Lightroom 5 beta has just been posted, and is ready for download and testing. Those of you who read my article last week about using a small, SSD-based MacBook Air for photos will be very interested in one new feature: Smart Previews. This lets you edit your photos using just the previews on your MacBook, and the changes all sync up to your actual photos next time you connect your big external drive.
And there’s more.
Apple has started selling refurbished models of its latest iPod touch online. In this case, that means $50 off, which translates to a 12%-16% price cut depending on the storage size. A 32GB refurbished iPod touch costs $249 instead of the normal $299, and a 64GB model costs $349 instead of $399. A refurbished option is not available for the 16GB iPod touch, unfortunately.
Colors options are yellow, blue, pink, white, and black for each storage size. You can also get refurbished versions of the 4th-gen iPod touch (released in 2010) for considerably less.
There’s really no reason to not buy refurbished if you’re shopping for Apple products online. Everything is factory certified, and the warranty is the same.
Source: Apple Store
After the successful announcement of Facebook Home for Android, the Menlo Park-based social networking giant is apparently in talks with Apple and Microsoft to bring the software to iOS and Windows Phone.
Facebooks’s director of product, Adam Mosseri, spoke with Bloomberg today about these talks. “We’ve shown them what we’ve built and we’re just in an ongoing conversation,” he said, making sure no one thinks anything is a done deal.
As an Apple employee, you can take a private, roomy bus with onboard WiFi along a secret route to get to work in sunny Cupertino, California. But why not just take a bike and get some exercise?
Apple has given its corporate employees the option to use a company-issued bicycle since 2011, and now thousands of workers use them to get to and from Apple HQ. Wired snapped the above picture of an Apple employee on his bike after sleuthing about Cupertino. There are apparently 420 of these bikes available on campus for employees to rent.
Cult of Mac Reviews Editor Charlie Sorrel posted about these bikes at Wired back in 2011. He discovered that they were M3 Mixte models from Public Bikes, a company located down the road in San Francisco. Apple ordered a custom batch without logos. Colors are light blue, silver, and gray.
Source: Wired
Image: Alex Washburn / Wired
Adobe has released a public beta of Lightroom 5, the next major version of its photo editing and management application. The download is free for anyone to use until June 30th. Adobe says Lightroom 5 will ship later this year.
Apple may have some of the highest paid executives in the country, but that doesn’t mean employees are satisfied lower down the food chain.
Since Tim Cook became CEO at Apple, the company’s corporate culture has changed. A byproduct of that change is that more and more Apple employees are leaving Cupertino to work at other competitors and startups.
If you’ve ever been disappointed with the YouTube for iOS app’s inability to tune into Live streams, then we’ve got some great news for you today.
Google just released version 1.3 of YouTube for iOS, and along with some stability and performance improvements, the app now gives users the ability to view Live streams inside the app. There’s also a new Queue feature that will let you add a bunch of videos to a list to watch later, along with some UI improvements to give users quicker access to their My Subscriptions feed.
The free update is available in the App Store now.
Source: iTunes
We’ve reviewed a lot of Bluetooth speakers here at Cult of Mac, and yet to this day, the easiest one to recommend is still the speaker that launched the category: the venerable Jawbone Jambox.
Well, Jambox, move over: there’s a new king in town. We’ll be hard pressed to recommend you anymore after getting our hands on the JBL Flip, a Bluetooth speaker that has better (and louder) sound than the Jambox, at a cheaper price, and a killer trick up its sleeve: it’s also an external battery pack, capable of charging your iPhone on the go!
While companies like Samsung have been busy making mega-huge smartphones with gigantic screens, Apple’s aim has been to keep the physical footprint of the iPhone the same while adding better features, like the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display.
If Apple wants to make an iPhone with a 4.5-inch screen though, it’s going to come with some big changes. However, Ran Avni has created an iPhone 6 concept that gives big display fans the 4.5-inch screen they dream of, without making the device bigger. To achieve the thinner, smaller design all Apple would have to do is ditch the home button.
Here’s a video of the concept:
Grabby, a new tweak from esteemed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich, allows you to quickly launch your most frequently used apps from your iPhone’s lock screen by extending the functionality of the built-in camera slider. Find out more about how it works and where to download it below.
With every new version of iOS, Safari ends up getting some new features, and designer Brent Caswell has some really good ideas about what should come to Safari in iOS 7, including a unified address and search bar, website push notifications, a better bookmarks manager, more advanced Reader options and more. Here’s a look at some of his better ideas:
Back in 2010, when netbooks were the fastest-growing segment of the P market and selling by the tens of millions, Steve Jobs defied conventional wisdom that Apple needs to make a netbook, famously lambasting netbooks as “cheap” and “not better than anything.”
Instead, Jobs introduced the iPad… and in the last three years, the iPad and similar tablets have completely killed netbook sales. In fact, in 2010, there were 32 million netbooks sold. Three years later? Only 10% as many will be sold, and by 2015, the segment will die entirely.
OS X comes with an almost non-existent collection of games by default. You’ve got a really lackluster chess game that hasn’t been updated for over a decade… and that’s pretty much it.
But did you know OS X has a secret game you’ve probably never seen, built right into the kernel of the operating system? It does, but don’t expect something on the level of Infinity Blade, or even Wolfenstein 3D… think more primitive. There’s a text adventure game built right into Terminal!
Breaking her silence on her husband and his legacy, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs appeared on Rock Center with Brian Williams on Friday to say that Jobs’s “legacy is beautiful for me to live with.” If you’re curious about was steve jobs married, this article provides an excellent overview of his life and relationships.
In an accident almost too horrifying for words, Jason Koger once ran over a fallen power line with his four-wheeler. 7,200 volts ran through his system, and the accident was so horrifying, he needed to have both his arms amputated. But there’s an app for everything, even robotic hands.
If you are an extremely wealthy individual with questionable intelligence, horrible financial acumen and the good taste of a Teletubby, there are any number of horrible bling purveyors who will be happy to take your iPhone and encrust it in so much bling that even R. Kelly would think it was a tacky waste of blood diamonds.
So it’s no surprise that some Hong Kong businessman commissioned a $15 million diamong encrusted iPhone 5, which is, of course, absolutely hideous. The centerpiece? A giant, 26-carat black diamond as the home button.
Four out of the five highest-paid executives in the United States work for Apple, Bloomberg Businessweek reports, but not one of them is CEO Tim Cook.
According to fiscal 2012 compensation figures for top earners filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Apple’s Bob Mansfield, Bruce Sewell, Jeffrey Williams, and Peter Oppenheimer join Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to make up the top five corporate earners last year.
Ecoute is one of the best third-party music players for iPhone, and it just got a whole lot better thanks to its latest update. In addition to the ability to download missing artwork, it also has new features and supports a new URL scheme that allows it to play nicely with Launch Center Pro.
Foxconn has begun taking on new workers as it prepares to begin production of Apple’s next iPhone, according to two seperate reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.
The company has added to its numbers at an iPhone plant in Zhengzhou, eastern China, ending a freeze on recruitment that was implemented back in February. The new workers will reportedly assemble the upcoming “iPhone 5S,” as well as existing models that Apple has requested to boost capacity, a supply chain source said.
Five employees working at an official iPhone distributor in China have been arrested after exploiting Apple’s returns policy by exchanging fake iPhone parts for real ones. The group sent 121 fake iPhone 4S BAND parts to have them exchanged for real ones worth around CN¥400,000 ($64,117), which they then used to build and sell fake iPhones.
This is the Bison Tote, and it’s just about the hottest laptop/camera bag ever. Unless, of course, you’re a bison. Why? Because the bag is made from bison skin.
Lomo’s awesomely handsome Belair camera has some retro-tastic styling, and a clever-and-classical bellows system to allow it to fold flat for your (oversized) pocket. The rub was that it used 120 roll-film, the kind used by medium-format cameras in the olden days.
120 is great, and the big negatives give amazingly sharp and detailed prints. But 35mm film is both cheaper and easier to process. To address this, Loma will now sell you a replacement 35mm back for your Belair.
Ever wanted to save a picture of an entire webpage? I have. Last time I made a style guide for our Cult of Mac reviews, I wanted to take a picture and scrawl notes on it. Could I find an app to help? Could I hell. In the end I resorted to printing PDF on my Mac and…. I can’t really remember. It was so convoluted that my brain has repressed the traumatic memory.
If only I’d had Barry to help me.
When you think about it, it seems absurd that there’s no way to add the currently highlighted text on your Mac to your notes. The Notes app, which is the spiritual successor to Stickies, with the advantage of a) not clogging up your screen with yellow squares and b) syncing with your iPhone and iPad, is pretty great. But it lacks, inexplicably, a way to quickly clip the selected text.
This little System Service, which runs an Applescript, will fix that for you.
LaunchBar power-users should get their virtual asses over to developer Obdev’s nightly builds page and grab the latest version of v5.5. Amongst a whole bunch of neat fixes and tweaks it adds one essential new feature: support for your iCloud documents.