Apple has released its eighth annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.
The forty-page document focuses on Apple’s progress in providing the 1 million+ people working in its supply chain with “safe and ethical working conditions,” as well as the company’s efforts to ethically source minerals.
The Togo Dock is a new pocket-sized iPhone dock from the makers of the Une Bobine, the super-successful “handy bendy iPhone-holding snake.” The new gadget is as simple as can be: it’s a little plastic reel with a magnet on the back, which turns a lightning cable into an iPhone dock that can be stuck to anything – as long as it’s made of ferrous metal.
Musx is like Instagram for music. Post tracks you like, add a few words and your followers can check out the same tunes. Why the hell didn’t anyone think of this before?
Pixite’s fantastic Tangent app gets a big update with v1.5, adding in a new “Urban Decay” pack that lets you point your iPhone camera at a building and have it crumble into rubble and dust, and then snap pictures as zombies and wild animals reclaim what us evil humans were only ever borrowing.
Wait, no. Urban Decay is a new set of fancy filters for grungifying your pictures. Just make sure you get the right Tangent app, as the developer has been plagued by a copycat who keeps putting fake versions of the app up on the store.
Here’s a neat take on the small pocket strobe or flash. Instead of forcing you to buy and manage the charging of a ton of AA batteries to use it, the Neewer TT850 is a hot-shoe strobe that uses a 12-volt li-ion battery. This not only makes charging easier, but also means you get a lot more pops per second thanks to the fact that the battery can dump 12V instead the flash instead of the paltry 6V that 4xAAs can manage.
Released at the end of 2012, Rocketcat Games’ Punch Quest isn’t the newest game to hit the App Store. However, as a former Flappy Bird player (yes, I admit it!) I was interested to see what else Apple’s recommender algorithms would suggests to me in terms of a substitute constant runner requiring precision-tapping.
Following those recommendations brought me to Punch Quest.
Punch Quest is pretty much a quest where you punch things. Like so many successful iOS game it basically takes a video game premise/paradigm — in this case a platformer — and strips it down to its most essential elements — in this case running and punching. Your left hand controls jumping, your right does the bulk of the punching, and the running is automatic — as if the action takes place on a giant treadmill, although you can choose to speed up or slow down within this setup.
Command-tab, a keyboard shortcut so ingrained in the Mac user’s finger-memory that it’s easy to find yourself hitting it when using a keyboard with your iPad, or when you’re on a PC (NB: don’t use a PC unless you have been professionally trained and are wearing a tie).
The switcher already lets you flip between apps, quit apps, view recent documents in a cool Exposé view (use the up/down arrows), and to drag and drop documents onto apps to open them. But now there’s SuperTab, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style app which adds even more.
The iPhone rumor mill has been in overdrive lately, but with the iPhone 6 launch not expect until later this Fall we weren’t expecting to see any pictures which makes this afternoon’s set of alleged iPhone 6 rear casings almost too delicious to believe.
A set of images of an alleged iPhone 6 hit Twitter this afternoon, originating from obscure account but have since been picked up by Sonny Dickson, the infamous leaker who revealed the iPhone 5 as well as a number of other Apple products.
The images feature a space gray and gold iPhone, both with an edge-to-edge display and a thinner profile. The rear casing also suggest Apple will ditch the two glass sections in the back – maybe finally utilizing their LiquidMetal tech for an antenna?
We can’t confirm if the images are genuine yet, but they still give you a pretty good idea just how beautiful a bigger screen iPhone will be.
Update: Looks like these photos are fake. At least there are more surprises to come.
See for yourself:
It’s been nearly two years since Apple has updated the Apple TV, but according to a report from Bloomberg fans will only have to wait until April to see a redesigned Apple TV with new interface and plenty of new channels to boot.
Whether you’re a fashionista looking for new sources of inspiration or a tone-deaf jeans and t-shirt kind of dresser, new app Flink will help you connect to the world of fashion blogging.
Flink allows you to see hot new “looks” from the top fashion bloggers around the web, including Garance Doré, La revue de Kenza, Adenorah, Absolutely Glamourous, Mercredie, le blog de Lilou, Modasic, and Blondie Baby. You can also save these looks for later, visit the original blog posts, and “heart” the looks you love.
When you first launch the app, you’ll tap to follow as many of the included bloggers, and then tap your way through each of the photos included in each screen. You can tap through to see what clothes and accessories make up each look, or you can just swipe through and see various images of the different parts.
All in all, if you’re looking to kick up your fashion knowledge, or just find some new looks to recreate in your own life, Flink just might be the free app you’re looking for.
To coincide with Steve Jobs’ appearance in the National Portrait Gallery’s new “American Cool” exhibition, Cult of Mac had the opportunity to speak with Charles “Chuck” O’Rear — the photographer who took the 1981 portrait of Jobs currently on display.
O’Rear, 73, recalls Jobs being aloof and preoccupied but — despite being young (he was just 27) — carried a real aura that this was someone who couldn’t be ignored.
“We had barely heard of him at the time,” O’Rear says. “With the same project I ended up photographing names like David Packard and Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, and Bill Noyce of Intel — all of who were better known than Steve. But there was a sense that Steve was a renegade, and so we should make sure we get his picture.”
The elusive developer behind the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has other games in the App Store that haven’t yet been pulled. Are they any good?
Take a look at Super Ball Juggling and see if it measures up to the hype and fame of Flappy Bird.
This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Super Ball Juggling” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”
The buzz continues around Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen’s scary addictive side-scrolling bird flapping game. The developer pulled the wildly successful app from both iOS and Android App Stores on Sunday, citing the fact that his game was too addictive. There are mobile devices out there on eBay and Craigslist for outrageous prices, and everyone seems to want to talk about the retro-inspired flap-fest.
While many of us have Flappy Bird still installed on our phones, it’s possible many folks didn’t get to the party until now.
We’ve already shown you a straight-up clone of Flappy Bird that you can play on any web browser, but these new ones are odd. And totally cool.
One of our favorite photography apps for the iPhone, VSCO Cam, got a big update this morning that give you more reasons than ever to turn VSCO into your only photography app/social network.
Footage has been released of a television crew discovering an original Lisa mouse used by Steve Jobs. The mouse was one of a collection of miscellaneous items found inside a time capsule in Aspen, Colorado.
Jobs had visited the area in 1983 for the Aspen International Design Conference — during which he delivered a speech predicting many of the Apple technologies which would come to pass during his lifetime — including the iPad, wireless networking, and even the App Store. Afterwards, Jobs was one of several conference attendees who donated objects for the “Aspen Time Tube” which has now been recovered.
Last week we revealed that Steve Jobs was set to feature in a forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, titled “American Cool.”
With the exhibition having now opened, this is the portrait of the Apple co-founder that curators Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear III chose to use: an image taken by photographer Charles O’Rear — perhaps most widely known for his digitally augmented “Rolling Hills” background used for Microsoft Windows XP.
A new Cydia tweak lets Snapchat users easily log their conversations in a way that subverts the original concept behind the private one-time message sending tool.
Integrating with the existing Snapchat app, the tweak adds an additional option under the “Open Settings” button on the official app. To access past conversations, users can hit the the settings icon to access the popup menu, then tap on the “Open Snapchat Log” option to view the log.
When Heidi from Waterfield Bags wrote to tell me about the Rough Rider, I had no choice but to write about it. It’s called the Rough Rider after all, which pretty much means I can make as many “going commando” and “bareback” jokes as I like.
It’s almost too easy.
New app Metadata+ tells you whenever a drone strike kills somebody overseas.
Working by pulling data from the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the app plots the location of each strike on a map, and then sends a push notification when an attack takes place.
If that doesn’t strike you as something the often-conservative Apple would want available in its App Store, you’re not wrong.
The app’s official release comes on the back of five separate rejections by the company, and a renaming from Drone+, Drones+, and Dronestream to the more innocuous-sounding Metadata+. The official App Store description reveals only that the app deals in, “Real-time updates on national security.”
Popular account manager and bill organizer app Manilla has received a significant update.
Back by the Hearst Corporation, Manilla is designed to let you manage and share personal finances, household bills, subscriptions, healthcare account, and travel rewards — alongside acting as a handy reminder tool for various bill payments.
Fancy a blue virtual keyboard for your iOS 7 device? If so, the appropriately named Cydia tweak BlueBoard may just be the tweak for you.
Once installed, users need to launch the Settings app and respring the device to get the tweak up and running. The tweak affects both keyboards within iOS 7, so that when enabled both the standard light keyboard or dark keyboard come with blue keys.
Ever wanted to save just one sentence of a web page? Or have you ever bookmarked a page, or sent it to your favorite read-later service, only to come back and wonder what the hell it was you’d wanted to remember?
Then Gloss is for you. It’s a bookmarklet and service that lets you highlight a single line of text on any web page, and it rocks.
Excessive demand and limited production cycles have pushed the Mac Pro’s estimated shipping date back to April.
The high-end machine, available in both Quad-Core and 6-Core editions, was originally supposed to ship in December, before being pushed back to February, then March, and now April.
If you Google Cult of Mac for “minimal iPhone case” you get a lot of results (too many, in fact, including a Mac-only music app – nice job Google). But you should ignore every last one of them, becasue the Bumprz really is a “case” so tiny you almost can’t see it.
Canon’s new G1 X Mark II brings good news and bad news. The bad news is that it ditches the optical viewfinder that has been found on G-series compacts like forever. The good news is that it adds a faster lens, better manual controls, a flip-up touch-screen LCD panel, Wi-Fi and NFC.
So, on balance, not so bad.