John Brownlee - page 114

Were you very good this year? Did Santa spoil you, and did you find yourself opening up a brand new Mac under the Christmas tree this morning? Congratulations, we’re jealous… but not so jealous that we aren’t eager to teach you how to get started with your new Mac, so you can enjoy it from day one.

In this handy guide, we’ll take you through initial setup; teach you some awesome tweaks that’ll enhance your OS X experience; introduce you to some of the best apps the Mac has to offer; and tell you about some great accessories that you just shouldn’t be without.

Here’s our guide to setting up your new Mac the right way.

2011 has been Apple’s most incredible year left. Heck, they’ve released more revolutionary products in this year alone than most companies manage in a generation. So we knew it would be difficult when we asked you to help us choose Apple’s best products of 2011. Now the results are in, and we’ve whittled the list down to just the finalists. Check out the finalists below, then help us choose just one of them that we’ll declare to be the best Apple product of 2011 in next week’s Cult of Mac Best Of 2011 awards.

Oh man, it’s too bad it’s too late to add this to my Christmas list. The Armstar is a gauntlet ripped straight from the forearm of Batman himself, featuring a working stun device, camera, flash light and iPhone / iPod dock, all in one piece of Kevlar arm armor. And Kevin Costner helped build it!

If only we’d found out about this a couple months back, I know what would have won our best of 2011 accessories award!

[via Obama Pacman]

Henry D. is an awesome boy hacker out of the UK, and this video of him “pwning” a local Apple Store is just too cute and funny for words.

In a collaboration with Macrumors, CiccareseDesign has produced a papercraft mockup of what the rumored 7.85-inch iPad Mini would look like… and you can even print it out and hold it in your hands yourself.

I’ve never particularly cared for iChat. It’s less full-featured than free alternatives like Adium, and since it can’t easily be skinned, if you hate all the bubbles and aqua in the UI, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Luckily, over at OS X Daily, they’ve put together a fantastic and simple way to replace the iChat Aqua Text Bubbles with a flatter, less idiosyncratic matte version. Check it out: this is really the way iChat should look by default.

Still don’t have a Christmas present for a loved one? Cash running low, so you need a good deal? You’re not going to beat this: Walmart is offering a $50 iTunes gift card for just $40, essentially giving you an extra $10 in downloads for free. Not only can the card be used on apps, music, ebooks, movies or even television shows, but the code is delivered to you digitally, meaning that you don’t have to wait for the post-office to deliver it to you: it’ll be available instantly. Slap that code into a Christmas card and you’re done!

[via 9to5Mac]

These days, Steve Jobs’s business acumen is legendary, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, when Steve first went on a fund-raising expedition to get money for the original Apple I in natal Silicon Valley, he was described as a secretive “joker” who couldn’t trust anyone and had a “flakey” partnership with Steve Wozniak.

We looooove Rockstar Games’s new iOS port of their seminal classic Grand Theft Auto III. Heck, here’s the proof. It was already worth at least ten times each penny that was being asked of it’s initial $4.99 asking price. Now though? It’s just a little under three bucks. That makes you a downright idiot if you don’t start downloading right this second. Do it!

With iOS 5, iPhone and iPad users started noticing a new curious behavior: app icons that suddenly started “Cleaning…” themselves. Facebook does it. Instapaper does it. Even Twitter does it. But what the heck does it mean?

This video of Steve Jobs from 1990 is an interesting artifact for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, it’s the clip in which Steve pioneered his famous “bicycle for the mind” analogy, which I’ve always felt is one of the most beautiful things ever said about computers.

What is also interesting, though, is how gung ho Steve Jobs is about video games in this clip, even going as far as to suggest that video games are the future of learning, and even the future of the Library of Congress.

Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with a DVD of a roaring fireplace looping on your television? Tacky!

Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with an 8-bit interactive fireplace roaring on your Mac? Awesome!

We’ve long loved Skitch, the screenshot and image editor that we’ve been using on our Macs in one way or another since 2007. A few months back, the guys behind Evernote bought out Skitch, which raised some questions about its future as a stand-alone app, but we needn’t have worried: not only is Skitch its own Mac app, but it’s now become a shiny iPad one as well.

Presumably, it takes intelligence to become rich, which is what makes it so mystifying to me that so many “luxury products” are things that only swollen-tongued mooncalves would actually buy. Take, for instance, Gresso’s custom iPhone, which costs $30,000, and tries to justify that with three in-laid clocks with ten year time reserves apiece… despite the fact that if you just turn it on, the iPhone has an infinitely more accurate clock for as many time zones as you care to throw at it. Oh, there’s also the ubiquitous slathering of Swarovski crystals, if crushed glass floats your boat. Horf.

Although he couldn’t play the guitar or drums to save his life, few individuals have had as much of an impact upon the business of music than Steve Jobs, and now he’s being posthumously recognized for it by the industry he helped save by getting his own Grammy.

This is turning out to be a gamer’s Christmas on the Mac App Store. Following yesterday’s surprise release of Limbo for Mac, Firemint’s beloved Real Racing 2 has also arrived on OS X, with all of the best features of the iOS version, including a 16 car grid, Quick Race and Career modes, 15 racing tracks and over 30 officially licensed cars including the 2010 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500, 2010 Nissan GT-R (R35), 2012 McLaren MP4-12C and more. In our eyes, though, the killer feature is the ability to steer your car using your iPhone or iPad. Get Real Racing 2 here.

It’s been a long time coming, but the award-winning, multi-platform platformer Limbo just hit the Mac App Store for $9.99. The story of a boy searching the afterworld to find his sister, Limbo’s an atmospheric puzzler from Playdead studios, most well known for its challenging gameplay and atmospheric aesthetic, Limbo’s one of the best indie games to have been released on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in recent memory, so it’s delifghtful to finally see it available for Macs. I know what I’m playing this afternoon.

We’ve been hearing a lot about pod2g’s upcoming untethered jailbreak for all iOS 5 devices, but the latest blog post on the hacker’s site makes clear just how close to completion the jailbreak is for distribution. In fact, according to pod2g, it’s “near ready for prime time,” and to prove it he’s showing the jailbreak running on a stock iPhone 4.

As Apple once did at Macworld, Microsoft has headlned the CES keynote for years now, but when Steve Ballmer takes the stage in 2012, it’ll be for the last time… and the reasons sound very familiar.

We’ve been seeing references to HiDPI display modes in OS X Lion for a while now, which has helped cement rumors that Apple will release a Retina Display MacBook Pro, at least, in 2012.

As such, today’s report that Apple left a big reference to HiDPI mode intact in developer builds of OS X 10.7.3 isn’t a big surprise. The functionality can be seen in Finder’s “Get Info” window, and allows you to open a file or app in HiDPI mode, which (while non-functional right now) would presumably user higher-definition fonts, graphics and other UI elements. Retina Display Macs seem like a shoe-in in 2012 at this point, don’t you think?

We’ve seen a couple good hacks that allow you to use Siri and the iPhone 4S to control your Mac, but Vocal is the best and most feature-rich one we’ve seen yet, allowing you to use your iPhone 4S to control apps, perform searches, copy-and-paste text, control iTunes, lookup words and much, much more.

We’re hearing rumblings that a huge number of Verizon iPhone users have been without 3G data this morning… a rare lapse of service indeed for the country’s most reliable wireless provider. We’re not sure which areas, though, are being effected, although some reports suggest that it has something to do with Verizon’s on-going LTE rollout.

Are you having problems connecting to Verizon for data this morning? Let us know what problems you’re having and where you are in the comments.

If you buy books through Amazon and use their Kindle app, a nice update was just pushed to the App Store bringing the option to subscribe on your iPad to any of the magazines offered on the Kindle Fire

Back in the 80s, slacking off at the office was no more rare than it is today, but while these days most of our time that we should be working is spent on Twitter, Facebook and blogs (thanks for that, by the way), in the 80s, it was more often than not spent gaming on your company PC.

Enter the Boss Key, a wonderful relic of covert 80s slacking. Let’s say you were playing a game on your company PC, and your boss walked by. By simply hitting a key on your button, you could instantly replace what was on the screen with a quasi-official looking spreadsheet, full of boring figures and dry analysis. When your boss left the environs of your cubicle, pushing the Boss Key again would allow you to plunge back into the game.

Neat, huh? Well, think of CovertChirp kind of like a Boss Key for iOS, except it doesn’t help your gaming stay undetected… it helps you covertly tweet.