John Brownlee - page 116

When Google first released their native Gmail app for iOS, it was just a total mess: an HTML5 web app that not only had less innate functionality than loading up Gmail in Mobile Safari, but couldn’t even do its one selling point — push notifications — right. Heck, it even gave error messages at boot. Iit was so bad Gmail pulled the app within hours of release.

A little while later, Google released an updated version that fixed everything wrong with the old Gmail app, but it was still a total snoozer of an app. But today’s update to Gmail for iOS actually brings some cool new features to the table that might persuade some folks to switch from Mail.app.

Steve Jobs has been mentioned as a possible contender for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year ever since he passed away in October, but in the end, Time has gone another direction: they have awarded their 2011 Person of the Year instead to “The Protester,” the abstract avatar for the political demonstrations in the Middle East, Europe and the United States this year.

One of the first tweaks I make to any Mac I use is this neat little tweak that adds the currently playing album’s art to any song playing in Tunes.

Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if you could do the same thing on iOS, replacing the Music logo on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the album art cover of the song you’re currently listening to? As usual, with a jailbreak and a simple Cydia download, you can.

Wow, Merry Christmas indeed. Dieter Bohn over at The Verge has put together the end-all-be-all guide to iOS, an overview of Apple’s plucky little mobile OS so well-illustrated, informative and complete, all we can do is stew in jealousy we didn’t do this ourselves.

If you’re anything like me, you often sit around and wonder what the people and animals you know look like with their skin and musculature pulled off to reveal the screaming skulls beneath. Unfortunately, pulling the faces off of actual living creatures to stare at their skeletons tends to be considered, as I understand it, somewhat declasse amongst the bourgeoise, so until society reconsiders its values, there’s this: the Skulls app by Simon Winchester.

It’s been a great year for jailbreaking, and with an iOS 5 untethered jailbreak on the horizon for 2012, the next year is looking even better. So why not help Cult of Mac out and tell us what your favorite jailbreak app or tweak of 2011 was?

Not only will your choices go into a “Best of 2011” jailbreaking feature next week, but you’ll help us reward all of the brave hackers who had the nerve to truly “think different” in 2011 by hacking into their iPhones and breaking Apple’s walled garden wide open, just for the fun of it.

For the exhibitionist, the free I Made Love app allows you to “check in” to places you have boned, down to the GPS location and sexual position.

Alarmingly, there is a high concentration of activity in I Made Love at the Market Basket parking lot across the street from me. I always thought those guys were just practicing wrestling moves in the back seat of their cars.

[via Gizmodo]

The Christmas Holidays are coming up, and if you’re a gamer looking for a rare week spent pushing, punching and shooting pixels, we’ve got a great Yuletide bundle for you: the Humble Indie Bundle 4. Not to put to fine a point on it, but it’s a sick deal, some of my very favorite games on the Mac.

Are you hoping to buy some last minute gear from Apple before the holidays, but the check hasn’t quite cleared yet? Apple just announced their holiday shipping deadlines this year. But how late can you push your last minute shopping out to?

Every couple of years, Apple gets a new design fetish in their UIs: brushed aluminum, for example, or that god awful faux leather look Cupertino’s rocking for iCal and Address Book.

Less objectionable than most of Apple’s UI fetishes is the gray linen background we’ve been seeing creep through iOS and Lion over the last year or so, but if you’re sick of drab gray, here’s a colorful way to replace your iOS Notification Center’s gray linen background with a colorful, blurred version of your springboard.

Did you miss out on seeing PBS’s fantastic documentary on the life of Steve Jobs when it aired in early November? Well, you’re in lucky: Steve Jobs – One Last Thing is now available on DVD. It’s also free to stream for Amazon Prime members.

We’ve got an affinity for great Apple tattoos here at Cult of Mac, but let’s face facts: most of them are pretty bad. But the Apple-themed tattoo we’ve fallen in love with today is a lot better than another hipster giving him or herself a “Think Different” tramp stamp.

Reader Karissa B. wrote us to show off her new Apple tattoo. We already liked it a lot: not only is the retro-style Apple logo nursing a mean mouthful of fangs, but the Pac Man like motif of Cupertino trying to gobble up its Clyde in a fleeing Microsoft logo was funny and whimsical. But it’s the story about what the tattoo means and why Karissa got it that really makes this tattoo shine.

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman has been peeling through the .plist files of the latest iOS 5.1 beta, and it appears that Apple is screwing with bloggers on purpose: weary of people dissecting the iOS files for mention of future iPhones and iPads, iOS 5.1 Beta 2 references the Apple TV 9, iPad 8, and iPhone 10, among others.

We’ve dedicated more than a few posts t0 declaring that a new iPad or iPhone is coming thanks to .plist references, but even so, I think this is pretty funny. Way to screw with a poor tech blogger’s head, Apple! The message is clear from here on out: you can’t trust iOS’s .plist files for a scoop. Well done!

If you’ve got a developer account, time to get downloading: Apple has just knocked up the second beta of iOS 5.1.

In addition, Apple’s gone ahead and updated the beta of the latest Apple TV software, as well as release Xcode 4.3 Developer Preview 2.

Release notes are below, but here’s hoping Cupertino’s finally cracked some of those battery life issues.

If you’re a fan of The Neverending Story, here’s an iPad case that even a Rockbiter could love.

We all know how the mano a mano duel between an iPad and a blender turns out, but what happens when you open up an iPad 2 and then plop it down in some molten lava? That’s just what accessory maker ZooGue wanted to find out, so they jumped on a plane to Hawaii and then threw their iPad 2 into a volcano.

The result? Pretty much as you expect: the iPad 2 complains about the heat for awhile, then bursts into flame and melts into metallic goo. It’s strangely cathartic, but that’s doubtless because it’s not my iPad 2.

[via NeoWin]

Short on cash for the holidays? If you don’t mind shopping at Radio Shack and have an old iPhone to trade-in, you can get a killer deal on a new iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S this week.

How killer? Well, how does a free iPhone 4S with no money down sound to you? Pretty good? Well, guess what: play your cards right and you could not only get a free iPhone 4S, you’ll get Radio Shack to pay you a little money to take an iPhone 4S off their hands. You just need to combine the right offers.

There’s over half a million apps on the App Store at this point, but that’s not to say that apps can’t still stand out from the crowd. Choosing the cream of the crop, though, can be a daunting and contentious task.

That’s why we need your help. A week from now, we’re going to announce our ten favorite iOS apps of 2011, then later in the month declare our vote for the best app of the year. Hence this poll; we need you to tell us which app you think qualifies as the best of the best.

Did you miss checking out Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal location on its totally insane launch day? Apple doesn’t want anyone to miss out, which is why they’ve posted a 360 degree panorama of the inside of the store on their official website.

Late last week, Apple uploaded this fantastic new ad to their official YouTube account, and it really is a beautiful piece of work: a magical mystery tour through a collection of living, breathing Beatles covers.

It’s really charming how proud Apple is of getting the Beatles on iTunes, to the extent that over a year later, Apple is still advertising the Beatles as if they are one of their own in-house products, like an iPhone or iPad.

Half a million. Most app stores would be happy to have half a million users, but that’s just the number of apps Apple has in the App Store. And while they are bragging about their big swinging stats, Cupertino’s got another one to announce: over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store since its debut in early November last year. Wow.

Do you hate the new Twitter? You’re not alone. The backlash against the changes in the new iPhone app are so loud and raucous that Tapbot is going to extreme measures to help make sure everyone gets through the Twitter 4.0 “upgrade” in one piece: they are putting their industry fave Twitter client Tweetbot on sale for the first time ever!

AT&T’s plan to gobble up the fourth largest carrier in America is, for all intents and purposes, dead. After the Department of Justice moved to block the deal, AT&T began to back out of the deal.

So here’s a question. How does one of the biggest companies on Earth, with more lobbyists and politicians in its pocket than you can count, find itself incapable of closing a merger deal with a fourth-rate carrier, even after spending millions on campaign contributions, kickbacks and lobbying?

The simple answer? AT&T done $%!@ed up.

Here at Cult of Mac, we’ve got our own axe to grind against freemium App Store games that try to get kids to max out their daddy’s credit cards with expensive in-app purchases, so it’s nice to see The Daily Show take freemium game makers to town in an absolutely hilarious, spot-on segment that shows how scummy these waters of the App Store can really be.

Which phone would fictional advertising genius Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men use? No surprises here: as this picture of Jon Hamm from the set of the hit television proves, only the phone with the best and most convincing advertising campaign on Earth, an iPhone, would do for Draper.

[via iSource]