Today sees the release of the Mac version of Civilization V’s Brave New World, the original title’s second expansion pack, following last year’s Gods and Kings expansion.

And it’s being released right alongside its PC version twin, also released today — which means multiplayer is gleefully cross-platform.

We’ve seen a couple of vintage Apple I computers auctioned off over the past year or so, each with an astronomically huge price tag. Another rare Apple I was sold at a Christie’s online auction today but this time the auction failed to reach its expected price.

The winner of the auction purchased the Apple I with its original manual, schematics and photo of Steve Jobs and Woz for $387,750.

While pocketing nearly 400 grand off an old dusty computer sounds like a pretty nice pay-day to most, the Apple I was expected to sell for as much as $500,000 according to pre-auction estimates, though it wasn’t expected to break the $671,400 price tag a working Apple I received in May.

Source: CNBC

Via: TUAW

In previous versions of iOS, the date and time stamps of iMessages you sent and received were printed right in the app, above the iMessages they pertained to.

Not so in iOS 7, with only a date stamp showing up at the top of each segment of messages that come in on a particular day. If you want to know what time those messages came in or were sent, it looked as if you were out of luck.

But wait! There’s more! Turns out that you can, in fact, see a time stamp for every message in the Messages app. Here’s how to access it.

When I first tested the BlueAnt Q3 headset, paired with my iPhone 5, I was surprised by how poorly it performed. I couldn’t get over how bad the audio quality was, and I was surprised a top-notch company like BlueAnt could release such a dud. Investigating further, I decided to snoop around online to see what others were saying, but it I wasn’t alone, other iOS users we experiencing similar issues.

With that in mind, I had no choice but warn readers, and rate the Q3 poorly.

But here, the story begins anew. After filing my review, several readers, and BlueAnt themselves, alerted me that the real problem has to do with the problematic ways Apple implements Bluetooth, and BlueAnt assured me a simple Q3 firmware update would absolve any audio issues I may have had. Fair enough, I thought, after all, this wasn’t the first time I had experienced subpar audio with Bluetooth headsets that, when used with non-Apple devices, seemed to function sublimely.

I’ve now tested a brand new fully-updated Q3, and I’m happy to report that it has indeed solved many of the Q3’s initial audio faux pas. BlueAnt, to their credit, has now earned at least some reprieve, as the Q3 is now bringing both fists to the fight.

Being able to find a great restaurant in any city from your iPhone is pretty great and all that, but when you’re starving, the only thing that matters is injecting that food straight into your digestive system as soon as possible.

Rather than drooling on your way to a restaurant you found on Yelp, you can now order your meal straight from the app. Restaurants supporting the feature will have an “Order Pickup or Delivery” button on their Yelp page where you can binge on all the burritos, pizza, bonbons and kabobs you want.

Support for the new feature is limited to select locations, but Yelp says it will be rolling out to more locations in the coming weeks. The free update is available now in the App Store.

Source: iTunes

Apple and Amazon have agreed to end their lawsuit regarding the rights to use the “app store” name, leaving room for both companies to use the phrase.

The case was dismissed on Tuesday afternoon by U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California. The dismal comes after Apple promised Amazon it won’t sue, thus eliminating the need for a counterclaim from Amazon.

Using your iPhone while driving is a huge no-no unless you want to die in a fiery crash of metal and flesh. Rather than putting all of its hopes behind Siri though, Apple has dreams of replacing all of your dashboard controls with a touchscreen interface.

According the the U.S. patent filing No. 8,482,535, Apple has developed a concept that would replace the analog controls of car dashboard with tactile and touch screen controls so you can keep your eyes on the road while adjusting temperature or changing the radio station.

Here’s how Apple described its dashboard to the USPTO: 

We already know that companies can track our location in real-time through a smartphone’s GPS and serve deals or ads relevant to your location, but what if your iPhone could predict where you’re going to go in 24 hours?

A group of researchers have created an algorithm that uses location tracking data on people’s phones to predict where they will be 24 hours from the present. Shockingly, the average error is within a mere 20 meters.  

You know how painful it can be when a customer or team member doesn’t understand your instructions. This Cult of Mac Deals offer aims to help you solve that problem…with Clarify.

Clarify makes it easy to communicate with images. It is screen capture software that offers a faster, simpler alternative to screen recordings. Create annotated images with ease – and be sure your message is understood.

And Cult of Mac Deals has Clarify for only $19 during this limited time offer.

When the first colorful shells for the so-called budget iPhone first started leaking, they seemed like they were probably fake. Surely, Apple would find some other way to skimp on their new low-end iPhone build price than by casing it all in cheapish plastic in a Froot Loop pallette of colors.

But it’s starting to look like there’s a lot of smoke for no fire, with another leak out of the Far East showing the budget iPhone in red, yellow, white, blue and green. These are starting to look real: budget iPhones with a 4-inch Retina Display that are about 2-3mm thicker than current devices, and will end the fragmentation between 3.5-inch and 4-inch displays among Apple’s for-sale iPhone range when the budget iPhones go free on contract.

What do you think of the budget iPhone’s look? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Apple Daily
Via: Slashgear

There’s a fair few accessories that put an iDevice charging cable on your keychain, but I think I like Bluelounge’s Kii the most, in that it’s actually housed in a key. It’s pricy, though: $20 will get you the 30 pin model, but if you have an iPhone or iPad with a Lightning connector, it’ll cost you twice as much to have a charge-and-sync cable that you’re always drunkenly trying to thrust into your house lock.

Source: Bluelounge
Via: Gizmodo

Although Apple beefed up the MacBook Air line at WWDC last month with new ultrabooks packing Intel’s Haswell processors, they have yet to upgrade the venerable MacBook Pro with the same technology. That’s a bummer, because Haswell can greatly improve battery life without sacrificing speed… surely the kind of tech you’d want in a Retina MacBook Pro.

We still don’t know when we’ll see the MBP line updated, but it’s looking like it might be happening soon, with new benchmark results for a next-gen 15-inch MacBook Pro popping up on a community benchmarking site.

In the new OS X Mavericks beta, there’s a new Notification system in place that mimics much of the way iOS handles notifications. Your iOS notifications, in fact, can push right to your Mac desktop as well.

Much like iOS, each app that uses Notification Center can be set to a fine-grained level of customization, letting you show them in Notification Center (activated with the icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen), decide whether to let them use a Badge app icon, and whether or not to play a sound for each app’s notifications.

If, however, you value your privacy, you may want to disable the default setting that has your notifications showing up even when the display is off or locked.

Here’s how.

Apple finally allows us to put the Newsstand icon in a folder in iOS 7, but wouldn’t it be great if we could completely hide all the built-in apps we don’t use? Thanks to a glitch in the latest iOS 7 beta, you can. After following a few simple steps, you can remove stock icons from your home screen so that they’re nowhere to be seen.

The Pandora app for iOS has today been updated with a number of new features that promise to make your listening experience all the more pleasurable. In addition to improved playback buffering, there’s a new automatic pause feature, Pandora URL support, and more.

If you obsess over even the tiniest speck of grease or dust on your camera lens, then you should probably avoid this video, which shows a poor Canon 50mm ƒ1.8 standard prime being tortured. And I do mean it when I say “tortured”: Evil photographer Richard Choi really gets elemental on that front element. The surprise? The lens (almost) doesn’t feel a thing.

Diamond Scale is what looks like a kind of fake novelty app which purports to turn you iDevice into a scale. The best thing is to just describe it to you.

The little drilled aluminum Braven 650 is one of my favorite portable Bluetooth speakers – it’s small, it’s light and tough and it sounds great. Plus, it’s a lot louder than the Jambox, and it has a USB port so that you can recharge your iPhone from the speaker’s battery.

So I have high expectations for the new 850. If the 650 was a competitor to the Jambox, the 850 is a rival for the Big Jambox

Do you snap pictures for your blog using your iPhone, and then do the actual blog writing on your Mac? Or some other combination of devices? Then PUPS is for you. It’s a new iPhone app from the makers of crash-happy blogging app Blogsy, and it has one purpose – to upload pictures from your iDevice to your blog’s media library.

Ever wonder just how much light a polarizer filter cuts out from your photos? You can easily see the effect in the viewfinder as your turn the filter and see the reflections disappear, but what if you could take a photo of the light it cuts out?

Sounds impossible? Not if you use math… and Photoshop.

Garmin has just announced a neat new HUD box that takes the map info from your iPhone and projects it up onto your car windshield. Named after the Paul Newman character in the movie of the same name[1], the HUD is designed to work with Garmin’s Navigon and Street Pilot apps, connecting to the host phone via Bluetooth.

Following the release of the iOS 7 beta 3 this morning, Apple has also released the third preview of OS X 10.9 Mavericks to developers this evening. The new preview comes two weeks after Apple released the second beta for Mavericks.

The  new release doesn’t contain any major new features, but focus mostly on bug fixes and performance. In an email to developers, Apple encourage beta testers to: haven’t discovered any major changes in the Mavericks preview 3 yet,

“Take advantage of new features, like APIs that optimize the new energy saving technologies in OS X Mavericks, as well as new AV Kit frameworks, Sprite Kit, Map Kit, and many powerful additions to existing frameworks.

Here are the release notes:

Spiderweb Software is an independent game developer based in Seattle. It’s been in operation since 1993, when it released its first game, Exile: Escape from the Pit, an old school RPG with tons of plot, dialogue, and fantasy storytelling.

Now in its twentieth year, Spiderweb continues the indie role playing game genre it’s been developing for the past two decades by releasing its twenty-first game, Avadon 2: The Corruption.

By now you’ve probably caught wind of the short list of great apps that’ve gone free in celebration of the App Store’s fifth anniversary (if you haven’t grabbed these apps yet, take a look now before all the free ends).

Missing from that list of free apps is Localscope, a fantastic navigation and discovery tool that Apple called the best navigation app of 2011.

Nothing screams “summer!” like a bag full of beer and ice. The messenger-bag gurus at Timbuk2 know this, and have re-clad and re-released their stealthy party-in-a-bag bag, the Dolores Chiller Messenger — this time in Pilsner Urquell’s signature green and white colors.

You may be asking “can’t I just dump all the stuff out of my own messenger bag and fill it with beer and ice?” Why no, you can’t. Your bag’s interior isn’t insulated; and more importantly, your bag doesn’t come with a handy bottle opener.