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Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for people who have an unnatural love for their iPhones. Freaks.

The promise is simple: Take a small box, stuff in some flash memory and a Wi-Fi radio, and make the contents of that flash storage available to any device on the network via a web browser.

That’s the Packetta from King Jim – a USB dongle which would be just about ideal were it not for a few deficiencies.

Still fantasizing about replacing your aging plasma with a new Apple television? According to recent speculation, the Cupertino company is going to announce the revolutionary new set any day now. But according to former Apple executive and current Apple watcher Jean-Louis Gassee, we’re kidding ourselves.

Gassee says that the rumors surrounding the device are nothing but an “enduring fantasy,” and that the only thing Apple will release that’s close to a television is a new Apple TV set-top box.

Research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that “smart connected device” shipments — which includes computers, smartphones, and tablets — reached a record high during the third quarter of 2012, largely thanks to Apple and Samsung. The pair’s hugely popular devices helped the market grow 27.1% year-on-year as it reached a record 303.6 million shipments valued at over $140 billion.

The countless problems users have faced with Apple’s new Maps service have been widely documented since the software made its debut with iOS 6 back in September. The large majority of users — particularly those outside of the United States — have found it to be unreliable, inaccurate, and largely useless.

Now Australian police have warned that using the service could get you killed. The caution comes after six motorists were guided into the wilderness when looking for the Victorian city of Mildura.

Square, the Apple-like mobile payment service that’s all the rage right now, just integrated with Passbook in iOS 6. Before you get too excited, the integration only allows iPhone users to store and use the new gift cards that can be sent via the Square iOS app. Square lets you pay for your stuff with your bank credentials while Passbook still does not.

Now you can send a digital gift card from any merchant that partners with Square, and the recipient can choose to open the gift card in Square’s Wallet app, print it off, or use it in Apple’s Passbook.

The all-new Twitterrific 5 is kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup, with a brand new look and a whole host of new features. It’s joined by the official YouTube client, which now supports iPad; an all-new Instacast; and a redesigned Gmail app.

iTunes 11 just came out, and if you’ve upgraded, you know that it has changed many of the familiar features and moved many of them to different places. Let’s take a look at the different ways to use iTunes 11 the right way, with the following tips and tricks.

Speaking to NBC talking head Brian Williams this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years.”

Cook went on to upgrade Apple’s efforts in television from a “hobby” to “an area of intense interest.”

These cryptic comments support what Steve Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, told an interviewer, which is that Jobs said off the record that he wanted to “reinvent” TV, that Apple had “licked” the problems associated with said reinvention, and that Apple’s solution would liberate TV viewers once and for all from “all these complicated remote controls.”

If you want to tease predictive meaning out of these two Apple CEO statements, the key is in what each of them said and to whom and why. 

Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in January, and since then the photography pioneer has been trying to sell off its many patents. Over the summer it was reported that Apple and Google were leading separate groups in a bidding war for the valuable portfolio. Now a new report says that Apple and Google have teamed up to place a $500 million bid.

Since the iPhone 5 was released in late September, Apple’s online shipping estimates have had trouble catching up with demand. Earlier this week, Apple’s online store started giving an estimate of 2-4 business for new orders, and now Apple is finally showing the iPhone 5 as being in stock.

As the iPhone 5 expands to more than 50 new countries in the month of December, Apple has managed to stabilize supplies just in time for the holidays. Customers in several countries around the world, including the United States and Canada, will now have their iPhone 5 orders shipped immediately. Notably, the U.K. Apple online store is still showing a 1-3 business day estimate. Unlocked models in the U.S. are shipping in 1-3 business days as well.

Source: Apple Store

This week’s must-have games roundup is by far one of our best yet; it’s filled with five awesome titles that you won’t want to miss. Three of those titles are classic games reborn on iOS, including Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — my personal favorite, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, and Mutant Mudds.

We also have Gameloft’s incredible new first-person shooter, Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour, and Minigore 2: Zombies, another terrific dual-stick shooter from Mountain Sheep.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

So what’s behind the door on Saturday the 8th? Letterpress for iOS, a word game for the rest of us, with a simple, cutthroat strategy and an amazing visual design!

Say you’re out and about and you find a link that you want to remember to download onto your desktop  once you get home. You could copy the URL to Notepad, email it to yourself, or add the page to Pocket, but you’re probably going to forget to do it later or lose the info.

A new utility called Transloader, created by Matthias Gansrigler, makes such situations easier to manage by allowing iPhone and iPad users to remotely download URLs to their Mac when they’re away from the house.

One of Apple’s most prized software patents is commonly referred to as simply “the Steve Jobs patent.” The late CEO himself is listed as one of the key inventors in the patent’s documentation, and it was also referred to as “the iPhone patent” when it was approved back in 2009.

Apple has been using this famous patent in courtrooms to sue the likes of Samsung and Google’s Motorola, but now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has entirely invalidated the patent until further examination.

Apple has released a big update for all OS X Server users on Mountain Lion. Version 2.2 adds a number of notable features, including the ability to cache app and software updates in the Mac App Store for faster downloads. Administrators can also monitor multiple Time Machines connected to different Macs on the same network and see when they last backed up.

The iPhone 6 probably isn’t going to come out for another 18 months or so, but seems how it’s so far away, now seems like a great time to fantasize about possible features Apple might throw into the device based on patent filings. It’s Friday. I’m tired. So screw it, let’s talk crazy.

Yesterday the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that showed Apple is considering adding hidden audio sensors into the displays of the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and maybe even the iTV if they get around to it. What wasn’t detailed was how Apple plans to use those sensors,  but one crazy idea is that Apple might use them to create sonar-maps kind of like in the movie The Dark Knight.

I thought I had the whole “paperless” thing under control until Doxie sent over the new, budget-priced Doxie One for me to review. Trust me: If you snap photos of your receipts with your iPhone in an attempt to banish dead trees from your life, you should probably switch to a portable scanner.

It really is that much better.

One of the best things about Christmas is the endless number of Ugly Sweater Parties during the build up to Santa smothering me with presents. Sure, ugly sweater parties have become cliché, but I’m not bored of them just yet, and using an iPad to create the ultimate ugly christmas sweater sounds awesome.

I pride myself on my ability to dominate the competition at an ugly sweater party, but never before had I thought to integrate an iPad or iPhone into the costume with the elegance Mark Rober pulls of in the video above. Replicating Mark’s sweater is pretty easy. Just download his Digital Dudz – Christmas app, buy a sweater, cut a hole in it, duck-tape your iPad to the back and you’re done.

Rather than going with a simple fireplace though, I’m thinking of displaying an endless collection of the best/worst GIFs, or just this.

Source: YouTube

Via: Gizmodo

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

So what’s behind the door on Friday the 7th? Tweetbot for Mac, the best (and most expensive) Twitter client on the Mac App Store!

If you’re a gamer, enjoy yourself this lazy December Friday afternoon through this wonderful, whimsical two-and-a-half minute video — in which Link, the elven, immortal hero of the Legend of Zelda series — travels across a series of Macs and iOS devices in a university computer land in order to rescue Princess Zelda from the evil wizard Gannon.

Just incredibly well done. Makes me want to load Majora’s Mask up in an emulator on my MacBook Air and while the afternoon away.

T-Mobile recently announced that they’ve reached an agreement with Apple to start selling the iPhone in 2013. Coming on the heels of their iPhone announcement, T-Mobile says they plan to stop subsidizing smartphones in 2013 to give customers more freedom.

All four of the major U.S. carriers offer smartphones at a subsidized price, giving subscribers a discount in exchange for tying them to a two-year contract. The contract helps the carriers retain customers, and the lower price point of the smartphone makes customers happy, but it also ramps up costs and restricts customers from upgrades. T-Mobile says they want to get rid of that system entirely.

Square Enix has announced today that it will be bringing Final Fantasy IV to iOS devices on December 20, and to Android at some point during 2013. The port appears not to be the original, but instead the title’s remake that was brought to the Nintendo DS with 3D graphics among other features and improvements.

Unlike Facebook and Google, when Apple decides to build a huge new data center, they’re not going to let anybody inside to see the technological marvels that they’ve cooked up. Apple just broke ground on a $68 million data center in Prinveville, Oregon, so rather than waiting forever to get an invite to tour the place, Wired sent out their spy plane to get some pictures.

Only a few parts of the data center have been completed, but it is interesting how close Apple is building their data center to Facebook’s gigantic new twin data center. Maybe being neighbors will help the two companies become best friends.

Here’s the pics of the future iCloud of the West.

Apple made its new iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad available to customers in China today, where its iOS devices have recently been seeing record demand. However, that wasn’t the case at the Cupertino company’s new retail store in Beijing. Lines outside the building were almost nonexistent when doors first opened, while only four customers entered the building in the following hour. Most of those who did walk out with a device sold them straight on to scalpers waiting outside.