Cult of Mac

Having finally fulfilled its Kickstarter premium rewards with backer MiDocks units, manufacturer Mi has begun selling black and a silver brushed aluminum MiDock on its own web store.

This unibody iPhone dock is lightweight, solid, and has a fairly impressive look about it, as if Apple or Twelve South could have designed it. It’s a wonderful first effort from the company, and backers and early adopters alike will find much to like about the MiDocks they bring into their homes.

Apple is no stranger to lawsuits and with all the cash its been making the past few years, the lawsuits from patent trolls have been piling up. According to a new study on lawsuits from non practicing entities (patent trolls), Apple got slammed with more patent lawsuits (171 total) in the last five years than any other company.

I can remember saving up my allowance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, itching to get just one more Star Wars action figure from the local department store. When I’d get there, money clenched in my sweaty little hand, I would bliss out at the sheer variety and number of action figures on display.

Which to choose? That robot bounty hunter looked super cool, but it certainly wasn’t Boba Fett, who took my money that day. My younger brother opted for Bossk, because apparently we’re a family who loves bounty hunters.

Today, however, you won’t have to choose. There are nine new videos detailing nine characters from the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II game, set to release on iOS on September 19th.

Philips Hue lights have quickly become one of favorite new iOS accessories thanks to a bunch of neat hacks and apps that have take advantage of the connected lights. Until now, Hue has mainly been controlled via an iOS app, but Hue Menu for OS X makes it so you can finally control Hue from your Mac.

Hue Menu is a new menu bar app that not only allows users to turn their Hue bulbs on/off, but you can also change the colors, create presets, pick custom colors using your own photos or the Mac OS color Picker and more. At $2.99, the app is an easy buy for Hue owners, plus the developer behind it says upcoming features will include alarms, timers, and geo-fencing.

Here are the full release notes:

The fifth-generation iPad’s new front panel, which sports thinner bezels down the sides of its display, has appeared yet again in a new high quality gallery. The panel already has its digitizer and flex cables fitted, and it appears to be a genuine Apple component straight off the production line.

I’m a podcaster.

And I’m not just a podcaster that sits at home and records on my MacBook Air with my Blue Spark Digital microphone. I’m a podcaster that likes to record on the go. That means I need to have something that allows me to record top-notch sound in a portable package.

So when I team up my iPhone with the iRig iMic, I’m able to do what I do…and do it well.

Imo Messenger, the messaging service that now boasts over 10 million users worldwide, has today received a nice new update on Android and iOS. In addition to free video calling on both platforms, the new release adds the ability to share broadcasts to your favorite social networks on iOS, and makes the app a universal release with support for both iPhone and iPad.

Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.

Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.

The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.

An Apple iPhone event for September 10 has been all but confirmed in recent weeks, and we’re almost certain that we’ll see the unveiling of both the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C. But what about new iPads? There have been rumors that claim they won’t arrive until October, but according to a new Bloomberg report, they’ll be part of the September 10 event as well.

Network locations are extremely useful if you use your Mac across a variety of networking environments, like a Proxy-laden school building, a super secured enterprise site, or a special set up at home. Each environment could take a ton of extra time setting up the details if you only had one networking setup system.

Luckily, Mac has always had this idea of Locations, a way of setting and saving all the little networking details for each location you use your Mac in. Did you know, however, that you can switch between network locations in the Apple menu? I didn’t, so I figured I’d share what I found out.

The virtualization maestros over at Parallels have long offered Mac owners a slick, easy way to run Windows apps on their Macs, but now they’re extending their mission in the other direction with a new app that lets you run Mac & PC apps… on your iPad.

If you purchased an iPhone 5 last year, you might remember how easily the black iPhone scratched and chipped. Christened ‘Scuffgate’ by upset owners, the black iPhone 5’s propensity for scratching even prompted Phil Schiller to comment upon the issue, saying such scratches were “normal.”

Well, no, they’re not, Phil. The white iPhone 5, for example, isn’t nearly as scratch prone as the black iPhone 5. Be that as it may, at this point, the iPhone 5’s scratchability can be taken as read. But what about the gold iPhone 5S? Will it be as scratchable as its black brother, or as pristine and unscuffable as the white model?

Nitro is a very promising new todo list app for the Mac (plus a bunch of hippie platforms). It keeps your notes in a plain text file on Dropbox, and is available free from the Mac App Store.

One of the best hacks to come to the Apple TV in the last year is PlexConnect, an amazing little program that hijacked the Trailers channel on your Apple TV and connected it to the Plex home media library running on your Mac. What the hack meant was that you could stream your Mac’s entire video or media library to your Apple TV just by navigating with the remote… no AirPlay required.

It was wonderful, but Apple doesn’t like hacks. That’s why PlexConnect is now dead. (Update: It’s back!)

Apple has purchased AlgoTrim, a Swedish firm specializing in image and video compression techniques, for an unspecified price. It could pave the way to better iOS device battery life, and much improved photo and video quality across Apple line-up of devices.

What would a weekday be without an as-yet-unavailable Kickstarter project? It would be a day without hope, without longing for the future, and without… effortless style for the untamed spirit.

Yes, “Effortless Style for the Untamed Spirit” is indeed the slogan being used to pitch an organizer for your MacBook charger. Seriously.

Pixen is one of my favorite Mac apps. If any of you follow me on Twitter or similar, you will have seen my Scary Baby avatar. That was built by me, one pixel at a time, in Pixen, probably running on an old white iBook.

Pixen is — as you may have guessed — a pixel editor for the Mac, and now it’s available in the Mac App Store.

No messing around with iLuv’s new camera case for the iPhone 5. It’s called the Camera Case, and it turns your iPhone into a little Leica-alike.

“The Executive.” The very name brings to mind leather cellphone accessories, oversized black onyx desks and “business class” seats on a 737, which consist of a curtain between you and the oiks, an inch of extra legroom and a terrible, plastic-wrapped breakfast to shove into your gullet during the 25 minutes of non-restricted flight time.

And “The Executive” is also the name of a Bluetooth keyboard designed — presumably — for using in those cramped “business class” seats.

You may be familiar with Pocket. It’s the shiny, fast, easy-to-use counterpart to Instapaper’s current lameware offering. And you may be familiar with Kobo, maker of e-readers and tablets.

Now, Pocket and Kobo work together, putting all your read-later articles onto your e-ink reader or tablet without a middleman.

Twelve South, the maker of the BookBook and other fine case and accessories, has debuted a versatile MacBook stand called the GhostStand. The transparent apparatus suspends any MacBook model, and the name implies that you’re not supposed to even know it’s there.

Like bicycle streamers or rum, adding a wifi hotspot to pretty much anything will make it exponentially better. The tiny new Hyper iUSBPort Mini is a great example of this: It’s a $90 USB drive with a built-in WiFi hotspot that can be used to share files or stream movies or songs to an iOS or Android device.

One tip for the device’s marketing team though: Please come up with a better name.

Parallels is known for allowing Windows apps to run alongside OS X without the need for a restart. It’s the only emulator of its kind that’s sold in the Apple Store, and now Parallels is venturing into another store of Apple’s, the iOS App Store.

Parallels Access is a new iPad app that lets you control your Mac or Windows PC from anywhere. What sets it apart is that Access “applifies” desktop programs to make them look and behave like native apps on the iPad.

The dizzying pace of iblazr‘s evolution has been difficult to keep up with over the last month.

It started out as an iDevice flash with four Cree-made LEDs that plugs into the 3.5mm jack. Then it gained a diffuser, and a short while later its designers added a reflective backing and redesigned the lens over the LEDs.

Now, the little flash has a cold-shoe adapter that’ll allow it to be mounted onto a DSLR.

You can thank Bluetooth technology for making cycling safer. “How’s that,” you ask, as you wolf down a Lemon Sublime Gu? The answer lies with the growing number of Bluetooth speakers designed to be mounted a bicycle; listening to music from a speaker obviates the dangerous (and often illegal) temptation to wear earphones on the bike.

The latest is Outdoor Tech’s Buckshot, a tiny, ruggedized (to IPX-5) shotgun shell-shaped speaker with a rubber mount for attaching it to a handlebar; it even doubles as a speakerphone. What separates the Buckshot from most other bike-friendly Bluetooth speakers is its diminutive size, and its price — the Buckshot is just $50.

Source: Outdoor Tech