Cult of Mac

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old rocker: you people just have no idea how good you have it.

The ease with which you can put together a fairly amazing-sounding song with that iPad and a few peripherals is darn near insulting, considering the kind of stuff we used to have to do, back in the day.

When I was in a band in Los Angeles in the 1990s (no applause, really, please), we recorded a little demo on a friend’s recording set up. This was a full-on audio workstation that used, joy of joys, Alesis Digital Audio Tape, (ADAT) a thrilling new technology that let you record up to eight tracks at once. My buddy linked up two of these bad boys for a full 16-track mini studio, and we spent weeks in that smelly room playing the same 10 songs, over and over to get them right. If we screwed up a part, we’d have to back up to the beginning again, a laborious process that certainly extended our timeline exponentially, newbie recording musicians that we were.

Soon after that epic effort, I wanted to do some of my own recording, but I really didn’t have the money to buy the kind of crazy-expensive equipment that we had used on our demo tape (remember tape?), so I turned to my Mac, a Performa 638CD that the salesman at Circuit City had sold me without mentioning that PowerMacs were just about to come out. Jerk.

Anyway, I lost a few brain cells learning some arcane audio recording software enough to just scrape by. I’m not sure I remember which software it was (brain cell loss, remember?) it might have been Cubase, Logic, or ProTools, but to say these were overkill (and darn pricey) is an understatement. They were hard to learn, and you needed a ton of weird equipment to connect MIDI keyboards or drum machines to the thing, so I didn’t even bother.

Macs continued to play a role in my music, but not to any huge extent. I’d rather be a musician than a recording engineer — and that was what you’d need to be to make older equipment and software sound halfway decent.

Flash forward to 2004. Steve Jobs announced Garageband, with a little help from John Mayer. Here, finally, was multi-track recording software for the rest of us. A little program that would let me record live music, use pre-recorded loops like the most expensive software at the time, and mix it all down to something that I could then burn to a CD and play in my car? All for the cost of, well, next to nothing? Sign me up, right now.

The next few iterations of the Garageband software added amazing technological advances, like recording more and more tracks at once, pitch correction and automated pan tracking (moving the audio from one side of a stereo signal to the other). The ability to easily create and edit Podcasts led to my short stint as a podcaster, in fact.

Now you’ve got this ridiculously advanced audio recording software on an iPad. A tablet that you can slip into a backpack and just go. It’s a glorious time to be a musician with this kind of ability within your reach. Just be sure and know you’re totally spoiled.

Apple has begun selling refurbished models of the iPad mini with Retina display for about 15% off in its online store. Only WiFi models are being offered right now in 32GB and 64GB variants.

A 32GB Retina iPad mini refurb runs $419, which is $80 cheaper than retail price. Not many third-party retailers can match that kind of discount.

While the Apple Store is the last place to normally shop for discounts, it does have one thing going for it: refurbished products. When you buy a refurb from Apple, you’re buying hardware that Apple has replaced with even newer parts than stock items in most cases. Refurbs also come with a full, one-year warranty.

Source: Apple Store

Your desk needs to be clean and organized so you function as efficiently as possible, right? Don’t you get tired of wasting time untangling, tripping and spilling due to that pesky abundance of cords.

CableHub isn’t just any other cable management system. Those only store one or two cables at once, but you need something that exceeds that. Some people need to charge a tablet, phone, headset, laptop, and any other everyday necessity to keep your day running smooth, and CableHub will help make that happen. And Cult of Mac Deals has The CableHub 2 Pack for only $24.99 during this limited time offer.

Dropbox has been very busy lately. After announcing big updates to Mailbox and the all-new Carousel photo app, a new service is joining its repertoire. Loom, a popular photo and video storage service, announced today that it has been bought by Dropbox.

The news isn’t a complete surprise given the recent launch of Carousel. While it’s sad to see Loom go, the acquisition is very smart on Dropbox’s part.

Sometimes in life you just want to experience the excitement portrayed in every action-packed book, movie and television show you see. While your regular day-job may not consist of being a hitman on the run, in the newly released app Hitman GO this is your sole occupation. Strategically swipe your hitman across squared grids helping him reach his targets in this addicting new puzzler. Do you think you have what it takes to take out all of your targets?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

Facebook announced this morning that it’s adding a new Nearby Friends feature to its mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you stay more connected than ever with your buddies by letting you stalk every step they take.

Eli Hodapp is the Editor in Chief of popular iOS gaming site, TouchArcade. He’s just released his vanity project, Hodappy Bird, a humorous take on the Flappy Bird phenomenon. The game plays just like its inspiration, with a bird that looks a lot like Hodapp and a Chicago skyline background (Eli lives in the city). Hodapp gave developer Paul Pridham $50 as a joke to build the game, and Pridham made it in the course of a weekend.

It’s all in good fun, of course, but also perhaps a commentary on the recent explosion of Flappy Bird into the market. We wanted to know more, so we contacted him.

Eli took a few moments to chat with Cult of Mac via email today about his project.

It’s nice having some record of the places you’ve visited, but FourSquare is a little granular for my liking.

Traveler’s Badges keeps it simple and broad. You just let it detect your location, and it generates a unique badge for your current city that you can collect and add to your collection. It even logs the date and time you were there, in case anyone asks.

If you want to get all global with it, you can even display all of your badges on a map. It’s not the most practical app, but it is pretty cute (and free). And it’ll kill like five seconds of a layover. Every bit helps.

Source:Traveler’s Badges – Free | Yangfan Qi

Cute animals are always in trouble.

They’re always lost or in danger, or they want to eat a crap-ton of candy but can’t without your help. They’re a burden on everyone they meet, and if it weren’t for us, they would all die cold and alone in the woods from an attack by a larger animal or scurvy or something.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help them. Like the star of FreeDum, who has fallen into the clutches of a pint-sized Jigsaw Killer of animals. I think he’s worthy of aid, and you can do so in this fun little maze game.

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DreamHost is an award-winning web hosting service that serves over 1.2 million apps, blogs, and websites. They guarantee 100% server uptime, while providing unlimited diskspace, bandwidth, e-mail accounts, and domain hosting. Plus, with 24/7 e-mail support, you can get help whenever you need it. And now you can get one year of web hosting plus one free domain for 79% off. That’s less than $2.10 per month for one of the best hosting services on the web.

We’re back with another “name your own price” offer here at Cult of Mac Deals.

That’s right. We’ve partnered with one of the world’s finest designers to bring you The Name Your Own Price B2B Designer Bundle. You pay what you want for the Business Cards, Web Banners, and Twitter Bootstrap Pricing Tables and if you pay more than the average price, you’ll receive all 9!

A premium update to nutrition app Wholesome lets you do more than just see what’s in your food. The base app — with all its nutritional information — is still free, but for $2.99, you can unlock the “My Nutrition” and “Food Diary” features.

These give you tools to track your intake of hundreds of nutrients like vitamins, minerals and isoflavonoids. I had to look up what isoflavonoids are, but I definitely haven’t eaten any today (they’re in peas).

Twitter advertisements promoting apps and games will now offer direct download links that make it easier and faster for users to obtain the titles that catch their eye.

Twitter teased the new feature several weeks ago and officially announced it today, but it has already been testing it with select companies, including Spotify, Deezer, and HotelTonight — so you may have already seen the new ads in your timeline.

If you’ve ever wanted to play Blizzard Entertainment’s wildly successful MMO World of Warcraft on your iPad, you just got your wish. Uh, kind of. After debuting on Mac and PC, Hearthstone: Heroes Of Warcraft has now been released on App Stores worldwide. But it’s actually a lot more like Magic: The Gathering than the MMO you’d expect.

While the latest version of Apple’s fantastic (and free!) music production suite, GarageBand, has lost some functionality like podcasting and Magic GarageBand, it still has plenty to recommend it for those new to music or old vets alike.

One of these cool features is the Learn to Play function, which has some pretty good basic music tutorials baked right in, along with the capability to purchase videos from hit artists like Sting and Norah Jones, who teach you how to play some of their famous songs.

It’s a pretty heady set of music learning; here’s how to access it. Getting really good at your instrument will take more than watching a video or three, but this is a great start if you want to try your hand at the guitar or piano.

In the past, when Apple has grown the screen of an iOS device — for example, with the transition from the iPhone 4s to the iPhone 5 — Apple has taken pains to keep the pixel density the same. The Retina Display on the iPhone 5 is 326 pixels per inch, just like the iPhone 4s. This makes it easier for developers and helps prevent the widespread fragmentation seen in the Android operating system.

With many rumors pegging the forthcoming iPhone 6 as having a much bigger 4.7-inch display, a practical issue presents itself: what would that mean for resolution and pixel-density? If Apple increases the display size, will they increase the resolution to compete with the likes of HTC and Samsung’s 1080p Android smartphones? And if so, what does that mean for app developers?

Gone are the days when simply taking a photo of a document was enough. Today, if you care enough to scan or photograph a piece of text, chances are you’re also going to want to edit it.

This is where a tool like Smile’s popular PDFpen Scan+ app comes in — which has just been updated for iOS 7.

PDDpen Scan+ differs from rival apps like Scanbot by performing optical character recognition (OCR) to create creating fully-searchable PDFs. The app’s latest update — Version 1.3 — adds an enhanced user interface, new paper sizes for scanned documents, the ability to preview OCR text as page overlays, and many more new features.

Apple’s incoming SVP of Retail, Angela Ahrendts, is one of Cupertino’s most widely anticipated hires in ages. The CEO of popular fashion chain Burberry, Ahrendts is so well-suited to lead Apple’s retail ambitions, and such a powerhouse executive in her own right, that many have wondered if Tim Cook is planning to have her replace him as CEO when he retires.

But when is Ahrendts going to join Apple officially? She was originally expected this month, but it’s now looking like she might push her start until June.

Why? Why else. Money.

In November 2013, Apple acquired PrimeSense, a 3-D technology sensing company that could hint at the ability for future iPhones, iPads and Macs to have a Kinect-like ability to sense where users are and react to their movements.

Given the acquisition, you’d think Apple would be the first company to use one of PrimeSense’s hot 3-D imaging systems-on-a-chip, maybe in the iPhone 6, but no. Google has beaten Apple to the punch, using PrimeSense’s Capri PS1200 3-D imaging SoC in the experimental Project Tango device, the world’s first motion-sensing smartphone.

Want to ask Siri what song is playing and get a definitive answer? In iOS 8 you might be able to, according to a new report.

Apple will reportedly partner with Shazam for a song-recognition feature in the next version of its mobile operating system. For those who don’t know, Shazam has been operating its own song-identification app (a personal favorite of mine) for years.

The app pulls in data from an iPhone or iPad’s microphone, sends it to the cloud for processing, and then returns results to users — allowing you to track down those hard-to-find tracks, without having to spend ages googling lyric fragments.

Having seen its shares jump recently, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has another plan she hopes will continue her company’s turnaround: convincing Apple to adopt Yahoo as the default search engine for Safari on iOS.

Yahoo has reportedly been working on two secret projects designed to build “a viable mobile search engine and monetization platform to convince Apple to make Yahoo the default search engine on its Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad,” according to a new report from Re/code.

Codenamed “Fast Break” and “Curveball,” the projects will be the subject of an upcoming presentation Mayer will make to Apple at some point in the near future — with the aim of getting the company to ditch Google as its search partner.

This mockup of a case suggests that Apple might be working on a successor to the iPhone 5c, the cheaper iPhone that supposedly flopped.

On display at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair, the case appears to be designed for a large-screen iPhone. But that phone does not appear to be the iPhone 6, which is all but officially confirmed to be bigger than current models. The Hong Kong case has a slot on the back only for a single camera flash, suggesting that it’s designed for a successor to the iPhone 5c, which is equipped with a single flash. The iPhone 5s has a double flash.

With so much buzz about the possibility of Apple’s expansion into the wearables sector, it’s no surprise that we’re not exactly short of iWatch concept designs.

The folks behind the universal CircleTime app have added another one to the pile, though — and it’s certainly eye-catching.

“Available” in black and silver, and featuring a 2-inch display with curved anti-scratch glass, full version of iOS, and a Li-ion battery that last seven days before needing to be recharged, HedgeHog’s design is more robust and high quality than some of the other variations out there — even if it does somewhat resemble the heavy duty bracelets worn by He-Man in Masters of the Universe.

Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.

On a Bags is at it again, launching three new bags for the laydeez and gennelmen out there. Do you like leather and canvas? Do you like style? Do you like protection for your camera gear and iOS devices? Then read on.