Remember that Office for iPad product shot that was floating around earlier today? Well, Microsoft won’t actually come out and call it bogus, but they do say any report of Office for iPad is based on “inaccurate rumors and speculation.” So is that a denial or what?
At this point, we’ve pretty much seen every part the iPad 3 has to offer: rear casing, Retina Display, logic board, CPU, Heck, we’ve even seen cables for the sleep/wake button, the volume rocker, the mute switch and other assorted guts. If you only had the digitizer and front glass pane, you could probably just slap all these parts together and build yourself an iPad 3 from scratch.
Oh hey, what do you know: here are the missing parts we need to build a complete iPad 3! Will wonders never cease?
The new front panel and digitizer, spotted by Apple.pro, confirms what we have long suspected: turned off, the iPad 3 will largely be indistinguishable from the iPad 2. Maybe a squidge thicker. The real distinction will be when the iPad 3 is turned on and that beautiful 2048×1536 kicks on.
Great, but when can we expect the iPad 3 to land. Only Apple knows for sure, but popular consensus indicates March 7th.
Sometimes the morass of Mail windows on a Mac can just become too much. Various apps have tried to help manage this in various ways: Sparrow by bringing the streamlined Tweetie aesthetic to mail, Postbox by in-line quick replies, and so on.
Even so, more often than not, when I close Mail for the day, I’m closing about a dozen or two blank or half-written email windows that have been opened during the day, then forgotten. Why can’t sending an email be as painlessly fire-and-forget as sending an IM? Enter QuickMailer.
One of the things I have always found interesting about bags is the way they are defined by their intent. There is more to them than their fabric and stitch. To judge a bag, you need to look beyond what it is to what it aspires to fill itself with. In other words, bags have souls, and like people, you can’t judge them just by what they are. You must also consider what they want to be.
The Acme Made Clutch is a bag that aspires to be as sleek as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that it is designed to fit. At that, it succeeds. Those looking for an all-purpose laptop bag to throw anything and everything into should look elsewhere, though. The Clutch is as minimalist, meticulously organized and with as much eye to fashion and form, it’s as if Jonny Ive had designed it for Steve Jobs himself. But Steve never was a guy who needed to keep a lot of things in his bag.
Can’t get enough of whizzing those Angry Birds through the air using your trusty catapult, knocking down the fortifications of those adorably cute, wonderfully evil, egg-guzzling Green Piggies?
Well, how are you going to do that without gravity in outer space, hmmm, smart guy?
Yup, that’s right, Rovio has just announced their upcoming Angry Birds sequel, Angry Birds Space.
Were you one of the people who freaked out about OS X Lion not shipping on DVD? Did you get outraged that the cost of a OS X Lion USB thumb drive cost $69.00, more than double the price of Lion through the App Store? Well, prepare to be incensed, because when OS X Mountain Lion ships, it’ll be a Mac App Store exclusive. That means it won’t even ship on a thumb drive anymore.
Yesterday we showed you how in OS X Mountain Lion, Software Update has shifted from its own app to the Mac App Store. But how will that work with updating apps that weren’t purchased through the App Store, but were instead bundled with your Mac at point-of-sale or installed from a DVD?
As you can see in the screenshot above, Apple’s got it covered: the Mountain Lion App Store will automatically detect any app that has historically been updated through Software Update and ask to register it to your Apple ID, along with a unique hardware identifier.
Which would win in a fight? OS X Mountain Lion or a real Mountain Lion? Over at DealMac, Jeff Somogyi put together this absolutely hysterical chart, delving into the question.
The cheeky result? If the criterion on which you are judging Mountain Lions includes messaging, productivity, note taking, notifications, sharing, gaming or Twitter support, OS X has the edge. If, however, you are judging mountain lions based upon their ability to leap 18 feet straight in the air, run at land speeds of up to 45 miles per hour and urinate upon things to mark their territory, the real-life Mountain Lion will eat your face off.
Go on over to DealMac to check out the full post, it’s priceless.
What with the whole Path address book debacle, this isn’t a good week to be caught up in a user privacy scandal on iOS as far as public perception is concerned. Google better batten down the hatches then, as it has just been discovered that they have been exploiting a loophole in the way Safari blocks cookies to bypass the privacy settings of millions of iPhone, iPad and Mac owners. Ouch.
Yesterday, we reported that Apple’s new Messages app icon looked pretty shamelessly similar to that of HipChat‘s. Now HipChat has spoken out about the maybe-theft-probably-concidence, and while they don’t have any hard feelings, they still think it sucks they’re about to get steamrolled by Apple.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re a big fan of HipChat, a phenomenal team calibration tool based around group chat and IM, which works on any platform with dedicated apps for Mac and iOS. In fact, it’s how we keep in touch with each other throughout each work day. The app is a mainstay in our docks.
So when we woke up this morning and found out Apple was announcing a new version of OS X including a brand new Messages IM app, the first thing we thought was: “Hey! That icon looks familiar!” Very familiar.
Chances are, you’re already salivating to download the latest version of OS X, Mountain Lion, when it’s released later this summer. For a fair number of Mac owners, though, installing Mountain Lion is going to require buying a new machine, as Apple has abandoned support for Intel’s GMA 950 and x3100 chipsets.
Here’s a list of the machines that can run Lion that can’t run Mountain Lion.
Not a huge change, but we just noticed that in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has changed the way adding widgets in Dashboard works to be more akin to Launchpad, with a full screen of equally spaced widgets being selectable instead of Lion’s approach, which puts available widgets at the bottom edge of the display.
In OS X Lion, the Mail, Contacts And Calendars systems pref pane allowed you to choose accounts between iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL… but check out how many more options you have in Mountain Lion! We know that Twitter is integrated into Mountain Lion, but you can also log into video sharing site Vimeo and photo sharing site Flickr, presumably to make sharing photos and videos online easier. However, we have yet seen any functionality taking advantage of this deeper integration. There’s also support for a host of new Chinese sites and more.
This is interesting. With OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has ditched Software Update as a standalone application, and instead baked its functionality into the Mac App Store’s “Updates” panel. Now if you hit Software Update, the Mac App Store loads and all of the integral software updates are found under a drop-down box under OS X Update.
Like most OS X updates before it, with Mountain Lion comes a new default wallpaper. Like Lion, Mountain Lion’s wallpaper keeps with the galaxy theme, but we think this one’s far more beautiful, with a softer blue tone that is quite calming and peaceful to look at. Anyone know which galaxy this is?
Here’s a link to the high-resolution, 3200×2000 pixel wallpaper. You can download the Mountain Lion High-Res Galaxy Default Wallpaper (2.3MB) here.
One of the big marquee features of Mountain Lion is deeply-baked Twitter integration, built right into every Mac apps. If there was any doubt about it after iOS 5, erase it from your mind: after some aborted experiments like Ping, Apple is doubling down on social networking, and the horse they’re backing isn’t Facebook… it’s Twitter.
Hey, developer kiddies! OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Mountain Lion server are now available to registered Apple developers over on the official Mac Dev Center. Both are downloaded through the Mac App Store after a redemption coupon.
We’re already at work downloading our copies of Mountain Lion. Keep tuned for Cult of Mac’s first look at the latest version of OS X, coming later today.
In addition to Mountain Lion, Apple is also making a number of other resources available to developers, including guidelines for developing apps for Mountain Lion, GameKit and GLKit programming guides for developing Game Center compatible games, and more. There is also a new version of Xcode, version 4.4, available to program Mountain Lion apps.
To explain OS X 10.8’s many incredible new features, Apple has released an official sneak peek at the features you’ll find in Mountain Lion. We’ve embedded it above. Watch it and tell us what you think in the comments!
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook has shared his thoughts on what Mountain Lion means for the future of the Mac, and has hinted Apple may be considering a grand unification of iOS and OS X somewhere down the line.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion won’t be available for most users to play with this summer, but if you’d like to try out a little slice of it already, you can already download the Messages beta for Mac, which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited free messages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch through the iMessage protocol!
In our review of OS X 10.7, we wrote that Lion was the first great PC operating system of the Post-PC age, and that any future update of OS X would continue to blur the lines between the Mac and the iPad.
Looks like we were more right than we could have imagined. Apple has just apparently announced Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which will make its first appearance as a developer preview today ahead of an official debut this summer.
The guy in the picture above is named Bill Flora, and according to the caption accompanying his smiling face from this CNET article, Bill’s a key leader on the team that created the Metro interface that Microsoft will be using for all desktops, laptops and tablets running Windows 8.
Looks like a nice guy, right? Now take a look at Bill’s work desk, and notice that he is designing Windows 8 using exclusively Apple products, including an Apple Cinema Display, a MacBook Pro, an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and what appears to be a Magic Mouse.
Good taste in hardware, Bill! Windows 8… good enough to be designed on a Mac. Hey, that should be Microsoft’s new tagline!
[Thanks for the tip, Paul!]
Update: Apparently Bill is no longer with Microsoft. Here’s hoping Apple snatched him up!
A week ago, it was discovered that the popular social networking app Path uploads users entire address books to their servers. They’ve since apologized and nuked the data. But Path’s not the only ones doing this: other high profile companies like Twitter are also doing it. And Apple’s letting them.
Not so surprisingly, Congress isn’t liking what it’s hearing about the address book security issue. In fact, House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Commerce Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee Chair G.K. Butterfield have written Apple a letter asking some hard questions about how Apple has allowed this to happen, and “whether Apple’s iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts.”
As most recently referenced in Tim Cook’s comments on worker safety at Goldman Sachs yesterday, Apple is spending a lot of effort in 2012 trying to solve allegations of abuse in their supply chain. This initiative has most recently culminated in Apple going to the unprecedented step of asking the Fair Labor Association to audit their factories.
The FLA’s report isn’t due until March, but already, the Fair Labor Association’s president Auret van Heerden has spoken out, saying that at first blush, Foxconn’s facilities appear to be “first-class” in comparison to the garment factories the association usually monitors.