It’s hard to believe it came out ten years ago, but when it first popped up on the PlayStation 2 back in 2001, Grand Theft Auto 3 was a revelation: the very first true 3D open world game, filled with fast driving cars, casual gunplay, irreverent humor and an obsession for low-brow thuggery for which Rockstar Games has become famous.
From Grand Theft Auto III, a whole series of games was born, including Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto IV.
Now Grand Theft Auto III is coming to iOS on October 28th. It’ll only work on an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S, and time will tell how Rockstar handles the controls, but this is exciting indeed. iOS already has a GTA game in Chinatown Wars, but as excellent a game as it is, it isn’t a 3D open world.
Me? I’m just hoping this heralds the release of Vice City or San Andreas next year. The former’s my guilty favorite, and the latter GTA4 didn’t even come close to matching.
It’s been a big year for Apple, one that’s set sales records around the world and seen the launch of some of Apple’s biggest and best products ever: the iPad 2, the iPhone 4S, iCloud, iOS 5, Siri, OS X Lion.
It’s also been a hard year, with Apple founder and ex-CEO Steve Jobs passing away last week.
In recognition of everything that’s happened for Apple this year, and to give employees a chance to give thanks, Apple CEO Tim Cook has just sent out an email to Apple Corporate Employees, telling them to take all of Thanksgiving week off, with pay.
When Apple introduced MobileMe, they really created a cluster$@#! of a situation with Apple IDs because they forced you to make a new one when you signed up. That means that millions of MobileMe users have two Apple IDs: the one they’ve used forever to buy songs, movies and apps, and another Apple ID forced upon you for MobileMe.
Well, now iCloud is here and MobileMe accounts have been ported and almost all of MobileMe’s services are now free. Wouldn’t it be nice to frickin’ be able to merge those two IDs into one so you don’t have to worry about this crap anymore?
Australia may soon become an Android-free zone. That’s the opinion of patent experts after an Australian court hit Samsung with a temporary sales ban. Although the sales halt mentions only the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the patents involved could touch every tablet and smartphone based on Google’s mobile software.
The iPhone has been good to Pegatron Technologies. The Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, along with Foxconn, supplies Apple with iPhones and iPads. The company recently announced received orders from the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant for 15 million iPhone 4S handsets, up from 10M orders previously expected. More than 2 million of the new iPhones will ship during the fourth quarter
Apple never intended that users use the Camera Roll for picture and video storage to show off to your friends and family. Here are a couple of tips to help resolve this problem.
A number of Cult of Mac readers, and many more on Apple’s Discussion boards, have reported problems after trying to upgrade to iOS 5 on Wednesday. A good percentage of the time these updates go well, but they didn’t today. On Friday, we may see problems when people try to upgrade from an existing iPhone to a new iPhone 4S. Therefore, I’ll give you five troubleshooting tips that generally fix most, but not necessarily all iPhone, iPad, iPod touch (aka your iDevices) or iOS problems.
The Redsn0w software by DevTeam has always allowed you to jailbreak your iOS device, giving you complete control over your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch (see why you should jailbreak here). This morning, though, redsn0w version 0.9.9b5 was released with iOS 5 support, meaning you can now jailbreak devices and run Cydia apps on devices with iOS 5 installed. Here’s how to jailbreak iOS 5!
Obviously, the best way to make sure you got an iPhone 4S on launch day was to order one online, but that ship has sailed, and if you didn’t get your order in, braving launch day lines is your only option at this point. After four iPhone launches though, we’re now pros at the line-waiting game. Here are our killer tips and tricks for not just surviving the iPhone 4S line-waiting madness and walking away with the model you want.
Only a marketing genius could take an also-ran technology company selling little-known products to few customers and turn it into the coolest underdog with a cultish following spending billions of dollars on products they did just had to have in order to exist. In short, that was Steve Jobs, the “greatest marketer of the ages,” according to AdWeek.
Will Apple regret saying goodbye to Scott Forstall? Photo: Apple
At Apple’s press events, Scott Forstall is the guy who introduces the company’s latest developments with the iOS firmware. He also pops up in the company’s infamous marketing videos in which they use words like “amazing,” “revolutionary,” and “magical.” But Scott’s not just that guy who gets up on stage every so often. He’s an incredibly important member of Apple’s executive team, and in a profile by Bloomberg Businessweek, he’s described as a “mini-Steve” who’s driven, obsessed over little details, and a magnificent salesman.
Guess who is tearing down the iPhone 4S? Our favorite gadgeteer vivisectionists over at iFixIt, that’s who. They’re in the middle of spilling the iPhone 4S’ guts right now, but we’ll update this post if they find anything interesting, Stay tuned!
If you shopping for an iPhone 4S and looking to trade-in an earlier Apple handset, you could get up to $200 off from one electronics retailer. The policy is just the latest appearing as stores ready for Friday’s rush of iPhone customers.
We’ve been getting a lot of reports this morning that iCloud is down for many users around the world, and Apple’s own iCloud system status page confirms it.
While it’s natural to fear a MobileMe style debacle, we’re guessing that this is just related to iCloud being hit with an unfathomable amount of early adopter traffic, and will settle down shortly as Apple brings up more servers to cope.
Still, if iCloud is timing out for you or loading incredibly slowly, it’s not just you: the rest of us are having these problems too.
With their usual alacrity, those jovial hacker nerds over at the iPhone Dev Team have already jailbroken iOS 5. But there’s a caveat: it’s tethered only, for now. Also? Don’t even think about jailbreaking an iPhone 4S or iPad 2.
Apple has been destroying PC sales, that’s not counting the red-hot iPad. Depending on which analyst you listen to, the Cupertino, Calif. company for the past 22 quarters has seen growth either 20 times or 80 times faster than the PC industry.
So, you’re the next Ansel Adams, eh? Well, dear reader, then we have a beauty of a deal for you this week. Say hello to the Mac Photo Effects Mini-Bundle!
This bundle is a pretty special one, so we’ll break this down easy for you. You get three cutting-edge Mac Photography Apps for less than the price of just one:
We’ve heard some wonderful stories from people who were lucky enough to have met Steve Jobs, all of which describe Steve as a remarkable man who was, amongst other things, determined, driven, and passionate. Steve knew what he wanted, and he was committed to making it happen, and to photographers who worked with him, that made him a very challenging photo subject.
Chalk up another courtroom win for Apple against Android. Tuesday, an Australian federal judge ordered Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales halted, a move that dooms lucrative Christmas sales for the South Korean company and could threaten other Android-based devices.
Apple is said to be finalizing deals with major movie studios that will allow the Cupertino company to introduce movie streaming to iCloud for Macs and iOS devices.
Back in March, at the next to last Apple keynote he would ever attend, Steve Jobs coined the phrase “post-PC world.” The usual cynics tittered at the time, and perhaps are still tittering, but as he often was, Steve was right: day by day, the iPhone in our back pockets or the iPad in our messenger bags are the most important computers in our lives.
For iOS 5, Apple put their money where Steve’s mouth was. Apple was going to prove to everyone that the umbilical between iOS and a Mac or PC could be cut.
Apple’s strategy was simple. They would go through iOS, identify every feature that assumed or required a PC, and radically retool it so that it relied on the cloud instead. With iOS 5, Apple stores all of your data — your mail, your calendar, your address book, your photos, your music, your ebooks, even your Doodle Jump save games — in the iCloud. iTunes Match hurls your complete music collection onto Apple’s servers, available to download anywhere and anytime without pulling out your Apple Connector cable. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi Syncing makes sure that if your iPhone or iPad does need to talk to your PC, it can do so just by being plugged into a wall socket and within stone’s throw of your PC.
All of this would be ambitious enough, but Apple didn’t stop there. They added major new features to almost every core iOS app: Mail, Safari, Camera, Calendar and more. They integrated Twitter sharing into the core of the operating system. They made a serious play for the hearts of magazine publishers with Newsstand. They totally overhauled the way iOS handles notifications. They introduced over the air updates. And then they introduced their own new iOS device messaging system that threatens the bottom line of every wireless carrier’s extortionate, hopelessly overpriced SMS texting plans.
So now iOS 5 is here, and the question is: has Apple severed iOS’s innate tether to the PC, or will iOS 5 be remembered as a smaller interim step towards the post-PC world Steve so presciently envisioned?
We’ve been playing with iOS 5 for months. Here’s what we think: by gum, Apple’s done it.
Demand for yesterday’s iOS 5 release combined with all the associated updates for OS X and other apps caused “unprecedented levels” of traffic over one UK broadband network.
Writing on their own network status alerts site, engineers at UK ISP AAISP reported that “something was up” at 8.48pm UK time last night.
I went to bed last night and my Apple TV stated that the update was gong to take a whopping nine hours. I get up this morning only to find out that it wasn’t even close to being done or that it had even moved along any. It looked stuck. So I started over and guess what?!?!?! The time went from nine hours to an extra galactic 41 hours – I guess the download was coming from the Andromeda galaxy.
Here’s how to work around all this update drama and get the update done in under 15 minutes.
Apple fans the world over are coming together to pay tribute to Steve Jobs this Friday, October 14, with a day dedicated in his honor. Steve Jobs Day encourages fans to admire Steve’s work and say thank you to one of the world’s greatest innovators.
To celebrate Steve Jobs Day this Friday, Erica Montelongo and Gunter Zieber are getting married at their local Apple Store.
“Gunter admired Steve Jobs and this is how he wanted to celebrate Steve Jobs Day,” said Montelongo, 34. “And when you add in Tiffany and Co., how could a girl say no?” To learn more about thesteve jobs wedding, check out this detailed article.
