The verdict is in — and Apple is stuck with Michael Bromwich, the antitrust monitor appointed to ensure the company’s compliance in e-book price fixing antitrust rulings.
Apple’s Antitrust Compliance Monitor Will Stay, Judge Rules
The verdict is in — and Apple is stuck with Michael Bromwich, the antitrust monitor appointed to ensure the company’s compliance in e-book price fixing antitrust rulings.
The new bandwagon onto which camera makers can desperately throw themselves in the hopes of saving their low-end camera sales is “smart lenses,” like Vivitar’s new Vivicam IU680. These are in fact just cameras, only they look like lenses and they sit on your iPhone, connecting wirelessly to allow you to control the device from an app and receive pictures from a large-sensor camera in return.
But really, what’s the point?
When Sunrise Calendar got its big iOS 7 makeover last fall, it solidified itself as one of the leading third-party calendars in the App Store. The biggest thing it was lacking was an iPad version—well, until now. Released last week, Sunrise had made its way to the iPad, and it’s great.
Anyone who grew up in the 80s will likely be familiar with the video game cliche in which players take on the role of hero as they battle their way through a series of fiendish castles to rescue a damsel in distress.
Adult Swim have taken this core concept and subverted it: forging a tower defense game that is pitched somewhere between Lemmings and Dungeon Keeper. Instead of playing the hero, you’re put in control of the villain tasked with protecting your castle (with its kidnapped princess bounty) against an army of wannabe do-gooders.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been working on a big-budget Steve Jobs biopic for awhile now. Not only will it have way less zero Ashton Kutcher, but it will be funded by Sony and probably go down as the Jobs movie of record.
Sorkin was confirmed to write the script back 2012, but there’s been little news out of the project since then. Today it was reported that the script has finally been turned into Sony, which means that production is just around the corner.
Google has bought Nest Labs, the hot startup co-founded by the father of the original iPod, Tony Fadell, for a hefty $3.2 billion. Nest has been making forward-thinking gadgets for the home, like its popular thermostat, since 2011. The Nest Protect smoke detector was just announced in October of 2013.
Interestingly, Google has promised that Nest will remain its own distinct brand and operate under the leadership of Fadell.
The web is full of all kinds of links, both clearly labeled ones as well as links with varying degrees of treacherousness (Rick Roll, we’re looking at you). While finding yourself sent to a video of Rick Astley may be fairly innocuous, there are times when you’re on the web and you come across a link that could possibly do something more serious.
That’s where the mobile web browsers in iOS 7 come in. I’ve tried this trick in both Safari and Chrome, but there may be other, less popular browsers that do the same thing: your mileage may vary.
Ylvis’s song “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” quickly became one of the most popular internet memes of 2013 thanks to its crazy weird but uncontrollably catchy video.
Just how popular has the meme become? So damn popular that Apple decided to add it as a Siri easter egg.
You can now cackle “What does the fox say?” to Siri and she will answer back with one of four secret sounds of the fox hiding somewhere deep in the woods – ‘Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!’ or “Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!” or “Chacha-chacha-chacha-chow!” or “Ring-ding-ding-dingeringeding.”
Via: BI
After coming under fire over the holidays for being the victim of a massive hack that leaked phone numbers and Snapchat usernames of over 4.6million of its users, Snapchat is back in the hot seat as many of its users are complaining of a being suddenly assaulted by Snap Spam.
Snapchat has been quick to put out the flames by publishing an open letter on its blog, claiming that the wave of spam is totally unrelated to the holiday hack that exposed users’ info. Instead, Snapchat blames the Snap Spam on the rising popularity of the service.
Here’s the full apology:
Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free
Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.
It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.
Cold Tires — Utilities — Free
If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.
Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.
Apparently, I’m a sucker for minimalist puzzle games.
You can find a lot of them in the App Store, and I’ve reviewed more than a few since I’ve been here. I like the simplicity, the clean interface, the solid blocks of color … it’s all very relaxing. And then I play something like Lyne, a new puzzler that looks like those other zen games, but then you start playing it and realize that beneath its sparsely populated surface is a relentless battle for your sanity.
In a good way. Mostly.
Great presentations are about the ideas, not the slides. Yet most people spend more than half their time making slides rather than honing their message. This is where Slidevana comes in.
Slidevana takes the tedium out of creating clear, elegant slides so you can concentrate on getting your message across. You shouldn’t have to be a snazzy designer to provide a quality presentation and this is the software to ensure anyone trying to present a point can inform in style. And now you can get Slidevana through Cult of Mac Deals for only $69 – a savings of 50%!
SimCity has been plagued by server problems since the day it arrived last March, and despite a series of updates and patches, EA still hasn’t been able to find a complete fix. As a result, the company has reversed its always-online policy and announced it will be adding an offline mode.
Calendar has a few new features in OS X Mavericks, like Facebook event integration, new Time Zone support, and continuous scrolling.
Another cool addition to the Calendar experience is the ability to collaborate with others. You can send invites via email to any number of contacts, and then email or message them all from the Calendar event proper.
On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh. On January 25, 2014, in Cupertino, California, the public will be invited to celebrate the extended team whose efforts popularized the graphical user interface and WYSIWYG software, defining computing for the rest of us. In honor of the 30-year anniversary of the Mac, the Computer History Museum, Macworld/iWorld and All Planet Studios are planning a celebration of this seminal computer and the original Macintosh development team.
The Mac 30th Celebration will be start at 7 p.m. on January 25. The Flint Center venue is just a few miles from the Apple campus, and the event is being held in the same 2,300-seat auditorium where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac back in 1984!
It’s already received a soft launch in New Zealand, but future Mega Jump 2 gamers elsewhere will have to make do with this trailer, ahead of the iOS game sequel’s official launch this Thursday.
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” the titular Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
But there’s no love lost between the two. If you ask Siri about ‘Her’, she’ll claim that Johansson’s “portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” and “gives artificial intelligence a bad name.”
Looks like Scarlett Johansson caught wind, and now, her feelings are hurt by Siri’s harsh words.
Last year, Apple made an important change to 80 percent of their Mac line-up, including the new iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac Air, and Mac Pro, that changed the type of flash storage of each of those systems to incorporate a PCI Express (or PCIe)-based storage system. It’s a much faster technology than the Serial ATA based storage Apple was using before, but there’s a rub: it also uses a non-standard connector, making upgrading any of these Mac’s flash storage impossible up until now.
At CES this year, however, it looks like Other World Computing (OWC) has made important strides to cracking the problem. They showed off flash storage prototypes that should enable users to upgrade their newer Mac’s SSDs.
If you tried to use Dropbox this weekend, chances are you noticed that the usually reliable cloud-storage service experienced an extended outage. What happened?
As large cities go, the Big Apple is a pretty safe place to live these days — unless, ironically enough, you’re the owner of an Apple iDevice.
According to new data released by the New York Police Department, while New York has seen dramatic decreases in the majority of major crimes in recent times, the theft of cellphone and other electronic devices has meant that the category of grand larcenies remains almost unchanged.
I’ve got a confession to make. I don’t like iOS 7’s new app switcher. Sure, it looks pretty, but the screenshots it provides are functionally useless, and closing apps is a much finnickier and hit-or-miss proposition than in iOS 6. It’s one of my least favorite changes in iOS 7.
But now that we’ve got a proper jailbreak thanks to Team Evasi0n, there’s no reason to live with any aspect of iOS 7 you don’t like. So I’m delighted to know that a new jailbreak tweak by iOS Developer Thomas Finch called ClassicSwitcher has brought the good old iOS 6 app switcher back, without its useless screenshots and “swipe up to close” functionality.
Days is a free iPhone app that uses your photos to create a journal of your adventures. The twist is that it takes your pictures and turns them into animated GIFs.
A new Kickstarter project aims to solve the annoying problem of running out of smartphone charge. The solution? A pocket-size USB charger called the Popcord.
Youtopia is a new YouTube app for the iPhone, from serial entrepreneur and friend of Cult of Mac Dotan Saguy. It lets you browse for more videos even as the current video is playing on your tiny iPhone screen.