News - page 1459

Marvin is an ebook reading app for the iPad that gathers together all your EPUB ebooks in one place. The idea is that you can keep your book files in your Dropbox and access them from anywhere.

It’s EPUB-only, which means it won’t work with your Kindle titles, but that’s no problem, because Marvin also has tight integration with the Calibre e-book app for desktop computers, and as all avid Cult of Mac readers know, it’s pretty easy to use Calibre to rip the DRM from your Kindle books and save them to your Dropbox as EPUBs.

Rickshaw Bags, the finest bag-maker in San Francisco, will now sell you a plush-lined sleeve for your iPad Air. I have tested the mini version and I loved it, although I’d say it’s actually better suited to the bigger iPad thanks to the fact that the mini looks after itself so well, even when left naked and cold in the basement of a dark messenger bag.

It would be next to impossible to ever label an iPhone thief “thoughtful” — but a recent story coming out of China took a turn for the strange when the thief in question painstakingly wrote out eleven pages of contact details and sent them to the owner of the iPhone he had pickpocketed.

There are two things that I love about this iPhone abacus case. One is that it’s an actual working abacus. The second is that I learned that you can stain and dye 3-D-printed plastic as if it were wood or leather.

Remember the rumblings about Apple acquiring PrimeSense, the Israel-based company behind the 3D motion tracking in the original Xbox Kinect? It turns out that the rumor is true, as Apple has officially confirmed the buyout.

Reports dating back to this summer have said Apple and PrimeSense were in talks, and just last week it was being reported that the deal was close to completion. Israeli business site Globes said the deal is valued at $300-$350 million earlier today, and AllThingsD later said the asking price is “around $360 million.”

PrimeSense certainly has expertise in full-body motion tracking, as evidenced by the Kinect, but lately the company has been focusing more on mobile. Its Capri 3D sensor is the smallest in the world and is designed for implementing natural gestures for smartphones and tablets.

Source: AllThingsD

Now here’s one for the record books – a special one-of-a-kind Product (RED) Mac Pro, created jointly by Jony Ive and Marc Newson, sold at Sotheby’s on Saturday for $977,000! The upper six figure bid makes the (RED) Mac Pro the most expensive desktop computer ever built or sold.

While there are plenty of revelations about how Jony Ive’s aesthetic developed in Leander Kahney’s NYT bestselling biography, Apple fans got a unique glimpse into an informative childhood inspiration for Ive this past week thanks to a television appearance on the Charlie Rose show.

Ive and industrial design pal Marc Newson have been making the media rounds recently to promote a charity auction featuring special items customized by the pair.

However, one item in the auction was neither designed nor modified by the pair: a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet signed by none other than George Lucas.

Apple and a 12.9-inch iPad; the first iOS 7 game controller is long overdue; Retina iPad Minis are almost perfect; strategies to backup all those iPhone photos you take; and Adam Christianson from the Maccast podcast joins us on this time on The CultCast!

Have a few laughs and get caught up on each week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below adventure begin.

This week in Cult of Mac Magazine: how some collectors are making serious money with old Macs.

Well, that and how some are discovering that it may be sentimental value that keeps the old machines humming – as it turns out for our publisher, Leander Kahney, who reminisces on the antiquated machines in his life.

And if you dream of finding an Apple 1 or coming across a Twiggy Mac and making a pretty penny, we’ll tell you what happens when those machines roar back to life and come up at auctions.

We’ll also help you figure out what to keep – and toss! – in your collection and showcase some of the coolest ways Apple lovers have repurposed those aging computer carcasses to give them new life.

Our Apple Genius dishes on how to keep your privates protected when you bring your machine in (it’s not as hard as you think) and the best way to let your technician know you’re not a total moron – so you can get your device fixed and get out as soon as possible.

Cult of Mac Magazine

Sure, those old computational machines are making some collectors serious new money. But love of Apple doesn’t always translate into hard cash. Over the years, we’ve covered a lot of cool things you can do with your obsolete — but still near and dear! — Apple gear.

Here are some of our favorites.

Springpad launched on the heels of Evernote in 2008. Though the two are superficially alike — they’re both cloud-based note-taking services often accessed though their respective iOS and Android apps — Springpad was always a little more geared toward collecting and organizing groups of things, like products or recipes.

Springpad’s latest update further underscores this difference; it now has a set of templates that can be used for organizing different categories of saved items, as opposed to the more open format of Evernote.

Apple and other tech companies have come under fire for taking all their manufacturing to China, but iPhone-maker Foxconn is looking to turn the tables a bit with its announcement that it plans to build a new $30 million high-tech manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania.

Think you got enough Apple stuff? Cult of Mac’s resident vintage expert Adam Rosen has collected so many Apple products over the last three decades, he converted part of his house into a museum to showcase them all.

Assembling your own collection of Mac gear isn’t easy, but the Vintage Mac Museum in the Boston area has managed to get its hands on some really neat — and odd — items, like a cutaway Mac Plus, a rare black Mac and more Apple memorabilia than any sane person should own.

Here’s a look at an incredible assortment of Apple products at the Vintage Mac Museum. Plus, find out what Adam thinks you should keep or toss.

Old computers tend to lead sedentary lives. Parked in shelves and closets, maybe touched by the occasional dusting; the lucky ones still run old games from time to time. But sometimes one becomes a sensation.

The Twiggy Macintosh is a prototype Macintosh 128k that used a 5.25-inch disk drive. Long thought lost to history, two of these primordial Macinti were recently resurrected and returned to life in full working glory. Their rebirth brought about a rare reunion of the original Macintosh design team. And one of them recently repaid the effort by fetching about $40,000 at an auction.

They are — without a doubt — the oldest working Macs in the world.

Here is the story of their amazing journey.

Apple is still facing supply constraints on the 3G/4G units of the iPad mini with Retina display, but it looks like customers can finally walk into an Apple Store and purchase a Retina iPad mini without ordering online first.

Apple has today begun selling the iPhone 5s unlocked and SIM-free to customers in the United States. Customers can stick in any GSM SIM card (so that’s one from AT&T or T-Mobile) when they receive the device and begin using it immediately with their existing plan — but they’ll have to wait 1-2 weeks for it to ship.

You probably don’t remember Clumsy Ninja, a totally unknown game that Apple chose to debut alongside the iPhone 5. The game was supposed to be out in 2012, but was delayed for mysterious reasons for a full year, without a word of explanation.

But Clumsy Ninja is finally here. And it debuts a new App Store feature along with it.

Apple has the exclusive license to liquidmetal, prompting all sorts of speculation that we would sooner or later see liquid metal iPhones, iPads and Macs. Despite this, so far, we’ve only seen Apple release one “product” using liquidmetal: the iPhone SIM ejector tool.

But Apple’s liquidmetal plans might be gearing up. The company has just filed five new patents, explaining the process by which it would use liquidmetal to build next-gen smartphones, tablets and digital displays.

I love my Apple TV. I hate the Apple TV remote. Oh, sure, it looks slick, but it might as well be a contact lens for all of the instantaneous ease with which it is lost.

I’ve taken to just velcro-ing my Apple TV remote to the back of my bigger, bulkier TV remote, but if you’d like a slightly less duct-tape solution, why not consider these fluorescent skins for the Apple TV remote that glow-in-the-dark?

Like most glowing items, these charge by absorbing ambient light and releasing it later. They come in multiple colors, and just peel on and off.

You have to admit, this would help you more easily spot your Apple TV remote. If you want one, you can get it now for just $9.95.

Source: Slickwraps

The third-generation iPad mini and second-generation iPad Air will have Touch ID, there’s no doubt. Just like Siri — a feature that debuted in an ‘S’ year for the iPhone — took a year to creep to the iPad, TouchID will have a year’s exclusivity before it comes to Apple’s line-up of tablets.

Don’t hold your breath, though. We’re almost a year away from Touch ID coming to the iPad mini. So you should take this picture of a ‘leaked’ iPad mini 3 with Touch ID with super pessimism.

Fed up of hearing about iPad Christmases already, and want to be reminded of what winter is actually all about?

Head over to the App Store then and download the free Sickweather iOS app, which will provide you with real-time, geo-tagged alerts whenever you are about to enter a location in which a person has recently reported feeling ill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Le9wvoY00

It’s sometimes easy to forget just what a paradigm shift the tablet computer — and specifically the iPad — represents. Well, Phil Schiller just reminded us by tweeting a link to Apple’s latest “Life on iPad” campaign.

Boxer is another of the new breed of apps that let you swipe your way through e-mail and get to the Zen state known only as “inbox zero.” Mailbox was arguably the first of these apps – which also let you turn your e-mails into to-dos – but it’s Gmail only and the iPad version sucks. Boxer, née Taskbox (which supports pretty much every e-mail service including vanilla IMAP), has just gotten bumped to v4.0, adding in iPad support and a slew of other welcome extras. It’s also $1 instead of $5 for a while, in way of celebration.

Wren’s V5AP is still one of my favorite AirPlay speakers, but recently I’ve been kinda off the whole AirPlay thing thanks to an the crazy East German walls of my apartment building. These walls are too crumbly to let me drill a proper hole for even a coat hook, but somehow thick and dense enough to confuse even a strong dual-band Wi-Fi signal. To recap: AirPlay speakers just won’t stay connected.

Thankfully, Wren now offers a Bluetooth version of the big, booming V5, called the V5BT, and it promises to be pretty good.

Changing a sentence to ALL CAPS on my Mac is dead easy: I just select the words, right click and choose Transformations from the contextual menu. If I want to do anything fancier, like weird Markdown footnotes, or adding bullet points to the start of every line, I can just write an Automator workflow and save it as a System Service.

But on iOS? In the immortal words of Run DMC, “it’s tricky”. Or was tricky: now we can use the $5 TextTool to do it for us.