Cult of Mac

Obviously, the 10-year-old Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic has stood the test of time — and then some — if we’re still playing it today (and we are, in part thanks to its recent iPad port).

Now, almost ten years to the day after its debut on the Xbox in 2003 (it debuted on the PC later that year and on OS X in 2004), both the iPad and Mac versions are on sale.

Aspyr, the publisher behind the Apple versions of the game, even scored an interesting interview with James Ohlen, the game’s lead designer.

Rovio, makers of the all-mighty Angry Birds franchise, kicked off the launch of its new publishing company last month with the new game Icebreakers: A Viking Voyage, but their second title is already here.

Tiny Thief has landed on the App Store this afternoon early reviews have been very positive. The game centers around the character Tiny Thief, an unconventional hero who uses cunning and trickery to out-smart his opponents across six epic medieval adventures.

Priced at $2.99 for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, the game plays similar to the point-and-click games of yore but has its own charm and mind boggling puzzles.

Here is the trailer and release notes:

Pacific Rim doesn’t hit theaters until Friday, July 12th, but if you want to rage battle against Guillermo del Toro’s Kaiju monsters on your own the official tie-in game is now available on the App Store.

The new action fighting game gives players access to five of the weaponized robots in the movie called Jaegers, to do battle against the powerful Kaiju monsters. You can choose Story Mode to play 30 different levels that kind of follow the movie, or Survival Mode and see how many waves of Kaiju you can defeat while upgrading the tech of your Jaeger.

You can grab Pacific Rim for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch from the App Store for $5.

Here are the full release notes:

ForeverMap 2 is one of those great apps that should be a no-brainer download for any even moderately frequent map user. Unlike either the standard iOS Maps app or the Google Maps app, ForeverMap 2 can download and store custom maps on your device — allowing you to use the map and accompanying navigation features even without a wifi or data connection.

Today, ForeverMap 2 has been updated with behind-the-curtain improvements to make it much faster, and it now also includes guide information from Wikitravel. It can even route bicycle trips. Best of all, Skobbler has dropped the price from $3 to free till the end of the day.

Deus Ex: The Fall came out yesterday, and the much-anticipated cyberpunk game was immediately met with lukewarm to mostly negative reviews for being a very bland game indeed. But that’s not the least of Deus Ex: The Fall’s problems. If you have a jailbroken device, the developers won’t let you play it at all… even if you’ve purchased it legally!

iOS 7 beta has a great new feature in the Notification Center system called Today. This is an attempt, perhaps, to counter Google Now with more useful current information available to you right on your iPhone or iPad’s lock screen.

You can enable the Summary, Traffic Conditions, Day View, Reminders, Stocks, and Tomorrow’s Summary right in the Notification Center, and make it available right on your lock screen, without having to type in your security passcode.

Here’s how to enable, and then manage, this new feature in iOS 7 beta.

https://youtu.be/uhM-DuM2WgE

Check out the inexplicable Samsung ad above. A weirdo sitting in a barren landscape, giggling at apples, as a synthesizer farts. Then, suddenly, he does a weird dance with Ninjas. Hey, don’t you want to buy a Galaxy S4 now?

It’s completely stupid, and Steve Jobs would have hated it. How do you know? Because legendary Apple ad man Ken Segall says he would have. Here’s why: Steve didn’t want his ad companies huffing the paint thinner.

Remember how desperate carriers were to get the iPhone on their networks? The billions Sprint and Verizon pledged to Apple in the hopes that they could promise a big enough order that Apple would have no choice but to give them the iPhone?

Looks like the laugh is on them. In fact, this year alone, Verizon might be on the hook for over $14 billion dollars in iPhones they are not likely to sell.

We all have at least one friend who is just verbose as hell on iMessage. Like, dude just doesn’t get the fact that you don’t want to read a novella about how the Chipotle burrito roller lady ripped his tortilla twice, so he sends his 1852 character rant to you like it’s an honor to know of his guacamole debacle.

Rather than having to scroll through extremely long iMessages in the chat window, iOS 7 has a new feature which allows users to expand them into full screen mode. A truncated version of a long iMessage will display in the chat window with a little arrow at the bottom to expand it and read more.

Here’s a GIF of how it works:

If you’ve been looking for a case for your smartphone but don’t want to get caught with one that becomes obsolete when you eventually upgrade, then Cult of Mac Deals has an offer that’s going to sound very appealing.

Now you can “splash-proof” any device with this case for only $9 – a savings of 77% – and have a case that is as versatile as it is protective.

Microsoft has announced today a major company reshuffle which will affect both its hardware and software divisions. It’s part of the company’s initiative to become “One Microsoft,” and it will see many company executives moved into new roles.

We’ve been hearing for years now about Apple’s never-quite-realized intentions to ship devices featuring Sharp IGZO displays. Now a new report says they’re coming to the 2014 MacBook line.

Despite “weaker” orders from Apple during the second quarter, Foxconn managed to post revenue that beat analyst estimates thanks to its increased focus on televisions. The company announced revenue of NT$897 billion ($30 million) over the three-month period, which is 0.6% higher than its second-quarter revenue for 2012, and better than the NT$829 billion expected by analysts.

Facebook for iPhone and iPad has been updated to introduce verified celebrities, public figures, and brands. Just like on Twitter, verified accounts will have a blue check mark next to their names, so now you’ll know for certain whether that guy you’ve been talking to really is Justin Bieber.

AutoFill has been a part of OS X and Apple’s browser, Safari, for a while now. When you fill out forms on the web, Safari will prompt you to use your contact info to fill in the form, or to use the form data you entered as your AutoFill information. This is helpful as you fill out a lot of web forms, of course.

Now, in OS X Mavericks beta, Safari has a new trick up its sleeve, with the ability to suggest secure passwords to you, and then saving them for you when you go back to that site. It’s called iCloud Keychain, and here’s how to set it up.

Samsung has overtaken Apple and Nokia to become the global leader in mobile web traffic, according to the latest figures from web analytics company StatCounter. It’s the first time the South Korean company has taken the lead in Internet usage, but Apple isn’t far behind.

The Blazar is yet another wireless speaker designed to play nice with your iDevices, and any other music-machines you might have laying around. This one distinguishes itself with a few neat features, including stereo pairing and NFC.

Quick, grab your ice skates: we’re going for a spin on the frosted lakes of Hell. Yes, that Hell. Why? Because the App Store just recommended me an app that’s actually good. It’s called Specifics HD, and it’s a note-taking task manager.

Roll up roll up roll up folks, and get ready for the Nerd-o-Rama. In today’s edition we bring you Calca, a “text editor for engineers.” Imagine that somebody took Soulver and Markdown and left them together in a survival pod for nine or ten months with lots of booze and no contraceptives, and — eventually — you’d get Calca.

Fact: The photographer never appears in group photos. It used to be that we’d hand the camera off to a stranger to snap a picture of us and our friends, but while I was happy to give my camera to a person picked almost randomly on the street, there’s no way in hell I’m giving them my iPhone.

And so does the march of technology further distance us from our fellow human beings. The latest tool of alienation? Groopic, an app which puts the photographer back into group shots.

Just five short years ago I interviewed the magnificently-bearded Julius von Bismarck about his Image Fulgurator, a modified 35mm film SLR which would project an image onto whatever it was pointed at using a powerful flashgun. The gimmick was that the device was triggered by the flashes of innocent tourist sheep as they flocked to famous monuments and snapped point-and-shoot pictures.

Invisible to the human eye, Julius’s various pictures and messages would be marked indelibly onto the pixels of these tourist photos. The fact that the Fulgurator looked like a gun just made the whole thing cooler.

Now, there’s a version you can buy. It comes from the folks at DIY Photography, and it’s called the Light Blaster.

IFTTT (If This Then That), the do-anything glue that hooks up all your favorite web services autmatically, now has an iPhone app. Not only that, it has three brand-new iOS-only channels which tie into photos, reminders and your contacts.

I’ve been testing it for a few days, and it’s pretty damn cool.

Auction giant eBay conducted an informal little experiment for the App Store’s fifth anniversary yesterday, to see whether people could survive O.K. without apps. Yeah, you’ve already guessed the answer.

Apple just seeded a new development release of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5, build 12F20 on it’s Developer page today. It includes a combo updater, a delta (just changes) updater, and a note describing the changes in the new seed.

The seed note says that the focus areas of this current seed are, like previous seeds, Wi-Fi, Graphics, and Wake from Sleep. In addition, this seed also focuses on PDF Viewing and Accessibility as well as Mobile Device Management.

If you’re a developer working on Mac apps that need to be compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, go ahead and head over to Apple’s Developer page and grab yourself a copy of one of the updaters, and have at it.

Source: Apple Developer

Typically, US iOS apps and games are released into the App Store on Thursdays each week, though some apps of late have been going live on odd days of the week, perhaps to beat the Thursday glut.

Either way, Square Enix’s first Deus Ex game to launch as a full experience on iOS has gone live today, one full day earlier than expected. Deus Ex: The Fall is the highly anticipated new chapter in the Deus Ex franchise, and it’s coming to iPhones and iPads, rather than consoles or computers. This alone makes it something to pay attention to, let alone the gorgeous visuals and brand new entry in the series.