Ever wanted to run your own AI startup, hopefully without bringing about the end of humanity in the process? A new game from the maker of the popular CARROT series of iOS apps gives you exactly that opportunity.
That’s just one of the great apps we’ve got covered in this week’s Awesome Apps roundup. We’ve also got a Snapchat update, a Steam gaming classic finally landed in the App Store, and a great Myst-inspired architectural puzzle game. Check out our picks below.
In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, we show you how to use Apple’s Music Memos app to record your musical ideas as well as how to hook a guitar up to your iPhone and rock out.
Learn about Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection which is now on display in a museum in the Ukraine — at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.
Check out Cult of Mac Watch Store’s first major sale on Apple Watch straps! Enjoy 20 percent off great brands including Meridio, Strapple, Nyloon and more!
Here are this week’s top stories.
This week on The CultCast: It’s official — the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote takes place June 5. Don’t miss our WWDC 2017 hardware expectations! Plus: Apple quietly acquires one of the world’s best sleep-tracking technologies; why Amazon’s Prime Video app may finally be coming to your Apple TV; our first impressions of the Amazon Echo Show, and the features we hope Apple steals from it; and stick around for a very weird, very tribal “What We’re Into,” the segment where we reveal all the non-tech stuff we’re currently digging.
Our thanks to Casper, maker of the internet’s favorite mattress, for supporting this episode. Learn why Casper is tops and save $50 off your order at casper.com/cultcast.
PDFs are fantastic. If you send somebody a PDF, you know it will look exactly the same on their computer as it does on yours. Same if you print it. But if your PDF contains a lot of images, it can quickly swell to an impractical size, making email impossible. Today we’re going to find out how to shrink that huge PDF dramatically, while making almost no difference in quality to the images therein. And we’ll do it using an app that’s already on your Mac, hidden in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility.
If you’ve been waiting (and waiting) to get your hands on a pair of AirPods, now’s your chance. Apple’s wireless headphones currently appear to be in stock at Verizon Wireless with fast, free shipping.
Grab ’em while they last!
Apple’s Music Memos app is just about about the best way to record musical ideas before they evaporate into the ether. For years, musicians used the built-in Voice Memos app to record snippets, but Music Memos, as you’d expect, is much better suited to the task. It can listen to you and record only when you start playing, it can detect the chords you play, and it can even add drum and bass tracks to your recording automatically.
This last feature is what we’ll look at today. We’re going to record a simple guitar track, add drums and bass, and send the whole lot to GarageBand on iOS for further work. That sounds like a lot, but once you lay down your recorded track, all it takes is a few taps of the screen. And remember, I use a guitar, but you can use any instrument.
Don’t want to spend your weekend catching up on paperwork or mowing the lawn? No problem: Cult of Mac is here to help you.
We’ve combed through the various apps which landed in the App Store over the past seven days, and picked out what we think is the cream of the crop. From Hulu’s new Live TV subscription service to a hypnotically fun puzzle game, here’s everything you (may have) missed this week.
For a Mac setup to stand out, it doesn’t need a ton of color. Take the picture above from Cult of Mac reader Powi Hart, for example. Everything in there is either white, black or silver — and it looks fantastic.
In fact, these white-and-black-themed Apple setups have got to be some of my favorites so far. Check out this week’s three iSetups submissions in the video below. iSetups is our new show that highlights the best Apple-centric setups submitted by our viewers. (You’ll also get plenty of tips and tricks for how you can improve your own setup.)
The iPad continues to dominate the tablet market, but the tablet market continues to decline.
For a 10th-straight quarter, year-over-year sales of tablet computers fell to a five-year low, according to the market research firm IDC. Even with enviable sales figures, iPad revenues have had a year-over-year slide for the last 13 quarters, according to the IDC report.
The FBI was unable to access the contents of “nearly half” of mobile devices it tried to hack in the first half of the fiscal year, FBI Director James Comey revealed at a Senate oversight committee hearing this week.
That added up to more than 3,000 mobile devices.