The iTunes Festival is an annual, month-long music festival and concert series that Apple has thrown since 2007 at the Roundhouse Art Centre in London. Earlier this year, Apple revealed the lineup for the 2013 Festival, but now Cupertino is starting to get the ball rolling on the festivities, updating the Apple TV with a new channel and updating the iTunes Festival iOS app accordingly.
Earlier this month, we reported that Vevo, the popular music platform, was in talks with Apple to make its own Apple TV channel a reality. The channel would allow Apple TV owners to access Vevo’s 24-7 music programming, and would be monetized by ads.
Unfortunately, there were no other details, and you know what they say, “A rumor’s not a rumor that doesn’t die.” So let’s kill off this rumor by making it a reality: the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the Vevo app could launch on the Apple TV as early as this week.
If you’re anything like me, you spent several months play Blizzard’s latest hack-and-slash action RPG, Diablo III, back in the latter part of 2011. During that period (again, if you’re anything like me), the skin on your back probably slowly grew into the fabric of your computer chair, your complexion became a shade best described as translucent, you bathed with a rag on a stick, and your eyes became the size of a lemur’s… all because you couldn’t tear yourself away from the game.
You might want to tie another rag to a stick now and save yourself the trouble later. Blizzard has just announced the first Diablo III expansion, Reaper of Souls.
Phlo is a handy little Universal iOS app which lets you search a bunch of different search engines simultaneously. Just tap in your search term and then hop between various sites using the popover sidebar list.
Just to put the following report in the proper perspective, let’s start out by saying that two months ago — just two days after Apple debuted iOS 7 at WWDC 2013 — we predicted that the iPhone 5S would be released on September 20th later this year, after debuting ten days earlier.
How did we come up with that date? It was easy. We looked at what Apple had done in previous iPhone launches, and then took a look at the calendar for 2013. No soothsaying, no mysterious sources. It was as simple as that.
So when Japan’s largest industry newspaper, Nikkei, starts reporting that Apple will release the iPhone 5S and 5C on (yup) September 20th, you have to ask yourselves. Do they actually know? Or are they just fudging it?
Protex’s new iPad case is a big improvement on the original – aesthetically, at least. The folks at Higher Ground (the company that makes the Protex) sent me the original and I couldn’t bring myself to review it as it looked like a rubber boot with a stripper’s underwear sewn to the back.
The new one keeps the rugged design, but swaps out the stretchy, satiny X on the back for a cross-shaped silicone grip.
Remember the Area Ware wooden iPhone dock concept that we saw back in May? No, neither do I, a problem not helped by the fact that Google insists on searching for “are aware” when I tap in “Area Ware”. Either way, that neat design has been, uh, redesigned and can now be almost bought: it’ll be shipping on November 1st.
I never thought I’d describe a camera and iPhone accessory as “creepy,” but here we are. The Keizus is a quadropod (four-legged tripod) which looks like somebody ripped the skeleton out of one of those cymbal-bashing monkeys beloved of 1970s and 1980s horror flicks. Shudder.
It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”
But is it too late?
I’m always surprised how much bigger and louder stereo speakers make music sound. It might be the fact that the 3-D space it creates fools our stupid brains into thinking that the music is surrounding us, but the difference is huge. Try it: take a device that’s hooked up to actual separate stereo speakers and flip between stereo and mono with your source.
And so I expect the Earshots Stereo Speakers to sound a lot bigger than their 34mm diameter would suggest.
Federico Ciccarese is an Italian designer whose Apple concepts have been seen on Cult of Mac many times. He has hit it out of the park with his most recent creation, the rumored iWatch running iOS 7. This is definitely the best looking iWatch concept we’ve seen to date.
Twitter’s video sharing app, Vine, has been overshadowed by the addition of video to Instagram, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from signing up for Vine. Vine announced this afternoon that it just hit 40 million registered users today — a huge jump from the 13 million users it announced in June.
The launch of Vine’s Android app in June is likely one of the main contributors to the recent boost, but Twitter hasn’t said how many of its users are on Android, or how are even active., but with amazing videos like this, it looks like Vine might be hard to kill.
Source: Twitter
Gold Diggers is a new take on the endless runner theme, the vertical runner. In it, players are placed at the head of a three-car mining train that actually digs straight down into the earth, picking up gold nuggets and avoiding things like flaming platforms, giant sand worms, and the more run-of-the-mill rocks and walls.
Players move the endlessly descending drilling mine train back and forth across the screen by dragging a finger left or right along the bottom of the screen, where a virtual button sits. The action occurs primarily through avoiding obstacles and chasing down gold nuggets — which can be spent in the game’s store for upgrades and better equipment — as well as power ups that add extra time, distance, or guns to the front of the player’s mine train.
When Apple’s Developer Center was hacked and went down last month, a Turkish security researcher by the name of Ibrahim Balic took credit for the scare. Balic claimed that he was able to get ahold of Apple ID logins, and Apple spent over a week rebuilding the Dev Center to fix whatever was specifically causing the security compromise. Since Apple never confirmed or denied that Balic was the culprit, his actual involvement in the incident hasn’t been clarified — until now.
Apple has listed some of the security flaws that have been reported to the company recently, and it looks like Balic was likely not responsible for the Dev Center outage after all.
This is #BackToSchool week at Cult of Mac Deals. There will be several new deals launching each day. Check in here each day for new deals for #BackToSchool. There will be a ton of apps, gear, gadgets, games, and more to buy just in time for the start of school, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for deals that have school — and savings — in mind.
The tools you can find today to take your school projects to the next level are simply astounding. You can do a lot with the innovations that have come along in design, as things like Haiku Deck and Prezi are replacing things like PowerPoint and those seemingly ancient slide projectors.
They’ve also reached a price where they aren’t only affordable for most, but even for those living on a student’s budget can add some impressive tools to their arsenal at a fraction of what it used to cost. And Cult of Mac Deals has gone so far as to assemble a bundle where you can get a ton of design assets – and name your own price in the process – with The Name Your Own Price Back To School Designer Bundle.
Apple’s Pandora-like competitor, iTunes Radio, is gearing up for a fall launch, but before Apple can stream songs to iOS devices across the U.S. for free, it’s got to find someone to help pay for it all, so it’s recruited some of the biggest brands in the world to supply it with ads.
The list of brand partners participating in the iTunes Radio launch will include McDonalds, Nissan, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble — all of which get exclusivity within their industries until the end of 2013.
Ever been caught out by a long YouTube video someone emails or sends you via Message that you really don’t have time to watch right then?
That’s where YouTube’s Watch Later playlist comes in handy, but it’s not super easy to find or access on the iOS version of YouTube.
If you want to know how to send a video to your Watch Later list, and then access it again in the future, here’s how.
Google announced a new version of its YouTube app for iPhone and iPad is hitting the App Store today. YouTube 2.0 includes a bunch of new features, including the ability to watch a video while searching for the next great thing to watch.
The app sports better Chromecast integration as well, complete with a new preview screen that lets you queue up videos to push to your TV. There’s also a “play all” feature that allows users to watch every single video in a playlist without having to queue anything up.
The free update is available now in the App Store and Google Play.
Here’s a video of the new features:
Remember the AmpJacket for the iPhone? It’s an awesome little rubbery case which uses passive horn-speaker tech to amplify the iPhone’s already-capable speaker, making it louder and clearer.
The AmpJacket for iPad mini is the same thing, only bigger and designed for the iPad’s stereo speakers. It’s also great, but for different reasons.
For the past two years it’s seemed that the Mac was invulnerable to the sudden drop in PC sales that have plagued other OEMs, but things aren’t looking too rosy for the Mac anymore either.
A new study from NPD Group found that Mac sales were flat year-over-year during July, and if things keep going at this rate, Apple’s domestic Mac sales will be down 5% year over year for the September quarter.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully found a way to sneak malicious iOS apps past Apple’s strict App Store review process that is designed to prevent such software from making its way onto our devices.
The technique used a seemingly innocent app called “Jekyll” that could be updated after approval to carry out harmful actions without triggering security alarms.
Dragon Age and its sequel (cleverly named Dragon Age 2) have provided PC and console gamers with deep, solid role playing set in an original fantasy world with engaging characters and a wide array of choices to make in storytelling and combat.
While the overarching story is what makes these games work so very well, the combat system, especially in the first game, is unique and compelling to play.
That makes the announcement of a new spinoff of the well-reviewed series, coming to Google Play and iTunes this fall, pretty darn spiffy, as Heroes of Dragon Age seems to focus solely on combat.
This morning TiVo unveiled its newest lineup of DVRs, and rather than trying to kick your iOS device out of the living room, the new DVRs will stream TV straight to your iPad or iPhone, even if you’re not at home.
This is #BackToSchool week at Cult of Mac Deals. There will be several new deals launching each day. Check in here each day for new deals for #BackToSchool. There will be a ton of apps, gear, gadgets, games, and more to buy just in time for the start of school, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for deals that have school — and savings — in mind.
Games are a great escape. The more involved they are, the bigger the escape — which is just what a student needs every once in a while. The Mac has only become a mainstream platform for games in recent years, and the type of games that tend to be best served on OS X are simulation-style games. That’s why I game more on the Mac than in the past.
Cult of Mac Deals hasn’t shied away from offering games in recent deals (including a “name your own price” bundle), and another bundle is about to make its mark: The Total War Bundle.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 hasn’t even been available to download from the U.S. App Store for a full week yet, and it has already seen over 16 million downloads, making it the “biggest mobile game launch” in EA’s history. It’s no wonder the company is already planning a new “Far Future” update that will bring new content to the free-to-play title.