Cult of Mac

A little over two weeks ago, we posted our ‘Shoot Like a Pro’ video series, where we gave you iPhone photography tips along with the chance to win a $500 Swivl.

We had over 140 entries, all of which where entered into a randomiser and one winner has prevailed, check out today’s video to see who won! But stick around to find out about our huge 25k Giveaway, for your chance to win some awesome gear. Just leave a comment on the video and share our Youtube channel to help us reach 25,000 subscribers before September 9th.

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

This week: Robin Williams. We remember the incredible passion, talent, comedy and heartbreak of one of life’s great artists. Then, stay tuned for this week’s best iPhone 6 and iPad rumors; Oculus Rift comes to OS X; the good, bad, and ugly of iTunes Family Sharing; and we pitch our favorite gadgets and apps in an all-new Faves N’Raves.

Join us and Youtube gadget-reviewer extrordinaire, Lewis Hilsenteger (aka UnboxTherapy), for this very fun and heart-filled CultCast. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

Our thanks to Automatic for supporting this episode. Plug Automatic’s Link adapter into your car’s data port, and paired with their beautiful app, you’ll be able to find your parked car, learn how to save fuel with tips based on your actual driving, and even diagnose and turn off your car’s check engine light. See it out in action and save 20% off your new Automatic now at Automatic.com/cultcast.

Whether at work or school, Notebook 4 is the easiest way to get more efficient. It gives you everything you need to stay ultra-organized, without nearly as much effort as taking notes with pen and paper.

NoteBook 4 stores your information in electronic notebooks that are just like the paper ones you’ve used all your life. Best of all, you can get NoteBook 4 now, but not for much longer, at Cult of Mac Deals for just $19.99!

Sam Sung, the most ironically named Apple retail employee on Earth, is giving away his work shirt, badge and business card to raise money for charity. The eBay auction ended last night with a winning bid of $2,653.

“I had a great time working for Apple and would recommend it to anyone,” said Sung in the auction description. “I hope my old business card will go to another fellow Apple enthusiast with a sense of humour and the desire to help raise some money for a good cause.”

All proceeds from the auction will go to The Children’s Wish Foundation, a nonprofit group that “provides children living with life threatening illnesses the opportunity to realize their most heartfelt wish.”

Beats Music is now the first app to greet iOS users browsing the ‘Apps Made by Apple’ section of the App Store, giving the streaming music prime real estate on iTunes that should help it reel in more users than ever.

iTunes added the Beats Music app to its list of homegrown apps today that can be found on both the iOS App Store and iTunes desktop, placing it at the top of the featured list that also includes Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, and more.

iPads have quickly replaced gigantic flight manuals in cockpits across the globe, but all that easy access to information, photos and loads of games nearly proved fatal on a recent Jet Airways flight that took an unexpected dip over a busy air route to Europe .

The two Jet Airways pilots were suspended after the plane they were flying from Mumbai to Brussels plunged 5,000 as the pilot dozed off while the co-pilot was busy playing on her iPad.

Less than an hour ago, Microsoft founder and super rich guy Bill Gates took the ice bucket challenge, which has various famous folks dumping cold water over their heads to raise awareness for Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS).

While Tim Cook completed the challenge himself at an Apple employee event, Bill Gates has gone even further — he built a crazy contraption to dump a ton of ice water on his head. The video (below) shows his planning attempts, complete with Comic Sans blueprints and a Surface tablet to do all the work and YouTubery.

Watch the full video below:

A group of Apple shareholders are ready to add to the company’s anti-hiring controversy woes with a new class action lawsuit of their own that alleges Apple leadership mislead investors and hurt the stock’s overall value.

The lawsuit was filed by attorneys for plaintiff R. Andre Klein with U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California this week, and accuses Apple’s senior management, including Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, of grossly mismanaging Apple’s resources when it struck an agreement not to hire employees from competing corporations.

Apple doesn’t have an official retail presence in the Middle East… yet. Recent job listings spotted by ifoAppleStore indicate that the company is looking to open at least one store in the United Arab Emirates by next year.

For the horde! This trailer for the upcoming expansion to massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is utterly fantastic.

Blizzard has a long history of creating amazing cinematic mini-movies for all its games and expansions, and this new one pretty much tops it all.

Even if you don’t know what the heck the orcs in the trailer are talking about, surely you can get behind how gorgeous it looks and how realistic these creatures seem. You’ll root for these monstrous humanoids in their bid for freedom, even if you’re not keen on them conquering the world in the process.

Check out the trailer below to see what we mean.

Apple is now using China Telecom’s servers instead of its own to power iCloud for Chinese customers. The switch took place on August 8th, and now the carrier is Apple’s only cloud service provider in China.

The decision is likely a direct response to the Chinese state-controlled media recently lashing out at Apple over national security concerns.

To go along with its Diversity week celebrations that have included Tim Cook taking an icy bath, Apple has added a little diversity to its executive leadership page today, by adding a new tier full of fresh faces.

The Apple executive profiles page has been expanded to include five of the most notable VPs at the mothership, including VP of Environmental Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, and Denise Young Smith who serves as VP of Worldwide Human Resources and the narrator of Apple’s new Diversity video.

You probably take great photographs with your smartphone. Compare your smartphone pictures with those of a digital SLR camera, though, and you soon realize that there is no comparison.

Without a doubt, the best photography is done with a digital SLR camera. Now, you can get a Canon DSLR of your very own with The Rebel Photographer Giveaway at Cult of Mac Deals.

Steve Jobs was known for speaking out loud, dreaming big and acting upon his thoughts. While it’s been just a few short years since his passing, fans have been able to see his characteristics shine through other personalities. The late comedian and actor Robin Williams lived a life similar to Jobs’ life: With every movie and every off-camera activity, Williams showed a passion for anything he did.

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to see how Apple pays tribute to Williams, as well as some crazy stories regarding the iPhone 6 and even how one new app is truly showing that life really is a box of chocolates.

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

Love Lego? Love iOS? Prepare to get your chocolate in your peanut butter.

Lego has just started selling Lego Fusion, a series of toys that blend everyone’s favorite plastic bricks with iOS gaming.

With Yosemite, OS X is getting its biggest visual overhaul yet, courtesy of Apple design head Jony Ive. But not everything is changing. Case in point: OS X’s File Inspector function.

Shown when you right click on a file in Finder and click ‘Get Info,’ Inspector shows you the nitty-gritty details of a file: it’s size, what file it is set to open with, it’s permissions, and so on. But in Yosemite, it looks pretty much as it ever did.

On Behance, user Ramotion has come up with a Yosemite-inspired redesign of OS X’s ‘Get Info’ menu that makes it more useful, intuitive, attractive, and flexible, especially when dealing with multiple files.

It’s gorgeous work, fitting of OS X Yosemite’s slick new design ethos as a whole. Take a look at the complete concept below.

EE customers in the United Kingdom can now pay a 50p fee when they call customers services to jump ahead of other callers in the queue. The priority service puts those who pay in touch with the next available operator while everyone else must wait, and it has been widely criticized by EE subscribers.

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The coiled hose left a mark on the grass, a fading of color where the sun could not shine.

From this moment on his front lawn, Binh Danh realized he could create a photographic process using sunlight, leaves and grass. He had no idea his method would develop into an organic process of self-discovery.

On leaves from his family’s garden, Danh brings fresh examination to an old war, printing haunted faces and horrific scenes from the Vietnam conflict with light and chlorophyll.

That caption along with the above photo could be what foils the robbery of an old iPhone. Why? Because the thief posted it to the victim’s Facebook account.

With the next-gen USB 3.1 standard now heading into production, the USB connectors of the future will be a lot more like Lightning. Featuring small, reversible connectors, the new USB Type-C cable will be particularly well suited to syncing and charging smartphones and tablets… again, just like Lightning.

But new images said to come from within Foxconn show that Apple isn’t done innovating with Lightning just yet, and that we won’t have to wait until USB Type-C to become ubiquitous to have fully-reversible USB Lightning cables. The shots are purportedly of a fully-reversible USB connector for Apple’s next Lightning cable. In other words, instead of having to plug the Lightning cable into your computer in one specific orientation, you could do it either way.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare: The app you’ve spent hours developing gets shut down before it even really launches.

It’s been a rocky road for four young French entrepreneurs who hoped to make their mark with a parking app called Sweetch. Their idea was to alert prospective parkers that spots on the street were freeing up, exchanging a nominal fee between drivers that could be donated to local charities. But instead of paving the road to fame by clearing the city’s congested streets, they ended up pulling their app from the Apple store under threat of litigation from San Francisco’s City Attorney.

“We helped five or 10 people a day, we brought value to them, but the city didn’t even try to understand that,” co-founder Hamza Ouazzani Chahdi says, speaking to Cult of Mac in the sunny, immaculate and modern apartment the guys call both home and office in the city’s Mission District. “We were lumped in with the other apps that definitely had a predatory model and it was toxic for us.”

He says that despite a meeting with San Francisco officials, the entrepreneurs weren’t really give a chance: “It was just, ‘Here’s your deadline.’”