Apple’s updated App Store guidelines finally give developers the ability to offer free trials for all apps — not just those that require a subscription. It’s a great move for users and creators, and something we’ve been demanding for a long time, but it has its problems.
Daniel Jalkut, developer of the MarsEdit blogging app for Mac, lists eight reasons why Apple’s approach to app trials is flawed.
It may not have been action-packed, but this week’s WWDC was bursting with great stuff. Don’t miss our WWDC 2018 reactions on this week’s episode of The CultCast. Then stick around for our list of all the best new iOS 12, watchOS, and macOS features announced at the keynote.
Our thanks to Casper for supporting this episode. Learn why Casper makes the internet’s favorite mattress, and get $50 toward select mattresses at casper.com/cultcast.
Logan Bailey’s first commercial invention is the Side Winder, a reel that neatly coils a MacBook charging cord to keep it tangle-free.
But the Side Winder isn’t his first Eureka! moment. That came in the fourth grade when he built a better toenail clipper.
Valve is making a huge change that’s going to have a massive impact on the content you see in the Steam Store. The company is doing away with human curation and allowing everything to be sold through its platform.
Valve says it should be up to players to decide what kinds of games they play, while developers should have the freedom to choose what kinds of games they make. However, it will be creating new tools that give shoppers greater control over what appears in their Steam Store.
Dynamic wallpapers are about to change the look of your Mac once Mojave launches to the public, but you don’t have to wait until this fall to get that new new right now.
Mojave includes 16 variations of the same majestic sand dune Apple showed off at WWDC 2018. If you can’t install Mojave on your Mac, you can download the Mojave dynamic wallpapers below.
It’s 2018, and yet Safari still wouldn’t show you website icons, aka favicons, in its tabs. But that has — finally — changed. In both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Safari can now display favicons. All you need to do is toggle one setting.
Who cares? Well, favicons make it much easier to identify the site you want among a whole mess of open tabs. You can simply look for a site’s colorful logo icon, instead of squinting at a few letters of truncated text when trying to find the right tab.
In the battle of digital voice assistants, people often mock Siri for lagging behind competing products from Amazon and Google. During Monday’s WWDC 2018 keynote, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, glossed over those failings, calling Siri the “world’s most-used digital assistant.”
What he neglected to mention was the increasing frustration of Siri users expecting more from a voice assistant. From simple requests returning inaccurate results to the inability to performthat he compound actions, Siri was in desperate need of attention going into WWDC. But will the Siri upgrades in iOS 12 do the trick?
Sonos is making a power play to take over your living room with its latest smart speaker called Sonos Beam.
Beam is a new sound bar that is smaller than Sonos’ Playbar and Playbase, but it also packs some new features like a five-microphone array and it plays well with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and of course, Siri.
Watch out HomePod, this thing looks amazing:
A big change Apple is making with macOS Mojave could make it more difficult for indie developers to build cross-platform games.
Apple is pushing game creators to drop OpenGL in favor of its own Metal API, which isn’t supported by third-party platforms. It may mean smaller game development teams are forced to choose between releasing on macOS or other operating systems.
You’re in a noisy bar or restaurant and can’t hear the person across the table from you. Good news: With a feature added in iOS 12, you can use your AirPods and iPhone as a low-cost hearing aid.
This feature is called Live Listen, and it’s been available for certain hearing aids for some time. But soon, anyone with a pair of Apple’s wireless headphones will be able to use it.