Cult of Mac

Who sells the most iPhones of them all? It’s not a carrier or a third party: it’s Apple itself. In fact, the Cupertino company sells 25% of all American iPhone sales, combined. Even more staggering, though, is that Apple sells one in ten smartphones, too.

Back in 2010, Apple was seemingly randomly sued by an eccentric 70-year-old crank who claimed to have “come up with the idea” of the smartphone. That lawsuit has now come to trial, and the crank has lost, but what’s confusing is how torn the jury seems to have been by the decision, even going so far as to call the alleged smartphone creator a “little guy” crushed by big business.

It’s Magic 8-Ball time here, as analysts continue to round-out 2013 by making predictions about what we can expect over the next year.

This time it’s analyst Canalys, which is forecasting that tablets will out-ship almost all other PC form factors combined in 2014 — representing around 50 percent of the total client PC market.

Nuance Communications — best known as the software makers of Siri — saw a slump in profits below its forecast 2014 projections, thanks to a shift to a subscription-based business model.

The move, which brings in less money upfront and instead is spread over a longer period, ensures more predictable recurring revenue — but also means a short-term hit in profit margins.

Hong Kong-based Biel Crystal Manufactory Ltd — a company that makes iPhone screens for Apple — is violating workers’ rights at its Chinese factories, according to a rights group.

The Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior alleges that Biel Crystal demands that employees work 11-hour shifts, 7 days per week, with just one day off every month.

Procreate is pretty much my favorite drawing and painting app for the iPad, and v2.0 blows the metaphorical, Cockney-accented doors off the previous version. Yes, it’s now iOS 7-ready, but it’s also now an absurdly powerful images editor, with a whole new interface design to boot.

Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost formed Studio Neat after a successful Kickstarter campaign funded a simplistic iPhone tripod mount that conveniently doubled as a stand. That was back when the iPhone 4 was Apple’s latest. The smartphone landscape has changed quite a bit since then, and now the Glif has too.

Rival tech companies have no problem promoting their products by ridiculing Apple’s, as evidenced by Microsoft’s recent anti-iPhone ads it had to end up pulling off the internet out of embarrassment.

In a new commercial for Nokia’s 2520 tablet running Windows RT, we are privileged to hear the inner dialogue of a man with an indistinguishable accent in a coffee shop wrestle over whether he truly loves his iPad. He finds it impossible to meaningfully connect with members of the opposite sex because of his iPad’s shortcomings, and we are supposed to sympathize with his inner torment. Then he sees the light of day when a girl whips out the Lumia 2520 with a physical keyboard. Microsoft Office! It all makes sense!

The man asks “Did I buy the wrong tablet?” at the end of the ad. No, but if you want a physical keyboard for the iPad, they are pretty easy to come by these days.

Apple’s Industrial Design studio is one of the most secretive corporate locations in the world, where even some of the company’s own high ranking execs can’t get in unless Jony Ive wants them to. So with the ID group barred tighter than a nuclear lockdown, how does one go about getting secrets about the design processes at Apple for a book?

Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang sat down with Leander on her show this afternoon to talk about some of the secrets he discovered about Jony Ive and the design team at Apple for his new book. Not only did The Gov dive into how hard it is to cover Apple, but he also dished on rumors he’s heard about Ive butting heads with top execs who have left Apple – and not just The Felt King, aka Scott Forstall – as well as how Tim Cook has become the ultimate peace keeper at Apple in contrast to Jobs diabolical ways of pitting execs against each other.

You can hear all the secrets in the video below:

Apple has yet to announce a successor to its three-year-old Thunderbolt Display, despite the fact that the company is releasing a new Mac Pro by the end of the year with the ability to power up to three 4K displays at once.

A Redditor did some digging and found that a display supplier overseas with ties to Apple is currently making 4K desktop-sized panels that are designed for Thunderbolt and could very easily be put in future Apple monitors.

Baby Lava is on a rampage. He’ll fly as far as he can and burn whatever lies in his path, but won’t give a thought to how water spells his doom. Once you fire the lava blob out of the starting volcano, you must carefully guide him across tropical islands where he can burn up helpless vacationers and pineapples to keep his fire burning. If you run out of energy, or touch the water between the islands, your fire will go out and Baby Lava turns into a blackened hunk of rock.

Baby Lava Bounce plays a bit like Angry Birds crossed with endless flight games like Whale Trail. Your objective is to gather enough energy to collect various idols which you offer up to the volcano. The only control you have is tapping to crash the lava down against an island. If you land on a flat surface, tapping again will let you hop a short distance. If the lava lands on a slanted surface, he’ll shoot up into the air. This will give you much needed lift, but can also make it much more difficult to maintain your energy level.

Infinity Blade came out nearly three years ago, but even though its been one of the most successful iOS games ever thanks to its impressive graphics and rich gameplay, Chair has only made the game available for free once, but for a limited time the company is giving away the game on the App Store starting today.

Thanksgiving is almost here, which means its time for the sacred American tradition of Black Friday sales madness. Apple hates to hand out big discounts on its premium products, but even Cupertino can’t resist offering a few Black Friday sales, and its already starting to promote this years deal with a new promo page.

Apple has posted a teaser image on its Australian site for its upcoming sale on Friday, November 29th that promises free shipping to anyone who buys something from Apple.com on Friday.

Black Friday started as a major shopping day in the U.S. the day after Thanksgiving, but more international retailers have started to embrace the sales day as well. We’re still waiting to see what kind of modest deals Apple will offer, but if last year is any indication, don’t expect to be blown away. Here are the price cuts Apple had last year:

Version control with Git has become an essential tool for every developer & designer. Top projects like jQuery, Ruby on Rails, and the Linux Kernel have been using Git for years, so it’s time you unlocked its full potential. And Cult of Mac Deals is here to help with our latest promotion.

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In 1983, Electronic Arts released M.U.L.E., a seminal title in the history of gaming that not only was one of the first real-time strategy titles, but also one of the first multiplayer games. It’s a game that has been widely hailed for decades by gaming enthusiasts, but has never seen an official update… until now, as M.U.L.E. Returns has hit the iOS App Store.

While Android hardware manufacturers were busy trying to pack as many cores as they could into their smartphone and tablet processors, Apple took a different route and decided to go 64-bit instead. It’s a move that makes the iPhone 5s and the latest iPads some of the fastest mobile devices on the market, and so it’s no surprise that its rivals are getting ready to follow suit.

Intel has promised that you’ll be able to buy Android-powered tablets with 64-bit “Bay Trail” processors next year.

When it comes to screens, 3-D=lame: our own brains are more than capable of turning 2-D cues into full 3-D scenes without any weird glasses or other trickery. But 3-D scans are totally useful for all kinds of fun and frolics, as well as real, serious applications. And now you can turn your iPad into a 3-D scanner with the Structure Sensor.

Following up on the successful release of Final Fantasy IV on iOS back in 2012, publisher Square-Enix is following it up with a sequel, which follows up on the characters and events of that game twenty years later. It’s called Final Fantasy IV: The After Years and it’s available now on the App Store.

Instagram does photos on mobile better than anyone else. They also recently added video to that mix, but it doesn’t look like Instagram is going to stop there: rumor has it they are getting into messaging next as well.

When you look at iOS, you’re looking at a user interface more than an operating system. Beneath the animations, transparencies and rounded-corner icons is the core of the operating system… basically, a bunch of ASCII text, similar to a Terminal window, that is what iOS looks like before it puts its face on.

In a rather interesting twitch, Winocm — one of the hackers behind the iH8Snow iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 jailbreak — has managed to get iOS’s core running on a Nokia n900 smartphone.

VSCO, the iPhoneography app which retro-fies your pictures and turns all blacks into shades of dark gray, has taken what looks like the final step to become a social network: The VSCO Grid, a place for you to group and display your best work in – yes – a grid, is now followable. As in Twitter or Instagram-like followable.

Remember Mac font managing apps? I do: I hated them. Extensis Suitcase caused more problems with my old G5 PowerMac than anything else, ever, and I was fairly conservative in my font use back when I worked as a designer.

Thankfully, Macs these days don’t need the user to manually switch fonts on and off: our computers are powerful enough to handle it. Which is why Bohemian Coding ditched its old Fontcase app and replaced it with the shiny new Fonts, an app that is dedicated to just organizing and looking at your fonts.

When the topic of Apple expanding into wearable computing comes up, few people are likely thinking that a logical starting point is a new hearing aid.

But according to numerous reports, that is exactly the direction Apple is heading in. The Danish-based, fourth-largest hearing aid manufacturer in the world has been collaborating with Apple to develop a device, called the LiNX, that will allow users to stream voice and music from their iOS devices without the need for an intermediary device.

Marvin is an ebook reading app for the iPad that gathers together all your EPUB ebooks in one place. The idea is that you can keep your book files in your Dropbox and access them from anywhere.

It’s EPUB-only, which means it won’t work with your Kindle titles, but that’s no problem, because Marvin also has tight integration with the Calibre e-book app for desktop computers, and as all avid Cult of Mac readers know, it’s pretty easy to use Calibre to rip the DRM from your Kindle books and save them to your Dropbox as EPUBs.

HTC has today announced a new HTC One variant that gives Android fans with a penchant for gold a nice alternative to the iPhone 5s. The new device is identical to the original on the inside, but its aluminum panels have had a new lick of champaign-colored paint.