Book fetishists often cite the smell and feel of a book as a reason to keep chopping down trees and wasting fuel to ship the pulp around the world. But what about something that we probably all value, whether we are paper-sniffers or we have entered the modern age – signed books? Specifically, how does one get a digital book signed by the author?
Brett Kelly has the answer.
Who needs Instagram? Well, me for one, ever since I gave up on Flickr and never really got started with the evil Facebook. But I’m pretty bored with the Instagram filters already (they could toss them all except X-Pro II and I wouldn’t even notice).
And yes, there are a million other photo-filtering apps out there, but what about a little DIY? If you’re feeling adventurous, grab some tape, some colored gels and your iPhone and head over to Lomography for this great little low-tech project.
Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.
With GarageBand for the iPad, Apple has brought an inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right to your favorite mobile device. This fantastic $5 app lets anyone with an iPad create, record and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
With a killer beat in place, it’s time to add the second (mostly unsung) hero of modern music: the bass. Whether your tastes run to big, fat and bottom-heavy or quick, snappy and distorted, GarageBand has you covered. With GarageBand for iPad, you can create bass tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
Let’s take a look at the simplest way to do that: Smart Bass.
With GarageBand for the Mac, Apple created something no one else had – a relatively inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right on the computer. Several iterations later, GarageBand came to the iPad, doing the same thing for mobile musicians in a big way. For $5, anyone with an iPad can create, record, and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.
The foundation of any good rock, dance, or pop song is the beat. Creating a drum track that stands out will take your music from “meh” to “wow.” With GarageBand for iPad, you can now create drum tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.
While many of us already have our eyes set on the new iPhone, which Apple will likely release this fall, there are still millions of people using the iPhone 4.
Released on June 24, 2010, the first round of iPhone 4’s are about to hit their two-year anniversary. This means that those who purchased an iPhone 4 along with the AppleCare protection plan, which effectively extends warranty protection to two years, are about to lose coverage.
If you bought an iPhone 4 in the summer of 2010 you should take some time to examine it in order to ensure that no part of it is showing signs of defect. Here’s what you need to know.
Apple touts their new 3D maps in iOS 6 as being brand new, but as it turns out, Nokia — of all companies! — beat them to it. That’s right, if you head over to maps.nokia.com right now, you can use what is essentially iOS 6 maps from your desktop browser.
It happens to all of us. You’re at your computer, ready to work, and you’ve forgotten your password. What should you do? Don’t worry, all hope isn’t lost. In this video, I’ll show you how you can reset your account password in OS X Lion, in just a few easy steps.
This is an article about using BitTorrent with other OS X apps to automate the downloading and converting of TV shows, adding metadata and then transferring them to your iPad to be watched. Some of you will rage that this is immoral, illegal (in your country) or both. Others will say that BitTorrent is, like, totally legit and is used every day for, like, downloading Linux builds, man.
I don’t care. What I do care about is watching TV Shows on my iPad, complete with subtitles, metadata, cover art and converted into a format that won’t kill the battery whilst playing back. I would buy these from the iTunes Store if I could, but as I live in Spain, I can’t. Here’s how to do it yourself.
Today the Chronic Dev Team released a new version of Absinthe, the popular tool used to jailbreak iPhones, iPads, and iPods. In this video, I’ll show how to jailbreak your device running iOS 5.1.1 with Absinthe.
The latest Absinthe untethered jailbreak for iOS has finally been released. After months of waiting, you can download the Chronic Dev Team’s free Absinthe tool to jailbreak your iOS device in a matter of minutes.
We’ll show you how to jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 the right way in this guide.
When you jailbreak an iOS device, you are given access to Cydia, the wild west frontier of tweaks, themes and apps you can’t get in Apple’s own App Store. Jailbreaking gives you the freedom to customize your device the way you see fit by installing various plugins, system-level extensions, tweaks and apps from Cydia.
After awhile, you can amass quite a few Cydia apps and packages, and it’s important to keep your purchases and downloads backed up for safe keeping. Whether it’s a jailbreak tweak you paid $2 for or a free one, you don’t want to lose what you find during your jailbreaking career.
Every several months a new jailbreak will come out for the latest version of iOS, and you’ll need to re-jailbreak your iOS device. Restoring to a stock version of iOS before jailbreaking removes all of your jailbreak apps and tweaks. In Cult of Mac’s ultimate roundup, we’ll show you the best ways to backup and restore your Cydia apps on your jailbroken iOS device.
Many people I’ve talked to are anxious to try out the new features Apple has brought to OS X Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, Apple has only made the beta of Mountain Lion available to registered developers. In this video, I’ll show you how you can get the biggest features of Mountain Lion today, using only existing apps.
One of my biggest gripes when dealing with files in OS X is working with zipped directories. OS X’s built in Archive Utility does a poor job of managing compressed files. With some tweaks though, you can make dealing with zipped files less of a pain. In this video, I’ll show you how to do it.
OS X has a nice default array of keyboard shortcuts, but as more advanced users know, it can be nice to be able to customize these shortcuts to fit your needs. In this video I’ll show you how you can customize and create keyboard shortcuts for any application.
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.
From nearly the day I began making videos here at Cult Of Mac, I’ve been receiving questions from readers and viewers about how I make my videos. From what I use to edit, to how I create certain effects within videos, I’ve heard it all, which is why I thought I’d put together a video to show those who may also be interested in video editing how easy it can be to get started making videos of your own using only the software that came with your Mac.
Jailbreaking has its many benefits, but there’s always a risk that installing a certain tweak or app from Cydia will cause something in iOS to go haywire. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you want to be able to fix the problem without having to restore and lose your jailbreak.
Luckily, there’s a relatively easy way to troubleshoot your jailbroken iOS device and find out the exact tweak that’s causing the problem.
With more and more security threats to OS X like the recent “Flashback” trojan, now’s a better time than ever to protect you Mac from any and all possible security threats. In this video, I’ll show you the best ways to keep your Mac safe from viruses and malware.
With all the retro photo-filtering apps in the App Store, it might seem redundant to take the time and effort to actually fire up Photoshop Touch and do the dirty work ourselves. But as it is a rainy April afternoon here at Cult of Mac’s Spanish HQ, I figured why not? After all, the whole point of this stuff is to have some fun, right?
So here we have it: How to make Instagrams the hard way.
Apple has said that its working on a tool to end the notorious Flashback botnet once and for all, but there’s still the remotest chance you could get infected. Keep in mind that only around 600,000 Macs have fallen prey to Flashback, and that number is a tiny fraction of the millions of Mac users around the world. Most of the machines that have been infected already are centralized in North America.
Your Mac is completely up to date and you’ve already checked to see if you’re infected by the Flashback trojan. If everything is squared away and you’re not infected already, here’s how to ensure there is zero chance you’ll get infected while you wait for Apple to save the day.
For users, Facebook’s takeover of Instagram just plain sucks. No longer will we be able to share photos of our dog or our breakfast (or our dog’s breakfast) without wondering whether Uncle Zuck is looking over our shoulders. But it will keep happening for as long as great businesses fail to charge money for their services.
In the meantime, we can future-proof our social interaction so that when the underlying services disappear, or get too evil for our tastes, we can raze our accounts to the ground and still keep everything we did there.
To do this, we’re going to use a combination of Tumblr and the amazing IFTTT (If This Then That). And while this example shows how to archive and display your Instagrams, you could ditch Instagram altogether and post photos from your favorite grunge-photo app.
So you decided to quit Instagram. You already exported your photos with Instaport, but is that enough to stop the Evil Empire from mining your account for yet more information to sell to advertisers?*
What you need to do, my friend, is delete your Instagram account entirely. Luckily, it’s pretty easy, an almost one-click process — unlike quitting Facebook itself, which is all but impossible.
iCloud is a great addition to the Apple ecosystem, but at times, it’s a little too limited in functionality for some. Many users wanted to be able to use their free iCloud storage as they would Dropbox, but iCloud restricts access and is only useful for storing app data or iOS backups. For those who are looking to get a little more out of iCloud, here’s a handy workaround I discovered today that allows you to upload any file to iCloud, much like you would with Dropbox. It’s not perfect, but it works, and for many it’ll be a helpful addition to iCloud.
There are now over 500,000 iPhone apps and 170,000 iPad apps available on Apple’s App Store and that number will surely continue to increase as new app developers enter the foray. In March 2012 Apple’s App Store surpassed its 25 billionth download. If you’re not already buying apps regularly, you probably will be soon. Here are some tips that may help you save some money on your App Store purchases.