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.’”

Bring on the ice, ice baby!

Tim Cook has gladly accepted Phil Schiller’s challenge to douse himself with a bucket of ice in order to get out of a $100 donation to ALS charities. Only instead of doing ice bucket challenge from the comfort of a beach chair, Cook made a party of it while Apple employees got turnt up with at the beer bash celebration for Diversity week.

Take a look:

Google has Nest. Apple has HomeKit. And now Samsung is buying into the future of home automation too, with the $200 million purchase of SmartThings – a hardware startup that makes it easier for all your smart appliances to talk to each other.

SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson announced today that after starting from the bottom of KickStarter, his two year old home automation company has been bought by Samsung and is moving to Silicon Valley.

In the smartphone race there are only two players: iOS and Android. That fact is clear in IDC’s new report for worldwide smartphone shipments for the second quarter.

Combined, iOS and Android account for a whopping 96.4% of global smartphone sales. IDC notes that there’s “little space for competitors,” which is a mild way of saying that every other platform has little to no hope.

Beats wowed soccer fans with its epic World Cup ad earlier this summer, but Apple’s new acquisition is now flexing its creative marketing muscles in an all-new way: documentaries.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Spike Lee’s legendary Do the Right Thing, Beats created a 22-minute short that follows the director and other actors from the film as they revisit the famous Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn that was featured in the movie.

Along with chatting up residents about changes the iconic neighborhood has seen since the film was released, Beats Music also threw a block party to celebrate the 1989 film, with guest appearances by Dave Chappelle, Wesley Snipes, Mos Def and Erykah Badu, along with a performance of “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy.

Check out the full documentary below:

The official iPhone 6 unveiling is less than four weeks away, but according a Wall Street Journal report, Apple is still debating whether it should limit its new Sapphire crystal displays to only the high-end models.

Production of Sapphire screens at Apple’s factory in Mesa is nearly up and running, and will produce twice as much sapphire as the current global output, but the company is still struggling to get enough material for the fall launch of the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6s this fall and might only add it to the most expensive models.

The technology behind the computer mouse has leaped to unimaginable heights in the decades following the first prototype in the early 1960s. And Apple’s latest variant of its Magic Mouse has quickly become one of the most powerful iterations of the revolutionary input device.

Its touch-sensitive body lets users manipulate their computers with more than mere clicks, thanks to an array of simple gestures and smart actions that make the Mac more productive than ever.

In today’s video, we’ll take a look at tips that will help you unleash the true potential of your Magic Mouse. You’ll learn how to access Mission Control, quickly switch between apps and do much more with these speedy tips.

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

Tom Hanks has already scored two Oscars during his illustrious acting career, but now the acclaimed actor is turning his attention to developing apps, because if Kim Kardashian can, why can’t the dude who played Hollywood’s most lovable moron do it too?

Hanks announced this morning that he’s launching a free writing app for iPad called Hanx Writer, that recreates the retro experience of typing on a manual typewriter combined with the modern luxury of a delete key.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — 12-year-old Josh couldn’t wait to get to the museum. For once, the visit wouldn’t be about “boring” old artwork or educational science, but something he really loves — Minecraft.

“This is great,” he said while tapping and mousing his way through a multiplayer Minecraft landscape that was part of an activity at The Anchorage Museum. “My friend told me about this and it’s way better than staying at home doing this in my bedroom.”

Apple is livid that a Thai government official spilled the beans on its pending launch of two new iPhone models and requested a meeting with officials at the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) to talk about a little thing called doubling down on secrecy.

Reports from Thailand indicate Apple’s top exec from South Asia met with NBTC secretary Takorn Tantasith to discuss his uncharacteristic disclosure of the two iPhone 6 models, but also told him Apple might not even name their next smartphone “iPhone 6.”

Adding to the pile of leaked iPhone 6 parts ahead of next month’s great unveiling, a new photo from China has given us our first look at a fully assembled iPhone 6 logic board and some of the new components Apple will add to the smartphone this year.

People who work in creative fields know that the best software products for media creation are made by Adobe. Whether it’s getting pictures just right with Photoshop, or putting together a whiz bang digital newsletter with InDesign, Adobe makes software to suit just about any creative situation.

While Adobe products are the industry standard in creativity software, they can also be complex and frustrating for novice users. That’s why Cult of Mac Deals, for a very limited time that is ending soon, is offering Lifetime Access To Over 5,000 Adobe Authorized Training Videos for the remarkably low price of $79. That’s 84% off the regular price of $500!

If you use your iPad or iPhone (or both!) onstage when you perform, you know how hard it can be to find a good place to put them. Putting your iPad on a flimsy music stand just won’t cut it, and leaving your iPhone on the floor near your guitar pedals is just asking for a stomped-on smartphone.

The solution, for me, has always been iKlip iPad stands, which connect right to my mic stand. The new versions, including a sweet new iPhone mount, keep my iPad and iPhone safe from all musician-based harm, and always at the right height and angle to get at my lyric sheets, set lists and guitar effects.

Although the environmental group she heads up is “pleased” about the improvements Apple announced to protect workers from toxic chemicals, activist Elizabeth O’Connell still won’t buy the Cupertino company’s products.

Even if it means making those phone calls to rally support against Apple on an iPhone with a cracked screen.

“I am very happy that Apple has taken these steps and that the company is listening to its customers,” the campaign director for Green America told Cult of Mac via email. “That said, I’m going to hold on to my cracked 5c for now. I’d like for Apple to deepen its commitment to worker health and safety throughout its supply chain before I consider purchasing any new Apple products.”

Researchers in the U.K. have developed a cellphone that is charged by ambient sound, eliminating the need for a charger. Filled with energy-harvesting “nanogenerators,” the device uses a principal called the piezoelectric effect to turn the sound vibrations in the atmosphere around it into energy.