This week’s episode of The CultCast is packed with great Apple stories. We talk: Reports of a cheaper, smaller HomePod; the end of iTunes; MoviePass tracking your every move; the first security camera for your car; and more! Hit play to catch the discussion.
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Epic Games is bringing its insanely popular Fornight Battle Royale to iPhone and iPad.
It will be exactly the same 100-player game you’ve been enjoying on consoles, with the same map and the same weapons — and it will support cross-platform play between PlayStation 4 and PC. You can sign up to join the beta on Monday, March 12.
In the world of watch straps, we think Ottm, a manufacturer of wooden Apple Watch bands, offers one of the best unboxing experiences.
The box itself is plain and simple, but the package is thoughtfully designed, containing extra links and a pin removal tool that makes it very easy to adjust your new band.
The bands are awesome, too. Made from zebrawood and/or sandalwood, each hand-finished strap is eye-catching, comfortable and unique.
We made a video to show you what to expect. And, check out Ottm’s wooden Apple Watch bands in the Watch Store.
If you like to pretend you’re in a private detective movie, recording yourself with voice-memos as you go about your everyday business, then your app choice is obvious: Voice Memos from Apple. It’s built into your iPhone, it’s simple, quick to use, and rock solid. But if you’re a musician, and you want to quickly capture ideas, the choice is more complicated. Let’s take a look at the best iOS apps for recording music memos.
We post our iPhone photos on Instagram and are often content if an image gets a few dozen likes. Luisa Dörr’s iPhone pictures got her a gig at TIME magazine. With the assignment, she landed the magazine’s cover — 12 of them to be precise.
The resulting work featuring some of the world’s most powerful women was published late last year and accelerated the career of the young unknown photographer from a small village in Brazil.
This tip is less of a how-to, and more of a why-to. Did you ever think about creating a sleep playlist for your HomePod? It’s a great idea for a few reasons.
Let’s see how it’s done.
Ever wake up feeling like you didn’t get any rest at all? Believe it or not, you might be sleeping wrong. Luckily, technology can help.
Nintendo is slashing 50 percent off Super Mario Run to celebrate Mario Day on March 10. New players will be able to unlock the full game, which includes six different worlds, for just $4.99 — but only for a limited time.
It’s not like you can ever find the app you’re looking for on your various home screens anyway, so why not do something fancy with those icons instead? Like, making your home screen an expression of your inner chakra, man. Or getting in tune with the color harmonies of the universe or whatever.
Whatever hippie crap you’re using to justify it, the results can be amazing. And who knows — if you arrange your home screens by color, then maybe you’ll actually end up finding things faster.
Apple will deliver a revamped iPad Pro during the June quarter of this year, according to a new report.
Inspired by the iPhone X, the device is expected to have significantly slimmer bezels and Face ID, and could make up for weaker-than-expected demand for Apple’s latest smartphones. Apple could also be planning a smaller, more affordable version of HomePod.
The Finder has been with the Mac since day one, way back in 1984. But just because it’s old, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some new tricks. Did you know, for instance, that you can add a path bar to the bottom of the window to show the path of the current folder on your Mac? Or that you can add a status bar in the same spot so you always know how full your drive is? Or that you can add a permanent preview pane over on the right side of a Finder window, even in icon and list views?
Let’s take a look, and see what else you can do.
Apple improves the speakers in iPhones, iPads and iPods with each release — usually making them louder than the previous generation. Still, people constantly complain that iPhones are not loud enough.
In our latest Quick Tips video, I’ll show you a super-easy way to boost those tiny speakers. Check out the video below to see how to make iPhone speakers louder!
The augmented reality revolution sparked by Apple’s ARKit needs a dash of accuracy if it’s really going to catch fire — especially when it comes to mapping.
That’s why London developer Andrew Hart created a location-aware toolkit that uses artificial intelligence to punch up the precision in apps built with ARKit.
“One problem with AR location experiences is the low accuracy of phone GPS and compasses, which makes it difficult to ensure that things line up,” Hart told Cult of Mac. “The toolkit uses computer vision techniques to recognize landscapes from tagged imagery, and then aligns the AR environment upon recognition. It works in different weather conditions, and means you can have really precise experiences.”
We’re still in the midst of a startup boom. The model of small, scrappy business-building has resulted in a body of knowledge about how to succeed. It’s also led to a bevy of tools that can help anyone, whatever they’re building. So we’ve gathered some of the best of them into a bundle of biz-boosting software.
A rare Macintosh prototype that was once rescued from the trash recently sold for more than $10,000 on eBay.
But the winning bidder backed out and now, the clear-plastic Macintosh Portable M5126 laptop is back on the auction site. Bidding started at 99 cents with no reserve.
Safari is a pretty full-featured mobile browser, but if you tap the time to long-press on its buttons and icons, you’ll discover a whole lot of neat extra tricks. These aren’t esoteric power-user tricks either. Pretty much every button on a safari page has an extra function, and it is almost always something you’ll find yourself using every day. Today we’ll see what the plain old reload button can offer us.
Xiaomi is gearing up to invade the U.S. with its Apple clones.
We’ve been waiting years for the Chinese company to make its most popular gadgets available outside of Asia. Now Xiaomi has confirmed that it plans to enter the U.S. market in late 2018 or early 2019.
Is your Mac stuffed fit to burst? Do you look at the Finder’s Status Bar, see “1GB available,” and then give up what you were doing and go check Twitter instead? What if I told you that you could offload much of the junk/important data on your Mac to iCloud, just like you do with your iCloud Photo Library? Well, you can, and it’s easy. It’s called Optimized Storage.
Square Cash is the world’s best coffee loyalty program — and it’s time you knew about it.
The Square Cash Coffee Reward program has been the highlight of my last six months. You can either take that as an indictment of my quality of life, or a resounding recommendation for this coffee cash-back program.
Wi-Fi is everywhere, except when it’s not. At home or the office, few things are as inconvenient or frustrating as suddenly losing your connection to the internet. So the reason for getting an app like this is obvious.
The latest iOS 11.3 beta, rolled out to registered developers Monday, includes a small but significant change to one of Apple’s apps. “iBooks” has returned after briefly being renamed “Books.” The move could suggest a rumored revamp is currently on hold.
Some of the most creative iPhone home screen designs we’ve ever seen use blank gaps to separate icons into groups or to create interesting stepped patterns. But how is that even possible? After all, if you delete a home screen icon, the others close ranks to fill in the space.
The answer is to add blank icons to create those gaps. Then, you can add a blank row to organize your iPhone home screen, or move all your apps the the bottom of the screen instead of the top.
Did you ever hit your macBook’s play/pause key to pause that YouTube video, only to have iTunes launch instead, and start playing that embarrassing tune from your last home workout session? Then you may be interested in a way to have your media keys control the site or app you want to control, instead of the app that Apple decides it will control. Luckily, there’s an app for that, called BeardedSpice.
Simon Pierro presented an Oscar for a new category: best reaction to a magician pulling an actual golden statuette from an iPad.
Pierro, who travels the world as the iPad magician, capitalized on the buzz leading up to Sunday’s Academy Awards by strolling the Walk of Fame performing tricks for dumbfounded onlookers.
There was a time when the little glowing bricks we carried around were called Game Boys. In those simpler days, passing time meant burning through Tetris, not swiping through Tinder. The graphics weren’t great, but the gameplay sure was.
With the Wanle Gamers Console, you can reclaim the nostalgia of portable gaming, and protect your iPhone at the same time.