Captured, edited, and filtered, all inside the Camera and Photos apps. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
One lesser known ability of the Photos app on your iPhone is that is can use third-party filter packs. If you install a photo-editing app that supports them, then you can apply that apps filters without ever leaving the Photos app. This makes it super quick to add sophisticated effects to your pictures, and you can revert to the original photo at any time in the future.
Today we’ll see how to use these filter packs, and look at a couple of great apps that have them.
The Dark Sky app provides a useful look at the next hour. Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac
Weather is something we all deal with, and an accurate idea of what’s coming can help inform your day-to-day decisions. With the Dark Sky Weather app, you can know exactly when to expect a change in weather conditions.
Unlike many of its competitors, Dark Sky goes deeper than a simple high-level summary of the day’s forecast. It offers hyperlocal forecasts for your exact address, with down-to-the-minute notifications about changing weather conditions. Uncannily accurate, it’s a shining ray of light in the storm of weather apps.
A new iPhone SE could be coming soon. Photo: Sam Mills/Cult of Mac
Apple could be gearing up to launch new iPhone models as early as next month.
New regulatory filings reveal that a bunch of new devices are planned. It’s likely they will be refreshed versions of the iPhone SE, which is due an upgrade in mid-2018, according to recent rumors.
Don't leave your Apple Pencil in the jar. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
You have a new iPad, and you have a new Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.
Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.
Power up your Apple Watch Series 3 in style with our top picks for best chargers and stands. Photo: Studio Proper
From pocket-size, portable chargers to sleek, modernist stands and cases, Cult of Mac Watch Store has your Apple Watch Series 3 charging needs covered.
We’ve rounded up our favorite stands and docks for Apple Watch Series 3 from some of the best brands on the market — Nomad, Zens, Twelve South, Just Mobile and more. Plus, a number of new brands including Amber and Proper. Whether you’re on holiday, on the go, at work or at home, we’ve got a charging solution to fit your needs. Check out our great lineup below.
Deliveries helps keep track of packages in transit Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac
As online shopping becomes an integral part of our lives, one pain point remains: Keeping track of when all our precious packages will arrive.
That’s why online shoppers will love iOS package-tracking app Deliveries. It eliminates the irritation of keeping track of where packages are and when they’re going to be delivered. Forget about dealing with the nightmare of order-confirmation emails and online accounts. Deliveries consolidates info on all the packages in transit to your home. Then it lets you keep tabs via a single timeline in an easy-to-use app.
The best and most useful apps for iPhone and iPad Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
With a mind-boggling 2.2 million apps in Apple’s iOS App Store, how do you find what’s good? That discovery problem is why we’re starting the 50 Essential iOS Apps series, a curated list of the best iOS apps on the planet, with new apps added every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Throughout this series, we will highlight essential iPhone and iPad apps in a variety of categories. We will show off apps that display excellent design, functionality, features and value. Or, most often, a combination of those desirable traits. Whether you’re looking to boost your productivity, take advantage of important data or just have a little fun, we’ll recommend great iOS apps to suit your needs.
Get access to over 400,000 tv episodes with SelectTV Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
You might think that Amazon, Hulu or Netflix are the biggest beasts of streaming content. But you’d be wrong. Turns out, they all fall under the umbrella of the biggest streaming service of all: SelectTV.
Get a bunch of marketable coding skills with these 10 comprehensive courses. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
The need for coders is only getting stronger. So if you’re looking for a way to boost your marketability, learning coding is one of the best ways. But where to start?
Apple might be planning cheaper HomePod to boost sales Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
HomePod sales have fallen well below expectations, according to one of the best Apple analysts in the game.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo told investors today that Apple is considering making a low-cost version of the HomePod in order to give disappointing sales a boost.
You can now play at 120Hz on iPad Pro. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac
Fortnite Battle Royale on mobile is a boatload of fun — but it could be a lot better. Clunky touch controls make it more difficult to play on iOS than on console or PC, and there’s nothing game controller manufacturers can do about it right now.
Gamevice has explained why its controllers do nothing if you attempt to use them in Fortnite — and why it’s taking Epic Games so long to add controller support.
Is HomePod nearing its end, or just getting started? Photo: Apple
This week on The CultCast: HomePod sales are already stumbling — is it doomed? Plus: Face ID could replace passwords on your favorite websites; the death of Touch ID scheduled for this fall; and our hands-on reviews of an $80 tech-packed coffee cup, a beautiful new HomeKit smart lock, and the all-new Mavic Air drone.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.
Everyone should welcome skill-based matchmaking. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac
Epic has promised to give Fortnite players free loot to apologize for recent downtime that left fans unable to play the game for around 24 hours.
Battle Royale players — including those on iOS — will be able to obtain a back bling gift from the store this weekend, while the game’s next big update will bring free Battle Stars. Save the World players can look forward to some goodies, too.
Did you ever snap a photo of a magazine page, or capture a screenshot of text, and wish you could just copy and paste it like any normal text? Maybe it’s a photo of a recipe from a paper book, and you’d like to be able to search for it in future? The good news is that you can easily extract the text from a photo or screenshot, right there on your iPhone.
The even better news is that we’re going to learn how to do it right now.
Why bother learning how to tune your guitar? Photo: Roadie
This is the Roadie. It’s a guitar tuner with a rotating slot that you slide over a tuning peg of your guitar. Then you pluck a string, and the Roadie listens to the pitch, and actually turns the peg for you, shifting the pitch up or down until it is in tune.
Add thousands of icons to your library of design assets. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
If you work on design projects, you know how important a library of assets is. And if you’re working on interface or website design, icons are your bread and butter.
HomePod sales are already suffering. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Apple has been forced to cut HomePod orders as inventories continue to build up in its retail stores, according to a new report.
The $349 speaker enjoyed a promising start when it made its debut in February, but demand has fallen quickly as smart speaker shoppers turn to more affordable options from the likes of Amazon.
Like a tidy stack of documents, right in your Dock. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Left to its own devices, the Dock on your Mac is little more than a list of running apps, plus a trash can. You probably already know that you can force apps to stick around in the Dock for quick-launching, and that you can drag any folder to the Dock and just click it to see inside. But did you know that you can add special folders that show you your recent documents, applications, your favorite items, and more?
The recent documents folder is worth the price of this tip alone (which is $0 BTW), because it keeps track of all your recently-used documents, anywhere on your Mac, and gathers them into one place. If you’re the kind of person who has a desktop cluttered with pretty much all your documents, then fast access to that file you were using one moment ago — and you swear it was right here, oh God where has it gone — is a lifesaver.
This portable Bluetooth speaker sounds great and can survive almost anything. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
Bluetooth speakers have made our music more portable. There’s nothing quite like bringing your tunes to the beach, on a boat, up a hill. There’s also nothing quite like the feeling of dropping your precious electronics into water or onto the rocks.
The Microblog app looks pretty great on iPhone. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Facebook tracks your every move and sells the information to people who try to fix elections. Twitter is destroying the fabric of democracy, and doesn’t care. And even if you leave Facebook, it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the biggest social networks outside of itself and Twitter. And now Facebook is promising to let anyone delete their posts, which means that you’ll never really know what’s been happening. IT’s time to leave Facebook and move on, but where?
After all, a social network is pointless if you have no friends on it. Happily, there’s a social network out there already that’s bigger than Facebook, and completely uncontrolled by any single company. It’s the web.
Today we’re going to see how to post your photos, messages, and other rants onto your own microblog, just like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The best part is, you own everything, anyone can read it, and it’s as easy to use as sending a tweet.
Will Apple move workouts to iCloud so you can browse them on any device? Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac
When it comes to fitness apps on Apple Watch, sometimes it feels like Cupertino is running before it can walk. Fancy new features like Heart Rate Recovery are very welcome, but a few of the basics remain missing.
Apple could make major strides when it releases watchOS 5. So in the second of three posts about the future of watchOS, I’ll focus on five essential fitness features I’m hoping we’ll see at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
Once you start collecting computers, it's hard to stop! Photo: David Greelish
Some people only care about the latest technology. For others, collecting the significant computers of the past — whether it’s an iconic first-gen Macintosh or iPhone, or failures like Apple’s short-lived Pippin games console — is fun in its own right.
If you fall in to this second group, you’ll love these five computer collecting tips to get the most out of your hobby. They will help you turn your passion for vintage Macs into an eye-catching computer collection.
There's some free space right up there. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
MacOS High Sierra upgraded the Mac’s under-the-hood file system, replacing the decades-old HFS+ with the shiny new APFS. What this means for the user is way faster file copying, the ability to revert to previous versions of your documents, and several other neat features. But it also means that you may have a lot less free space left on your storage disk, thanks to APFS’ habit of using it to store special ‘dark matter.’Today we’ll learn what this dark matter is, and how to free up disk space.
Turn your dusty old Mac into a fat stack of cash. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Professional Mac users holding out for the next Mac Pro are going to have to wait at least another year.
After revealing in 2017 that it was completely redesigning the Mac Pro, some fans held out hope that the new Mac Pro would come out by 2018. That’s not going to happen though. In a series of interviews, Apple executives revealed that the new Mac Pro will be a 2019 product.
Pages may be the best "desktop" publishing app for most people. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Today we’re going to use the new features in Pages 4.0 to create an amazing report. If you need to write a book report, or create a longer document for school or work, the new Master Pages feature in Apple’s free word processor will prove extremely handy.
With Pages, it’s now easier than ever to throw together an amazing-looking document with almost no effort. Apart from the writing, that is.