It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally here! Long months after it hit the Mac, Beamdog Entertainment’s update of Bioware’s classic RPG set in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, is finally available on the iPad.
Probably the last thing you want to admit in your app’s release notes is that you’ve integrated Appirator, the annoying “please rate me, please please please” popup that makes your paying customers hate your app. But we’ll give NexTiga’s Smart Photo Album a pass, becasue it also adds some great new real features.
Google has finally released its official iOS app for the Movies & TV section of its Play Store. The universal app is available for free in the App Store, but it comes with several severe limitations.
First off, you can’t buy content through the app due to Google not wanting to give Apple a 30 percent cut of all in-app purchases. Another con is the lack of offline playback, meaning you can’t cache a video to watch later when Wi-Fi isn’t available. And for some odd reason, video only plays back in standard def on the iPhone.
The app is pretty barebones, but it is nice for the Chromecast, Google’s little streaming dongle that plugs into the TV. Chromecast users with iOS hardware have previously been limited to Netflix and Hulu Plus, but Google Play offers more recent movie and TV selections.
Source: App Store
Tim Cook traveled to China for the third time in as many months to seal a blockbuster deal with China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier. Apple is now available on all of China’s largest cell phone networks, opening up a market of mind-boggling proportions. Cook, in a rare TV interview with the chairman of China mobile, said he was “incredibly optimistic” about Apple’s prospects.
People underestimate how big a deal China will be in the next 10 years. The West still thinks of it as a poor country, but within a decade more than three-quarters of the urban population will be middle class, according to McKinsey. By next year, China will account for about 20 percent, or $27 billion, of global luxury sales, according to another McKinsey report. Whether shopping at home or abroad, Chinese consumers are snapping up pricey cars, jewelry, clothes and watches. This is a tidal shift in an enormous economy. The pundits who say that Apple should be making a low-cost phone to compete with low-cost Android phones have got it wrong. Apple will end up selling every top of the line phone they can make and then some.
There are a few seeming contradictions to these trends. China may be known for its massive commerce of counterfeits, but middle-class consumers there are primed to pay a premium for the genuine article. Apple’s iPhones and other goods have clear status value, and middle-class Chinese consumers will buy them en masse.
Luxury car sales already prove this point: Jaguar sales were up 157% in China in 2013, nearly three times the growth in any other region. Growth is so strong, Jaguar Land Rover is shifting sales from Europe and the US to China, it’s now their primary market. Mercedes and Lexus are selling so many cars in China at a huge markup they’re not even bothering to export them. Even low-end retailers are adjusting their wares to suit these upscale tastes: Wal-Mart is also aggressively expanding in China, where they’re targeting the upper-middle class with suburban stores that require a car to reach and the shelves are stocked with pricey merch.
Japan in the 80s had a reputation for cheap shoddy knock-offs, now it’s the world’s third largest economy. Korea went through the same transition, thanks in large part to Samsung and other global conglomerates. China’s next. But now there’s a difference is scale: Tim Cook’s giddiness is due to the fact that the next decade, China will become a vast middle class economy with hundreds millions of consumers who want Apple’s products.
The essential Apple product will stay the same. I predict that Apple’s response will be much like that iconic American chain, McDonald’s. In addition to clogging arteries with Big Macs and fries from Norway to Lebanon, the local restaurants give a nod to local traditions. In France there are high-end pastries, there’s the Maharaja Mac of lamb or chicken in India and rice burgers in Hong Kong. It’ll be fascinating to see what Apple will offer in the way of “local menu” items in China.
More than 30 years old as a concept, and one of the very first iOS games to be released in the App Store back in the day, Pac-Man is a genuine O.G. of the gaming world.
With Apple currently giving it away for a limited time as part of its “App of the Week” promotion, we at Cult of Mac thought the time was right to pay homage by revisiting one of the all-time-greats.
So how does it measure up here in 2014?
The City College of New York is investigating its use of former Apple exec Scott Forstall’s photo in advertisements for the school’s student ID card.
Cult of Mac contacted the college Wednesday afternoon about Forstall’s strange appearance on the promotional materials. “I’m not commenting,” said Ellis Simon, City College’s public relations director, who added that he was aware of the situation but needed time to “get all the facts straight” before talking about the apparent mixup.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a quick slide-show creator, an app that will help you snag some wheels, and more data than you require.
Here you go:
Presentics — Productivity — Free ($9.99 unlock)
If you have a presentation to prepare at the last minute or you think PowerPoint is too clunky, you might want to look at Presentics. It’s an iPad app that will help you make a minimalist slide show quickly and easily. It just takes a few taps and some typing, and you’ll have a quick, clean project. You can also embed images, audio, and video right inside the app if you want to go all multimedia on it.
You have access to everything in the free version, but the $9.99 unlock lets you save more than two projects and share over the cloud.
Cold Tires — Utilities — Free
If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.
Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.
Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free
Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.
It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.
Legítimo — Productivity — Free
Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?
Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.
Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.
Bykes — Travel — Free
Bike-sharing programs are popping up all over the world now, and here’s an app to help you navigate some of them. Bykes will help you find stations for 11 bike fleets in five countries (more to come). In addition to just showing you where the depots are, it will also tell you how many bikes are there and how many stalls are available for those looking to return their borrowed wheels.
So if you live in — or are visiting — Dublin, London, Brisbane, Melbourne, Boulder, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, the District of Columbia, Montreal, or Toronto, you’re all set. If not, just wait or drive, I guess.
The Los Angeles Board of Education has voted to continue its efforts to provide every student and teacher in the L.A. Unified school district with a computer by approving a new $115-million proposal to distribute iPads to 38 more campuses. The proposal also calls for the purchase of laptops for every student at seven high schools, and picks up a couple thousand extra iPads for new state tests in spring.
Overall the board thinks it will buy somewhere around 67,500 new tablets just for the spring testing, even though an oversight committee recommend only purchasing 38,500. The board decided getting everyone the same model at the same time is of the utmost importance for revolutionizing education, even though the $1-billion effort is expected to exhaust all their tech funds made available by voter-approved school-construction bonds.
Fans of word games are always looking out for new apps that will let them arrange letters and clear blocks or cross things or whatever else people do when they’re using text as game pieces. Here’s another game that lets you do that.
It’s called Alpha 9, and it’s basically Boggle plus Tetris. Your goal is to form words of at least three letters in order to clear lines from a board to keep the letter blocks dropping from the ceiling from piling up to the top of the screen.
That’s Wall Mode, anyway. It has another game type, but they’re both pretty average.
If you want to be sure your data is secure on your Mac, Apple has provided an easy way to do so. They’ve created File Vault, accessed via the System Preferences, to encrypt your startup drive with some heavy duty file security.
You’ll need OS X Lion or later, and you’ll have to have an OS X Recovery partition on your drive. This last bit is typically installed on newer Macs, anyway, but to test it out, reboot your Mac and hold the Command-R key down. If you see an OS X Recovery screen, you’re good to go.
Setting up FileVault is even easier than that. Just launch System Preferences and click on Security & Privacy to get started.