Giles Turnbull - page 15

I liked this photo, which Sameli Kujala posted to the Cult of Mac Flickr pool.

On the right, Mac OS 8 on CD-ROM, packaged in its huge cardboard box. Vintage 1997 stuff. In the centre, today’s diminutive Lion USB stick – which you don’t even have to use if you download direct from the Mac App Store. And on the left, a bottle of champagne, adding suitably classy balance to the whole scene.

If you have a great photo of your smart Apple stuff – retro or modern or both together – and you’d like to share it with your fellow Cult of Mac readers, do send it in: [email protected]

(Photo used with permission. Thanks Sameli!)

Developer Moritz Haarmann put together this neat experimental “fluid layout” concept for retail on the iPad.

Self Control is a tiny little app for people who just don’t have any. Self control, that is.

I love the Internet Archive, it’s one of the best online projects there’s ever been.

I knew it archived a lot of stuff, but until this week I had no idea that the collection included scanned magazines of old. Jason Scott, of textfiles.com fame, now works for the Archive and wrote a blog post about some of the latest additions – dozens of tech magazines from the dawn of personal computing.

At first glance, you won’t see anything Mac-specific on the list. But you need to delve a little deeper. Remember, in those days Apple was just one of dozens of new arrivals, all of them jostling for position in a brand new consumer market.

Sphero was unveiled months ago at CES, and remote-controlled spherical object fans everywhere have been eagerly awaiting its official release ever since. Today, the company announced that final production models have just arrived.

Whatever you do, don’t blink. Otherwise you might miss the superbness of this Who-tastic iPad case, and instructions for making your own.

For just two dollars, you can buy the pattern for this smart multi-dimensional iPad sleeve, and make it yourself with some yarn, some needles, and a sonic screwdriver.

Just like the real TARDIS, this one’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. On the outside, you have a 7.5inch by 9.5inch crocheted sleeve, but on the inside you have more hours of entertainment than most of us can handle in 11 (count ’em) lifetimes. Having a time machine would actually be quite a good way of keeping up with it all, wouldn’t it?

(Hands up who else is really enjoying the current series of Who?)

Here’s something cool from the team at the Institute for Machine Tools and Manufacturing in Berlin, Germany: an iPhone that’s been turned into a remote control for industrial-size robots.

Airfoil is just one of a list of fantastic audio apps from indie developers Rogue Amoeba.

Smule’s MadPad is a crazy finger-tapping box of fun for your iThing, guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Once your kids get their hands on it, it will soon drive you insane, but never mind: it’s worth it.

Hands up if you love iCal in Lion.

Anybody? Any hands up there at the back? No? Oh.

Does your Mac’s desktop look like this? Or like this? If so, you need help. More to the point, you need Clean.

Wait, is this a joke?

The people responsible say no, but still: I have my doubts.

Michael Hart, founder of free ebooks repository Project Gutenberg, died this week. He was 64.

Today’s chunk of Best Thing Ever are these tasty looking Instagrahams – cookies inspired by photo app Instagram.

Thing is, the basic recipe could take you anywhere you want to go in this strange new world of edible application icons.

If you’ve got the colored fondant icing and the skill to apply it, you could make yourself an entire home screen’s worth of iconified cookies. Which we would totally love to see, by the way, so if you do that, let us know.

In the meantime, you’ll find me browsing the archives at Bakerella, which has just become my new favorite baked goods blog.

There’s a treat for photography fans this morning, with the launch of the British Journal of Photography‘s official iPad app.

Wait, what? You haven’t downloaded Contre Jour yet? Get thee to thine local Store of Apps and grab it, pronto. If you don’t yet own an iPhone or iPod, go out and buy one first, then get Contre Jour.

Bean is one of OS X’s little treasures. It’s a lightweight rich text editor that’s nimble, fast and offers just a teeny tiny bit more than Apple’s own TextEdit. And does all this for free.

Minimalist email client Sparrow continues to grow apace, thanks to some updates over the summer. We last looked at it back in March, but there’s a lot of new stuff since then.

Every now and then you hear something that makes your heart bounce with pride, and recently we at Cult of Mac heard one of those things.

It turns out that a prototype iPhone case design we featured here back in March has become a real commercial product, thanks to its investors seeing it mentioned on our site.

We’re delighted that we were able to play our part in turning this business idea into reality. But we’ll let the guy who came up with it, Joey Chun, tell the whole story.

Composite is an excellent iPad 2 app that lets you “remix your surroundings”, painting with the world around you.

Somewhat overshadowed by the recent launch of Lion was Bare Bones Software’s release of version 10 of venerable text editor BBEdit.

Mission Control is one of the big new features in Lion, and like most new features it brings with it some new keyboard shortcuts. One of these is Command+Left Arrow or Command+Right Arrow to move swiftly between spaces.

It’s a sensible shortcut, but on my machine it conflicted with the shortcut I use dozens of times a day to jump to the end of a line of text. If you’re in a similar position, and you’ve found that Command+Right or Left Arrow no longer does what it used to do, here’s how to fix it.

Unlike the majority of my esteemed colleagues here at Cult of Mac – indeed, unlike almost everyone in my profession, it seems – I’ve not upgraded to Lion just yet.

Lion is here. Our own Kahney/Brownlee dynamic duo have written up their own review, but let’s take a moment to find out what other reviewers are saying.