We got it wrong last week, when we thought a cryptic Disney teaser was a clue to something we’ve been salivating over for a few months: the arrival of Android and iOS at Disney’s Infinity platform.
Instead, Disney has released a beautiful Toy Story 3D puzzler game for iOS and Android; and even though it’s not exactly what we’ve been waiting for, it still looks really freaking cool.
A couple of weeks ago, 11 bit studios (Anomaly Warzone Earth, Anomaly Korea) asked us all to pre-order its next game at half price, sight unseen. Well, the time has come to lift the curtain on that mystery game.
Anomaly 2 is planned for a Q2 2013 release on Mac, PC and Linux, bringing the sci-fi strategy series started on iOS to desktop computers for the first time. Along with the announcement, the development team has released a preview trailer (above) and developer diary, the latter of which is a very honest look at what it takes to make an independent game these days.
Apple is working on a 4.5-inch iPhone with a polycarbonate body, according to a new report from Japanese publication Macotakara. The device has reportedly been “postponed” for a 2014 release.
Want to preserve your entire photo, without having to crop it, and save it to Instagram for all your many followers to enjoy and Favorite? Well, you could pull it to your Mac, create a square canvas, add sidebars with an image editing app, and then put it back on your iPhone, ready to send to Instagram, but who wants to do all that?
#NoCrop–the app, not the hashtag–has you covered.
Google has a released a pretty big update for its YouTube iOS app that adds a “send to TV” option. The feature was added to Android last year.
This is basically Google’s version of AirPlay. It’s an open protocol that’s in Google TV, Xbox, PS3, and some new HDTV sets. Once you’ve paired with the device, the YouTube iOS app becomes a remote for discovering and playing back videos on the big screen.
The promise of the Wahoo RFLKT is of a tiny, ultralight box with an LCD readout which displays information from an iPhone cycling app on the handlebars of your bike. You get the advantage of using your favorite tracking app, and also of having an easy to read and control HUD, instead of having to buy an expensive GPS-enabled bike computer.
The reality comes somewhat short.
Skewering Apple’s recent ads aired during the Oscars, Conan O’Brien spells out for everyone what the iPad is really used for more than almost anything else: porn. Of course, the iPad mini is even better, since you can hold it with one hand.
It was recently reported that Apple is working on a wristwatch computer with a curved glass display. The glass was speculated to be Corning’s Willow Glass, a brand new technology that lets a thin pane of glass fold up like a newspaper. “The thinness, strength and flexibility of the glass has the potential to enable displays to be “wrapped” around a device or structure,” according to Corning.
If Apple were to release an iWatch in the next year or so, it would assumedly need Willow Glass to be ready for mass production. Unfortunately, it will be several more years before Corning’s flexible displays are ready for consumers.
After saying that the highly anticipated racing game would launch in 2012, EA and Firemonkeys have finally released Real Racing 3 in the U.S. App Store. The Real Racing franchise has been a staple part of the App Store since 2009, and the third installment was demoed onstage at Apple’s iPhone 5 event last September.
Real Racing 3 is perhaps the most visually stunning iOS game ever, and it’s free to download. However, there is one catch…
Throughout the churn of ever-changing priorities and products at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, or at any trade show for that matter, there is one constant: slogans. To be more specific: big banners printed with meaningless corporate gibberish.
This is where the world’s surplus of words like “enabling,” “future,” “innovating,” and “together” go to die, like orange-skinned retirees to Florida.
Leap Wireless owns Cricket, a small prepaid carrier in the U.S. that recently started selling the iPhone. In fact, Leap was the first pay-as-you-go carrier in the U.S. to start selling the iPhone at full price. Now other prepaid carriers like Virgin Mobile have also picked up Apple’s handset.
In recent months, Leap hasn’t been very thrilled about how many iPhones it’s selling.
For the sixth year in a row, Apple has topped Fortune’s list of world’s most admired companies, beating out other tech giants to the top spot like Google, Amazon and IBM.
Cult of Mac reader, Richard, emailed us today with the following issue:
I was trying to move my photos from my Mac to an external drive and during the transfer it kept asking me if I wanted to cancel or replace the image because that image was already there. I didn’t want to stop the process so I kept saying cancel. Afterwards, I realized that I was probably replacing images with the same number (e.g., img. 18) but that the images were probably different because, for example, I had simply reused sd cards from my camera and created a whole new set of images. Does this make sense? If I did indeed do that, are those images gone forever?
Yikes! We’ve all done this at some point in our Mac lives, some of us (looking right at myself) more than once. How can we get these replaced files back? There are three options that I know of.
Jefferies analyst Peter Misek is one of our favorite Apple analysts in the entire world. Mostly because his Apple predictions are usually horribly wrong.
After the disastrous Apple TV SDK Event rumor he created earlier in the month, Misek is back with a new note to Apple investors, and it’s not a happy one. According to Misek, Apple is about to face a very rough two-year period, and he might actually be right.
The iBookstore might not be the most profitable leg of Apple’s empire, but it is said that Apple doesn’t get into a business if it can’t make a billion dollars off of it… so no surprise that the iBookstore is a billion dollar business, even if it’s not much more than that.
Remember that one time that a U.K. judge told Apple that they have to publish a public apology to Samsung on their homepage? It was a really weird punishment that made a lot of us scratch our heads, but Apple handled it pretty well.
Well it turns out that that same U.K. judge who was pro-Samsung now has a really good reason for wanting Samsung to win against Apple – he just got a new job with Samsung!
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was pretty disappointing from a gadget-lovers point of view. Samsung was there, but didn’t announce anything new. Microsoft didn’t even have a stand, and even the once-great App Planet section is little but a business-service wasteland (albeit with the best tea, coffee and beer in the show).
Still, even a pile of crap has variations in its texture, and so we bring you the “Best” of Mobile World Congress 2013.
Apple announced today that their free education portal, iTunes U, just topped over one billion downloads for content. iTunes U provides free educational content from some of the top universities around the world and is the world’s largest online catalog of free educational content.
If you’re looking for a free education, or just want to brush up on some subjects, you can enroll in iTunes U courses from professors at Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.
One of the longest running complaints with iOS is the lack of a filesystem, particularly for pro users. Some might even say that it’s a problem limiting the adoption of iOS devices as primary computers. To help bridge this gap, developers have released countless file management apps in the App Store, all attempting to solve this issue. The problem is, none of these apps got it quite right. Some had great UIs and a lack of features, while some were visually upsetting while littered with an abundance of options. Files App, a new application from Sonico Mobile, changes all that. Not only does it look great, it provides a myriad of functions as well, making it one of the best file management apps I’ve ever seen for iOS.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Bluetooth speakers are great in the kitchen. But the the Josiah from Kwamecorp is possibly the best kitchen speaker ever. Not only does its beautifully minimal styling fit right into any kitchen, but it’s fashioned from ceramic, and can even act as a snack tray.
This small Bluetooth speaker looks remarkably like the iconic Jawbone Jambox, arguably the most popular ultra-portable Bluetooth speaker on the market right now. And just like the Jambox, it can be used to stream music and make calls. It even comes in what looks like the same colors — or very similar colors — the Jambox comes in.
But look more closely, and you’ll see small cosmetic differences — because this isn’t the Jambox. It’s the Urge Basics Sound Brick, and it has one very big difference with the Jambox: it’s less than one-third the price.
We say “might,” because we haven’t tested it yet; but sandwiched between the hard exterior shell of Incase’s new Chisel case and the iPhone it protects is a second, soft case with a secret ingredient called Poron XRD — a material we’ve found almost unbelievably excellent at absorbing impact energy.
After texting on the iPhone for awhile, you get used to seeing the “…” bubble mid-conversation. Whenever someone with iMessage is typing to you, the ellipsis bubble appears in that thread of the Message app. It helps you know that whoever you’re talking to is about to respond, and it also gives people away when they choose to start an iMessage and then stop.
What if you could see when someone was sending you an iMessage no matter where you are in iOS? The iPhone’s status bar would be the perfect place to display such a notifier, wouldn’t it?
Today Amazon updated its Cloud Player iOS app with full support for the iPad. Amazon’s music streaming and storage service got its own iPhone app last summer, and now the app has been made universal with an interface that’s optimized for the iPad’s larger display.
With Cloud Player on the iPad, Amazon customers can stream music and download tracks to play offline. The app displays larger album artwork while music is playing, and it retains the same look and feel of the iPhone version.
The new year is well underway, and we’ve got a bundle lined up for you here at Cult of Mac Deals that will help you make the most of your Mac over the months to come. And the best part is that you’ll get all 8 of these time-savings apps for free as part of The Mac Freebie Bundle.