Cult of Mac

Update: A SteelSeries representative sent us the following in an email asking why the price had been reduced so soon after the initial release.

“The response of this product coming out of CES was incredibly positive, [but] the largest concern was with the price set at $99.99 MSRP. Our goal with the Stratus goes beyond just selling a controller; it’s really about helping to define a new platform. We want to see that succeed and took initiative immediately after CES to find ways where we could improve the odds of that success by lower[ing] the price. The outcome is that our team was able to work with our partners to bring the cost for the consumer down to $79.99.”

Original Post: Well, it looks like the price wars have begun in earnest. SteelSeries’ Stratus is now $79.99, instead of the $99.99 it launched for at CES. If you pre-ordered this at the older price, you’re in luck: SteelSeries will honor the new, lower cost for all pre-orders.

SwiftKey, the most popular third-party keyboard on Android, is coming to iOS through a new note-taking app called SwiftKey Note. A leaked promotional image for the app has been leaked on Twitter today, but it’s not yet clear when it will be available to download from the App Store.

When you buy a 16GB smartphone, you don’t actually get 16GB of space to install apps, music and other media. No matter what smartphone you buy, the operating system needs to be installed into memory, and that takes up valuable gigabytes.

Still, some phones are better than others. As far as staying trim, the iPhone 5c is the best value for the money in its class, allowing users to install media to 12.60GB of the 16GB drive. The Google Nexus 5 comes in second place at 12.28GB.

The worst offender by far, though? The Samsung Galaxy S4. You won’t believe how little internal memory you get.

Think Google’s 1Gbps fiber speeds are impressive? Think again. BT and Alcatel-Lucent have teamed up to achieve lightning-fast speeds of 1.4 terabits per second in the U.K. — that’s over 10,000 faster than the current fastest consumer broadband available in Britain, and it will let you download 44 full-length HD movies in a single second.

What’s more, it was achieved using existing fiber broadband cables.

Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.

I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.

But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.

External USB battery packs are a dime a dozen, and most of them look pretty similar. Why bother with one of those, though, when you can power your iPhone with Darth Vader’s fricking lightsaber?

What’s in an app name? That’s the question an developer had to ask himself after accidentally naming his app that was sexually suggestive enough that no one actually wanted to use it.

A new Apple patent application published today relates to iAd technology that will allow Apple to target users with specific content based on a person’s predicted mood, their likely interest level, other content they are currently interacting with, their current geographic location, and the time of day.

In some applications, mood would be gauged using a camera which, equipped with facial recognition algorithms, would be able to measure specific expressions.

One month after its launch in the App Store, Codeacademy: Hour of Code has gone universal — being optimized for iPad and iPad mini, as well as iPhone and iPod touch.

Google has lost its battle against a patent troll after a Texas court found Android guilty of infringing a push notification patent. SimpleAir — which has also targeted Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and other technology giants — is now seeking $125 million in damages.

Sony Pictures Television has a new iOS game available in the App Store and, unlike previous titles, this one’s based on an original property.

Called Suits and Swords, the game is a cross between a blackjack card game and an RPG, set in four different fantasy realms.

You’ve most probably seen Apple’s tear-jerking “Misunderstood” Christmas commercial: an ad about a seemingly isolated teenager who spends the holidays with their face buried in their iPhone — only to reveal at the end that they’ve been using the device’s camera to create a touching tribute to family togetherness.

Well, it seems that someone from Universal Studios Orlando’s ad agency David&Goliath also watched it (or else this whole thing is an amazing coincidence) because the theme park’s new ad — embedded above — bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s much-lauded commercial.

If your New Year’s resolution was to age in style, then you’re clearly thinking along the same lines as the makers of The Sims FreePlay for iOS.

In its first update of 2014, the freemium mobile version of the EA life sim now lets you “complete your family tree” by aging your teen Sims into adults by completing the “Adulthood” quest, while also letting you socialize with senior sims by completing the “Seniors” quest.

Evernote continues to suck as an app, and excel as a back-end service for better-designed apps. EverMemo is yet another quick note taking app which posts your important scribblings direct to your Evernote account to be indexed and assimilated, all without having to launch Evernote’s own bloated monster and tap desperately as you try to find the new-note button before you forget whatever it was you were trying to remember.

You’re most likely using one of two calendar services, or maybe both: Google Calendar and/or iCloud. Now – if you’re using the truly excellent Fastmail email service – you can test out the beta version of its new calendar. It’s as clean and simple as the mail service, and syncs perfectly with your iDevice or Mac using CalDAV.

A large number of users have reported issues with a problematic status bar in iOS immediately following a jailbreak.

While it’s hardly the biggest issue for a liberated iOS device to encounter, having the carrier name, signal status and remaining battery turn from white to black — or sometimes not vanish when it’s supposed to — while using certain apps can be both annoying and overall detrimental to user experience. Thanks to a straightforward resolution , however, that issue can now be sorted out in the form of a Cydia package installation by following these steps:

Got a car? Got an iPhone? Like to tap away at the iPhone screen and distract yourself instead of watching the road ahead and earning the trust that pedestrians and cyclists put in your every time they venture out onto the road? Then I have good news! Now you can careen down the highway, secure in the knowledge that your precious iPhone will never slip off the dash, nor even deviate from it’s perfectly-chosen angle.

If you have a modern Mac, there’s almost no reason not to use FileVault, the all-disk encryption that’s built in to OS X. It doesn’t slow the computer down, it keeps your data safe and – if the machine is switched off – then even if a baddie pulls your drive he’s stuck with a useless chunk of silicon.

And now Apple has added one more convenience for the cautious user: authenticated reboots.

Seemingly just moments after an iTunes update added the ability to browse our App Store wish lists, along comes Mentio, an iPhone app to do the exact same thing. Only instead of using your existing iTunes wish list, it lets you build your own, and buy apps, movies and music from within the app itself.

To quote the all-seeing Strobist, “Memo to @Nikon: THIS is how you do a retro-dialed digital camera.” Take a look. These are the official product shots of the Fujifilm X-T1, an SLR-style mirrorless camera joining Fujifilm’s X-Series lineup. Isn’t she purdy?

More than two million videos from the web are being saved to Pocket each week now. To make the viewing experience more seamless, Pocket has integrated AirPlay into its iOS app for sharing with the Apple TV. The update went live today in the App Store.

Thanks to the slickness of AirPlay, users can exit the Pocket app when a video is streaming. There’s a new AirPlay button embedded in the app’s video player.

“This is just the beginning of how Pocket plans on truly becoming the DVR for the Web, and we think it’s going to be a great addition to our users’ experience in general,” said Pocket.

Source: App Store

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.