Day One has been one of the most popular journaling apps in the App Store for years, and it has always stuck to its guns: privately storing your thoughts and memories. But what about when you want to share something with your friends?
Today Day One is introducing Publish, a way to do exactly that.
Apple’s five day music festival is set to start today at SXSW in Austin Texas, but rather than making content available only on iTunes or Apple TV, the company has partnered with Vevo to help stream the event live.
Music fans can plug into the event live on Vevo’s website, but you’ll have to use a Safari browser. Shows will also be viewable on iTunes, Apple TV, and the iTunes Festival app for iOS.
The free concert series kicks off tonight with Coldplay, and features acts like Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Schoolboy Q, Soundgarden, Pit Bull, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson and others throughout the week.
Up until now, iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 has been painful to use. The New York Times calls it “planned obsolescence,” but it’s really just old hardware having a difficult time powering new software.
The good news is that the newly released iOS 7.1 has noticeably sped up animations on the iPhone 4, reports Ars Technica. “iOS 7.1 solves the problem for people who don’t tweak their devices’ settings or for people who like the way the animations look but not how they feel,” according to Ars. “Animation durations have been shortened noticeably throughout iOS 7.1, and toggling “reduce motion” is now purely cosmetic.”
Apps open generally faster, and opening interfaces like Control Center feels smoother. Since iOS 7.1 will likely be the last major update that’s available on the iPhone 4, there is no reason to not download it.
Source: Ars Technica
Now that you know where to find all those DVDs, video games, and CDs with Shot and Find, you might want something to read. All Librarist needs is an ISBN, a keyword, or a quick scan of a barcode, and it’ll let you compare prices from stores all over the world.
The scanning works really well, and it includes an impressive selection of stores to choose from. Now if only it actually had some way to give me more time to read, it would pretty much be the perfect app.
Source:Librarist – Free | Droid Ltd
Grabbing an Apple exec for your board of directors has become somewhat of trend lately among prominent companies. Nike, Ferrari, Goldman Sachs, and even Vail Ski Resorts have done it, and now GoDaddy is the latest to join the ranks.
Wave Wave reminds me of the end of a story called “Blind Alleys” from an old Tales from the Crypt comic. It’s about the residents of a home for the blind seeking revenge on their unscrupulous caregiver by setting him loose in a maze lined with razor blades with a starving dog. He’s running from the beast, slashing himself to ribbons but still staying ahead, “And then some idiot turned out the lights.”
Why does this twitchy arcade game remind me of that sadistic story? Because it hates me in the same way, starting me out at a disadvantage and then continuing to throw in sudden changes until I lose.
It’s a random, cruel, mechanical bull of a game, and you should absolutely play it.
We all love our music and MixTape is all about that elusive perfect mix.
MixTape Pro will help you create, experiment, and publish the results onto the web or directly into iTunes. You can share your pro creations with friends or jam out by yourself. And right now you can save a bunch of money on MixTape Pro because Cult of Mac Deals has this simple and elegant app available for 50% off during this limited time offer. That’s right – you can get MixTape Pro for just $24.99!
iTunes Radio has barely been around for six months but after launching alongside iOS 7 in the U.S., Apple’s music streaming service has already knocked Spotify off the #3 spot among the most popular music streaming services in the country.
Apple wants Samsung to pay a $40 license fee for every smartphone and tablet it sells after the South Korean company infringed five patents with a number of Galaxy-branded devices.
That’s right… just five patents, $40 for every device. It’s a pretty surprising demand — especially after Apple recently stated that monetary damages were “not an adequate remedy” for Samsung’s patent infringing ways.
Apple might have added a bunch of new features for iOS 7.1, but not all of them are available in every single market.
Thanks to Apple’s “iOS 7 Feature Availability” webpage, however, it is possible for international users to easily check which features are supported in which countries. Apple’s CarPlay, for example, is currently available in just thirteen markets, while Siri’s more advanced features — included restaurant and movie reviews — to limited to even less than that.
Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age. Launching and switching programs takes longer, simple tasks become arduous, and the dreaded beach ball of doom appears more often. The Operating System just starts to feel crufty, and can get worse over time. I see these issues in my IT consulting business regularly.
You may be asking, why does this happen? There are many reasons, but some are more common than others. Sometimes your hard disk (or SSD) gets too full and interferes with normal computer operations. Crashes or misbehaving programs can corrupt the disk directory or application cache files. Remnants from old software may still be running behind the scenes, or you don’t have enough RAM to deal with your OS and workflow.
OK, so is there some sort of tune up or spring cleaning you can do that sorts it out? Your tech always tells you to just reboot the computer, but there’s got to be more than that. The good news: yes, there are some things you can do. And, perhaps, adopt some more efficient computing practices for yourself along the way.
Apple has made some changes to its Customer Loyalty Program, adding new items and increasing the discount offered on existing ones.
The discounts — which quietly went into effect last week — are on offer to people who spend upwards of $5,000 on Apple products in a 12-month period, making this a loyalty program targeted predominately at companies and education customers.
Companies like Apple using specially commissioned shuttle buses to ferry employees back and forth from San Francisco have caused their fair share of problems in the past.
Wanting to find out just how often the buses traveled past his house, Wired writer Kevin Poulsen recently decided to start monitoring the local Wi-Fi environment to see how often the Wi-Fi equipped buses registered.
In a world in which the iPhone camera is good enough to be most people’s primary camera, the days of low-grade cellphones pics are a thing of the past (for Apple users at least.)
But it’s not simply a matter of megapixels, but about the other “value added” touches that truly make the iPhone a camera worth hanging up your SLR for.
One of those touches is Apple’s neat “tap to focus” functionality, which arrived with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009.
It’s a tale as old as time (and, perhaps, a song as old as rhyme): Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers immediately get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, eventually claw together a jailbreak, only for Apple to then find out about the flaws and fix them for the new iOS version.
Rinse and repeat.
Having released iOS 7.1, Apple has also released a list crediting the individual researchers and companies who helped spot security issues with the previous version of iOS — including jailbreak specialists Evad3rs, the team behind the iOS 6 and 7 jailbreaks.
We all know that Siri has some fun Easter eggs, but according to some Apple’s virtual assistant also has an entire backstory — unlockable by asking just the right questions.
“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” says Adam Cheyer, one of the chief engineers for the project. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”
As mentioned in our iOS 7.1 screenshot roundup, the new iOS update adds auto-HDR mode for the iPhone 5s, letting the camera’s brain decide whether or not to activate the High-Dynamic Range feature.
In theory, this should mean that your iPhone will switch to HDR when there is too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture in one exposure.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here: When we’re in the air, we don’t give a second thought to our luggage traveling in the belly of the plane just a meter or so below us. We don’t really start thinking about our checked bags until we’re standing at the carousel, as we’re wondering if it would look more suspicious to the customs officials if we visited the bathroom before or after picking up our suitcases.
So the Calypso Tag, which lets you know that your bag is about to exit the luggage conveyor, is probably a better option than a GPS tracking tag that you can’t follow when you’re in the air anyway.
If you replaced your first-gen Kindle Paperwhite with the new model just to get Goodreads integration, Cloud Collections and the cool new page-skimming feature, then you should look away now. An update pushed today to the first-gen Paperwhite has added all of these features to the older model.
Instagram has added a new “Lux” filter to its iPhone app, letting you “strengthen or soften your photos with a custom slider.” The slider affects the contrast of your image, but it does in in a way that actually looks good.
Growing up I was a huge fan of the game Asteroids.
But while it’s great seeing these games appear on iOS, too often they’re accompanied by a feeling of disappointment. Although there’s no arguing that the games themselves are still great, too often the controls let them down. Where arcade machines, and even computer keyboards, did four and eight-directional movement well, I have yet to play an iOS game where the virtual buttons felt anything less than passable.
In games where timing is everything, and controls are meant to become so intuitive that you find yourself thinking about them when you’re not actually playing, that’s a massive problem.
While popular video games like Battlefield and Call of Duty rule home video game consoles, good shooter games have been hit or miss on mobile platforms. The developers at Glu Mobile aim to solve this problem with their new app Frontline Commando 2, the sequel to their popular third-person shooter title. Will Frontline Commando 2 find its way onto your devices?
Take a look at Frontline Commando 2 and find out what you think.
This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Frontline Commando 2 brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
Seriously, if I have to start over from scratch one more time when I try and use Siri to send a Tweet or book an appointment, I may just give up using Apple’s much-touted personal digital assistant altogether.
As it is, I tend to skip trying to use Siri other than as a glorified app launcher and I use the built-in dictation instead from within the Messages, Twitter, or Calendar apps.
But that was before I found out that you can just tell Siri to change whatever it is she’s not getting.
Today Apple updated its Remote iOS app with some additional options for playing content through the Apple TV.
You can now control iTunes Radio like music played through a shared iTunes library. The ability to browse purchased movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store has also been added. Apple added the option to stream purchased content last September, and now it’s easier to navigate an online iTunes library from an iOS device.
Update 4.2 to the Remote app includes bug fixes as well. It can be downloaded for free in the App Store.
Source: App Store
Last week, the Churchill Club in Menlo Park, California gathered a small panel of journalists who all share something in common: they’ve written recent books about Apple.
Cult of Mac editor-in-chief Leander Kahney, author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, joined former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane, author of Haunted Empire: Apple after Steve Jobs, and Fred Vogelstein, contributing editor at Wired and author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. The panel was moderated by Adam Lashinsky, senior editor-at-large of Fortune Magazine and author of Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works.
The hour-and-a-half talk covered a wide range of topics, from Apple’s post-Steve Jobs identity to the products the company is working on for the future.