Cult of Mac

Today Apple acknowledged that a small number of its newest 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros have an issue that is resulting in the laptop’s trackpad and/or keyboard becoming unresponsive. Any machines that could be potentially affected by the glitch would have had to been purchased since Apple announced the new 13-inch model at its Oct 22nd iPad event.

“Apple is aware of rare circumstances where the built-in keyboard and Multi-Touch trackpad may become unresponsive on 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (Late 2013) computers and is working on an update to resolve this behavior,” said the company. An Apple support forum thread with over 48,000 views is full of users who have been experiencing trackpad and keyboard glitches.

Until the update is available, Apple suggests closing the MacBook’s display for one minute to let it reset.

Source: Apple

Via: CNET

Auctions for rare Apple equipment have attracted a lot of attention the past few years, with prices for the Apple 1 going as high as an astounding $671,000! Another Apple 1 is going up for auction in Germany next month on November 16, but in addition a very different rare Apple item will be on the same auction block. One of only two known working Twiggy Macs in the world is going up for sale.

Twiggy Macs were prototype versions of the original Macintosh and used a proprietary 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, instead of the 3.5-inch disk which ultimately shipped with the system in 1984. All Twiggy prototypes were ordered destroyed by Steve Jobs – and long thought lost – but the last couple of years have seen an eventful rediscovery of this piece of Macintosh history. Now one can be yours – if the price is right.

When you searched for apps in the App Store in iOS 6, you got a bunch of cards that you could swipe through to find the specific app you were looking for. To get back to the beginning, you’d need to swipe back as many of the apps as you’d swiped through, and that could take some time.

There’s a new little trick in iOS 7 that makes it a lot easier to pop back to the beginning of the cards.

I’m a huge fan of minimalist bags to carry about my tech items. Why drag around a massive messenger bag to just hold my Macbook Air, an iPad mini, and some power cables? Sometimes though, you need to carry more than just the basics, like a full size iPad, extra batteries, keys, wallets, books, and the like.

The Staad Slim Backpack, then, is a nice mix between these two extremes: it carries the essentials in a compact design, but has a bit more space than you’d think, letting me add in some extras, like a portable power-brick and a pair of glasses in a case.

Tellingly, this backpack is a well-designed thing of beauty, with nary a stitch or seam out of place. The zippers are solid and immeasurably useful, and the placement of pockets is ingenious. The clasp is simple yet secure, and the colors–from the chocolate leather of the front flap to the light brown of the waxed canvas to the inner lining’s patterned orange–just scream style and substance. This is a backpack I can use for a long, long time.

Maps© — Social Networking — Free

If you want to use Google’s Street View function without having to go into Apple’s occasionally dodgy Maps, you might want to check out Maps©. In addition to letting you look at people’s lawns like you’re there, you can also drop pins between two points to calculate distance (this gets less accurate the farther apart your points are), check traffic, and get directions. And if you want to see where your friends live (which is creepy, but I’m sure you might have innocent reasons), you can import their addresses from your contacts and drop pins there.

It does a bit of everything, really.

Maps©

Parent thieves are the worst. They’re even more despicable when they kidnap your parents and fill the scary, nebulous cave system behind your house full of monsters!

This is Callys’ reality in Callys Caves. The evil Dr. Herbert has whisked Callys’ family away and its up to her to buy enough shotgun upgrades to slay her way to victory.

We’ve already heard that the new iPad mini may be in short supply at launch due to low yield rates of its Retina display, and that has now been confirmed by supply chain sources in Taiwan. Sharp and LG Display simply cannot produce the panels fast enough, according to reports, and so Apple may not have enough units to meet the initial demand later this month.

You might wonder how you would live without your smartphone, but one gas station clerk in Florida could literally be dead without his. His HTC EVO 3D stopped a bullet that was fired at his abdomen during an early morning robbery, ensuring the injuries he sustained were only minor.

The Hunting is an interactive zombie film made for — and with — the iPhone. It presents a world in which the undead rise because of a spontaneous global failure of antibiotics. But that’s not really important; the main thing is that zombies are in the room.

The first part of the story runs about 12 minutes, and it sets the scene pretty well. Your character (you) wake up, put your pants on, and discover that a bunch of things are on fire in the distance, and some ugly sucker in your kitchen wants to kill you. You do a bit of swiping and tapping, make a couple choices, and then you’re done.

It’s very short, but what’s there is promising.

CNNMoney has hit out at Apple by saying that it should momentarily forget about its position as an acclaimed product manufacturer and instead “focus on its mediocre software.”

While acknowledging that Apple builds some of the most coveted laptops, tablets, and smartphones around, writer Adrian Covert nevertheless singled out the company’s suite of software applications as the “one dark cloud” which looms over Apple. Although apps like iPhoto, Pages, iCal and Mail are functional enough, Covert claims, better alternatives exist, while iTunes and defunct social network Ping are varying degrees of broken.

Owners of Dell’s Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks are experiencing something foul when they take the notebook out of its box for the first time, and it isn’t just its cheap plastic shell and disappointing hardware. It’s the “smell of cat urine” emanating from the keyboard.

A Google Glass user in California may have become the first to get a ticket for using the wearable while driving. Cecilia Adabie was stopped by a Highway Patrol officer last night then summoned to the superior court for “driving with monitor visible to driver.”

The ticket has sparked debate over whether or not it should be legal to use Google Glass while behind the wheel.

I started using Fantastical on my iPhone the day it was released back in November of last year. Like other users of the fantastic (bad pun intended) Mac app, I couldn’t wait to have its natural language parsing on my iPhone. With Fantastical, you can just type “get lunch with Buster at 3 tomorrow” and be done. Far better than the poorly-designed rigamarole that is Apple’s Calendar app.

Today Flexibits, makers of Fantastical, released the biggest update to their iPhone calendar app since its original release. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is a completely new app that works only on iOS 7 and features a new design, new features, and yes, a price.

https://youtu.be/HsQqY0O8Qcc

Majesco Entertainment contacted us Wednesday with its launch trailer for upcoming game, Romans from Mars, an endless-wave castle defense game that will be out on the App Store this Thursday.

The game places you behind an upgradable ballista, which is the only thing keeping the armies of Mars (the god of War, thank you very much) from conquering the Earth itself. Jupiter, who likes to get back at Mars, gives you a little extra power, as well, including the elemental powers of Fire, Ice, Earth, and Lightning. You know, just in case that crossbow isn’t quite upgraded enough.

Romans from Mars will be free to play, with in-app purchases to speed up your progress. It is available in the App Store (as well as Google Play) starting tomorrow. For now, enjoy the trailer above.

We’ve been able to change the name of our Mac documents from the title bar since OS X Mountain Lion, and it’s made for an interesting new workflow.

In fact, there was a nice little drop down menu that would let you duplicate, move, and rename the document resulting from clicking on the triangle to the right of the document name in the title bar.

Now, though, in Mavericks, that’s changed.

So you have your iPad and your apps, and you even arranged a bowl of fruit/nude model (delete as applicable). But what about hardware? After all, only stupid babies fingerpaint, right?

If you’re doing a lot of iPad painting, you should pick some kind or drawing tool. But what kind? Styluses can be had as dumb pencils, as brushes or even in Bluetooth pressure-sensitive versions.

And then there are the other accessories that’ll make painting a little easier.

Wacom ICS

Wacom makes the best graphics tablets for Mac and PC and now it wants to do the same for the iPad. The Bamboo stylus is already my favorite iPad stylus, but the ICS, or Intuos Creative Stylus goes one better with pressure sensitivity.

The iPad’s screen is binary in terms of touches: It might detect multiple fingers, but they’re either touching or not. So the pen itself has to measure how hard you’re pressing and send that info to the iPad. In the case of the ICS, this is done via a low-power Bluetooth 4 connection, with the pen communicating 2048 levels of pressure. This wireless connection also means you can use the button on the side to control various functions: undo/redo for example, or to pop up a color picker.

The ICS uses a single AAA battery, has a replaceable nib, and comes in a natty box which carries extra batteries and nibs.

This, as they say, is the Rolls Royce of styluses.

Wacom
Price $100

Jot Tote Case

You have your pens and pencil, but what about somewhere to keep them? A pencil case is traditional, and the Wacom comes with one. But Adonit’s Jot Tote case is made to hold your iPad and also let you clip on a stylus. And while it’s designed for Adonit’s own Jot, you can use it with pretty much any pen-shaped object.

The case is a rear shell with a grippy finish, and on the back is a steel strip which slides out of the side and grabs onto the pen, holding it both safe and handy until you need it. This might not be strictly necessary, but for serial pen-losers it’ll be sure to save you some cash.

Adonit
Price: $50

Nomad Brushes

While a pen is nice and all, nothing quite beats the feel of a good hogs-hair brush when you’re smearing on the oils. When I first saw a Nomad capacitive brush years ago, I thought it was just a gimmick. Then I tried one, and I loved it. You can’t really scrub and stipple the paint of course – the iPad sees the brush as just another pink digit – but that doesn’t mean that the action of stippling, scrubbing or stabbing isn’t more pleasing to the brain. It really does feel like you’re painting on canvas. Well, not canvas, as canvas has a stretch and give that the glass screen lacks, but it is like painting on wood or card.

Now nomad has a range of brushes, but my advice would be to go for a set of whole brushes. The kits with the single handle and screw-on tip look good in theory, but these things take up so little space it’s nicer to have the convenience of quickly grabbing the brush you want without dicking around changing the tips.

Nomad
Price: From $20

Your iPhone

One thing that was essential to me when I painted in oils was a palette. I went the traditional route with a thin plywood board in the familiar shape, which is easy to hold in one hand, but I know people who just mixed their paint on tabletops or any nearby flat surface (including one of my own paintings).

Remote Palette is an app which lets you use your iPhone as a palette to mix paints. You can swoosh your colors around until you have the exact hue you need and the color will be automatically loaded into your brush in the iPad app. It works via Bluetooth so you can use it anywhere.

The only downside is that you have to paint using the Remote Palette app on the iPad, which is pretty limited. It’s not MS Paint, but neither does it come anywhere close to something like Procreate. Still, it’s cheap and fun.

Remote Palette
Price: $1

NeoLucida

The NeoLucida isn’t really an iPad accessory, but it can certainly be used as one. It’s a modern version of the camera lucida, an optical device used by artists throughout history (well, since the mid–1800s anyway) to make their drawings more accurate.

The principle is simple: the unit has a prism on the end of a flexible arm, and this lets you see both your paper and your subject at the same time. This allows you to “trace” the image from real life as if it were projected onto your paper.

And of course when I say “paper” I also mean “iPad.”

The NeoLucida was made by university art professors Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin because antique versions are too expensive for working artists and students to afford. Their Kickstarter was super successful, raising almost half a million on a target of just $15,000, and they’ll be back in 2014 with a retail version. Until then you might want to speak to your bank manager before hitting Ebay.

NeoLucida
Price: Around $40

The Nike Fuelband SE was announced earlier this month, with some impressive new features. But existing Fuelband owners won’t be left totally out of the lurch; when Nike drops the Fuelband SE on consumers next week, they’ll also roll-out some of the new features to users of older models.

‘Tis the season for class-action lawsuits, and a new one is being brought against Apple, alleging that the Cupertino-based company knew about problems effecting the 27-inch iMac, yet did nothing to stop them.

As the fifth generation full-sized iPad, users likely know what to expect from the newly-released iPad Air. And while the device doesn’t try and reinvent the wheel by radically altering the iPad’s genetics in either abilities or form factor, the mere fact that Apple has proven able to further hone what was already a winning concept — by decreasing the size and weight, upping the speed and power, all while maintaining battery life — is reason enough to mark down the iPad Air as an assured winner in the tablet category. This verdict is more than backed up by the reviews which have begun flooding in over the past 24 hours, with reviewers now having had around a week to test Apple’s newest tablet.

In the Apple world, records tend to be exponentially shattered. For example, if it took three hours for WWDC to sell out last year, it’ll probably sell out in three minutes this year. Last year, it took five weeks for OS X Mountain Lion to be installed on more than 10% of all Macs. Guess how long it took this year?

Intel has been rumored for years to start building ARM chips. Now they actually are doing so, and will begin fabrication of 64-bit ARM processors in 2014, but not for Apple.

The fourth-generation iPad with its dual-core A6X processor was certainly no slouch, but it looks like one when you put it up against the new iPad Air. Thanks to that new 64-bit A7 chip, the iPad Air is an incredible 80% faster than its predecessor in Geekbench tests, and over five times than the iPad 2 (which is only $100 cheaper).

If you switched from an iPhone to an Android-powered smartphone because you felt a 4-inch display was just too small, then Apple may give you a reason to switch back next year. Several industry experts are predicting that the Cupertino company will step up its pursuit of high-end Android smartphones by finally introducing a larger 5-inch display with the iPhone 6.

We reported it back in July and now there is confirmation: Steve Jobs-actor Ashton Kutcher has joined Lenovo to help launch its new Yoga tablet.

“This is not just another ‘me too’ tablet.” Kutcher said at a launch event for the Android device Tuesday night.

Somehow, Adonit and Evernote have together managed to solve the biggest problem in iPad styluses: the size of the tip. Instead of a big fat pinkie-sized blob of rubber, the new Jot Script has a point that’s more or less the size of a regular rollerball ball.

And best of all, the latest version of Penultimate, Evernote’s note-taking app – has been developed in tandem with the pen to work like, well, to work like an Apple product.