Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.

Brendan Ó Sé aimed his iPhone camera, composed on screen the wavy painted lines on a Copenhagen street and snapped the photo as four people entered the frame from different directions.

For reasons Ó Sé cannot explain, he titled the photo, God will send a sign. When he does, be prepared.

Not long after, Ó Sé received widespread attention for the photo after it was selected by Apple to be part of its “Shot on iPhone 6” advertising campaign. There were billboards in several countries, magazine ads, an international award and interview requests.

Ó Sé was not prepared. He was kind of floored.

Gameloft, a.k.a. one of the most important publishers in mobile gaming, has announced that it’s closing its NYC studio effective immediately.

As the studio behind some of the best-selling games of the past decade-and-a-half, including the great Spider-Man Unlimited game, the announcement leaves close to 100 people without jobs.

With unparalleled numbers of orders from Apple, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus may be the handset everyone’s talking about right now, but don’t think that Cupertino has given up on its previous record-breaker, the iPhone 6.

The company has debuted not one, two, three, but seven new ads and commercial spots showing off Apple’s current-gen iPhones. Check them out below:

Samsung may have strenuously previously denied that it, but evidence is mounting that the company is indeed rushing to release the Galaxy Note 5 ahead of the iPhone 6s.

According to a new report, Samsung plans to launch the device in mid-August — one month earlier than previous incarnations of the Note, which typically arrived in September.

The iPhone 6s is on the way, but that’s not going to stop forward-looking Apple watchers from speculating about future phones — like, say, 2018’s iPhone 8.

Alongside regularly-demanded features like wireless charging, designer Jermaine Smit has come up with an unusual dual-screen concept reminiscent of Russia’s YotaPhone — which would offer a 2K display on one side and a low-power screen on the other.

Check out a video below:

Apple has a history of blasting fart apps from its App Store. But when is a fart just a fart, and when is it art?

Scott Kurtz, artist and writer of popular webcomic PvP, and his business partner Cory Casoni decided to find out with Farty Troll, a Flappy Bird clone about propelling a flatulent, blue giant named Skull through a maze of coffee cups using nothing but his own wind. Apple repeatedly rejected the app, but after a bit of straining and a lot of effort, it has finally come out.

It all started a year ago as part of Kurtz’s comic, which is about the employees of a magazine who were transitioning into game publishing.

Apple Music Connect is like another version of Apple’s failed Ping service. It’s being promoted as a way to keep in touch with your favorite artists, but man is it impersonal.

My Connect page is full of bland PR-style stuff and links to buy music from artists I’m following. There’s just not enough quality posts in there to justify checking it each day.

Until now. Jonathan Poritsky has a fantastic idea over at his music blog: why not follow the folks on Apple Music who actually share and curate music? Follow Julie Adenuga, Zane Lowe, or any of the genre or curator profiles hidden in Apple Music.

These are the folks that are sharing amazing music. Here’s how to follow them.

This post brought to you by Disk Analyzer Pro.

Having a computer with a lot of storage space is just like having a house with a gigantic attic. After a couple years, the thought of actually sorting through your collection of long-forgotten items packed into the nooks and crannies becomes more and more frightening. Even the most diligent among us end up with forgotten heaps of digital detritus.

Let’s be clear: It is incredibly dangerous to do anything with your phone while you’re driving. You shouldn’t be texting, checking your mail, or swiping through Tinder when you should be focused on all of the people and giant, dangerous machines around you.

But Toyota knows that despite all of the warnings and common sense, some people are just going to chance it anyway. So a new radio ad it’s running in Sweden is taking the choice out of their hands.

You can see the promotional video about the ad below.

A major pharmaceutical company is looking at how it might use ResearchKit to create new, potentially life-saving medicine.

Purdue Pharma, maker of painkiller Oxycontin, would be the first company to use Apple’s open-source, data collection platform for commercial use.

Excited about the new Heroes: Reborn series coming back to television? Want to relive highlights from the original Heroes series in preparation for the reboot set to air this fall?

How about an entire prequel series that explains how the world has changed since Heroes? You’re in luck, then, as NBC has created a digital series that does just that: Heroes Reborn: Dark Matters.

If you want to see it, though, you’ll need to download the Heroes: Reborn app, which is only on iOS.

Along with releasing the first ever public beta of iOS 9, Apple has also opened up OS X El Capitan to the public for beta testing as well.

Developers have been toying around with Apple’s latest iOS 9 betas for over a month now, but starting today, everyone can download and install the latest iOS 9 beta, even if you’re not a developer.

Slack is ingraining emojis even deeper into your work environment whether you like it or not. Users were already able to send emojis casually while chatting, but now anyone can specifically react to messages in Slack with emojis. It’s pretty easy to get creative with this, and it’s sure to spice up the chat with your co-workers.

Conan O’Brien and sidekick Andy Richter head off to Comic-Con International this week on the late night television show.

Instead of taking the train down, Richter decides to take a road trip. Conan is excited!

What happens next is a thing of beauty, as Team Coco blasts on down the Fury Road in a auto-monster straight out of Mad Max’s latest big-screen adventure. Check it out in the video below.

Chinese gadget maker Meizu today announced its new flagship, the aluminum-clad MX5, and it couldn’t look any more like an iPhone. The device sports a unibody design and high-end features, including an “mTouch 2.0” fingerprint scanner that’s integrated into its home button.

After previewing its productivity suite to testers for the past four months, Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac is now available to anyone with an Office 365 subscription.

Microsoft announced this morning that the final version of Office 2016 is ready for primetime, marking the biggest update to come to Office for Mac since the last version was released nearly five years ago.

The new version of Office boasts a number of huge features that were designed with Mac in mind, including an improved user interface that feels like it’s part Windows, part Office for Mac 2011. The familiar Ribbon user interface is still around and plays nicely with OS X features like sandboxed, apps, Retina screen optimization, Multi-Touch gestures, and full screen views.

Check out some of the new goodies:

Too many of us are familiar with the resonant thud as our iPhone takes a faceplant onto the ground, letting us know without even looking that it’s been busted. It’s a huge inconvenience and expensive to get fixed properly, not to mention the psychological ache at having something we rely on taken out of commission. All of those issues are soothed with iCracked’s iPhone 6 DIY Screen Repair Kit, available now for $114.99, a meaty 36% off of the normal price.

Apple will announce a larger “iPad Pro” later this year, according to countless reports, and Samsung is already preparing its Android-powered competitor. The device is likely to be a larger addition to the flagship Galaxy Tab S family.

Apple is known for its uncompromising demands on quality, and now it appears that the iPhone-maker is helping third-party accessory makers learn the magic of making beautiful packaging too.

Apple Stores have begun stocking third-party accessories with redesigned packaging that was created with help directly from Apple. The new packaging aims to reinforce the Apple Store’s image as premium retail location by matching the color of Apple Stores’ storage wall.

Here’s a look some of the new packaging:

Spotify and Apple Music are now the two major players in the battle for music streaming supremacy, but if Facebook has its way the world’s most popular social network may also become the best place to discover and listen to tunes.

Facebook is in early talks with record labels to develop a music streaming service of its own, according to a new report that claims the social network has some bold plans for the future of music.

Facebook is making a pretty big update to its iOS app today — for the first time ever giving users a major say in how their News Feed is organized.

As anyone who has ever agonized over whether to unfriend that one person who keeps on posting incomplete statuses like “had a bad day :(” will know, up until now Facebook’s News Feed have been pretty much left up to the company’s algorithms.

That’s about to change. And about time, too!

The history of music is full of stories of inventors – from Edison to Apple – trying to improve the listening experience. Even formats and devices that became obsolete, such as 8-track tapes or iPods, have a lasting place in the soundtracks of our growing up.
 
There were also interesting ideas that flopped. Such is the category reserved for instruments like the Tefifon. If you haven’t heard of the Tefifon, then that means you probably didn’t grow up in West Germany during the 1950s and 60s.

Imagine if the 8-track tape and a vinyl record could produce offspring. The music player’s cartridge known as a Tefi would be it.

Law enforcement has a love-hate relationship with the iPhone. Features like Activation Lock have helped crack down on smartphone thefts, but there’s always the lurking threat of someone asking Siri about 9/11 and accidentally dialling 911 in the process.

The latest issue police are butting heads with Apple about relates to the company’s late-2014 decision to no longer maintain decryption keys which let Apple unlock iOS 8 devices for police as part of active investigations.

And New York’s cops aren’t happy about it!

Steve Jobs may have been adamant that the iPad would never ship with a stylus, but more and more evidence is mounting that the upcoming 12.9-inch iPad Pro will do exactly that.

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an application from Apple for something called “Continuous Handwriting UI,” describing how a future iPad could be geared toward picking up and understanding handwriting.