Cult of Mac

Next time you are traveling somewhere or commuting your way to work, look around you. It’s evident that the number of book lovers who have taken to reading on a digital format has risen significantly over the years. In 2011 and 2012, Amazon said it sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, excluding free eBooks.

Though it has become apparent in recent years that there is a slight fall in the growth of eBook sales (particularly so in 2013), eBooks are still far too compelling to die out, and today we tend to use more than one medium to consume the same thing. So next time you’re hesitating to pull out your Kindle or iPad mini on the bus or train due to the watchful eyes of a “book snob,” just remember that it’s not possible to please everyone, and that there are still thousands of benefits to the electronic book format.

Finnish developer Supercell has a huge hit on its hands with Clash of Clans, and they’re releasing a brand new follow-up that looks surprisingly similar: Boom Beach.

In Clash of Clans, you build a base and defend it with your medieval warriors. You can also go out and attack other people’s bases.

In the trailer for Boom Beach, you might notice a familiar mechanic at work.

Today you may have noticed a little teaser page from Flexibits, makers of the beloved calendar app Fantastical.

“Fantastical 2 for iPhone on your iPad is good,” reads the teaser. “Fantastical 2 for iPad on your iPad is even better.”  There’s a mailing list where you can sign up to get notified when the app arrives.

We’re itching to tell you more, like exactly when the app is coming out and why it’s awesome, but you’ll have to be patient. All that’s being said at this point is that Fantastical for iPad will be a separate download from the existing Fantastical for iPhone. That means new and existing customers will need to pony up a little change.

Stay tuned for Cult of Mac’s full review.

Source: Flexibits

I’ve been on a zombie movie kick as of late, and once I’d caught up on Walking Dead and vintage George Romero films, I expanded my sights towards the App Store, where I discovered Useless Creations’ delightful Zombies Everywhere! Augmented Reality Apocalypse.

MacWorld/iWorld 2014 is less than a week away which means the Cult of Mac team is gearing up to descend on Moscone North for three days of non-stop Apple-related gizmos, speakers, workshops and other nonsense.

We’re bringing the best 30 minute Apple conversation you’re going to hear aaaaaaaall week long to the event live on Thursday, March 27th at 8pm. Come join us for our live CultCast recording party at The Box SF for a night of prizes, Apple conversation, drinks galore and hopefully a couple surprises.

Erfon, Leander, Buster and Alex will be hanging out all night bringing out the laughs and immature humor along with the rest of our SF staff. Hopefully we’ll get around to talking about Apple too thanks to our hosts DigiDNA and MacUpdate.

Entry is free and we’ll be grooving all night thanks to music from producer Egadz and his funky arcade electro button box – a must hear for electronic music fans and geeks.

And beer will flow like wine. (Shhh… yes you know: open bar!)

Today Spotify announced a killer deal for college students: it’s cutting the cost of its Premium subscription in half from $10 to $5 per month. The discount will work for up to four years, and all you have to do is verify your name, date of birth, and college you attend.

A Spotify Premium subscription gets you unlimited access on any device to the service’s 20 million songs. We recently called it the best all-around music subscription service money can buy. Apple is even rumored to be building its own Spotify competitor. Spotify has apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and web.

Claiming your college discount is pretty easy through the Spotify website. The cost will be reduced for the next month’s billing cycle. Existing Premium subscribers can get in on the discount as well.

Source: Spotify

Ashton Kutcher’s role as Steve Jobs didn’t exactly set the box office on fire when it was released last summer despite Kutcher deep diving into the former Apple CEO’s life.

If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who still hasn’t seen Jobs you can finally steam it for free on Netflix Instant.

Your days of endlessly hitting “Refresh” to see if a price has come down may be over (unless you like that sort of thing). Punchr is a new app that will monitor any part of a web page for updates and then let you know when it happens. You just navigate to the site and then select the part of it you want to look out for, and it’ll send you a push notification if something changes.

So now you can spend less time refreshing Twitter when it’s down and more time taking pictures of your lunch to post on Twitter when it returns.

Source:Punchr Page Monitor – Free | BitMelter Ltd

If you’ve spent enough time messing around in Terminal, you’ll know one thing for sure: re-typing the stuff you’ve laboriously typed in with only minor differences is tedious. And it happens more often than we’d like.

The Terminal does, however, keep a history of all the commands you’ve typed into it. To see this in action, you can cycle through the last few commands you’ve typed in, simply hit the arrow keys up or down when in Terminal.

There are a few more less intuitive commands to make the best use of your Terminal history, however.

Penguins are pretty amazing.

Maybe you’ve seen March of the Penguins, and maybe you haven’t, but they’re brave little creatures who just happen to be food for some terrifying creatures. But they don’t let that get them down because they’re penguins, damn it, and that means something.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but Adventure Beaks is a really fun new free-to-play iOS game where you lead an elite squad of penguins through a platforming adventure for fortune and glory. And you can jack some seals up while you’re at it, so that’s like icing on the cake.

But it’s the Antarctic, so it’s basically all icing, but you get my point.

Want to know how the iOS and Android battle is playing out around the world?

Mobile technology firm dotMobi has created an infographic dividing 101 countries around the world into either the Apple (black) or Google (green) camp, based on device browsing. (Grey countries are not included in the dataset.)

Apple didn’t infringe on Samsung patents, and therefore won’t have to pay any damages, a Tokyo District Court said Tuesday.

Apple had been accused of infringing on data communication patents belonging to Samsung, which featured in Apple’s iPhone 4s, iPhone 4 and iPad 2.

Apple was granted a patent on Tuesday related to a GUI modified for disabled users of iOS devices and MacBooks.

Entitled “Devices, Methods & GUI’s for Accessibility using a Touch-Sensitive Surface,” the patent describes several methods for allowing a person with impaired vision to use a touch-sensitive surface, including a touch screen display or a track pad.

A new high quality video was posted online Monday — showing the demolition of a building on the site of Apple’s forthcoming Campus 2.

The video was uploaded to YouTube by an anonymous user under the name Apple Internal. It depicts the destruction of a building along Ridgeview Ct., one of the main arteries running through the 100-acre plot of land Apple will use to build its new 2.8 million square-foot “spaceship” headquarters.

85% of iOS devices are running iOS 7 or later, Apple claims.

Refreshing its iOS usage numbers on Monday, Apple measured usage of its most recent mobile OS for a seven‑day period ending March 23, 2014.

Mailtracker is an app that lets you snoop on the folks you send email to. It tells you if and when your mails were read, what device they read it on and what city they are in. Sounds pretty creepy right?

The Photographer’s pouch is a boiled-wool pocket that will stick inside any camera bag thanks to the velcro strip on its back. And of course you’re not limited to cameras, or even camera bags – anything that will fit fits, and any bag with velcro can be used.

This is more of a tip than a gadget, but it uses a gadget, so we should be cool. Photojojo’s new Selfie Help book (actually a web page) is full of great tips, but one jumped out at me: why not take that fisheye lens you have and stick it on the front camera of your iPhone?

Apple has added a new “related apps” feature to the app store when viewed on an iOS device. Now, along the top of the screen, over the details of an app, you’ll see the breadcrumb trail in the picture above.

Just over a month after Apple launched the second story on its ‘Your Verse’ microsite, chronicling how iPads help mountaineers climb the world’s tallest peaks, Apple has released a new update, detailing how the tablet can help diagnose athlete concussions.

Between their jailbreak solutions for iOS 6 and iOS 7, the hacker collective known as Team Evad3rs has done a lot for OS X device owners.

Despite what they’ve done to help liberate people’s iOS devices, though, Team Evad3rs has asked for remarkably little back. With JailbreakCon coming up, then, why not support Team Evad3rs with these high-quality vinyl skins, courtesy of the folks at iCarbons?

Like other iCarbon skins, you can customize the official Evad3rs skin with different colors, right down to any element.

The official Evasi0n skin starts at just $13 from the iCarbon website: grab one now to show your support of jailbreaking!

Via: iDownloadBlog

Yup. Thirteen years ago today, on March 24, 2001, Apple and Steve Jobs unleashed the first version of Mac OS X 10.0 (code named ‘Cheetah’) on to the world.

Despite officially being a teenager, OS X is holding up better than most 13 year olds: its voice isn’t cracking, it’s not awkward around girls, and since Scott Forstall’s departure, there’s barely a blemish to be seen on its otherwise pristine countenance.

What’s your earliest memory of OS X? Share it with us in the comments.

Has your child bankrupted you in Smurfberries? Had a child who maxed out your credit card on in-app purchases? Good news. Apple is now writing to some iTunes account holders, telling them they may be liable for a refund.

The last Apple TV concept we saw had us swooning for a redesigned Apple remote/gaming pad, but if Apple decides to reduce the Apple TV’s size to take on the Chromecast and the new Roku stick, this Apple TV Air concept from Curved might be spot on.

Rather than running an HDMI cable to Apple’s little black box, the Apple TV Air concept would plug directly into your HDMI port, allowing you to instantly beam video from your iPhone to your big screen TV over AirPlay.

Take a look:

Today Google released Photowall, an iOS and Android app that beams photos through a Chromecast to be displayed on a TV. Photos can be doodled on and rearranged in a grid interface that updates as new photos are added.

Photowall works with the Chrome browser by providing a URL that anyone on the same network can access in Chrome to add their own photos and make edits. Once all photos are uploaded, a video can be made and published on YouTube.

Google put together a quick video to show how Photowall works: