Audiobooks.com has today launched the first subscription service to provide unlimited access to thousands of audiobooks streamed directly to your device. The service uses an HTML5 web app and promises to enforce no monthly limits and no long-term commitments.
We know Apple puts a lot of effort into its product packaging to ensure it’s almost as beautiful as the product within, but you may be surprised to hear that an entire room within the Cupertino company’s headquarters is dedicated to testing different variants of product packaging.
Apple has issued an EFI firmware update to its mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pro which enables Lion Recovery over an Internet connection, allowing users to reinstall the latest OS X operating system onto their machine without the need for physical recovery media.
A Cydia package by the name of SiriToggles brings functionality to Siri that Apple should have included from day one. With the free SiriToggles tweak on your jailbroken iPhone 4S, you can launch any app, change your system settings, and even turn your iPhone off with your voice.
While Apple has restricted Siri to a limited set of capabilities by default, SiriToggles liberates the virtual assistant for jailbreakers.
He created products that profoundly shaped the technology sector and modern culture as a whole. He won a Grammy without ever recording a song. Now Steve Jobs has a commercial jetliner named after him.
Virgin America has emblazoned a giant “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” on the side of one of its Airbus A320 jets. The plane flew for the first time last fall and is part of an internal naming competition within the airline.
Siri has a new competitor, and her name is Evi. Developed by True Knowledge and powered by the same Nuance-based backend as Apple’s virtual assistant, Evi is available for all iPhones in the App Store. There’s also a beta app available for Android handsets.
While Evi doesn’t have the integrated advantage that Siri wields, she is perhaps the first clone that’s just as smart, if not smarter, than Siri.
Help on those tricky algebra problems could be a touchscreen away thanks to a new iPhone app.
A company called Does That Make Sense? (DTMS, for short) plans to offer live help to students using Apple’s smartphones.
Microsoft’s super expensive Surface table doesn’t have anything on the iDesk, a stunning concept by the editors at MacLife and illustrated by Adam Benton. The iDesk’s Minority Report-like interface would allow you to sync your iOS devices by simply placing them on the table. Not only that, but the whole desk could serve as a trackpad. Talk about gestures.
Thanks to the newly-released Absinthe untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can finally get Siri up and running on Apple’s latest tablet. The process isn’t an easy one, as you will need to set up your own SiriProxy server and edit your iPad’s filesystem.
If you have the time and stamina to get Siri up and running on the iPad 2, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the voice assistant goodness that’s available on the iPhone 4S. You’ll also be able to install other jailbreak tweaks to enhance Siri’s functionality.
Thanks to Apple’s free AirPort Utility app for iOS, it’s easy to make simple changes to your Time Capsule and update its firmware without having to use a computer. Here’s how to update your Time Capsule firmware using only your iOS device and the AirPort Utility app.
Last Friday the Chronic Dev Team released Absinthe, a free tool for jailbreaking the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1. The release was met with such high demand that many were unable to install the jailbreak for nearly 24 hours due to intense traffic strains on the Greenpois0n.com servers.
Jailbreaking has become much more of a mainstream trend during the last few years, and the demand for this recent jailbreak reiterates that millions are still willing to hack their iPhones and iPads post-iOS 5.
More signs pouring in the iPhone benefitted big time during the holidays. In particular, new research finds some 36 percent of consumers buying the iPhone 4S between October and December 2011 were abandoning other platforms, such as Android or the BlackBerry. The findings were doubly good news for Apple, as researchers found 21 percent of iPhone 4S buyers chose the 64GB smartphone model.
Tablets — especially iPads — were hot holiday gifts. A new survey finds that in about just one week, the percentage of U.S. consumers owning a tablet almost doubled to 19 percent, up from 10 percent prior to Christmas Day. That portion was even higher as you go up the income and education scale.
Following the release of iTunes U for iOS last week, Apple has introduced a new support section to its website that is aimed at students and teachers who are interested in adopting the new app. The support notes cover things like creating new iTunes U courses, creating course podcasts, and marketing your institution’s content.
Research in Motion announced over the weekend that the company’s two co-founders have stepped down as co-CEOs of the embattled BlackBerry maker in favor of two relative unknowns. RIM’s Chief Operating Officer Thorsten Heins becomes the new CEO while Royal Bank of Canada executive Barbara Stymiest was named independent chair.
Designer extraordinaire Jeff Broderick has created yet another tool for enhancing your productivity on your iOS devices. QuickContact is a beautiful web app that allows you to create app icons for quickly initiating calls or messages from your Home screen.
Pixelbit’s Reckless Racing quickly became a hit when it first came to iOS back in October 2010, so it’s no wonder the company has been hard at work on a sequel. Fans of the top-down arcade racer will be pleased to know that Reckless Racing 2 is on its way, and it’ll hit the App Store next week.
If you thought there would be little interest in an Apple event that didn’t include new hardware, think again. Following the unveiling of iBooks 2 with support for textbooks last week, Apple saw an incredible 350,000 textbook downloads in just three days of availability.
Apple is set to roll out support for 802.11ac “Gigabit Wi-Fi” this year to a range of devices including its Apple TV, MacBooks, Time Capsule, and possibly even its iOS devices, according to a new report. The new specification offers speeds around three times as fast as the existing 802.11n wireless technology, with speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.
Did you choose to purchase an iPhone over the Android-powered Galaxy S II? Well, congratulations. Like many of us here at Cult of Mac, you’ve been “Samsunged!”
Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.
It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.
The New York Times on Sunday published a provocative piece asking whether Apple has an obligation to make its products at home in the U.S.
The article describes how, in 2007, just before the iPhone hit stores, Steve Jobs angrily discovered that its screen was easily scratched. He ordered the plastic screens be immediately replaced with scratch-proof glass ones.
New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
The Times notes that General Motors in its heyday employed 400,000 U.S. workers. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas. An additional 700,000 workers build and assemble Apple’s products, mostly in China.
The Absinthe for Mac jailbreak tool has been updated with several bug fixes for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners looking to jailbreak on iOS 5.0 or 5.0.1. We’ve covered Absinthe in detail since it was released to the world yesterday, and this second update addresses key issues that users have been experiencing.
The Chronic Dev Team has updated its Absinthe jailbreak tool with support for Windows users. iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners can use Absinthe for Windows to install the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1.
Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?
After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: Which is better? Android’s three virtual buttons or iOS’s physical home button?
In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!
Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.