Cult of Mac: a blog about the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone - and the people who love them

Google Chrome for Mac arrived yesterday in beta form. The browser is lacking important features, including bookmarks and cookie management, and the useful app mode available in the Windows version. Also, benchmarks show it’s marginally slower than Safari. But in use I’ve found it good enough to set as my default, and Chrome’s superior to [...]

Whatever reality-bending substances are being imbibed, chewed or smoked at UPS, sign me up: they tagged Adam Jackson’s iMac Core i7 as a fruit.
And now his work tool is awaiting inspection by the FDA, after UPS did the smart thing by “submitting proper documentation” for what it believed was a 40-pound shipment of possibly forbidden [...]

Meet the iVictrola, the weirdest and possibly the coolest iPhone dock you’re likely to see this Christmastime.
Or should I say not likely to see, as it appears that the limited stock at Design Within Reach has already sold out. Oh well.

That’s not the end of the world, though. Consider it a moment of inspiration, and [...]

As Christmas approaches, you might be thinking of buying a pocket sized video recorder for your loved one. But which one should you get? A Flip? An iPod Nano?
How about none of the above? When I asked my Twitter followers the same question, they were unanimous: “Get a Kodak Zi8“, they said.
So what’s [...]

To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.

Dragon’s Lair has never been [...]

As Christmas approaches, you might be thinking of buying a pocket sized video recorder for your loved one. But which one should you get? A Flip? An iPod Nano?
How about none of the above? When I asked my Twitter followers the same question, they were unanimous: “Get a Kodak Zi8“, they said.
So what’s [...]

In a sea of bulky, boxy waterproof cameras that do little to encourage stashing them in a pocket and bringing along for the ride, the Pentax Optio WS80 is a refreshing change — it’s tiny, and practically begs to be stuck in a pocket and brought on the next romp. But that scaled-down size is [...]

Quite new on the App Store is Launchball, a physics game that might look familiar to you if you’ve ever played the London Science Museum’s online version.
The Museum has ported the web-based Flash game to the iPhone, with some help from Bright AI, and the result is lots of fun.

Like a lot of physics games, [...]

With Time Capsules epidemically failing after an average of 18 months and 22 days, it might be time to start thinking about an alternative use for your pristinely albino, Apple-branded router once its body squirts out its last breath of 802.11-n ectoplasm.
Why not turn it into a lovely gift box? Over at Instructables, there’s [...]

As a smartphone, the iPhone is hard to beat, but as a tool capable of inflicting extraordinary acts of physical violence, the handset is less impressive… even when compared to Apple’s other products.
A MacBook Air, of course, can be stealthily drawn across a carotid artery, but the iPhone’s rounded, lozenge-like design makes it a [...]

The festive season is so close you can almost taste it. The kids are pestering to put up Christmas decorations; so why not give them something fun to do this year?
SymmetriSketch is a great free vector drawing application (also available for Windows and Linux users) that lets you play around with symmetry across a 2D [...]

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 [...]