BitTorrent Sync is one of the best Dropbox alternatives out there. Drawing upon the power of BitTorrent, BitTorrent Sync allows you to keep folders synced between multiple Macs easily, but without storing them in the cloud or having to pay for things like storage.
If you’re a BitTorrent Sync user — and you really should at least consider being one — great news. BitTorrent Sync just got an iPad app.
What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.
Twitterrific 5 for iOS has received a nice new update that adds a number of new features and user interface improvements. In addition to a redesigned profile layout, there’s a new pull-to-refresh animation, and users now have the ability to view profile banners by tapping on them.
Before I got lazy and did everything in Snapseed and Instagram, Filterstorm was one of my favorite iOS apps, and now it’s back, bigger, faster and, uh, neuer than before. Developer Tai Shimizu started over and came up with a whole new take on his powerful photo-editing app, which is appropriately called Filterstorm Neue.
Here comes wearable computing, and Android and the Googleverse have a huge head start. But will the Android devices lose the lead because they fail to target the women’s market?
Jony Ive. He’s the private man who some say is Apple’s own heart… and on our newest CultCast, our own Leander Kahney, with his new book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products hitting stores Nov. 14th, reveals inside information about the design icon, and how he and his teams create the world-renowned products we all use every day. Plus, J.D. Power says, for the first time ever, Samsung tabs are better than iPads… we’ll debunk!
Have a few laughs and get caught up on each week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let baseline roll!
If you’ve ever wanted to make viruses fight, Pathogen will help you realize your dreams. Pathogen is a board game that has you infecting tiles to eventually take over the entire playing field. You can play versus the computer in an increasingly difficult campaign mode or challenge your friends.
Perhaps I’m not quite as good at “Go” as I thought I was, but Pathogen’s difficulty is undoubtedly the first thing you’ll notice. The computer in the campaign is prepared to take advantage of your mistakes at every turn.
I’ve frequently been so close to winning a match only to have the computer claim victory because I forgot to take over one of its pieces butting up against my wall of viruses.
I’ve been to Apple’s current campus a few times, mostly for product presentations at a modest theater Apple calls the Town Hall.
When I went down to see the introduction of the iPod Hi-Fi, Apple’s attempt at a boombox, Steve Jobs had had a warren of nearby offices transformed into an Ideal Home exhibition.
It was February 2006, a couple of years after Jobs’ first treatment for cancer but before his liver transplant. He tried his best to get through the presentation with his characteristic charisma and energy, but he seemed to tire quickly and towards the end he obviously just wanted to get it over.
However, after introducing the iPod Hi-Fi and some other products, everyone was herded across the hall. Jobs wanted to showcase the iPod Hi-Fi in its “natural” surroundings and some offices had been dressed up to look like your typical living room, bedroom and den.
The iPod Hi-Fi was a $350 white plastic boombox — Apple’s attempt at replacing customer’s home stereos. During his presentation, Jobs said he’d spent small fortunes over the years on audiophile gear, but the iPod Hi-Fi sounded so good, he was now he was replacing his home stereo with one.
As we trooped from one room to the next, I found myself beside him. Ever the intrepid reporter, I introduced myself, thrust out my hand and asked him if really had replaced his Marantz stereo with a boombox? As he towered over me, he just looked down contemptuously at my outstretched hand, and said one word: “Yes!”
Of course, there was no way to use this in my story. But I was impressed with his antisocial nerve. Many people buckle in the face of social niceties like shaking hands: not Jobs.
Apple’s HQ isn’t exactly Grand Central Station, open to all. I’ve never eaten at Caffè Macs or played foosball on the grass in the middle of campus. I did get a walkthrough once, when I visited someone’s office, but was told to keep looking straight ahead and not snoop into anything.
You can drive around the campus on Infinite Loop, the ring road surrounding the nerve center of Apple operations, but the only place for the public to visit is the Company Store in the first building: One Infinite Loop.
Here you can pick up Apple-branded pens, mouse pads and T-Shirts. I bought a shirt that said, “I visited the Mothership.” Apparently, the most popular shirt says “I visited the Apple campus. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.”
It’s unclear what public access anyone will have to the new spaceship Apple Campus 2. The theater, where Tim Cook will presumably preside over future product presentations, is outside the main donut (and underground to boot!).
Let’s hope there are opportunities to visit, even if it’s only to shop at a small company store.
Before he died, Steve Jobs said architecture students would be able to marvel at the huge headquarters, which he envisioned as the best in the world.
Let’s hope Apple honors this, and doesn’t close off access to outsiders like a glass prison you can’t break into. We all deserve to spend some time in the fantastic space that Jobs envisioned.
Leander’s new book about Jony Ive and the Apple design studio is out in November. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products is available for pre-order on Amazon.
Boo Halloween — Entertainment — Free
Alright, so today’s app isn’t the most practical one you’ve ever seen. It’s not even the most clever. But it’s fun and easy to use, and it’s Halloween, damn it. Boo Halloween is a quickie photo app that lets you put a variety of spooky faces on pictures of you and your friends using reasonably accurate facial recognition. It comes with six masks — four of which are pumpkins — and you can buy nine more for a dollar if you think your buddy would look better as Batman, a zombie, or Billy, the puppet from Saw. Not much to it, but it’s silly, and it made me chuckle.
BestRoute Free — Navigation — Free
Now that Halloween is over, the rest of the holidays are clamoring for our attention. And some of them require shopping, which can mean a lot of driving all over town. And if you want to make sure you’re taking the most efficient route possible, you might want to plug your stops into BestRoute Free, a new app that lets you quickly and easily mark waypoints (by searching or just a long tap on the screen). It’ll then tell you the best order in which to make your stops.
It would probably also come in handy if you suddenly had to deliver a bunch of pizzas or something.
Coloring Pages for Zane — Education — Free
Coloring Pages for Zane is a simple app that contains coloring-book-style pages you can send to your AirPrint-enabled printer with just a few taps before you let your little ones loose on them with all the crayons. It’s so simple, in fact, that the kids can run it themselves, and that’s by design. The developer made it for their autistic son so that he could easily print out his own pictures and get right to the important business of coloring them in. It launches with a selection of images; additional pictures are available via in-app purchases. But that warm feeling you’re getting in your heart right now is free.
Cocktail Academy — Food & Drink — $3.99
Cocktail Academy is a new app for people who would like to make their favorite drinks themselves or try some new ones without embarrassing themselves in front of their friends. It has directions to create 110 cocktails and even includes video tutorials in which international-award-winning bartender Giancarlo Di Niso shows you exactly what to do (spoiler alert: It involves a lot of measuring and shaking and/or stirring). You can search for drinks several ways including alphabetically and by percentage of alcohol, and the app even lists caloric content for each concoction for your dieting convenience. Grog, for example, has 186 calories, and I never realized I was curious about that until just now.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has compiled this list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
by Nick Bilton
In 2005, Odeo was a struggling podcasting start-up founded by free-range hacker Noah Glass and staffed by a motley crew of anarchists. Less than two years later, its days were numbered and half the staff had been let go. But out of Odeo’s ashes, the remaining employees worked on a little side venture . . . that by 2013 had become an $11.5 billion business – Twitter.
That much is widely known. But the full story of Twitter’s hatching has never been told before. It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles, as the founders went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities featured on magazine covers, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show, and Time’s list of the world’s most influential people.
New York Times columnist and reporter Nick Bilton takes readers behind the scenes as Twitter grew at exponential speeds and gets inside the heads of the four hackers out of whom the company tumbled: Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Christopher Stone, and Noah Glass.
by Rob Delaney
Rob Delaney is a father, a husband, a comedian, a writer. He is the author of an endless stream of beautiful, insane jokes on Twitter that force you to pause with their absurdity. He is sober. He is sometimes brave. He speaks French. He has bungee jumped off the Manhattan Bridge. He enjoys antagonizing political figures. He broke into an abandoned mental hospital with his mother.
He’s also one of the funniest stand-up comics I’ve seen in person with a weird cornucopia of recklessly imaginative jokes that are both hilarious and repulsive at once. His new book – Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. – reveals the hilarious and heartbreaking true stories of how Rob came to be the funniest man on Twitter today.
by Rich Cohen
For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever–a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city.
In Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, Rich Cohen tracks down the coaches and players from the team to find out what made the fantastic offense of Walter Payton and QB Jim McMahon work so well. Did they really hate the guys on the other side? Readers who don’t even like sports will still enjoy Cohen’s story about the love of his favorite game. The end result is a portrait of not just a team, but a city and a game: its history, its future, its fallen men, its immortal heroes. But mostly it’s about being a fan, about loving too much.
Cut Copy – Free Your Mind
Melbourne’s Cut Copy came to ether in the early ’00s, when the rediscovery of ’80’s electro and dance pop was in full flower. Yet one of the group’s great strengths is the fact that it is a group, with a flesh-and-blood rhythm section–not just one person behind a bank of gear. The Aussie quartet’s fourth album reinforces that notion, putting crucial yuan muscle behind the sparkling synth riffs. Sure, tunes like “Footsteps” are fueled by an Italo-disco-flavored, club friendly feel. But it’s Ben Browning’s bass guitar lines that lend the greatest gravitas to the elegant synth-pop of “In Memory Capsule,” while Mitchell Scott’s analog drum kit brings a bit of vital rock ballast to “Dark Corners & Mountain Tops” and the luminous, power ballad-esque “Walking in the Sky.” So while there’s little on Free Your Mind that couldn’t drive dancers to exhaustion, the album’s essence is more than just momentum.
M.I.A. – Matangi
“Paper Planes” launched M.I.A. into fame but if you’re not familiar with the singer’s entire musical arsenal, her latest album provides a fun and crazy take on pop culture. Matangi is the fourth studio album by English-Sri Lankan recording artist M.I.A., released on 1 November 2013 on her own label, N.E.E.T. Recordings, through Interscope Records.
The album, which is the follow-up to her 2010 album Maya, features collaborations and production from The Weeknd, Switch, Hit-Boy, Danja, The Partysquad, Surkin and others.It also features songs like “Bad Girls,” “Bring The Noize,” “Come Walk With Me,” and “Y.A.L.A.”
Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP 2
Few figures in hip-hop have changed the game as fundamentally as Marshall Mathers. The Detroit emcee’s cutting wordplay and playfully sadistic wit have earned him fans beyond hip-hop’s borders and made him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 –Eminem’s first solo endeavor since 2010’s multiplatinum Recovery–comes charging out of the gate with “Bezerk,” a Rick Rubin-produced track that chopps up the heavy guitars of Billy Squier’s “The Stroke,” name-checks Public Enemy, and delivers a flurry of jabs at celebrities. In short: classic Eminem.
Combining forces with Rubin and longtime collaborator Dr. Dre, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is gritty, raw, and an appropriately provocative sequel to Eminem’s groundbreaking 2000 release. Huge, hard-hitting singles like “Survival” and “Rap God” make it one of the artist’s most uncompromising albums to date.
Killer whales are beloved, majestic, friendly giants, yet infamous for their capacity to kill viciously. Blackfish unravels the complexities of the dichotomy, employing the story of the notorious performing whale Tilikum, who–unlike any orca in the wild–has taken the lives of several people while in captivity. Blackfish expands on the discussion of whether it’s ethical to keep orcas and other whales in captivity, as well as the consequences of continuing to do so.
David Clark is a small-time pot dealer who likes to keep a low profile. His clientele includes chefs and soccer moms, but no kids. He learns the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished when he tries to help out some local teens and winds up getting jumped by a trio of gutter punks. Stealing his stash and his cash, they leave him in major debt to his supplier, Brad. In order to wipe the slate clean–and maintain a clean bill of health–David agrees to become a big time drug smuggler for Brad and bring a shipment over from Mexico. What could go wrong?
The comedy finds David twisting the arms of his neighbors to create a fake family and roll their RV to the border of Mexico and back during Fourth of July weekend where everything ends with a bang.
Okay get this, there’s a cranky undercover operative who’s a total badass–played by Academy Award winner Denzel Washington–who begrudgingly joins forces with a young, up-and-coming badass undercover operative–played by none of than Mr. Funky Bunch himself, Marky Mark Whalberg.
The two badass undercover operatives then take on a drug cartel but it blows up in their faces. Once they join forces everyone suddenly wants them dead so they have to strip themselves of the hatreds for each other and work together to get out alive. Yes, it’s your buddy-cop action movie with a new twist, but there’s no one funner to watch on the screen than Denzel Washington strutting around like the coolest cop to ever walk the planet.