Last week, Ally somewhat accidentally discovered that if you change an iMessage’s group name on your computer, it changes the name for everyone on the thread. It not only led to some pretty hilarious griefing for our other co-workers, but got me thinking about other ridiculous tricks and trolls for making iMessage conversations a little more — shall we say — interesting. So here are ten ridiculous games, tricks, and other nonsense to keep you and your friends laughing throughout the day.
Changing the group name won’t send your friends alerts the way traditional texts will, but it does change how new messages show up — when you receive a text, the group’s name will show up next to the sender. There’s room for lots of silliness here, as well as emoji, and everyone has access to changing the name — you can’t lock it down.
If you’re messaging with someone who gets impatient waiting for text messages, you can grief them with an oldie but a goodie: a gif of the text message in progress icon. This doesn’t work perfectly on Macs or with people who have read receipts enabled, but it’s still worth a giggle or two.
Whether your friend has an aversion to a particular song or you just want to send a little Rick Astley love their way, you can use iOS 8’s iMessage vocal recording feature to send a clip of a song — prerecorded or sung yourself — to your friend in need.
Just don’t be surprised if they retaliate.
One emoji or two to spice up a conversation is all well and good, but do you know what’s even more fun? Creating stories out of emoji. You can use the return key and the emoji keyboard to build all sorts of storyboards and tales, depending on your patience — and use o the return key.
Of course, if you don’t want to spend the time building a narrative, you can always torture your friends with an emoji dump by sending 1000 copies of an emoji their way. The old-fashioned way to do this involves a lot of copying and pasting, but if you have Workflow, you can use Myke Hurley’s devilishly horrible script for auto-sending 1000 copies of an emoji someone’s way.
It may not be as sophisticated as a Facebook or Game Center game, but there are a variety of old-school board games you can play with a few emojis and some creativity. Connect Four’s a fun one, but you can even rock checkers or chess if you’re patient.
Can’t find the right emoji for a response? That’s what reaction gifs are for: You can use third-party keyboards like PopKey or a gif search site like Giphy to help pick the perfect gif response for a particularly silly conversation, or even make a gif of yourself using Workflow or GifMill.
Selfies aren’t just for your Instagram feed: They can be super-useful at expressing all sorts of emotions that emojis or gifs are lacking in. Excitement, rage, horror, joy — whatever you want to express toward your buddy, you probably can with a quick-shot selfie.
This one was suggested by Dave Addey on Twitter, and what an awesome suggestion it was:
@settern I sometimes pretend I’m a text adventure.
— Dave Addey (@daveaddey) February 5, 2015
I did this with a few friends last week, and it’s pretty hilarious where it will take you: One of my friends tried to keep to the original Zork script by looking up a walkthrough; one started inspecting strange things on the ground; and one had me spin up an entirely new adventure for hours that left us both laughing. If you want to practice your storytelling and confuse your non-geeky friends, this is a pretty great way to do it.
File this down as another way to confuse your buddies and end up laughing: iOS 8’s QuickType keyboard is great for predicting and filling in long words you don’t necessarily want to type in full, but it’s even more hilarious when you let it drive your conversation entirely.
Use only QuickType to create a message, and it will attempt to create a logical sentence as best it can… albeit, a logical sentence that twists, turns, and meanders. Your results can be pretty fantastic.
I won’t spoil this one for either party, but pro-tip: If you’re feeling glum and want a cheer-up, texting 866-740-4531 is a guaranteed smile.
I received a bunch of other great ideas on Twitter, but if you have a personal favorite fun thing to do over iMessage, leave it in the comments.
Imagine the horror of a bricked or water-damaged phone and the sudden realization that all of your valuable photos, contacts, and sensitive information are drifting away in the digital wind. We think that years worth of collected data is invaluable. Luckily for you, iDrive is asking less than the price of some cheeseburgers.
This iDrive plan affords you a lifetime of unlimited cloud backup secured by 256-bit AES encryption with an optional private key. You can add up to 5 devices, so all of your tablets, phones, and PC’s can stay connected. There’s even support for Facebook and Instagram backup. Sufficient storage space with built-in security is worth investing in at any price, especially $10!
See more at deals.androidguys.com
Imagine the horror of a bricked or water-damaged phone and the sudden realization that all of your valuable photos, contacts, and sensitive information are drifting away in the digital wind. We …
We’re heading into a holiday weekend here in the United States so you know what that typically means. That’s right, Amazon is giving away a bunch of free apps and games. For the next …
Ready for a new next-gen handset but aren’t prepared to shell out the clams for the hefty upgrade? Today just might be your day! We’re giving away a top-tier next-gen handset of …
We’ve all seen those hunky power strips with the flickering orange indicator lights curled up in the corner like some sort of unsightly electrical snake. Nothing sucks the life out of your …
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It’s here! Microsoft has today flipped the switch and released its promised Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones. Outside of what we saw at the Redmond event on January 21, this is our first real opportunity to take a look at the next major version of Windows for smartphones.
If you’re already enrolled in the Windows Insider program, to download it you’ll need the Windows Insider app on your phone and from there the rest is relatively easy.
We’re heading into a holiday weekend here in the United States so you know what that typically means. That’s right, Amazon is giving away a bunch of free apps and games. For the next couple of days (Feb 12-14) you can grab up to $140 worth of stuff. Among the titles being offered up at no cost are Trivia Crack, Shazam Encore, OfficeSuite Professional 8, Cut the Rope: Experiments and more. There’s 37 available but you can pick and choose what you get!
In addition to the limited time promotion, Amazon is dangling a few other deals.
Amazon
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Apple’s enormous Campus 2 building site in Cupertino, CA, has been pretty much off limits since construction began (excepting hard-to-restrict aerial photography), but San Francisco public radio station KQED got a quick on-the-ground tour of the site which, well, it’s very much a construction site right now. Lots of concrete and steel and whatnot, just arranged in the ring of the Apple Campus 2 design instead of more traditional right-angled structures.
The new complex is being built on a former HP campus site. Said KQED’s Amy Standen:
“What Apple inherited on the property was several older buildings, all of which were broken down and deconstructed. Much of the material from those old buildings was recycled into new building material to make the new campus, according to Apple.”
Apparently 95% of the debris from the old buildings is being recycled and will be reincorporated into the new structures. The prodigious use of on-site recycled materials means that Apple’s reduced the impact of the construction on the surrounding community — nowhere near as many concrete trucks have been rumbling through Cuptertino to pour the building’s enormous foundation and subterranean parking structure, for example.
Source: KQED
Carphone Warehouse in the UK is now selling the three current smartphones in HTC’s Desire range. They include the Desire 320, the Desire 620 and the Desire 820, the latter of which which we reviewed in December.
Microsoft has just published the list of Windows Phone compatible with the Windows 10 Preview.
Unfortunately, the list is definitely a subset of phone with many of the high-end ones being left off the list. Of course, this will likely change in the coming weeks and months but for now, these are the supported devices for the Windows 10 Preview.
Letter Way is a word game that has a unique puzzle gameplay to it. You use the creation of words to open up letters on the board to make more words to open up more letters until all the letters have been opened. This makes for a dynamic and challenging gameplay experience.
The gameplay is quite enjoyable, and can be both a pick up game, or a game you sit and play for a while. You use the letters you see to form words. When letters you use are next to tiles that have a color and you successfully create a word, those colored tiles will flip to reveal new words. However, different colors do different things, making the gameplay more challenging. I enjoy word games (even though I’m not very good at them) and I feel as though this game brings a unique approach without being another Scrabble copycat. There are levels too, about 80 of them, so the game should keep you pretty busy as each level gets harder.
Interface is how the app looks and how you interact with it. Letter Way does well with both. The game looks good, and feels modern, bringing intuitive graphics and animations. The game is also very touch friendly, making the “controls” a breeze and something you don’t even need to think about.
Letter Way walks you through how to play the first couple of levels, making it easy for anyone to download the game and learn how to play. I don’t have much to say about them, actually, which is a good thing because it does its job!
Letter Way is a fun game that can be addicting, challenging, and fun all at the same time. Honestly, I don’t have anything bad to say about the game.
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Traditional photographs inevitably incur some physical wear and tear, while their digital counterparts are seemingly immune to such damage. When repeatedly shared over social channels, though, digital files can suffer a similar fate as they’re repeatedly copied and compressed. Artist and photographer Pete Ashton has sped up this gradual disintegration process in his recent project entitled “I am sitting in stagram.” He began with a single photo, uploaded it to Instagram, took an unfiltered screenshot and reposted the resulting image, repeating the process 90 times to produce an effect akin to the real-life aging process. That specific count also allowed him to fit a 6fps time-lapse video of the project into the service’s 15-second limit to animate the transmutation.
The core concept of Ashton’s work (and its title) was inspired by an audio experiment from 1969 called “I am sitting in a room” by composer Alvin Lucier. That version began as a spoken word recording that was played back and re-recorded through a repeated process. Like Ashton’s images, the sound became a haunting departure from the original after multiple iterations. It’s not the first time that Lucier’s pioneering work inspired a new generation of artists: William Basinski used a similar method to create his 2002 expimental album called “The Disintegration Loop” and YouTube’s emergence spawned a video variation in 2010.
The topic of digital image degradation stemming from re-use was even explored earlier this year in an article for The Awl, leading its author to declare the trend of less-than-crisp photos as “shitpics.” While that seemingly pejorative term is more about the online community adding some rough edges to an all-too-perfect digital landscape and Ashton’s take on the phenomenon is more conceptual, they both seem to find something compelling in all that noise.
Filed under: Cameras
Via: Gawker
Source: Art Pete
A new report out of Israel-based business newspaper Calcalist [Google Translate] claims Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to make a trip to Israel next week to coincide with the grand opening of the company’s newest office space in the country. The plans are, however, yet to be finalized.
The project, housed in the beachfront district of Herzliya Pituach, has been ongoing since the middle of 2013, when Apple signed a contract to lease 12,500 square meters of office space in the district.
With the project now completed, Apple is set to house 800 employees in an expanded footprint of 17,000 square meters (183,000 square feet). According to Haaretz, the company’s R&D centers in Israel are focused on “storage space, processors and communications chips,” so the new Herzliya offices are likely to be tied into those areas.
Apple has two other office spaces in Israel: one much farther out from Herzliya in Haifa and another within walking distance of the new building in nearby Ra’anana. For that reason, Apple is expected to consolidate the Ra’anana offices into the new building once it’s up and running.
As Haaretz noted back in 2013, many believe Apple’s continued expansion overseas highlights the company’s deep appreciation of foreign markets and its desire to keep the manufacturing of Apple products under as much of its own control as possible.
“Apple is preparing to drop external suppliers and to control its entire production process,” [Explace chairman Shlomo] Gradman said. “This is a company that maintains its secrecy and they’re currently exposed to information going every which way. So it’s buying companies and improving its abilities in the field of microelectronics so that it can control the production process from beginning to end.”
“Even though Apple has been active in Israel for only a short time, the company has been impressed by the abilities here.”
Apple first began making headway into Israel after purchasing flash memory firm Anobit to gather a few key components of the manufacturing of the iPhone and iPad – namely flash memory performance and reliability – under its own roof. A meeting last year between Cook and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed towards the company’s continued interest in Israel’s market, despite the specifics of the conversation being kept private.
AIVAnet 