The Spider-Man drawing above was created entirely on the iPad Pro using Procreate and the Apple Pencil. After many years, my love of drawing has been reignited and transported to the digital age.
This week: get your mace and taser ready for Black Friday! We share some of the best deals on MacBooks, iPhones, Playstation 4s, Xbox One’s, Wii U’s and more. Plus: why your Mac store apps could be corrupted (and what to do about it); RDIO bites the dust; and the iPad Mini 4 proves far better than we originally thought.
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The flagship speaker from Sonos has been revamped, redesigned and relaunched. The result is awesome.
The new Play:5 is a big, beefy speaker that sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s available in stores today, and although it’s not cheap, I’d recommend you go out and get one. Or two. Stereo is even better.
Harvard classmates Lei Guo and Oliver Hayen created what could have been just another messaging app. They knew they had something unique, as every app development team claims, so they put it in the hands of 2,000 people and hit launch.
Within 30 days, their app SOMA Messenger had 10 million users and has been growing since. They’d love to brag about who is using it, except they can’t because of security measures built into the app that prevents even them from knowing SOMA’s users.
Boasting a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 11,000 parking spaces, 2,000 bike parking spaces, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and a 100,000-square-foot lab thrown in for good measure, Apple’s “spaceship” Campus 2 is pretty darned massive.
Struggling to wrap your head around that? Then consider that it’s big enough to house pretty much the entirety of Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. And we’ve got the (mocked-up) photos to prove it.
I’ve got a love/hate relationship with standing desks. While I love the health benefits of standing, I seriously cannot stand at my desk all day every day. It needs to be easily adjustable.
Also, not all of us have the space for yet another desk in our homes or offices. Most of us have a regular, plain old desk. If you’re looking for a standing solution – you can convert that plain desk super easily with this Sit-Stand Desktop Workstation. It’s a heavy-duty, solid piece of work, and it sits right on top your regular desk. There’s room to strap on a monitor or two, or even just place your Macbook on top with an external keyboard and mouse below.
The iPhone can do a lot of things, but work as a functional piece of furniture? Yes, as one design studio proved when it created a tiny lampshade that clips to the iPhone.
Activate the flashlight app and behold, a nightstand reading light.
If you’re an Apple ID owner, you know that two-step verification is the best way to make sure that only you have access to your personal credit card details along with your app, music, and video purchases.
Until a couple of weeks ago, Amazon–another company that probably has private financial information from you–didn’t have a way to do the same thing. That way, even if someone figures out your password, they’ll only have half the info needed to make changes to or access your account.
Now that the Seattle-based books-and-everything-else company allows for it, it’s time to zip up your personal details. Here’s how.
What does my performance in the gym have in common with iOS 9 adoption? Apparently the fact that both start strong, get a bit overconfident, and then run out of steam far too quickly.
That’s according to Apple’s latest developer figures, at least, which show that roughly 67 percent of eligible iOS users are currently upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.
The newspaper that covers the wizarding world of Harry Potter publishes photos that move on the page. For us Muggles, there’s LifePrint, a pocket-sized printer that brings a similar magical to our still photos.
The LifePrint device lets you embed a video inside a printed photograph, using augmented reality and requiring the viewer to point their smartphone at the picture to bring it to life.
You’re just so excited for your new Apple TV that you can’t wait until tomorrow to get it, can you? That’s why Apple has teamed up with Postmates to bring same-day delivery of its wide range of products and accessories to a new market: New York City.
Wacom is to graphics tablets what Kleenex is to facial tissues, so it’s no surprise that the company knows its way around a stylus. And the original version of the Bamboo Fineline is a great entry point for those looking to start drawing, sketching, and taking notes on their iPads.
One thing that apps like Instagram and VSCO have mastered is making photo retouching on a mobile device (e.g. smartphone, ipad, etc.) a breeze. Simple sliders grouped in easily understandable categories and real-time results make the editing process a snap. It’s fun and easy to dial in the overall look of an image on your phone’s screen! However, with that convenience, comes limitations. For instance, if you want anything more precise than a slider you’ll have to open up a professional application like Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture.
If you’re enamored of the beautiful aerial screen savers on your new Apple TV and want to do something similar on your Mac, you’re in luck.
SaveHollywood is a screen saver module that will work on any Mac running OS X 10.8 or later, and it lets you play any movie you want when your Mac enters screen saver mode.
Here’s how to get it set up.
Ever wanted to see a chart depicting Apple’s perilous decline from the moment Tim Cook took over as CEO until now? Well, you’ll just have to keep on looking, because this particular infographic shows nothing of the sort.
Instead, this spectacular infographic visualizes the year-on-year growth of Apple’s iPhone business, from a “puny” 1.36 million units in 2007 to a whopping 231.22 million this year. Check it out below.
We all like to carry our gadgets around with us, but there are definitely times when you’ll want to be ultra portable and just take along, say, your iPad mini on vacation. Or, perhaps you want to get some writing done on the airplane:we all know the seat-back tray is way too small for a full laptop.
This ultra-portable Brydge keyboard is a fantastic match for the iPad mini, letting you be a bit more productive than you would without an actual keyboard. It’s designed to match whichever iPad mini you own, turning the whole thing into an adorably small Macbook-like laptop-style tablet.
This post is brought to you by VMware, maker of AirWatch.
Whatever your organization’s mission, synchronizing all your employees’ mobile devices can power up your operations. However, wrangling together an array of phones, tablets and laptops is very tough. Making sure they’re all caught up and in sync with the same software versions and whatnot — let alone sourcing or (gasp) developing the applications your business will run on them — is a lot for a business of any size to take on.
My iPhone 6 Plus is a battery hog. I routinely get around 12 hours off of one full charge. I carry around external battery packs to make sure I’m not short when it matters.
I’d do pretty much anything to increase the amount of battery I have left at the end of the day, including the following fairly extreme trick.
A good iPhone case protects your handset from the blunt force of a fall. Then there’s the case that protects the force of your blunts.
The iHit is a case for the iPhone 6 and 6s with a slide out odor-free compartment that can stash up to five pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes. It is the latest evolution of the iHit case, which started with a case for the iPhone 5 that had a spring-loaded chamber for a single joint.
iPad Pro Diary, Day 2: I have a shameful confession to make. Even though I’ve been using an iPad and iPhone for years, I haven’t really been using them.
I do a few things that haven’t changed for donkeys. I read on the iPad all the time and send the odd email. I play songs on Sonos. I played Kingdom Rush a few times. I watched a Netflix video. That’s about it.
My iPhone I use more, but nothing heavy duty. Messaging, email, photos and maps. The odd phone call.
But now that I’m forcing myself to use the iPad Pro for work — to see if it really is a PC replacement — I’m discovering something unesxpected: That the iOS ecosytem is far deeper, more productive, and better integrated than I knew.
Not only is work easier on the iPad these days, it’s a lot more fun.
Rumor has it that Apple Watch will get an update next year. There is already plenty of speculation about what cool new features Cupertino will add.
Personally, I’m hoping that the new watch will focus on fitness, so I’ve created a mockup concept to show what I’d like to see in the next generation of Apple Watch. I call it the Apple Watch GPS, Nike edition.
This week: can the new iPad Pro really replace your Mac? Apple seems to think so, but we’ve got a Pro in-hand and we’re not so sure. Plus: Apple may soon offer us all a simple way to pay each other; and stick around for another classic El Kahney rant—zombie edition—on an all new Stuff We’re Into.
Our thanks to Harry’s for supporting this episode. Harry’s super-sharp, German-made razors ship free right to your door and for way less than the drugstore razors. Learn more at Harrys.com and save $5 off your first order with code CultCast.
The iPad Pro is being hailed as “a new kind of computer,” but as some have noted, it’s really the top half of a new kind of computer. Missing is the bottom half — the keyboard.
Apple has a solution for that — the $169 Smart Keyboard, which turns the iPad Pro into a laptop lookalike. But there’s a fantastic alternative: Logitech’s Create keyboard and case.
Logitech’s Create has several advantages over Apple’s Smart Keyboard. First, it’s a keyboard and a case that turns the Pro into a proper faux laptop (Apple’s keyboard is half a case that covers only the iPad’s screen). Logitech’s keyboard has fantastic chicklet keys, versus Apple’s hated low-travel flat keys; and it’s backlit, an essential requirement for any keyboard.
All in all, Logitech’s $150 backlit keyboard turns the iPad Pro into a MacBook — but a MacBook with cool extra features like Touch ID and a touch-sensitive screen.
We’re all excited to start unlocking the full potential of the iPad Pro, but we have a problem: We can’t really start doing that until we can get our hands on the Apple Pencil stylus that the company swears will change how we draw virtual lines forever. As of this writing, it’s showing a four to five week wait for shipping, and that’s up from the one to two weeks we saw when the peripherals first went on sale.
So if you have an iPad Pro to play around with but aren’t sure what to do while you wait for your awesome stylus to show up, we have your back.
If you’re one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a big, beautiful iPad Pro, you might be surprised that many of the same OS X keyboard shortcuts, like the ones for cut, paste, find, etc., are available right on your new giant laptop replacement.
The iPad Pro keyboard has a Command key on it, as do several third-party keyboards.
If you’re already a Mac user (and you should be), you’ll feel right at home when you need to create a new document in Pages, make your text bold or italic, or even show the word count in a document. Here are several key combinations you can use right out of the box.