Cult of Mac

When I moved to the States 20 years ago from the UK, I had two suitcases. One contained my clothes and other worldly possessions. The other case was filled with my crappy old Macintosh.

The Mac was obsolete even then, but leaving it behind was unthinkable. I held on to it for decades, hauling it across the country and multiple house moves. I’d still have it now, if I hadn’t cooked it showing my kids the joys of OS 6. Moronically, I blocked the top vents with a box and the explosive pop of overheated circuits nearly gave me a heart attack.

The busted Mac was just one of a garage-full of creaky old Apple technology I chucked out recently in a major de-cluttering (mandated, btw, by the wife). The list is too heartbreaking to mention in full, but included dozens of desktops and laptops, as well as boxfuls of obsolete iPods, mice, keyboards, modems, printers, monitors and cables.

Other things that I threw out and probably shouldn’t have? I also disposed of boxes of Apple press passes and press kits, including one for the special-edition U2 iPod that included a nifty poster. I kept one “Think Different” poster (featuring Gandhi) but recycled a bunch of others.

Why did I hoard all this stuff? Mostly laziness. eWaste is a headache. It’s easier to just hold onto it. But part of it was because a lot of this stuff still worked! I might have gotten a new, bigger monitor, but there was nothing wrong with the old one. Sure, it’s VGA resolution, but it still functions!

And then, I always felt there would be a time when I needed that FireWire extension cord, or a serial-to-USB adapter. Right? I’d kick myself if I had one once but threw it out when I needed it. But mostly it was sentimentality. Each item had a specific memory, triggered by softly stroking its chunky beige keys.

EndlessTV – Seasons — Lifestyle — Free

Now that we’ve gotten that pesky “Halloween” thing out of the way with all its gross movies and candy and fun, we can get down to the serious business of planning “The Holidays.” And if you’re getting ready to celebrate American Thanksgiving and need appropriate programming on your phone or iPad right now, EndlessTV’s “Seasons” app might be what you need. It features quick-loading, topical shows (mostly about food) that you can swipe through at your leisure.

I learned how to make a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin, and I don’t even know what I’m going to do with that knowledge.

EndlessTV – Seasons

Apple is still facing supply constraints on the 3G/4G units of the iPad mini with Retina display, but it looks like customers can finally walk into an Apple Store and purchase a Retina iPad mini without ordering online first.

I only really have a Facebook account for work purposes, and I usually only go there when I want to feel bad about myself. So I typically have no idea what’s going on there.

Apparently, Alpha Zen, a quotation-focused new game by developer Large Animal Games, wants me to know what’s going on with my friends, so it includes a mode that makes their statuses into game pieces.

It’s a little weird, but let me explain how the game works.

Apple has today begun selling the iPhone 5s unlocked and SIM-free to customers in the United States. Customers can stick in any GSM SIM card (so that’s one from AT&T or T-Mobile) when they receive the device and begin using it immediately with their existing plan — but they’ll have to wait 1-2 weeks for it to ship.

eBay’s Black Friday sale is set to start a day early this year, on Thursday, November 28 — and it includes a whole bunch of tablets, smartphones, consoles, and cameras. So whether you’re into Android or iOS, there’s a great deal to be had, such as an original iPad mini for $239, a Nexus 7 for $199, and the new iPad Air for $469.99.

If you store your user name and password details via the Keychain in OS X, you know that Keychain makes it a lot easier to do so. You can store login details for all those websites you visit, including banking info, social network details, and the like, right in the Keychain.

At some point, though, you might forget the actual passwords. It’s like how we used to know all our close friends’ phone numbers by heart, but with the advent of the smartphone, I doubt many of us even know too many of our buddies’ actual digits.

If you want to remember the passwords that are stored in Keychain, though, you’re in luck.

Chances are you’ve already picked your preferred music streaming service by now, but you’ll have another to consider next year when French startup Deezer make its debut in the United States.

The company has avoided the U.S. up until now, citing too much competition, with Spotify, Rdio, Google Play Music All Access, and many others already offering subscription-based music streaming services there. But having already amassed over 5 million paying customers in 185 countries worldwide, it’s ready to do battle with the big guns.

You probably don’t remember Clumsy Ninja, a totally unknown game that Apple chose to debut alongside the iPhone 5. The game was supposed to be out in 2012, but was delayed for mysterious reasons for a full year, without a word of explanation.

But Clumsy Ninja is finally here. And it debuts a new App Store feature along with it.

Apple has the exclusive license to liquidmetal, prompting all sorts of speculation that we would sooner or later see liquid metal iPhones, iPads and Macs. Despite this, so far, we’ve only seen Apple release one “product” using liquidmetal: the iPhone SIM ejector tool.

But Apple’s liquidmetal plans might be gearing up. The company has just filed five new patents, explaining the process by which it would use liquidmetal to build next-gen smartphones, tablets and digital displays.

I love my Apple TV. I hate the Apple TV remote. Oh, sure, it looks slick, but it might as well be a contact lens for all of the instantaneous ease with which it is lost.

I’ve taken to just velcro-ing my Apple TV remote to the back of my bigger, bulkier TV remote, but if you’d like a slightly less duct-tape solution, why not consider these fluorescent skins for the Apple TV remote that glow-in-the-dark?

Like most glowing items, these charge by absorbing ambient light and releasing it later. They come in multiple colors, and just peel on and off.

You have to admit, this would help you more easily spot your Apple TV remote. If you want one, you can get it now for just $9.95.

Source: Slickwraps

The third-generation iPad mini and second-generation iPad Air will have Touch ID, there’s no doubt. Just like Siri — a feature that debuted in an ‘S’ year for the iPhone — took a year to creep to the iPad, TouchID will have a year’s exclusivity before it comes to Apple’s line-up of tablets.

Don’t hold your breath, though. We’re almost a year away from Touch ID coming to the iPad mini. So you should take this picture of a ‘leaked’ iPad mini 3 with Touch ID with super pessimism.

Fed up of hearing about iPad Christmases already, and want to be reminded of what winter is actually all about?

Head over to the App Store then and download the free Sickweather iOS app, which will provide you with real-time, geo-tagged alerts whenever you are about to enter a location in which a person has recently reported feeling ill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Le9wvoY00

It’s sometimes easy to forget just what a paradigm shift the tablet computer — and specifically the iPad — represents. Well, Phil Schiller just reminded us by tweeting a link to Apple’s latest “Life on iPad” campaign.

We finally have a verdict in the high-profile Apple-Samsung patent infringement lawsuit, and it involves Samsung paying Apple $290 million for copying key features of both the iPhone and iPad for its own line of smartphones and tablets.

The jury’s verdict covers 13 of the 26 Samsung devices.

Boxer is another of the new breed of apps that let you swipe your way through e-mail and get to the Zen state known only as “inbox zero.” Mailbox was arguably the first of these apps – which also let you turn your e-mails into to-dos – but it’s Gmail only and the iPad version sucks. Boxer, née Taskbox (which supports pretty much every e-mail service including vanilla IMAP), has just gotten bumped to v4.0, adding in iPad support and a slew of other welcome extras. It’s also $1 instead of $5 for a while, in way of celebration.

Wren’s V5AP is still one of my favorite AirPlay speakers, but recently I’ve been kinda off the whole AirPlay thing thanks to an the crazy East German walls of my apartment building. These walls are too crumbly to let me drill a proper hole for even a coat hook, but somehow thick and dense enough to confuse even a strong dual-band Wi-Fi signal. To recap: AirPlay speakers just won’t stay connected.

Thankfully, Wren now offers a Bluetooth version of the big, booming V5, called the V5BT, and it promises to be pretty good.

Changing a sentence to ALL CAPS on my Mac is dead easy: I just select the words, right click and choose Transformations from the contextual menu. If I want to do anything fancier, like weird Markdown footnotes, or adding bullet points to the start of every line, I can just write an Automator workflow and save it as a System Service.

But on iOS? In the immortal words of Run DMC, “it’s tricky”. Or was tricky: now we can use the $5 TextTool to do it for us.

Smile software’s TextExpander Touch has used hacks to get around the lack of inter-app communication on iOS, but now Apple has stepped in to end the parade. Smile has been told to stop using the Reminders database to store your snippets and figure out some other way to share your data with other apps.

Apple won’t approve any updates until this is done, and third-party apps using the TextExpander SDK may also suffer the same fate.

Apple has erected a new webpage that highlights different ways the iPad is used in various professions, from wind turbine technicians to Broadway dancers. Originally tweeted by Apple Interactive Art Director Davy Rudolph, the new “Life on iPad” webpage also includes a video of the same name that Apple originally showed at its iPad Air/mini event last month.

There are 6 stories Apple has chosen to tell about how the iPad is helping wind turbine technicians, a professional speedskater, a vineyard worker, an off-road racer, a Broadway choreographer, and a surgeon. Each story is succinct and obviously full of praise for the iPad. As the holidays approach, marketing tactics like this set Apple apart from the competition.

Source: Apple

Via: Davy Rudolph

Following last week’s first beta of OS X 10.9.1, Apple has seeded a new version of the beta – Build 13B35 – to developers this afternoon.

The new build of OS X 10.9.1 packs a couple of bug fixes for Gmail integration in the OS X Mail app. There are also some fixes for an emoji bug and improvements to Safari’s sharing capabilities. Developers can grab the new beta from the Mac Dev Center.

Apple also released second beta builds of Safari 6.1.1 and Safari 7.0.1 along with some firmware updates for the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule base stations.

Source: Apple

Dropbox’s iOS 7 redesign landed today in the App Store, and it brings not only a new look to the app, but AirDrop support and a “streamlined” iPad interface. The colored top and bottom bars have been distilled to better fit the iOS aesthetic, and the white and blue colors in the app’s icon have been inverted.

Joining Belkin’s armada of WeMo home-automation devices today is the WeMo Insight Switch. Like the plain-vanilla WeMo Switch, the Insight Switch will let you power on or off whatever is connected to its outlet via the WeMo iOS or Android app. Unlike the regular Switch, the Insight lets you also see exactly how much money you’er spending on juice, and adds more control flexibility.

Meteor is a $1 app with a brilliant, simple solution to a common problem no one seems to have addressed until now — and it’ll almost certainly unclutter your phone.

Meet the HuMn Mini, the mini version of the most successful minimal wallet on Kickstarter to date. This is the ultimate minimalist wallet – and it is built to last a lifetime.

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