Apple confirmed to CNBC late on Monday that it has asked Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to veto the controversial religious freedom bill SB1062.
Apple is the latest company to urge Brewers to veto the bill, which critics have suggested will allow companies to use religious belief as a basis for discriminating against the gay and lesbian community.
This year we’re covering the Barcelona Mobile World Congress a little differently. Each day there will be one liveblog post here on Cult of Mac and one on Cult of Android.
Instead of gathering up press releases and writing them up in the press office at the show, and then hitting the parties, we’ll be posting quick photos and snippets of info from the show floor itself.
Think of it as a kind of Instagram/Twitter hybrid, only right here on the site. Currently the newest posts are at the top, reverse-chronological style. And if you want us to check something out, Tweet us @mistercharlie or @killianbell.
Now, let’s get on with Day Two.
They may still be wrapped in an ongoing patent dispute, but Apple and Samsung have temporarily put aside their differences to tell the European Union that it should cut down on the ability of companies that license patents to win court rulings limiting product sales.
Apple and Samsung are just two of 19 companies and associations who put their names to the letter, which seeks to battle patent trolls who don’t manufacture actual products but instead rely entirely on license fees.
2014 isn’t only the thirtieth anniversary of the Macintosh. It’s also the thirtieth anniversary of Infocom’s classic game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — a title that will likely be fondly remembered by anyone who was gaming in the mid-80s.
To mark the game’s thirtieth birthday, and to coincide with the 36th anniversary of the series’ first radio broadcast, the BBC has announced that on March 8 it will publish a new online version of the game, featuring new high definition graphics, social media support, and smartphone/tablet optimization.
Following the unexpected uncovering of Tim Cook’s high school photos, Apple has updated the official iPhone 5s page and iSight section to pay tribute to the company CEO’s gawky yearbook origins. Looking good, Tim!
Apple may be great at making trackpads, but they are pretty terrible at making computer mice. On the positive side, though? Those mice make pretty great fashion statements.
Today the world’s largest hearing aid manufacturer, GN ReSound, announced the ReSound LiNX. Designed specifically for the iPhone, the LiNX is the first hearing aid to be part of Apple’s official “Made for iPhone” program.
When you buy a 16GB iPhone 5c, you get 12.60GB of storage space left over after taking into account iOS 7’s default install size. Comparatively, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was the worst bang for the buck, storage-wise, in smartphones: a paltry 8.56GB of internal space was available to the user to store apps and media upon.
Even the S4, though, was roomy compared to the newly announced Galaxy S5. A 16GB Galaxy S5 comes with less than eight gigabytes of usable memory.
When you sell your old iPhone to a third-party, what happens to it? It enters a thriving third-party marketplace in China, where it is restored to almost new and sold in gray and emerging markets. Weird!
WhatsApp, the popular messaging service that was recently bought by Facebook, is adding a big feature in a few months: voice calling.
During a keynote at Mobile World Congress, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that voice calling would be added in the second quarter of this year. The feature will be a free addition to the already free app.
WhatsApp has 465 million monthly active users, which is 15 million more than Facebook. The service’s huge international presence (it’s the largest mobile messaging service in Korea, for example) also helps explain why Facebook paid $19 billion to own it.
Source: TechCrunch
Do you remember that gorgeous iOS 8 concept from last week that merged multitasking with control center? It’s coming soon to a jailbroken iPhone near you.
Like some totem out of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series, a bizarre and grotesque statuary tribute to the late Steve Jobs was unveiled in Belgrade, Serbia today. Even more bizarrely, Apple may have liked it enough to put it on display in one of its Cupertino offices.
The iOS game controller market is growing at a pretty healthy pace, but there has yet to be a controller that really steals the limelight. We’ve gone hands on with several options, and they all seem to fall into the same boat: a decent upgrade from touch, but not console-level quality.
Demoed at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona, the Mad Catz C.T.R.L.i might be the new controller to beat.
Released early in 2014, Bloodstroke marks Face/Off director John Woo’s first venture into the world of mobile gaming. A Flappy Bird clone ultraviolent actioner from developers Chillingo, Tiger Hill Entertainment, Moonshark, and Chimera Entertainment (enough names for you?), this has the potential to be the most stylishly bloody iOS game of the year.
So how does it measure up?
Let’s say you’re at a conference, and you meet someone you’d like to share your contact information with. You could both download one of many apps in the App Store for this express purpose, you can hand them a business card, or you can just use the simplest solution: send them an email or text message with your contact info.
It’s super easy to do, and takes way less time than downloading an app. It’s also more efficient than a business card, since you know no one actually keeps those, right?
Are you tired of running from zombies, but looking for another way to distract yourself from boring yet obviously beneficial exercise?
The Walk–developed jointly by the UK’s National Health Service and Department of Health–has you walking the length of the UK while listening to an original story in which you’ll need to figure out why a bomb exploded in the tube station, evade hostile agents and the police, and discover how a mysterious package you’re given might save the world.
Samsung just revealed its latest flagship smartphone the Galaxy S5 and not only is it waterproof, it comes in four colors – black, white, blue and gold.
Apple announced the gold iPhone 5s last Fall which led to Samsung to respond up with a limited gold S4 edition, but now it plans to sell the gold S5 globally starting in April.
The gold iPhone 5s was a huge hit with consumers with demand far outpacing supply. We’ll have to wait till Spring to see if the gold S5 inspires a similar fervor with fans, but so far it’s drawing more comparisons to a band-aid than an Apple product.
The Galaxy S5 Gold, or what I call the Galaxy S5 Band-Aid pic.twitter.com/xU5fzvWrvz
— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) February 24, 2014
Image: BI
Tim Cook may happen to be the leader of the most successful technology company in the world right now, but before Apple’s CEO reigned supreme he was just another pimple-faced high schooler from a small town in Alabama.
Cook likes to keep a low-profile but thanks to some high school yearbook photos we now have a glimpse of what Robertsdale High School’s salutatorian of 1978 was like when he wasn’t busy playing the trombone and yearbooking.
Checkout these pictures from Tim Cook’s senior yearbook:
Keeping themselves in the news, Mark Zuckerberg and the people of Facebook have just recently acquired the hit messaging app WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. With over 450 million people already using the app each month, they hope to build upon this success. Similar to their purchasing of Instagram in 2012, will you start using WhatsApp for all of your conversations?
Take a look at WhatsApp app and see what you think.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the multi-platform application “WhatsApp” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
Apple TV users in the U.S. received a smackdown early Monday in the form of a the WWE’s new 24/7 streaming channel.
After being revealed at CES this year, wrestling fans can now watch all the brutality and drama the WWE has to offer with its live streaming network that includes access to pay-per-view events, reality shows, documentaries, and classic matches.
It’s time to start viewing the world around you through a whole new lens…and Cult of Mac Deals has an offer that will help you do just that.
The TOCCs Smartphone Hi-Def Magnetic Lens Kit is perfect for adding an new artistic view to your photos. Your stock iPhone camera barely gets the job done, but you can exceed your expectations and take beautiful pictures that are full of life and really capture the moment with these lenses – and all for the low price of just $19.99!
Creating your own Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to keep your productivity high. To make a shortcut for a menu item that doesn’t already have one, you simply drop into System Preferences > Keyboard, hit the Shortcuts button at the top, and then add your shortcuts (more below). You have to add the full menu path for the shortcut to work, though, and there’s the rub.
Some apps have menu items that are named the same thing. For example, in Pages, there are two submenus named Use Default: one in the Baseline submenu, and one in the Ligature submenu. How can you tell your Mac which menu you want to activate with your new shortcut?
For gamers who would rather relive the classic days of 2-D platformers, the forthcoming Android and iOS title Venture Kid looks a sight to behold.
With an obvious debt to the Mega Man series, and graphics straight out of the 8-bit era, Venture Kid isn’t a port of an old game but an entirely new one — albeit aiming for an old school, pixelated aesthetic from a time when your typical mobile phone was the size of a brick.
On Sunday, HBO debuted the first trailer for its upcoming Mike Judge comedy series Silicon Valley.
Hoping to be viewed as Entourage for the startup scene, the series promises to take viewers inside a fictionalized Silicon Valley, complete with cameos from real-life high tech players.
Today marks the 59th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.
To mark the occasion, here’s a video tribute created by several Apple employees for Jobs to mark his thirtieth birthday in 1985: