Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he'll really appreciate it.
While several iPad case manufacturers have already announced iPad mini and iPad 4th generation cases since the product reveals yesterday in San Francisco, Apple has today posted several high-resolution technical drawings of each of the new tablet computers to its developer website, on a page titled, “Designing Cases for iPod, iPhone, and iPad.”
Yet Siri can, at times, just be a little loud. If you want to whisper your question to her in a quiet environment, she may, in fact, shout the answer back to you, even if you have your iPhone on silent mode. Turns out, Siri has her own independent volume controls, which can be adjusted for when you’re in those “keep quiet” situations. Or, I suppose, turn it up in the super loud ones.
When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.
It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.
As you may have noticed, Apple announced the iPad mini today. Soon after, of course, came the analyst perspective – if there’s a strong demand for the iPad mini device, we may see serious supply issues. This has been rumored already in regards to the aluminum back for the new iPad mini, but this is the first report that a shortage of display units may also have a role to play.
“We’re now starting to see the issues that [Apple] is having with Samsung,” said Richard Shim, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, in an interview with CNET.
Samsung is not supplying displays for iPad mini, according to the analyst, which leaves only two suppliers to make the smaller iPad mini for Apple.
Apple Head of Marketing, Phil Schiller, took the stage today and asked a very important question. “What does the iPad mini do that the iPad doesn’t already do?” he wondered aloud.
His answer was only half as good – “It can fit in one hand.” Here at Cult of Mac, however, we think that’s only part of the story. The fact is that Apple’s newest, smallest, thinnest iPad makes a perfect gaming controller.
Privacy, it’s important. With all the integration between apps, devices, computers, and the big, bad internet, it’s easy to lose track of all the ways people can find out about you, your friends, and your family.
Thankfully, most services and devices these days have some sort of tool or system to allow you the control you need to manage which info is available and to whom, as well as how much is even out there. iOS 6 is no different, with a nice set of toggles to allow you to be the boss of your own information.
Apple announced the iPad mini today, a smaller iPad model that starts at $329 for a 16G model. Along with the new form factor and a lightning connector cable, Apple is also making Smart Covers for the new iOS device. You can see them right on the Apple Store website.
As it says in the official Apple Press release, the iPad mini Smart Cover will be available in six colors, including dark gray, blue, green, pink, light gray, and (PRODUCT) RED. It will cost $39 and fit that sweet new Wi-Fi iPad mini you can pre-order on October 26, purchase in an Apple retail store on November 2. The Wi-Fi + Cellular models will show up mid-November.
It’s got to be tough making cases and other accessories for Apple products. While it may seem that everyone knows everything about the new iPad mini already, the truth is that the actual specifications of the product are unknown by anyone except Apple and its manufacturing partners in China.
An accessory maker who wants to create an iPad mini case, for example, is hard pressed to know what to make, what size and shape to make it, and what type of person is going to want it, especially at first. The stakes are high, considering that a well-designed case that makes it to market at the same time as the iPad mini will be the one that most people choose.
We spoke to Marware’s Director of Marketing, Ronnie Khadaran, who opened up about the process his company went through to design its new iPad mini cases and accessories.
This is the most anticipated iPad release yet, bringing the apples-and-oranges competition between Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the newly-releaced Google Nexus 7 to a boil just in time for the holiday gift-giving season of 2012. We’re all extremely excited to see what this heavily rumored new form factor will bring to the table, and how Apple will position the device in its already spectacularly successful line of iOS devices.
The iPad 2 was announced in March of 2011, with the new iPad (not the iPad 3, as we all assumed) was revealed in March of 2012. The iPad 2 broke the thinness barrier of the iPad one, and brought faster CPU and graphics enhancements, while the iPad 3 upped the ante to Retina-quality resolution and a faster, warmer CPU.
What will the iPad mini do to convince us all we need yet one more of Cupertino’s magical devices in our households? In this Cult of Mac rumor roundup, we’ll examine everything we think we know about the iPad Mini.
Preview is a catch-all file viewer, handling a variety of image formats as well as the ubiquitous portable document format, otherwise known as the PDF, which was introduced by Adobe in 1993, and was released as an open standard in 2008. One thing Preview has had trouble with, until now, has been adding extra pages to a PDF document.
Not anymore, as the Mountain Lion version of Preview will let you add pages to PDF documents on the fly. Here’s how.
Fieldrunners 2 is one of my favorite iOS games, hands down. Developer Subatomic Studios has taken the tower defense genere to a new level with this sequel to their popular and multi-platform game, Fieldrunners. This second game was released in July of this year, almost 4 years after the first iteration came out on iOS, then Mac.
Today, the studio announced that they’ve added in-app purchasing to the game, something many games come with from the start. Those games, however, typically come at no up-front cost. Fieldrunners 2 was released as a premium, paid game, at $2.99 for the iPhone and $7.99 for the iPad version. Why did they add this freemium-style in-app purchasing system to a game that’s already doing well as a paid app?
Find My Friends is an interesting app, allowing family and friends to keep track of each other in real time. When you use your iTunes account with the Find My Friends app, you can let those important to you know where you are using the location services on your iOS device, like your iPhone.
But what if you have friends or family that don’t have iCloud, or even iOS (perish the thought!)? It turns out that the latest Find My Friends app that comes with iOS 6 allows for email notifications, so you can have your iPhone send out an automated, location-based email whenever you arrive or leave a specific location. Here’s how.
Got a birthday wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they are never wanting for just the right gift to give you for the next celebration? How about a grocery list that you can add to secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing that you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list?”
Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can set this up using Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with OS X Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, as well as with iCloud.com Here’s how to set it up.
Shared Photo Streams came along with iOS 6, allowing us all to create our own little photo sharing social networks using nothing more than an iCloud account and our iOS devices. Creating and sharing Photo Streams is dead-simple, but managing some of the more non-intuitive features, like comments and subscribers, can be a bit tricky for the uninitiated.
We took a look at these new features and put together a guide on using Shared Photo Streams to help you get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch when creating and sharing your photos with your friends and family.
The new developer seed for OS X Server v2.2, Seed 2, is out. In an email sent to developer accounts, Apple announced the new download, and included a link to the seed download source, a set of instructions on how to instal and/or upgrade from various previous versions of OS X Server, and a PDF with the new changes detailed.
Safari 6 came out just before Mountain Lion did, and it’s bundled with Apple’s latest operating system. For many Mac users, Safari is the end of the line when it comes to web browsing, as well as a super fast modern, accessible web browser for the rest of us.
We took a look at several new features of this latest iteration of Safari, including security tips and tricks, as well as how to use Reading Lists and sync tabs from your Mac to your iOS devices, and vice versa.
If you’ve played any of the MapleStory games on the web or iOS, you know Nexon. They’re an established developer of free-to-play online games for iOS, the web, and PC. Today the company announced the launch of another free-to-play iOS game, Space Tanks, for the iPad and iPhone. It’s Nexon’s 27th mobile title this year. Wow.
The MacHeist Bundle is a great deal of software for a great price, and it benefits great charities. This much you know, because we already told you.
Today, however, we learned that another app has been added to the run down, the $50 cooking app, MacGourmet, that developer Mariner Software calls the “iTunes for recipes.”
Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.
As a publicly traded company, Apple submits its financial reports every quarter to let their investors know how well the company is doing. However, Apple is under no obligation to share specific financial results about each of the individual products it sells, data that it is still trying to protect via the court in the Apple v Samsung case in Northern California.
However, rabid interest in the specifics continues unabated. In a survey reported today, CNN Money asked 61 Apple analysts, 31 from Wall Street and 30 independent analysts, what their estimates were for specific device sales in the quarter that just ended on September 29, 2012. Turns out, the analysts estimates were all over the place when it came to predicting the number of iPads sold.
Telltale Games announced today that iOS users can now download Episode Three of The Walking Dead: The Game, entitled “Long Road Ahead,” to their iPhone or iPad. It’s the third of five episodes in the critically acclaimed series based on Robert Kirkman’s zombie drama, The Walking Dead, which started as an award-winning comic book, then made its way to become a critically-acclaimed television series on AMC.
Shared Photo Streams are fantastic, of course, barring the niggling detail that only the person who creates them can add photos to them. Sometimes, though, as with all tech, things don’t necessarily work the way they should. For example, sometimes you won’t be able to see comments that have been posted by subscribers. Other times, deleting a comment from a shared Photo Stream via iPhoto or Aperture won’t be reflected on your iPhone.
I got really used to using Chrome on my desktop and laptop Macs before Mountain Lion came out with Safari 6 at its heels. I try to use Chrome on my iOS devices, for the history and bookmark synching, I really do, but more often than not, I end up using mobile Safari, because a) it’s the default for all clicked links in other apps and b) I really, really like Reader.
Now, if you’re using Safari on both your Mac and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you’ll be pleased to know that you can access the tabs you’ve opened on your iPhone on your Mac, and vice versa, as long as you’re using iCloud. Let’s take a look at how we do this.
US District Court Judge Lucy Koh today denied Apple’s request to have several documents sealed from public view in its fight to recoup more damages from Samsung than were even awarded by the jury several weeks ago. The documents include “product-specific unit sales, revenue, profit, profit margin, and cost data” that it also wants to use in its argument for a higher award from the court.
Judge Koh basically said that Apple can’t have it both ways. Her decision says to the Cupertino-based company that it can’t use documents in its arguments that it then in turn wants to keep secret. It just doesn’t work that way.
The folks at Klout, the social network influence web company, want you to be recognized for your Klout score wherever you go. Their iOS app has added Perks and a special Passbook-enabled influence card that you can access right on your iOS device when you’re out and about.