There was a time when the most luxurious laptops around weren’t MacBooks. They were Sony Vaios, and up[on his return to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs so admired the design and engineering of the Vaio line-up that he wanted to make an exception and license OS X to Sony for use on their laptops. And it almost happened.
Google has reached a tentative agreement with the European Commission following a three-year antitrust investigation into how it displays search results in Europe. As part of the agreement, the company will display search results from three of its competitors — such as Yahoo! and Bing — alongside results that promote its own services.
By reaching this agreement, Google has escaped a fine of up to $5 billion, or 10 percent of its revenue from 2012.
A new Apple patent describes an invention that may one day replace the Mac’s Finder.
Referring to a method for classifying documents in such a way as to allow for a multi-dimensional graphical representation of their contents, the patent would move away from the way information is currently structured toward a “graphical multidimensional file management system and method” that would be far more intuitive than the system used today.
President Obama used an iPad for an impromptu interview during a recent appearance at a Maryland middle school.
The President — who has previously claimed that he spends hours using the iPad each day — seemed perfectly at home as he used the device to carry out an interview with the classroom teacher, before turning the iPad to record the pupils, assembled press members, and “Mike, my secret service agent” who he claims “never smiles.”
Google Maps’ latest update for iOS adds a new “Faster Route” feature, which notifies users in navigation mode when a quicker journey to their destination becomes available.
The new feature works in conjunction with Google Maps’ existing ability to track traffic data in real time. Once alerted that there is a possible faster route, users have the option of either tapping “No thanks” and remaining on their present course, or else hitting “Reroute” and diverting their journey to one that Google predicts will be faster.
Apple is the fourth greenest tech/telecoms company — generating 85 percent of its power through green power sources — according to a new list published by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The recently published report compares the amount of power used by America’s top technology and telecom firms with the percentage that comes from renewable “green” resources, such as wind, solar, bio-gas and other options.
Recently launched free app WerYoo takes on Instagram — combining a photo app with a social network — by allowing users to place their photos and hashtags on a map, which they can then share with friends.
WerYoo lets you show off your photos to people in your immediate proximity, and pings you whenever a new nearby photo is added — thereby letting you both keep up to date with friends and connect with new people.
Forgotify is kind of like that box at the back of the thrift store which holds vinyl records so bad that even the sample-crazy music nerds won’t touch them – only on the internet. It’s a web service that collects the roughly 4 million (!) unplayed tracks on Spotify, and serves them up to you at random.
I love the press-to-shoot feature of Instagram’s video mode: it stops you from making one long boring take to fill up that eight seconds or however long it is that you get. But maybe you want to make a boring one-shot clip, or you’re planning on making the world’s shortest remake of Hitchcock’s Rope. Whatever, this neat trick from Photojojo is for you.
Dungeon Keeper for iOS has received its first update, one week after its initial launch in the App Store.
Sadly, the update doesn’t remove some of the game’s worse freemium-associated elements (our review criticized its approach to micro-payments for being “overeager to claim all of your precious gems to get anything done”) but it does add a host of other modifications — including “the power of friendship” which lets you drag in other friends to play through Facebook and Game Center.
Lovers of bookbindery cases who find beautiful plain leather covers a little boring can now tweak their Pad&Quill iPad Air cases with any number of fancy patterns. The highly-protective, last-forever cases can now be customized to order on the P&Q store, letting you obsess over such options as the delicious-sounding “Gold Metallic on French Roast,” and the distinctly 1980s-style " Chevron on Gray Linen.
I’ll admit it. The main reason I’m posting about the beautiful Project Bloom iPhone case is the hedgehog. Specifically Woody, the African Pygmy hedgehog that you see in the photo above.
But that’s not to say that the case isn’t worth a look. It is. So Let’s.
Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.
Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.
Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.
Evernote now does natural-language searches. Type something like “images from Barcelona” into the search box and your query will automatically be turned into a search query with the form contains:images place:Barcelona.
You can also search on the device that created the note, document types, tags and notebooks and pretty much everything else you can think of. It’s like a local Google for your notes.
It was always a matter of time before Apple killed off the popular Evasi0n jailbreak, and as of iOS 7.1 beta 4, they had killed off at least one critical exploit.
But Apple’s not going to stop there. They’re nuking Evasi0n from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
It seems like we’ve been crowing for years about the promise of IGZO — a display technology that radically improves power efficiency, allowing for thinner, lighter, longer-lasting devices — for ages, but with the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display, Apple finally started actually delivering on that promise.
But what now? A new job application suggests that the next generation of Mac laptops might get IGZO too, paving the way for new design possibilities.
Microsoft didn’t just announced a new CEO today. They also announced that they were buying a $15 million stake in popular mobile check-in app Foursquare. But to what end?
To save time, here’s my advice: If you have an iPad or iPhone, a guitar and $300 to spend, then spend it on the iLoud. It’s a small, portable Bluetooth speaker that is way louder than any other Bluetooth speaker, and it lets you plug in your guitar and use your iPhone – wirelessly – to add effects using an app like IK Multimedias’s AmpliTube.
More importantly, the iLoud rocks.
Microsoft’s search for a new CEO is over. Satya Nadella, who was formerly the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, will replace Steve Ballmer immediately, the company said today.
Apple has released a fifth beta build of iOS 7.1 to developers this morning, two weeks after dropping the last iOS 7.1 beta was seeded.
iOS 7.1 beta 5 is available to developers in the Dev Center or via an OTA update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Like last time, Apple has also released a new beta for Apple TV as well as XCode 5.1.
The release notes only mention the addition of new natural-sounding Siri voice for English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Japanese, and Chinese (Mandarin – China). We’ll update you on any other new changes once we get it downloaded on our devices. Feel free to yell at us on Twitter (@cultofmac) if you come across anything yourself.
Here are the download links:
When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.
Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free
Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.
The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution happen in real time.
It’s kind of eerie, actually.
The History Channel has gotten a little weird over the past few years.
It used to be all about World War II and the Industrial Revolution, but ever since around 2008 or so, something has been creeping in. Something decidedly un-historic. Now, we flip over to History to learn about UFOs, prophecies, and pseudoscience. So it makes sense that the channel would release a fake documentary about a War of the Worlds-style conflict that took place instead of World War I.
The Great Martian War is an endless runner that shares its name with that program, and it places you in the middle of the conflict as a scout trying to deliver intel to Paris on foot. You’ll run, jump, and slide to avoid obstacles and massive alien walkers.
And you’ll die. You’ll die a lot.
I’m traveling to Russia to cover the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It’s going to be a thrilling, crazy experience. You’ll see some of my work here at Cult of Mac, among other places.
Here’s the gear I’ll be taking with me overseas:
Oof.
Dell has, of course, “borrowed” a few inspirations from Apple over the last few years, but in a recent marketing video uploaded to the Texas-based PC maker’s YouTube channel a month ago — and since hastily removed — Dell showed an XPS 15 laptop that seemingly dual-booted between Wind0ws 8 and OS X.