Cult of Mac

The ever-expanding holiday season is upon us once again, and Cult of Mac wants to help make your obligatory family dinners the least awkward they can be.

We know that a certain amount of discomfort is unavoidable. Kids might have tantrums, Grinches might get a bit too much “holiday spirit,” or some cousin with a beef might have been waiting for everyone to be in the same room before they announce how they really feel about Grandma.

Family drama aside, we have a few tips for conversation tech topics to avoid during dinner to keep everyone as happy and un-yelled-at as possible. It was a big year for tech, but some topics are best left in Internet forums and the comments of your favorite Apple blog.

Teaching your kids how to code is pretty much as important as teaching them to write, according to Apple’s senior VP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, in an interview promoting the company’s Hour of Code project.

Apple is turning all of its retail locations into coding centers for kids this week. The classes will offer hands-on instructions into the basics of coding that Federighi says will hopefully set of a spark with the young learners.

The fact that professional-level photos and videos can be made with the camera on the iPhone is old news. However, the amazement never gets old with professionals when they forgo conventional equipment to use iPhones on a shoot.

The cinematographers who capture breathtaking action sports for Freeride Entertainment were in awe of the results with the iPhone after filming some of the most daring skiers, wakeboarders and motocross athletes for a promotion for HITCASE.

The developers of the Poison Maps app figured out a new way to implement 3D Touch that goes above and beyond what we’re used to seeing. They use two patent-pending gestures called “context zooming” and “context panning.” The first lets you quickly see the surrounding area of a particular location you’re zoomed in on without leaving that location, while the latter lets you move around in the surroundings and effortlessly focus in on somewhere new.

These gestures work using long presses. Since 3D Touch can sense varying amounts of force, Poison Apps cleverly uses the technology to adjust the zoom based on how hard you press.

Apple Pay is showing up in more places these days, but if you live in a town like mine, it can be hard to know exactly where those places are.

Want to know whether that hip restaurant down the street or your local pharmacy supports Apple Pay before you get there? Here’s a super easy trick using either your iPhone or your Mac.

The holiday shopping season is usually a huge boon for PC manufacturers, but according to the latest estimates from the International Data Corporation, shoppers have decided to skip the PC upgrade as a gift this Christmas.

Google Calendar is bringing your appointments and to-do list together with a new update that adds support for reminders. Calendar will display your tasks and to-dos alongside meetings and events so they’re harder to forget, and sync them across Inbox, Gmail, Google Keep, and Google Now.

Another week, another Cult of Mac Magazine – the best place to get your Apple fix in one place.

This week, we’ve got quick tips to speed up your iPhone and Apple Watch, our take on the stupidity of killing the iPhone’s headphone jack, new how-tos for Apple Music and Apple TV, a hilarious bit of Star Wars fever that Siri’s picked up, and the latest rumors about iPhone 6c and iPhone 7. That not enough? There’s tons more inside.

Here’s the rundown for this week’s cover stories:

The iPad lineup has seen a ton of changes since Apple introduced its first tablet in 2010. Not only have the form factors evolved ever so slightly, but the internal components have pushed the product line from a cool reading/gaming device into a powerhouse machine that can replace your laptop.

To see just how much iPad has progressed, EverythingApplePro created a speed test using every iPad ever made. It’s no surprise that the iPad Pro comes out on top, but the original iPad off a shocker by beating some of its successors.

Check it out:

Maybe you played with Lego bricks as a kid and moved into adulthood building with computer graphics, steal and concrete. Lego always promised it could inspire future builders.

Now the toymaker loved around the world is looking for someone who still likes to hit the bricks. Lego is looking for a master model builder for a new Legoland Discovery Center in Michigan and is holding a two-day tryout next month to find the perfect candidate.

Dropbox has announced that it is killing its Carousel and Mailbox apps in early 2016.

The company says it will use what it has learned from these products to improve its core Dropbox service, and to increase its focus on Paper, the tool that allows you to create new documents and collaborate on them in real-time in the cloud.

Understanding and working with data is key to how organizations large and small make and measure their impact. Mastering data can give you new insights and make you an invaluable asset to any team. If you’re intimidated by the thought of big numbers and spreadsheets, this massively discounted collection of lessons will give you the solid grounding you need to work with data like a maestro, covering the essentials of extracting, managing, and analyzing data. It’s a comprehensive bundle of lessons going for just $39 at Cult of Mac Deals.

I’m not usually a big fan of third-party iOS keyboards because they’re often clumsy and perform worse than iOS’s default keyboard. But I like Slash Keyboard. It’s fast, it’s accurate, and it allows you to search for and insert nearly anything on the web – GIFs, stickers, YouTube videos, Foursquare locations, you name it — into an email or text message, without once changing screens.

It’s hardly speculation to suggest that, as soon as Apple is rumored to be entering a new area of production, every manufacturer with capacity wants to get in on the new opportunities.

The latest example of this is Japan Display, which is reportedly in the early stages of converting one of its factories in Ishikawa factory into an test production line to try and win iPhone orders when Apple switches to using OLED displays in the near future.

Given its slowing sales and the continued record smashing of its iPhone brethren, it’s easy to think of the iPad as the “also ran” of Apple’s iOS devices.

In fact, people continue to talk about the iPad an enormous amount — more than any other topic in tech, if you believe Twitter’s freshly-released list of 2015’s top trending topics.

Reports that iPhone 6s production may be slower than expected may be plain wrong, if you go by the record earnings one iPhone supplier recorded last month.

Catcher Technologies supplies the metal casings for the iPhone 6s. In November it recorded sales on $254 million — representing an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous month, and a massive 50.3 percent increase from this time last year.

There’s no doubting that Apple’s “Find my iPhone” feature can be pretty useful at times. But a recent story highlights the feature’s potential dark side — as a family was attacked after a group of people knocked on their door, erroneously claiming their lost handset was inside the family’s home.

We’ve heard plenty of conflicting reports about when we should expect a new smaller, 4-inch iPhone “c” from Apple, but Piper Jaffray’s resident Apple analyst Gene Munster suggests that Cupertino would be wasting its time by releasing a sequel to 2013’s iPhone 5c.

Why? Because, Munster claims, customers don’t really want smaller handsets at all.

The Japanese Apple Store in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district had to be evacuated and a promotional event canceled over the weekend after it received a bomb threat.

From a photography app with a difference to a math training app with human curation and a fantastic classic iOS puzzle game going free, we’ve sifted through this week’s most exciting apps to bring you the ones you absolutely need to download now.

Check out our picks below. Trust us, this is the way you want to spend Sunday!

Drones are becoming so common and easy to use that they’re almost impossible to break. Take the Micro Drone 2.0+ with HD-Camera: Inverted Flight Edition — just toss the thing into the air and it’ll automatically right itself, no matter the angle. Want to fly it upside down? It’s cool with that, in fact that’s what it’s built for. It’s an acrobat of a drone that’ll make your jaw drop, and so will the price, just $99.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Best List: Magic Flute bike pump by Portland Design Works

The magic of the Magic Flute is its ability to do two things with equal aplomb.

On the one hand, it is a solidly built hand pump that lets you fill your bike tire the old-fashioned way. On the other, it is a handy CO2 cartridge adapter that lets you fill your tire quickly without the need for elbow grease.

Back in June, Apple’s Eddy Cue promised that iTunes Match – Apple’s song matching service that syncs local music files to the iCloud for streaming anytime – would soon phase out its 25,000 track limit in favor of 100,000 tracks.

Sadly, we haven’t heard anything more about that since. But Apple might now be soft-launching the higher 100,000 track limit.

If you’re a Verizon customer who wants to be able to make Wi-Fi calls on your Android or iPhone like your brethren over at Ma Bell, you’ll soon be able to. But if you’re on an iPhone, you’ll have to wait until 2016.

Though Apple spends far less on research and development than the competition, they out-innovate them all. How? Catch the discussion on this episode of The CultCast. Plus: iPhone 7 may ditch the beloved headphone jack; Amazon Video is coming to Apple TV; the holiday accessory that could be eroding your WiFi signal; and with the year drawing to a close, we choose we our favorite Apple device of 2015!

Our thanks to Lynda for supporting this episode. Lynda is like the Apple Music of online education, with over 3000 expert-taught video courses you can stream straight to computer or mobile device. Learn how to use Logic’s new super powerful Alchemy synth, or develop Mac apps for OS X—learn all you want for free for 10 days at lynda.com/cultcast.