Imagine slapping your nightstand to snooze your iPhone’s alarm. Or rapping on the kitchen countertop to flip recipe book pages so your flour-coated hands don’t mess up the iPad’s screen. These scenarios could soon be real: XTouch is a new technology that essentially turns any solid surface into an input device for an iPad or iPhone.
Like Nests’s futuristic thermostat, its iPhone-controlled smoke/carbon monoxide detector looked like the perfect replacement for the antiquated systems used in most homes today. It turns out that the Nest Protect was a little too good to be true.
Since the device went on sale in November of last year, Nest has discovered that one of the Protect’s hallmark features can malfunction. And that happens to create big safety concerns. Until the issue is resolved, Nest Protect sales have halted.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Marc Demarco – Salad Days
Listening to Mac Demarco’s third solo album Salad Days is a trip to a laid-back 90s guitar-pop. Demarco’s voice dips up and down over tracks with growing maturity that, coupled with subtle production, makes Salad Days the best carefree jam of 2014 to date.
iTunes – $9.99
Cloud Nothings – Here and Nowhere Else
Cloud Nothings might be the best rock band you never heard of. Hailing from Cleveland, the indie-rock trio pushed out their fourth studio album this week, Here and Nowhere Else, that is pumped full of grisly rock singalongs that are thrilling, conflicted and caustic in all the best ways.
iTunes – $7.99
Pure X – Angel
Austin’s Pure X debuted the their second album less than a year ago but they’re already back with a third in the form of Angel. Its dreamlike acoustic guitar riffs are paired with tempos that create a mood reminiscent of the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, even though the album artwork looks like something you’d buy from a mall t-shirt kiosk.
iTunes – $14.99
Flashboys
by Michael Lewis
If you enjoyed the celebration of vanity and wealth in Wolf of Wall Street, you’ll probably dig Michael Lewis’ new book Flash Boys. The characters are less-cliche than your average Wall Street types which makes the stories more interesting as they discover a new way to make mountains of cash – high-frequency trading. The book made big news this week when a footnote about one of these firms, Virtu, delayed its much-anticipated IPO.
iTunes – $14.99
Long Mile Home
by Scott Hellman & Jenna Russell
In the same vein as 102 Minutes and Columbine, Long Mile Home is the definitive book about the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, straight from the Boston Globe reporters closest to the scene. It covers the expected ground detailing the horrors of the bombings but also serves as a testament to the resourcefulness and resilience of the Boston community.
iTunes – $14.99
Frog Music
by Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s first book, Room secured her reputation as a bestseller, but rather than staying with familiar territory, her second book is a dark murder mystery set in San Francisco in the year 1876. Frog Music mixes literary eloquences with vigorous plotting that really shows Donoghue’s range and talent as writer.
iTunes – $10.99
August: Osage County
Based on the Tony-award winning play of the same name, August: Osage County is both dark and hilarious thanks to an incredible cast of strong women who step into the roles of the dysfunctional Weston family. Meryl Streep is pitted against Julia Roberts after losing her husband, but others like Juliette Lewis, Abigail Breslin and Margo Martindale add divergent paths of drama for the family in crisis.
iTunes – $14.99
Mistaken For Strangers
Mistaken for Strangers is about two out-of-orbit siblings hell bent on finding harmony with one another. It pits Matt Berninger, frontman of the almost-famous band The National against his slacker brother Tom, an aspiring filmmaker. Mayhem ensues when Tom is hired to film the band’s breakout tour but eschews his duties in hopes of using the band’s fame to springboard his own troubled career.
iTunes – $14.99
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Ben Stiller’s latest film sees the comedian jump into the sensible shoes of Walter Mitty, a shy film developer for Life magazine who also has a tendency to slip in and out of daydreams. When his job, and that of his co-worker/crush are endangered, Walter sets out on an extraordinary journey of his own. Some of the gentle humor from the 1947 Danny Kaye classic survives, though greatly enhanced with a giant dose of modern CGI effects.
iTunes – $14.99
For those who thought Office for iPad was too late to the party, the numbers tell a different story. Today Microsoft announced that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote combined have been downloaded a staggering 12 million times in one week.
If you doubt that number, then just take a look at the App Store charts.
Vine has added video messaging. After today’s update, video messages (or VMs) can be sent to friends on Vine or through SMS and email.
A six-second message can be sent to more than one person, but not as cleanly as Instagram Direct works. A new conversation thread will be opened for each person you send to, meaning you have to send the same video multiple times.
Today Facebook Messenger was updated with the ability to make free voice calls over WiFi both domestically and internationally. Making calls over a cellular connection uses data. The features works similar to FaceTime Audio, which is natively baked into all iOS devices and Macs.
Facebook Messenger technically added VOIP (voice over IP) calling in January 2013, but the feature has been limited to the US, UK, and Canada until now. Facebook users with the Messenger iOS app installed can be called with a new phone icon at the top right of a conversation thread. The calling interface looks almost identical to Apple’s stock Phone app in iOS 7.1.
Messenger was recently updated with group messaging and forwarding. After WhatsApp was bought by Facebook earlier this year, it was revealed that VOIP calling is coming to that app as well in the coming months.
Source: App Store
I’m kind of obsessed with monitoring and comparing numbers like blog views and podcast downloads. It’s probably a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I made up my own word for it: “metriculous.”
Whether is an app that satisfies that part of your brain, if you have it. It lets you compare today’s temperature, precipitation, wind, and humidity to the same day last year. The temperature panel is free, but you can unlock the rest — and any future ones — for $2.99.
So it’s basically a cool-looking weather app with an extra layer of trivia on top of it for crazy people inquisitive, metriculous types.
Monument Valley is what would happen if Fez and The Room (the game, not the movie) took place inside of M.C. Escher’s sketchbook.
It has a vibrant, interesting world full of impossible geometry, mysterious accusers, and bothersome crows. It’s a puzzle game and a jumpless platformer, and it’s endlessly amazing and mind-boggling to behold.
It is also one of the easiest games I’ve ever played, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check it out.
When you want to look up a street address in Safari, you may still be using an old workflow: copy the address from the web page, paste it into the search bar, and then use Google Maps.
With OS X Mavericks, you might even have gone a step further and pasted the address into Apple’s Maps app, and then sending the directions to your iPhone.
There’s another way, though, which offers more immediate gratification: opening the address in Safari.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.
One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.