Cult of Mac

Everyone loves feeding cute little animals, and mobile-game developers are no different. Games like Cut the Rope and Cat on a Diet are all about bringing food to adorable, tiny faces, and Drop That Candy continues the tradition.

In this colorful puzzle game, you are tasked with clearing all of the candy in a series of boxes in order to drop them into the waiting mouth of Gizmo, a woodland creature of indeterminate species. You do this by tapping on the candy, and you can clear multiple pieces of the same color with a single tap if they are touching.

It’s an odd setup, but it all adds up to a game that is equally cute, clever, and fun.

We’ve all had more than enough time to get used to iOS 7 now that it’s been out for a few weeks, but some people still hate Sir Jony’s parallax masterpiece. For those of you dreaming of a different interface on your iPhone, devoid of gradients and helvetica nue, there’s a new tool from UsvsTh3m that will let you create your own iOS 7 redesign masterpiece.

Visitors can tweak iOS 7’s icons, background, font, colors, and most importantly, those horrific shadows. Of course these changes aren’t really going to show up on your iPhone but you can have a bit of fun with friends and share your masterpiece with the world.

Think your version is better than Jony’s? Post your iOS 7 redesign in the comments below and we’ll add it to our gallery.

Source: USvsTh3m

If you’ve ever wanted to code iPhone apps, then join the club. There are plenty of developers already out there delivering content to the App Store every day – and tons of budding developers who are chomping at the bit to do so. If you’re going to compete in this saturated marketplace you’re going to need a solid foundation to build on. And you’re going to need to have it fast.

Cult of Mac Deals has an offer right now that will get you well on your way to building and designing killer apps. For a limited time you can get The iOS Foundations Video Course Bundle for only $69 – a savings of 65% – and this course is geared towards giving you what you need to bring your app ideas to life.

Reports of inaccurate motion sensors in the iPhone 5s continue to grow. As reported last week on Cult of Mac, there appear to be widespread problems with the 5s’ compass, gyroscope and accelerometer.

The original forum thread at MacRumors is now at a whopping 19 pages of user reports, and Apple has yet to respond to Cult of Mac’s repeated requests for information.

This morning, Gizmodo conducted its own tests and found the iPhone 5s motion sensors to be “totally screwed up.”

Looks like the problem is far more widespread than the naysayers on our original post, and on the MacRumors thread, are willing to admit.

Oh, that Baldur, always leaving his Gate open for demons to walk through and attack the world. Silly Baldur.

Developer Beamdog, along with Atari and Overhaul Games, announced pre-purchasing for the upcoming Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, coming to Mac and PC November 15, 2013, and iOS and Android “soon.” The sequel to last year’s successful Baldur’s Gate will run you $24.95 for the full HD resolution and remastered art from the original game, which released in September of 2000, quickly becoming “the most celebrated Dungeon’s & Dragons … game of its time,” currently sitting at a Metacritic score of 95.

There’s a new gameplay trailer, as well, which you can see below.

Let’s not beat around the bush; the incognito mode built into Google Chrome for iOS is used for one thing, and that’s browsing websites that you wouldn’t want others to know you were browsing. But you should stop it — right now.

It appears that the latest release added a nasty bug that causes all of those sordid searches you make in incognito mode to be shared with the regular browser window — as well as Google Chrome on your Mac or PC if you have them all set up to sync with each other.

Apple’s new “Spaceship” campus has received approval from the Cupertino planning commission ahead of a city council meeting on October 15. The new building, which will become home to 14,000 Apple employees, is now another step closer to fruition, and providing there are no hiccups, Apple will be able to make a start on it next year.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

SAN FRANCISCO — Those purveyors of productivity Evernote recently held their third annual conference here.

There was something in the keynote for everyone: swag, an avalanche of announcements — a partnership with Post-it! A new stylus! Backpacks! Scanners! — and a few groan-inducing jokes. (“Do you know what’s the biggest room in the world?” “Room for improvement!”)

Coming on the heels of the Apple event which introduced the world to the new iPhones, it felt like someone had given the time-weathered keynote a much-needed facelift. Or just peeled back a few crusty layers from what we’re all so used to sitting through to hear about the cool new stuff we’ll want.

Here are a few things the Cupertino company could learn from the upstarts.

Samsung has today unveiled Shape M7, a $400 wireless speaker that hopes to compete with the Sonos. It connects to your smartphone, tablet, or computer via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or NFC, and there’s a handy companion app that makes setup easy on Android and iOS devices.

Twitterrific, arguably the best third-party Twitter client for iOS right now, has been updated to take advantage of the new 64-bit A7 processor built into the iPhone 5s. It was one of the first Twitter clients to embrace iOS 7’s new design guidelines, and it appears to be the very first to support Apple’s new processor, too.

Had BlackBerry’s cross-platform BBM launch gone as originally planned, we’d all be BBM-ing each other on Android and iOS by now. Of course, that didn’t happen, and so we’re not. But the Canadian company is still working hard to deliver BBM to its rivals.

Earlier this week BlackBerry promised that it was “100% committed to bringing BBM to Android and iPhone,” and it just resumed beta testing on Android with a brand new release.

Back in December of last year, AgileBits released version 4 of 1Password for iOS. A completely redesigned, streamlined interface was introduced along with a built-in browser and iCloud syncing. The app has supported Dropbox and WiFi syncing for years, but iCloud was a welcomed addition when using version 4 on multiple iOS devices.

1Password 4.0 for iOS was a great release, but the Mac version was sadly left in the dust. The good news is that the developers at AgileBits have been working quietly on a totally new version of the Mac client for months, and it’s finally available.

The Netflix app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has been updated to bring high-definition video streaming to devices running iOS 7. The release also adds support for AirPlay, and some improvements and optimizations that make the app more stable under Apple’s latest software.

Retail giant Target confirmed Thursday that it will launch Brightspot, it’s own prepaid mobile service.

The service will use T-Mobile networks and will give customers unlimited talk and texting for $35 per month, with plans that include unlimited data for $50 per month. The unlimited plan will be similar to T-Mobile’s own service, which caps high-speed data use at 1GB per month.

Better yet? After six months of paid service, Target will give you a $25 Target gift card for your loyalty.

Apple reported some system outages early Wednesday, with multiple services going down between 9:30 and 11:00 am. Game Center and FaceTime were also down for a shorter period of time around 9:30, an outage lasting till 9:45 or so. Here’s what that looks like:

Multiple Services – 9:28 AM – 10:57 AM – Some users were affected
Users may have been unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, Mac App Store, or iBookstore. Users may also have been unable to access iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, or restore purchases from an iCloud backup.

If you were trying to connect to the App, iTunes, or Mac App Stores during this time (or the iBookstore), you may have had trouble. You may have had trouble accessing iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, or restoring purchases from an iCloud backup. It wasn’t you, luckily, but Apple.

Here’s how to find out in the future whether it’s you, or Apple, that’s not letting you use the services.

There’s not many people out there who can claim that their iTunes library is in pristine shape. In fact, more people will admit that it’s a bit of a mess – or even a chaotic one. That’s where TuneUp Version 3 can come to the rescue…no matter how messy your iTunes is. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $29.99 for a limited time.

The iTunes Festival, Apple’s 30-day music extravaganza, ended on September 30th with a performance by Katy Perry. Apple broadcasted live streams of all the festival’s shows on iTunes during the month of September, and the concert videos are still available to stream for a limited time.

Apple’s Eddy Cue recently gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly and talked about why artists (and Apple) love the iTunes Festival. He also explained how Apple is leveraging its connections in the music industry for iTunes Radio.

Apple may or may not announce an iPad mini with Retina display in a couple weeks, but one thing that’s pretty much a given at this point is Touch ID coming to the iPad and iPad mini.

We haven’t seen any leaked fingerprint sensor components for the upcoming iPad 5 hit the Internet yet, but Unboxing Therapy has done some investigating of its own to see if a Touch ID would fit with some of the leaked components we’ve already seen. The results? You’ll have to see for yourself in the video below, but it looks promising:

Update: Mailbox developers emailed us today to let us know that the option to change default browsers is indeed in version 1.6.2, but only appears if you have Chrome installed. Hooray!

One of the biggest complaints about Apple’s iOS is the inability to decide which apps will open when you click links like website URLs and email addresses. Being able to change the default web browser, or the default mail application, would be a fantastic addition to an already great operating system, iOS 7.

Until then, though, we have to use mobile Safari, and Apple’s Mail app, at least when we click through to a link on Twitter or in an email.

The developers of the Mailbox app included a little feature that–when using the Mailbox app at least–will let you choose a different browser for any web URLs you click through to. Unfortunately, it only seems to hold true for an earlier version of Mailbox, 1.5.0, instead of the current version 1.6.2. We’ve emailed the Mailbox devs to find out where this setting went and why.

If you’re running 1.5.0, still, though, here’s how to enable it.

Ultimate Ears, owned by Logitech, makes my favorite portable speaker ever: the UE Boom. The cylindrical powerhouse of a speaker is rugged, stylish, and easy to use.

Imagine my utter joy when I received Ultimate Ears’ latest entry into the portable speaker market, the UE MiniBoom, and found them to be even tinier and equally rugged and easy to use. Oh, and they sound fantastic, too.

When it comes down to who will control the future of the PC, Microsoft, Apple and now Google are battling it out for control of the incredibly important education market, and more specifically, schools.

Not only do school contracts provide each company with massive sales orders, but it allows iOS, Windows, or Chrome to take root in kids lives as they hopefully take their OS of choice with them into the workforce. While Microsoft has asserted its dominance in schools, Google’s VP of product management for Chromebooks, Caesar Sengupta, says 22% of the school districts in the U.S. are now using Google Chromebooks.

Samsung has reputation of making smartphones with screens bigger than the Hindenburg and the newly released Galaxy Note 3 is no different. With a 5.7-inch display the Note 3 is one of the most monstrous phablets ever built, which is cool if you’re using it as a tablet, but really sucks if you’re trying to hold it in one hand and make a phone call.

To make things easier on its single-handed users, Samsung has included a hilarious new tiny screen mode feature called “Use for all screens” that shrinks the UI of the smartphone phablet down to a window that’s small enough for you to use with one hand. To make things worse you’ll have to dive deep into the settings to toggle the tiny screen mode. The only other option was to shrink the size of the actual device, but rumor is Samsung decided that’d be too elegant.

Here’s a video by Android Central on how the setting works:

You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.

You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.

And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.

Well … it’s alright.

Cable industry veteran and former CableLabs executive Jean-François Mulé became an engineering director at Apple last month, and he’s hard at work on “something big.” His appointment comes just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its latest Apple TV, and at a time when the Cupertino company has been working hard to improve the $99 set-top box.

But is Mulé part of something a little more exciting?

The big screen biopic Jobs opened this summer to mixed reviews, primarily over the film’s lack of accuracy in depicting events from Steve Jobs life and Apple’s history. It’s not the first movie out about Jobs and it definitely won’t be the last as filmmakers strive to tell a celluloid version of the life of the mercurial Apple co-founder.

A lot of Apple old-timers have commented on the accuracy of the movie, but it took a Mountain View, CA local-access TV show called John Wants Answers to get Steve Wozniak, Daniel Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld together to dish fact from fiction. Host John Vink has a long history with the Cupertino company; he was an engineer at Apple from 1996 to 2012 and currently heads Macintosh desktop engineering for Nest Labs.

The two-hour discussion went through the film scene by scene, peppered with entertaining banter and some surprising recollections from the panel. Dan Kottke, who also worked as a script consultant on the movie, noted that “in making that film, it was a huge choice of where to start it and where to end it…I thought the movie did a pretty good job of getting the emotional notes right.”

Read on to know more about why no one ever got fired over kerning, had to ask what a Macintosh was and why you should watch TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Fact Versus Fiction

The general consensus was that events, dates, facts and fiction were occasionally conflated to tell a better story. Many scenes were partially correct, but key details were altered. Some events portrayed were complete fiction, and the chronology wasn’t always right.

One example is the story of the Apple I and the Homebrew Computer Club. In Jobs the film, a young Steve Jobs stumbles across Wozniak’s new creation – a computer with a keyboard and screen – and becomes mesmerized staring into the TV monitor. He then sells the idea of a computing revolution to a reluctant Woz and convinces his shy companion to bring his system to the Homebrew Computer Club.

Woz spoke at length about what really happened:

“Steve and I both had gone over to a friend’s house, Captain Crunch, John Draper of the old blue box phone phreaking fame,” recalled Wozniak. “He sat down at a terminal, a teletype, and he started typing. Then he began playing chess with a computer in Boston.” Woz and Jobs were dumbfounded.

“Whoa!” said Woz. I thought: “this is just like Pong. I have to have this ability.”

Woz got some chips, an expensive keyboard ($60 – uppercase only) and wired the thing into his TV set. “This was not a computer, this was a terminal,” said Woz, “But it was a very short step before that terminal just got a little addition that made it a computer.”

Soon Woz made those additions and while Jobs was off at college, he started going to the HomeBrew computer club. Every two weeks, Wozniak hauled his TV set in the car, set up everything on a table in the lobby and started programming in earnest. Soon crowds began gathering and he started showing off his creation.

The buzz was growing, so Woz recalled that during one time Jobs was back home, “I pulled him to the club and showed him all the people around me. And he got the idea that we could sell them. I would have given them away for free.” The HomeBrew computer club already was full of people who wanted to change the world and Woz wanted to help.

“This is the complete opposite of the movie,” interjected show host John Vink. “In the movie we had Steve Jobs trying to convince you [Woz] to come to HomeBrew and you said ‘Nah, I don’t wanna go.'”

“Oh no,” replied Wozniak, “I’d been there since day one.”

What’s a Macintosh?

The development of Lisa and Macintosh were seminal events for the future of Apple. The group concurred that the scene where the Lisa team was chewed out for not having multiple fonts in the word processor was complete fiction. Nobody was fired for a lack of typefaces or kerning, but they did note that a different engineer at Apple was fired around that same time for not wanting to undertake the effort to build a mouse for the system.

Many of the celluloid scenes did portray parts of events accurately, with dramatic effect added for flair. One clip included in the trailer portrays Jobs drafting a young Andy Hertzfeld for the Macintosh team. When Hertzfeld asks for more time to continue working on his Apple II project, Jobs yanks the computer off his desk and says “you’re working on the Macintosh team now.” Then a quick cut to Apple employee Bill Fernandez, who asks “What’s a Macintosh?”

Via email I asked the panel if that was how things really happened, or just good theater?

All three agreed that the Mac project was not a secret around Apple engineers and management at that time.

Nobody would ever have asked “What’s a Macintosh?” That line was just tossed in for dramatic effect, and Fernandez was actually working in Japan at that time. But Hertzfeld did confirm that he lost his computer in the transition.

“[Jobs] came by my desk and said “you’re working on the Mac now’,” said Hertzfeld. “I had just started this new OS for the Apple II, DOS 4.0… and I wanted to get it in good enough shape that someone else could take it over. Steve said ‘Are you kidding? The Apple II’s obsolete, the Apple II’s gonna be dead, you gotta work on the Mac!”

Hertzfeld pleaded for more time, but ultimately to no avail. “Then he unplugged my computer and carried it away. So I had no choice but to go after him!”

The Mac Failed Terribly

Some of the most animated discussion centered around Jobs departure from Apple in 1985 and the initial failure of the Macintosh project. They felt the movie didn’t accurately portray why Jobs was removed from the Mac team.

Woz: “The real situation was that the Mac failed terribly. Totally. We built a factory to build 50,000 of them and we were selling 500 a month. Steve had cancelled projects because they could only sell 2,000 a month.”

“I think he was taking it real hard that he’d failed for a third computer he’d tried to create and his vision really didn’t understand you have to build a market, it takes time, you aren’t going to sell 50,000 on day one. And meanwhile, we had to save the company.”

Jobs wanted to cancel or hamstring the Apple II in favor of the Macintosh, but it was important to continue selling and marketing the older system for a few more years. It generated most of the revenue. That was the primary business decision.

Hertzfeld chimed in: “I tell that story a little bit differently. The Mac did sell a lot of units initially, because of its novelty, because of its positive qualities. In June of 1984 it sold over 60,000 units. So they upped the forecast because Christmas was the big time and they thought they’d sell 80,000 units.”

But sales fell off steeply after the back-to-school rush in early fall, and by the end of the year sales were down to about 1,000 a month.

“When the Macs weren’t selling, a major mistake they made was trying to focus it on the office market,” recalled Hertzfeld. This was the time of the Lemmings commercial, a disastrous followup to the wildly successful 1984 spot. “The whole Macintosh Office thing never really got developed. The Mac needed a hard disk, that was really the biggest single design mistake that we made.”

Kottke: “And meanwhile Lisa had a hard drive.”

Woz: “Patience, patience, patience. Don’t put out a machine when it’s not a good enough machine for the price you’re selling this year. Work on it, work on it, work on it, and put it out when it is a good enough machine to sell at the price you’re offering.”

Steve Jobs and Apple clearly learned that lesson in the post-NeXT period.

Woz: “The Lisa was the right machine, with the right amount of RAM, but it was the wrong year for pricing. We finally got the Lisa back when we got OS X, actually, that’s what I like to say.”

Summing Things Up

The panel generally thought the that TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was a better portrayal of events of this period. Regarding Jobs, “there was no sense of suspense about this movie” said Wozniak. It didn’t show Steve’s thought process, how he reasoned and argued with people.

Hertzfeld noted that both movies had good acting, but Pirates had the better script. He felt that Jobs often felt like a laundry list of incidents instead of something which would show a deeper meaning.

Kottke said the producers of the film faced many decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, such as details about Pixar and NeXT. He said the filmmakers had tried very hard to get things right.

But one of Kottke’s most surprising memories might have been a quick quip to Woz: “Did you not love the Apple III? Because we all thought it was great!”

For more fascinating details, you can watch the entire two hour episode of John Wants Answers on YouTube. Source: John Wants Answers

Image: Photos: Jeff Lee