Giles Turnbull - page 17

Developer Ben Dodson has uncovered some cool stuff inside iOS5 that can turn your AppleTV and iPad2 into a wireless games console setup.

This crazy-looking thing is Stance, an iPad holder designed to sit in cup holders everywhere.

Apple’s new vision for MobileMe is a whole new service, iCloud. During the keynote yesterday, Steve Jobs and team made it clear that many of the existing paid-for MobileMe services will live on, for free, in iCloud.

Many, but not all.

London’s Financial Times has stuck its corporate finger up at Apple with the unveiling of a slick – really slick – webapp that looks amazing on an iPad.

Mac OS X Lion has more than 250 new features, and Apple has thoughtfully put together a list of all of them.

Here are some interesting nuggets plucked from that list…

OK folks, this page is for you. You’ve heard about iCloud and iMessage and iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud and Lion and iOS5 and OMG, there’s so much stuff.

Lion represents something of a landmark in the history of operating systems, for many reasons.

Say hello to Hound, a new free app from the people at SoundHound. What’s it for? It’s a voice search app for music and musicians. But it aspires to greater things.

Silent Film Director is another app to add to the amusing-video-effects list, but this one’s worth investigating.

Music lovers, pay attention: your festivals will be digitized. UK cell phone network Orange has just announced an mobile app (for all platforms, not just iOS) for this year’s Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, UK.

Amid all the talk of malware scares for Mac users recently, here’s a useful guide to Mac security basics, from the NSA of all people.

Nisus Writer Pro, a venerable word processor for Mac OS X, recently got updated to version 2.0, with some very welcome additions to the features list.

Opera has finally released Opera Mini 6 for iOS for iOS, with a bunch of very welcome new features.

The ingenuity shown by people devising iPhone add-ons (both software and hardware) never ceases to amaze me. This latest idea is one of the coolest I’ve seen for a while.

Love Instagram? Love seeing your friends’ instaphotos? You might love Screenstagram then.

Hopefully you already know how great Preview is. It comes built in with every Mac, it handles PDFs and images with ease, and does a great deal of basic image editing just fine, saving you the bother of opening more substantial, more expensive image editors. Here’s a tip for getting perfect square crops inside Preview.

SpotiMy is a tiny Menu Bar widget for controlling Spotify without having to switch to it.

How often do you find yourself goofing around on Facebook when you should be working? It’s OK, you’re not the only one. But in future, you might be able to keep yourself productive with a clever little app called Obtract.

Author, illustrator and photographer Chris McVeigh put together this fantastic Lego iMac using Lego Digital Designer, and has released the digital version so we can all make our own copies.

Look, memory and me just don’t get on. I forget where I’ve left my keys, even when I’ve left them on the Special Key Hanging Hook that I put up precisely to avoid that.

I forget why I went upstairs. I forget why I walked from one room to the next. Once, I forgot why I stood up from my chair, stayed there swaying in confusion for a moment, then just sat down again.

Imagine, then, the state of dribbling horror a game like Memneon leaves me in.

Looking resplendent with its iMac adornment, this super-cheap desk is entirely made out of cardboard.

It was designed by Hong Kong born Savio Ku, who is at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, as part of his final year studying 3D design.

Keyboard launcher Alfred just got updated to 0.9, and there’s a lot of lovely stuff included.

Most of the new features are for users of the optional paid-for Powerpack, but there’s some nice bits for free users too.

Twitter mate of mine Giles Booth posted this on Flickr the other day, and it had me doing a double-take for a moment.

No, it isn’t actually running Newton OS. It’s displaying a picture. Just like this other image of a Kindle “running” Macintosh System 1.

You can put custom pictures on your Kindle if you like – try using these instructions. See what other classic Apple software you can “run” on your Kindle. Clarisworks? Eudora? Hypercard? Ahh, memories…

(Photo by Giles Booth, re-published with permission)

Onyx is a free system maintenance tool for Mac OS X.

One of the nice things about Onyx is that it covers everything you can think of. It’s packed with tools that you might want to use often, plus some you might use only once in a blue moon. But they’re all there, in one place.

It’s a safe bet that most Cult of Mac readers – and certainly all the Cult of Mac writers – are broadly in favour of almost everything Apple creates.

Almost everything.

If there’s one feature of OS X (Snow) Leopard that drives me and every other Mac user I’ve ever known mad with fury, it’s the Help Viewer, and its obstinate insistence on floating on top of every other window in sight.