It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire” at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]
Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
5:31 pm, November 19th, 2009
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Reviews, Software, Top stories, iPhone | No Comments »
9:44 am, November 19th, 2009
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite it hitting the shops a couple of months ago.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Hardware, Reviews, Top stories | 4 Comments »
6:42 am, November 18th, 2009
Russell Davies does lots of things that are interesting, including, um, Interesting and Newspaper Club and a bunch of other stuff, but the other week he did a talk at the Playful event in London, culminating in this fabulous mock-up of an augmented reality game using an iPhone.
The idea is genius: you start playing the game with one tap, and after that you don’t have to look at the device at all. You walk around with your earphones in, and it alerts you with sounds when there’s stuff to interact with. This video explains it better:
SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Gaming, News, Top stories, iPhone | 2 Comments »
9:30 am, November 17th, 2009
Good news! Two doses of it, in fact.
First: QuoteFix for Mac fixes the problem of top-quoting in Mail! Now you can use Mail and reply to email messages underneath the text of the message you’re replying to, as God intended things to be.
Second: I got this tip from Tim Gaden’s Hawkwings blog, which has had a fresh burst of energy over the last month or so, and is now buzzing with tips about using Mail (and other cool things to make your Mac using life easier). If Hawkwings isn’t in your RSS reader or on your list-of-sites-to-keep-an-eye-on, I urge you to add it there.
There’s an old internet joke that you’ve probably heard a thousand times:
A: Because people don’t like reading backwards
Q: Why is top-quoting a bad idea?
Email is a very personal thing. Most people don’t care how their replies are displayed in their email software, but for those of us who’ve been around long enough to remember when “email client” was the term used for “email software”, some things – like whether you quote at the top or the bottom – matter a lot.
Most modern email services top-quote. By which I mean when you hit reply, the original message is underneath and your reply is on top. Makes no logical sense, but people have got used to things being that way. It’s just How Email Works for millions.
Gmail made things a little better, by retaining top-quoting but keeping messages in context as threaded conversations. Combined with its “Show quoted text” feature, it makes top-quoting bearable.
Thing is, Mail top-quotes too, and those same people – you know the ones I mean – hate it for that. Now, at last, there’s something for them. QuoteFix sorts it all out and makes it work the way it should. There. That’s better isn’t it?
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Opinions, Tips & Tricks | 16 Comments »
12:20 pm, November 13th, 2009
This presentation is the work of Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, and in it he makes a lot of very interesting points.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Apple, News, Opinions | 11 Comments »
7:23 am, November 13th, 2009
Screens of all shapes and sizes can end up cluttered with windows and palettes all over the place. On tiny little MacBook screens you get everything overlapping everything else; on ginormous 27″ iMac screens, everything’s so far apart you have to crane your neck to take it all in.
Step forward Zooom/2, a utility designed to make managing all those windows a little bit easier.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »
5:27 am, November 13th, 2009
Popular Science has published its Best of What’s New 2009 list, with Apple a winner in the Computing category.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in MacBook Pro, News, Top stories | 3 Comments »
9:25 am, November 12th, 2009
So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.
Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.
“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”
Posted by Giles Turnbull in OS X, Opinions, Software, Tips & Tricks, Vintage Tech | 2 Comments »
4:50 pm, November 11th, 2009
November 11th is internationally recognised as a day of Remembrance; in the US it’s Veterans Day, and here in the UK is known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, iPhone | 1 Comment »
9:47 am, November 11th, 2009
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Favorites, News, Reviews, Software, Top stories, iPhone | 2 Comments »
5:56 am, November 11th, 2009
When I saw this snap in the Cult of Mac Flickr pool, I wanted to find out more. Who is the owner of the little family of Macs old and new, and how did they end up on this desk?
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Interviews, MacBook Pro, Vintage Tech | 6 Comments »
3:31 pm, November 10th, 2009
Bare Bones released a Yojimbo update this afternoon, which adds a handful of nice new bits and pieces.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »
5:53 am, November 6th, 2009
Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe bet), they’ll throw in a copy of Mariner Write as well.
Sweet deal? I reckon. All of these are great apps. What’s the catch?
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Software, Top stories | 11 Comments »
10:22 am, November 5th, 2009
This is a great idea, and bound to go down very well with your kids.
Balloons is simple: you launch a virtual balloon into the air from your phone. You add a photo and a text message to the label that dangles below the balloon, and send it off.
Anyone with the Balloons app can catch that balloon and add their own message. If you shell out for the paid version, you can track the balloons you’ve launched and see what other people have added to them.
To celebrate and set things off, we’ve created a Cult of Mac balloon for you to catch. It’s purple with green stripes, and has a photo of the Cult home page at the top. If you catch it, let us know what you think about Balloons.
This is a particularly friendly application. I can see school classes all over the world launching balloons to make contacts in other schools. And Shiny development have wisely kept the choice of balloons fairly limited to start with; I wouldn’t be surprised to see custom balloons appearing soon, as an in-app purchase.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Reviews, Software, iPhone | 4 Comments »
5:22 pm, November 4th, 2009
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in How tos, News, OS X, Software | 2 Comments »
Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an [...]
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
If you jailbreak your iPhone, the first thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO is change the default filesystem password.
When you jailbreak, the filesystem’s password is set to the common password “alpine.” As people usually don’t bother changing this password after performing a jailbreak, it’s really easy for hackers to get access to any jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch [...]
Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon. Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video [...]
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released blackra1n RC3, which is an update to a 1-click jailbreak that adds activation options and an add-on blacksn0w, which unlocks latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS baseband version 05.11.07. To use blacksn0w, make sure you have this new baseband (check under Settings –> General –> About –> Modem Firmware) [...]
