Cult of Mac

This week: two awesome Apple artifacts hit the auction block; Oompa-loompas leak pics of a super-sized iPad; forget headphones, the Beats acquisition could be all about video; Woz sets the FCC straight on net neutrality; iPad is where the Gov-er-na-tuh stores his shirtless selfies; a popular travel app you should definitely download, like, right now; and, is Apple building out their own content delivery network?

Heartily guffaw your way through each 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 audio adventure begin!

Our thanks to Smile Software for supporting this episode! If you haven’t tried TextExpander from Smile software, you’re missing out on one of the most useful apps available for the Mac. TextExpander saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures, and it’s an application Erfon uses every single day. Try it out yourself for free at smilesoftware.com/cultcast.

Click on for the show notes.

I started writing stories this year – short fiction and a couple of novellas so far – and I’ve found I need to make a lot of notes. The iPhone is pretty great for this, as you’d expect, but not always: Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to tap away on a cellphone, and sometimes you might want to make little drawings, or maybe you just find it easier and faster to pull out a paper notebook or index card.

The biggest advantage of iPhone notes is that they are sync-able and searchable. Paper is neither. But using a combo of apps, old-school paper hacks and an easy-to-maintain “workflow”, I came up with a simple note-taking system that keeps paper and pixels together, both equally searchable, sync-able and usable.

Apple’s video chat feature FaceTime has bridged the miles for families, sparked a ton of romances and probably shattered a few marriages.

This may be the first time it’s ever shipwrecked someone, though.

John Berg was sailing off the coast of Kona, Hawaii when a FaceTime login request started messing with the navigation app on his iPad. Although sailing apps on smartphones and tablets so popular they’re credited with having sunk the market for Garmin products,  imprecise navigation has been a concern.

We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.

Cooking, charging, camera-ing and generally staying out-of-doors are the themes this week. But if you are stuck inside out of the sun, don’t worry – we have you covered too.

This week we get cooking with a gadget-charging camping stove and a slick, iPhone-friendly food thermometer. We also do DIY projects (without tenderizing our thumbs) with the German Latthammer, charge our flagging phones with a purse that packs a built-in battery, and record everything using the super-dorky Lifelogger camera. Is the sun shining? Yes it is!

With another week full of news in the past, your host Joshua Smith is here to give you a wrap-up on some of the latest and biggest features. Facebook’s alleged Snapchat competitor, Microsoft’s latest attempt at an ‘iPad killer’ and iCloud’s hacking are among just some of the featured stories in today’s rundown.

Take a look at the video and be sure to return next week for another. Subscribe to CultOfMacTV on youtube.com to catch new episodes of the roundup and other great video reviews, how-to’s and more.

If you’re like me, spending $60 on a game these days is rare. I may have too many game consoles connected to my television, and I may have way too many games on my Steam account, not to mention my iOS devices, but every once in a while, a game shows up for the big screen that just makes me stop and start counting out the twenties.

Watch Dogs, coming out next Tuesday across the US for PlayStation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, is one of those games, and if the trailer below is any indication of how it’s going to feel playing it, I would spend twice as much to do so.

“I saw something no one was meant to see so they came after me,” says vengeance-minded protagonist, Aiden Pearce. “But someone fucked up and the wrong person died. Now, I’m coming for them.”

Drop the needle on avant-garde musician Brian Eno’s latest album release (on vinyl, of course), and you’ll hear all sorts of future-retro electronic sounds composed to stir your emotions in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Aim your iPhone at the very same vinyl record, and if you’ve installed the app made for the purpose, you’ll see a whole different scene, a 3D hologram-like cityscape that rises up from the spinning platter. Check out the video (below) for a sneak peek.

A set of images of the iPhone 6’s alleged backlight panel have been leaked on the Chinese site Weibo this morning. User “顾Gooey” who posted the pictures claims they’re fit for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 that Apple is rumored to release later this year.

We can’t verify the legitimacy of the photos, but the part does appear to be produced similar to the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s. However, Nowhereelse.fr notes that the connector has been moved slightly from the iPhone 5c backlight, and the pins are slightly different, signaling some possible changes from Cupertino.

Here’s another shot of the display from the back:

Apple’s sapphire glass could be the biggest thing to hit the iPhone since Touch ID, and even though it hasn’t announced an iPhone 6 or iWatch with a Sapphire glass display yet, its chummy parasitic buddy Samsung is already looking for a way to copy.

Cult of Mac Deals regularly offers “name your own price” bundles, and we’ve got another here for you that assembles 9 apps and an iOS course that really deliver the goods … and the savings!

These types of bundles are time-limited opportunities to buy a collection of apps for whatever you want to pay! The bundles are exclusively constructed and are made for anyone looking to discover the best apps from around the globe. And The Name Your Own Price Mac Bundle 5.0 is no exception.

Countless “endless runner” games have made it big in the App Store—all the way back to Canabalt in 2009. Now we have more titles like Tiny Wings and Badland that pride themselves on not only fun, causal gameplay, but immersive design.

The next game in the endless runner camp to make it big could very well be Alto’s Adventure, an upcoming title from Snowman, the small developer behind popular to-do app Checkmark. In an exclusive peek at the game’s artwork given to Cult of Mac, we’re shown the incredible design that’s going into bringing Alto’s Adventure to life.

This post is brought to you by Aiseesoft, creator of Mac FoneLab.

Have you ever accidentally deleted your important contacts or call history on your iPhone/iPad that was not backed up? If you find yourself in a situation where you have deleted contacts from your iPhone, you can easily recover them with Mac iPhone Data Recovery from Aiseesoft. And Cult of Mac readers get a special discount.

Thailand is one of the world’s most coup-prone countries. It’s also home to people who smile the most in selfies. So even when the tanks roll in, the urge to snap takes over. Better yet: get that shot with the soldiers. Or the tank. That’s what’s happening in Bangkok, where the smartphone set is taking keepsakes as the coup comes to town.

Rachel LaCour Niesen’s passion for vintage photos started when she walked down her grandmother’s wood-paneled hallway to look at a bedroom wall that held a carefully edited family history.

There she saw a photo of her father standing proud in his cap and gown on graduation day, an aunt sitting poolside during a swim meet and a happy couple cutting their wedding cake. The imprint those pictures left on LaCour Niesen lies at the heart of her @savefamilyphotos project on Instagram, where she curates a collective history. She invites people from around the world to send her a digital copy of a cherished family photo and brief story that, in many cases, gives the photo its emotional muscle.

“The treasure is not just the photo but the story that comes with it,” LaCour Niesen told Cult of Mac. “I believe stories are the currency of our past, present and future. Without them, we are bankrupt. Our family photos trigger those stories. They are like glue that holds my story — and our stories — together over time.”

Throwback Thursday, Facebook and Instagram have made personal blasts from the past a weekly — if not an hourly — ritual. The web is awash in fuzzy Polaroids, vintage Kodachromes and black-and-white snaps, uploaded by individuals with hard drives full of memories and shared by everyone.

The recently revealed exploit that allows anyone to bypass the iPhone’s Activation Lock system is a rather simple process that requires adding just a single line of code to a computer running iTunes.

The exploit, which is called DoulCi (“iCloud” backward), has already been used thousands of times on locked iPhones and iPads around the world. It’s the work of a pair of anonymous hackers, who cracked Apple’s theft-deterrent measure by tricking lost or stolen iOS devices into thinking they are being reactivated by Apple’s servers.

While mockups of Apple’s eagerly awaited iPhone 6 have been popping up for a while now, it’s still pretty amazing to see just how far we’ve come since the first generation iPhone made it to our sweaty palms back in the good old days of 2007.

That comparison is made clearer in a new video put together by YouTube user DetroidBORG, which does a great job of comparing a dummy iPhone 6 handset with every previous model of iPhone that has come before.

When you’re dealing with a Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller project, visuals are everything — which is why it’s great when they live up to expectations.

Following years of waiting, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is almost upon us, opening August 22. A perfect opportunity, then, to release five character posters, highlighting a combination of brand new characters and previous fan favorites.

And, man, do they ever look pretty!

Disney has announced the screenwriter-director combo who will helm the new Star Wars standalone film. The writer will be Gary Whitta, a tech nerd turned screenwriter who has written the dialogue to some of the best adventure games on the Mac and iPad. As for the director? He’s behind the number one movie at the box office right now, Godzilla.

Outside of reading Cult of Mac (which you’re already doing!) Medium is one of the best go-to destinations of quality writing on the Internet. A blog publishing platform co-founded by ex-Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Medium is an effortlessly easy-to-use social journalism network that puts content — not ads — first. It’s like WordPress meets Instagram.

Medium already has a wonderful iPhone app, but sadly, universal support was missing at launch. But that’s all changed, and you can now surf Medium on your iPad as well.

Apple has issued an update to its iAd producer tool — adding support for creating full-screen banner ads for iPhone, along with the ability to upload Producer project to iAd workbench.

iAD Producer version 4.2 additionally includes folder reorganisation in the tool’s Assets sidebar, alongside the expected unspecified bug fixes and performance tweaks.

Apple’s been big on education under Tim Cook’s leadership — whether that be pushing for iPads in schools around the world, or teaching people to code in Apple Stores.

Apple’s latest Editors’ Choice in the App Store continues this educational theme, with a brain-training app called Elevate designed to help improve articulation, reading and listening focus, writing abilities, and information-processing speed.

Conventional wisdom is that while Beats has a lot of fashion credibility, the actual audio quality blows. So why does Apple want to buy them?

Rumors have swirled that it’s an acqui-hire, and that Apple wants Beats so that it can also own Beats executive Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, whose contacts in the music industry are unparalleled.

But there could be another reason, too. Apple might want to prevent Samsung from purchasing Beats.

It is often said that what separates Apple from companies like Samsung and Sony is that at Apple, design is law. Other companies put engineering first.

But that’s not true, according to former Apple senior designer and user experience evangelist Mark Kawano. Speaking to Fast Company’s design site, Co.Design, Kawano says that Apple is still an engineering first company.

The difference? Every engineer at Apple knows how to think like a designer.

Still stumped what to get your dad for Father’s Day? Apple’s hoping you’ll go big and gift him an iPad Air, but even if you just want to get a sweet iPhone case for the old man the online Apple Store will now ship it to you at no extra cost.