Sick of the boring old gray linen background on your Siri? If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone 4S, why not try the new Custom Siri Background Cydia tweak, which allows you to apply a picture from your Camera Roll as Siri’s background wallpaper.
For a company named after nature’s candy, Apple’s releases a surprising lack of edible products. That’s not likely to change any time soon, but if you’d like a cake or a bit of pastry with Apple’s eye for style and incredible packaging design, look no further than this incredible Taiwanese bakery.
Some of Apple’s stock iPhone apps would work wonderfully on the iPad, such as Clock, Stocks, Weather, and Calculator. But the Cupertino company seems to have no plans to port these apps over to the larger device. After all, I’m sure if it did we’d already have them by now.
But thanks to a new utility for jailbroken iPads called Belfry, you can port them over yourself.
If you were concerned that Apple was all out of surprises, Tuesday put that all to rest. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant surpassed Wall Street expectations and the amateurs, making analysts fall over themselves describing Apple’s first quarter of 2012 results as “historic.”
Despite being labeled the first real competitor to the iPad, it seems Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet still has a long way to go before it can lure tablet users away from Apple’s device. Although it seemed to be incredibly popular when it launched last year, largely thanks to that attractive $199 price tag, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the Kindle Fire, and other “limited function tablets,” had no impact on iPad sales whatsoever.
What sort of numbers should Apple report later today for the first quarter of 2012? The third quarter surprised all analysts as Apple announced a rare under-performing quarter due to the late introduction of the iPhone 4S. Stung by that rebuke, professional analysts are offering conservative projections for the first quarter of 2012. This sets up a classic pros versus independents cliffhanger.
The ability to print documents from an iOS device is a feature that many of us find incredibly useful, but Apple’s implementation has its flaws — such as the need for an AirPrint compatible printer. But thank to xPrintServer from Lantronix, you can wirelessly print to almost any networked printer from any iOS device.
Apple’s iPad is not hurt by Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, a Dutch appeals court just ruled. Apple had appealed an August 2011 decision that the South Korean tablet didn’t infringe upon the iPad’s design. Today’s ruling only answered whether the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 too closely resembled the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant’s product.
Audiobooks.com has today launched the first subscription service to provide unlimited access to thousands of audiobooks streamed directly to your device. The service uses an HTML5 web app and promises to enforce no monthly limits and no long-term commitments.
Thanks to Apple’s free AirPort Utility app for iOS, it’s easy to make simple changes to your Time Capsule and update its firmware without having to use a computer. Here’s how to update your Time Capsule firmware using only your iOS device and the AirPort Utility app.
Tablets — especially iPads — were hot holiday gifts. A new survey finds that in about just one week, the percentage of U.S. consumers owning a tablet almost doubled to 19 percent, up from 10 percent prior to Christmas Day. That portion was even higher as you go up the income and education scale.
Following the release of iTunes U for iOS last week, Apple has introduced a new support section to its website that is aimed at students and teachers who are interested in adopting the new app. The support notes cover things like creating new iTunes U courses, creating course podcasts, and marketing your institution’s content.
Pixelbit’s Reckless Racing quickly became a hit when it first came to iOS back in October 2010, so it’s no wonder the company has been hard at work on a sequel. Fans of the top-down arcade racer will be pleased to know that Reckless Racing 2 is on its way, and it’ll hit the App Store next week.
Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.
It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.
A smattering of journalist authors are freaking out over Apple’s license agreement for the free new iBooks Author tool.
ZDnet’s Ed Bott called the license agreement “greedy and evil.” PCmag.com’s Sascha Segan wrote: “Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you.” Even Daring Fireball’s John Gruber called it “Apple at its worst.”
Et tu, Gruber?
What’s strange about these emotional responses to Apple’s legalese is that they fail the reality test. Apple’s iBooks Author terms are neither greedy nor evil; they don’t mean Apple’s “owns you;” and it’s certainly not the worst thing Apple has ever done.
Here. I’ll prove it.
Have you checked out our new Instagram feed yet? It’s pretty sweet and we’ve been having a lot of fun seeing snapshots of our readers’ lives as well as giving you guys some behind the scenes looks at Cult of Mac. This week we were inspired by Austin Radcliffe’s blog Things Organized Neatly so we asked our Instagram followers to upload pictures of their Apple products organized neatly and include an #AppleOrganizedNeatly tag so we could share them with the rest of the world. Here’s a gallery of the best pictures we saw on Instagram this week:
If you’re a Dropbox user, uploading images to your Dropbox account directly from your iOS devices can be incredibly handy. And with QuickShot ($1.99), it couldn’t easier. Simply link the app to your Dropbox account and images are automatically uploaded as you snap them.
This is great if you often use public computers and you need to upload multiple images, but you don’t want to send them all via email. You can also use the app as alternative to Photo Stream. Sure, Photo Stream’s great, but until Apple allows us to delete our photos individually, it’s not ideal for everyone.
By uploading your images to Dropbox instead, you have access to them on pretty much all of your internet-connected devices. Here’s how to get setup with QuickShot!
Psychotherapist Marcos Quinones has got streamlining a one-man office down to a science.
Quinones, a former software developer, is a New York City-based cognitive behavioral therapist and licensed clinical social worker who runs his entire office on Apple gear.
He credits the iPad with making a big impact in the smooth running of his sole practice.
As part of our continuing series about businesses using the iPad, he shares a few key apps that help him process payments and help with patient records, saving time and money.
The Raspbery Pi project is a darling little exercise in ingenuity. It looks like a USB thumb drive, but instead of 2GB of flash, it’s a fully functional computer running Debian Linux, featuring a 700 MHz ARM 11 processor, 128 MB of RAM, a USB port, and an Ethernet port… all for just $35. Splendid, splendid geekiness. Hanging this from your car keys, you can literally get connected anywhere. But where’s the Apple angle?
Try this one for size: it supports AirPlay.
Back in 2004, I couldn’t afford $499 for an iPod, so instead I got a 20GB Dell DJ for $299. Honestly, it wasn’t a bad little MP3 player, but it looked like it had been designed by some sort of extraordinary, irradiated orangutan toiling away in the bowels of the Kremlin during the Soviet electronics revolution of the late 1980s. I realize that analogy doesn’t make any sense, but just look at the design and button placement on this thing, and all will become clear.
My DJ lasted me quite a few years, but when I finally upgraded to an 80GB iPod Classic in 2006, I breathed a sigh of relief. The lesson? Accept no substitutes.
On that note, here’s the latest bizarre Communist clone of a popular Apple gadget: the Red Pad, named after the only book a loyal Maoist ever needed in the 1960s-era Chinese Communist Party, his Little Red Book. It looks just like an iPad, but it’s tailored specifically to run apps compatible with China’s massive state propaganda machine. Oh, and it costs twice as much as an iPad 2!
The only problem? After poor reviews, the Chinese government has wiped out all mention of its existence.
Two of the reasons Apple’s iPhone is yet to adopt LTE connectivity is that existing LTE chips are just too large for the iPhone’s slender form factor, and they eat up so much power your new iPhone 4S wouldn’t even last the six hours that you currently get if it was hooked up to an LTE network.
However, a new Apple patent application reveals that the Cupertino company has already set about revolutionizing its batteries to make them thinner and more efficient — possibly making way for LTE connectivity in the iPhone 5.
We told you a few days ago that retro classic SoulCalibur was headed to the iOS App Store. As of today the fan favorite title is available in the App Store for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users.
Comparing uprisings in the Middle East to what happens when a manager brings his or her own iPhone to work seems like a bit of a stretch, but IT executives say the effect has provoked a similar shake-up.
The people (read: employees) have brought about a groundswell of change in the corporate world by opting to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and choosing their own apps. This has upended the “regime” of IT departments, who used to be able to control what devices employees used and what ran on them.
Today Apple unveiled its digital textbook software for the iPad and Mac. We’ve covered every aspect of the announcement, including the event’s three main releases: iBooks 2, iBooks Author for Mac, and the iTunes U app.
While Steve Jobs mentioned his desire to revolutionize the textbook industry in Walter Isaacson’s official biography, Apple has been relatively silent about its plans to take the education market by storm. As it turns out, the company’s dream for digital textbooks comes from a student intern’s pitch in 2008.
Eager to try the new iBooks Author tools? Better have an iPad. In fact, even if you do have one, you can’t even preview what your e-book will look like on an iPad itself without connecting the device to your computer.
What a bummer. That’s convoluted, and cuts right out authors who want to publish their e-books through the iBookstore without necessarily spending $499 on a device first. Considering there’s already an iOS simulator as part of Apple’s development tools package, why didn’t they just hook iBooks Author’s preview functionality up to that?
[Thanks for the tip, Roger!]