mark Smith’s Spell Quest: Grimm’s Journey is this week’s iOS Game of the Week, and it’s a fun one.

You’ll need to spell words to move Grimm from left to right, with longer words causing more damage to the baddies you encounter. You’ll pull letter tiles from a grid below, and some tiles will give you power ups, others will poison you. It’s a fun mix.

Check out our video below for some gameplay footage.

No one but actual, honest-to-God bicycle messengers had the authority to wield a Timbuk2 messenger bag. If you were an iron-assed hard case living life on a bike, you’d probably earned the right; though you might still have found yourself the target of diluted messenger disgust.

That was the pervading vibe 15 years ago when I bought my first Timbuk2 bag, a Bolo (back then, each size had a name; the Bolo was the large version). Make no mistake, these were Messenger Bags: simple, voluminous, virtually indestructible black holes, able to swallow an inordinate amount of awkwardly dimensioned deliverables, specially stabilized for use on the bike exclusively. The only grudging nods to civility were a couple of pockets sown onto the outside of the bag and an optional padded shoulder strap.

And apart from a few minor changes, it’s stayed that way. Like the coelacanth, the Classic Messenger has remained a living fossil, unchanged, while other Timbuk2 species have evolved and developed around it. Until now.

While iPhone calls these days are vastly better than those of iPhone models in the past, let a lone calls made on those old flip phones, they can still be pretty cruddy, depending on your service coverage and location within that area.

If you’re at home (or at a place with WiFi) and in a bad location for cell tower reception but still need to make a voice call, you can do one thing to immediately improve the audio fidelity of your iPhone to iPhone calls: use FaceTime Audio.

Getting Apple to dish on secrets is practically impossible, but if you’re looking for an inside line to one of the most powerful CEOs in tech, the house next door to Tim Cook just went on the market.

That’s right, even you could become Tim Cook’s neighbor, as long as you got a cool $2.8 million in the bank to drop on a condo.

The capabilities of today’s are so incredible, a few weeks ago we came across a 20-year old RadioShack ad and everything you could buy  has already been made obsolete by the iPhone. Still, the iPhone’s powers are so much greater than those products it doesn’t do justice to compare it to a $29.99 speed dial phone, so Bret Swanson at Tech Policy Daily decided to find out how much an iPhone would really cost in 1991.

Swanson’s back-of-the-envelope math estimates it would have cost Apple over $3 million to make a machine with comparable powers to the iPhone back in 1991, and that’s only counting some of the hardware.

Even though it feels like the iPhone 5s just came out, the rumor mill is already churning out little bits on the iPhone 6: a supercharged camera, a bigger display and a ton of sapphire crystal glass.

A number of designers have presented both wacky and plausible mockups for what the iPhone 6 might look like, but our concept designer friend Federico Ciccarese just sent us his rendition of what the iPhone 6 might look like. While it doesn’t have any wild design changes, it still has my pockets lusting after a 4.7-inch iPhone 6.

Check it out:

Bed Bug Proof — Utilities — Free

America is seeing a resurgence in bed-bug infestations, and here’s an app to help you screen a room and identify the little biters before they introduce themselves.

To be perfectly clear, Bed Bug Proof is an app created in part to sell an anti-bed-bug spray. But the practical information and tools it provides, like the inspection guide, comparison photographs, and a magnifier/light to let you use your phone to search for eggs and poop, are useful enough to let it stand on its own.

Although it will make you itchy just looking at it. Seriously.

Bed Bug Proof – Terramera Inc.

This just in: Someone has made a game about zombies.

You probably weren’t expecting that, huh? A zombie game? It’s crazy on the face of it.

Now, look: I hate zombies as much as the next person. Maybe a bit more, even. Stupid shambling a****les. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend all of my gaming time killing them. I have a lot of other things to pretend to kill, like Nazis and Pokémon. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately sold on Overlive, a new undead-themed gamebook with role-playing-game elements, even though it’s hard to go wrong with me once you start offering choices and stats.

Once I started playing it, though, Overlive won me over.

Ever wanted to dabble in anime? Sure you have.

Anime Studio Debut is fun, easy, and exciting for any age and any skill level. This powerful and comprehensive animation software will help your ideas come to life. Plus, it includes detailed video tutorials and pre-made content to help you get started right away. And now you can get Anime Studio Debut through this special Cult of Mac Deals offer for only $19.99…a savings of 60%!

The best winter athletes across the world are descending on Sochi for eternal glory, but while snowboarders have been preparing their Double McTwist 1260s a different kind of competition erupted on social media early this year – competitive selfie taking.

Yes, the Selfie Olympics were a real thing and took social media by storm with entrants posting their pics with the hashtag #SelfieOlympics. What started off with simple mirror selfies quickly evolved into a competition to see who could cram the most random objects in front of their bathroom mirror.

The results of the Selfie Olympics were so hilarious we asked Cult of Mac readers to submit their best selfies for our own smaller contest, but before we reveal our winners, here are the best selfies from the main event.

Tons of competitors used their door for a prop, but this dude nearly snapped his neck trying to capture this ridiculous selfie.

Taking a selfie with your selfie is so meta we love it, even if he is using an Samsung phone.

Weird contortions on the door only lasted so long before competitors started bringing props into play. This little guy’s Flava Flav mock up is great, but the added foot in the sink brings in a whole other element of incredible.

Eventually the competition graduated from simple selfies and props, to a contest to see who could make the most elaborate backdrop in front of the bathroom mirror. 

These guys created an entire Footlocker in their bathroom. And I must say those Kobe 8 “Year or the Snake” shoes are a nice choice.

Even indigenous jungle tribes were getting in on the selfie action.

Flying knives. Fireballs. More seasoning than any cook should have to deal with. The number of things that could have gone wrong in this Habachi selfie are too numerous to count.

King Tut made a late entry into the games, but his treasure trove didn’t disappoint.

The hands down winner for the best Apple-themed selfie. It’s like a selfie, in a selfie, in a selfie, in a selfie. I think we may have been incepted.

Why is a this guy riding a bike through his shower while playing the guitar? Who is he going to blast behind the Christmas tree? Doesn’t he know you’re not supposed to put your Xbox, iron, TV or any other electrical device so close to the shower? Who cares, this guy just won the Selfie Olympics.

 The Cult of Mac Selfie Olympic Winners

Incorporating old camera tech into a modern game of photographic narcissism, Javier Cobas snuck in to grab the Bronze

Silver

This selfie from Namuks comes to us all the way from Kenya. The gorilla pod on top of the head really stands out in contrast to the woman’s niqab.

Gold

I’m 99.7% sure the helicopter in Scott Katz’s photo is fake, but there were no rules against augmenting reality, so for his ingenuity, and the fast that he snapped this at the site where the Legion of Boom just dominated the Super Bowl, he’s this year’s winner of the Cult of Mac Selfie Olympics.

All our winners left the virtual podium with Photoshop Touch for iOS. Thanks for playing!

Popular wine tasting app Wine Spectator WineRatings+ has received a notable upgrade, adding updated content, a new design interface, and a version designed specifically for iPad.

While the mandatory iOS 7 design improves readability and ease of use, the real improvements include an updated Top 100 Wines list for 2013, containing editors’ latest list of the world’s “most exciting” wine.

Google made a surprise announcement at the end of January that confirmed it was selling Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion, but the search giant seemingly forgot to tell us that it made a big investment in the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer the following day.

Reuters reports that Google will pay Lenovo $750 million for a 5.94 percent stake in the company.

A recent report suggested that Apple was restarting manufacture of the iPhone 4 to target India, Indonesia and Brazil as developing markets. In fact, sources say that Apple never stopped making the phone.

A news story for BGR India claims that — while the volumes might not have been so high as that of the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, or even the iPhone 4s — Apple continued manufacturing the iPhone 4 ever since its introduction, since the phone serves as a key component of Apple’s sales strategy in countries outside of the U.S. and Western Europe.

Popular MMO (that’s Massively Multiplayer Online) game, Line of Defense, has arrived on iOS via a new combat strategy game called Line of Defense Tactics.

Giving gamers the opportunity to take control of a team of four Galactic Command Marines (GALCOMs) as they embark on a range of missions across space stations, starships, and planetary battlefields, Line of Defense Tactics lets you train your squad, upgrade their stats, weapons, inventory and abilities en route to becoming the ultimate fighting force.

The money side of Apple is nothing out of the ordinary for anyone who follows investor news and views. The idea, however, that Apple products — specifically the iPhone — may be considered a form of hard currency in themselves is something a little bit different.

That’s the premise of a recent post by Bloomberg News reporter Vernon Silver, however, who claims that in recent months he’s been using unlocked iPhones to pay his bills.

Reporter is a crazy iPhone app that tracks… well, everything. It pops up an alert at random intervals throughout the day and conducts a mini survey, then puts all this data together to be mined at your leisure.

Today sees the App Store launch of retro-styled hack n’ slash iOS actioner, Only One.

Borrowing its one-man-fights-off-millions-of-enemies-on-top-of-a-giant-tower premise from the Jet Li-starring cult movie The One, the game is the fighting equivalent of a never-ending platformer — only with waves of enemies (70 in all, plus 7 bosses) taking the place of constant leaps and obstacles.

Beep is a weird little device that could be either just the thing you’re looking for, or the stupidest accessory ever. It’s a Wi-Fi volume knob that hooks up to your speakers, and streams music either direct from Pandora, or from your iDevice via its own companion app. No AirPlay, no Rdio or Spotify. I told you it was weird.

Meet the Miggo, a camera strap that wraps around your camera to make a protective case. If that gets you as excited as it makes me, then keep reading.

Tim Cook has acknowledged that Apple has bought back $14 billion of its own shares over the past two weeks — reacting to an 8 percent decline in shares following the recent financial quarter results.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Cook admitted that he was “surprised” by Wall Street’s reaction to Apple’s last quarter, in which the company broke records by selling 77 million iOS devices over the holiday season.

Apple’s recent share repurchase is the largest of its kind for a company of Apple’s size over a similar timespan. During the past 12 months, Apple has bought back $40 billion of its own shares — part of a plan to repurchase a total of $60 billion. In the past two weeks Cook says that Apple bought $12 billion of its shares through an “accelerated” repurchase program, and a further $2 billion on the open market. Apple plans to disclose updates to its buyback program either next month or in April.

With Phraseology 2.0, developer Greg Pierce has made a definitive case for URL schemes, the trick that he invented with his Drafts app to let iOS apps talk to and send data to each other. While Phraseology 2 can work as a text editor, it is in fact a “word processor” for iOS. And I don’t mean that in the crappy, MS Word bloatware sense, either. I mean that it’s a machine to process text, from any other app.

If you got a kid to draw a picture of a camera, that picture would look just like the new Nikon P340, a device that can be accurately described as “boxy, with knobs.” And it’s gorgeous, kind of like then Lenovo Thinkpad of cameras, and despite its diminutive form it has everything an enthusiast would need – except a viewfinder.

Under its previous owner, Instapaper was a good-but-limited iOS app with a barely functional website component. Under its new ownership at Betaworks, the app has slowly become part of a great ecosystem, with the latest addition being a Safari extension.