You know how Apple is always calling its products “magical?” Well, it turns out that it may be right. Harry Potter author J.K Rowling not only uses a MacBook Air to write, but says that it has changed her life.
The iPhone isn’t the only thing that looks more handsome when it gets taller and thinner. Bookbindery cases get better looking too, as you can see with event he quickest glance and Pad&Quill’s new Little Pocket Book. Stretched lengthwise and squashed a little depth-wise, it’s “thinnest we have ever made,” says P&Q honcho Brian Holmes.
The various bookbindery cases for the iPad are great and all, but I always found them to be a little impractical. They look lovely, they offer a ton of protection, but they do tend to get in the way. But the Kindle, made to be read like a book, seems tailor-made for a book-like cover. And here it is, the Hardcover for Kindle Touch from Dodo.
Path just pushed out a new update to its iPhone app, introducing a number of nifty new features. Users now have the ability to share their favorite films and books, send personal invitations with their own message to their friends, snap photos using the volume button and then edit them with Path’s new tools, and more.
Pad&Quill’s Littlest Black Book case was announced back on April 1st, and it still seems like a joke. However, I have one next to my keyboard as I type this and it is very real. And very, very cute.
French publishing and price-fixing laws might have been the model for Apple’s iBookstore price-fixing
One of the ironic twists about the anti-trust lawsuits against Apple and the major publishing companies is that Apple’s entrance into the ebook market actually broke Amazon’s virtual monopoly on the ebook business. In the process, publishers gained the ability to control ebook pricing, which can be seen as actually encouraging competition in the industry.
While the U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general from many states are pursuing lawsuits around the matter, not every country would see the situation in the same terms as the U.S. government. In France, for example, publishers can legally control pricing and are protected from booksellers undercutting their business as Amazon had been doing with its power over the ebook market. It’s even possible that France’s laws protecting publishers may have served as inspiration for the agency model that Apple used in building the iBookstore.
I can imagine that the reaction you get from mentioning the word “jailbreak” within the Apple camp in Cupertino is almost identical to that you get when mentioning the word “bomb” on an airplane. In fact, Apple hates the word so much that it considers it an expletive, and it’s now filtering it from the iTunes Store.
One of the big things missing from Lightroom — Adobe’s excellent photo processing app — was printing. Not boring old printing where you have a big, expensive box in the corner of your office spit out endless sheets of paper until one of them is right. No, we mean remote printing, where you choose some images, hit a button and, a short while later, a gorgeous book appears on your doorstep.
Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture have had this for a while. Now, thanks to Blurb, the brand-new Lightroom 4 has it too.
The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.
You might have suspected that the right music – whether it’s thrash metal or Mozart – keeps you more focused or relaxed.
Now a trio of brain researchers have studied the effects of playlists on the brain, resulting in a nifty little book called Your Playlist Can Change Your Life. In the book’s 200-or so pages, they explain how to use specific playlists to alleviate anxiety, promote concentration, get happy or move into a flow state thanks to Brain Music Treatment or BMT.
If you can’t make it to New York for BMT therapy, for $9.99, you can also download a Common BMT File. Created from more than 2,000 people’s brain waves with the help of evidence-based BMT tech, they say it acts as a kind of aural “first-aid” before you get your own playlists together.
Intrigued (my current nightstand read is Mark Changizi’s excellent Harnessed about music and the brain), I talked to author Dr. Galina Mindlin about what playlists have the most impact, cleaning up your music collection and her current heavy rotations.
Read our latest...
Cult of Mac is a daily news site that follows everything Apple. Our goal is to provide timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest reviews. Find out more about Cult of Mac.
Published in sunny San Francisco.
All times are in PDT (GMT-8).
![The Littlest Black Book For The iPod Nano [Review]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid-Photo-28062012-1430.jpg)
![Cleaning Up Your Messy iTunes Playlists Can Boost Your Brain Power [Interview]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PLAYLIST-FINAL-BOOK-COVER-PHOTO-300DPI-fix.jpg "PLAYLIST -FINAL BOOK COVER PHOTO 300DPI")
