Buster Hein - page 222

I’m tired of seeing your crappy vertical videos on YouTube. I mean, I’m not saying the content of your videos are crappy, but black bars on the sides are annoying and they’ve destroyed my desire to watch whatever cute and silly things your cat is doing on YouTube.

The war against Vertical Video Syndrome has been waging for years, yet the horde of black-barred videos that have infested YouTube have continued to multiply. However, in an unexpected move that may finally cure us of vertical videos, Google’s new YouTube Capture app has the greatest video recording feature of all-time  – you have to rotate your iPhone into landscape mode before it will let you record a video. 

Google just released a new app that is going to make it even easier to share all your funny and embarrassing videos on YouTube. YouTube Capture is a new iOS app by Google that records videos and uploads them to YouTube straight from your iPhone.

YouTube Capture is designed to get videos on to the video sharing service as easily as possible by keeping the interface clean and simple. Once you open up the app it’s ready to record and after you stop recording a video it’s immediately ready to upload to YouTube. It’s simple and awesome.

Here’s a video of how the app works:

When the App Store first came into being in 2008 the majority of new apps released were paid apps. Times have changed and more and more app developers are electing to go with free or freemium models rather than charging users to download their app.

Appsfire just posted their 2012: A Year In The App Store review that analyized the 1 million apps that have been sold in the App Store and they found that only 34% apps released in 2012 were paid apps – down from 74% in 2008.

On Friday Walmart announced that they were going to sell the 16GB iPhone 5 in stores for only $127. It’s the cheapest deal on the iPhone 5 all year, except Fry’s has decided that they want to undercut Walmart so they’re now selling the iPhone 5 for only $126!

Similar to the Walmart deal, Fry’s big iPhone 5 discount is only available in stores. They also have the 32GB and 64GB iPhone 5 on sale for $226 and $326 respectively.

Source: Fry’s

Via: DealNews

Imitating Apple design is a great idea, except when it comes to chairs.

A chair that doubles as a MacBook looks pretty cool in theory, but what happens when you sit on the keyboard? Is that where dubstep comes from? Not to mention the fact that the lack of cushioning on this thing means sitting on it for hours would be more torturous than listening to Ke$ha on repeat.

Source: Reddit

If you’ve been waiting for a great time to buy the iPhone 5 Walmart is ready to seduce your money out of your wallet.

Walmart announced today that they’re going to drop the price of the 16GB iPhone 5 down to $127 starting today, and they’ve got other great holiday deals on other Apple products too.

Following the launch of Windows 8 and the Surface RT, Microsoft’s head of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, abruptly left the company. Some assumed Sinofsky would become the next CEO so it left many to wonder about the fate of Windows 8 and the approach they will take to software in the future.

Julie Larson-Green has been tapped to replace Sinosky and she’s started her reign by talking to the media about what makes Windows 8 special. While many view Windows 8 and the Surface RT as responses to the iPad’s popularity, Larson-Green claims that Microsoft totally didn’t even think about the iPad and iOS when designing Windows 8.

Apple just unleashed the iPhone 5 on China today so things should be going really well for the company on Wall Street as well, but they’re not. According to initial reports, the debut of the iPhone 5 has been somewhat muted thanks to a snowstorm hitting Beijing and a pre-order requirement to prevent rioting.

Adding to Apple’s pain, the company’s stock hit a 10-month low today and is trading at $511.58 – the lowest its been since February.

Apple’s been focusing their retail expansion overseas the last few years. They recently announced plans to build their first store in South America, and they’ve continued to open up new flagship stores in Asia.

Hong Kong already has two Apple Stores, but a third store is opening up in the Causeway Bay area this Saturday that is both massive and beautiful. The main feature of the Causeway Bay store is its 30-foot glass curtain wall that allows customers to see all three stories of the store while walking by on the street.

What are you supposed to do with all the Apple logo stickers you get with each iPhone, iPad, and Mac purchase? Like, yeah I guess you could put one on your car if you’re into that, but then what do you do with the other 24 stickers you’ve collected over the years?

Redditor ebinellis decided to go super-meta and make an Apple sticker made out of Apple stickers. He says it’s still a work in progress, but unless he turns it into a Steve Jobs Apple-sticker-mural we think his work here is done.

Source: Reddit

We’ve been waiting for someone to make a great iOS Gmail app ever since the Sparrow team was bought by Google this year. Sparrow is still great, and the Gmail app has gotten better, but the experience of  using email on a smartphone still feels unnatural and archaic.

A few apps have tried and failed to change mobile email, but app development company Orchestra thinks they have the right answer with their new app Mailbox. Blending an email inbox with a Clear-styled to-do list, Mailbox provides a modernized take on mobile email that is simply beautiful.

Here’s what the app looks like in action:

Year in review lists are usually pretty exhausting, but with millions of apps to choose from in the App Store there’s a pretty good chance you missed some great new apps that came out in 2012. Apple just unveiled their App Store Best of 2012 page and it’s packed with goodies.

The App Store Best of 2012 is divided into numerous categories of apps so everyone will find something they enjoy. Apple didn’t stop with just the App Store though. The Best of 2012 list also includes selections from Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books, and even Podcast.

You can check out all the goodies right here.

Tweetbot is our favorite Twitter client for Mac. We love it so much, we’ve even included it in our Cult of Mac Advent Calendar. Even though the app is a bit costly at $19.99, it’s worth every penny because of the love and dedication poured into the app from the Tapbots team.

The latest version of Tweetbot for Mac was just released on the Mac App Store and it’s full of new features. The update includes some new global hot keys, better notifications, along with numerous other features and bug fixes.

Here are the full release notes on everything that’s new in Tweetbot for Mac 1.1:

Android has been dominating the iPhone in terms of market share, but if consumers decide to buy what they really want right now the two platforms’ roles might be reversed. In a new survey, Apple analyst Gene Munster found that 53% of smartphone buyers plan to buy an iPhone 5.

Whether those prospective iPhone 5 owners actually go out and buy the iPhone 5 is a whole other story, but Munster says that interest in the iPhone 5 is growing despite the Maps app fiasco.

Using Apple Maps in Australia is freaking dangerous. Like, if you’re just trying to get directions to your girlfriend’s aunt’s house, you might get navigated to a cave full a flesh-eating mutant wallabies. Or it might just navigate you off the road and into the wilderness if you’re not paying attention to where you’re driving, but whatever.

Samsung has decided that Apple’s Map fiasco in Australia should not go unnoticed, so they’ve created a guerrilla marketing campaign to lure people into using a Samsung Galaxy SIII because it has dependable maps.

Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, releases a list of the best places to work for every year. A lot of other websites comprise similar lists, but what makes Glassdoor’s list unique is that it’s based on feedback from anonymous employees who actually work at the companies.

For the last three years Facebook has been in the top three while Apple has appeared in the number spot in the past as well. For 2013 Glassdoor ranked Apple as the 34th best place to work at, while Facebook grabbed the number one spot.

The iPad mini is such an incredible device that many of us assumed it will start to cannibalize sales of the iPad early on.

Last month we saw some early analysis that claimed the iPad mini is cannibalizing the sales of PCs, not iPads. However, a new report from Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu is predicting that the iPad mini is starting to eat into the iPad’s sales.

from Vimeo.

So you wanna be the next Jony Ive and make beautiful and intuitive products that are just like Apple’s? Good for you. But figuring out how to replicate Apple’s design philosophies isn’t all that easy – look at RIM.

To help you out, Online MBA created this two minute video that boils down all of Jony and Steve’s design insights into five bite-sized nuggets. Maybe you won’t invent the next iPhone but if you follow their advice it should at least prevent you from becoming the next Scott Forstall.

Source: OnlineMBA
Via: Gizmodo

We’ve seen a number of stories over the years where Find My iPhone helped iPhone and iPad owners reunite with their lost devices. Now Apple’s making things even easier for people hunting down their devices by including driving directions to each device.

Find My iPhone for iOS will now tell you the exact route you should take to get your lost iPhone back. To use the driving directions features, users must be updated to iOS 6 because Find My iPhone gives driving directions through Apple Maps.

Coming on the heels of the new Instagram update, Twitter announced yesterday that their iPhone app was coming soon and that it would have all kinds of photo filters. The updated Twitter app just hit the App Store and is ready to be downloaded.

The free Twitter 5.2 update comes with photo filters powered by Aviary. The eight different filters will make your Twitter pictures more like Instagram photos, which is kind of nice seems how Instagram decided to stop displaying their pictures inside of a Twitter, but does the world really need more filters?

Here are the full release notes on Twitter for iOS version 5.2:

If you have faith in the supernatural deity named Gene Munster, and believe with all your heart that Apple is going to release the iTV in 2013, then you’ve probably got all your pennies saved so you can drop some fat stacks on Apple’s flatscreen next year.

Apple products usually aren’t cheap, and we figure the iTV will be no different if Apple ever releases one, but according to a new survey, over 46% of Americans are totally fine with having to pay over $1,000 for an iTV.

Ever want to see the robot computer code language Siri actually thinks in before she translates it to English? Well if you’re in the U.S. and ask Siri why she doesn’t speak Danish, German, Portugese, Mandarin, French, Russian, or a number of other languages, then her answer will come back in a goop of unintelligible robot-speak. Well, unintelligible for people who have little understanding of coding.

It looks like there’s something wrong on the server end of Siri and she’s unable to retrieve the proper answer. Rather than answering in English, or offering to do a web search on your question, she orates the code version of the answer. We’ve yet to find any other questions that prompt a similar response from Siri, but this is another simple flaw that Eddie Cue and his team need to fix whenever they get done saving people from Apple Maps.

Have you seen similar code-based answers from Siri for other questions? Let us know in the comments.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

What hidden behind door number 11? How about something that will help you burn all those Holiday Calories – The Nike Fuelband.

Notification Center in iOS and OS X is great in concept but kind of crappy in practice. First off there’s the linen background that doesn’t really make sense when you’re pulling down a curtain for notifications in iOS. There’s also those tiny little X buttons that you have to tap twice to close notifications, and a couple other annoyances that fill up the Notification Center page.

Alex Saretzky decided that Notification Center needs to be spruced up by simply applying Apple UI concepts that have been used in other apps. His new concept for the Notification Center isn’t a complete revision, but more like fine tuning, and it’s something that Apple should implement with iOS 7.

It’s been rumored that Microsoft Office for iPad will be unleashed on the world in early 2013. We haven’t seen any leaked screenshots, nor has Microsoft given an official release date, but it’s bound to come out sooner or later.

The latest signs that Office for iPad is coming soon come from Microsoft’s own support site where references to “Excel for iPad” have been found.