R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99

Halloween is just a week away, and here’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications, and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.

It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?

Well, you do now.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App

This week sees the release of Batman: Arkham Origins on consoles, but if you can’t wait to spend your nights beating criminals to death with your bare hands, a companion game is out now for your favorite iOS device.

Batman: Arkham Origins is a free-to-play brawler in which you play as the Dark Knight in a series of battles against groups of criminals who attack him one at a time. Between bouts, you upgrade Batman’s abilities, purchase new equipment and suits, and wait for your stamina to recharge so that you can go on more missions.

It’s pretty much everything you’d expect from a free-to-play Batman game. But it has Batman in it, so there’s that.

Airmail, the wonderful third-party email client for Mac, which we’ve written about a number of times here on Cult of Mac, has today been updated with a whole host of new features and improvements for OS X Mavericks. In addition to quick reply from notifications, the release also adds new icons for the Notification Center, offline editing, local drafts and sent folders, and lots more.

O2 U.K. has partnered with Evernote to give all of its customers a one-year Evernote Premium subscription for free. The offer applies to all business, pay monthly, pay-as-you-go, and mobile broadband customers, and it’s available starting today.

In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.

We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.

Samsung has been fined $340,000 by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission for an Internet campaign against HTC that violated fair trade rules. The South Korean company paid students to praise its own smartphones in online reviews while slamming those of rival HTC.

Last night, Apple released four new videos, including ads for the iPad mini with Retina Display and the iPad Air. One of those ads, Pencil, Apple used the width of a pencil as a reference point to just how light and magical the Air actually is.

If you paid close attention to the ad, though, you might have been surprised who voiced it: none less than Heisenberg himself, Bryan Cranston, also known as Walter White on TV’s Breaking Bad.

For those of us who have been running OS X Mavericks since it was announced at WWDC in June, it’s been obvious for a while that OS X Mavericks is a complete miracle when it comes to battery life. Installing Mavericks on any MacBook is enough to eke an hour or so more battery life out of it, but especially when running on MacBooks boasting Intel’s power-sipping Haswell processors, it’s a game-changer.

What kind of battery life increases are you looking at on, say, a 2013 MacBook Air? Up to 30% improvements, according to legendary Apple OS reviewer John Siracusa.

For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.

In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.

Blackberry’s in trouble. Ever since the iPhone’s debut in 2007 blindsided them, the once-dominant smatphone company has been struggling to recover its mojo. Who can save the floundering Canadian company from ruin? Former Apple CEO John Sculley to the rescue!

If you’re hoping to get your hands on the new iPad mini with Retina display next month, then you’ll want to be one of the first in line at the Apple store when it goes on sale. According to one tablet industry expert, supply of the new device will be “ridiculously tight” at launch, likely leading to long delays for those who aren’t lucky enough to bag one on day one.

BlackBerry has today updated its new BBM app for iPhone, addressing an issue that caused it to crash under Apple’s latest iOS 7.0.3 firmware. The update also brings a number of new features, including contact categories and list sorting and filtering in BBM Groups.

Written by Greg Keonig, product designer and publisher of Atomic Delights.

As a product designer, one of my favorite parts about any new Apple product launch is the inevitable “How it’s made” video. The Mac Pro incarnation did not disappoint.

What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things – even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.

ForeverMap 2’s brand-new update is ostensibly an iOS 7 makeover. But if you’re a regular user, one look at v3.3 will tell you that it has been improved almost everywhere.

Tublme is possibly the stupidest name for a thing, ever. But it’s also a fantastic name if you think about anagrams, lost vowels, Tumblr and .me domain suffixes. It’s got em all.

Tublme is also an OS X Tumblr app, and it’s pretty gorgeous.

Here’s a neat tip for OS X Mavericks users. It lets you choose how long a Notification Center alert goes away for when you snooze it.

It happens to all of us at some point: you get a little tipsy, you open up your computer and you’re trying out some fancy new contacts app; or you’re just not really paying attention to what’s happening in your browser. And then BOOM, you’ve signed up for a LinkedIn account. Good luck. You have now ruined your e-mail forever.

We all hate the seemingly unstoppable spam that LinkedIn loves to spray all over our inboxes almost daily, but now the company has gone one better, able to inject its insidiousness right inside the native mail app of your iPhone, using a kind of “plug in.” How is this sorcery done?

Hazel users who have already installed OS X Mavericks have reason to be cheerful today: An update to the app brings support for Mavericks Finder tags, letting you do all kinds of neat things with your files, automatically based on how you tag them.

Mac gamers rejoice, as Mac game port superstar Aspyr just announced the fantastic news that the latest hilariously bloody Borderlands 2 downloadable content (DLC), “TK Baha’s Bloody Harvest,” is available for Mac on the very same day it is available for PC gamers, bringing us all closer together in our need to blast each other away in 2K Games’ brilliant first person shooter game.

T-Mobile is bringing its “Uncarrier” strategy to tablets with the upcoming launch of Apple’s new iPads. Yesterday we reported that T-Mobile will offer 200 MB of free (yes, totally free) data to iPad Air and mini owners.  But that’s not all.

Yesterday Apple announced that all of its consumer software, including OS X Mavericks, is now free. Customers who buy Apple’s hardware will have full access to the completely new versions of iLife and iWork at no additional cost. It’s a bold move that The New York Times called a direct attack on Microsoft Office.

The decision to make iWork free wasn’t Apple’s only jab at Microsoft during yesterday’s keynote, and now the Redmond giant has gone on the defensive.

The BAFTA-nominated games studio behind award-winning Great Big War Game, Rubicon Development, just released its latest mobile game: Combat Monsters. It’s available now on Google Play, the App Store, Windows, and will be coming soon to the Mac.

Star Wars® fans…you’re going to be excited about this one.

Cult of Mac Deals doesn’t usually offer iOS games, but today is a different story — especially when we get to showcase one of the most popular iPad games on the market at 50% off. That’s right. You can now own one of the greatest role-playing games of all time – Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic™ – to play on your iPad. And you can own it for only $4.99.

Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.

Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.

Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.

During yesterday’s iPad keynote, Apple showed several new videos to the audience. Now four of those videos have been uploaded to Apple’s official YouTube channel.