Cult of Mac

Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.

There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.

In OS Lion, Apple introduced two new features, called Autosave and Resume which mirrors this functionality. Turning off SafeSleep, then, is really just disabling a duplicate feature. It shouldn’t affect Autosave or Resume if you’re running OS Lion or later, and it could potentially save you gigabytes of hard drive space.

Here’s how to do it, though we caution you not to do this if you’re even slightly uncomfortable with the idea.

Gameloft has made Gangstar Rio: City of Saints and N.O.V.A. 3, two of its high-end mobile games, free for a limited time on iOS. Both titles are universal releases that can be played on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and they’re usually priced at $4.99 and $6.99 respectively — saving you $11.98.

Well, that’s some positive news. The CW television network is bringing its television content to the Apple TV, the first network to do so directly, instead of via Netflix or Hulu. Even better, you won’t have to have a cable subscription to access the CW programming on Apple’s set top box, like many other content providers require.

The CW plans on launching an app to bring shows like Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and 90210 sometime in the next few weeks, according to a report at Deadline, though no release date has been reported.

One word cropped up over and over at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it wasn’t “speakerdock” (yes, that may be two words; but I’m merging them here because that’s what I’m doing). In fact, the word was “Bluetooth” — a word discordant with the very idea of a dock-equipped speaker.

And yet, amid the tsunami of Bluetooth-equipped speakers at CES, there were holdouts — adherers to the Old Way of doing things, of physically connecting a device to its speaker.

One such holdout is the Aud 5, iLuv’s first speaker dock to harbor a Lightning connector.

https://youtu.be/Vi0HhR-PmQE

Polish-based Infinite Dreams has seen pretty sizable success with their iOS games. Can Knockdown, a physics game that gives the player a row of balls with which to virtually smash stacks of cans, is so popular that the second game in the series (Can Knockdown 2) was even super-sized into a coin-op arcade game.

Now the third game in the series has arrived for iPad and iPhone, Can Knockdown 3. And just like its predecessors, it’s beautifully engineered, gobs of fun and horribly, horribly addictive.

The Pebble smartwatch was a runaway success on Kickstarter, and backers have been receiving units in the mail for the past several months. Nearly 70,000 Pebbles have been shipped, and today the watch’s SDK has been updated to allow two-way communication between the Pebble and mobile apps. Pebble is encouraging devs to create “watchapps” that can “send and receive data from a connected smartphone app.”

Apps were previously restricted to the Pebble’s basic functions, but now nearly every facet of the watch can be controlled with (and control) a third-party iOS or Android app.

eBay has released a pretty big update for its iPhone and iPad app. If you’ve used eBay on iOS before, you know that it’s not the greatest experience in the world. Today’s update hopefully makes it better.

Besides a visual redesign, eBay has added several nice features, including multiple item checkout, quicker registration, bug fixes, and more.

For years there have been rumors saying that Intel will make mobile processors for the iPhone, and we’ve explained why that won’t happen multiple times. It’s just too late for Intel in a world that is dominated by ARM.

The CEO of Intel stepped down today, and he has revealed a juicy factoid: Apple approached Intel to provide processors for the original iPhone some six years ago, and Intel said no.

Tim Cook is going to Washington to testify before a Senate committee next week, but the Apple CEO is pulling a rare move for the company and going on the offensive early by giving media interviews to explain its position.

During an interview with Politico, Cook addressed the controversy surrounding Apple’s cash hoard by explaining where its offshore cash comes from, how Apple plans to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and why the company will push for policy change in Washington: 

A new piece of Mac malware has been discovered. The virus installs itself as “macs.app” and silently takes screenshots to then upload to shady servers. It doesn’t appear to be very widespread at the moment.

The malware was uncovered on an African activist’s Mac at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual event dedicated to “exploring how best to challenge authoritarianism and promote free and open societies.”

If you have a mid-2012 MacBook Air, Apple has released a small firmware update that addresses “a storage firmware issue that, in rare cases, may cause a system to fail to recover from crash.”

The update itself is just 1.69MB, and can be downloaded here

Even though the iPhone has thousands of apps that help you organize your thoughts and ideas, nothing works quite as well as a traditional paper notebook. At least that’s the thinking that went into DODOnotes, the first iPhone compatible paper notebook.

DODOcase, the company behind one of our favorite iPad cases, has come out with a new product for iPhone called DODONotes. It’s basically just a notepad with a little die-cut tray nest for your iPhone while an elastic strap holds it in place and also prevents you from actually using your iPhone.

There are plenty of funny things to ask Siri. One of my daughter’s favorite things to do with Siri on my iPhone, besides rename me all sorts of ridiculous names, is to ask it questions.

“Siri,” she’ll say, “what is your real name?” Siri will reply with how she really doesn’t like talking about herself. Hilarious, right?

I’m almost afraid to show my daughter this tip, because she’ll now have a ton of funny questions to ask Siri, getting truly cute and laughable responses along the way. I may never get my iPhone back.

Here is a list of some of the best funny things to ask Siri. We’ll leave finding out the answers to you.

For the past six year that I’ve owned an iPhone, not once have I thought about buying a dock. What’s the point? You’ve got your cable right there anyway, and unless it adds some great functionality to the iPhone, I’ve never seen much point in them. But the Projectone from Karas Kustoms has changed my opinion on the usefulness of iPhone docks.

The Projectone is a machined aluminum dock for your iPhone 5 that passively amplifies sound like a megaphone. Its simplistic style and industrial stylings make it one of the best-looking iPhone docks we’ve seen in a while, but is it actually worth its $45 price tag?

Apple just released a new version of iTunes that comes with a couple of unexpected new features. The 11.0.3 update includes a new MiniPlayer, an improved songs view, and finally support for multi-disc albums along with some bug fixes.

Amazon announced today that it has struck a deal with NBC/Universal to bring more popular TV shows to Amazon Prime Instant Video. The new deal gives exclusive streaming rights to a number of shows for the next four years as Amazon continues to beef up its catalogue of shows to do battle against Netflix.

Among the shows that you’ll be able to find on Prime Instant Video (but not on Netflix) you’ll find Grimm Season 1 and Covert Affairs Seasons 1-2 starting today, and then Hannibal and Defiance will be added later this year.

Jeff Bezos announced the deal this morning via a public letter on Amazon’s homepage. An accompanying press release detailed the news shows from the deal as follows:

Let’s face it … you can never have enough storage. With all of the media we’re using these days and essential backups we’re trying to keep, the more storage we have the better off we’ll be. The “cloud” is becoming increasingly useful for this – and this Cult of Mac Deals offer is going to give you the opportunity to have a whole lot of it with MacMate.

This 2 year MacMate Pro plan covers more than just cloud storage. It’s going to cover your web hosting, file sharing, email, graphic galleries, and much more. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $59 – a savings of 85%!

Blackberry Messenger might finally be coming to iOS this summer… but it’s just been confirmed that doesn’t mean a native iPad version.

The new Google Hangouts app for Android and iOS is the best messaging service Google’s produced yet, but one thing that will probably prevent it from taking off is its lack of SMS support.

If you tried the Hangouts yesterday you probably noticed the amount of people you can talk to is sparse. That’s because Hangouts only uses Google+ to connect to other humans so all of your friends would have to sign up for Google+ before you can use Hangouts to send them a message.

The dearth of people on Google+ probably means that Hangouts isn’t quite ready to be your go-to messaging app quite yet, however, Google’s Community Manager says SMS integration is coming to Hangouts soon.

Handheld games consoles like the Nintendo 3DS and the Sony PlayStation Vita have long been suffering at the hands of smartphones and tablets. But the latest data from IDC and App Annie should give handheld game developers — including Nintendo — something to really think about.

While consumer spending on Android and iOS continued to rise during the first quarter of 2013, it fell considerably on handhelds.

See that girl in the MacBook Air on the right? She’s a professional model for stock image site Shutterstock.com, who once did an entire set of images called “Pretty Woman Lying On The Sofa Holding Her Smartphone.” And that smartphone in question is clearly an iPhone 3G/S.

Okay. Now see the image on the left? That’s from a recent Samsung ad, and what do you know? The model’s iPhone has been artlessly photoshopped into a Samsung Galaxy S4… even though that device features a 5-inch display that is so large, the phone’s tiny size in the model’s hand implies a woman who is over eight-feel tall. Here’s proof. 

On the one hand, this is a photo from a stock photo site, meaning as long as Samsung paid for the image, they can do what they like with it. But still…. jeez, Samsung. Surely there’s one pretty girl in the world who prefers her Galaxy to an iPhone that you could track down for a photoshoot, right?

Via: Samsung Copies Apple

What if your iOS lockscreen intelligently pulled together all the data inside your iPhone and made sure that you could keep track with your real-world life without even sliding-to-unlock?

This beautiful iOS 7 concept by Jürgen Ulbrich of Apfellike.de reimagines iOS as something a lot more similar to Google Now than we’ve ever seen in iOS before.

Stylistically, we can quibble about it — the visual style of this concept obviously is more in Google’s school than Apple’s — but the functionality is exquisite. I would love a Google Now-like experience on my iOS 7 lockscreen, wouldn’t you?

Rovio really does make its games a worthwhile investment. Angry Birds Seasons is almost two and a half years old now, and it has just received yet another 36 new levels — plus a new power-up — on Android and iOS. That’s not bad for a 99¢ game now, is it.

With the exception of the possibility of new color offerings, we all know that the iPhone 5S will likely look pretty much identical to the iPhone 5… but that doesn’t mean things aren’t changing significantly on the inside. And BGR thinks they have proof.

Android and iOS managed to grab a whopping 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013, with a total of 199.5 million units sold worldwide. There are no prizes for guessing which of the two platforms grabbed the most market share.