It’s only been available for a couple of weeks, but iOS 7.0.6 already represents just over half of all iOS traffic.
The data was provided by Onswipe, a mobile publishing and monetization platform, and reveals that as of March 3, iOS 7.0.6 makes up 50.06% of traffic on all iOS platforms.
I won’t lie. The main reason I checked out Upword Notes is that it sounds like Upstream Color, Shane Carruth’s amazing movie about pigs (some are calling it Babe 3).
But underneath this strange coincidence (surely just another of Carruth’s crazy web of mystery) lies a solid note-taking app, one with some genuinely clever features.
If non-clicky keyboards are what you’re after, and you don’t like the free one that came with your Mac, then Logitech offers some of the best options around. I own two, that I’ve bought with my own cash money, and if I had an Apple TV or Media Center setup, I’d be seriously considering the new Harmony keyboard and hub, which doesn’t work quite how you think.
Mines of Mars is a fantastic mining and crafting game with a mysterious story, developed by WickeyWare and published by Crescent Moon Games. It’s along the lines of Super Motherload or SteamWorld Dig, in that you must manage your fuel and cargo space while you dig deep into the crust of the Martian planet to find ores, gems, and other secrets.
You’ll come up to the surface to fuel up, exchange ores for ingots, play some fun mini-games based on arcade classics like Berzerk.
It’s a game full of mystery and atmosphere, mostly due to the creepy storyline and amazingly atmospheric soundtrack by composer Evan Gipson. Check out the trailer below to see what it looks like.
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!
Rick Ross – Mastermind
It’s hard to believe that the Teflon Don is already onto his sixth album, but here it is, Mastermind, and it’s Rick Ross at his best. The rap version of the Wolf of Wall Street embodies excess thanks to his obsession with wealth, and while there’s nothing truly groundbreaking about the production of Mastermind, tracks like Devil Is A Lie, Sanctified and Thug Cry feature brutal beats and the albums carries enough starpower to take out Alderaan with guest appearances from Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz and Jeezy.
iTunes – $13.99
Eagulls – Eagulls
I’d love to recommend Pharrell’s new album G I R L, but it’s not as stellar as I was hoping – and this is coming from a dude who danced his butt off to Happy, alone, more times than should be legal. However, Eagulls’ debut self-titled album is a spectacular cacophony of punky post-rock tunes that will get you moving just as much as Pharrell’s beats.
iTunes – $8.99
Real Estate – Atlas
While the Eagulls are full of energy, Real Estate’s third full album Atlas features delicate guitar melodies and swaying vocals. Real Estate borrows sounds from The Shins and Yo La Tengo while still maintaining their unique sonic footprint full of songs the capture feelings of separation, uncertainty, but most importantly, exploration.
iTunes – $13.99
The Enchanted
by Rene Denfeld
For her debut novel journalist, Rene Denfeld channels her experience as a death penalty case investigator into a gut-wrenching, spelling binding debut novel. Set deep inside a decaying prison, The Enchanted features the story of York, a death row inmate on the verge of execution and “The Lady,” an investigator who dives into his history in an attempt to get his sentence reduces, but what she finds is an ugly past with parallels to her own awful history.
iTunes – $10.99
Redeployment
by Phil Klay
Many Americans find it hard to connect with the wars half a world away in Afghanistan and Iraq, so Phil Klay’s book of short stories grabs readers into the frontlines of the wars, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. The short stories are interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival as the characters struggling to make meaning out of chaos.
iTunes – $10.99
Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
by Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman
Learning quantum mechanics doesn’t register high on most people’s to-do list, but if you’re ever been curious to learn the behavior of subatomic objects through mathematical abstractions, Leonard Susskind’s new book provides a great introduction to the difficult field. Other writers shy away from quantum mechanics’ weirdness, but Susskind and Friedman embrace the utter strangeness of quantum logic but present their understandings in crystal-clear explanations that let you sink into the field at your own pace.
iTunes – $9.99
Short Term 12
Written and directed with undeniable vitality by Destin Cretton, Short Term 12 depicts the lively yet wounded intersection of messy, broken humanity at a foster-care facility for at-risk teens. Brie Larson stars alongside John Gallagher JR from The Newsroom as a boyfriend-girlfriend duo working at the center, who are tested by two troubled yet fitted residents as the struggle to contemplate their future together.
iTunes – $12.99
Oldboy
After being held captive in solitary confinement for 20 years, former advertising executive Josh Brolin is inexplicably released one day without ever getting a glimpse of his captors or their motives. With his newfound freedom, he sets off on a mission to figure out who kidnapped him and how to find salvation.
iTunes – $14.99
Genius On Hold
Steve Jobs and Woz got their start in consumer electronics by hacking together Blue Boxes for cheap, but if it weren’t for Walter Shaw the two might have never gotten the business bug. Who’s Shaw? Genius On Hold tells the story of Shaw, a telecommunications inventor who invented features like call-forwarding, touchtone dialing, speakerphone, voice recognition and many other creations we still use to this day, but he was held back by corporate greed and government monopolies and ended up working for the mob to create the infamous black box.
iTunes – $19.99
Google released a new update for its Gmail iOS that makes it getting email faster than ever thanks to a new background refresh feature.
The Gmail 3.0 update will now retrieve your mail while the app is not open so you don’t have to keep refreshing to see if your boss finally replied to that important email in the last 5 minutes.
Also included in the update is a new simplified sign-in feature that automatically signs you into all of your Google apps once your login to just one. The free update requires iOS 7.0 or greater and is available now in the App Store.
Here are the release notes:
Alright, so your iPhone already has a compass built right into it, but if you want a little more information in your orienteering, you might want to look into this app.
In addition to the standard “North is over there” bit, DueNorth will also give you your latitude and longitude, and plunking your finger down anywhere on the screen will tell you which direction and heading you’re prodding. Plus, the display has a Night Mode, so you can figure out how to get out of the woods without every bear in the vicinity knowing that you’re lost.
You know how it goes: You’re up late, feeling a little peckish, and you don’t have anything in the fridge. What do you do?
I mean, I’d go to the store down the street and get some sour bears. And if you’re Draku, the star of Midnight Bite, you do the same thing. Except substitute “store down the street” with “village at the base of the mountain,” and substitute “sour bears” with “blood of the sleeping townsfolk.”
But he’s a little guy, and the humans are prejudiced against vampire children who stalk up in the night and murder them, so he has to be careful. And as the one controlling him, you also have to be careful because the controls are apparently also racist against the undead.
Topeka Capital Markets’ report that, by now, we’d all be using finger rings to control our Apple televisions may have added up to precisely nothing (even being mocked by Tim Cook) — but one company is trying to make the so-called iRing a reality.
The company is called Logbar, and it’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund an “Ring: shortcut to everything.” When paired with your mobile device, this ring will let you use gestures to send texts, control your home appliances, and carry out a variety of other tasks.
In news that will come as a shock to absolutely no one, it seems that Corning Glass (makers of Gorilla Glass) aren’t big fans of Sapphire glass.
Asked by Morgan Stanley analyst James Fawcett his thoughts about “one large handset and device maker” planning to use Sapphire in its products, Tony Tripeny, a senior vice president at Corning Glass, responded that: