Cult of Mac

We met with Morgan Belford, Game It Forward’s co-founder, when we hit PAX last month, and he told us about his company’s new game, Quingo, a free-to-play mix of trivia and bingo for iOS. The game lets players of all skill levels, including kids, play the trivia game to earn money for some great charitable causes, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Kiva, PAWS, Seattle Children’s, Splash, and The Martinez Foundation.

“We want to make sure our players can see the concrete results of their contributions, so we worked hard with our charity partners to define specific projects that will receive the funds,” said Belford in a statment. “To that end, players can see how much they’ve contributed and how well each project is doing.”

If you like trivia, it’s a great way to give something back while playing a game. Not too shabby, for sure.

I’ve been using Neat products for the past couple of years. I’ve got a NeatDesk for Mac and an active NeatCloud account. So when the folks at Neat reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in putting the company’s latest piece of hardware – NeatConnect – through the paces, I jumped at the chance.

I’m really not a fan of trivia games. Any time someone drags out Trivial Pursuit at a party, I’m the first to come up with an excuse not to play. But You Don’t Know Jack was always different. It’s a trivia game with attitude, a sense of humor, and a weird bald mascot. What’s not to like?

The original game launched in 1995, and now it’s on iOS with a new title: You Don’t Know Jack Party. This is a new, live multiplayer version of the trivia game that lets you connect up to four different iOS devices to one Apple TV and play together in the same room on the big screen, via a secondary, free JackPad controller app.

Sure, there’s also a single player experience, but it won’t be as much fun.

Puzzle Knights is a match-three game with tactical strategy, light RPG elements, and online arena battles created by Mojaro, a developer made up of some pretty experienced game development folks, like founder Laurent Ancessi, who has worked in the gaming industry for over 25 years, with a bunch of top gaming companies, like Electronic Arts, Sony, Radical Entertainment, and Naughty Dog.

The game has just launched into the app store, and is looking pretty good. Check out the launch trailer below.

If you were hoping to order a new iPhone 5s from the Apple Online Store tomorrow and have it delivered to your door on Saturday, then you may be out of luck. The new handset just went on sale in Australia, and no matter which color or capacity you go for, every single model comes with a 7-10 business days shipping estimate.

With the launch of iOS 7 yesterday Apple made some bold steps to ditch the rich textures, shadowing, and other skeuomorphic elements that have been a staple on the iPhone since 2007.

Thanks to the departure of iOS Software Chief Scott Forstall back in October, Sir Jony Ive was given a bigger role in iOS software development, so to hype up the launch of Jony’s first software masterpiece, he and Apple’s new SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with USA Today to give some details on what went into the creation of iOS 7.

According to Jony, the decision to strip iOS of all its shadows and physical references was pretty easy once they got Forstall out the door:

Calling it the “first Speed MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),” Zynga released Solstice Arena to the iOS App Store this past June. The game garnered many awards and some fairly good reviews from around the web.

Tuesday, Zynga announced that Solstice Arena was available in the Mac App Store, bringing the streamlined real-time action battle arena game to OS X.

The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c has just gone on sale in Australia, and the team at iExperts have already gotten their hands on the new devices and given them their first teardown.

Thanks to all the leaks we’ve been enjoying in recent weeks, many of the components you’ll see below have already been seen before. But if you get a kick out of seeing expensive gadgets being pulled apart — or you just admire Apple’s incredible build quality — then you’re in for a treat.

The city of Cupertino this week published updated plans for Apple’s proposed new campus ahead of possible approval next month. A city council meeting is scheduled to go ahead on October 15, and providing all goes well, Apple will finally be able to begin clearing the land that the “Spaceship” campus will be built upon.

Good news, Google Wallet users — you can now access your account on your iOS device with an official Google Wallet app. You can use it to make payments to friends, track your loyalty cards, and access nearby offers. One feature you won’t find, however, is tap-to-pay, which relies on NFC connectivity.

If you love tanks but find your standard-size garage and local laws too restrictive, you might want to check out Boom! Tanks, a free-to-play armored combat game by developer Codemasters.

This love letter to all things treaded and turreted tells the story of one group of people with tanks squaring off against a less-good group of people with tanks, and — look, it’s called Boom! Tanks. You can probably guess what you’re signing up for.

Combat in Boom! Tanks works like this: At the beginning of the round, you drag and hold an aiming cursor over your enemy in order to lock it into your targeting system. Once this is done, you will always hit; the question becomes how hard. And you figure that out with a timing-based minigame in which you try to stop a marker as close to the middle of the meter at the bottom of the screen as you can. Stopping it directly in the middle grants you a “Perfect Shot” which does more damage. Meanwhile, the game drives your tank around; you don’t even have to worry about that.

At the Tokyo Games Show today, Sony unveiled its new PlayStation App for Android and iOS, which lets gamers access the PlayStation Network from their smartphone and tablet to interact with friends, see what others are playing, and remotely download games to your console.

The app will also turn your Android or iOS device into a second screen for selected PlayStation 4 titles.

Grab your iOS7-running iPhone and activate Siri. Now say one of the following…

Change the brightness
Adjust Bluetooth

… and various combinations thereof. You’ll be rewarded with switches and sliders to adjust these settings right there on the Siri screen. Pretty good huh?

The Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5S? It’s not limited to just human use. As Darrell Etherington over at Techcrunch has discovered, it works just fine with a cat’s paw too.

Boom! No, I mean it literally. This is a boom mic for the iPhone, although here is is pictured not on a boom but on the iPhone itself. Yes, for just $40, you too can make amateurish-looking movies where the mic dips into frame at just the wrong moment[1].

As seen in the iPhone 5s, Apple’s new A7 chip is the world’s first 64-bit ARM-based chip… but it’s not Apple’s first quad-core chip. Instead, the A7 is dual-core in a sea of Android competitors boasting 32-bit quad-core processors.

One of the things that makes typing long-form text on the iPad bearable is TextExpander Touch, the iOS version of Smile Software’s amazing snippet-substitution app for the Mac. Sadly, iOS7 has broken the clever hack Smile was using to let it share its snippets with any app on your iDevice.

But happily, there’ a new hack, and it just requires third-party developers to make some tweaks to their own apps.

Over on his official Flickr stream, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has posted this beautiful shot of the iPhone 5c packaging.

With iOS7, Apple has upped the cap for app downloads over cellular to 100MB, meaning that if you carelessly hit “update all” for your apps when you’re out of the house, and you have a bunch of game updates pending for your iPhone, then you could potentially burn through your entire month’s bandwidth allowance in one go.

It’s not just you: iOS 7 has seemingly killed off support for some unlicensed, third-party Lightning cables.

Simplenote was one of the first iOS note-taking apps that could sync with apps on the Mac or the web. And despite tweaks and added complexity over the years, it really didn’t change.

Unfortunately, what passed for simple and minimal five years ago looks like a Linux spreadsheet app today, and this – along with some weird bugs – ended with me removing Simplenote from my iOS devices.

But now Simplenote is back. It’s simpler, it’s fast, and it also comes on the Mac.

The Nikon AW1 might look look as awesome as the Nikonos, Nikon’s previous waterproof camera (pictured below), but it is the first interchangeable-lens camera I can remember since that iconic design that can be taken underwater without a housing. And having tried out underwater photography with an iPhone and a blurry-lensed case this summer, I can totally see the appeal of doing it with a proper camera.

BlackBerry has finally provided us with launch dates for its new BBM apps for Android and iOS. Just as we expected, the popular messaging service will reach Google Play first on Saturday, September 21 — before popping up in the App Store just a day later on Sunday, September 22.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncyN-LTKTMw&feature=youtu.be

Just after CES wound down back in January, I was part of a (relatively) small group of journalists and bloggers present at the Disney media event that revealed Disney’s Infinity game universe to the world. Problem was, I had no clue why I’d been invited, as all the hoopla was about the console game. Toward the end, I bumped into Bill Roper, Disney’s product development chief, and asked why I was there as I gulped down a delicious, miniature milkshake.

His answer was cryptic. But the reason I’d been invited has just made its entrance onto the app store today — it’s the Disney Infinity: Toy Box iPad app, a virtual sandbox mashup that allows anyone with an iPad to take a variety of Disney characters and play with them in different Disney worlds. And it’s free — for now.

Facebook updated its iOS app today with one of the biggest redesigns since the switch from HTML5 to native last year. Arguably the most popular third-party app in the App Store has been rethought for iOS 7, and Facebook believes that it will be incredibly well received. Why? The social giant has been quietly testing aspects of the new app with millions of unsuspecting Facebook users for awhile.