There has been rather a lot of interest recently in the 3D motion sensing device Leap by San Franciscan company Leap Motion. While the company CTO was somewhat reluctant to talk about The Leap’s modus operandi / camera / sensor, he was more than happy to give Cult of Mac a demonstration of Leap in action. Watch the video here.
WWDC is only a few days away and the event is shaping up to be filled dramatic announcements. Expectations include an Apple HDTV, a new Mac lineup that includes an updated Mac Pro, the unveiling of the next iPhone, iOS 6 with Siri support for the iPad, updates to Siri’s functionality, and load of additional details about Mountain Lion.
Whether all those expectations are met or not, WWDC and its keynote will pack lots of information for developers and IT professionals as well as various Apple product announcements and previews. The big announcements may be the best part of WWDC for most Mac users and Apple fans, but the event is, at its heart, a giant powwow for developers. It also offers IT professionals and CIOs their best glimpse at Apple future plans and the new technologies that they will need to support and/or manage.
So what are IT leaders and business professionals going to be looking for at WWDC? Here’s our IT wish list for this year’s WWDC.
Gameloft is at it again, teaming up with Marvel to produce yet another hit mobile game. After the success of Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, Marvel knew just who to go to for the creation of an Amazing Spider-Man mobile game that they planned on launching in conjunction with the new film. Gameloft has been working closely with Marvel and Sony Pictures to ensure the game stays as true to the film story as possible.
In case you haven’t heard, Instapaper quietly snuck its way into the Google Play Store today. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Instapaper, its significance to Android, and why this Android user won’t be buying it. Instapaper is a popular service for saving web pages for reading later. It not only saves pages for reading later, but also strips them down to a clean text-only format for easy reading.
It’s a nice concept, which when released back in 2008 for iOS, was original and extremely useful. But over the course of the last four years, Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment has spent most of his free time insulting Android and its fans… and now he wants us to give him money? Let’s take a brief look at the Instapaper app and its history to show just how insulting this is.
If you’ve had problems jailbreaking your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with the Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak released a couple weeks back, good news: the indefatigable iPhone Dev Team have updated their popular jailbreak tools with iOS 5.1.1 untether compatibility, including redsn0w (for all factory unlocked devices), PwnageTool (for devices reliant on software unlock), Cinject (for already jailbroken but tethered iOS 5.1.1 devices) and Ultrasn0w 1.2.7.
The friendly skies have been cozying up to the iPad for awhile now. First, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allowed pilots to replace hundreds of pounds of flight manuals and log books for Apple’s tablet, and now a new airline is promising to save fuel, increase profits and make their customers happier by phasing out the in-flight entertainment system in favor of a fleet of iPads.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a beautifully simple timer app for the iPhone that could mean you never need to set timers manually again. There’s also a terrific app for beaming your photographs to almost any display — without additional hardware or software. Plus lots more.
Photography is one place where older is definitely better — for now at least. We take amazingly high quality photos with our digital cameras and then add filters, grain, vignetting and all manner of other imperfections to make those pictures look like they were shot on film cameras. And not even good film cameras: pretty much all of the effects we use mimic defects in the photo processes of old.
Now, with Osmo Leaker, we have an app whose sole purpose is to add simulated light leaks to our photos. Tap the film-cartridge icon and random orangey strips will be added to your photograph, just as if you had accidentally opened the back of the camera before you rewound the film. Don’t like the result? Tap again. Decided you actually did like the previous leak better? No problem, you can go back (in the Pro version).
When you’re done, you can export to the usual places — Facebook and Twitter — and also save to the camera roll or open the image in Instagram. And that’s it: Osmo Leaker is a one trick pony, but it performs that trick very well. There are two versions available, a free version and a $1 pro version. The Pro app has more effects, full-res export and no ads, as well as the back button for fickle mind-changers.
All this has me wondering how ridiculous this retro-fication might be if applied to other technology. Low-res movies with barrel distortion to replicate the crappy picture of an NTSC CRT TV? Crackles and pops applied to lossless music to simulate vinyl? Wait, that last one actually exists!
Source: iTunes
Via: iPhoneography
Netflix announced an updated version of its iOS app on Thursday for customers in the U.S. and Canada. The update is centered around improving the overall user experience while streaming movies and TV shows to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. One important improvement beyond that, however, is the ability to control mobile data use and avoid expensive overage fees.
MacKeeper is a strange piece of software. There may be no other app as controversial in the Apple world. The application, which performs various janitorial duties on your hard drive, is loathed by a large segment of the Mac community. Check out any blog, site or forum that mentions it, and you’ll find hundreds of furious comments condemning MacKeeper and Zeobit, the company behind it. We discovered this ourselves earlier this month, when we offered a 50%-off deal on MacKeeper. Look at all those furious comments on the post.
The complaints about MacKeeper are all over the shop: It’s a virus. It holds your machine hostage until you pay up. It can’t be completely removed if you decide to delete it. Instead of speeding up your computer, it slows it down. It erases your hard drive, deletes photos, and disappears documents. There are protests about MacKeeper’s annual subscription fees. Zeobit is slammed for seedy marketing tactics. It runs pop-under ads, plants sock-puppet reviews and encourages sleazy affiliate sites, critics say.
But what’s really strange is that MacKeeper has been almost universally praised by professional reviewers. All week I’ve been checking out reviews on the Web and I can’t find a bad one.