Rob LeFebvre - page 6

Want to get your hands on the latest, greatest iOS and OS X features for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac before anyone else does? Do you love checking out all the new stuff in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan so you can be the first to comment on them?

All you need to do is sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program, and you’ll be able to access the public betas of these flagship operating systems before they’re available to the rank and file.

Here’s how to sign up for (and install) Apple’s latest public betas.

Urbanears Hellas Bluetooth washable headphones

You can’t beat the sound quality (or comfort) of a good pair of on-ear wireless headphones, but working out with most pairs can be an exercise in moisture management with a side of stink-appeal.

These new Hellas headphones from Urbanears solve that problem with a removable, machine-washable headband and ear cup. You simply pull off the mesh-covered bits, toss them in the provided net laundry bag, and drop them in your washing machine. You’ll never have to deal with smelly, sweaty headphones again.

Apple TV does apps, and you could be the next breakout star of the App Store with these new educational videos straight from the mothership.

Apple’s providing developers with 11 new video tech talks to help you understand how it all works, in hopes that even more developers and designers will choose Apple TV for their next project.

Trying to express your empathy for a friend’s grief, or your outrage at a recent political post, has been a Facebook conundrum since day one. No one wants to Like things they don’t actually, well, like. It’s just too limiting.

That’s why Mark Zuckerberg and Co. just rolled out Facebook’s new Reactions, five new emotional icons that we all get to use in place of the familiar thumbs-up Like button (which is still there, thank goodness).

The new Facebook Reactions system has rolled out to the web and your iOS devices today (via the Facebook app). Here’s how to respond to Facebook posts with a bit more color.

There’s a big difference between photos you put up on Instagram and those that your buddies upload and then tag you in.

Chances are, the ones you’re tagged in aren’t as flattering as the ones you put up yourself.

If you want to keep embarrassing Instagram pics off your profile, here’s what you can do.

Even if the “teacher” is a college kid with bad diction, the one-hour Lightroom Basics course that I just took is pretty darn fantastic.

I have to take a lot of photos here at Cult of Mac, especially for reviews. Every gadget and gewgaw I review gets a big, bold photo at the top to best show off its features.

Because of this, I’ve been hoping to get serious about my photography for a while now. The first step was to sign up for one of these amazing, useful courses.

Instagram power users are all about the filters, typically choosing a few favorites that they use more often than others.

Instead of swiping back and forth along the filters row, why not reorder them to put the ones you use most often up front? Better yet, how about deleting the ones you don’t use ever to streamline your entire filter experience?

Here’s how.

As a victim of a poorly-made iPhone wallet case that lost my ID and credit card, I’m always wary when I try a new one. I like carrying my valuables with my iPhone so I don’t need a secondary wallet, but I really like hanging onto my stuff even more.

The Urban Armor Gear Trooper case takes great pains to secure three to four plastic cards (and a bit of cash) in its roomy interior and provides a locking door that acts like a mini safe — nothing’s gonna fall out of this wallet case.

Folks looking to promote their next big block-party, wedding or musical shindig can now get in on Snapchat’s action with these new temporary geofilters for the popular photo-sharing service.

Called “On-Demand” geofilters, they’ll allow anyone, including local businesses, to create temporary location-based filters that will show up whenever other Snapchatters walk through the area defined when they’re created.

The bad news? The new feature will cost you $5 per filter to create.

We’re not saying that you search for inappropriate stuff on Instagram or anything, but if for some reason you’d like to clear your search history in the photo sharing app, you can.

You can’t view your search history directly, but it does inform your new searches, making it “easier for you to find your favorite people and hashtags again quickly,” according to Instagram.

So, if you don’t want certain (ahem) searches to show up when you’re looking for new things, here’s how to clear your Instagram searches.

Stellar Wanderer gets right into the action with space battles from the very first mission, which takes place in the full 360 degrees of your spaceship viewport.

You’ll take to the vastness of interstellar space, populated by huge space stations, rugged traders, and (obviously) hordes of space pirates to complete missions given to you by mysterious individuals and then taking the reward money to upgrade your craft and piloting skills.

There’s a lot of space in space, and you’ll feel every kilometer of it when you drop into Stellar Wanderer on your iPhone or iPad.

Check out the gorgeous launch trailer below.

Tim Cook sparked an internet controversy when he penned his open letter to Apple customers about why the tech giant was pushing back against a court order to create an FBI-friendly version of its iOS software.

Find out more about Apple’s epic battle over iPhone encryption, along with how to unlock your iPhones secret emoticons, 10 hard drive space-saving tips, the best news and RSS apps for your iOS devices, and a bit about John McAfee’s bid to hack the iPhone for the FBI.

All that and much more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Here are the top stories this week.

Instagram is a veritable playground of fascinating photography. The trick is to find accounts to follow that won’t waste your time with snaps of low-quality food or wacky pets. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.

So how do you find folks worth following? By checking out what the people you follow on Instagram are looking at, of course. You can also check out the photos you’ve liked, and add them to your feed if you haven’t already.

Here’s how to follow your friends’ hearts to fuel your Instagram addiction.

If you want people to read–and hopefully respond–to your emails, you should really pay attention to the data.

Email service Boomerang, which lets you schedule emails into the future as well as find out who’s read them, did a little research into its own customers to find out what, exactly, will get recipients to read your missives.

Turns out, if you write like an emotional 3rd grader, you’ll get better results.

Avid Instagram users like to know when new photos show up on the social media platform so they can be the first to like, respond, or even comment on their favorite Instagrammer’s pictures.

You can do the same thing by turning on notifications for a specific user, letting you know exactly when your buddies post to Instagram.

Here’s how to enable this cool hidden feature.

Stanley is a bendable, leather-and-felt iPhone stand that thinks different.

Instead of the standard aluminum and white plastic of many an iPhone stand, Distil Union’s Stanley is a soft, approachable bit of gear that will bend into all sorts of positions, letting you set the viewing angle and height of your iPhone with very little effort.

It’s a refreshing alternative to the typical tech common to other stands, a fact that’s gotten the Stanley funded at more than twice the requested amount on Kickstarter.

Best List: Eve Energy Switch and Power Meter by Elgato

Thanks to this cool little HomeKit gadget from Elgato, I know exactly how much energy my PlayStation 4 uses (79 watts). I also know how much energy is sucked away by my living room lamp (40 watts), my big HDTV (143 watts) and my Apple TV (8 watts).

All I did was plug each of these devices into Elgato’s new Eve Energy Switch and Power Meter, and then pull up the associated app on my iPhone to get instant information on the power being pulled through whatever I’ve plugged in.

The smartplug is also voice-activated, letting me turn on and off whatever device is attached to it.

Neat, huh?

Doodling on a Snapchat is fun; it lets you customize just about any snap with the power of your own artistry, or lack thereof.

If you’ve noticed, though, when you choose the color for said doodle, there’s no white or black options. And what if you want something in between red and white, like, say, pink?

Here’s how to make your images truly your own with custom Snapchat colors.

Twitter and animated GIFs are a popular combination – the social media company’s users shared 100 million of them last year – but finding just the right one has been more art than science.

Today, however, Twitter rolls out a new way to search for your animated funnies from within the 140-character service itself.

Is this the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen on your wrist? Yes, yes it is. It’s the tiniest game of pong you ever did see, too.

Game developer Matt Wiechec has made A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch and it hits all the right nostalgic notes for ancient gaming fans like myself and retro-cool folks like you.

Check it out.

Emoji has sort of taken over my iMessage conversations on the iPhone lately, and I’m willing to bet you use a lot of the cute little pictures too.

What if I told you there was a hidden treasure trove of text-based emoticons that you can access in addition to your favorite emoji?

Even better — it’s easy to enable these iPhone secret emoticons. Here’s how.

Your next MacBook will get more than just a speed bump, with Intel’s powerful new Skylake chips bringing intense performance (and maybe better battery life) to the new laptops we’ll all be drooling over soon.

Find out exactly how these new processors will make new MacBooks rock, plus what you need to know about iOS’ brick-inducing “Error 53,” how to make Siri work even harder for you on your Apple TV, and which are the best ergonomic accessories for your Mac in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Here are the week’s top stories.

If you’ve got one of those fancy new Macbooks with the USB-C charging cable, Apple is ready to replace it for you if it’s one of the defective ones.

“A limited number of Apple USB-C charge cables that were included with MacBook computers through June 2015 may fail due to a design issue,” says the Apple web page announcing the program.

Your MacBook might not charge (or only charge intermittently) when it’s connected to one of these faulty cables.

If you’re looking to show a little local pride in Snapchat, the company made it pretty easy to make and upload your own so that you (and anyone else who’s in that location) can swipe right and show off a custom geofilter.

All you need is a graphics program like Illustrator, Photoshop, or (my favorite) Pixelmator, a little bit of time, and you can represent your town with a custom Snapchat geofilter.

Here’s how.

Snapchat lets you filter your snaps with a color, the temperature, or the name of the city you’re in (geofilters), but did you know you could create a snap with more than one of these cool things?

It’s relatively simple, but (as with many things with the popular app) it’s not super easy to find in the weird interface that Snapchat uses.

Here’s how to impress Snapchat friends with a two-filter combo.