As Apple secures exclusive after exclusive with the hottest names in music, Spotify is beginning to feel the heat. According to Troy Carter, global head of creator services at Spotify, these deals are “bad for artists, bad for consumers, and bad for the whole industry.”
Countless “endless runner” games have made it big in the App Store—all the way back to Canabalt in 2009. Now we have more titles like Tiny Wings and Badland that pride themselves on not only fun, causal gameplay, but immersive design.
The next game in the endless runner camp to make it big could very well be Alto’s Adventure, an upcoming title from Snowman, the small developer behind popular to-do app Checkmark. In an exclusive peek at the game’s artwork given to Cult of Mac, we’re shown the incredible design that’s going into bringing Alto’s Adventure to life.
One more way that Apple is challenging Google is by pushing for exclusive games on iOS, claims a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reports that as Android’s influence has grown, Apple has been offering games developers promotional perks — such as premium placement on their app store home pages — in exchange for first rights to particular titles.
Last August, Apple struck a deal with EA to receive a two-month exclusivity window for Plants vs. Zombies 2, which did not arrive on Android until November.
A similar deal saw the popular sequel to ZeptoLab’s puzzle game Cut the Rope arrive on iOS in December — but not make it to Android until late March this year.
LAS VEGAS — With the throng of tech bloggers covering CES, it’s not often that the heavily covered show hands us a surprise — but here’s one.
Netatmo, the French outfit best known for its fancy cloud-connected micro/personal Weather Station (and now also a device that measures your level of sun exposure), is about to add a hard-core new component: a rain gauge.
We don’t hand out five stars here at Cult of Mac just for any old thing. In fact, out of hundreds of reviews, I can count on my fingers the number of gadgets and apps that have received a five-star rating. But the 2Do iOS app was handed five stars, and it was well-deserved. Now Guided Ways Technologies has released a Mac version of its superb task manager — are you excited yet?
InboundWriter is one of those stunning, trick applications you’re surprised even exists. It’s a web-based text editor that allows you to see — via a big speedometer-like gauge — how well you’ve tuned your document to be search-engine friendly (otherwise known as search-engine optimization, or SEO), and then gives you the tools to tweak your document’s SEO to perfection. And yes, it’s free — so long as you don’t go over eight documents per month.
But since its launch early this year in May of last year, InboundWriter has been running on Flash, making it annoyingly unavailable on the iPad. But that’s about to change; it’s been re-worked from the ground up to run on HTML5, and has even had its aspect ratio optimized for the iPad.
We have some great news for those of you who aren’t ashamed of purchasing digital comics. Marvel has signed a multi-year deal with comiXology, the largest digital comics platform, to exclusively distribute single issue English-language digital comics worldwide. Marvel fans will have a plethora of sources to obtain these digital comics, including the Marvel apps available for Android and iOS .
I’m expecting some really cool iOS/Android stuff to pop out of indy dev First Post. The year-and-a-half-old startup is run by Jacob Robinson, the former art director at Sony Online Entertainment (who had a hand in forming legendary titles like the EverQuest series, DC Universe, Star Wars Galaxies and Unreal Tournament). It’s also completely self-funded, “which is not an easy thing to do at all,” says Robinson.
First Post’s debut game, Snacksss, may not exactly be the stellar breakthrough title one might have hoped for; the cartoony, Sonoran Desert-themed iPhone game has lots of pretty artwork but needs help in the gameplay department, which has the player listlessly flicking a hungry snake at rabbits ad nauseam.
An unconfirmed report surfaced yesterday saying that Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted at Valve’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Whenever Cook is spotted out and about, people take notice. The CEO of the world’s most valuable company doesn’t personally visit other tech companies to simply have a chat.
Many speculated as to why Cook would be visiting Valve, maker of popular game series like Half-Life, Team Fortress and Portal. Valve also boasts an incredibly robust online PC gaming platform called Steam that operates similarly to Apple’s App Store.
We’ve gotten word that Cook was indeed at Valve yesterday, and what’s more, Apple is planning a full-on assault to take over the living room. This assault won’t just be limited to the long-rumored Apple HDTV set, but will also include a revolutionary home console as well.
When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.
That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.
On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.
Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.
