If you’re a Dropbox user (and you should be!) you might want to take a look at your ‘About this Mac’ info box: the popular cloud syncing app will drop support for OS X Leopard and earlier on May 15th.
The year is 2018. After a long day at work, you pull into your driveway, whip out your iPhone 10 Plus and say, “Siri, I’m home.”
Your garage door opens silently, beckoning you to enter the ultra-connected smart home of the future.
As you walk in, your lights turn on. The wife used to get on you about leaving the lights on, but her nagging feels like a distant memory now. Your thermostat cools everything down to a comfortable 69 degrees. Knowing that you pulled into the driveway two minutes ago, your oven has started preheating itself. You usually fix dinner for yourself on Thursdays, so it’s time for frozen pizza.
Apple surprised developers with its new programming language, Swift, at WWDC 2014 but it hasn’t taken long for the developer community to get behind what will soon be the replacement for Objective-C.
In the latest programming language popularity rankings from RedMonk, Swift has shot up from the 68th ranked language in Q3 2014, to the 22nd most popular language going into 2015. To put that growth into perspective, Google released its new language Go in 2009, but it just barely cracked the top 20 in this quarter’s rankings.
Here’s the full rankings chart:
It will be many months before developers see Apple’s first iOS 9 beta, but the Cupertino company has already begun testing the update internally ahead of this fall’s release. The software has starting appearing in analytics data for a number of sites in recent months, including our own.
Apple won’t be at the mammoth International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, but once again, it’s setting the agenda from afar.
While Korean electronics giants like Samsung will dominate the show floor, Apple is laying the future path for the entire tech industry.
In the coming year, the tech industry’s big battlegrounds will be your body, your home and your car. At CES, thousands of companies will showing off new and prototype products to do battle in these arenas. But Apple is the company to beat. With the upcoming Apple Watch, in addition to HealthKit, HomeKit and CarPlay, Apple is setting the agenda for the entire tech industry, and it’s not even there.
Apple’s new interpretation of a particular iOS 8 feature could severely cripple countless third-party apps like Dropbox and Evernote.
The new interpretation came to light after Panic, a very respected indie developer, was told to remove the ability to send files to iCloud Drive in its file transfer app Transmit. And because of the way iOS 8 is designed, the app can no longer send files to any other storage provider.
What’s worse is that Apple provided little to no explanation for why it was implementing the policy change, and there’s no telling which app will forced to comply next.
Despite never having laid their hands upon an Apple Watch, developers are feverishly crafting apps for the long-awaited wearable.
To do this, they face considerable challenges: The size of the device is unlike anything most of them have ever contemplated, and they must design for an entirely different kind of user experience. To make matters worse, the Apple Watch’s functionality will be severely limited, at least at first.
Still, the independent developers that Cult of Mac spoke with are unabashedly delighted to take on the design challenge as they seek to colonize the next frontier of computing: your wrist.
The first vehicles to support Apple’s CarPlay infotainment system are just starting to appear on the market, but a clever hack from developer Adam Bell means you may be able to get your hands on it sooner than most — and without the need for a compatible in-car infotainment system.
Despite not quite being ready for primetime just yet, Bell’s nifty jailbreak means that users will be able run Apple’s CarPlay software on iPhones and iPads, as seen in the above picture.
It follows hot on the heels of Pangu’s recent iOS 8 jailbreak, which Apple has subsequently (and most likely temporarily) patched.
If you’re looking for a fun puzzle game to play over the weekend you can do a whole lot worse than RGB Express, Apple’s “App of the Week” which has gone free in the App Store.
Arriving on iOS one month ago, the game is a charming strategy title in which you play the route planner for a fleet of trucks, responsible for plotting their paths through increasingly complex neighborhoods, always ensuring that every home receives its package.
Starting off simply but getting increasingly complex as the game goes on, it’s an entertaining challenge, spanning 200 levels in all, that’s sure to appeal to the kind of iOS gamers who also enjoy titles like Blek.
A crucial part of making apps involves the beta testing process, and Apple has released a new tool to help streamline the process for everyone.
After initially previewing TestFlight for third-party developers alongside iOS 8 at WWDC in June, Apple made it available for use today. Developers can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers, including non-developers, to try early builds of their apps before they hit the App Store.