Sam’s Club is offering the 16GB iPhone 5s for only $119 through January, which is the lowest price out there we could find right now. The deal requires a two-year carrier contract with either AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or US Cellular.
You would normally have to be a Sam’s Club member to take advantage of this discount, but outsiders can shop and pay non-member prices as part of the Friends & Family Open House that lasts December 13th through the 15th. So today is the last day for non-members to get the full benefit of the deal. Sam’s Club previously had the 5s marked down at $147.
A lot of retailers are discounting Apple’s latest iPhones for the holidays, so now is a great time to buy. Walmart is selling the iPhone 5c for $27 and the 5s for $127 until December 24th. Best Buy has a great holiday deal running where it will knock $75 off any iPhone 5s regardless of storage capacity on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, which is the best option if you want something larger than 16GB.
MarkDrop is a new Markdown editor for the Mac that displays a minimalistic editor on the left and a preview window on the right that updates in real time. The app prides itself on a clean interface, and you can share via PDF, HTML, or print.
Tired of the way your smartphone, tablet, computer, or other tech gadgets are looking these days? Now you can change it up with a stylish skin from Slickwraps.
Slickwraps makes amazing skins for these big name brands and more! They literally make hundreds of sweet skins for just about every tech gadget out there including your iPhone and/or Android phone. This Cult of Mac Deals offer will get you $40 Slickwraps credit for only $20 – credit you can apply to any product (or products) they have for sale on their website. This deal gives you the freedom to shop around and get exactly what you want.
Car makers next year will begin selling vehicles that support Apple’s new system for connecting iPhones to the in-car entertainment systems built into the dash.
Nice, but it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s why Apple should start building the in-car entertainment systems themselves.
One came out a year ago, and one came out this past week.
iOS 7 has ushered in a new age of design for third-party Twitter apps. Before Jony Ive’s monumental redesign of iOS was introduced over the summer, apps capitalized on making themselves stand out with a distinct design aesthetic—the robotic, chromatic look of the old Tweetbot, for example.
Several of the biggest Twitter clients in the App Store have undergone their iOS 7 redesigns by now, and while they feel more at home in iOS 7, they’ve also become harder to tell apart at first glance. The launch of Osfoora 2 for iPhone this past week reinforces this design trend.
While accepting a lifetime achievement award from Auburn University, his alma mater, Apple CEO Tim Cook told of how The Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy shaped his passion for human rights and equality. “Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, I saw the devastating impacts of discrimination,” Cook said in New York on December 10th. “Remarkable people were denied opportunities and treated without basic human dignity solely because of the color of their skin.”
He recalled childhood memories of watching crosses burn on neighbors’ lawns in Alabama. “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever,” Cook said. “For me the cross burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred, and a fear of anyone different than the majority. I could never understand it, and I knew then that America’s and Alabama’s history would always be scarred by the hatred that it represented.”
Finally, a Bluetooth® speaker made for on-the-go lifestyles. With an integrated omnidirectional microphone, The PULSE combines music-playing and conference-calling capabilities in a palm-sized package.
Weighing in at only 2.3 ounces, it attaches almost anywhere with the included clip – backpacks, seatbelts, pockets – so it’s always available, but never in the way. And for a limited time you can get it for just $79.99 – a savings of 19% – courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals!
It’s the time of the year for lists: naughty, nice, best of, trends, Thirteen Surprising Bathroom Habits Of Tech Innovators. Stuff like that.
All those listicles can make your eyes water, even though you can’t stop yourself from clicking through to Ten Loudest Grunters in Women’s Tennis, I know I can’t.
But it was with great pleasure that I spotted Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive made it into the venerable Wall Street Journal’s Books of the Year section.
This week on the CultCast—its layout, its machinery, and the creative people and processes that build the amazing products we love—we go behind the veil of Apple’s insanely secretive design studio. Plus, how to get great paid apps for free (it’s legal, promise!), and could an Apple/Microsoft merger be in our future? One analyst thinks so…
Have a few laughs whilst getting caught up on each week’s finest Apple stories! Download new and past episodes of The CultCast on iTunes or hit play below and let the audio enjoyment commence.
Thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.
We’re all supposed to be better people around the holidays. Unless we happen to be a hackathon dude who fires off a Facebook rant about how San Francisco is filled with human trash.
And, sure, you can delete that stupid stuff. But that same technology that enabled you to quickly air your most callous, thoughtless opinion won’t take it back that easily. His subsequent apology did little to smother the flames about how tech needs better PR to convince the world we aren’t the philosophical disciples of Charles Montgomery Burns.
That’s why Facebook is considering a compassion button – so in this case you could sympathize with your hackathon pal for his complete lack of empathy for the homeless? – for example.
This week, Cult of Mac reports from the front line of digital companies and nonprofits with heart and soul from Stanford’s inaugural Technology and Compassion Conference. The idea behind it is to bring things like mood trackers and compassion training to our iPhones, so we act like jerks a little less. And the world will thus becomes a better place…
We also bring you the best new books, music and movies in iTunes and apps in the store as well as the inside scoop from the behind the counter with our Ask a Genius Column. ‘Cause we’re generous like that.
Apple EarPods are sleek and gorgeous. For most people like me though, they fallout all the time. Moshi has released its new Mythro earbuds that promise to stay in-place while still sounding good at an affordable price, so we’ve decided to put them through the ringer to see if they’re a suitable cheap earbud alternative. While we’re at it, we also take a look at Moshi’s first ever iPad charger, the IonBank 10k. It’s light, white, and sleek all over, but does it have enough juice to make it worth carrying around? Check out our findings below:
The problem with the native Contacts app on your iPhone is that you have to keep the addresses, phone numbers, and emails updated on your own. If your friend moves, or gets a new number, it’s up to you to get the information and enter it correctly into your Contacts app. That’s just so old school.
Addappt is a new app that aims to change all that. You invite others to download and enter their own information in the app, and then every time something changes on their end, the entry in your app changes, too. Better still, the app will push the changes to your native Contacts app, something I’ve not seen before in an app of this type.
The iPhone 5s introduced us to Touch ID. Photo: Apple
Apple seeded the second beta of iOS 7.1 to developers nearly a month after 7.1 beta 1 was released. Once again, Apple’s beta doesn’t contain any major new features but there are a couple useful tweaks that you’ll enjoy hidden among all the bug fixes, performance improvements and speedier animations.
Here are the five biggest changes Apple made to iOS 7.1 today:
Sprint is planning to buy T-Mobile, according to The Wall Street Journal. The $20+ billion deal would combine the nation’s third and fourth largest carriers. Sprint is reportedly “studying regulatory concerns and could launch a bid in the first half of next year.”
If Sprint and T-Mobile do merge, they would have a combined customer base of nearly 100 million, which is much closer than they are separately to Verizon’s 119 million and AT&T’s 108 million.
AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile two years ago, but the deal was eventually shut down by antitrust concerns from the Justice Department. The same thing could very well happen again this time around, but only time will tell. The last thing the U.S. carrier industry needs is less competition, so maybe going from the “big four” to the “big three” isn’t the best idea.
Today the Chinese site C Technology published a report saying that Apple’s rumored iWatch is coming next October and will have wireless charging. C Technology has gotten stuff wrong about Apple in the past, but it has also leaked parts for future products that ended up panning out.
The point isn’t C Technology’s track record, but what its latest report says about the iWatch: no one has any real clue what Apple is up to.
Stickers by Dharma Comics given out at the first Compassion and Tech Conference.
Marc Brackett wants to put a Mood Meter on every smartphone. That way, in addition to helping us get through our daily lives, iPhones can make us more attuned to why and when we feel cheerful, tired or annoyed.
The director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has been working with a team from HopeLab on an app with a simple interface where users rate their energy and pleasantness using four colors and a five-point scale.
If you’re at all like New Yorker Brackett, you’ll frequently find yourself in the red. And that’s a not necessarily a bad thing.
“I like being angry. It drives me to change education policy,” Brackett said. His presentation substituted a scheduled one about empathy and video games.
Despite the pinch hit, his talk resonated strongly with participants and echoed several of the ideas presented in the projects presented in a later competition.
“I have come to understand that students who are more emotionally confident tend to be strong language learners,” Angela Weikel, Spanish teacher and world languages department chair of San Domenico School in Marin County told Cult of Mac. “So if I can bolster students’ self-esteem through scientific strategies, they are more likely to enjoy learning Spanish and will connect with the culture.” She says she plans to implement Brackett’s ideas to help students’ develop a richer vocabulary and become more aware of their feelings.
Speaking with Brackett afterwards, I wondered whether my own first reaction — which usually involves some gradation of annoyed (irritated, peeved, irated) would move into another realm through diligent tracking. “Not really, but that’s all right. To a certain extent if you can name it, you can tame it. But compassion for all of your states is a better goal.”
Brackett recounted his own struggle with mood states, realizing he doesn’t like to be in the yellow (high energy, high pleasantness) after experimenting with it in a Crossfit class.
“I’m not pumped like the trainer, or the rest of the guys. I’m never going to be like that. I’m a red or blue kind of guy.”
The app (digital mood ring 2.o?) is expected to be available for public consumption by April 2014, if not sooner, in Android and iOS versions. It’ll face competition from dozens of mood tracking apps on the market – ranging from MoodyMe to The National Center for Telehealth & Technology’s T2 Mood Tracker.
While many of the ideas presented during the conference weren’t new — at least if you’ve been to a few meet-ups or tech accelerator showcases in the Bay Area — it comes at a time when the tech boom is seen as an antagonisticforce rather than a one that helps change society change for the better.
When Your iPhone Becomes A Compassion Trainer
You’re going about your business on a regular workday when a text message pops up on your iPhone from an anonymous number: “Stop texting me you jerk!”
How would you answer?
If you participated in a study from the University of Michigan about empathy, there are higher chances you might text something back like “Sorry you’re having a bad day! I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
Sara Konrath, an assistant research professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, says the results of the study that used texting prompts to “train” people in compassion were not conclusive, but the follow-up done six months after the conclusion of the study with the potentially hackle-raising text shows that our phones may help smooth out the rougher edges of our personalities.
“Men in particular less likely to agree that aggression was a good thing,” Konrath said. “It increases pro-social behavior, but not necessarily empathy.”
As part of the texting research, part of the John Templeton Foundation’s Character Project, participants thumbed their way through exercises designed to test for empathy reactions. Six times a day, they reported mood, feelings of connectedness, the number of people interacted with since the last text message and several other factors. Some were prompted to text messages that were empathy boosters (“send a nice text to someone close, try to make them feel loved”) while others were asked to reflect on someone they had trouble getting along with.
Konrath says that while empathy is heritable to an extent, she likens it to a muscle we can all work on strengthening. Conference goers found the results intriguing. “I can imagine structuring peer review around this concept and helping my students approach each other’s work more constructively, with greater focus on how they can become compassionate responders,” said Alyssa J. O’Brien a lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford.
Next up for Konrath? Trying to compare face-to-face empathy with text messages and possibly work on an app. Because we’re all different IRL.
My App Is More Altruistic Than Yours!
During the second half of the one-day conference, apps in the empathy space killed each other with kindness in a friendly competition. (Several of the speakers gave a nod to the other presenters and their ideas, opening the doors for collaboration once the gloves were off.) The 10 finalists each got a chance to tell judges and conference goers, who could vote by text message, why their idea would extend the reach of compassion with tech.
More Mood Tracking: personal mindfulness training with contest finalist Dara.
High school senior Sam Reiss was a shoe-in for first place, with a project that brings pen pals to the generation that grew up with Skype. Dubbed X-Change the World, its goals include “enhancing the cultural and global spectrum of youth throughout the world, improving the level of conversational English of our participants and building cross-cultural bridges that lead to greater global curiosity and compassion.”
The platform pairs students from the U.S. with teens in countries including Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Tanzania and Kenya in a virtual classroom. The project, which already won second place in a national youth service challenge, walked off with the $10,000 prize. Two other projects won $5,000 each plus a consultation with a a growth capital fund exec and a chance to meet the Dalai Lama. They included a taxi game called Compassion in Motion and wellness tracker SeekChange, which includes Siri-like component called Dara to track your moods and activities.
Yes, the beatings and bright lights of GTA: San Andreas have finally been squeezed onto iPad and iPhone screens. But that’s not the only good news this week regarding iOS ports of big-name classics.
Transport Tycoon, an elegant SimCity-like game that focuses on planning, constructing and managing a transportation empire, has just released a free version of its iOS port, which was originally released at the end of October.
The first thing you’ll notice about Star Trek: Trexels (if you’re a massive nerd like me anyway) is that all the little pixel people are wearing Original Series uniforms while the overall game interface is the LCARS system from The Next Generation. A minor complaint, but it is a gripe I feel keeps Trexels from reaching its true potential.
Star Trek: Trexels by YesGnome Category: iOS Games Works With: iPhone, iPad Price: $2.99
You play as a Starfleet admiral tasked with searching for the USS Valiant that disappeared in the currently unexplored Trexel system. The Valiant may have been destroyed but Starfleet doesn’t know for sure. So you hire a crew and send a barely constructed starship out to explore uncharted space. Nothing bad whatsoever could happen!
Some users have reported problems with sending text messages to their friends and family after the upgrade to iOS 7.
Typically, when iMessage is unavailable, your iPhone should send messages as SMS ones instead, denoted by the green chat bubble as opposed to the regular blue.
If, however, your iPhone won’t send texts automatically, here’s a possible fix.
While all of us aren’t destined to get our heads buried deep in lines of programming languages, chances are that most of us, and especially our children, will benefit from knowing the basics of how the most ubiquitous devices in our world operate.
Despite the current backlash against the “coding for all rhetoric,” teaching kids the basics of programming can’t be a bad thing. Heck, teaching ourselves to code may be a fantastic lead in to a rewarding hobby, a new career path, or both.
That’s the idea behind the “Hour Of Code,” a national initiative set to run December 9 – 15, 2013 that’s designed to take kids through the basics of programming in their schools. This new app from Codeacademy is specifically tailored to the process, so even if your kids (or you!) don’t have a school that’s participating in the Hour of Code, they can still get the benefit.
The iPhone 5s introduced us to Touch ID. Photo: Apple
Apple has just seeded the second beta for iOS 7.1 after it released the 7.1 beta 1 nearly a month ago. Registered developers can grab the update by logging into the Developer Center.
Apple TV is also getting a new beta build for developers today as Apple has made the Apple TV Software beta 2 available to devs today, alongside the newly released Xcode 5.1 Developer Preview 2.
We’re still waiting for more info on the new goodies, but we’ll update you on new features once we’ve got them installed.
In the meantime, here are the direct download links:
Cold and flu season is upon us, and you might not know this, but that thing where you just hold your hands under the water for a second before wiping them off on your pants? That’s not doing a darn thing.
If you’d like to know a better way to wash your hands, Hand Wash is here for you. It trains you in the World Health Organization’s Five Moments method, and it even contains a little game that will grade your mastery of washing technique and duration.
Now, stop using your hand as a tissue and go clean up. I want to sneeze just looking at you.
In my review of The Room a few months ago, I said it was the best mobile game I’ve ever played, and I meant it. The Room 2, the iPad-only sequel to the puzzle-box escape title, is out now, and it’s more of the same.
The Room 2 by Fireproof Games Category: iOS Games Works With: iPad Price: $4.99
And I have absolutely no problem with that.
It’s really good. It’s really, really good. If you played the first one, you should play this one immediately. And if you didn’t play the first one, you should play it, and then you should play this one, and then you’ll be all set.
Looking to capitalize on the surge of Bitcoin’s popularity, some mischievous pranksters from 4chan’s random image board are trying to convince Mac users to trash their computers.
The hoax claims that Apple has included Bitcoin mining software on all Macs since 2009, but you just need to enter a simple terminal command to unlock it. Of course, there is no secret Bitcoin mining app hidden in OS X, so what does the terminal command sudo rm -rf/* in the picture actually do? Oh, it just basically reformats your hard drive.
