A wonderful new news app from Reuters kicks off this week’s must-have apps list, providing you with an “unprecedented photography experience” that allows you to immerse yourself in the biggest news stories from around the world. Also included in the roundup is a terrific app for making mobile websites from your iPhone, a new weather app, and more.
Many of the writers here at Cult of Mac use Flipboard to read news, and we know many of you do too. That’s why we’re proud to unveil our new and improved Flipboard page!
We’ve been working closely with Flipboard for the past several months on a special design that fits our style here at Cult of Mac. Our Flipboard page has been tweaked and optimized to mesh with our site layout, and now Flipboard is an even better way to read Cult of Mac on the iPhone and iPad.
The new developer seed for OS X Server v2.2, Seed 2, is out. In an email sent to developer accounts, Apple announced the new download, and included a link to the seed download source, a set of instructions on how to instal and/or upgrade from various previous versions of OS X Server, and a PDF with the new changes detailed.
Kicking off this week’s must-have iOS app is the 1997 violent driving sensation that is Carmageddon. It finally makes its debut on iOS, and it’s an exact port of the original. It’s accompanied by Sonic Jump, Sega’s latest release; Mikey Shorts Halloween, and True Skate.
If you’ve played any of the MapleStory games on the web or iOS, you know Nexon. They’re an established developer of free-to-play online games for iOS, the web, and PC. Today the company announced the launch of another free-to-play iOS game, Space Tanks, for the iPad and iPhone. It’s Nexon’s 27th mobile title this year. Wow.
The MacHeist Bundle is a great deal of software for a great price, and it benefits great charities. This much you know, because we already told you.
Today, however, we learned that another app has been added to the run down, the $50 cooking app, MacGourmet, that developer Mariner Software calls the “iTunes for recipes.”
We told you earlier this week that Apple is gearing up to open a new retail store in the famous Wangfujing shopping district. Not only will the new store be the largest of the 5 other Apple stores in China, but it will also be the largest Apple Store in all of Asia. 300 local employees will work at the flagship Wangfujing store and serve customers with two 360-degree Genius Bars and plenty of floor space.
Apple’s Wangfujing store opens at 9 A.M local time Saturday, October 20th. Lots of people have already gathered in the freezing Beijing weather for the grand opening.
We’re huge fans of TwelveSouth’s BookBook cases here at Cult of Mac. Like everyone else, we’ve been anticipating a BookBook for the iPhone 5. Today we got word that TwelveSouth has an updated BookBook for Apple’s newest iPhone in the pipeline, and the case will be available next month!
BookBook is unique because it doubles as wallet, making it easy to carry your cards and ID with your iPhone. Not only will BookBook for iPhone 5 come in two colors, but TwelveSouth has redesigned the case to include… drum roll please… a hole for the rear-facing camera!
I despise iOS 6 Maps. Despite writing some initially favorable early impressions that now seem like they were written by a slathering moron demon who temporarily possessed my soul, ever since iOS 6 has been released, I have been frustrated by a fail rate on iOS 6 Maps that hovers somewhere around 70%. Not only can I most of the time not get iOS 6 Maps to give me a correct answer to a search query, I usually can’t get it to give me the same wrong answer twice in a row.
I realize a lot of people think iOS 6 Maps is just fine. Some of these are people I respect. I have a hard time reconciling their views on the matter with my reality. I have my suspicions that people who think iOS 6 Maps is just fine commute everywhere in their cars, and have a set pattern of destinations that rarely change: point A to point B to point C. I bike everywhere, I’m constantly going to new addresses, and for me, iOS 6 is just an utter disaster.
I yearn for the return of Google Maps to iOS 6, but I find their web app to be wanting, and most of the maps competition to be slow, ugly and just as bad as iOS 6 Maps when it comes to walking and biking instructions. Up until now, Mapquest (!) was the best app I found for getting me where I’m going.
That’s all changed, now that I’ve discovered Maps+. It’s based off of Google Maps, so it’s accurate. It uses the same tileset as iOS 5 Maps, so it’s pretty and familiar. It’s super fast, and it’s free.
One of the biggest annoyances of using Instagram is when I have a friend who also uses Twitter and I want to mention them in a photo that I’m about to post to Twitter, except their Instagram and Twitter usernames are completely different.
It’s not a huge inconvenience, but it’d just be easier if everything was the same. Instagram says they just solved that problem and now Instagram names will magically be translated to their proper Twitter handle when posted on Twitter.
When the folks at Griffin were choosing a mythical creature for which to name their company1, they might have gone with Janus instead, to better reflect the schizophrenic nature of its offering: serious computer accessories vs. frivolous toys.
That’s not to say that the toys are bad. On the contrary, Griffin’s iOS-controlled choppers look amazing. And now they’re joined by these remote-controlled monster trucks.
Most people will download almost any iOS game, no matter how silly it looks, as long as it’s free. They just won’t stick around for more than one day. A new study on user engagement in free-to-play social games discovered that 85% of new players in the U.S. never go back to the game after the first day.
There are reasons why you should always understand how technology works before taking scandalous pictures of yourself and sending them to your lover. You don’t know where those pictures are going to end up. You might snap a naughty picture with your iPhone that then gets sent to your iCloud Photostream that is then synced with your school’s iPad. Then your students might be playing around on that school iPad, find the pic of you lookin’ saucy, and then all hell breaks loose.
That’s exactly what happened to one middle school teacher. The weird twist to the story is that the teacher didn’t get fired or suspended for having nearly pornographic photos of herself on a school device. The students that found it go suspended instead.
Reuters’ new iPad app is called The Wider Image, and it’s dedicated to showing off the news agency’s photographs. It’s free, and if you want to spend the next few hours lost in amazing photojournalism from around the world, whilst learning a bit about that same world, then go download it now.
To be honest, I’m writing about DrBlinky for two reasons, both of them frivolous. One is the name: DrBlinky. Who couldn’t love a name like that?
The other is the Indiegogo pitch video, a triumph of cheesiness and amateur earnestness, but in a (very) good way. Put it this way — if Will Ferrell and Ricky Gervais ever teamed up to do a parody Kickstarter-style promo, it would look like this.
No one uses iTunes anymore. iTunes is like that one cool guy from high school who used to be a lot of fun to hang out with, but then everyone grew up and he’s still out there prowling the streets of your hometown, getting drunk, attending local football games and hanging out with high school kids. He just failed to grow up like everyone else, and that’s kind of what’s happened to iTunes. It’s antiquated and bloated. People dread using it and even though iTunes 11 is supposed to drop this month, we don’t think that’s going to change much.
What can Apple do to fix iTunes? Is there even a way to do it? It’s an ugly and slow app but it’s still important, so it’s not like Apple can just nuke it altogether and start over. Should Apple divy up the functionality of iTunes to other OS X apps the same way they do with iOS? We haven’t played with iTunes 11, but the demo at last month’s keynote didn’t make us too hopeful. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what Apple should do to fix iTunes.
The iPad mini will be announced next October 23rd, but when’s it actually going on sale? Common sense and looking at what Apple has done in the past would dictate November 2nd, which is what previous internet rumor suggested. Now we’re hearing confirmation of that date from loftier sources.
If it’s anything like the other products in the ever-burgeoning Beats franchise, the Beats Pill is likely a triumph of pricing over quality. It comes in at a Jamboxian $200, stands just two inches high, and works like any other portable speaker — via Bluetooth.
The iPhone 5 has been a sell-out since it went on sale on September 21, and it’s still incredibly difficult to get hold of in some markets even a month later. With five million units sold, it’s the fastest-selling iPhone to date, so it’s no surprise one analyst is predicting that iPhone sales could be even better than originally expected.
One of the consequences of the iPhone 5’s streamlined, ultra-thin design is that you can no longer just pop off the backplate of the device and replace it. That means no more Don-Draper-esque teak backs or glowing Apple logos or anything else that you could do to deeply personalize your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.
So what do you do if you want to customize your iPhone 5 without having to slap a bulky case on it? You skin it. And RAW out of Brooklyn is making some of the best custom skins for the iPhone 5 around out of quality leather and wood grain to give your handset a classier look.
If you have any idea what an ollie is, or a 50:50 grind, or a heel-flip (or — if you grew up in the 1980s, an acid drop or boneless), then you should buy True Skate right this minute. Seriously. I’ll wait.
Why? Because — despite some v1 limitations — True Skate is the closest you’re going to get to a dead-on skateboarding sim in 2012. The only things missing are the security guards to come and harass you, and bad fast food.
Microsoft claims its new Surface RT tablet, which begins shipping later this month, has a display that’s superior to the Retina display in the third-generation iPad. But according to DisplayMate CEO Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, that may not be the case. After some basic comparisons, Soneira found the Surface tablet’s display is “significantly less sharp” than the new iPad’s.
Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.
Apple has begun work on the first phase of its Prineville data center, which will include clearing and flattening the land for one of two 330,000 square-foot buildings. Each building is said to be more than twice the size of a typical Costco store, and this initial phase of construction alone is expected to cost Apple $68 million.
One thing’s clear: the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be a cakewalk to jailbreak. It’s based upon an all-new chip and an all-new operating system, and so far, the Dev Team has been stumped as to how to get a jailbreak out to the masses. But now Planetbeing, a member of the Chronic Dev Team, has given iPhone 5 owners a ray of hope: he says he’s almost figured out a full tethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, and from there, an untethered jailbreak is on the horizon. But there’s a big catch: it can only be run from a developer account.