Cult of Mac

Apple and Samsung have become very acquainted with one another in the courtroom. Every since Apple’s crushing victory against Samsung in 2012 over patent infringement, the tech giants have been duking it out through a seemingly-endless string of appeals. The culmination of 2012’s verdict is a second trial that begins today in San Jose, California.

Much in this trial is the same as the last: Apple and Samsung are both accusing each other of copying patented ideas, and there are billions of dollars on the table. But enough has changed to make the outcome of this second trial unguessable.

Apple and Samsung are headed back to court today for round two of their billion dollar patent lawsuit that will see the two companies pointing fingers and slamming down arguments on who copied whose patents.

We’ve seen enough evidence to have our own opinion on Samsung’s copying ways and now thanks to this Thai cartoon it all becomes perfectly clear why Samsung just can’t help itself.

Image: Killua51
Thanks: Grahame

We’ve shown you how to change the default “On my way!” shortcut on your iOS device, making it just a bit less dorky. We’ve also helped you sync those keyboard shortcuts via iCloud.

Today, however, let’s look at this great use case of iOS keyboard shortcuts – the quick response template.

Cam Bunton over at Today’s iPhone has a great idea – use keyboard shortcuts to create your own short, simple message to respond to folks via Messages or Mail with this same iOS feature.

This morning’s gallery of iPhone 6 renderings had us drooling for an iPhone 6 but a set of leaked images claiming to originate from Apple supplier Foxconn might be our first glimpse of Cupertino’s next handset, or at least a phase of its development process.

The Weibo account they were posted on claims they’re straight from the Foxconn production floor, but seems how all the April Fools jokes are coming out today, we advise take pairing this with a hearty serving of skepticism.

Here’s another pic:

Sure, we’ll be seeing a host of fun things tomorrow on the internets, many of them having to do with new crazy Apple products.

Today, however, we found this slick little number from site AppleUser: the Mac Air Desktop, a slimmed-down version of the Mac Mini.

What’s great about this sweet little photoshop job is that it meets the requirement of any good April Fools’ prank–it’s totally something we’d want to buy.

If you have a cool story or a handy travel tip you’d like to share, Grawler will let you. It’s a new app that wikis up the world by having its community add photos, waypoints, and descriptions of their favorite destinations. And if you happen to live in a less-than-popular travel destination *cough*Lincoln*cough*, it comes preloaded with articles from Wikipedia.

And since I’m pretty sure nobody else in the community has this kind of insider information, I think I’ll go ahead and create my definitive guide to private places to sneak naps on the University of Nebraska campus. Worldly travelers need to know that.

Source:Grawler: The Local Wiki – Free | Cosmix

Side-scrolling shoot-em-ups are typically exercises in excess. You have no shortage of enemies, power-ups, or ridiculously large bosses, and most importantly, you have all the bullets you’ll ever need. Just hit the button anytime, and bullets come out. That’s how it works.

“Oh, really?” says Exodite. “How about if it didn’t?” And that’s when things get a little weird.

By limiting your ammo, Exodite brazenly defies decades of tradition. And it’s kind of brilliant for that.

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Note: This article was originally published in Cult of Mac Magazine, available on the App Store.

Flappy Bird came onto the scene with a bang, ruffling feathers from Hanoi to Hannover. Dong Nguyen, the developer of this seemingly overnight sensation, was as taken aback as the rest of us, evident from his shocking decision to stop offering the game for download as well as his recent decision to bring it back.

Game developers and publishers can only hope to reproduce this kind of crazy success. And each and every one of the people we talked to at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was eager to share opinions on how Flappy Bird happened, how it might happen again, and why it was such a runaway hit to begin with.

Have you lost your Mac password? Are you unable to get into your computer because of it? Apple lets you restore your password if you have the system disks that came with the computer, or–if you have a newer non-optical disk machine like a Macbook–with the built-in system recovery mode.

If you aren’t able to access your system disks or the recovery mode, there’s a couple of tricky ways to reset your password. Both methods are explained in a video by Quinn Nelson on his YouTube channel, and they’re pretty great ways to reset a lost password.

A word of warning, though: this is also a way a malicious person can gain access to your Mac. If you have sensitive documents on your Mac, you owe it to yourself to use FileVault or a third-party encryption tool to add another layer of protection that doesn’t require your admin password.

They say that Macworld doesn’t break news as much as soft launch it: Cult of Mac Magazine
begs to differ. This week, we bring you news you won’t find elsewhere from the Moscone floor.

Based upon leaked schematics discovered by Macotakara of the forthcoming 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch variants of the iPhone 6, Nowherelse teamed up with concept designer extraordinaire Martin Hajek to create what may be the most plausible look at what Jony Ive’s next iPhone design would look like yet.

All the proportions here are perfect: althougb it features a larger profile, a super thin design, and an edge-to-edge display, the design still features a beautiful internal symmetry that seems worthy of Apple. There are some changes: the edges are curved, more organic, and the volume buttons have been unified into a single rocker, but otherwise, it looks like an evolution of the current iPhone 5s. Which is exactly what the iPhone 6 would look like.

Check out more images below. What do you think? Could this be the iPhone 6?

Apple is reportedly trying to lure top Swiss watchmakers away from luxury brands in its efforts to build an iWatch.

Jean-Claude Biver, president of luxury brand LVMH’s watches and jewellery division, claims that Apple has tried to recruit staff from his Hublot brand, along with employees from several other top Swiss watchmakers.

“Apple has contacted some of my employees – I saw the emails personally,” he said, noting that none of the individuals contacted jumped ship.

Samsung’s head of mobile business, J.K. Shin, earns more than Tim Cook, according to a new report.

In 2014, Shin received $5.8 million compensation– made up of a base salary of 1.17 billion won, and 1.6 billion won in incentives and performance bonus. By comparison, Tim Cook took home $4.25 million — only slightly more than the $4.17 he earned in 2012.

Barrel-inspired jailbreak tweak Cylinder has been updated and listed on Cydia’s BigBoss repo.

The tweak allows users to add animations to their iPhone Home screen. These animations can be created via special Lua scripts — a lightweight, but powerful scripting language — and then layered on top of one another to create customized effects.

A bumper is a great option for folks who don’t care for cases, but are clumsy enough that they need some protection for their iPhone. And the brand-new Grovemade wooden bumpers not only offer protection but look great too. Also, they have names that you’ll want to lollop around your tongue, over and over.

Degauss Labs’ new Pocket earbuds cost $35, which puts them on the cusp of “quality possibility” (a term I just made up) – they might sound good, or they may just use the same crappy old internals of every other cheap earbud under $50.

But what this Swedish-designed gadget does have is style, and that’s probably the most important spec in this price range.

Oh man, soon you won’t even be able to break into an old abandoned building without running into a bunch of other folks who are doing the same thing, only instead of being all cool and “urban” and fearless like you, they just got guided there by an app.

Which is my way of complaining about Kamino, an app which lets you share “Urban Hikes” (seriously) using your iPhone, and forces to use Facebook to do it.

Long-time gamers know that nine times out of ten getting excited about a movie tie-in will in end in disappointment. At the same time, the last few years have been pretty good when it comes to comic book titles making their way onto consoles, computers, and mobile devices.

I find anything that promises one-handed operation of your iDevices suspicious, but then I have a dirty mind. The Grip&Shoot – seen by Buster last week and Macworld – is one such gadget, and it adds a trigger grip to the iPhone to make shooting videos and photos way easier.

Like the current bloom of retro-styled shooters, but don’t like the $500+ prices? Unsurprisingly, Olympus has you covered – the new Stylus SH1 looks hot in a silver and black/white body, and packs Wi-Fi, a built-in zoom lens and 5-axis image stabilization.

Sony’s Digital Paper is so odd that if it were released tomorrow on April 1st, I’d wonder whether or not it was just a cruel prank. But apart from the absurd price, digital paper is a pretty great-looking product.

Over at the Hotel Club, they’ve posted a fantastic interactive infographic showing the differences between traveling at the dawn of tourism — 1863 — and today, 150 years later.

But this particular section, showing how the gadgets and guides that people relied upon in the Victorian era when traveling overseas have been totally made obsolete by the iPhone, really stood out to me. We’ve previously seen how the iPhone made everything Radio Shack sold 20 years ago obsolete, but as this infographic shows, the iPhone has made centuries — not just decades — worth of gadgets obsolete. It’s one of the most important inventions ever.

Source: Hotel Club

Do you like Facebook’s Chat Heads as a notification system for Facebook messages? On Android, Chat Heads can run universally in any app, but on iOS, they only show up in Facebook, Paper or Facebook Messages. It’s in-app only. But if you have a jailbroken device, a new tweak will allow you to break Chat Heads out into the rest of the iOS operating system.