Cult of Mac

Twitterrific 5, a popular third-party Twitter app for iOS from The Iconfactory, was updated today with a few new features.

Beats Music launched yesterday as a Spotify/Rdio alternative, and the new music service is already having scaling issues.

Due to an “extremely high volume of interest,” Beats Music has stopped adding new users until it can support the unexpected demand. The app is currently sitting in the number one position in the free chart of the App Store’s Music category.

Have you had problems with iOS 7 randomly crashing and rebooting? For many, the white screen of death (or black, depending on your device color) has been a big enough problem to fill countless pages of complaints on Apple’s support forum.

“We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash,” said Apple today in a statement. While Apple hasn’t specified when the fix will be released, iOS 7.1 would be a safe bet. The software is rumored to drop in March.

Source: Mashable

I’ll be honest: Missile Command was never my favorite classic game from the glory days of Atari. Originally released as a coin-op in 1980, designed by Dave Theurer (the man who also created Tempest and the world’s first commercial game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics, I, Robot), Missile Command came straight out of an era in which the scariest thing imaginable was a nuclear attack.

Today Apple released a minor update to iTunes that brings the ability to view your iTunes Store wish list directly in your local library. Support for Arabic and Hebrew has also been improved with other stability improvements.

Source: Apple

So, I finally broke down and bought a Pebble Smart Watch the other day. Just rolled into Best Buy and looked at both the FitBit Force fitness tracker and the Pebble. At just $20 more than the Force, I figured I’d get a fun geeky gadget that would do more than tell the time and count my steps.

What I got for my $150 was a geeky gadget that tells me the time and passes notifications–usually–from my iPhone. And that’s about it, really.

I’ve grown up with this last name, so I’m fairly used to people butchering it. I’m surprised at the amazing number of pronunciations given to my last name over the past several decades, with people adding all sorts of weird consonants that just aren’t there.

Siri isn’t much different, though she does manage to say my name phonetically, but my family doesn’t say “Luh-Feb- Vree.” We say, “Luh-Fay” with an accent on the second syllable.

Turns out, it’s easier than you’d think to teach Siri how to say names correctly.

Last night Bill Gates jumped onstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to talk about how he’s curing the world of polio as well as the next big tech ideas – weirdly there was no mention of an iWatch. What begins as a gushing interview takes an awkward turn when the former King of Windows starts eying Jimmy’s MacBook at the of his desk corner.

Watch the awkward exchange in full glory below:

Carl Icahn’s relationship with Apple has been rocky ever since he became the company’s most loquacious investor last Fall. While ribbing Tim Cook publicly with one hand for not doing a bigger buyback, the other has been busy forking over fat stacks of cash for more and more AAPL shares.

This morning Carl went classic Icahn and took to Twitter again to complain about Cook and the Apple board not giving him and other investors more money with his proposed $50 billion buyback, while also announcing he’s been gobbling up AAPL shares faster than Jaws went after those guys on the boat:

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

https://youtu.be/8ShyrAhp8JQ

Apple added two new videos ads to its YouTube channel this afternoon – ‘Light Verse’ and ‘Sound Verse’. The two ads have been running on TV for a couple days now and are pared down 30-second variants of their new 90-second ‘Your Verse’ ad that debuted during the NFL playoffs.

As the name implies, Light Verse features a bunch of scenes featuring the iPad Air, light beams and enough lens flair to make J.J. Abrams proud. Sound verse focuses on, you guessed it, sound. Both ads also featureRobin Williams’ narration from Dead Poets Society.

Here’s Sound Verse:

Science is cool, and Atomic Fusion: Particle Collider wants you to know that.

It’s a tough game to describe. It’s kind of like a shooter, but you don’t shoot anything. It reminds me a bit of Tilt to Live except that nothing is really trying to kill you. You’re basically just flying around collecting stuff. So maybe it’s also a little like Katamari Damacy but not nearly so goofy.

Whatever it is, though, it’s fun.

Not content with stopping game creators from using the word “candy” in their titles, Candy Crush Saga developer King is now trying to block indie developers from using the word “saga,” too. The company has filed a “Notice of Opposition” against Stoic for its Viking-themed role-playing game The Banner Saga.

If you’ve been thinking about ditching your iPhone for an Android-powered smartphone, but you’ve been put off by the time and effort it takes to transfer all of your data, you no longer have an excuse not to make the move. Motorola just updated its Migrate transfer tool to support iPhone users who want to make the switch.

Using Migrate, users can transfer all of their contacts and calendar entries from their old iPhone to a new Motorola handset in just a few simple steps. It all happens without wires, and it’s completely free.

Have you ever been browsing the internet, opening new tabs, and blithely going about your business when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an ad begins blaring at you from one of your various tabbed windows?

This can happen in Safari or Chrome (or any other browser, really), but Chrome has a new feature that will let you find the guilty, noisy culprit and shut it down.

If you’re anything like me, as much as you love your Apple TV, the fact that it is so small actually causes some problems in your entertainment center, as it can actually be nudged around and fall behind things. That’s a big pain, especially since the accompanying Apple remote isn’t just equally tiny (and even easier to use), but depends on line-of-sight to work properly.

The Apple TV holder by Tinsel & Timber is a wonderful solution to this problem. A beautifully carved block of walnut with indentations for your Apple TV and remote, not only will it keep your entertainment center organized and the remote where you can find it, but it also looks great.

Tinsel & Tinder’s Apple TV holder is also available in maple, and no matter which one you buy, you can choose between three different felt colors to line it. It’s not actually that expensive, either: each one costs just $49.99.

Looking for a slightly cheaper alternative? Consider the similar product Bloc, which we previously wrote about here.

Source: Tinsel & Timber

As with many of Apple’s more prosaic advertisements lately, Apple’s recent Dead Poet’s Society inspired ad for the iPad Air and iPad mini, “What will your verse be?”, has alternately been praised and ridiculed by critics who were either touched or wanted to barf at the idea that buying an iPad is heling you write a living human poem.

Even if you love the ad, though, you have to admit that the ad shows a very different use scenario for the iPad Air than the one you have. In the ad, it’s used by helicopter rescue pilots, storm chasers, ice hockey coaches, musicians, Bollywood filmmakers, scuba divers, rock musicians and artists. You? You mostly just use it on the toilet. Admit it. You’re reading this on the toilet right now.

Source: Doghouse Diaries

In this era of heightened security fears, when headlines routinely shout about hackers stealing millions of personal records in a single digital heist on some of the nation’s biggest companies, you should never be handing your Apple ID and password over to anyone who isn’t Apple. Yet that’s just the permission that the new Sunrise calendaring app asks when you first load it up, and not only is there no rule against apps doing so in Apple’s internal guidelines, but Cupertino’s actually awarded Sunrise with a coveted spot in the “Featured” section of the App Store.

Every time, the game of cat-and-mouse between Cupertino and jailbreakers goes like this. Apple releases a new version of iOS, patching existing jailbreak exploits. Jailbreakers poke and prod at the code for a few months, until they find a new exploit. They hold off on revealing the nature of this exploit to anyone for as long as humanly possible, lest Apple get wind of it and close the hole in a point release. Then, when the finished jailbreak is finally released, Apple’s programmers sniff out the exploit, patch it, and the whole game starts anew.

When Team Evasi0n released the iOS 7 jailbreak, then, it was only a matter of time before Apple fixed the exploit that allowed it to happen to begin with. Surprisingly, though, Cupertino did not patch Evasi0n in the developer betas of iOS 7.1… until now.

The glass cube of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store in New York City might look iconic, but there’s one big problem with glass: It shatters. And in the latest wave of polar weather to hit the East Coast, that’s just what happened when a snowblower got too close to the Apple Store.

For any longtime Apple fans, it’s amazing to think that today marks 30 years since the January 22, 1984 airing of the Nineteen Eighty Four-inspired Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott.

Not only did the commercial usher in Apple’s most famous desktop computer brand, but it also served as a perfect articulation of the Apple identity: an identity that continues along the same lines three decades later.

Despite the lack of concrete news available on the subject, we’re hardly short of concept designs for Apple’s eventual iWatch.

This one, by San Francisco UI designer Todd Hamilton, is among the best yet — a sleek design that resembles a cross between the Nike Fuelband and an iPhone.

There are bound to be teething problems as Google Glass rolls out to users. Back in October last year, Cult of Android reported on the Glass user given a ticket for “driving with monitor visible to driver.”

Now we have the not dissimilar case of a theater-goer removed from a screening for alleged piracy.

The viewer in question was watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with his wife at an AMC movie theater in Columbus, Ohio, when he was roughly removed from the screening by Department of Homeland Security officials.

The team behind cult drawing app DrawQuest have sadly announced that it will be closing shop.

For those unfamiliar with it, DrawQuest is was an iOS app — originally for iPad, but with an iPhone version launched in November last year — that set daily drawing challenges to a niche community of artists.

In a blog post on the DrawQuest site, app creator Christopher “moot” Poole (also the man behind 4Chan) wrote the following:

The Todoist todo app has been updated and renamed. It’s now called “Todoist Next,” and it has been turned into a lean, mean visual-scheduling-and-collaboration machine.