This photograph by Reddit user Sean Petykowski is absolutely beautiful, and a lovely reminder of the extraordinary, almost crystalline complexity that makes up even Apple’s simpler products, like this Apple Wireless Keyboard.
Do you have a Retina MacBook Pro, 2012 MacBook Pro or a 2012 MacBook Air? Have you noticed things running a bit hot, or the battery life not quite being up to par with what Apple’s told you to expect?
Apple has just released a new software update for MacBooks from June 2012 onward that fixes issues that can lead to increased CPU power consumption, as well as improve compatibility with some USB devices through these device’s new USB 3 ports. The update weighs in at a little over 76 megabytes and can be downloaded at the link below.
Source: Apple
There’s no shortage of under-the-radar games on the iOS App Store that have ripped off some art, an idea, or even an IP from bigger and more successful products, but we haven’t seen a rip-off as shameless as Armed Heroes for a while, which seems to have stolen all of its art assets wholesale from the wildly successful (and wildly addictive) Mac and PC action game, Torchlight.
Every once and a while here at Cult of Mac, we like to peel open our gadget bags and catalogue what’s inside them for a bit of fun in our “What’s in our gadget bag?” series. The scope of our gadget bags has nothing on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s, though: his bag contains two iPads, a MacBook Pro, two iPod nanos, three iPhone 4Ses, an iPhone 4, a Mophie, a Jambox and even more.
One of the many clever little touches accompanying last week’s official unveiling of the Tweetbot alpha for Mac was the icon: signifying’s the app’s alpha status, the blue robotic bird icon we all know and love on iOS was replaced with a metallic silver egg. Get it? Because it’s still not hatched.
I still love that joke, and it’s a great example of the little things Tapbots does that sets them apart from the rest… but I have to say, over the course of the last week using Tweetbot as my Mac Twitter client, I’ve missed having Tweetbot’s iconic blue bird in my dock. Here’s how to give Tweetbot for Mac the same icon as on iOS.
Do you hate Apple’s increasing tendency towards skeuomorphic designs? In other words, do you hate how Apple keeps on slathering their beautifully designed apps with a revolting faux wood or leather finish?
You’re not the only one, but luckily, it’s not hard to remove.
In a very unusual revearsal from their previous position, Apple has re-embraced EPEAT environmental standards for all of its products.
Nowadays, Apple locks its devices down pretty tightly: RAM soldered onto motherboards, proprietary torx screws and parts glued to each other inside cases. About the only tool you’ll ever find Apple shipping a product with that has been designed to help you actually open that device up is the iPhone’s liquid metal SIM ejection tool.
But that wasn’t always the case. Thirty years ago, Apple shipped every 5.25″ disk drive controller add-on kit for their Apple II computer with the adorable little wrench you see in the picture above, meant to help you actually install the card in your machine. It even had a cute little Apple logo stamped into the metal. I wish I had one of those for my keychain.
Via: Reddit
When we review speaker docks here at Cult of Mac, one of the most common things we’ll ding them for in our ratings is lack of Bluetooth streaming support. Especially for the more expensive speaker docks, it just seems like a no brainer: why not just slap in a Bluetooth chip for a couple bucks and infinitely expand the usefulness of your product?
We assume that we will continue to be disappointed by Bluetooth-less speaker docks for years to come, but maybe this brilliant KickStarter project can help mitigate that disappointment. Called the Pear (get it?), it’s a tiny little Bluetooth dongle that plugs into your speaker dock’s 30 Pin Dock Connector and gives A2DP streaming Bluetooth audio support to any device!
There’s not much more to it, which is why this is such a great idea: imagine being able to upgrade that dusty old speaker dock going unused on your nightstand or in your kitchen with just a $40 add-on. Unfortunately, it’s a Kickstarter project right now, but with more than $29,000 dollars towards its $40,000 goal already attained with almost two months left to go, this looks like one idea that’s going to soon become a reality.
Source: Kickstarter
Via: Engadget
Foursquare, Facebook, even Find My Friends… these are all services that are ostensibly designed to help us to find our real-life buddies when we’re around town. So why are they so bad at it? Why do they all feel so useless?
The reason’s pretty simple when you think about it: most of the time, you don’t really care where your friends are, or how many trophies they’ve earned, but when you do want to know where they are, you want to know exactly where they are at that precise moment, either because they’re running late or you’re hoping to meet up. And the only way to really know that with any certainty is to ask directly.
Tehula is a new iPhone app that makes asking people where they are just deviously simple. And it works even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad: all you need is a phone with a GPS unit and a web browser.
Back in 1992, sci-fi futurist and console cowboy cyberpunk William Gibson of Neuromancer fame helped come up with a puzzle that has been puzzling computer cryptographers ever since.
At the 1992 Meeting of the Americas Society, a 3.5-inch disk meant to run on a Mac PowerBook was distributed alongside a limited print noir art book by Dennish Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, Jr. On the disk was an unknown poem Gibson had penned called “Agrippa (a book of the dead)”. When the disk was plugged into a PowerBook, the text of the poem was displayed exactly once… and then a script on the disk caused the poem to be permanently scrambled so it could never be read again.
Two decades later, one cryptography student is trying to get to the bottom of how it all works.
This is interesting: Apple has just applied for a patent showing a way that they could allow the iPod nano to sync and charge through pins positioned in the clip. What’s most interesting about this is that it implies that the iPod nano could ditch the 30-Pin Dock Connector, just like the Shuffle.
Hardware news site Kitguru.net has put up an extensive gallery of images which they believe is the iPhone 5 in the wild. We disagree: this is pretty clearly a rough model someone has put together for the purpose of getting the jump on making cases or accessories. But it still shows what the consensus is amongst accessory makers with ties to the Far East about what the next iPhone will look like.
If you’ve ever gamed on your Mac or iPad, you’re probably a big fan of the Tomorrow Corporation and their indescribably weird physics puzzler, World of Goo. They’re now teasing a new game, called Little Inferno, and while there’s no gameplay to go by, it looks even weirder, taking place in a world suffering from a mysterious ice age in which children must burn their old toys and mementos and breathe in the fumes in order to stay warm and fight off encroaching death.
Yup. Absolutely bonkers. There’s no release date yet, but you can pre-order the alpha for $14.99, which will get you access to the game early on the PC or Mac. The iOS version will probably come out a few months after release if World of Goo is anything to go by.
Source: Little Inferno
What does it take to work at the Apple Store besides a love of all-things-Apple and a willingness to work for a low hourly wage? Three things: great customer service, true grit and the ability to tell Steve Jobs himself that he’s being a total idiot.
With OS X Mountain Lion, AirPlay Mirroring is finally coming to the Mac, allowing some Macs to stream audio and video directly to their Apple TV.
‘Some’ is the operative word here. Much to the disappointment of the vast majority of Mac owners who will be installing Mountain Lion on their machines in a couple weeks time, AirPlay Mirroring will only work if you have an iMac, MacBook Air or Mac Mini from mid-2011, or a MacBook Pro from early 2011.
There’s been a lot of conspiracy theories floated about this requirement. Some have argued that it’s forced obsolescence on Apple’s part, trying to force older Mac owners to upgrade their machines. Others have suggested that the reason Apple requires a Mac from 2011 or later is because of special DRM technology in Intel’s chips that didn’t debut until last year.
The truth of the matter, however, is far less sensational. The reason you need a 2011 Mac to make use of AirPlay Mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion is because the graphics in older Macs just don’t cut the mustard.
When you think about the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, you probably think about all of their excellent particle smashing work, which recently culminated in the supposed discovery of the so-called ‘god’ particle, the Higgs Boson.
But twenty years ago this July, the researchers at CERN were responsible for another watershed moment, not in the history of physics, but in the history of the web: they put up the first ever image on the Internet. And they used a Macintosh to do it.
More than any other iPod, the venerable iPod nano has tended to be the chrysalid of the family, morphing from one radically different shape to the next with every successive generation.
The first couple generations of the iPod nano tended to be long and thin devices, to be replaced with a squatter square third-gen model, before returning to its familiar rectangle shape for the fourth and fifth generations, only to become a radically different touchscreen Shuffle-sized device in 2010.
Crazy. So what’s next for the iPod nano? According to a new report, it’ll stay a multitouch device, but again become long, thin and rectangular. It’ll even get a home button!
In 2006, Apple released an iPod that, to this day, is unique amongst all of the iPods it sells in that it didn’t come with a standard Dock Connector: the iPod shuffle.
In order to save space in a design that was built from the ground up to be as tiny as possible, Apple jettisoned the traditional 30-Pin Dock Connector in the second-gen shuffle in favor of a clever implementation of USB that plugged in right through the 3.5mm audio jack.
For the last six years, Apple has favored this implementation of USB syncing and charging in its line of iPod shuffles, even as every other model of iPhone, iPod or iPad shipped with a much bulkier 30-Pin Apple Dock Connector.
As rumors have heated up that Apple will abandon the 30-Pin Dock Connector in the next iPhone for a slimmer 19-Pin Connector, a natural question to ask is, “why?” If Apple just wants to save space in the next iPhone, why not just adopt the time-tested iPod shuffle’s approach, which is about the most efficient and elegant implementation of USB ever designed?
The answer’s simple: while the iPod shuffle’s USB design is ingenious at syncing and charging, it’s really crappy at everything else that the 30-Pin Dock Connector is designed to do. But what does the 30-Pin Dock Connector do, why doesn’t Apple just use USB like most of its competitors, and why is 19-Pin — not 30 — the way to go?
Well, here’s a good idea that’s been a long time coming: AT&T is about to launch a new service that will make it easy for you to report and block your iPhone or iPad’s service if it has been stolen.
Although Apple quietly fixed the problem on their end that led to numerous corrupt app updates being sent out to customers, the after effects continued to plague app developers who had been bitten by the bug in the form of one-star App Store reviews from outraged customers. Now Apple’s done the right thing, and obscured these one-star reviews from influencing afflicted apps’ ratings.
Everyone wants the latest hot Apple product, even gangs of masked thieves carrying deadly assault rifles.
When the original Apple I and Apple II computers hit the market, they weren’t the only invention of creator Steve Wozniak. Woz’s goal from the get go was that the Apple II should be able to run a faithful reproduction of Breakout, the game he had helped code for Atari before the formation of Apple.
Thus was born Integer BASIC, which shipped on every Apple I and II and eventually lead to Applesoft BASIC, the first computer language most people growing up in the 80s and even early 90s ever learned.
If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane, Joshua Bell has coded up an awesome emulator of Applesoft BASIC that runs using Javascript, in-browser. Not only can you use it to write endlessly recursive profanity just like you did in Junior High, (GOTO 10) but it even comes with a number of cool vintage sample programs… although ironically not Breakout.
Apple’s iWork suite hasn’t been updated since January 2009. To put that in perspective, when the last major version of iWork came out, OS X Leopard was still the most recent version of Apple’s operating system, and Snow Leopard was still eight months away from being announced: OS X Lion and Mountain Lion weren’t even glimmers on the horizon then. The most current iPhone was the iPhone 3G, and the iPad was still a year from being released.
It’s obvious, then, that the iWork suite is way past due for an update. It’s possible, though, that we could see iWork ’12 hit as soon as the end of July, dropping alongside OS X Mountain Lion.
One of the killer features of OS X Mountain Lion is AirPlay Mirroring. Just like on your iPad or iPhone, AirPlay Mirroring will allow you to beam video and sound from your Mountain Lion Mac to an Apple TV connected to your television set. The result? If you’re someone like me who watches a lot of video on his MacBook Air, you’ll never have to reach for that Thunderbolt-to-HDMI converter again.
There’s only one problem with AirPlay Mirroring in Mountain Lion: inexplicably, it doesn’t work on all Macs. In fact, unless you have an iMac, MacBook Air or MacMini from mid-2011, or a MacBook Pro from early 2011, you can’t get in on Mountain Lion’s streaming action.
Why? One theory is that it’s all about DRM.