Cult of Mac

Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?

Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.

And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.

Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.

Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.

That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.

UltimateEars Boom is yet another wireless Bluetooth speaker, a category that has gone from a mere sprinkling of spores on the petri dish of consumer gadgets to a veritable mushroom field of musical materiel. However, as is now necessary in this crowded corner of consumerism, there’s a twist: This speaker will annoy everyone equally, wherever they may be.

The obvious thing to say about the XiStera is to call it the "“Swiss Army Knife” of iPhone 5 accessories. Leaving aside for a second the fact that, if all the Swiss Army is bringing to the fight is that little knife, it’s no wonder it refuses to play in any wars, let’s make a better analogy for the Xistera. It’s like a Glif crossed with a Pulltaps corkscrew.

Music is what started it all for the modern Apple with the iPod back in 2001.

Today, the consumer electronics giant released a new TV ad entitled “Music Every Day.”

Have you ever wanted to introduce two super interesting people from different circles of friends, but never really knew how to go about it? Tinder, a new app that helps you discover new people around you in real time, has just updated with an added feature: Matchmaker.

“Introducing two people, whatever the purpose, can be time consuming and often times socially awkward,” says Sean Rad, CEO of Tinder. “Matchmaker gives you an extremely easy and socially acceptable way to make that introduction, while furthering Tinder’s vision to be the platform people use to meet new people.”

Google is considering a buyout of Waze, the mapping app for iPhone and Android that specializes in crowd-sourced information. Waze’s asking price is around $1 billion, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Other big tech companies have been courting the map startup, most notably Facebook.

“None of the bidders is close to clinching a deal and the talks may fall apart,” says the report. There have been whispers that Apple has also considered an acquisition, but nothing concrete has surfaced yet.

Waze would be a good asset for any of the three aforementioned companies. The service has more than 40 million users that report valuable information like traffic incidents and wrecks. At this point, Apple Maps could probably use the functionality more than Google.

Source: Bloomberg

The makers of Whale Trail, a popular iOS game where you fly a whale through a psychedelic skyline, have a new game out in the App Store. It’s called Blup, a new puzzler that aims to be an “addictive conundrum of coloration.”

iPhone games like Letterpress have started setting the trend of more flat, squared interface aesthetics. It’s something Apple is expected to do in iOS 7. Blup falls right into that category, and it looks pretty interesting.

Earlier today, Microsoft released a new ad that attempts to show how much better the ASUS VivoTab is at getting stuff done than the iPad. A similar TV spot was aired last night with Siri being used to mock things like the iPad’s lack of Powerpoint (a Microsoft product).

Alongside its TV ads, Microsoft has put up a new webpage called “iPad vs. Windows.” At the bottom of the comparison it says that the ASUS ViviTab “has a bigger touchscreen” than the iPad.

False.

Apple is rumored to be working on a budget iPhone targeted at emerging markets. The device will allegedly be made of plastic and look like an iPod touch in the back and an iPhone 5 in the front. Other reports have claimed that Apple is working on multiple color variations beyond the traditional black and white.

Today a new report from Japanese publication Macotakara claims that Apple is currently testing such a device in the supply chain for production later this year. 

Looking for a powerful little Mac app that will help you create sweet videos using your photos and music? Photo Movie Maker Pro can showcase your story to fit any occasion and with a real film feel you can effortlessly make a stylish movie in no time – and Cult of Mac has it for a limited time for just $19.99.

Rhapsody, the online music streaming service a few of your friends used ten years ago, has released a redesigned version of its iPhone app. Like Spotify and Rdio, Rhapsody allows you to create playlists, download tracks for listening offline, and look up artist/album information. It costs $10 per month for access to millions of tracks.

“Beautiful and fully redesigned, the latest incarnation of the Rhapsody experience gets the music playing faster than ever,” according to the company. Rhapsody is calling this the “Ferrari of iPhone apps,” which is a bit of a stretch. Today’s update brings a lot of interface elements that have been in competing apps for a long time. Rhapsody still doesn’t look any better than Rdio, or even Spotify. The iPad version blatantly copies parts of Spotify’s iPad app, actually.

Nice try, Rhapsody.

Source: App Store

Via: The Rhapsody Blog

When reading an iBook on your iPad or iPhone, you typically tap the right side of the page to go forward, and tap the left side of the page to go backward, right? If you want to skip to a different part of the iBook, you can tap on the table of contents button in the upper left and tap to the chapter you want to go to.

How do you quickly navigate more than one page forward or backward, though? With a real book, you just flip through the pages until you find the one you’re looking for. In iBooks, you don’t riffle through pages, but you can navigate quickly and visually to other portions of the book.

Add the Olloclip accessory lens’s price to the cost of this new Olloclip Quick-Flip case and you get to $120. That used to be the price of an entry-level camera from a fairly decent brand, but I’d recommend you buy the Olloclip gear instead. Your iPhone’s camera way, way better than a $100-200 point-and-shoot, and the Olloclip gear makes it much easier to use.

As the most popular game franchise the App Store has ever seen, Rovio doesn’t like to giveaway its prized Angry Bird apps for free, but for the first time ever you can now download Angry Birds Space for free.

Apple named Angry Birds Space as its ‘App of the Week’, which means everyone gets to download it for free for the next 7 days. If you’ve ever wanted to slingshot cute little birds into the vacuum of deep space, then here’s your chance to do so risk free.

Source: App Store

Tim Cook survived his grilling during his appearance before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc. Even though some of the senators still aren’t happy with Apple’s international tax practices, a solution to the problem wasn’t given.

Not one to pass up the opportunity to make fun of senators, John Stewart broke down the Senate hearing on his show last night and jokingly proposed the U.S. create the ‘Tax Code Nano.’ The entire bit is pretty hilarious, you can watch it below:

Apple always kicks WWDC off with a big keynote on Monday morning and this year will be no different. AllThingsD reports that Apple has officially stated that the keynote for WWDC is scheduled for Monday, June 10th.

No word on who the speakers for the keynote will be, but you can expect to see at least Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Who knows, maybe Jony Ive will make an appearance to show off his changes to iOS 7, now that he’s the director of Human Interface. We’ll have to wait and see.

Source: AllThingsD

Starting in May, AT&T is introducing a new “Mobility Administrative Fee” to the bill of all postpaid customers. The new fee will cost AT&T customers an extra $0.61 per line, per month.

While the total cost of the fee is unlikely to break the bank on your next bill, it does mean that you’re going to pay an extra $7.32 per phone line per year on your wireless bill, so if you have multiple lines on your account, you’ll pay much more than an extra 7 bucks a year.

The new fee is crummy deal for customers, but AT&T is super excited to take more of your pennies because with over 70 million postpaid customers the new fee will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue every year.

Microsoft is obviously tired of everyone saying that Apple is the only tablet maker that innovates. Last night Microsoft published its first Windows 8 tablet vs iPad ad that made fun of Siri, but the company’s not stopping there.

Microsoft just posted another anti-iPad ad to its YouTube channel this morning. Rather than belittling Siri though, the new ad takes the iPad to task over its specs by comparing it to the extremely popular ASUS VivoTab RT.

If you drop your iPhone and you don’t have it covered by AppleCare or another insurance plan, it’s almost always cheaper to have it repaired by a third-party than it is to have Apple do it. Unless you have an iPhone 5.

Apple’s tight control over iPhone 5 components means that they’re so hard to get hold of, repair costs remain high — even with third-party services. Some have even been unable to offer iPhone 5 repairs because they cannot obtain the parts.

Shazam has today launched a universal app offering iPad support for the very first time. The release boasts a number of nifty new features, including auto tagging, a dynamic home screen, the ability to flip through recent matches, and more.

Evernote has today rolled out a new Reminders service to its clients on the Mac, iOS, and the web. The new service rolls three of Evernote’s most-requested features into one, delivering in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your note list.

After being pulled from the App Store back in April for violating Apple’s latest guidelines, AppGratis has turned to Android to keep its app recommendation service alive. The company has this week launched a new app in Google Play that promises a free app every day, plus discounts of up to 90% on paid Android titles.

Typically, when you hit Command-N while you’re in the Finder, you’ll get a window for the folder you have set in the Finder’s Preferences dialogue. But what if you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac, to move stuff around in sub-folders when in icon view, for example? If you want to open two copies of the same folder on your Mac at the same time, simply do the following.

Mailbox, the hugely popular third-party Gmail client for iOS that has changed the way we manage our emails, is now available on the iPad. The update comes just over three months after Mailbox made its debut on the iPhone, and you’ll be pleased to know that you no longer have to wait in line to use it.