Cult of Mac

Airbnb is poised to completely disrupt the hotel industry, and today’s rebranding of the startup makes it even more obvious.

Like Uber and TaskRabbit, Airbnb is all about using technology to make a seamless experience in the real world. You can look up a place to stay in the iPhone app, communicate with the owner, and book it without ever having to be put on hold or wait in line at a front desk.

With a redesigned interface focused on simplicity and discoverability, Airbnb is making it easier to find places to stay. But sadly all of that is being ignored because of how ridiculous that new logo looks.

You should be able to easily switch carriers in the U.S. once you fulfill your two-year contract, but most of the time it’s easier said than done. A new bill being reviewed in Washington plans to let you unlock your phone to take it to any carrier after your contact is over.

The Rickrolling meme will never die, and if Dan Petro has his way, you may soon be able to drive down your neighborhood and rickroll every TV on the block in seconds.

After finding a vulnerability in Google’s Chromecast Wifi implementation, Dan Petro built a device for less than $100 out of a Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, wireless cards and 3D-printed pastic case. It’s name: The Rickmote Controller. It’s superpower: Takes over any Chomecast-equipped TV within Wifi range and plays Rick Astley’s legendary “Never Gonna Give You up.”

Check out this video of the Rickmote in action:

After Apple acquired Beats, it wasn’t going to be long before Samsung was selling expensive audio accessories of its own. Rather than buying an already well-established brand, however, the South Korean company has today launched its own. It’s called Level, and it currently boasts three sets of headphones and one good-looking wireless speaker.

This may be the last time you feel good about walking half a mile to get a cronut: a calorie-counting food scale and fitness tracker are on to you.

Smart food scale Prep Pad now synchs with Jawbone Up, keeping track of what you’re eating and how many calories you are burning.

It’s latest buddy system in the quantified self movement, where, as we reported earlier, your car is already conversing with your fitness tracker about how much you should be hoofing it instead of driving. Sales of fitness gadgets like the Jawbone Up, Fitbit and Nike + are over the previous year, leaving us with 19 million trackers and trainers strapped to our wrists.

One year after being found guilty of e-book price fixing, Apple has reached a conditional settlement with the U.S. State to pay $450 million for its role in the price fixing conspiracy that involved five major publishers.

Apple’s settlement could bring $400 million back to consumers’ wallets, reports Reuters, but the court documents filed on Wednesday reveal that the company isn’t quite ready to throw in the towel yet, with hopes that its appeal will shrink that fee down to just $70 million.

Magic Radio, the music streaming from DoubleTwist that boasts more than 13 million tracks, finally supports AirPlay streaming thanks to a new update that’s available now in Google Play. The release also adds Qualcomm AllPlay integration, but strangely, support for the Google Chromecast is still missing.

Doxie One: Scan Documents Anywhere, Anytime (US)

With Doxie One, it’s easy to go to paperless. You can scan everything from bills and receipts to reports, drawings, recipes, notes, business cards, photos, and everything else. Plus, no computer is required, so you can scan from just about anywhere! Doxie One will then sync to your Mac or PC and help you organize your scans.

Pick up the Doxie One for just $99 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Dropping cash on a new iPhone dock each time Apple decides to change the form factor can get pretty annoying, but if you’re down with rolling your own home brewed solution, you can actually create a sturdy dock for your iPhone 5s or iPod Touch using nothing but the LEGO blocks laying around your house.

We’ve seen a few LEGO docks over the years, but a YouTuber has created a simple step-by-step tutorial that teaches everyone how to build their out of three parts – a top segment, cable holder and a base. The dock in the video only uses black and white LEGOs for a sleek look, but we’d love to see it with a splash of color.

Watch the full tutorial below:

Just because people are expecting Apple to revolutionize wearables with its long-awaited iWatch, doesn’t mean that there aren’t already some interesting developments going on in the wearable tech field.

I’m a massive fan of Jawbone, which has just updated its UP by Jawbone iOS app with a new fitness-oriented update — designed to focus on food-related goals, such as weight and calorie intake.

The Flappy Bird phenomenon will never die. Although the game has been pulled from the App Store, the addictive little Bird has spawned a million clones, and been ported to all manner of devices, including Android and Windows Phone smartphones, as well as the Mac.

But what you’re about to see might just be the ultimate Flappy Bird port. It’s Flappy Bird running on a vintage Apple IIc, at an astonishing 60 frames per second.

So long as we live in a world where WhatsApp can be bought for $19 billion and even an ultra-simple novelty app like Yo manages to scrape together $1 million in venture funding, people are going to go right on creating messaging apps.

One of the latest is La-La Messenger, which promises users the possibility of conducting entire conversations out of song snippets. A greeting, for instance, might be “Hello” by Lionel Richie, while “the world is a dark place if this is the future of communication” could be Sean Paul’s “Gimme the Light.”

I’ve been a runner for a long time. I trained for (and ran) the 1994 Los Angeles Marathon. I’ve run 5K races, half marathons and relays for full marathons up here in Alaska, too. I find that running gives me the best bang for my buck: All I need is a pair of running shoes, some appropriate clothing (it gets cold up here), and some music to keep me getting out there.

Recently, though, I’ve been playing with a new bit of gear: the Pear Sports heart rate monitor, paired with a set of earbuds engineered to stay in your ears while working out, plus a pretty fantastic mobile app to make sense of the heart rate data.

Smartphone user habits may change depending on where you are in the world, but one thing remains largely the same: the iPhone (and Apple brand) is a status symbol.

With that in mind, Apple is tapping FPT Corp., Vietnam’s biggest listed information and communication technology company, to help grow its market share across Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

As with China, developing markets such as Vietnam represent important potential hotbeds for Apple to target, and establishing a presence early is of the utmost importance. According to Lam Nguyen, Ho Chi Minh City-based country director at International Data Corp, Vietnamese smartphone sales will increase by around 56 percent to 12 million units in 2014 alone — and Apple should be in a position to get a large chunk of those sales.

Photos have surfaced on French Apple website Nowhereelse.fr that purport to show the Touch ID sensor for Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6.

While at first glance, the images look identical to the sensor embedded within the iPhone 5s — Apple’s first smartphone to feature the Touch ID technology — upon closer inspection some tiny differences in design can be spotted. These predominantly relate to the edges of the sensor where the tiny screws will attach it to the device’s metal housing.

The two sensors can be seen next to one another in the image below:

Photography is all about light, and photographers are all about light painting. There are many tricks to try, from isolating objects with incandescence outside the frame to shining light directly at the camera as in Janelle Pietrzak’s Bambi series, created using light stencils.

Creating this interesting analog photo effect doesn’t require any special equipment, just a detachable flash, some craft materials and a lot of imagination.

Splicing a cute little animal into a photograph doesn’t take more than a few seconds for anybody with a copy of Photoshop.

But Colorado artist Janelle Pietrzak spends hours cutting light stencils with a razor blade, then uses a shoebox and long-exposure photography to bring Bambi and other cuddly creatures to life inside her home.

“If you look at my photographs there is fantasy world full of mythical creatures, floating orbs, ghosts and goddesses, all created by manipulating light,” Pietrzak tells Cult of Mac. “The catch is that I hardly use any Adobe Photoshop. What you see in the images is basically what I saw on the back of my camera.”

While Google has Nest Labs and Apple has HomeKit, Samsung is reportedly looking to enter the home automation space by acquiring Internet of Things company SmartThings for $200 million, according to TechCrunch.

SmartThings is a home automation platform that allows users to connect devices such as lights or doorlocks to a system controlled by their smartphone. It has previously raised over $15 million from investors.

Apple has been waging a fierce war against Flash ever since the iPhone debuted without the power to run Adobe’s battery hungry, multimedia software. Finally, seven years into the battle, Google is adding another blow by flagging Flash content in mobile search results with a warning that sites might not work properly.

With so many people in the world having iPhones with the same ringtones, hearing a ringer go off can be irritating and confusing. The iTunes Store sells ringtones, but they can become quite expensive if you like switching things up a lot.

In today’s video, we show you how to solve this annoying problem by creating your own free ringtones in iTunes. Just follow these simple steps to separate yourself from the crowd instantly.

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IBM and Apple used to be sworn enemies, but a lot has changed since the early days of the Macintosh and the PC race. Both companies have committed to making Apple software and hardware a one-stop shop for businesses in what some consider one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships” ever.

In an interview with CNBC, Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty discussed their mutual excitement about the “landmark” partnership.

Today Apple announced that it’s partnering with IBM to “transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps.” The relationship will combine IBM’s enterprise data specialties with Apple’s iOS hardware and software.

“iPhone and iPad are the best mobile devices in the world and have transformed the way people work with over 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and over 92 percent of the Global 500 using iOS devices in their business today,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement. “For the first time ever we’re putting IBM’s renowned big data analytics at iOS users’ fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple. This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver.”

There are four key areas that Apple will be working on with IBM:

Today Snapchat introduced Geofilters, which are location-based stickers that can be quickly applied to a snap by swiping once to the left after you take a picture. The feature could finally provide a revenue model for the startup that turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook.

iOS users have proven they have an uncanny ability to waste obscene amount of coin on silly in-app purchases, and the latest tech-titan to cash in on all that spending is none other than reality star Kim Kardashian.

Kim launched her first iOS game at the end of June to surprisingly great reviews, but the bigger surprise is the mountain of cash Kardashian and developers Glu Mobile are about to make off of all the fans flocking to download a piece of Kim’s Hollywood life.