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.
The high cost of Apple’s iPhone means that it struggles to compete in China, with rivals like Samsung offering a whole range of devices designed for different budgets. But a low-cost iPhone 5C could change that.
One analyst believes that as long as Apple prices it right, the device could help the Cupertino company become the number one smartphone vendor in China, crushing Samsung on the way.
Google has updated its Google Maps apps for Android and iOS to add real-time incident reports from the Waze community. This means that when Waze users — or “Wazers” as they like to be called — report accidents, construction, road closures, and other delays, the alerts will be displayed inside Google Maps as well as Waze.
The Finder in Mac OS X is specifically designed to help you find stuff. In any Finder Window, you can arrange the icons or lists of files alphabetically by Name, by Kind of file, by the Application that opens that file, by Date Last Opened, Added, Modified, or Created, and also by Size and by Label.
In list view, you can also click on the top column title to sort the list in ascending or descending order. It’s a pretty comprehensive way to find your stuff in the Finder, without even having to search for it.
Did you know, however, that you can also arrange Applications by application type (Productivity, Social Networking, Music, Video, and so on)? I didn’t, so here’s a tip on how to do just that.
Even as it stands, Thunderbolt is blisteringly fast, allowing up to 10 Gbps per lane, for a maximum throughput of 40 Gbps. Intel, though, has already upgraded Thunderbolt with the new Thunderbolt 2 spec, which not only doubles the possible transfer speed on a single lane to 20 Gbps (although not increasing total maximum throughout), but enabling 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously.
Since Thunderbolt debuted on the Mac, you’d probably expect Thunderbolt 2 to show up first in an Apple product, right? Maybe an updated Retina MacBook Pro? Alas, it’s not to be: the PC motherboard you see above is the first Thunderbolt 2 compatible product.
If you believe recent scuttlebutt, one of the reasons Apple is looking to release a gold iPhone 5S later this year is because gold is a color that sells really well in China. Is that supposition even remotely true though? If it is, it should be quantifiable.
Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt went looking for data to see if Chinese buyers really do like gold. Data’s actually pretty slim, but if the cars Chinese consumers buy are any concern, not only is gold not their favorite color… it’s only slightly more popular than puke green.
If you use Luxogram, or Webstagram, or any other Instagram compatible app, prepare yourself for the possibility of some change. Instagram has started approaching app developers and services, telling them that if they have “Insta-” or “-gram” in their names that they can expect to have their access to the Instagram stream cut off.
One of the brilliant ways in which Dropbox sort of ingratiates itself to users is the way it hands out extra storage for various tasks. For example, you might get extra Dropbox storage by allowing Dropbox to automatically upload your iPhone photo roll to their servers, or by recommending a new user.
Technically, Dropbox could pretty easily just give everyone a massive amount of storage — say, 100GB — and not impact their business model much (this is the strategy Flickr uses), the gaming aspect of Dropbox is part of its charm. It’s more fun to earn more storage than to simply have storage.
So here’s a nice trick on earning your next Dropbox level up. You can easily add 1GB to your Dropbox account just by linking it to the popular email app, Mailbox.
Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink is a System Service for OS X which automatically generates links from your text, without you having to bother to look anything up on Google first. It’s like having an unpaid intern inside your Mac.
And Editorial is that fancy new iPad text editor that incorporates workflows that you can roll yourself.
Now the two have been combined into one amazing iPad ball of goodness.
Paperback is a minimal read-later service that uses your Pinboard account as a source for articles. Any time you check the “Read Later” box when saving bookmarks to your Pinboard account, these items are added to a rudimentary queue. Paperback uses this list to provide you with a nice, clean, Instapaper-like web view of these links.