Cult of Mac

Product Hunt is the hottest startup in the Silicon Valley tech bubble right now, which is fitting because all it does is promote other startups.

Think of it like Reddit for the best new apps and services. Users can up-vote products they like and submit their own for consideration by the community. It’s a site for the geekiest of tech enthusiasts who are early adopters and care about how things are made.

The official Product Hunt iPhone app was released today, and it’s currently getting featured on the front page of the App Store.

Apple is nearly ready to become the go-to place for healthcare providers to get all your personal fitness data, and along with meeting with hospitals to talk about the benefits of HealthKit, Apple has been talking to the countries biggest health insurance providers about partnering with its health initiatives.

Estimote makes iBeacons in little polygon shapes with cool colors and custom designs. Designed to communicate over low-energy Bluetooth, Estimote Beacons can be used to alert nearby smartphones of a specific deal when they enter a shop, for example.

But what if different items for sale in that shop had their own iBeacons? That’s the vision behind what Estimote is calling Stickers, small adhesive sensors that can be put just about anywhere. As more and more companies adopt iBeacon technology, expect to start seeing these kinds of little beacons everywhere you go.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been under fire all year for being run pretty much the exact opposite way as Apple. Needing all the help they can get, Tim Cook payed a visit to the local Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto this afternoon.

Tim tweeted that he met with doctors and veterans at the VA Palo Alto with Congresswoman. Anna G. Eshoo. The hospital now uses iPads to help treat vets and families, and you can bet Tim did a little campaigning for HealthKit and iOS 8 while pulling out his best Patch Adams impersonations.

The iPad program at VA Palo Alto was initiated at the beginning of 2013 and now claims shorter-than-average wait times for both primary and specialty care appointments. Newly confirmed secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Robert McDonald, also visited the Palo Alto VA yesterday and said it sets the standard within the troubled health care system, calling it the “crown jewel.”

It has been seven years since Intuit has released a new version of Quicken for Mac. Like Windows XP, the finance management suite has remained a shining beacon of how ancient software can look after a few years.

Now it’s 2014, and Quicken is back with a big 2015 release and companion mobile app. There are some new features, and certain features from Quicken 2007 are missing in the launch version. The design has been completely revamped, and cloud sync keeps your finances up to date on the Mac and Money Management iPhone app.

Other than getting to #humblebrag to all your friends that Dr. Dre is your colleague at the top tech company in the world, working for Apple has some serious benefits in the form of cash money.

Apple makes sure to compensate most of its corporate employees enough to at least afford a Tesla. But if you’ve ever been curious how much each position at Apple earns a year, the folks at BusinessVibes created the graph based on data from GlassDoor that ranks over 20 jobs at Apple based on pay from the lowly Mac Genius to Jony Ive’s industrial designers.

The good news for coders ready for a career switch is even software quality assurance engineers start around $92k a year, but of course Apple places the most value on industrial designers who bring home nearly $30k more a year than the 2nd highest paid employees – hardware engineers.

One of the most famous speeches by Steve Jobs is the commencement address he gave at Stanford University in 2005. The 22-minute speech is definitely worth watching if you’re an Apple fan.

Apple has made small and subtle references to Jobs in its software before, and now another easter egg has been discovered in Pages for Mac. Jobs’ entire commencement speech is hidden within a text file in Pages, and it’s easy to pull up.

iPhone 6 leaks have stolen most our attention lately ahead of next month’s big reveal, but a new set of leaked images may have just given us our first look at some of the iPad Air 2’s internal components.

Other leaks have shown the next-gen iPad Air’s rear shell and front display, but alleged images of the iPAd Air 2’s Wi-Fi module, GPS antenna, and microphone were posted today by Chinese Apple blogger Xiaolong Cahakan, indicating full production on Apple’s next tablet is about to get underway.

Find My iPhone has been invaluable at recovering lost Apple devices, but if you’re anything like me, keeping track of where you parked the car amid a sea of concrete and sedans is even harder than remembering where you dropped your selfie machine.

Apple’s latest patent filings reveal it has been working to solve those lost car disasters with an ingenious system that could be included in the future iPhones to guide you back to your vehicle, and it doesn’t even need an LTE or GPS signal.

Apple has released the second public beta of OS X Yosemite to participants in its first ever open beta program for the desktop operating system that opened up last month.

The public release follows the sixth OS X Yosemite beta that was seeded to developers earlier this week, and also comes with an iTunes 12 update that can be downloaded through the Mac App Store.

Now that Samsung is pretty much the only Android handset manufacturer making any money, you’d think that Android’s fragmentation problem would start to get better, but the latest Android fragmentation report from OpenSignal reveals the madness of developing for multiple screen sizes, hardware specs, and various versions of Android, has only gotten worse over the last year.

Cult of Mac Deals is all about making your life easier on the cheap. Today, we want to highlight a few amazing deals on Mac apps that we think will make you more productive and won’t break the bank.

We have deals on software that will clean up your iTunes, run Windows software on your Mac, track your computer’s activities, and much more.

Our iPhones are trusty sidekicks helping us save the day with every task we perform with them, but sometimes they meet their weaknesses. While our devices can’t be perfect all the time, periodically home buttons become unresponsive and other common errors can occur with them.

In today’s video, take a look at how you can fix an array of different iPhone problems in just 60 quick seconds. Find out the best way to fix an unresponsive home button, a water damaged iPhone and even clogged headphone/charging ports.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Chrome Remote Desktop is set to get a new screen recording feature that is expected to rollout to the public very soon. Available on both Mac and PC, it will allow users to shoot how-to videos and other screen casts without having to install dedicated screen recording software.

It’s that time of year again! The weeks before a new iPhone launch are always marked by big box retailers trying to clear their stock of the soon-to-be-older models at steep discounts.

Right now, that big box retailer is Walmart, who is discounting the 16GB iPhone 5c to just $0.97, and the 16GB iPhone 5s to $79, with a two-year contract.

Apple’s bid to recover $16 million in attorney fees from Samsung following the massive patent dispute between the two companies has been blocked by the U.S. District Court. Judge Lucy Koh has also returned a $2.6 million bond posted by Apple to block sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.

In the latest of a seemingly endless number of schematic leaks, a pair of documents obtained by GeekBar indicate that the next iPhone 6 might not come in the usual 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB varieties.

Rather, it’ll come in three flavors. 16GB. 64GB. And 128GB. But surprisingly, no 32GB.

Today I’m going to review a plastic bag. A new low, even for me? Maybe, but this is no ordinary plastic bag. It’s a bag that has beaten out pretty much every waterproof gadget case i’ve ever tested, because:

1. It fits almost every gadget I have
2. It weighs almost nothing. I can keep one in every bag I carry.

The bag is the LokSak, and it’s designed to keep your gadgets safe.

Like most of Samsung’s products, the upcoming Galaxy Alpha is already getting a lot of flack amongst Apple fans for being a ripoff of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 6.

Armed with his super-realistic 3-D render of what we believe the next iPhone will look like, our favorite Apple-obsessed conceptual modeler decided to put a render of the iPhone 6 next to a render of the Galaxy Alpha and see how similar they really were.

And how similar are they? You can judge for yourself after the jump, but in my opinion, up until now, the only thing Samsung hadn’t stolen from Apple for its Galaxy smartphones was the quality of materials used to manufacture them. Looks like even that’s not true anymore.

Tesla Model S owners will soon be able to use an iPhone or Android-powered smartphone to start their car when they’ve forgotten their keyfob. The new feature will be introduced with an update to Tesla’s in-car operating system that’s currently in beta testing ahead of its public rollout.

If you’re freaking out about the new words added to OxfordDictionaries.com — like “adorbs,” “listicle,” “hate-watch” and “acquihire” — you’re not alone.

Most folks learn their vocabularies while growing up. Adding new words or changing the meaning of existing ones can be confusing to the human mind. Many of us pass judgment on these new words, upset about how technology is “dumbing down” the language.

This type of linguistic change — and the inevitable backlash to it — is nothing new, says Roy Mitchell, assistant professor of anthropology at University of Alaska Anchorage. “All living languages are always changing,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone. “Even some dead ones change,” he added, noting that Neo-Latin is simply the addition of Greek roots to a long-dead Roman lexicon.

You don’t have to like it. You just have to accept that it’s happening. And that there’s nothing you can do about it.

Dong Nguyen took a leave of absence after he discovered that his hit game, Flappy Bird, was ruining peoples’ lives with its addictiveness. Now he’s back with with what looks to be an equally addictive and even more difficult game, Swing Copters.

Just a week after Beta 5 for OS X Yosemite was released, Beta 6 is already here.

In today’s video we take a quick look at the latest changes to Yosemite in action as we draw ever closer to it’s official release.

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Parallels, one of the most popular virtual machine programs out there, has a brand new version out for the Mac. Parallels 10 brings a number of noticeable performance improvements, new features for IT pros, and the ability to use OS X Yosemite features in Windows.