Cult of Mac

Apple has released its latest commercial, and it’s a doozy.

Called “Better,” the ad (which is narrated by Tim Cook) refers to Apple’s work in terms of its environmental efforts — describing the company’s push to reduce its carbon footprint, conserve resources, and inspire others to follow suit.

Wouldn’t it be great to have everything you need in one package to learn about the elements of design? Further to that, wouldn’t it be great if you could name your own price for that package? Well, Cult of Mac Deals has both of those covered with The Name Your Own Price Learn To Design 2.0 Bundle!

With this bundle, you’ll get 8 courses and over 80 hours of professional instruction – and all for a price you’re willing to pay! We’ve also chosen three charities (Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons) that we believe make a significant, positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help whichever of those three charities you choose!

Come July 1, Mac users running various older versions of OS X won’t have the ability to use their mac.com and me.com addresses to log into the AOL Instant Messaging service via iChat.

Apple says that users who want to take advantage of the service must upgrade to at least OS X Lion 10.7.2.

iOS devices might be ruining your child’s ability to play with building blocks, according to a recent report.

Members of the UK’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers claim that addiction to iPad and iPhones mean that children aged between 3 and 4 have no problem swiping a screen, but have difficulty understanding real space, and possess “little or no” dexterity in their fingers.

“I have spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks or the like, or the pupils who cannot socialize with other pupils but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone,” says teacher Colin Kinner.

Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.

Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.

You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.

Source:Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic

If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m a sucker for a good word game, and here’s a new multiplayer offering with an interesting idea behind it.

Catena is all about you and your opponent making a chain of words. One player starts, and then the other has to come up with another word that uses one or more of the last letters of the previous entry. For example, if I played “wholesome,” my opponent could play “somewhat” or “metric” or anything else that continues the chain.

It has a few hiccups along the way, but it’s mostly a good time.

If you’re the owner of a jailbroken iOS device, a new tweak can give you a wealth of better power down options… and even graft iOS 7.1’s new power down slider onto stock iOS 7, or give you back iOS 6’s power-off slider. Keen!

This week we get ready for springtime excursions with three portable speakers that shrug off splashes and are happy to be used in the shower. Which one will you take to the lake, pool or beach? Let’s take a look.

Apple has turned even the most modest weekend strummer into a guitar hero.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, our games editor and disco band frontman (!) Rob LeFebvre takes you on a magical mystery tour of Garageband’s latest and greatest features. He’ll walk you through a shiny new piece of kit called Drummer, plus get you ringtone making and learning from the pros in the Lessons store.

Rob has also kept his ear to the ground for all the other great gear you need to make your homegrown music making hit the right notes and, well, sound better. And definitely louder. Whether you’re rocking at home or taking your iPad with you on stage.

So. The beat goes on with Charlie Sorrel sifting through MacBook stands to single out the best, plus his picks for the best Apple-related gear and Buster Hein’s top choices from iTunes for music, books and movies you’ll be grooving to all week.

Cult of Mac Magazine

First unveiled in iOS 6, Apple Maps has been known to distort reality before, but can it conjure a mythical prehistoric beast from the waters of Loch Ness?

Cryptozoologists are saying yes. They are claiming that Apple Maps has finally located the elusive Loch Ness Monster!

Wall Street consensus is that when Apple announces its Q2 2014 quarterly earnings on Wednesday, Apple’s year-over-year iPad numbers won’t look good. On the low end, at least one Wall Street analyst says that Apple will have sold 23% fewer iPads this year than last year in the same quarter; on average, Wall Street expects Apple’s iPad sales to have declined 0.7% year-over-year.

How can this be? This is the year that Apple unveiled the Retina iPad mini and the beautifully redesigned iPad Air, after all. How is it possible that these iPads can be selling worse than the inferior iPads a year ago?

Ex-Apple exec Jean-Louie Gassée has a theory, and it’s not one that Apple fans are going to be happy to hear: the iPad is a big tease, and fundamentally less useful than both a smartphone or a laptop.

Every aspect of Facebook’s entire business is essentially designed to target ads. Is anyone surprised, then, that the social networking giant intends on launching its own mobile ad network, similar to Apple’s iAds?

One more way that Apple is challenging Google is by pushing for exclusive games on iOS, claims a new report.

The Wall Street Journal reports that as Android’s influence has grown, Apple has been offering games developers promotional perks — such as premium placement on their app store home pages — in exchange for first rights to particular titles.

Last August, Apple struck a deal with EA to receive a two-month exclusivity window for Plants vs. Zombies 2, which did not arrive on Android until November.

A similar deal saw the popular sequel to ZeptoLab’s puzzle game Cut the Rope arrive on iOS in December — but not make it to Android until late March this year.

Cloud computing is quickly becoming the standard method of creating scalable, manageable Web Application Services. Today Cult of Mac Deals is offering a course that will give you an in-depth walkthrough on how to utilize the wide range of cloud computing services that Amazon provides.

You’ll learn what is available in AWS, and how to use it effectively for your own needs. After you start by learning exactly what cloud computing is, and why you should be using it, you will be shown all the wonderful features that AWS brings to your digital life. And Cult of Mac Deals has this course for only $19 – a savings of 61%!

Having dead Wi-Fi zones in your apartment or office is a huge inconvenience for all. NetSpot Pro is the answer to all these problems.

NetSpot Pro lets you visualize, optimize and troubleshoot your wireless networks using any MacBook so you can stay connected at all times, never missing a beat, a post or an important email. And Cult of Mac Deals has NetSpot Pro for just $29!

Back in September, popular Youtuber Lewis Hilsenteger released a hands-on video of what he believed to be the outer shell of the iPad 5. The video exploded on the Internet, and six weeks later when Apple announced the iPad Air, it confirmed the parts were spot-on.

So how does someone get their paws on the parts of one of Apple’s most anticipated gadgets weeks before it’s announced? On this week’s CultCast, Hilsentenger is our guest — and he’s going to tell us exactly how he did it.

We’re in the midst of a holiday weekend, and Cult of Mac Deals has some great offers that are worth exploring while you’ve got time to spare!

The BookMark by Vorson is one of the thinnest backup battery solution on the market. We’ve got this backup battery solution for just $38.99 for a limited time. And MONOCLE, a high quality speaker that lets you listen to music and calls on the go, is available for only $34.99!

To be or not to be? That’s the question posed by Sometimes You Die, a game powered by existential angst that’s tearing up the charts.

The game — which is based on the question of how much of the gaming experience you can strip away and still have the end result be fun — has become the surprise hit of 2014, despite (or perhaps because of) its unusual take on life, death and the meaning of video games.

Now Philipp Stollenmayer, a 22-year-old developer who lives in the Netherlands, has opened his sketchbooks to show Cult of Mac how Sometimes You Die came to life.

A new malware campaign targetting users of jailbroken iOS devices has been discovered by reddit users.

Called “Unflod Baby Panda,” the malware hooks into all running processes of jailbroken devices and tries to steal their Apple ID and corresponding password.

Security firm SektionEins had the following to say about the malware:

[It] appears to have Chinese origin and comes as a library called Unflod.dylib that hooks into all running processes of jailbroken iDevices and listens to outgoing SSL connections.

From these connections it tries to steal the device’s Apple-ID and corresponding password and sends them in plaintext to servers with IP addresses in control of US hosting companies for apparently Chinese customers.

Nike is dismantling the hardware team behind its FuelBand fitness tracker, according to a new report from CNET.

The sportswear company, which features Tim Cook on its board of executives, reportedly fired between 70 and 80% of the 70-person hardware team on Thursday.

Despite being Cult of Mac’s resident comic book fan, I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.

They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.

Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week. What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft came out on iPad this week, and I can’t seem to stop playing it. The amazingly well-balanced digital collectible card battling game has got its hooks in me and won’t let up.

This is the same game as the one that came out on Mac and PC last month, but in an easy to transport and play iPad version. The touch controls are well suited to the gameplay, and you’ll find quite a bit of depth once you figure out the basic card game itself.

I spent a little time recording this free-to-play game and chatting about it in the video below.

It has been nearly three months since Facebook launched Paper for iPhone, a cutting-edge experiment in what it means to use Facebook. Today Paper received its first big update in the App Store, and a few of the elements that were stripped out of Facebook in the original release have been added back.

Apple is still waging a legal war with Samsung, but the company is already bracing for a new battle that threatens to entangle Apple with its foes Google, Adobe and Intel against a pack of angry tech workers who say the four companies were in cahoots on a no-hire agreement.

According to the latest court filings, the 64,000 tech workers represented in the class-action lawsuit claim that Apple and the other companies should not be allowed to limit evidence about Steve Jobs in the upcoming trial, no matter how unsavory it may be.