John Brownlee - page 99

We’re nosey as anyone here at Cult of Mac. We are also complete nerds, which means that we’re always peeking into people’s bags at conferences, or checking out what gear people use.

And we figured that you all might be just as bad, so we figured we’d rip open our man bags, handbags and purses and show you what’s inside, and why we carry what we do.

We’ll be doing this periodically from time to time. This week, we’ll be checking out what’s usually in the three (!) separate gadget bags of Cult of Mac Deputy Editor John Brownlee, and he’ll be filling us in on what everything is and why he carries it.

Head on by the kiddy table at your local Apple Store and you used to see four iMacs, loaded up with educational software and games. Go on by with your kid today and you’ll see four iPads running educational iOS apps instead.

Hope they wipe those things down frequently: never seen a kid without at least several culture farms worth of germs on his or her pink, sticky hands. Those iPads are going to be disease-crusted petri dishes after a day’s worth of kids finish sliming them up.

Otherwise, great call. The only better learning tool for a child than an iMac is an iPad.

Apple has a patent for a touchscreen iMac with an arm that swivels the display down to allow you to manipulate the display more like an iPad, without getting “gorilla arm.” It’s a cool patent, but what would that iMac look like in real life? Motion graphics and 3D animation student Joakim Ulseth put together an awesome video bringing an iMac Touch running OS X Mountain Lion to life. There’s a lot of problems with this sort of design, and Apple would never in a million years release it, but it sure does make a sexy video. [via iFans]

One of the greatest things about a service like Dropbox is that as long as you are either using apps with support baked in or can save your files to a Dropbox folder, you can keep all your data synced between multiple Macs.

What if you want to keep app data synced between Macs that don’t lend themselves to being saved to a Dropbox folder or don’t come with Dropbox support, though?

For example, most Mac games don’t allow you to specify where you keep your saves, but what if you want to be able to save your game on your iMac and then load it up again on the road on your MacBook Pro? Or what if you want to keep your app settings synced between your iMac and MacBook Air? Settings files are usually stored in a hidden system folder on your Mac, so how do you keep things synced then?

It’s actually way easier than you might think. Here’s how to keep any file or folder synced between Macs using the cloud, no matter where it’s stored.

For the last few years, each Worldwide Developer’s Conference has sold out in successively less and less time. Three years ago, WWDC sold out in a month. Two years ago, it sold out in a week. Last year, it took twelve hours.

Everyone knew WWDC 2012 would sell out even faster than last year’s when it was eventually announced, but it’s obvious even Apple didn’t anticipate how fast that would be: less than two hours to sell out 5,000 tickets.

The problem? Cupertino-based Apple announced WWDC ticket sales before its own time zone even rolled out of bed and brushed its teeth. The result is that West Coast based app devs — the kind who can just climb in their cars and drive to the Moscone Center — have been totally boned, and tickets to WWDC were gone before they even knew they were available for sale.

At $1600 bucks each, WWDC tickets don’t come cheap, and that ticket shock can be especially acute if you’re a student, slaving away on the app you hope will make your fortune between classes and barista shifts.

Apple’s sympathetic. That’s why they are again offering 150 student scholarships to full-time or part-time students who want to go to WWDC.

In the last two weeks, Apple’s share price has plummeted over $60 from its all-time high ahead of reports suggesting that iPhone growth was stalling at domestic carriers. Today, though, Apple has again hurtled past the $600 barrier in after hours trading after Cupertino announced yet another record breaking quarter.

Looks like we can look forward to another three months of stock growth, until the next silly pre-earnings call investor scare.

[via]

Apple has just announced their Q2 2012 results, and despite Wall Street plunging AAPL stock by $60 a share over the last couple of weeks, there was no reason for pessimism as Apple is announcing yet another record quarter, with 35 million iPhones, 12 million iPads, 7.7 million iPods and 4 million Macs sold.

Full press release after the jump. Stay tuned for live coverage of the conference call with investors later today.

Linus Torvalds is not a huge fan of Apple products. He is, as he describes himself, a socks and sandal kind of guy, a tinkerer. Even so, the Linux creator is absolutely in love with the MacBook Air… and wonders why the hell other laptop makers can’t come out and release an ultrabook that’s worth a damn.

OS X has been undergoing a gradual process of iOS-ification ever since Lion was released last year, and that process will continue with this year’s Mountain Lion. A new rumor states, however, that it won’t end there, and iPhoto ’12 will be packed with features lifted from iPhoto for iOS when it is released on the Mac App Store this summer.

Yesterday, we heard an analyst report suggesting that Apple would effectively kill off the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines and merge then into a single, streamlined device known only as the MacBook.

It was an interesting report, but analysts say a lot of things, including sometimes when they are at the bottom of a barrel of bourbon. But now Mactrast is saying that their own unproven source is echoing reports of a MacBook Pro/MacBook Air hybrid… boasting USB 3.0 support and a sexy, lightweight Liquidmetal chassis.

Asking people what the best iPhone carrier is usually leads to a number of thoroughly unscientific and subjective responses. For example, one person might recommend AT&T simply because they’re locked into a two-year contract with Ma Bell and don’t want to admit they made a mistake. Someone on Sprint, on the other hand, might recommend their network for the “unlimited data” to someone for whom speed — not volume — is the most important criterion.

CarrierCompare is a new iOS app that aims to moderate the debate by allowing you to see what the best iPhone carrier is at any given location. But right now, Apple’s stamping down on a key feature that makes the app less useful than it could be.

Chinese ingenuity and resourcefulness is an amazing thing, and we see it in action every time we pick up an iPhone or iPad. We also sometimes see it when iPhones are smuggled into China. First, Chinese iPhone and iPad smugglers were using crossbows and ziplines to get over the border, and now they’re cutting open glass beer bottles, stashing iPhones inside then gluing them shut.

This woman was caught trying to smuggle over 200 iPhone 4s and iPhone 4Ses at the Sha Tau Kok border this way. Wonder what she did with all that beer. And imagine finding an iPhone at the bottom of your brew. Usually the only thing I see there is pink elephants… and maybe the occasional dead mouse.

[via MIC Gadget]

The United States Department of Justice has already filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five other e-book publishers for alleged e-book price fixing in the lead up to the launch of the iBookstore, breaking Amazon’s wholesale monopoly on e-books and forcing them to adopt the agency model.

Apple believes it’s got a really good case against such allegations, and wants to go to trial to fight the charges. So do publish Macmillan and Penguin, who have refused to settle the case. But it looks like they won’t *just* have to defend themselves in the United States, but now up north as well, as price-fixing class action lawsuits against Apple and other publishers have started being filed in Canada as well.

For the price, the Sony RDP-X500iP is a hell of a lot of sound. In fact, it’s the best-sounding iPhone, iPod or iPad dock we’ve seen in its price range, and it even manages to match the audio quality of some speaker docks that cost $100-$200 more. If you’re looking to buy one, though, you should be aware of a couple of niggles before you drop your dough.

As you may know, Apple is being targeted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for calling the new iPad “4G-capable” when Australia not only doesn’t have any LTE networks, it will never have LTE networks compatible with the new iPad.

Apple’s already changed the wording on its website in response to the complaints to make it clear that Australian customers buying an iPad WiFi + 4G are only getting HSPA+ speeds at best, but that may not be good enough. Regulators are now targeting Apple in a lawsuit over their use of the term 4G, and Apple’s already preparing its defense.

That defense? That 4G doesn’t actually refer to any specific technology, but is just a marketing term. And honestly, at this point, that’s about right?

Probably the most widely anticipated gaming release on the Mac scene this year is Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III, which is due to be released — after years of buzz and a twelve-year gap since Diablo II — on May 15th.

The Diablo games are fantastically-tuned hack-and-slashes in which you explore randomized dungeons, collect loot and gelatinize waist-deep hordes of monsters, and if you’ve never played one, you either hate gaming or have been woefully deprived.

Luckily, we can right that problem easily enough. Although there’s a month left before Diablo III is available to purchase, you can play the game’s beta up to level 13 for free all weekend long.

Your iPhone’s touchscreen might look just like a single pane of living glass, but there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. Every iPhone is comprised of multiple layers: an LCD that actually blasts the pixels out of the Retina Display, a glass substrate laye separating the LCD from the touch layer that translates your finger swipes and prods into input the system can read, and a layer of protective Gorilla Glass on top.

Obviously, Apple’s existing touchscreen tech works well, but having so many different layers has its drawbacks. A big one is that it adds to the iPhone’s thickness. But Apple may already be on the cusp of inking a deal with Sharp and Toshiba to adopt in-cell touch panel displays, which should lead to a slimmer, lighter iPhone 5.

Holy crap. Check out this amazing custom iPad cover Redditor 44 Oz. had made for him by Australian-based leatherworking firm High On Glue, made with premium leather, suede lining, a kangaroo leather spine and embossed with the original Apple logo designed by Ron Wayne back in 1976, featuring Sir Isaac Newton resting under an Apple tree.

I don’t usually like folio-style cases, but I’m sliming myself with thick ropes of drool here. Covetous ropes of drool. This is a thing of beauty. Beat the rush and go give High On Glue your business, they’re going to be backed-up for months after this case goes viral.

More images below.

When people ask why Apple doesn’t make its iPads in America, the usual explanation is that labor costs are so high, there’s no way an iPad could be made in the country for less than $1000. That answer has always lacked weight, as the manual labor of constructing an iPad is actually a very small portion of its overall build cost: building an iPad in America would cut down margins, but not double the price.

No, there’s a better reason why every iPad gets made in China, and you can find it on your local periodic table. Every iPad is made with a sizable number of rare earth metals… all of which can only be mined in China.

This is the default signature on AT&T’s new Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. Sorry. Rather, what I meant to say was, this is the default signature on the Samsung Galaxy SS™ II Skyrocket™, an AT&T^:P 4G^ℌ LTE^℞ smartphone^℃!!!!!!

[via Daring Fireball and Jason Prell]

Apple and Samsung have been trading body blows in their legal war-on-the-street for awhile now, suing and countersuing each other the Earth over for patent and IP violations. Now U.S. Judge Lucy Koh has ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook and Gee-Sung Choi to stop suing each other for a second and meet to try to talk it all out.

Do you remember when Twitter patented the pull-to-refresh tech they acquired from Loren Brichter when they purchased Tweetie and made it their official, thereby effectively putting all the apps that use pull-to-refresh (like Tweetbot or even Facebook) in their legal crosshairs?

Pull-to-refresh inventor Loren Brichter said there was no reason to worry, and it seems like he was right, as Twitter has today announced an awesome initiative in which they have promised that their patents will only ever be used defensively… even if they sell them to another company down the line!

One of the most annoying things about Apple’s Bluetooth implementation in iOS is that turning it on or off is a four-step process involving digging deep into Settings. Considering the battery drain associated with just leaving Bluetooth on and the wide variety of devices you can connect via Bluetooth to your device, it’s a constant irritation for many.

Jailbreak utilities like SBSettings make turning bluetooth on/off on the fly a fairly simple proposition, but unfortunately, Apple hasn’t borrowed inspiration from any of them when it comes to baking better Bluetooth toggling into iOS. A new $0.99 app on the App Store, though, makes it much easier to toggle Bluetooth on the fly on your device even without a jailbreak. Launch the app once to toggle Bluetooth on, launch again to toggle off. Simple.

A couple of months ago, The Wall Street Journal raised a huge stink when they reported that Google was tracking millions of iOS & Mac Safari users against their wishes using a loophole in the way that Safari’s cookie handling algorithm.

Google on its parts always said it had done nothing wrong, and used known functionality in Safari to make sure their advertising cookies were always stored locally on users’ machines, even if their cookie settings were set to private. Looks like that might not have been enough for the FTC, though, who are now looking to start doling out fines to Google over the issue.