magic

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on magic:

iPad magician pranks mall goers with snakes

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iPad magician
Magician Simon Pierro frees a snake from his iPad.
Screenshot: Simon Pierro/YouTube

If a tablet computer is a window on the world, then live snakes recently crawled through that window in a mall in Germany thanks to the iPad magician Simon Pierro.

Pierro operates his iPad in a space that can not be explained with a chip, graphics card, app or even augmented reality. All that shoppers knew is that one second Pierro was showing them a picture of a snake and then guiding it out of the iPad to slither and wiggle the next.

This, as you can imagine, scared the bejesus out of people.

Get ready for WWDC with this Apple Watch magic show

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The Apple Watch is magic
The Apple Watch is magic
Photo: Simon Pierro

We’re eagerly counting down the last hour until Apple unveils its new lineup of magical software and other goodies, but Simon Pierro is ready to reveal some of the magic that’s already inside your Apple Watch.

The iOS magician released a new video for WWDC fans that goes through the features of the Apple Watch by bending reality with the same type of clever tricks that landed him on The Ellen Show earlier this year.

Watch his new Apple Watch routine below:

This hot wearable turns you into the Human Torch

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The PYRO Fireshooter puts shooting fireballs in the palm of your hand. Screen grab from ellusionist.com
The PYRO Fireshooter puts fireballs in the palm of your hand. Screengrab: Ellusionist

Smartwatches may have a lot of firepower, but what about a wearable that lets you shoot actual flames from your hands?

The PYRO Fireshooter puts fireballs right up your sleeve. It attaches to the underside of the wrist and contains four individually triggered barrels, each able to launch a fireball 10 feet.

Clipping Magic Brings Photo Background Removal To Your Mac’s Browser

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One of the coolest features of Photoshop for iOS is the "Scribble Select" tool. You draw a fat green line around any object you want to keep, and scribble some red into the parts you want to delete. Hit "OK" and a few moments later you have your subject, neatly cut out from the background, better than you could have managed on even the best desktop machine of a few years back.

But what if you aren’t near your iPhone or iPad when you need to do some quick ‘shipping? You need the browser-based Clipping Magic.

Card Now Fakes Printing Your Real Business Card – You Know, For Laughs [Review]

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Turn your iPhone into a printer
Turn your iPhone into a printer

I didn’t expect Card Now to actually make me laugh, but it did. The idea of a business card-conjuring trick app made me shiver with horror – why would I inflict such a thing on other people?

But the reality, when I tried it out, was hilarious. When I “magically” pulled a freshly-printed business card off of my phone’s screen and into the real world, people’s reactions were delightful. I ended up laughing out loud.

Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 Now On iPad For Free

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Magic finally comes to the iPad, and it looks great.
Magic finally comes to the iPad, and it looks great.

Some of you may already be familiar with Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, not just because it has the longest name the App Store has ever seen, but also because it was one of the most impressive iPad titles that was shown off at E3 earlier this month.

It’s now available to download — completely free — and it looks incredible on the new iPad’s Retina display. Whether or not you’re a fan of the Magic franchise, this is certainly a title you should check out.

MIT Video Tech Could Turn iPhones Into Real Life Tricorders

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Imagine that you could just point your iPhone’s camera at your baby and it would immediately tell you his vital signs: heartbeat and so on. Or that you could fire up an app and it could pick out tiny, invisible movements from what looks like a still video. Using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification, boffins at MIT are doing this already.

Show Your iPhone Photos On Any Screen In The World With Scalado PhotoBeam

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Finally, a non-sucky use for QR codes

One of the hallmarks of great Apple software is that it makes you smile like a kid when it does something unexpected and undeniably cool. The first time you pinch-to-zoom, for example, or when you swipe over a picture in iPhoto for iOS and it automatically applies a correction depending on what’s under your finger.

The other hallmark of Apple’s apps is that they look great.

Scalado’s PhotoBeamer manages the first of these things, appearing to work as if by magic. On the second, though, it fails somewhat.

The Magic Behind iPhoto For iPad’s Beaming

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One of iPhoto for iOS’s most useful new sharing features is called Beaming. It lets you send your photos quickly and directly to anyone sharing your Wi-Fi network and also running iPhoto.

As good, long-time Mac users we remember the bad old days of networking, where getting two Macs to talk to each other was all but impossible, and hear-tearingly frustrating at best (even when they were joined to opposite ends of the same Ethernet cable). Clearly, something has changed. So just how does iPhoto Beaming work?

Zagg Boost Speaker Runs On ‘Magic’

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No wires, no Bluetooth, no nothing. The Boost appears to work by magic
No wires, no Bluetooth, no nothing. The Boost appears to work by magic

Zagg’s new Boost speaker, sold under the iFrogz brand, appears to amplify music using nothing but magic. Just place your iPhone (or any other device with a speaker) on top and it will boost the sound. No wires, no Bluetooth, no nothing. The music just issues forth from a pair of 2-watt speakers.

Damn You Android! We Want This Amazing Scalado Photo App

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For once, there's an Android photo app to make iPhone users jealous

When you’re snapping a tacky, cliched vacation photo, isn’t it annoying that all those other tourists are buzzing around and generally getting in the way of that monument/handsome plaza/amusing statue? Short of climbing up into a bell tower and, well, you know what, there’s little that you can do to remove these scampering human ants. You could take a sequence of photos and buy Photoshop just to paint out the milling hordes, or you could try Scalado’s Remove app. If you had an Android phone.

What If iOS 5 Were Truly Magical? Watch These Incredible iOS 5 Magic Tricks

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When Steve takes the stage tomorrow morning, it’s pretty much a sure bet that he will use the words, magical, amazing, beautiful, and extraordinary a few dozen times each as he introduces the new iOS 5, iCloud and OS X Lion. We’re sure that iOS 5 is going to be great, but the iOSMagic Team has dreamed up something more amazing than even Steve Jobs can deliver.