Top stories - page 740

To get the fun of virtual bowling without a Wii, look no further than Bowling Central, a magical iOS app that lets you swing your iPhone around to send a virtual bowling ball slamming into all the pins at the end of the lane.

The game is powered by Rolocule Games’ motion-tracking technology, called “rolomotion,” which lets you swing your iPhone like a Wii remote. The gaming company’s two founders wanted to create a Wii Bowl-style experience, only with an Apple TV and an iPhone, and they won a 2014 Edison Award for their solution.

“We worked really hard to get the motion gaming controls right,” Rolocule’s Anuj Tandon told Cult of Mac in an email, “and getting the perfect controls took time. Not only … can you give accurate direction to the ball, but by twisting the wrist, the ball can be given a spin, just like real bowling.”

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.

It’s been a long hard slog for all involved but the 64,000-person class action anti-poaching lawsuit brought against four major tech companies, including Apple, is finally over.

The companies — which also included Google, Intel, and Adobe — reportedly agreed to pay a total of $415 million for their misdeeds.

As OS X becomes increasingly popular, it’s only natural that it becomes a bigger target for hackers, scammers and advertisers. We’re seeing a rise in complaints about adware programs built for OS X, which can take over your computer and prevent you from doing things like open up your browser. But don’t worry — it can be really easy to get rid of.

In today’s video, I’ll show you how to remove all traces of adware from your Mac in less than two minutes using an excellent tool called AdwareMedic.

I have no plans to buy a smartwatch at the moment, but when I do, I already know the first command to give it.

I’m going to make my jaw as square as possible, activate the phone for my first call (probably to my wife), and say: “Calling all cars! Calling all cars!”

With Android Wear already here and Apple Watch on the way, we must salute detective Dick Tracy and his his two-way wrist radio.

Comic strip creator Chester Gould first strapped a wrist radio on Dick Tracy in 1946. He upgraded it to a wrist television in the 1960s. Tracy never complained about dropped calls or bandwidth problems.

I’ve written on numerous occasions before about how we’re currently living through a golden age of iOS games, and apparently Apple agrees with me.

According to a new patent application published today, Apple may be investigating the possibility of building in a miniature joystick inside the Home button of future iOS devices.

Read on to find out how it could work.

Want to see something neat to start off your day? How about a Siri RSS reader?

RSS readers, as most readers will be aware, are great at aggregating news headlines from a variety of different websites that get updated throughout the day. While they’re useful tools, they’re less than ideal for blind or partially sighted users, however.

With that in mind, one blind Redditor recently announced that they were posting a $1,000 bounty for any developer who could create a jailbreak tweak capable of not only keeping track of RSS feeds, but also getting Siri to read them out loud.

Although high-end smartphones can boast anything up to 4GB RAM these days, the iPhone has been stuck on 1GB ever since the iPhone 5. This hasn’t really been much of a problem, because iOS is so efficient that developers have been able to continue making apps and games superior to most things on Android, while sticking within the 1GB limit.

This may be about to change, however, according to a new report circulating in the Taiwanese media, which suggests that Apple plans to boost up its iPhone to 2GB of LPDDR4 memory for its forthcoming iPhone 6s, which will likely arrive this September.

The tech blogosphere has been buzzing this morning with news that Apple might be ditching Intel after ‘the world’s most accurate Apple analyst’ issued a report predicting iMacs and MacBooks will shun Intel processors for Apple’s own ARM-based solution within the next 1 – 2 years.

The ramifications of Intel getting ditched by the only personal computer line that’s still gaining marketshare would be huge. Intel’s stock has been trading down 1.53% since the news broke this morning, but before you ditch your Intel stock and start dreaming of a fanless ARM-powered MacBook Air, there are two things you need to know that show Kuo is probably wrong.

A brilliant white lightning bolt strikes the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In Venice, Italy, a whale splashes joyfully through a street system made up of canals. In New York, an elephant is lifted high into the sky by a mass of colored helium balloons.

These may sound like the most fanciful of cheese dreams, but they are, in fact, the work of a fantastic artist double-act: German-born Robert Jahns and his iPhone.

Using his iPhone to assemble his surreal masterpieces, and then posting the resulting pictures to Instagram under the name nois7, Jahns is taking the art world by storm. And like many contemporary artists, he couldn’t have done it without his trusty Apple device.

We’ve known for a while now that a fortunate few people with close ties to Apple have been testing the Apple Watch in the wild, but this may be our best glimpse yet.

Posted on Instagram by Vogue international editor Suzy Menkes, the picture shows a man’s arm (thereby ruling out Menkes herself) sporting the chic Apple smartwatch, which Apple has been heavily promoting in fashion and design circles.

“So here is that new Apple watch gleaming and glinting and performing at the dinner table,” Menkes wrote. “Who owns the arm?! A free Apple watch for anyone who guesses right!”

Sadly, she went on to add that she was “only kidding.”

There are tons of new games out every week, and it’s hard to decide which ones to purchase, let alone which free games to download. We’re here to take some of the guesswork out of your decision, though, as we’ve scoured the best games that have come out so far this year.

From time wasters to deep strategic gems, this list will have you gaming in no time. Grab your copy of these five great –and brand-spankin’ new — gaming experiences today and you can thank us later.

LAS VEGAS — Walk the halls of the massive International CES trade show and you’ll be bombarded by an outrageous number of pitches for products with radical new features.

You can glimpse the shiny happy future of consumer electronics at the show, although some of the innovations on display are clearly destined for the dustbin of gadget history.

At the biggest booths, reps for big companies like Sony and Samsung — but, sadly, not Apple — talk up the latest additions to their product lines. At smaller booths, inventors show off prototypes for products that may not ever roll off an assembly line. There’s a nonstop blitz of “world’s first” products.

It’s impossible to see everything, but it’s a blast trying. Here are Cult of Mac’s picks for the best of CES 2015, from Lightning-enabled headphones and massive TVs to drones and self-adjusting belts.

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.

LAS VEGAS — The problem with the state of smartwatches, beyond the sucky software, is that they’re all ugly. The Apple Watch might very well be the first wearable that not only works, but looks good too, although we won’t know for sure until the finished product is on our wrists this spring.

There were dozens and dozens of smartwatches displayed on the sprawling show floor at International CES last week, but the only one that looked good enough to adorn my wrist was the new Withings Activité Pop.

It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of fancier watches like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, but it’s not your average dumb watch either. And for now, just a smidgen smarter is smart enough.

Incredibly sloppy security at one of Apple’s key suppliers exposed some of Cupertino’s most closely guarded secrets to anybody who could conduct a simple Google search.

For months, one of Quanta Computer‘s internal databases could be accessed using usernames and a default password published in a PowerPoint presentation easily found on the Web.

Quanta, based in Taiwan, is the world’s largest notebook manufacturer. In addition to Apple, Quanta assembles laptops and ultrabooks for dozens of companies, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sharp and Sony. The company is also supposedly assembling the upcoming Apple Watch and the long-rumored iPad Pro, though no official announcements have been made.

LAS VEGAS — Apple Pay is cool, but what if you don’t have the latest iPhone 6? The Plastc Card might be for you.

Plastc is a chameleon-like electronic card that stores up to 20 cards — debit, credit, gift and even security cards.

It’s the same size and shape as a regular card, but has a sharp and striking e-ink display. You simply swipe through the e-ink screen to choose the card you want, and swipe the mag stripe through the reader.

Instead of carrying 20 cards in your wallet, you carry just one.

LAS VEGAS — Laptop docks aren’t usually the sexiest things in the world, but the latest hardware from Henge Docks could be considered somewhat titillating.

Henge’s upcoming horizontal docking station is a beauty. Its sleek, metallic profile looks like an extension of Apple’s unibody MacBook design. But this thing doesn’t only have good looks; it boasts robust port expansion, helpful cable management and automatic docking.

A small company based in San Francisco, Henge Docks is already known for its vertical MacBook dock and Gravitas dock for iOS devices. Customers clamored for a horizontal MacBook dock that didn’t require a secondary display, and the finalized version is being displayed for the first time at International CES here this week.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a junk bin full of old technology. It’s just the way we’re made; there’s nothing better than sifting through the detritus of technology that you loved.

I’ve traded in my iPhone for the last five generations, from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 5, or passed them along to my kids or significant others. The first generation iPhone, however, was something special, so I kept it.

As I was looking for ways to let my daughter listen to music at night without the temptation (or networked connection) of her more modern mobile phone, I chanced upon this lovely little rounded gadget from 2007 in the plastic bin I lovingly refer to as my Dead Technology Museum.

I figured I’d add some music to the thing, and that would be that. But the more time I spent messing around with it, I realized that I could make it into a pretty great little device; even though it pales in comparison with the iPhone 6, there’s still plenty of use in this baby.

 Here are seven things, then, that you can do with your own old iPhone to make it just a bit more useful, whether it’s an original iPhone or an even more modern model. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these old iPhone uses.

The Cult of Mac team spent the past week sweating it out in Las Vegas and gathered up a ton of hands-on looks at some of the hottest products heading down the tech conveyor belt to you in the near future.

We’ve got the two guys who’s gadget can help you bake the perfect cookie, a self-adjusting belt for when you’ve eaten too many cookies, and a sexy sci-fi car that will help you feel better about not having your futuristic flying vehicles, yet.

Be sure to click on through and see this week’s top stories, and subscribe to our free weekly digital magazine right here.

The iPhone has become such a major part of our existence, a piece of technology that we almost take for granted, that it’s difficult to remember a time when we were instead tapping away at our Moto Q, Palm Treo and Nokia E62 handsets.

But while the iPhone has gone on to revolutionize our lives (and Apple’s business) it’s not that long ago — eight years today — that Steve Jobs stood on stage at MacWorld 2007, and told the world that Apple had created a touchscreen iPod, a cell phone, and a breakthrough Internet device all-in-one.

Coming off its most profitable holiday season ever, and a record-breaking week for the App Store, it’s worth taking a moment to rewatch Jobs’ first iPhone presentation: both to see an iconic moment in tech history, and to be reminded of how far we’ve come since then!

Check it out after the jump:

LAS VEGAS — In a sea of iPhone cases and other Apple-related gizmos, one would expect to find at least a few Apple Watch accessories at CES.

Sure, the Watch itself won’t come out for probably a few more months, but we already know what it looks like and a lot about how its apps will work. Where are the companies looking to hitch their wagons to Apple’s next big thing?

Out of the 3,679 exhibitors spread across the 2.06 million square feet of show floor at International CES this year, there is only one Apple Watch accessory, and it’s an unfinished prototype.

If you look at the work of photographer and graphic artist Alberto Seveso, you might inadvertently feel you’re in the throes of a Rorschach inkblot test.

You are staring at ink for sure and, mesmerized, you can’t help but process what the eyes and brain see. Looks like lava, melted plastic or the gas explosions from an evolving star in deep space. The heart will no doubt see beauty but the gut may roil and struggle.

Seveso, a highly sought-after editorial and commercial photographer, hopes he is stirring our insides when he captures the fleeting art of ink or paint being poured into water.

LAS VEGAS — Drones are everywhere at the International CES show. You can’t walk though the South Hall without hearing the feverish buzz of quadrocopter wings luring people to their booths.

Most of the new drones we’ve seen are either too expensive for normal people, or they’re cheap and lack compelling features. But after hours of searching we’ve found the one drone you should pay attention to in 2015: The Hexo+.

On the outside, Hexo+ doesn’t look too different from other drones, but it packs a killer “auto-follow” feature that will allow budding drone photographers to capture epic aerial videos without needing a dedicated pilot to frame each shot.

LAS VEGAS — Your iPhone captures great imagery, but sometimes the built-in zoom just isn’t enough. An ingenious gadget that quickly connects smartphones to almost any optical device gives your everyday camera superpowers.

The Carson Universal is an incredibly simple idea, but it delivers some pretty astonishing results. You can use it to connect your smartphone to telescopes, binoculars, microscopes, spotting scopes or almost any other optical device with a rounded eyepiece. Instead of buying a specialized, device-specific adapter, it’s a one-size-fits-all optical attachment.

“It kind of opens up the possibilities,” said Michelle Hyers, the engineer who designed the Carson Universal.