Apple

Super market already planning to beam ads to your Apple Watch when you walk in

Marsh Supermarkets, a retail food chain headquartered in Indianapolis, IN, with stores throughout Central Indiana and parts of Ohio, has installed iBeacons in all of its 75 stores and plans to run Apple Watch triggered advertisements when you walk in the store, AdWeek was the first to report.

The Apple Watch isn't even on sale until reportedly March, but that isn't stopping Marsh from preparing to take advantage of the hands-free advertising.

Verifone announces new point of sale hardware that could give Apple Pay big boost

Verifone, a company that boasts it connects more than 27 million payment devices to the cloud, has announced a new point of sale (POS) system that aims to work with any smartphone on the market, and could be a huge boost for Apple to get Apple Pay more widely adopted in stores.

The PAYware Mobile e355, the newest mPOS terminal from Verifone, frees merchants from consumer technology upgrade cycles and adapts to multiple OS options, the company says. "It is a flexible, long-lasting device that can accommodate different form factors and outlive smartphone and tablet models."

Apple testing iOS 9 prototype builds, weblogs hint

Just as our own analytics showed a very clear spike of traffic emanating from devices running Apple's unreleased iOS 8.1.3, now word comes that several publications are starting to see versions of iOS 9 showing up on web analytics for their sites.

Assuming version numbers have not been spoofed, this would indicate Apple may have begun testing first prototype builds of iOS 9, ahead of a developer preview expected at its annual developers conference in the summer.

Spotify now has 15 million subscribers, 60 million active users

Spotify now has 15 million subscribers paying for its premium features and 60 million active users total, the music streaming giant announced on its blog on Monday.

The new numbers on Monday compare to number two months ago when the company said it had 12.5 million paying users out of 50 million subscribers, showing impressive growth for the latter number.

Smart driving assistant Automatic now connects your car and home with Nest

First preview at CES 2015 a week ago, Automatic, makers of the popular connected car adapter, today officially announced a new feature to connect your car and home with Nest, the smart thermostat from Google.

The integration enables communication between your car and home through intelligently chosen rules that give the Nest thermostat a more timely understanding of when heating or cooling is needed and more importantly, when it's not.

Apple releases revamped App Store category just for kids

Apple has added a new category to its App Store, aimed just at children, the company's official App Store Twitter account announced on Saturday.

"Set children loose in wondrous worlds designed especially for them," the "Games for Kids" category description writes." From cute puzzlers to accessible tower-defense games, our selections are perfect for a wide range of skill levels and interests."

Rise & Shine alarm clock app makes you smile before it shuts up

Rise & Shine is a new app, from the folks at Foley Productions, that has a creative way of getting you to wake up in the morning (or evening, depending on your schedule). We've seen apps where you have to shake the handset to make the alarm clock shut up, however Rise & Shine takes it a step further - you have to show it your pearly whites with a smile.

What would you like to see from Apple this year?

Apple blogger and Instapaper founder Marco Arment caused an earthquake in the Apple community when he released a blistering article on the current state of Apple's hardware earlier this week. It's not often you see Apple bloggers being critical of the company they're usually so quick to praise.

"We don't need major OS releases every year," Arment wrote. "We don't need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace."

So that left two questions: Is Arment correct in his theory? What do you want from Apple in 2015? 

Apple overtakes Nikon for second place camera brand on Flickr in 2014

Flickr has released its list of camera brands that were used the most to capture photos on the photography website in 2014. The top five were: Canon at 13.4 percent, Apple at 9.6 percent, Nikon at 9.3 percent, Samsung at 5.6 percent, and Sony at 4.2 percent.

Apple overtook Nikon for the second place spot in 2014. The iPhone 5, 4S and 4 were the top three for both 2013 and 2014, with the Canon EOS 7D and the Nikon D7000 unchanged in 4th and fifth place respectively.

Spotlight bug exposes your Mac’s IP address and more to spammers

An unusual oversight in how OS X's Spotlight feature handles privacy settings in Apple Mail leaves the door open to spammers, phishers and online tracking companies who can obtain private data such as your IP address, current operating system version, browser details and more, whenever an email message is previewed in Spotlight.

First discovered by German technology news site Heise, the bug takes advantage of a common information harvesting technique and a Mail setting which determines whether or not the program loads remote content in emails.

Piracy on iOS: 60% of Monument Valley installs on iPhone and iPad not paid for

Even though this particular data point is a few days old now, I think it's highly relevant in light of Apple's glowing App Store stats revealed yesterday.

According to developer Ustwo Games, its award-winning and incredibly successful Monument Valley, an atmospheric puzzle game in which you manipulate impossible architecture inspired by the works of M.C. Escher, has seen a significant chunk of its potential revenue lost to piracy because only 40 percent of the $3.99 game installs on the iPhone and iPad were paid for.

The vast chunk of the remaining sixty percent iOS installs were illegitimate, or to put it bluntly — pirated. On Android, the paid install base is a paltry five percent (you read that right), as a huge hunk of the remaining 95 percent of users opted to steal Monument Vally on Android rather than pay four bucks to enjoy it.

Is the 60 percent piracy rate on iOS a worrying number for Monument Valley developers and a bad sign for Apple's mobile platform? Read on for the full reveal.

The Princess Bride gets official iOS game

The official mobile game of The Princess Bride, the 1987 classic fantasy adventure movie adapted from William Goldman's 1973 namesake novel, is now available in the App Store.

Featuring four different games, The Princess Bride lets you experience all the favorite scenes from the film. You'll be wrestling giants, engaging in sword fighting and more, earning awards along the way and unlocking images and sound clips from the movie.