Cult of Mac

Free public domain audiobooks app Audiobooks (kind of like Audible for the poor-dible) has just received a notable upgrade.

Coinciding with the app’s fifth anniversary, Audiobooks 6.0 features a redesigned interface — improving significantly on the iOS 7 overhaul which arrived last September. The improved interfaces adds book covers for easier searching, along with a better library and file management system.

The upgrade also sees the addition of around 1,600 new audiobooks to the app’s free catalog, along with the addition of podcast support.

I don’t need to tell the readers of a blog called Cult of Mac that Steve Jobs could be brilliant. Nor, if you’ve read much about Jobs’ life, do you likely need to be informed that he could sometimes be a little unhinged — whether that meant berating co-workers, or bursting into tears because the design for a forthcoming product didn’t totally live up to his expectations.

A good case can, in fact, be made for the fact that these two qualities went hand-in-hand: that treating the creation of a personal computer or a smartphone as if life depended on it was what made, and still makes, Apple products great.

Taking this idea into consideration, a new plan by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications seeks to find the country’s next great technology mogul who is just a bit “hen” — the Japanese word for odd, weird, or crazy.

If you’ve previously felt left out by the lack of Touch ID on non-iPhone 5s devices, have no fear: according to well-resepected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo the fingerprint sensor will be featured as a standard in all new Apple devices– including the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3.

A number of Mac and iOS users from across Australia have had their Macs, iPhones and iPads remotely locked by hackers — and money demanded if they want to be able to continue using the devices.

Affected users have taken to Apple’s support forum, along with social media, to discuss the issue.

Facebook’s Chat Heads first debuted back in April, 2013 as a central UI element in the new Facebook for Android, the Facebook app on iOS, and the laughably ill-received ‘Facebook phone,’ the HTC First. Just like it sounds, a Chat Head is a bubble-like chat indicator that hovers over everything else until you read the message and then dismiss it by dragging it to the trash.

Some people love Chat Heads as a whimsical alternative to the omnipresent UI indicator. Some people despite it as the perfect example of design excess: a disruptive nagging ‘feature’ that forces a user to go through a tedious interaction every time a message is received in order to dismiss it. However you feel about Chat Heads, though, you can now have them on your iPhone’s default Messaging app… if you have a jailbroken device, that is.

With so many security scares lately, it’s the perfect opportunity to make sure that your Mac security is as beefed up as possible.

That’s why it’s good timing — both for Google and for us — that the search giant has just released a very useful tool which makes it easy to upload suspicious files for scanning with the popular Google-owned VirusTotal service.

In this digital age, the days of physical media are coming to an end.

With The MacX DVD Video Converter Pro Pack, you can rip and convert movies easily. Now you can enjoy those films anywhere and everywhere — and for only $19.99 courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals.

Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee has regained consciousness for the first time after falling into a coma two weeks ago, according to The Korea Herald.

The 72-year-old suffered a heart attack earlier this month, before undergoing a 60-hour heart surgery related to acute myocardial infarction. The medical team at the Samsung Medical Center say that he is recovering well. Lee was reportedly awoken after hearing family members cheer a Samsung Lions baseball game on a nearby television.

For many of us, our iPhones are already the most-used remote controls in our entire house. But come June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s ready to make that official. A new report says the company is planning a platform that would turn its iOS devices, including the iPhone, into universal remotes for the internet of things inside your house. Think of it as Made for iHome.

Apple has made a slight but also important update to the way the App Store handles apps that have been refunded by developers to customers.

While you used to be able to request a refund for a paid app and continue getting updates, that is no longer the case.  Once a refund has been granted, the customer is unable to get support for the app or download it again.

As warmer weather hits even San Francisco, we’re pooling our beer money for a robot bartender. And some wasabi-flavored toothpicks. Our ever-expanding crew could use some of these modular Modos bookshelves and stools, too. There are so many things on Kickstarter that we want — jeans, maps, comic books — that we’re sharing our wish list with you.

Even cranky futurist Jaron Lanier supports Kickstarter — it “turns consumers into a priori funders of innovation” and we’re pretty sure that translates into robotic cocktails for everyone.

Scientific calculator app Archimedes has received its first significant update in quite a while.

Adding the expected iOS 7-compatible design tweaks, the app also adds a number of useful improvements. The first of these relates to Archimedes’ plotting function. Curves now feature fluid navigation and crisp rendering, and are adjusted in real-time as their associated formulas are edited.

In Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a scene in which a tribe of early hominids, having encountered an extraterrestrial Monolith for the first time, are suddenly evolved to the next stage of human consciousness, and are capable of using tools for the first time.

This video of children from the ages of 6 to 13 trying to figure out how to work a vintage Apple II is like the opposite of that. And it shows just how inexplicable computing was to pretty much everyone before Steve Jobs released the original Mac in 1984.

Ever since Apple first unveiled the iPad, we’ve been hearing rumors about Apple switching to ARM-based Macs. Now, the rumor is back again, with a French website claiming that Apple is actively developing 64-bit, quad-core Mac variants with ARM-based chips. But we’re just as skeptical as we’ve ever been.

If you thought that round two of Apple vs. Samsung was the end, you are sadly mistaken.

Although Apple recently won $119 million in a second victory against Samsung in patent court, that modest figure is nowhere near enough to make Apple back down. Not only is Apple seeking a retrial, but it wants to ban past and potentially future Samsung phones from being sold.

If you’ve been looking to get your hands on the latest state-of-the-art gaming console, then Cult of Mac Deals has a giveaway you’ll definitely want to check out.

We’re giving one lucky person an Xbox One, the game Titanfall, two controllers, a Kinect and a headset. All you need to do is click here to enter.

Apple’s two latest ads in its expanding ‘Your Verse’ campaign tout the iPad as a content creation tool and instrumental part of the creative process. Calling them merely “ads” doesn’t actually do them justice, as they are much fuller stories than 30-second TV spots on Apple’s website.

Called “Orchestrating Sound” and “Exploring Without Limits,” the first narrative is a profile of renowned composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and how he uses the iPad to make symphonies. The second addition follows the deaf travel blogger Chérie King and how she uses the iPad on all of her trips around the world.

To end off your weekend, we’ve got three offers at Cult of Mac Deals that will keep your stuff powered up, let you record Internet radio, and keep that wallet bulge from happening.

First up is a package of 100 AA and 50 AAA Duracell batteries. Available for just $56 through this limited time offer, you can get dependable power for your devices. Duracell’s “coppertop” batteries are engineered to be some of the most dependable in the world.

It’s the second part of our roundup of 10 great, quick tips for your iPhone, some of which you probably don’t know about yet. Make sure to check last week’s five tips.

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.