Everybody likes whining about Apple. The company doesn’t innovate anymore, critics say. Their new phones are boring, the same old wine in a line of colorful new bottles. The “S” releases are always just tweaks of yesterday’s iPhone, and are not fundamentally different. Android phones dominate global market share, and have caught up to and zoomed past Apple in every relevant way.
The naysayers can say nay all they want: Apple’s iOS market share numbers are about to explode like an iPhone 5 plugged in with a cheap Chinese charger.
It’s finally here! Terraria for iOS brings the 2D Minecraft-inspired crafting, mining, and fighting open-world game to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and boy is it fun!
Developer 505 Games spent a ton of time making this work well on the touchscreen, and it shows, with controls that, while they take some getting used to, work really well to bring the complexity of a game like Terraria to our favorite gaming devices. Here’s a video of a bit of the tutorial, so you can see for yourself.
In the final months leading up to the next major iOS release, there’s barely enough activity on the jailbreak front to fill a couple of conference rooms. But with the public release of iOS 7 just around the corner, it’s like the calm before the storm as hackers gear up for what may be the toughest system to crack yet.
Developers, hackers, and hardcore fans gathered in late August at JailbreakCon in New York City, an annual summit for the meeting of the minds within the jailbreak community. And while the conference’s founder, Craig Fox, wasn’t “overly pleased” with attendance for the third edition, he still considers the event a success. Why? It fulfilled its mission.
For the past few years, JailbreakCon has played a crucial role in providing face time to code jockeys from different continents who would otherwise only know each other by Twitter handles. Friendships are formed and ideas are shared. This year was no different. And as the release of iOS 7 draws near, jailbreaking’s closely-knit group of hackers and developers is getting back in the game.
Apple is becoming a victim of its own success. It’s been several years since the company launched the iPad and revolutionized yet another product category, but we haven’t seen anything truly groundbreaking since then. Sure, we’ve had the iPad mini, the Retina MacBook Pro, and the awesome new iMac, but they’re all variations or improvements on existing products.
Now the world is clamoring for something completely new — something that’ll take off just like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Some reports suggest it will be the Apple “iTV,” the company first television set, which is said to be in development inside the company’s Cupertino headquarters. But it’s more likely that Apple’s immediate concern is with the “iWatch,” a smartwatch powered by iOS that will bring all kinds of crazy-cool technology to your wrist.
I had suspicions Apple might be working on its own watch when it redesigned the iPod nano last year. A lot of fans used the tiny nano as a watch thanks to third-party strap accessories, and it seemed like its form factor and design were changed for a reason — to make way for something new.
We’ve been reading iWatch rumors for the past few months, so it’s time to put them all together and establish what we think we know about the iWatch so far.
Welcome to Cult of Mac Magazine: a weekly newsmagazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we’ll bring you the best of what the Cult of Mac blog does on the Web, in an iPad-friendly format.
But there’s a twist.
Cult of Mac Magazine is the first news magazine devoted to the world of Apple technology. It’s like a Sunday newspaper magazine, but focused on Macs, iPhones and iPads and the people behind the news.
We’ll be doing a lot of original, long-form journalism. The world of technology is changing at a breathtaking pace. We’re in the middle of one of the biggest technology shifts ever; from desktop to mobile. Apple, of course, is at the very heart of it.
To help you with this change, we’ll have special editions devoted to different topics, from iOS gaming to cooking with an iPad. These special editions will be a mix of reported features, product reviews, app roundups and killer how-tos.
We’ll have new weekly features, like our “Ask a Genius” column, in which a genuine Apple Genius answers your thorniest technical questions.
We think a weekly iPad magazine is a great way to package and organize the stuff we are publishing every day on the website.
With news about Apple breaking 24 hours a day, it’s easy to miss stories on the web and hard to find something once it’s cycled down the site’s front page.
There are several forces at work that make it a great time to be publishing a blog-like magazine. The iPad is a reading machine. We’re already seeing tens of millions of page views in apps like Flipboard and Zite that syndicate our content. The web is good for breaking news or brief product reviews. The iPad is better for deep dives that explore a subject in depth.
We’ll be publishing four issues a month for a $1.99 monthly subscription. We think it’s going to be great. We’d love for you to check it out.
Apple has been hard at work on OS X Mavericks, even though it’s pushing to meet its deadline for iOS 7, and while many Apple fans were hoping the next Mac operating system might launch shortly after next week’s iPhone keynote, a new report claims Apple won’t ship OS X Mavericks until October.
Monokrom is a pretty neat B&W conversion app for the iPhone. I uses colored filters to do the converting, so you can get some dramatic effects, just like if you were to use colored filters on your lens whilst shooting B&W film. Unlike most iPhone B&W apps, though, the range of available filters is unlimited – it uses the colors of the image itself.
From the department of “One Thing Well” comes KeyCam, an iPhone app which takes photos with a timer. Or a clap, which I guess makes that “Two Things Well,” but still.
Remember Federico Viticci’s review of the amazing new iPad “text editor” Editorial? Of course you do – it’s the one you pushed to your read-later service and never read later, because it was just too damn long for a single post on a website. Hell, the thing even had a table of contents. A blog post with a table of contents.
Now, though, you can enjoy Viticci’s opus in a form much better suited to a long text with multiple sections: a book. And being an Apple nerd, Viticci made it into an iBook.
Despite the fact that Brother’s new, top-of-the-line all-in-one inkjet printer looks like a swarthy behemoth, Brother says the MFC-J6920dw is actually 35 percent smaller than comparable competitor’s models.
Brother achieves this through something they call “Landscape Print Technology,” a feature it introduced last year that lets the printers output to large pages from printers with relatively small footprints.
