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A looper is a great musician’s tool, for practice and for making songs. Looper apps are also fantastic fun for anyone who wants to take a crack at creating a tune. Just hit record on a looper app, and make some noise. Then hit the button again, and your recording is played over and over, in a loop.

Then you then build on this, adding more layers. A guitarist can chop out drum beats, then some chords, and play a melody over the loop. A beatboxer can boom, boom, chick and spit into a microphone to build up what the kids call “sick beatz.” And Jimmy Fallon can sing a duet with Billy Joel.

There are many looper apps for iOS. Here are a few of the best.

This week on The CultCast: Apple makes a major play to become the next HBO. Meanwhile, intriguing new images surface showing what looks to be a product we all thought had died — the long lost Apple Television.

Plus: A trusted source says Apple’s next Watch will be more boring than we hoped; and finally … eating bugs … Thai Tinder … yes, Buster Heine is back to share strange stories from his travels deep into the heart of Thailand.

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the HomePod speaker Apple announced at WWDC last month. But thanks to the firmware that was released to developers on Friday, we now know a little bit more about its internal hardware.

Drones are awesome. However, they can also be big, complicated and expensive. The Fader Stealth Drone proves they can also be small, sleek and simple to use. Plus it looks like something straight out of Mission: Impossible.

It’s easy to ignore how intuitive it is to use an iPhone. But a team of designers painstakingly crafted the vast array of simple swipes and taps that give the iPhone its magic.

This week on The CultCast, we’ll tell you the stories behind inertial scrolling and Swipe to Unlock. And we’ll talk about Bas Ording, the man who brought iOS to life using the physics of our natural world.

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.

I recently switched back to freelancing full-time, and whilst I am lucky enough to have clients who don’t ask for precise hourly breakdowns, I have always been intrigued to know how much time I was spending on work tasks, especially those tasks that I didn’t directly bill for.

Many time trackers rely on you explicitly setting the task you are tracking and remembering to switch to another task when it’s time to track that. This is easy to forget, and for someone like me who switches tasks frequently, it’s hard to always know when one task finishes and another begins.

Timing 2 takes a different perspective. Instead of tracking by task, it tracks by application usage and uses a set of rules to assign activities in those applications to certain projects and tasks. The premise is that after a learning process, you can leave the application running behind the scenes and it’ll track everything for you automatically. You only need audit the results.

Amazon is coughing up a whopping $13.7 billion in cash to acquire Whole Foods Market.

The two companies will merge but Whole Foods stores will continue to operate independently, with co-founder John Mackey retaining his role as CEO. The move instantly gives Amazon almost as many stores as Apple.

If you felt worried about Apple’s supposed lack of innovation, today’s action-packed WWDC keynote should have allayed your fears. Apple execs sprinted through a 2.5-hour technology showcase filled with hardware updates, serious software upgrades and even a whole new product category.

The whirlwind presentation showed the end result of a busy company with almost unimaginable assets. Far more than a sleepy kickoff to an annual developers confab, today’s stunning presentation showed the magical output of an innovation machine firing on all cylinders.

Anyone who pegged Tim Cook as asleep at the wheel better think again. Here are the key takeaways from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 keynote.

WWDC 2017 | Everything you need to know!

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Any time is a good time to sharpen your skills for creating apps. The market for mobile and desktop applications is as hot as ever, and any extra skill in developing for iOS will make your work that much more marketable. With more than 250 hours of lesson content, this bundle of nine comprehensive courses can offer a jumpstart to anyone looking to get involved in app development, or sharpen the skills of even seasoned coders. And right now, you can get the 2017 iOS 10 Complete App Builder Bundle for just $59.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Interest in the (PRODUCT)Red iPhone has died down since its release back in March, and the novelty has likely worn off already for those of you who picked one up. Now it’s time to make it interesting again!

We’ve put together a list of five brilliant red products, all under $30, to compliment the red iPhone and reinvigorate your love for its unique color. Check out the video along with details for all the accessories we’ve featured below.

Top 5 Red iPhone Products under $30

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This week on The CultCast: It’s official — the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote takes place June 5. Don’t miss our WWDC 2017 hardware expectations! Plus: Apple quietly acquires one of the world’s best sleep-tracking technologies; why Amazon’s Prime Video app may finally be coming to your Apple TV; our first impressions of the Amazon Echo Show, and the features we hope Apple steals from it; and stick around for a very weird, very tribal “What We’re Into,” the segment where we reveal all the non-tech stuff we’re currently digging.

Our thanks to Casper, maker of the internet’s favorite mattress, for supporting this episode. Learn why Casper is tops and save $50 off your order at casper.com/cultcast.

This week on The CultCast: The CIA loses control of its iPhone-hacking arsenal, and computer crooks turn your gadgets against you. Plus: Why iPhone 8 may arrive later than you hoped; our favorite Apple AirPort replacement routers; and we discuss the non-Apple gear we’re currently obsessing over in an all-new and aptly named “What We’re Into.”

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.

This week on The CultCast: It’s been five years of CultCasts! We’ll regale you with some of our favorite stories from past shows. Plus: Our hardware expectations from Apple’s rumored March event; why iPhone 8’s wireless charging will probably be lame; Apple has five teams working on next-generation charging tech; why iPhone 8’s camera could pump out industrial-grade slow motion; and Steve Jobs gets a beautiful new home on Apple’s new spaceship campus.

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code “CultCast” at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.

To achieve maximum success, iOS game developers need an idea that’s both reassuringly familiar and strikingly new. That’s exactly what Stagehand delivers: The new platform game employs a clever twist on the popular endless-runner genre, with a sprinkle of ’90s classic Lemmings thrown in for good measure.

“Stagehand is a game that looks like a side-scrolling platformer, but instead of controlling the character, you move the stage,” developer Matt Comi told Cult of Mac. “We call it a ‘reverse platformer.’ The protagonist, Frank, runs and jumps all by himself. It’s the player’s job to make sure he doesn’t run into walls.”

Apple impressed us all with its Q1 2017 earnings earlier this week. Is it the start of something spectacular?

iPhone sales beat expectations, and though things may look bad for the iPad business, there’s strong demand for Apple Watch, the Mac lineup is raking in more than ever, and services will be big enough to be its own Fortune 100 company by the end of the year.

Is Apple headed for another boom period? Or does it need more than just the iPhone 8 in 2017 to keep up this trend? Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over Apple’s year ahead.

Instagram isn’t simply a social network for sharing images. Used properly, it’s a powerful tool for connecting with like-minded photographers and getting feedback about your images.

I’m passionate about photography, and finding communities I can engage with is really important when it comes to helping me improve and get ideas for new projects. These Instagram tips and tricks, which I use on a daily basis, can really help you grow as a photographer.

This week on The CultCast: We run you through the most ridiculous gizmos at CES 2017 — stuff that nobody on earth actually needs. Then we spice things up with our most hotly anticipated tech of 2017.

And finally, we’re gonna be real with you guys…. Apple had a rough 2016. But that’s all behind us now. It’s a new year. It’s a fresh start. We discuss what Apple needs to get right in 2017.

The year’s winding down but there’s no sign of slowing for the great deals coming into the Cult of Mac Store. From a premium wallet that also charges your phone and a security-enhancing keylogger to a mini-guitar made for the digital age and a charger that draws juice from the sun, we’ve gathered some of the very best new deals.

In addition to being a photo viewer, the Preview app for Mac offers basic image-editing functionality. If you want a quick and easy way to resize images, this built-in Apple app will do the trick.

Here’s how to use Preview to resize photos and other images in macOS Sierra.

Apple has filed a patent for a wraparound glass enclosure that would be perfect for next year’s “all-glass” iPhone 8. It is designed to be thin and light, but also robust, scratch-resistant, and radio-transparent.

This week on The CultCast: Is a secret Apple project stalling Mac updates? It wouldn’t be the first time. Plus: Apple teases Black Friday deals; AirPort routers are walking dead, and the Mac Pro might be next; the future of Time Machine; why iPad should be an iOS/OS X hybrid; and Jony Ive’s new role designing Apple itself.

The online world is a lot like the real one — full of positivity and peril alike, as many wonders as weirdos. That’s why signing on via a virtual private network (VPN) is a must: a secured, encrypted portal to the web that maintains anonymity, protects data sent and received, and sidesteps location restrictions on streaming content. That might sound like protection that will cost you, but nowhere near what you think and certainly much less than it’s worth. Right now you can get a lifetime of VPN protection for just $69 at Cult of Mac Deals.

With a sharp screen, a fast processor and 4GB of RAM, the new LeEco Le Pro3 is a bold shot across the bow of Apple and other premium smartphone makers.

While the hardware nudges the phone toward the high end of the spectrum, the rock-bottom pricing should send shivers through Cupertino. At just $399 — or $299 if you get in on LeEco’s generous instant rebate, which starts today — the Le Pro3 is a steal when compared to the iPhone 7 Plus.

The best work I ever did as a photographer resides in a collection of Western Digital external hard drives that are stored in an old, large camera bag in my closet. The images span more than a decade and with any one of the WD My Passport drives, I can confidently plug one in and quickly find some black-and-white relic of my past.

You can see the progress of time in the pictures (clothes and hair styles) as well as in the design and sizes of the WD drives. Each year, the drives offered more storage space in the same basic compact housing.

So I was astonished a couple of weeks back when the UPS driver dropped off a WD My Passport sized just a little bigger than a deck of cards — with a whopping 4 terabytes of storage.

Yes, lots of people still use their smartphone to make calls, and some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus owners are having a bad experience doing just that. Many report poor sound quality on both devices during calls, and it’s not yet clear if software or hardware is to blame.