While smartphone have really taken off since Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007, believe it or not, traditional feature phones have remained the biggest sellers worldwide. That was until the first quarter of 2013, when smartphones out-shipped feature phones for the first time ever.
Of the 418.6 million cellphones sold during the first three months of the year, 51.6% of them were smartphones, according to new figures from IDC.
Scapple is a great new app for writers. If you were looking for an app that creates a sheet of paper on your Mac, then this is it. Scapple comes from Literature and Latte, the folks behind the amazing Scrivener, so you know that it has been designed and used by writers.
Lifehacker’s Adam ”never seen without a beanie" Dachis has come up with an ingenious solution for the gadget-laden traveler. Instead of messing around with travel chargers or any other gadget-by-gadget solution, he built a mobile charging station out of a giant portable battery and a USB hub.
Derrick Story – photographer, Macworld writer, podcasts and the man who (somewhat brilliantly) named his site The Digital Story – has just launched a new book called iPad for Digital Photographers.
The book isn’t proposing that you use you iPad to take photos, holding it up in front of you like some big dork, but that the iPad is a slim and powerful computer that should be slipped into the gear bag of anyone who takes pictures.
You don’t want to see my desk. Trust me – it’s pretty bad. In fact, you mightn’t even be able to see it, hidden as it is under a stack of junk and gadgets.
Actually, I’m kidding. I’m a neat-freak, which is why I have my eye on the Station, a bamboo desk tidy for your iPhone and all your other crap.
Critically acclaimed real time strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, has just hit the Mac App Store with a new Elite Edition, just for the Mac.
XCOM stands for Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, and the game lives up to its name, with turn-based tactical battles on a global scale, with a solid storyline and deep role playing game systems to boot. If you’re a sci-fi gamer who loved StarCraft I and II, XCOM is right up your alien-infested alley.
And now it’s finally on the Mac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoVW62mwSQQ
Now that’s pretty. Apple just posted a HD video of its new, poignant TV ad, “Photos Every Day,” on its YouTube Channel.
SpeakingPhoto is a new social photography app that lets you connect in real-time with anyone you like, using photos and recorded audio to share your special moments. Competing with Vine, Snapchat, and Digisocial, SpeakingPhoto aims to be a nicer place to be; instead of the party-atmosphere of the latter two apps, this one wants to let you record and archive the “memories, notes, and stories behind milestone moments in your personal and professional lives.”
Pretty heady stuff for a photo sharing app, right?
American McGee’s Spicy Horse Games (Akaneiro, Alice: Madness Returns) revealed its new real time strategy (RTS) digital collectible card game today, tentatively titled Hell Invaders.
Marco Arment has sold his popular read-it-later service Instapaper to Betaworks, the company that recently acquired and rebranded Digg. For years, Instapaper has been a widely-used web service and iOS app for saving links to read later in a clean layout without ads.
Don’t worry, Instapaper won’t be going anywhere. Arment and Betaworks plan to keep developing and maturing the service.
This morning, tickets went on sale for Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference at $1,500 a piece. In a matter of two minutes the conference was sold out, and many developers were left staring at their computer screens with mouths agape.
But it looks like Apple didn’t sell all of the tickets just yet. Apple is reserving tickets and offering them to developers who were able to place their orders online.
The hardware controller for Leap Motion’s futuristic gesture tech was slated to arrive in stores on May 19th. Now Leap Motion is having to delay its public release until July 27th. The reason for the delay is the need for more beta testing and integration with partners who will support the gesture-based platform.
In case you haven’t seen any of the demos, Leap Motion is incredibly cool. It allows you to control your Mac using Minority Report-style hand movements. Developers have been testing and integrating Leap Motion with their apps, and the software will come with its own app store at launch.
Your heart races as you stare at your Mac’s screen, breathlessly anticipating the browser window loading another time. “If I just hit refresh again, maybe it will work,” you tell yourself. And it doesn’t. You check Twitter to see that your nerdy, developer friends can’t order tickets either.
WWDC 2013 sold out in two minutes. That’s crazy, but it’s true. You missed out.
Perhaps the above image is a more appropriate logo for this year’s WWDC, considering how many saddened devs won’t be able to attend. Apple gives third-party devs its full attention only one time of the year, and that has historically been WWDC. My colleague, John Brownlee, has already explained the reason tickets sold out so quickly. And Apple simply can’t open the conference up to more devs. Better luck next year.
Source: Louie Mantia
Mailbox may be the best email app out there, but it’s only on the iPhone. In Cult of Mac’s official review, we noted that one of the biggest cons was a lack of iPad support. Because Mailbox has such a distinct workflow for managing email, it’s difficult to use when not present on all devices.
The good news is that Mailbox is coming to the iPad. Orchestra, the developer behind the app, is working on an iPad version as we speak. Other platforms are also being looked at, including the Mac.
Ever since 2008, WWDC tickets have sold out faster and faster. In 2009, tickets to WWDC tickets sold out in a month. In 2010, it took eight days. In 2011, tickets sold out in 12 hours. Last year, they sold out in 2 hours.
This year, though? You needed to record the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it melee of WWDC ticket buying with one of those super highspeed cameras they use to show bullets blasting through fruit. 5,000 tickets to WWDC sold out in under two minutes, and even if you were there from the very first second, the sheer crush of developers trying to login to Apple’s system crashed it.
In essence, unless you got lucky and Apple’s login system didn’t barf all over you, there was simply no way to get a ticket this year.
What can Apple do about WWDC in the future to allow more people to attend? Honestly, probably not much.
Public Wi-Fi is becoming more commonplace these days, with smaller cities (like the one I live in) even adding it for the convenience of commuters and the like. But when you’re on public Wi-Fi — like at coffee shops, airports, hotels, or conferences — anybody can see what you’re doing online. If you visit sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon.com, and thousands of others, your privacy may be at risk.
In short…your privacy is gone on public Wi-Fi.
This Cult of Mac Deals offer aims to help you combat those who might try to compromise your devices while surfing public Wi-Fi with Cloak. Cloak is the antidote to hackers and hacker tools like Firesheep. With just one click…you’re safe. And thanks to this deal, you can have that safety for only $59.99.
The Amplifiear from BiteMyApple is a nifty little accessory that clips onto the corner of your iPad and boosts its sound output. It’s specifically moulded to amplify and direct the sound from your iPad’s speaker, and it promises to increase its volume by up to 10 decibels.
While the iPad’s speaker might not need amplifying in a quiet room, add background noise — such as a busy street or children playing — and it becomes hard to hear whatever it is you’re watching or playing. But by projecting your iPad’s sound towards you, the Amplifiear is designed to be “perfect for these conditions.”
The Amplifiear comes in six colors — black, white, red, green, blue, and orange — and is priced at just $24.99. Let’s find out whether it’s worth it.
Assisted Touch is an accessibility feature for iOS, usable on any iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that recreates the hardware buttons and other gestures that someone with a motor disability might need to use. It also lets other folks use the Home, volume, screen lock, wake/sleep, and multitasking bar without using any of the hardware buttons themselves.
This can be pretty handy if you have the device in a case or holder of some type where accessing the buttons is tricky or impossible, like a home-made picture frame, for example.
Here’s how to activate this useful feature.
If you weren’t one of the lucky few that bought a WWDC 2013 ticket within the first 120 seconds they were available, then you’re probably super bummed that you’re not going to hangout with Jony Ive and the gang in San Francisco.
Don’t worry though, you can still get into the party if you’re desperate and have a few extra grand on you. Someone’s already put their WWDC ticket on eBay and the bidding starts at a cool $10,000.
Many of us thought Twitter was content to watch its Mac app die a slow and painful death, as the company hasn’t updated the app in forever, but new life has been breathed into the app at last.
Twitter just announced an update for the Twitter Mac app that brings Retina display support, better photo sharing, and support for 14 more languages. The app icon also received an update, along with the tweet composer, in what is the first update in nearly two years.
Here’s Twitter’s list of updates:
WWDC 2013 is already proving to be Apple’s most popular event ever. After opening ticket sales for the event a mere two minutes ago, Apple has already sold out.
Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee was trying to get a ticket. He says: “I started refreshing ten minutes before WWDC, and when the tickets went live, I was instantly hit with an error message when trying to login on multiple browsers. So many people were slamming the WWDC ticket page, Apple’s login system just keeled over. By 10:02AM PDT, all the tickets were totally gone. Unless you got lucky, you didn’t even have a chance.”
Apple announced the dates of WWDC 2013 yesterday, but tickets didn’t go on sale until 10AM PDT this morning. That’s a new one for Apple: usually, tickets for WWDC are available immediately upon the announcement of the dates for the conference. This system, however, has been criticized by many developers, especially those overseas, who never even had a chance to get a ticket.
It’s hard to imagine they liked this year’s free-for-all any better. Apple has got to come up with a better system for WWDC. May we suggest a lottery for 2014?
Even though Apple announced the dates of WWDC yesterday, tickets for the event didn’t go on sale until today. Apple just flipped the switch on WWDC 2013 ticket orders, so if you’re hoping to make it to this year’s event, you better hurry up and get to ordering.
Apple sold out of tickets for WWDC 2012 within 2 hours last year, so we expect this year to be even more crazy. Going to the event will set your back $1599, not including your flight and hotel. The event will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco this year from June 10-14th.
Update: You never had a chance. Apple sold out of WWDC tickets within 2 minutes.
Source: Apple
Without a doubt, the coolest thing we saw at CES 2013 this year was the JamStik, a tiny, ukelele-sized guitar with real strings that connects over WiFi that you can use to record, perform or learn instruments on your iPad.
The only problem was, when we saw it, it was such a new product that it didn’t even have a booth, let alone a distributor. But now it’s finally inching closer to release, spearheaded by a new IndieGoGo campaign that promises to bring the cool-as-hell iPad guitar into your hands and ready to shred by the end of the year.
LinkedIn has launched a new iPhone app today called LinkedIn Contacts, which promises to make it easier to stay in touch with your most important relationships. It brings all of your contacts together in one place, then provides you with alerts for birthdays, job changes, and more.
(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Medium, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Williams’ new publishing platform.)
Usually during Apple’s quarterly earnings calls, you have to read between the lines to guess what Apple’s really thinking. On Tuesday, all you had to do was read the actual lines, because Cupertino was remarkably candid for a change: there was no way that the Apple of 2013 could match the numbers of the Apple of 2012, but “new product categories” — like the iWatch — were going to blow the roof off the house in 2014. In the meantime, Apple needs investors to be patient… and they’re not above paying them off to make it happen.