Originally planned as a June 11 release, Sim City is now going to release on August 29, 2013, according to a tweet today from EA’s official SimCity Twitter account.
Joining another hotly-anticipated game release for the Mac, Bioshock Infinite, SimCity will hopefully be ready for prime time and not delayed again.
My kids and I have been watching episodes of Adventure Time, Cartoon Network’s disturbingly funny cartoon show. The adventures of Finn, Jake and a cast of crazy characters is compelling television, and hilarious on many different levels.
Legends of Ooo – Adventure Time originally launched for iOS last year in June, and while it provided some of the same fun and voiceover work as the cartoon show in a goofy little iOS package, it only came with one episode, “The Big Hollow Princess.”
This oversight has been corrected this past weekend with the release of the second episode, “The Library of Doom,” an all-new story and adventure game with new voice overs for the characters within. Even better, Episode 2 is absolutely free for a limited time as an in-app purchase. Shmow-zow!
If you haven’t gotten to check out The World Ends With You: Solo Remix yet, it’s completely understandable. Publisher Square Enix has a reputation for charging much more than the typical iOS game when it releases its popular games onto Apple’s touchscreen platform. It totally makes sense you might not want to pick it up for $17.99 for your iPhone, let alone $19.99 for your iPad.
If I said that the game, originally released to the dual-screen Nintendo DS, is completely worth every penny of the asking price, would you pick it up? Probably not.
But what if I said that both versions are now much less expensive, with the iPhone version in the App Store at $9.99 and the iPad version at $10.99? If you love innovative, brilliant gaming on the go, you’ll go grab a copy right now. Who knows how long the sale will last?
The number one rule when it comes to stealing an iPhone is to turn off Find My iPhone and restore iOS to factory settings. Every good thief knows this, but there are so many clueless ones who don’t; the latest of whom is a charming douchebag from Dubai named Hafid.
Hafid likes to cruise around various locales of the UAE and pose the shit out of them. What he doesn’t know is all his profound selfies and other photos on his stolen iPhone are being uploaded to the original owner’s Dropbox account. And she’s posting them all on Tumblr:
We’ve all been there: out of juice on the road and with no charging cable on hand. You can, of course, carry around a 30-pin or Lightning charging cable with you, but that takes up space. There’s something to be said for a small footprint and peace-of-mind.
Enter the Kii by Bluelounge. It’s sync-and-charge piece of mind on a keychain, in a very convenient form factor.
UPDATE: As Cult of Mac reader lepht points out below, there are contrasting opinions on whether push actually saves battery life. Check out his post here to see a different point of view. Also note tordofm’s comment below, and the original article I linked below, both of which support the push as battery saver idea.
You have a couple of options when setting up your email accounts on an iPhone or iPad: Fetch and Push. While Push is only available to more modern email accounts like Gmail, most of us have at least one account that can utilize this email service.
But what’s the difference, really? And how do you set it up on your iOS device? That’s why we’re here.
Mobile payment startup Square has updated its Register app with several new features. Both the iPhone and iPad versions of the app can now record and track payments, including checks and gift cards. On the iPad, merchants can reconcile their cash drawers using the app’s clean interface. The portable SM-S220i printer can now be used to wirelessly print receipts from the app via Bluetooth.
The Apple Store and Best Buy recently started carrying Square’s iPad stand that helps turn the device into a point-of-sale machine.
Square Register is available for free in the App Store.
Source: App Store
The endless runner genre continues to iterate across a variety of gaming apps for iOS, with clones and actual, unique ideas vying for the same space. Knightmare Tower, from Juicy Beast Studio, is one of the latter: a vertical endless runner with a twitchy, compelling take on the genre.
Players take on the role of a Knight, whose gameboy gaming session is interrupted by a letter from the local king. All of the king’s princess daughters have been captured by an evil skull, and must be rescued (sigh). Tired trope aside, the Knight leaps into action astride a wooden rocket ship, intent on flying to the top of the evil castle tower and rescuing a princess per level.
Things haven’t been going all that well for HP on the PC shipment front, but it’s hoping to make up for that with its new high-tech Project Moonshot servers. In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman is so jazzed about her company’s new servers that she’s even going around bragging that Apple might be considering HP for its iTunes services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqfEE_X5cpQ
Joining its buddy Microsoft, Nokia has decided to start attacking Apple’s products head-on with a new ad campaign for the Nokia 925 that bashes the iPhone 5’s camera.
The new ad starts by noting that more pictures are taken on the iPhone every day than on any other camera. But Nokia’s all about quality instead of quantity, goes the ad, so you should totally buy the the Nokia 925 if the only thing that matters in the world to you is your smartphone’s camera sensor.
To Nokia’s credit, their PureView cameras are pretty nice—if you don’t mind lugging around a big bulky Windows Phone that still doesn’t even have Instagram.
Thanks: Dave
Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.
Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:
In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.
Google has released an official AdSense app for Android and iOS, allowing AdSense users to keep track of their earnings on the go. You can keep an eye on your latest earnings for the day, see what you earned yesterday, and view your earnings for the month so far — plus lots more.
Football season is only a month away, so the NFL has completely rebuilt its NFL Mobile app for iOS and Android with a redesigned look that gives football fans quick access to breaking news, scores, and video highlights.
As part of the update, the NFL has folded in functionality from its Verizon-made app, which gives Verizon subscribers the ability to pay for premium features such as live streaming NFL games on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights and NFL RedZone on Sundays.
Apple has sent out an email to registered developers to outline its restoration plans for a number of services that are still down following its Developer Center outage. Those include Xcode automatic configuration and access to license agreements, program enrollments, and renewals—all of which are to be reinstated this week.
For a long time after its launch, the iPad was by far the best-selling tablet on the market, and no matter how hard they tried, rival devices didn’t stand a chance of stealing its market share. But that’s all changed, according to the latest figures from IDC.
Android-powered slates saw a staggering 163% increase in the last year, and they’ve now overtaken the iPad and opened up a rather large gap in market share.
Feedly, the company that picked up the Google Reader API, cloned it, and made it available for all and sundry, just announced their first attempt at monetization: Feedly Pro.
Coming in at a very affordable five dollars per month, Feedly Pro gets paying members more features than the standard Feedly, with promises of more to come, sourced from Feedly users themselves.
I’m always looking for ways to get things done more efficiently and—better still—effectively. After all, those two elements combined are the true keys to improved personal productivity. And while I’m not a coder, I am well aware that the term “lifehack” has its roots based in the realm of coding. The term essentially originally meant “a more general solution related computer problems that occur in a programmer’s everyday life” but now it means a lot more.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t still apply to the realm in which it was born.
Those with older iPhones and iPods are now being contacted regarding a possible payout over faulty liquid damage indicators that caused some customers to lose out on free AppleCare repairs. Apple agreed to pay $53 million in a class action lawsuit earlier this year, and those who may be eligible for damages should be receiving an email soon.
I love Google Chrome—it’s my browser of choice on Android, Mac, and iOS. But navigating your bookmarks within the mobile apps is nowhere near as easy as it should be. Fortunately, there’s an awesome little tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that solves that.
It’s called BMarks Bar, and it introduces a handy bookmarks bar that offers one-tap access to your favorite sites.
Pegatron may be gearing up to take on future iMac orders from Apple after “some related upstream supply chain players” revealed that they have sent iMac components to Pegatron for assembly. Quanta is currently tasked with assembling Apple’s popular all-in-one, and it’s unclear whether the two will now work side-by-side or whether Pegatron will take over.
Have you ever lost your user account password for your Mac? You know, the one which lets you get into your Mac at login, or install software, or delete stuff from the Applications folder? You haven’t? Well, you’re a better person than I am, because I’ve forgotten mine (usually on older Macs I haven’t used in a billion years, but still) and had to pop in a Mac OS X CD and go through the recovery process.
While that’s not too big of a pain in the butt, it does take some time. Time which could be better spent drinking beer, or solving a Rubik’s Cube, am I right?
If you’re running Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, you can assign your Apple ID to your user account, which can help when you need to reset your password. You know, if you forget it or something. Ahem.
Over the weekend, President Obama weighed in on the famous Apple vs. Samsung patent disputes by vetoing an import ban proposed by the International Trade Commission that would have prevented Apple from bringing iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 into the country.
An avowed fan of Apple’s products, it was the first time a U.S. presidential administration had vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987, and seemed to signal that the Obama Administration was not going to penalize an American company like Apple in favor of a foreign company like Samsung.
Financial Markets took notice. Samsung’s market cap is down a billion dollars since the vetoing.
If there seems to be one universal law of commerce, it is this: If you purchase an iPhone from a strange man in the back of a Burger King parking lot who you initially contacted through Craigslist, it is a fact that there will be anything except an iPhone in the box he sells you.
This is a law of commerce more nitwits should probably internalize, since yet another poor sucker has fallen for this classic ploy, with one important difference: It was a McDonald’s! Dum dum DUM!
Leica’s incredible Monochrom camera costs $8,000, and shoots only B&W images. That is of course an absurd price, but it does bring amazing light sensitivity and detail thanks to the fact that there are no color filters blocking light from the sensor, and that all three dots from each pixel are dedicated to grabbing luminance data.
New Zealander Raymond Collecutt clearly liked the look of a dedicated monochrome sensor, but didn’t like the price. So he did what anyone would do—he sacrificed one of his two Canon EOS 1000Ds to the cause, and scraped off the color micro lenses on top of the sensor.
As someone who has been testing iOS 7 for months, I can tell you that when it drops, some app icons are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Why? Because icon design that looked good in the house Scott Forstall built are going to look really out of place in the house Jony Ive knocked flat to the ground.
Unfortunately, unlike on OS X, there isn’t an easy way to swap out an app’s icon for a custom one of your choosing. That said, a new app called Iconical has figured out a workaround. The app lets you customize your homescreen, no jailbreak required, by taking advantage of the custom URL schemes of over 14,000 apps. This, my friends, is a clever idea.