Opening this week’s must-have games roundup is a stunning first-person shooter that has you protecting planet Earth from invasion from the “Xenos,” who are on a mission to infect every civilian that gets in their way. We also have a crazy dual-stick shooter that has made the leap from Xbox LIVE to your pocket, an update to Angry Birds Space, and lots more.
The future of the ukulele is here with Futulele! I’ve been playing around with this app from Amidio this afternoon and it’s great. It’s the first app as far as I know that lets you play with both your iPad and iPhone simultaneously! Here’s a video demonstration….
It’s June 1st, and that means Apple’s deadline for when Mac developers need to have their apps sandboxed has come to pass. After months and months of extending the deadline to iron out technical details, all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must now obey Apple’s sandboxing requirements. All existing Mac App Store apps cannot be updated until they meet the guidelines.
While sandboxing will mean safer and simpler Mac apps, there are some negative effects developers have to consider.
Those MADFINGER guys are at it again! After their blockbuster third person shooter SHADOWGUN essentially became the poster child for console quality gaming on mobile, they’ve gone ahead and teased us with their next project: DEAD TRIGGER. MADFINGER has worked hard at optimizing their games to showcase the graphical prowess of NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor as well as supporting iOS’s new iPad, and DEAD TRIGGER is no different. Featuring:
Google sent out invites to certain publications this morning for a mysterious Maps event that will be taking place on Wednesday, June 6th. With the plea to come see the “next dimension of Google Maps,” the company plans to show a “sneak peek” at upcoming features for its mapping technology.
Sure, the event sounds interesting, but the fact that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place 5 days later really adds fuel to the fire.
A decade ago, your mobile phone number may not have meant much. In the days before number porting, mobile phone numbers were transient. If you switched carriers or moved, you got a new number.
Things are a bit different today. You can take your number with you from one mobile carrier to another, you can port it VOIP services like Vonage, or forwarding services like Google Voice, and you can even port it to a landline phone. Your phone number, much like your personal email address or Twitter account, belongs to you for as long as you want to keep it.
That can create a problem for companies implementing BYOD programs. If an employees bring their own phones, they also bring their own numbers. For many employees, particularly those that are mobile professionals, their mobile number is the go-to number to reach them. When such an employee leaves that company, what happens to his or her phone number?
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the world to “stay tuned” to what his company has planned with Facebook. The social network has been rumored to appear in iOS for years, but 2012 looks to be the year Apple and Facebook finally join forces.
iOS 6, internally codenamed “Sundance,” will feature Facebook integration, reports MG Siegler of TechCrunch. The integration will be similar to the way Twitter is currently implemented in iOS 5, although Apple has yet to iron out the kinks in how sharing will work.
Last week’s release of the much anticipated Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak didn’t just benefit iPhone and iPad owners: it also gives a new lease on life to the second-gen Apple TV. Now Firecore has released a major update to their aTV Flash software, and the new goes far to supercharge your set-top box with great new functionality the stock firmware doesn’t offer.
Apple is hell bent on detonating their MobileMe service on June 30th. If you’re still using it, they want you out, and now. Earlier this morning Apple sent email notices to customers who still use MobileMe, iWeb, and iDisk instead of iCloud and told them to pack their lovely treasures and head over to Me.com before everything gets lost in a digital fireball of destruction in 30days.
When traveling, keeping your iPhone safe, charged, and accessible is pretty much a constant battle. What kinds of accessories you need to do so will depend on your destination, your transportation, and (obviously) your budget. Here are a few suggestions for stuff that you might find helpful when travelling with an iPhone.
When the folks at CanvasPop emailed to tell me they wanted to print one of my Instagram photos onto a canvas and mail it to me, I felt a little like I was being stalked. They’d even picked out the photo ahead of time – one I took while I was testing out the excellent TIFF-shooting 645 Pro app.
Still, I wasn’t so creeped out that I wouldn’t send my address, so a week or so later a huge package arrived with the picture inside. And it’s pretty neat.
Summer is upon us, and that means new movies. Tons of great blockbusters will be debuting over the next couple months, including Prometheus next weekend in the U.S. and The Dark Knight Rises on July 20th.
Apple has a handy summer movie guide for 2012. There are some great iTunes trailers and movie details included for what’s hitting theaters, so be sure to check it out.
This is a good way to get a quick rundown of the major movie releases this summer. HD trailers are included for each title along with official release dates.
When you’re upgrading your PC to Windows 8 and can’t decide if you should keep nothing, or keep nothing, don’t worry, Windows 8 will help you decide. At least that’s what happened when one person on Twitter upgraded their OS today. It’s probably just a small bug, but we’ll stick to Mountain Lion when it comes out.
Image: Jukka Eklund
The flaws and future of Siri, his thoughts on Steve Jobs, the long rumored Apple television – Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the 10th annual All Things D conference, and boy, did he have a lot to say.
Join us in our brand new CultCast episode as we pick apart Tim’s D10 interview and tell you why he possibly confirmed the existence of Apple’s long-rumored, top-secret television.
And is the Mac Pro about to get the axe? We’ll tell you what we think.
All that and our answers to your questions on our brand new CultCast. Subscribe now in iTunes and read on through for our show notes.
Put your hand up if you can do more with PowerPoint than make a simple presentation that goes from slide to slide? Fine, you can put your hand up if you know how to make a transition. The thing is though, PowerPoint is a pretty powerful program and can do a lot more than just a simple slideshow. Sure, PowerPoint gets a bad wrap for the terrible slides that people produce—not PowerPoint’s fault, typewriters have been used to write dreck for years!—but you can make a stunning visual impact with PowerPoint—if you know how.
Good thing we’ve got a PowerPoint for Mac course for you as today’s Daily Deal.
A major update to Maps is totally out of the bag, but what else is going to be new in iOS 6? According to a new report, iOS 6 won’t look that much different from iOS 5… until you open up the core apps, which have all been rebuilt from the ground up.
The news that IBM bans Siri for every employee that has an iPhone 4S and participates the company’s BYOD program unleashed a lot of discussion about whether the company was being paranoid or prudent. One of the bigger questions to come out of all that discussion was a reframing of the issue itself – does Siri have a place in the business world to begin with?
Setting aside the security and privacy issues that led IBM to ban Siri, are there compelling use cases for Siri in the workplace? If there are, do they outweigh the privacy and security concerns? Could Apple do more to make Siri business-friendly?
Apple is expected to unveil iOS 6, the next major iteration of its software platform for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, at WWDC in two weeks. Not much is known about iOS 6, other than the new Maps app and the possibility of a more metallic look. Many have been speculating about what Apple could introduce, and we at Cult of Mac have a few ideas we’d like to see come to fruition.
The iOS jailbreak community has been innovating at a quicker pace than Apple for years. Jailbreakers had multitasking first, tethering first, iTunes WiFi sync first, and so on. There are many jailbreak concepts currently available for iOS 5 that we’d love to see Apple implement in iOS 6. That’s not to say that Apple will adopt all of these concepts, but we expect at least a few to show up in a way that only Apple can make happen.
At every public appearance by Tim Cook — say, Wednesday’s on-stage interview at AllThingsD’s annual D10 conference, or at the next WWDC keynote — there is always a certain type of commentator who, with hushed voice, will see the spectre of Steve Jobs looming behind Apple’s new CEO.
It’s no wonder. Steve Jobs was a personality larger than life, so it’s no surprise that the force of that personality can still be felt nine months after his death. Likewise, it’s undeniable that the soft-spoken but forceful Cook is less charismatic than his predecessor. But the idea that Tim Cook is a haunted man, trying to live up to the legacy of Jobs, is absurd. He’s his own man, his own CEO, and Apple today is doing better than it ever was under Jobs’s leadership.
Apple recently followed Amazon’s lead in unveiling a “Free App Of The Week” category, and this week’s is a doozy: Nik Software’s practically perfect image editor, Snapseed.
Normally priced at $5, Snapseed is a fantastic photo editing app that allows you some fantastic control over manipulating and editing photos that you’ve taken with your iPhone. It’s simple enough that even the most Photoshop-unfriendly Instragrammer can use it. This isn’t the first time Snapseed has been free, but my guess is a lot more people will download it this time.
In addition to making Snapseed free, Apple has also declare their Editor’s Choice picks for the week: Nick Jr Draw & Play (iPhone), Nick Jr Draw & Play HD (iPad), Rock(s) Rider (Universal) and Heroes Call (iPad.
If you’re a mobile gamer, then you already know the pangs of those on-screen controls. That’s why any serious gamer heads straight for some form of bluetooth controller to get his/her game on. Snakebyte (Sunflex), a company that makes gaming-related peripherals, has announced their plans to sell a new bluetooth gaming controller for Android and iOS. The idroid:con looks to differentiate itself from other bluetooth conrtollers by being the first to have five different functions and come with no app obligation.
I really love these poignant ads for the Brazilian iPad magazine app, Veja, all of which feature a single finger “dipped” in a different news story after loading up the app. A story about an oil spill features a digit dripping with crude, while a story about genocide coats the finger in blood. The effect is more subtle for the third ad, which shows a pruned finger being held up after a story on a flood.
Not only are these ads gorgeous to look at, but the dripping finger metaphor is a poignant one, not only for the way the iPad has changed the way many of us experience news, but for the immersive power of iOS as a whole.
Beautifully done. Here are the other two ads.
The concept of shared data plans has been floating around in the U.S. mobile industry for a while. So far, however, only Verizon has announced plans to offer them. This idea of shared data plans is based on the various family and business plans available from almost all major carriers in which multiple lines and corresponding devices are bundled as a single plan on a single account. That allows all the devices share the same pool of minutes.
While it seems like shared data would function in a similar manner, the issue isn’t quite so clear-cut from the perspective of mobile carriers. In fact, according to AT&T CFO John Stephens, carriers still aren’t sure how to configure shared data options or how much money they would make or lose by implementing them.
Cricket Wireless became the first prepaid carrier to offer the iPhone yesterday, but it’s unlikely it’ll be the last. One source claims that both the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S will also be arriving on Boost Mobile later this year.
Apple’s ability to turn over its inventory incredibly quickly is seen as one of the Cupertino company’s greatest strengths. But just how quickly does it sell its products? According to Gartner’s Supply Chain Top 25 league table, Apple clears its entire inventory every 4.9 days. That’s faster than Amazon, Coca-Cola, Dell, and Samsung. In fact, the only company that turns over its inventory quicker is McDonald’s.