And so it begins… iHome has kicked off the CES Lightning accessory announcements with a typically indigestible press release containing roughly one zillion new gadgets.
If you want to hear about the Bluetooth headphones and alarm clocks, and all the other stuff, then visit the link below. For the neat new do-everything iDL100 alarm dock, read on.
Next week sees the beginning of CES, and with it I’m hoping to see a deluge of new Lightning accessories. All of Apple’s star mobile devices have switched over to the new connector, but the accessories industry still hasn’t caught up.
I have a few adapters to make my old gadgets play nice with my new iDevices, and they work great. But the tiny new Lightning plug will not only shrink current accessories, but also make whole new classes of gear possible.
Automatica is a very clever take on in-car audio. It’s a USB stick which grabs new audio content whenever it is in range of a known Wi-Fi network, and it can be managed right from your iPhone via a custom web app.
DockMinimal is – surprise! – a minimal dock. It’s only minimal in looks, though, as this thing not only holds your iPad at pretty much any angle you want, it also works with almost any tablet-like device you have.
Hell, there’s even a hidden stylus.
When I was a kid, magnets promised everything and delivered nothing. Wile E. Coyote’s scheme to feed the Road Runner iron filings and trap him with a giant horseshoe magnet mightn’t have work exactly as planned, but the magnet did at least drag any and every metal object in the vicinity into Mr. Coyote’s cave.
These days, magnets are as strong as the cartoons always promised. And they make things like Mesh’s JustMount possible.
Do you know your 7,200-times-table by heart? Good, because if you buy the JuiceCane, you’re going to need it.
Why? Because the JuiceCane is a stackable, extendable spare battery which packs 7,200 mAh of power, and can be joined to other JuiceCanes to increase that capacity.
It seems like just last week that I was raving about Unbound – and that’s because it was. However, there is now yet another amazing app for browsing the photos in your Dropbox.
It’s called Heliog, and it is the equal of Unbound – although it takes quite a different approach.
If you had to get up early on January 1st, I hope you used the built-in Clock app to set your iOS alarm; otherwise you may have spent an unintentional extra few hours in bed. Why? Because the Do Not Disturb feature of iOS 6 switched on as usual on the last day of 2012, and then stayed on.
Many users of Do Not Disturb report that the feature didn’t switch itself off yesterday morning.
Apple was on fire in 2012. Along with the incredible iPhone 5, we saw the first retina tablet and the pocketable iPad mini. This was also the year in which Apple let the iPod touch out to play, giving it features on a par with the iPhone 4S instead of using leftover components from Google’s leftover Nexus parts bin.
But not everything from Apple made it into our top ten. The Retina MacBook Pro, despite being an amazing machine, is still a laptop, albeit one with a hi-res screen and no DVD player. And the new iMac’s most interesting contribution to tech is the HDD/SSD Fusion Drive. Sure, it’s skinny, but who really cares about a thin desktop machine? It’s like making the world’s thinnest lawnmower.
Most of the rest of my picks reflect the fact that high-tech consumer electronics are now as utterly mainstream as the iron or the microwave oven. Sure, us nerds still love to play with the latest crap, and there will always be plenty of ill-informed consumers who are suckered into buying cheapo Android tablets, but these days gadgets generally Just Work, and the differences are in the little details.
That’s why we have fitness widgets alongside fancy portable speakers and implausibly good-for-the-price headphones.
So, should you be in the mood to read yet another end-of-year best-of list, carry on.
Photo-book printing service Milk has teamed up with overpriced notebook maker Moleskine to make overpriced photo books in the shape of – you guessed it – Moleskine notebooks.
I’m not sure what I like best about this fantastic lobster-shaped iPhone case. It could be that it puts protects your handset by putting it on the back of a creepy crawly crustacean. Or it could be that it is made by the improbably-named Noddy Boffin.
Or, most likely, it could be the name itself, which hearkens back to the days when just tossing a lobster into the mix was enough to earn the coveted “surreal” tag: “Lobster Mobile Telephone Case.” [emphasis added]
Did you read last week’s Cult of Mac post about copying your Instagram photos over to Flickr? Did you think to yourself “Well, ain’t that something? I’ll surely have to do something about that,” and then just do nothing? Well, I have good news – your laziness has at last prevailed, for there is another service that does the exact same thing, only better.
Believe it or not, Christmas is almost here, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
Today, we’re looking at last-minute stocking stuffers. To be honest, if you still haven’t finished your Christmas shopping, you should really be out hitting the malls today. But seeing as you’re here reading this instead, here are a few ideas.
I have resolutely been refusing to buy an iPad mini, but this new case from Lion Case might tip me over the edge. It’s a mini version of one of my favorite cases of the year, the New York Hong Kong Folio.
Sharing your holiday photos is always a pain, and e-mail is usually the “answer.” Mom wants the pictures in her Facebook, your smart sister wants them in her Dropbox, and her stupid hippie boyfriend wants them on paper, because bits are like, so ephemeral, man.
IBeam.it is a service that promises to make this easy, by letting you share photos from any service you like, and letting the recipient pick where they receive them. Sadly. it looks like a no-go.
After last week’s Instagram furore, many people threw a hissy fit and quit the free photo-sharing service for which they have never paid a penny. And a lot of those quitters went over to Flickr and its outstanding new iOS app.
Over the weekend, Flickr gave its regular free members a three-month Pro subscription. This is super smart, and not only as a way to entice yet more users away from Facebook’s newest toy – a Flickr Pro account ups your limit on photo uploads, which lets you bring in all your pictures from, say, Instagram.
And the best way I have found to do this is with the new Free The Photos service.
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.
Day 23 is here, and today, we’re talking about JamBox’s bulkier big bro: the Big JamBox.
Believe it or not, Christmas is almost here, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts that cost less than $30. Yes, that means you are cheap, and — seeing as you still haven’t bought anything despite it being almost Christmas — lazy.
Screen protectors are big business, apparently, judging by the number of people I see with the filthy, peeling prophylactics stuck to screens, bubbles pushing through. But they all have one big problem – feel. No matter how fancy they are, those plastic skins will never feel as good as the silky, slippery glass of the naked iPhone screen.
Which is why Seidio will now sell you a tempered glass protector for your iPhone 5.
Oh man! The Mac Belt is an amazing combination of flat-out utility and naively wrongheaded design. It is exactly the kind of thing you expect a mad professor to come up with, except this crackpot product is actually out there on Kickstarter.
Here’s a brief description: The Mac Belt is a belt (the kind that holds your pants up) with a giant novelty buckle. And that buckle folds out to make a little bracket for your iPad or iPhone. Yup. An iPad stand that mounts on your junk.
Unbound app is a Dropbox-linked photo viewer. Imagine if iOS’ built-in Photos app linked to Dropbox instead of needing you to dick around with iTunes and the flakey Photo Stream, and you have pretty much imagined Unbound.
Instagram’s iOS app has been updated to v3.4.0. It fixes a few ridiculous omissions from the last version, and adds a new filter, no doubt as a way to get users to shut up about the Terms of Service debacle.
Could it be that, after spending a lifetime looking, I have finally found the perfect bag? Of course not. There’s no single bag that can perform every task.
But I might just have found the perfect day-to-day backpack. It’s the medium Velo from Rickshaw Bagworks in San Fransisco, and it’s pretty damn awesome.
“Click!” You hear that? It’s the sound of an iPad turning into a Microsoft Surface, with the help of the Nibiqü keyboard cover.
Now that we see it, it’s obvious that this product was completely inevitable. And almost equally inevitable is the fact that it comes by way of Kickstarter.
I usually avoid posting about concept designs because most of them are so lame. But the iPhone Theater deserves a special mention, somewhat ironically for the very same reason – it’s so lame.