John Brownlee - page 141

The new full-screen support in OS X Lion is a dream come true for lifehackers looking to squeeze more productivity out of their apps, but one problem for keyboard users is that there’s just no standardized shortcut.

That seems like something of an oversight on Apple’s part, but luckily, there’s an easy to way assign your own universal full-screen shortcut for every app on your machine, even if the devs didn’t provide their own easy keyboard combination for triggering full-screen on your Mac.

What do you do with 18 iPads and some remedial stop-motion expertise? You do what the guys over at iPStand did and play Tetris with them, complete with a chiptune cover of Korobieniki playing in the background.

Ironically, because there’s only 18 iPads, though, iPStand can never get a true tetris and clear four rows at once. If only they had 24!

Man, it snuck up on everyone, but the second-gen Apple TV got a huge update in the last hour. The iOS 4.3.3 update for the Apple TV 2 does add some minor things like Vimeo support to the feature set of Apple’s set-top box, but here’s the real biggie: you can now buy any television show directly from your Apple TV, then access and stream them using your iTunes account.

While Apple and Samsung’s globe-spanning IP lawsuit hasn’t made a dent in either company’s business up until now, the first real blow has landed… and it is Samsung walking away with the bloody nose, as a new development in Australia means Samsung can’t sell their iPad-like Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet on the continent until further notice.

Do you remember WebM? It was the video compression technology Google spontaneously announced early last year as an open, free alternative to the H.264 codec, used by Apple in every video shown on the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Despite the fact that Google said that this was completely free, and H.264 is technically subject to a number of royalty fees, uptake on WebM has been pretty slow. Steve Jobs himself thought it was such a non-starter that all he did was link to a screed against WebM that argued that it was just a slight variation on the H.264 codec, and well covered by MPEG-LA’s patent pool… something that was likely to get Google sued.

Well, here comes the lawsuit.

One of the perpetual complaints levied at Apple over the years is the fact that iTunes is a bloated mess of an app that tries to do too many things at once to maintain Apple-style elegance.

No doubt Apple would love to address these concerns, but what it would take is a complete overhaul and rewriting of the software from the ground-up. Give how much of Apple’s business links into iTunes — everything from apps, to music purchases, to iBooks, to iPhone, iPod and iPad syncing — that’s a prohibitive task.

A prohibitive task, according to reports, that Apple’s already in the thick of.

Hey there, true Beliebers! You know who jailbreaks? No less a personage than Mr. Justin Bieber, that chart-topping iTunes artist!

Do you feel like you have to be just a huge honking moron to use Internet Explorer instead of a superior browser like Safari, Chrome or Firefox? That might not just be hyperbole: a new study has found that the IQ of people using IE is lower than the average of those using competing browsers.

Too lazy to do your chores or errands? Willing to pay some cash to crowd source it? Meet TaskRabbit, a collaborative service that allows you to post up things you don’t really want to do, along with how much you’re willing to pay for them to get done, and then get a willing stranger to show up at your door to do them.

Frustrated by Apple’s reticence to release a Mac with a built-in 3G modem for everywhere internet connectivity? Don’t sweat it, Apple may have something else in mind: Super WiFi that would allow your MacBook to connect with your Time Capsule from up to 62 miles away.

Best of all? That tech just got one step closer to reality.

Hey, guess what! In just a few months, AT&T’s going to start throttling your iPhone’s 3G speeds if they think you use too much data, just like Verizon already does… even if you’re an unlimited data subscriber! Aren’t mobile companies just grand?

Just a few days after rumors started springing up that Apple intended on buying streaming video service (and Netflix competitor) Hulu comes an even odder rumors, courtesy of BGR: Apple is in talks to buy Barnes & Noble out from under them. What?

We’ve already shown you here at Cult of Mac how to nuke Lion’s LaunchPad and Start over, but what if you don’t want to go to such extreme measures? Instead, what if you just want to remove or add a few different apps to LaunchPad, without starting from scratch?

It’s easy, thanks to Andreas Ganske’s Launchpad-Control. Here’s how it works.

Reader Pascal Beausoleil pointed us to a cool (and, we think, new) easter egg in OS X Lion.

If you go to System Preferences > Users you can change your OS X default user icon to a vinyl record… but what are the track titles on that record? If you like Steve Jobs’ keynotes and his unique, shouted catchphrases, you’ll absolutely love this…

OS X Lion is the best version of OS X yet, but some of its design choices aren’t without controversy… especially the decision to make the whole operating system more like iOS.

Hate that stuff? Over the next few days, we’ll be posting some tips on taking the iOS inspirations back out of your Mac. Today, we’re going to change the default way Lion handles scrollbars to be less like the way they work on the iPhone.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to play piano, to be a chain-smoking, Jelly Roll Morton style jazz tinkler… but I’ve never really had the equipment to get it done. I’m sort of excited, then, by the Piano Apprentice accessory: just slap an iPad into the small keyboard accessory, and you should be on your road to ragtime in, well, no time at all.

If you’ve ever played the classic NES fighter, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, you can probably sympathize with Nintendo right now: an absolutely huge juggernaut of an enemy has filled their screen, capable of knocking them out with a one-two punch… a blow that is only tipped by a sly wink a millisecond before.

That enemy’s Apple, and it is fighting with two weighted gloves with the iPhone and iPad, accordingly. Now Nintendo’s so punch-drunk that they are dramatically lowering the price of their latest console, the Nintendo 3DS, less than six months after it debuted.

For years, Apple has been affiliated with a little online shopping portal called CVN.org, otherwise known as the Christian Value Network. The site raises money for various religious groups by taking a small slice of product purchases at over 600 participating companies, including Apple and iTunes.

Sounds innocuous, right? Except that several of those religious groups are described as “active hate groups” that regularly engage in “anti-gay, anti-women” activities. And after a petition that garnered 22,000 signatures, Apple has yanked their support from the CVN and pulled iTunes from the network.

At $29.99, Lion was priced so cheap that everyone could afford the upgrade. Everyone except John Christman, that is, who found that his PayPal account was charged $3878.38 by Apple.

If you hit the road a lot, the problem is always chargers. Remembering chargers. Keeping them organized. Preventing them from tying themselves up in knots at the bottom of your gadget bag.

Aviiq’s got a gorgeous little solution to all of these little road warrior problems. Called the Portable Charging Station, it’s an accessory that is a lot more useful than it might first suggest: it’s a tidy, foldable bag with all the cables and charging equipment inside. Just zip it up and go.

Apple recently announced that they’d sold just over 15 billion apps in just three years, which got ZDNet’s Eric Lai doing some number crunching, and it turns out that the App Store has just passed a big milestone: Apple’s now selling apps faster than McDonald’s can sell hamburgers.

OS X Lion is the best version of OS X yet, but some of its design choices aren’t without controversy… especially the decision to make the whole operating system more like iOS.

Hate that stuff? Over the next few days, we’ll be posting some tips on taking the iOS inspirations back out of your Mac. Today, we’re going to focus on how to stop your Mac from handling your text input as if you were typing it out on your iPhone.

The Geniuses at your local Apple Store are trained to be some of the most confident and unflappable retail employees in the biz, but how far can you push it? Can you order a pizza in an Apple Store? Can you take your wife on a date to one? Can you get your iPhone repaired dressed as Darth Vader? Can you bring your pet goat into the store?

Prototype case designs coming out of Chinese accessory makers based upon leaked Foxconn intelligence are painting a dramatic picture of the next iPhone. If these leaks are right, the iPhone 5 won’t be a mere iPhone 4S, but rather a radical new device that not only boasts a curved, more ergonomic design and a larger display, but also revolutionizes one of the core aspects of the iOS experience… it totally gets rid of the Home button.

See anything interesting in the image above, plucked right from Apple’s own website? Say, the iPod Touch with the 3G icon in the top left? Did Apple just out a web-connected iPod Touch coming in September?