It was back in the good old days of 2012, that we reported that Apple’s App Store had received more than 1 million submissions.
Well, it took between then and now for that number to mean that there are 1 million apps currently live.
As the week ends for many of us (and starts for others), Cult of Mac Deals has a couple of offers that look appealing in more ways than one.
First up is KICK: the Game-Changing Portable Lighting Studio. KICK provides smartphone-controlled studio quality lighting and effects that you can add to all your images and videos – and it fits in your pocket! The other offer is The Icojam Raster Icons Bundle, which features over 4,200 high quality icons for your design arsenal. KICK is going to cost you only $149 and the Icojam Raster Icons Bundle will run you just $35 – but both are available for only a limited time.
Apple flipped a switch this week and enabled customers at 254 U.S. Apple Stores to get spammed with micro-location based promotional nagging.
The new system, called iBeacon, is a low cost, low-energy way to achieve actionable “indoor GPS” in which “beacons” use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals to figure out exactly where you are and send messages relevant to that specific location.
I’ve written before that Apple’s larger iBeacon plan is brilliant, and it is.
But Apple Stores are probably the least-compelling iBeacon scenario I can think of.
Your typical Apple store is a glass box, a single room with a door in the front, a Genius Bar in the back and tables and shelves in the middle. It’s impossible to get lost in a regular Apple Store and trivially easy for customers to find any of the tiny number of products for sale. Also: Apple doesn’t do in-store promotional discounts except for one day a year (Black Friday).
Right now, you participate in the Apple Store iBeacon system by launching the Apple Store app (which I imagine most iPhone owners don’t know exists) and changing your iPhone’s settings to use iBeacon (which most iPhone owners don’t know how to do) and granting permission to get in-store promotions (which most iPhone owners probably have no interest in).
Once all that happens, iBeacon interrupts you to nag you about trading in your old iPhone, and offers help like Microsoft’s Clippy when you’re looking at a specific section of the store: “I see you are looking at iPads? Would you like to know more about the iPad?” (I made up the wording, but the intent of some iBeacon messages is identical to that.)
As a result, iBeacon in Apple Stores mostly annoys. I can think of a hundred scenarios where iBeacon could be incredibly great. But the greatest of these: My house.
The iPhone is a great travel tool, but making your smartphone travel actually smart isn’t about packing it up with dozens of apps you never use or that won’t get you out of the plane seat next to the loo on a crowded holiday flight.
Enter Cult of Mac Magazine. In time for your holiday travels (or maybe escaping from your loved ones for some beach or ski resort time?), we sounded out dozens of road warriors to learn what they really find necessary for the daily commute or continental flight. These black tees and easy-to-launder socks of the app world, if you will, include some surprising picks, many of them free.
If your travel is mostly of the four-wheel variety, you’ll want to read what happens when reporter Alex Heath took smart-driving app Automatic for a month-long spin. (Can it reform his gas guzzling, donut-making driving style?)
In our exclusive Ask an Apple Genius column, we answer your questions about how to get your Mac repaired on the road and how to handle assistance when you live in a town without an Apple store.
You’ll also find our picks for the best in apps this week and what’s really rocking the iTunes store when it comes to books, movies and music.
Mosey on over to Cult of Mac Magazine on iTunes and check it out!
Ah, to be ten years old again — and arrested for stealing £400,000 ($654,000) worth of Apple products.
That is the news coming out of Coventry, in the UK, where a dawn raid saw police arrest a boy and a 37-year-old man for their part in a series of commercial and domestic burglaries.
As ever with many of Quirky’s excellent crowd-sourced designs, the Prop Power Pro inspires me to make my own. I’m pretty sure a regular extension cable plus a bendy wire coat-hanger plus a length of flexible tubing would do the trick. The thing is, by the time I’d bought all the parts (plus a roll of gaffer tape), I’d be in the hole for way more than the $25 Quirky want for its version.
There are really only two obvious solutions for backpackers to keep electronics charged out in the boonies.
There’s the more conventional route of using a solar-powered battery, like the Joos Orange, or Solio’s line of chargers. Or there’s the less common alternative of using one of an increasing number of stoves that can charge gadgets while heating dinner or water for coffee.
The upcoming newest member of the latter group, the PowerPot X (that “X” is a 10, btw), can even charge an iPad.
I’ve tested lots of leather wallet cases for the iPhone, but the Wall St from id America is a lot different to the rest.
It’s not a folding case like Twelve South’s iconic BookBook, but rather a sleeve that your iPhone slips into that has a large hole in its front for your display, and a little pocket in its back for your credit cards.
It’s an ideal alternative for those who like to keep things simple and don’t want to have to deal with flappy front covers when using their smartphone. It makes everything easy to get to, and it doesn’t cover up any buttons, ports, or speakers.
The Wall St fits both iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s (there’s another version for iPhone 5c, too), and it’s available in a number of pretty colors, including brown, blue, orange, and red. It costs $34.95, so let’s find out whether it’s worth it.
Foursquare released a new update for its iPhone app today that finally brings the app in-line with iOS 7’s new white and minimal UI along with some new enhancements that make the app more socially aware than ever before.
When Barack Obama first made his run at the United States presidency way back in 2008, much fuss was made about how this politician was so cool, he used a BlackBerry.
Seems laughable now, doesn’t it? Yet at the time, Obama was considered so technologically hip for using a BlackBerry that he once laughingly said that if the Secret Service wanted to take it from him, they’d have to pry it from his hands.
Flash forward five years, and President Obama’s BlackBerry doesn’t seem so cool anymore. In fact, it seems ridiculous. So why isn’t he using an iPhone?
Great news for corrupt restaurant employees and criminal scum everywhere: you can now use the latest Google Wallet app to skim credit cards right into your iPhone. In theory at least. And without actually recording the magnetic strip. But “Google Wallet update allows easy addition of credit cards using the iPhone camera” doesn’t have the same link-baiting ring to it. So scum and villainy it is.
One of my favorite parts of the Kanex Multi-Sync keyboard I reviewed in October. In fact, I said that “Kanex could sell it as a standalone product and do well.” And guess what? You can now buy it, in a pack of two, for just $18.
You know anamorphic, right? It’s a way of getting super widescreen film onto the relatively squarish frame of 35mm film. It’s done by using a special lens on the camera that squeezes the image sideways, and then a reverse lens on the projector that stretches it back out again when you watch it. This is why, in the bad old days of non-letterboxed video, you’d sometimes see the end movie credits squished up to fit them onto your TV screen, all while the rest of the move had just been shown with it’s sides chopped off.
Which brings us to the Anamorphic Adapter Lens for the iPhone 5/S, from Moondog Labs.
Most of us are aware that the iPhone can be an effective security tool; there are countless clips on YouTube proving its worth as a recording device, and FaceTime, Skype and the like allow someone on the other end to watch, and if needed send help, when things get sketchy.
A recording of a mugging, however, is no use if the muggers steal the phone; and initiating a FaceTime call under extreme stress is probably more difficult than it might seem.
Enter Eye Got You Covered, a $4 app that fixes both those problems and adds other thoughtful features.
Since there are relatively few good alternatives to the iPhone’s stock Mail app, a newcomer to the group usually sparks our curiosity and interest; what’s the cool new spin? Will we actually use it? Will we use it enough that it eventually replaces the Mail app on our home screen?
In the case of attachment-obsessed newcomer Inbox Cube, the answers are fun, yes and possibly.
After years of negotiations, Apple and China Mobile have finally closed a deal for the carrier to sell the iPhone. Rumors of the two companies working together started gaining momentum a few months ago with a report from the The Wall Street Journal, and now the same publication is reporting that the deal has been finalized.
We’re still waiting on an official confirmation from Apple and China Mobile, but now is probably a good time to buy Apple stock. Why? There are 700 million reasons.
iOS 7 has brought some great new gestural support, like being able to swipe from the left side of the screen to go back a page in apps like Settings, Mail, and Safari.
Did you know, though, that you can use the same gesture to peek at your list of email or iMessages from within those specific apps? I didn’t either, so figured I’d pass it along to you.
Has it really been less than three months since the roll out of iOS 7?
Well, however long it has been that has clearly been enough time for most users — since new data from online ad network Chitika reveals that iOS 7 is currently running on more than 70 percent of North American iOS devices.
Bokeh is an iPhone app (and web service) for easily “lifeblogging” your photos and thoughts. And because nobody but you really cares about the mundane details of your days, Bokeh can be used as a private diary, too, albeit a private diary that you access via the web. So what’s the gimmick? What sets Bokeh apart from all the other lifeblogging apps out there? It has a great calendar view, making it easy to browse and zero-in on the exact memory you forgot.
RotoView is an app that lets you zoom in super close on your iPhone photos, and then scroll around them by tilting the iPhone itself. It is also a great example of how iOS 7-native design can help an app look great, when otherwise it would very likely look awful.
Yes, Joshua Young is a doctor. And yes, the strange device he built and now wields is indeed sonic. But no, it’s not a screwdriver.
Instead, Joshua’s intricate alloy AUUG controller is an imaginative musical device that turns the iPhone or iPod into a unique instrument that uses accelerometer magic to bend and blend sound.
It’s lacking the iPhone’s speaker slit, but otherwise all sources indicate that Darth Vader is an iOS user, most likely using either an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5.
The above selfie — which just appeared on the official Star Wars Instagram account — is designed to help launch the marketing platform that will be used to help build up to the new batch of sequels, currently being worked on by Disney.
It’s official: riding-a fixed-gear-bike-past-some-old-city-warehouses is the new perky-and-quirky-guitar-music in Kickstarter pitch videos, and the latest people to put an Urban Warrior in their video spot are Martin Fredewess and Philip Perera. What are they selling? A pretty cool-looking iPhone keychain carabiner called the TiStand. And spoiler alert, it’s made of titanium.
Wireless phone carrier Consumer Cellular has announced a deal that will allow it to start carrying the new model iPhone 5c and 5s.
We’ve seen roughly one zillion iPhone wallet cases passing through the pages of Cult of Mac, and like neutrinos there are surely untold others which we never even detect. And yes, the Access Case is another wallet case, and yes, it’s even a Kickstarter project. But it has one thing none of the others do: it has a sweet-looking sister that fits the iPad, and which knows how to suck…