Cult of Mac

Apple has released a fifth beta build of iOS 7.1 to developers this morning, two weeks after dropping the last iOS 7.1 beta was seeded.

iOS 7.1 beta 5 is available to developers in the Dev Center or via an OTA update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Like last time, Apple has also released a new beta for Apple TV as well as XCode 5.1.

The release notes only mention the addition of new natural-sounding Siri voice for English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Japanese, and Chinese (Mandarin – China). We’ll update you on any other new changes once we get it downloaded on our devices. Feel free to yell at us on Twitter (@cultofmac) if you come across anything yourself.

Here are the download links:

When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.

Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free

Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.

The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution happen in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

The History Channel has gotten a little weird over the past few years.

It used to be all about World War II and the Industrial Revolution, but ever since around 2008 or so, something has been creeping in. Something decidedly un-historic. Now, we flip over to History to learn about UFOs, prophecies, and pseudoscience. So it makes sense that the channel would release a fake documentary about a War of the Worlds-style conflict that took place instead of World War I.

The Great Martian War is an endless runner that shares its name with that program, and it places you in the middle of the conflict as a scout trying to deliver intel to Paris on foot. You’ll run, jump, and slide to avoid obstacles and massive alien walkers.

And you’ll die. You’ll die a lot.

I’m traveling to Russia to cover the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It’s going to be a thrilling, crazy experience. You’ll see some of my work here at Cult of Mac, among other places.

Here’s the gear I’ll be taking with me overseas:

Oof.

Dell has, of course, “borrowed” a few inspirations from Apple over the last few years, but in a recent marketing video uploaded to the Texas-based PC maker’s YouTube channel a month ago — and since hastily removed — Dell showed an XPS 15 laptop that seemingly dual-booted between Wind0ws 8 and OS X.

Facebook Paper is a pretty great panacea to the social network’s usually crummy iPhone apps, but unfortunately, it’s only available in the United States, leaving those overseas out-of-luck. But because Paper is a free app, you can download it pretty easily even in other countries. Here’s how.

Batteries are potentially volatile things, stuffed with electrochemical cells practically humming with electolytes. Every once and a while, then, they’re sure to break down, and companies like Apple do literally everything in their power to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Here’s why. An iPhone 5c that exploded in the pocket of a 13-year-old girl resulted in a fire so severe that she was
rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns.

How about an app which lets you view your entire iPhoto or Aperture library on your iPad, without syncing, and without having either of the Mac apps running? That’s PhotoScope, a $5 universal app for iPad and iPhone which does just that.

At an RRP of $200, the Solarpad isn’t the cheapest solar charger for your iPhone, but it does aim to be the best. Every detail has been tweaked to squeeze the last drop of juice from the Sun’s photons, from the battery itself (the same kind as Tesla uses in its cars apparently), through the efficient charge controller (form Maxim) to the cables themselves (fatter, to let the current flow more easily, says the blurb).

What’s more, you can pitch in early on Kickstarter and get a full setup for just $158 (right now anyway – the campaign only just launched).

I’m a terrible DJ (unless you count success by the number of people you can force off the dance floor with one track, in which case I’m a total mix master), but I’ve worked with enough DJs to know the tricks of the tracks. And one of those tricks is the old left-it-at-home routine.

When somebody requests a song you don’t want to play, you say “Excellent song! I love that one.” Then you pause and say “I think I left it at home.”

Now, Djs will have no excuse, becasue the new Pacemaker app will let you spin and mix tunes from Spotify’s huge gazillion-song library.

Unread is an iPhone alternative to the king of iPad RSS readers, Mr Reader. Not that it works the same way, or looks anything like Mr Reader, or has anything to do with it at all. No, the thing that the new super-minimal, gesture-based Unread has in common with Mr Reader is sharing.

The Touchfire keyboard has all the functionality of a standard keyboard, but in a paper thin, transparent silicone that fits directly on your screen. You can still view the entire screen right through the keyboard with the ability to touch and swipe as if nothing was there. This keyboard will turn your iPad into a laptop killer!

If you own an iPad this product won’t let you down. And this pricing won’t let you down, either. That’s because for a limited time you can get the Touchfire for only $37.99 through Cult of Mac Deals!

Well, it looks as if the Samsung Galaxy S5 is about to be unveiled at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung is sending out invitations to an event called ‘Unpacked 5’ scheduled to occur at 8pm Central European Time on February 24. But what can we expect from Samsung’s next would-be iPhone killer?

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the greenest tech company of them all? Not Apple, at least according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the Top 30 tech and Telecom companies that run on green power. But they weren’t far from the top.

According to the EPA’s ranking, Intel is the greenest tech company there is, having used over 3 billion kWh of green power in 2013. Next up, Microsoft, who took second place at just under 2 billion kWh. Google came in third with a distant 737 million kWH, and Apple came up in fourth place with 537 million kWH.

There is a consolation prize for Apple, though. While they may only be fourth greenest company in the EPA’s eyes, they did at least source more providers for that power than any other company on the list.

Via: BGR

Today, Facebook released an incredible new app called Paper that is a total reimagining of what Facebook on a mobile device means. As I wrote over on Fast Co. Design, it’s the opening sentence in Facebook’s next 10-year plan that puts mobile first.

It’s a great app, but there’s just one problem: the name. There’s another widely known drawing app called Paper by developers FiftyThree Inc. FiftyThree’s not happy about their name being lifted. Facebook’s response? Basically, “tough noogies.”

North Korea is a bizarre place, in which DPRK dictatorship denies its population any interaction with the West, even as the government’s elite drinks Cristal with Dennis Rodman. In such a regime, you might not be surprised to know that there’s not a lot of Mac users.

However, the North Korean government has released its own operating system, and the latest version looks decidedly familiar. It’s basically a Linux distro skinned to look like OS X!

Apple is starting to crack down on apps that request a user’s unique advertising identifier, but not actually show any ads within the app… and Apple may be doing it to put its own iAd network on better competitive footing.

After Apple’s Super Bowl ad — which we summarily declared to be so good that it won the Super Bowl without even trying — Apple has posted a behind-the-scenes video to its YouTube channel, showing how the ad was shot.

And how was it shot? On January 24th, Apple directed 15 camera crews across 10 countries armed with several iPhone 5s’s, who were all in communication with one another over FaceTime to stay in sync.

Cult of Mac reader Rob J asks,

Having an issue with the conference call feature on iOS 7 and thought you might be able to help. Getting everyone on the call is no problem but I can’t seem to figure out how to have a private conversation with one person in the call.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do, if not super intuitive.

The developer of 10000000–pronounced “ten million”–is working on a sequel, and to celebrate that fact, he’s dropped the price on the Mac and iOS versions of the first game (still pronounced the same way).

For $1.50 on Mac or $0.99 on iOS, you can get one of the coolest mashups I’ve played in recent memory. 10000000 is a delightful and engaging mix of endless runner, match-three, and RPG, and it’s super fun to play.

The new game, called You Must Build A Boat, has a pretty interesting story behind it, as well.

OS X offers a very nice graphical user interface to verify and repair your hard drive, located in the Utilities folder. It’s called Disk Utility, and you can use it as the first line of defense when weird disk-related things happen to your Mac’s hard drive.

If, however, you want to dig in a bit deeper, or you’re already running Terminal a lot and don’t want to launch a separate app, you can use the following commands to both verify (check for problems) and repair any problems that you might find when verifying.

Pebble today announced that its new appstore — announced at CES in Las Vegas last month — is now open on iOS and coming soon to Android. It’s already home to over 1,000 apps and watchfaces for everyone’s favorite wearable, and it’s built right into the Pebble app for smartphones.

iHud — Utilities — Free

You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.

But iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.

I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.

iHud – Anders Sperling

After rumors swirled that it’s going after Flipboard, Facebook has made its new storytelling/reader app, Paper, available on the App Store starting today.

Paper allows you to explore and share stories with friends the same way you’ve always been doing on Facebook, except the app also brings in news curation on topics of interest, and it features an immersive new design with less distractions and more natural navigation movements.

Whether the app will actually kill Flipboard remains to be seen, but after playing with it a bit this morning there is one app it’s certain to kill, the original Facebook app.

Here are the release notes: