When your working relationship begins with the company you’re working with making an official complaint about your “unprecedented” bill, you know things are off to a rocky start.
Cult of Mac reported back in late November about Apple’s dealings with court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich: the former U.S. attorney and Justice Department inspector general given the job of ensuring Apple’s antitrust compliance regarding e-book price fixing.
1Keyboard looks like a great way to avoid having to spend $100 on Logitech’s K811 Easy Switch keyboard. It’s an app that takes the input from your Mac’s keyboard and sends it to the iDevice of you choice, and it costs exactly $0.
The Fitbit is one of the most popular fitness trackers out there, and today its companion iOS app was updated with an interesting new feature for iPhone 5s owners. By taking advantage of the new phone’s M7 co-processor (a chip also found in the latest iPads), Fitbit has turned the 5s into a health monitor without the need of an additional wrist strap.
MobileTrack uses the M7 to track the user’s activity throughout the day and distill it into helpful data, like miles traveled and calories burned.
It’s at least six months until Apple reveals iOS 8, and probably nine months until we see the iPhone 6 for the first time, but that hasn’t stopped Eric Vasille of iPhonesoft from imaging what the iPhone 6 and iOS 8 will look like.
Have you ever wanted to easily run Windows applications & PC games on your Mac? Well, you can…and thanks to this Cult of Mac Deals offer you can do so at a price that makes choosing to do so a whole lot easier.
CrossOver 13 allows you to install Windows software right onto your Mac without a Windows license, without rebooting, and without a virtual machine. Your Windows applications and games integrate seamlessly on your Mac OS X and run alongside your other Mac applications. And Cult of Mac Deals has this revolutionary piece of software available for a limited time for just $29.99.
Many of us got or received iPhones for Christmas, and I’m guessing you thought you were pretty smart, putting it in a gift bag to disguise the telltale shape. But you’ve got nothing on this guy, who fooled someone into thinking that the iPhone they were actually unwrapping was just a crappy old chair. Check out how they did it, after the jump.
Want to capture a square image from the get-go, rather than cropping in Instagram later? How about Taking a panoramic photo or a video? If you have an iPhone 5s, you can take a slow motion video, as well.
It’s pretty easy to get these options, though it may not be as intuitive to find. Here’s how.
A promising prototype stand called the Plinth fits in a pocket but quickly deploys to support a large tablet, a smartphone or even an old-fashioned book.
Developed by U.K. product designer John Bull, the super-portable Plinth would make it easier for him to use his beloved iPad by holding it rock-steady at three different angles.
The U.S. National Security Agency has spyware designed to grant backdoor access to the iPhone specifically, according to leaked documents shared by high-profile security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and German publication Der Spiegel.
While speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, Appelbaum shared his knowledge of “DROPOUTJEEP,” a top-secret NSA program that can intercept an iPhone’s SMS messages, contacts, location, camera, and microphone.
Occasionally a rare piece of Apple gear will appear on eBay and be suddenly pulled. Why? Apple doesn’t like it when its internal hardware gets exposed out in the wild. But sometimes a prototype slips through Cupertino’s watchful eye and gets sold.
An eBay seller in Australia has sold what appears to be an original iPhone engineering prototype for a nice sum of $1,499.
Besides its fantastic longform features, The New York Times Magazine is known for its striking cover art. The Sunday publication has been creatively led by Arem Duplessis for the past decade, and now Duplessis is leaving to join Apple as a creative director within its marketing department.
Dragon Dictate for Mac 3 offers incredibly accurate speech-to-text and allows you to run your favorite desktop applications by voice. It’s the #1 voice recognition software on the market for good reason, and it’s available for 50% off – just $99.99 – from Cult of Mac Deals during this limited time offer.
This software solution offer far more than speech-to-text. With it you can create and edit documents, manage email, surf the Web, update social networks, and more – quickly, easily, and accurately – all by voice. Just read your text aloud and watch the magic appear before your eyes right on your computer screen.
So let’s get the obvious out of the way at the start: Streets of Rage isn’t exactly new. The original game came out in 1991 — meaning that it would now be of legal drinking age were it a person. The iOS port is newer (obviously), but coming out in 2009 that puts it in roughly the same timeframe as iOS 3. Ancient.
So why are we reviewing it?
That didn’t take long. Just twenty-four hours after Cult of Mac first reported that a jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 was incoming, it’s here, allowing even iOS 7 holdouts to get in on the jailbreaking fun.
Ugh, Flash content, right? It slows everything down, and buries content within inaccessible Flash movies, and forces you to install and keep updating the plugin, even if you don’t need it.
Honestly, I hope Flash goes the way of the dodo, and HTML5 takes over. If I had my druthers, I’d disable Flash on my Mac
Until then, however, there are some sites where you actually need to enable Flash to see the content. So, instead of completely dumping Flash in a fit of pique, you can enable it in Safari only for specific sites.
Love iOS 7, but don’t have a device powerful enough to rock it? Good news — Whited00r, the custom firmware for older iOS Devices that adds many of the features of newer versions of Apple’s mobile operating system — has just been updated to version 7, and it brings a lot of iOS 7’s look and feel along with it.
In addition to all the new products of 2013, the past year was a whir of activity in the vintage Apple space. Apple may be content to only move forward and deny existence of any products older than seven years – what do you mean my first generation MacBook Pro is vintage??? – but the public has not forgotten them.
The biggest retro news of the year was probably the ascendancy of the Apple 1 on the auction block. In May, an Apple 1 fetched a record price of $671,000 at an auction in Germany – until just recently the highest price ever paid for a personal computer. Other Apple 1s sold this year in the $300,000 range, so if you are lucky enough to have one of these oldies-but-goodies in your attic, dig it out now!
Remember when Tim Cook said it was going to be an iPad Christmas?
According to the latest analytics data from research group Flurry, it looks like he was spot-on.
It was widely reported in January that Apple was in talks to buy Waze, an Israeli startup with a hugely popular maps app. Waze was rumored to be asking Apple for $750 million. The same outlet that broke the acquisition rumor quickly backpedaled and said no such deal was taking place. Google ended up buying Waze in June for $1 billion.
And so goes the buyout game in Silicon Valley, a power play where tech giants like Apple and Google court hot startups with the hopes of adding them to their war chests.
Apple had its biggest year ever for acquisitions in 2013, with a record 15 smaller companies joining the fold. A dozen of them have now been publicly disclosed.
For an entity as secretive as Apple, examining the companies it buys is one of the only ways to peek into its future plans. When AuthenTec, a company that specialized in fingerprint readers and identification software, was purchased in July 2012, speculation immediately followed. What did Apple want with fingerprint sensors? The answer ended up being obvious, and the technology debuted in Touch ID in September 2013.
Often the outcome of an Apple acquisition isn’t so immediately apparent.
Historically, Apple acquires far fewer companies than its competitors. But the line is starting to blur. Google publicly bought three times as many companies as Apple in 2012 and not even twice as many in 2013. Apple bought more companies than Microsoft in 2013.
So what does all of this say about Apple’s future?
Remember the 25 billion iTunes downloads? How about when Vine came out, or Flipboard? What about that Ashton Kutcher movie?
There was a lot of Apple-related news in 2013, so we decided to pop it all into a video for your viewing pleasure. If you’re like us, you’ll dig this trip down memory lane.
So, let’s take a look back at the long year behind us as we gear up to head into the new year.
Given its tremendous success over the past 12 years, it’s easy to forget that the whole iTunes concept was once a risky proposition people weren’t sure would succeed.
Well, leap forward to the present day, and even the U.K.’s much-lauded BBC is taking its plays from Apple’s playbook — by announcing that it is rethinking (or at least augmenting) its classic flat license fee by borrowing from the iTunes/Netflix model and charging users £5 ($8.25) to download their favorite shows.
Having taken the holidays off (in Samsung’s case to nurse its wounds), Apple and Samsung are back to patent negotiations.
According to an article which appeared Sunday in The Korea Times, the two companies have resumed their patent battle — with officials at the Fair Trade Commission saying the companies are looking to hash out issues related to royalties.
BitTorrent Sync has received an end -of-2013 update — adding an often requested feature and several important fixes.
Christmas is a filthy time of year. First, it’s in the middle of the winter, when coughs, sneezes and dirty old diseases are most common. And second, extra germs, bacteria and viruses hitch a ride on us meatbag humans as we jet around the globe to see our families, swirling the air into a slurry of septicity.
It’s no wonder Santa spends the rest of the year in bed.
What you need to counteract this insurgence of influenza is the PhoneSoap charger, a kind of Howard Hughes-style tissue box for your iPhone, only with a UV lamp inside.
Here’s a reason to download Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts app if you haven’t already: the latest gift — freely downloadable using the app — is Martin Scorsese’s critically-acclaimed 2011 film Hugo.
The movie, based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times best-seller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station, who meets a down-on-his-luck toymaker, who turns out to be silent movie special effects maestro Georges Méliès (the guy that famously made this iconic short, entitled A Trip to the Moon).