If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber or otherwise rent or buy a lot of Amazon Instant Video, you’ll have a one word reaction to this story: finally. Amazon has just released an official Instant Video app for the iPad.
Google’s official Gmail app has had a sordid history. It launched so broken it had to be pulled from the App Store, and when it relaunched, it came without push notifications… a pretty big oversight in an iOS email client. Gmail finally got push notifications, but the app overall still felt a little clunky.
Enter version 1.3. Google says the latest update to their official Gmail app for iOS makes a bunch of under the hood changes to improve animation, scrolling and responsiveness.
Hulu Plus has long been a curious omission on the Apple TV’s list of channels, but it now appears that Apple has quietly added it this morning to its supported steaming services. If you don’t see it, try rebooting your Apple TV. About time!
Source: Macrumors
The 2012 Presidential Elections are fast closing in on us, with a little over three months left before Barack Obama and Mitt Romney enter the ring and, following the protocol laid out in the constitution by our forefathers, settle the question of who will become the next American president in front of a panel of judges in a Zoolander style walk-off.
Perhaps to prepare for this upcoming challenge, Prsident Obama’s re-election campaign is launching a new iOS app.
Just a reminder, friends: if you’ve ever used Apple’s iWork.com beta to share and collaborate on documents in the cloud, you need to download them to your computer today… otherwise, at the end of the day, Apple will press a big red button and your precious Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents will be ripped apart into a trillion trillion atoms and slowly dispersed throughout the universe.
First launched in 2009 as a service to let iWork users collaborate, edit and download documents online, iWork.com is being killed off having never left beta in favor of Apple’s newer and more full-featured cloud initiative, iCloud.
Source: iWork.com
Facebook has just introduced a new feature for their official Facebook for iPhone and iPad app that gives users Instapaper-like abilities to save posts shared on Facebook to read later. Now you too can collect your friends’ most embarrassing social network blunders in a favorites folder for posterity! Oh, and links you want to read later too, of course.
In 2012, there’s nothing that lends prestige, luxury and credibility to a shopping space like an Apple Store. From that perspective, it’s the Tiffany’s or Sak’s of the 21st Century.
In fact, it looks as if the Apple Store was considered to be such a prestigious draw that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bent over backwards to make sure it could get Apple to lease a space in the famous Grand Central Terminal… at the expense of other applicants.
The Samsung vs. Apple legal brouhaha has been a pretty tedious story to cover up until now, but over the last week, those of who with a professional interest in paying attention to the bickering were finally rewarded when Apple started coughing up images of their early iPhone prototypes in the court filings.
On Saturday, though, in preparation for the start of today’s trial, Apple released a new filing with dozens of sketches, prototypes and 3D models of early iPhone prototypes. We’ve seen some of them before, but a lot of them are new, and one thing that is abundantly clear is that back in 2006, Apple has already thought out every possible shape an iPhone could be.
We’ve put together a gallery below of all of Apple’s iPhone prototypes, culling the images from a longer slideshow from All Things D. Check it out: not only will you see iPhones that never made it in there, you’ll see the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4 and even a longer iPhone that could be the iPhone 5!
Apple has just announced that OS X Mountain Lion is the most successful launch of Mac OS X ever, with over three million copies sold in four days.
“Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
Last year, Apple sold over 1 million copies of OS X Lion in the first day of release. It looks like Apple managed to not just match that rate, but exceed it with Mountain Lion.
Apple’s press release is after the jump. Have you updated to Mountain Lion yet?
September 21, 2012 is looking increasingly likely as the release date for the next-gen iPhone and upcoming iPad mini, as a new report from a trusted site pegs the date.
Have you ever noticed that the Shuffle option on iTunes or on your iPod isn’t truly random? For example, if you have a playlist with ten tracks and start off by playing, say, the second track, iTunes will always shuffle to the exact same next track, everytime.
Doesn’t seem much like “Shuffling,” does it? It is, though: Apple’s just thinking about Shuffling a different way than you are.
The Apple Command key (or, as you might better know it, ⌘) has a beautiful and clear history. Originally, the ⌘ key was an Apple symbol instead, but Steve Jobs thought that using the Apple logo as a keyboard shortcut in the original Macintosh’s menus was “taking the logo in vain” so he tasked the great icon designer Susan Kare to find a solution. The symbol she chose was the traditional clover symbol we all know today, chosen because it is commonly used in Scandavaniva to indicate a tourist attraction or place of interest.
Interesting, right? Unfortunately, there’s no related story as to why the Option key has its own unique (and very abstract) symbol: ⌥. Marc Edwards’ brilliant take on what the ⌥ symbol means is doubtless revisionist history, but I love the visual metaphor of a train switching tracks. That may not be the real tale, but it should be.
Source: Twitter
Via: Brooks Review
Whenever Apple moves to purchase a company, you know they’ve got something up their sleeves, and it’s not hard to imagine the possibilities of their latest acquisition: maker of fingerprint sensor chips, AuthenTec.
If you’re a fan of the Bluth Family and have been eagerly anticipating the return of their adventures you probably already know that after a seven year hiatus, Arrested Development is coming back on the air next year for a fourth season thanks to a streaming partnership with Netflix.
But hey, Franklin, guess what? The fourth season is already being written, and here’s the first episode script being read on narrator and executive producer Ron Howard’s iPad to prove it, who says it’s “very funny” and has “lots of lines for the narrator.”
Okay, there’s not much else here, but if you’re a fan of Arrested Development, just seeing a page from the script is enough to get you pumped. Either way, it sure beats Losing It! or Armageddon II: Armageddon, films that Maeby Funke produced after “conning” her way into a job as a prominent Hollywood executive.
Source: Twitter
After months of construction work on the old Banco Espanol de Credito building on Passeig de Gracia, Apple has today taken the wraps off of its new flagship retail store in Barcelona, Spain. Cult of Mac has exclusive first pics from the scene.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell knows a thing about Microsoft. After all, he initially founded Valve Software — makers of such mega-hits as the Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead series, as well as the popular Steam digital delivery service — using the millions he made working for Microsoft for 13 years.
So when Gabe Newell says that he thinks Windows 8 is going to be apocalyptical for PC makers and cause OEMs to start fleeing the platform in droves, it’s worth paying attention. Especially since Valve’s Steam delivery service is putting increasing emphasis on Windows alternative OSes like Linux and, yes, the Mac.
Like a healthy baby in utero with all its fingers and toes showing on the ultrasound, we’ve now got a pretty good picture of what the next iPhone will look like: longer, thinner, a new metallic back, a smaller 19 pin dock connector and, of course, a bigger 4-inch display.
It’s going to be a beautiful phone, but what next? It’s unlikely that Apple will do another major iPhone revision for awhile, which means future iPhones will, for the forseeable future, probably just refine the forthcoming design.
Here’s a beautiful concept of what the iPhone’s design could look like in the next couple of years, courtesy of French designer Nak.
It’s hard to believe that it was just a little more than a year ago that Apple released OS X Lion. Only twelve months later, and we’re now staring right down the maw of Apple’s ninth major release of Mac OS X: Mountain Lion.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion signifies a new approach on Apple’s part towards OS X updates: instead of going years between major releases, Cupertino is trying to take the rapid release approach that has worked so well for them with iOS and apply it to the Mac.
Mountain Lion, then, feels in many ways less like OS X 10.8 than OS X 10.7.5: a smaller, more tightly focused update continuing what OS X Lion started, taking iOS’s best ideas and bringing them to Mac.
Thanks to major breakthrough features like iCloud syncing, Notification Center, Sharing, AirPlay Mirroring and more, there’s less of a distinction in Mountain Lion between the Mac and iOS than ever. But is that a good thing, and how will it change the way you use your Mac?
With every new major release of OS X, there are, unfortunately, a lot of people who end up having problems. The big news this morning is that many new Mac owners who are eligible for a free Mountain Lion update can’t redeem their codes for the update, but these poor sods aren’t likely to be the only ones with problems, as millions of Macs across the world do their darnedest to trip up the attack of Apple’s latest cat.
Tech support issues can be annoying, and it can help to bellyache and gripe with other people. So if you’re having issues with installing or even downloading Mountain Lion, why not jump into our open thread and tell us what’s going on. Maybe we or one of our many great Cult of Mac forums users can help! At the very least, we can commisserate, and that’s always nice too.
CLICK HERE TO TALK ABOUT MOUNTAIN LION TECH ISSUES IN OUR FORUMS
According to a French blog site, the highly anticipated iPhone 5 featuring a larger screen and a 19-pin dock connector will be released on Friday, September 21, 2012.
Tongue firmly in cheek, my buddy Rob Beschizza over at Boing Boing explains the best way for fans of Sparrow to prepare their Macs for all future enhancements and developments that may result from today’s announcement of a Google acquisition.
You might want to wait on actually following these instructions until Sparrow Google Plus integration comes down the pipeline.
Source: BoingBoing
If Apple releases Mountain Lion on the same schedule they released Lion last year, they will unleash the latest version of OS X to the world the day after their quarterly earnings call. That means that next Wednesday, July 25th, everyone should be able to drop $20 on the Mac App Store for a copy of OS X Mountain Lion.
There’s one exception though: if you bought a Mac after June 11th, 2012, you’ll be automatically eligible to receive a free OS X Mountain Lion upgrade. That means if you’re the proud owner of a new Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or 2012 MacBook Pro, or any older Mac purchased recently, you’ll get a free upgrade.
All you have to do is go to this page within 30 days of when Mountain Lion drops and tell Apple you’re eligible for an upgrade. Generous, no?
Source: Apple.com
Via: OS X Daily
The title really says it all: Flower, a baby alpaca over at the Insight Ranch in Southern California, spends her time making farting sounds with her mouth, trembling almost faster than the speed of video and scrolling through photos on her MacBook Pro.
The title screams cute; the video screams something halfway between surrealism and nightmare. This could have been directed by David Lynch on a dare.
Source: YouTube
Via: Laughing Squid
Early last year, Apple applied for a patent which described how they could add a “wild new dynamic screen saver system that could sense the environment it is in and in a chameleon-like fashion automatically change the screen saver.”
Clumsy wording aside, I loved the idea from the get go. Imagine, docking your iPhone at night, only for the screen to perfectly match the decor of your bedroom. Unfortunately, like most of Apple’s patents, there’s no telling when or even if Apple will ever actually roll out such functionality.
Luckily, we don’t need to wait for Cupertino to get off their duffs, because Chameleon Clock is here to turn our iPhones and iPads into chameleons for us.
Whenever the Apple HDTV comes out, it’s going to need an array of slick media content partnerships to get off the ground. That’s one reason why Tim Cook might have been hobnobbing with Hollywood executives at a recent media conference, but these deals are tricky to strike, and take time.
According to analysts, that’s why the Apple HDTV might not launch until 2014… and when it does, it will be a U.S.-only launch.