Ever since the first iPhone, bloggers and pundits have wondered what it would be like if Apple actually baked an iOS emulator into a future version of OS X that supported multitouch displays. Something Dashboard-like, called up with a function key press. I bet it would look something like this.
When American Airlines announced that they were planning on phasing out the paper in-flight charts in the cockpit in favor of the iPad, some of us smelled a PR maneuver. How could a couple of breakable $500 tablets in each plane be cheaper or easier than just printing out some maps?
As it turns out, though, paper’s heavy… and merely by switching to the iPad in every plane, American Airlines could save up to $1.2 million every year in fuel costs alone.
Apple might not have more money than God (yet), but come the end of this quarter, they are likely to have so much cash flowing from their coffers that, if they had a mind to, they could buy the entire mobile phone industry.
The most impressive ebooks on the iPad aren’t ebooks at all, but dedicated iOS apps. With the power of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and ePUB3, though, there’s no reason that has to be the case at all: you can put together a truly interactive, animated ebook right within iBooks.
Check out this awesome look at the iBook put together by Walrus Books for the upcoming Lovecraftian tome Kadath: The Guide To The Unknown City. Not only does it feature interactive maps, embedded fonts, integrated pop-ups and more, but it even has its own in-book meta game and version of in-app purchases.
This is super cool. I wish we saw more iBooks like this, but unfortunately, it seems like most publishers design their ebooks for the lowest common denominator platform — the Kindle.
If you weren’t convinced that the most dramatic upgrade you can do to a Mac is install a solid state drive in its belly, check this video out.
15 seconds. Just 15 seconds. That’s how long it takes a 3.4GHz Sandy Bridge iMac armed with a Sandy Bridge processor and an SSD drive to launch all of its apps simultaneously.
In iOS 5, Apple has fixed a long standing issue that prevented home screen web apps from running as fast as they would within Mobile Safari.
Oh, man, finally. Years after showing Europe how a streaming music service ought to be done, and just a couple of weeks after Apple made it clear that their own iTunes-In-The-Cloud service wouldn’t do streaming at all, Spotify has officially confirmed that it will be coming to the United States within a matter of weeks.
Remember when Mark Zuckerberg scoffed that there was no reason to release a native Facebook iPad app because the “iPad’s not mobile!”
Guess he’s changed his mind: Facebook’s prepping an official iPad app, and it’s already in final testing.
The iPad 2 jailbreak we’ve all long been waiting for could arrive as early as this evening.
Apple may be considering licensing Rosetta to developers whose software might otherwise be left behind in the transition to Lion.
It’s been a bad year for RIM so far. Their BlackBerry business has been harried on all sides by the iPhone, and their stock has delated largely thanks to the arterial spray of customers they are losing to Apple.
Worse, in response to the iPad, RIM released the much heralded BlackBerry Playbook, which might just go down in the books as one of the worst, least functional and woefully misguided pieces of consumer technology ever.
Finally, just last week, Apple totally eliminated RIM’s sole advantage over iOS by announcing iMessage, which Wall Street is already saying will kill BlackBerry’s remaining prospects in enterprise.
Anyone surprised that RIM”s now announcing layoffs after seeing their first quarter results? I thought not.
This is not how you make a universal remote for the iPhone.
Apple’s new iTunes Match functionality is an incredible boon to music lovers, effortlessly matching your local music to Apple’s cloud servers, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Instead, iTunes Match is the product of numerous inked deals between Cupertino and music publishers: no deal, and iTunes Match can’t mirror tracks from that label.
So bad news, soul and R&B fans. Numero Group has just vocally drawn a line in the sand: iTunes Match legitimizes piracy, and they won’t be part of it.
Wondering just where in the hell those Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs with Thunderbolt are? Sitting in a warehouse, just waiting for OS X Lion to go gold, according to the most recent report.
Neat spot by Alam van Roemburg: the iCloud icon uses the Golden Ratio, which has been thought since the 16th Century to lead to pleasing, harmonious proportions in aesthetic design.
What do you know? Think Geek has taken their excellent chrome suction joystick for the iPad, shrunk it down and brought it to the iPhone and iPod Touch. $17.99 will buy you one, and while I’ve always thought these miniature controllers were more trouble than they are worth, the iPad version of Joystik-It works pretty well.
If you do a lot of gaming on your iPhone, specifically in games which have a virtual D-Pad, you could do worse than one of these.
Social networking giant Facebook is secretly working on a way to put their own App Store on tens of millions of iOS devices. It’s called Project Spartan, and it’s an aggressive attempt to build an HTML5 front end for all of Facebook’s existing apps on any Apple device, even without Flash installed.
If the patent drawing above is anything to go by, Apple is working on a new social experience for the iPhone that will allow irradiated, cycloptic mutants to find out what they have in common with one another even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Based on the actual wording of the patent, though, it should work for everyone, allowing you to use your iPhone to find the most interesting person in the room, every time.
Apple has just erected plywood walls around their iconic Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City, and some massive renovations are about to go down. Could the iconic glass cube be about to go sphere?
If you’re going to school in the fall and were anticipating a free iPod Touch along with your new Mac, prepare to feel ripped.
Remember the three Foxconn employees arrested back in December for leaking the design of the iPad 2 to third-party case makers? They’ve been found guilty, and they’re going to prison.
Got a spare buck? Literally… just one dollar. Want to use your iPhone 4 guilt free? Why don’t you give it to The Nature Conservancy, and they’ll use it to offset the lifetime CO2 emissions of your iPhone 4? That’s a penny for each pound of carbon!
Set to be published in August 2011 by Bluewater Comics, Steve Jobs: the Co-Founder of Apple is a comic book bio by writer C.W. Cooke and artist Chris Schmidt that aims to tell the story of Apple’s inimitable founder in a less wordy and more visual format than Steve Jobs’ official biography.
Although the comic has not been colored or lettered yet, Bluewater Productions was kind enough to give Cult of Mac an exclusive preview of a few of the pages of the still unfinished comic, covering everything from Steve Jobs’ birth and adoption to his time as a tripped-out, LSD-popping Buddhist working for Atari. Check them out!
Reader Adam Moffat sent us this awesome mash-up of Lion’s cool new galaxy wallpaper and the famous opening shot of Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer chasing Princess Leia in the first few minutes of Star Wars.
We love it. Here’s the inspiration. If you think it’d make a fine desktop for your geeky Mac, you can download a high resolution copy from us here. Thanks for sharing your work with us, Adam!
Remember back in April, when Steve Jobs replied to the overblown iPhone LocationGate mini-scandal by saying that it was Google who was tracking users, not Apple? As he often is, looks like Steve is right.
