Angry Birds Friends, the latest bird slinger from Rovio, has today landed on iOS. It’s a little different from the other titles in the series, because this one’s all about social gaming, rather than playing alone. The game connects to Facebook, than allows you to challenge your buddies to weekly tournaments, and brag about your highest scores.
If you’ve only recently upgraded to iTunes 11, you might be wondering where some of the features you relied on are? If you’re looking for Podcasts or Radio in the Sidebar, you might not see them right off. Luckily, the fix is fairly easy, and it’s also a great way to customize what you do see there, letting you get rid of things like iTunes U, Ringtones, and other stuff that you may not even have an interest in.
Here’s how.
Yahoo! launched its new Weather app for iPhone a few weeks ago, and it’s quite possibly one of the prettiest weather apps you’ll find in the App Store. It’s received a ton of praise for its design, which combines gorgeous Flickr photos with clean, minimalist graphics.
If you instantly made it your new weather app — just like we did — then you’ll be pleased to know you can know make it your default weather app on iPhone with a new jailbreak tweak called “YahooWeatherisBetter.”
https://youtu.be/qKQAivS0xsE
Former Apple Retail Chief Ron Johnson’s time at JC Penney was not a good one for the company. Johnson tried to revamp the retailer’s image from a clearing house for cheap junk sold at discounted prices during an endless spree of “sales” and “coupons” into a refined boutique, a store-within-a-store retail concept similar to the Apple Store.
The result? A $12.99 billion year-over-year decline in revenue that got Johnson fired as CEO after his first year on the job. And if that’s not bad enough, JC Penney is now adding insult to injury by releasing a commercial apologizing for the changes he made.
It’s no secret that new MacBooks are coming at WWDC in June, but they’ll just be spec bumps, featuring a small ~8% performance boost thanks to Intel’s new Haswell processors, and a gain to battery efficiency. Nothing to get excited about, right?
Actually, no. Haswell’s hiding one super beefy update in its silicon: Iris, Intel’s super-charged integrated graphics that will boost Haswell’s polygon by 200% compared to the last generation… not to mention make the MacBook Air’s graphics beefy enough to support a Retina Display.
Ever wish that you could change the font size in your iPad web browser? Well, with NaviDys you totally can. You can also switch up the font, and adjust letter spacing and line spacing. What is this browser? A type nerd’s dream? Well, maybe, but really it’s designed to make things easier for the visually impaired.
The second-most-common use for my iPhone’s camera is
scanning. I snap pages from recipe books, business cards from, well, from the kind of people who still carry business cards, and hand-written notes from index cards. Which means that my Camera Roll is full of pictures of slightly skewed documents with my pink thumb peeking in at the bottom corner.
Standscan will stop this.
UK low-cost airline Easyjet – referred to by some Brits as "sleazyjet" – has brought Passbook support to its mobile app. Now you can not only shop for flights with the app, you can check in and have the boarding pass sent to your iPhone’s Passbook app.
You know those cool mini DNG previews that let you take edit your RAW photos even when your don’t have the drive containing your photos connected to your MacBook Air? That tech could soon lead to Lightroom on your iPad. On Scott Kelby’s show The Grid, Adobe’s Lightroom boss showed off a prototype of the app.
If you’re not already using Acorn for Mac OS X, now might be the time to give this Photoshop alternative a look. The newest version, Acorn 4, just hit developer Flying Meat’s web page, coming in at an affordable thirty bucks and a host of improvements, tweaks, and additional features.
The International Data Corporation (IDC), an firm that analyzes tech trends around the globe, released its quarterly Worldwide Tablet Market Study today, showing that tablet sales show no signs of slowing down any time soon.
The study shows that tablet shipments have increased 142 percent year over year for Q1 2013. Tablet shipments totaled 49.w million units in this first quarter, surging past the entire first two quarters of 2012 combined.
All tablet makers saw huge gains in the tablet space, though Apple’s overall share of the market is decreasing. The iPad is still the world’s largest tablet being sold, with 19.5 million shipping in the last quarter, up from 11.8 in last year’s Q1, an increase of 64 percent.
There was a study by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) last week which concluded that voice-to-text apps, like Siri, offer no benefit over standard texting. In fact, they say, reaction time nearly doubled when using these types of apps.
Adam Cheyer, one of the scientists that helped create Siri, however, begs to differ.
The Apple Pop-Up Museum showcases the history of Apple from its inception to today. The exhibit is run by Lonnie Mimms, a tech junkie who has been collecting every bit of Apple gear he can get his hands on for decades.
The museum opened last month, and if you’re in the Atlanta, Georgia area on May 18th or June 8th, Mimms will be opening the doors again.
Hackers want your web logins, especially ones that have sensitive banking info, like your Apple ID. A fresh round of phishing attacks that ask for Apple IDs and passwords has surfaced.
“Phishers appear to have concentrated their fire on a relatively new target: Apple IDs,” according to Trend Micro. “In recent days, we’ve seen a spike in phishing sites that try to steal Apple IDs.”
The U.S government has been warming up to consumer smartphones for some time. A couple months ago, the Pentagon announced that it will permit “the use of commercial products for classified communications for the first time.” Android handsets and iPhones are starting to be used in areas that previously didn’t offer security clearance.
In a world that has been ruled by Blackberry, the latest Samsung and Apple devices are about to be let into deeper parts of the government.
One of the more useful features of modern browsing, the AutoFill function started on the desktop, then made its way to the iPhone and iPad a while ago. It lets your iOS device hold all the form data, populating the oft-repeated fields with your personal info like your name and address. That way, you don’t have to type it all in all the time, which is brilliant on a mobile device with a small touch-keyboard.
When you share a device like an iPAd, like I do with my kids at home, you may not want to share this personal data. Until a proper multi-user experience comes to iOS, the best way to get around this is to clear out your personal info, and then turn off AutoFill. Here’s how.
The ThinEdge bumper from MyBanana promises to be the world’s slimmest “frame case” for iPhone 5, delivering minimalist protection that doesn’t spoil your handset’s sleek and sexy form factor. It adds just 1mm of thickness to the sides of your device, which is just enough to protect its aluminum edges from dings and scratches.
The ThinEdge extends slightly around the front and back edges of your devices to ensure they never come into contact with flat surfaces when placed down, and that means you can show off your handset’s design without having to worry about picking up scratches.
The ThinEdge provides a soft touch matte finish that increases grip, and it comes in a range of colors, including black, orange, pink, silver, and white.
Is it worth its £23 ($35) price tag?
Twitter’s default app for iPhone isn’t necessarily our favorite app for tweeting, but it appears Twitter is starting to get more serious about edging out its competition.
A new update for the Twitter app for iOS was just released today with a new location-based Trends feature. The update also includes the ability to invite friends to join Twitter, better playback on Vine videos, replies to retweets now have more information, and there’s some bug fixes too.
Here are the full release notes:
Jony Ive has been working hard on revamping iOS 7 with a “flatter,” less skeuomorphic design, and Apple is trying to get everything together in time for WWDC in June. iOS 7 is rumored to be a pretty big departure from past versions due to Ive’s involvement. Many of former iOS chief Scott Forstall’s design choices have reportedly been undone by Ive, who prefers a more minimalist aesthetic than Game Center’s green felt.
We haven’t seen OS X 10.9 yet because Apple has been pulling engineers off the project to finish iOS 7 in time for this summer, according to multiple reports. But don’t fret, iOS 7 should still “should ship on time” later this year.
People often underestimate the experience of having wireless headphones when you’re going about your day but once you try these you’ll understand why Bluetooth headphones receive all the hype these days.
They’re sleek, comfortable, wireless, Bluetooth compatible, they sound great, and they’re 43% off thanks to Cult of Mac Deals. For a limited time, these headphones are just $57 – and that includes the cost of shipping!
The iPad is one of the most magical devices ever created. It can store billions of books, photos, songs, and movies. It can entertain you with games, and help you boost your productivity with thousands of apps. It also doubles as a great head replacement.
Last week we put out the call to see what it would look like if Cult of Mac’s readers replaced their heads with iPads. The results were absolutely incredible. Some of you guys went with the funny route, while others showed off their serious photography skills. We’re giving five winners a free copy of FX Photo Studio Pro, but in our eyes they’re all winners.
Here are the 9 best people with iPads for heads:
Want to know why Steve Ballmer wakes up in a sweat at night, screaming at the shadows and clutching his hogshead-sized heart? Look at this chart of year-over-year growth rates of Windows PCs since the iPad came out, put together by the ever nuanced Horace Dediu at Asymco. When the iPad debuted, it immediately killed the PC industry as we know it.
In fact, as Dediu makes clear later in his analysis, Microsoft’s doing so poorly in the PC market right now that even though the Surface was a flop, it’s still accounting for a third of all Windows revenues. Absolutely mind boggling.
Source: Asymco
Everyone’s favorite digital rights crusaders Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have just released an annual report, ranking the biggest companies in tech for who does the best job protecting your data from being rifled through by the Federal Government.
Google’s really good about it. Apple? They’ll give away all your emails and data if the government just breathes on them, and they won’t bother telling you about it either.
CERN has given us many things in our day, most notable among them recent proof of the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson… one of the most elusive objects in particle physics. But like the Higgs Boson, most of CERN’s achievements are pretty exotic.
On April 30 in 1993, though, CERN gave us something it gave all of us something we all use to this day: the worldwide web, software and technology that anyone could use (and everyone did) to build what we, today, called the Internet.
Like many of the revolutions of the computing age, though, the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.
Amazon’s Kindle app for iOS hasn’t always been as accessible as Apple’s own iBooks, but that changed today with a new update that adds VoiceOver support, among other new accessibility features. Kindle will now read aloud over 1.8 million books, allowing those who are visually impaired to kick back and listen to their favorite titles.