Cult of Mac

It’s easy to poke fun at Microsoft when it comes up with its own knockoff version of an Apple’s long-awaited iWatch, iPad, iPhone, iPod, or pretty much any other innovation in the company’s history. However, when it comes up with its own ideas, it kind of makes us think that “thinking different” isn’t really in Microsoft’s DNA at all.

According to a recently filed patent application, Redmond’s latest Apple slaying idea is for something Apple hasn’t expressed any apparent interest in: a mood changing/health device in the form of a robotic butterfly. Yes, really.

True Blood’s seventh and final season continues tonight with the third episode of the season: “Fire In The Hole.”

Death comes to us all, and that’s no empty promise with this series. Reverend Daniels calls it out: “Death is a dark and blinded motherf-cker, whether you see it coming or you don’t,” he tells Sam Merlotte.

This week’s episode is all about love. Sookie’s unequal love for Alcide, Pam’s love for Eric, Sam’s love for his lost fiancee and unborn child, Reverend Daniel’s love for Lettie May, and Andy’s love for his daughter Adilyn. All the characters act out of love and sometimes lust, but even the good guys are going to need more than blind faith in each other to survive.

Spoilers below, so consider yourself warned.

As the week winds down, Cult of Mac Deals wants to highlight some of the best deals that were offered in the past week.

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While Google and Samsung’s smart watches seem designed with function over form in mind, it looks like Apple’s iWatch will be more of a luxury fashion item. A key executive from TAG Heuer, a Swiss watch maker, has been hired by Apple to help market its upcoming wearable.

Along with this latest hire, Apple has been slowly building a team of fashion industry experts who will be instrumental in making the iWatch a commercial success.

If you are like most people, you have a number of connected devices in your home or business. Of course, you have your iPhone, your computer, and you probably have an iPad or two kicking around also.

Wouldn’t it be great to have one keyboard that will easily work with all three without having to reconfigure the Bluetooth settings every time? That’s why you need to enter the Multi-Sync Keyboard Giveaway from Cult of Mac Deals. It’s free!

USA! USA! On this festive 4th-of-July CultCast: Apple prepares to kill-off Aperture and iPhoto; Siri might soon understand us all better; Apple maps stops getting you lost; and did you know Steve Jobs always ate lunch alone like a sad Keanu? We’ll tell you the story. Plus, we reveal our favorite 4th activities, and a weird breakthrough app has us texting Hodor to all our friends! Gods be good.

Grab your sparklers and catch up on this week’s best Apple stories! 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 festivities begin.

Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.

The internet is a valuable resource with which to conduct business, study, and play. However, while you are happily surfing the web, sinister elements at every turn threaten to steal your data or render it useless.

That’s why you need to protect yourself with the world’s most popular security, privacy, and access application: Hotspot Shield Elite, now available for only $39 at Cult of Mac Deals.

The iPhone is far and away the most popular smartphone in the U.S., according to a new report by research firm ComScore. According to ComScore, 169 million cellphone users in the U.S. use smartphones — representing around 70 percent of all mobile users.

Of these, Apple can lay claim to 41.9 percent of users, while runner-up Samsung has captured 27.8 percent of the market. After Samsung, the numbers drop dramatically to 6.5 percent for LG, 6.3 percent for Motorola, and 5.1 percent for HTC.

As excited as a lot of people are about the forthcoming iPhone 6, one of the big sticking points has been the presence of ugly antenna breaks on the back of most of the models we’ve seen so far.

In mockups and alleged leaked production units, these antenna breaks resemble strips of tape, or grout between the line of tiles, and leave Apple’s next generation iPhone not as attractive as it could otherwise be.

Take the Xistera out of its box and you’ll be disappointed. It’s ugly as hell, like a cheap corkscrew, and it looks like it won’t really do much. But hidden in those graceless curves and eye-gouging corners is what a lazier journalist than me would call a “Swiss Army knife of iPhoneography.”

Happy July 4! While you’ve probably got plans with friends and family — or a date with a BBQ — appmakers are hoping you’ll have a bit of time for iOS gaming over the holiday, too.

I’ve written before about how 2014 is shaping up to be a golden age of mobile gaming for Apple users, and to make the deal a little bit sweeter, various popular games are currently being discounted in the App Store to give you something to play over the long weekend.

Which games? Check out our list below for the full details.

I’ve been playing music for coming up on 30 years now, and I’ve tried a ton of music gear. These days, I run a fairly bare-bones setup, with a smaller amp for those close venues, a couple of dual-effect pedals (Visual Sounds’ Route 66 and H2O), and a Boss VE-20 vocal harmony box to thicken up the background vocals in my disco band.

I’ve always had a thing for multi-effect boxes, though, running through my share of a few complicated ones that never quite gave me what I needed in terms of both effects sounds and onstage ease-of-use.

When I heard about TC-Helicon’s new VoiceLive 3 mega-stomp box, with a huge range of guitar effects and amplifier modeling, an amazing vocal-harmony processing system and a stage-quality looping feature, well, I had to try it out.

Could this be the next generation iPad Air? New pictures showing up on the Japanese online news site ASCII Plus depict what appears to be a mockup of Apple’s forthcoming iPad Air 2, including images of it next to the current iPad Air model.

The images show a tablet that looks around 1mm thinner the current iPad Air, and features the expected addition of Touch ID, which has been the basis of multiple previous rumors.

When it comes to the driving forces behind Silicon Valley innovation, caffeine would rank pretty high on the list.

If you’ve always wanted to get an inside peak at Apple, but don’t have the kind of computer science or engineering background you think you need, you may be interested to hear that Apple recently advertised a position as “iCup Technician.” Your job? To keep the iPhone, iPad and other Apple divisions up to their chattering teeth in coffee throughout the day.

“The Apple iCup Services is specially designed to provide a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department,” is how Apple phrases the position. “The iCup staff is also available on call during business of operation.”

Everyone knows that the Apple vs. Samsung patent war has been raging for what seems like forever, but would you be any the wiser to hear that Samsung is invoking “Alice” to try and beat two Apple patents?

The patents in question are Apple’s “slide-to-unlock” patent, which describes swiping your smartphone’s home screen to unlock it — and “universal search,” which refers to a universal interface for retrieving information in a computer system.

In May, a jury found Samsung to be guilty of infringing on the first patent, but let it off the hook for the second.

But while Apple was only awarded an underwhelming $119.6 million (compared to the $1 billion it was awarded from Samsung in 2012) Samsung lawyers think they’ve come up with a way to invalidate the whole lawsuit: by taking advantage of a recent legal precedent called Alice v. CLS Bank.

Sunrise, one of the most popular third-party calendar apps for iOS and Android, released a Mac version today.

It looks a lot like the existing mobile app and has many of the same features, including the functionality that sets Sunrise apart: direct integration with services like Evernote and Facebook.

An alleged display panel for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 has been shown off on video. Not only do you get a good idea of how the device will fit in the hand compared to the 5s, but the display reaffirms previous rumors about the device’s new design.

The Chinese media is affirming that Apple will unveil new iPhone hardware in September, although there’s confusion about exact dates.

Imagine if you were actually a hunter of massive, dangerous creatures. You’d need to gear up, make sure you have all the weaponry and armor you’d need, enough ammo for your ranged weapons, and you’d have to be sure your giant swords are sharp enough to cut through touch monster hide.

You’d need to practice, for sure, and you’d probably get better over time, able to aim your sights at even more deadly monsters, because the bigger the baddie, the better the payoff.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is exactly this. While hunting monsters is a ton of stressful fun, full of dodging and attacking and slaying, the rest of the activities in-game — choosing weapons, farming, hiring chefs and companions, crafting and buying better weaponry and armor — are equally as satisfying.

And now? It’s on your iPhone (or iPad), with some really excellent touch controls and better visuals than ever.

It’s the iPhone’s battery life that gets attacked in Samsung’s newest TV ad for the Galaxy S5. With the tagline “don’t be a wall hugger,” the ad depicts iPhone owners in desperate need of a charge at the airport. We’ve all been there, sadly.

Galaxy S5 users walk about without a care in the world showing off the device’s powering saving mode (which basically makes it a dumb phone) and swappable battery. The ad itself is another attempt to make Samsung’s product look better than Apple’s by slinging mud, and it comes across just as petty as it did the last dozen times.

Three years after it was released for the iPhone, Facebook has finally brought its Messenger app to the iPad. Like most messaging apps for the iPad, Facebook Messenger features a sidebar of conversation threads with a chat window to the right.

The competition between iOS and Android is coming to your car. The recently announced Android Auto is Google’s answer to Apple’s CarPlay, and the two platforms offer similar features, with each promising to seamlessly connect smartphones to automobiles’ in-dash monitors.

As you might expect, though, there are some key differences between CarPlay and Android Auto beyond the type of phones with which they work. In today’s video, we take a look at the many features of the competing platforms, as well as the automakers who are partnering with Apple and Google, to help you decide which will be the best fit for you.

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