Cult of Mac

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.

Apple’s current flagship store in San Francisco is in something of a cramped location, so Apple wants to move it three blocks away, to Union Square.

We’re big fans of Pixelmator here at Cult of Mac — it’s one of the finest image editors you can buy for your Mac, and it’s just $14.99. And it appears we’re not the only ones who love it. Pixelmator just announced that its latest 2.2 Blueberry update has seen over 500,000 downloads in just one week, becoming its most successful release to date.

iOS is a fantastic platform, but as it approaches its sixth birthday, it’s in desperate need of a lick of paint. If you jailbreak your devices, then you don’t need to sit and wait for Apple to administer that, because you can take the design refresh into your own hands by theming.

The only issue with that is finding a theme that’s as beautiful as the hardware it’s running on. There aren’t many out there that fit this description, but iMIUI from Xiaomi is one of them.

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

Apple has today announced the winner of its $10,000 App Store gift card after the App Store surpassed 50 billion downloads on Wednesday. The lucky customer is Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio, who downloaded Say the Same Thing, a word game from Space Inch.

Mobileaks says the above render comes from a tipster who has seen the iPad mini 2 with Retina display. We’re not so convinced.

Our Macs contain an extremely significant amount of our livelihood, so we’re always willing to protect that. This Cult of Mac Deals offer is for a simple and powerful application that backs up all of our applications and files so we don’t have to worry about the ‘what ifs?”.

Knowing our Mac’s hard drive is backed up, secure, and protected gives us the confidence to continue to do what we do best. Now it’s your turn to let go of all your worries so you can continue to do what you do best – and at just $19.99, Stellar Drive Clone is your solution.

Snapshots is a fantastic idea, and one I can see being used pretty heavily at weddings — or by, say, a gaggle of journalists who shoot an event and might need to pool their images.

Seriously, have you gotten your tickets, yet? Star Trek: Into Darkness is coming this weekend, and it looks like the entire US is heading tot he theater to see it, en masse.

Fandango is having a good run of it, claiming that 71 percent of the pre-release ticket sales are coming through it’s very convenient service, with 32 percent of that traffic coming via mobile apps.

Further, they just told me that 15 percent of the mobile ticket sales through the Fandango app are coming from iPhone users, while 6 percent are coming from the Android mobile app.

The band, OK Go, known as much for its fabulously nerdy and complex videos as for its quirky and upbeat pop music, have made an app. Before you go, “meh,” and move on, thinking that this is another one of those record publishing tie-in apps that, really, no one loves but the publicist trying to push it, take a look at the video here.

Get it? These guys made the app. Ok, mostly guitarist Andy Ross, but the other guys certainly had a hand in the app. They definitely appear in the video above. Singer and bassist, Tim Nordwind, had this to say when we asked about the app.

So, the game we’ve been telling you about since before it even had a name is out now for Mac, PC, and Linux, and it looks as good as the developers promised. It’s a sequel to Anomaly Warzone Earth, originally released on iOS, and it will only cost you $13.49 for the first week after launch. You can grab it on Steam, or Anomaly2Game should you so desire. And really, it’s a pretty desirable game.

Warsaw, Poland-based 11 bit studios kicked things off last February when they announced a mystery game that you could purchase before you even knew what it was, and then announced the name of the game not too long after.

Well, here we are, and there it is, ready for you to grab for less than a decently sized pizza at 10 percent off the eventual retail price of $15.

It’s strange to think that, till now, as big a high-end audio player as Shure has had no answer to the extravagant, big-gun, flagship in-ear monitor models of its rivals — models like the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro Custom, or the JH Audio JH16 Pro.

But now they do — big time. The new SE846 extends Shure’s highly regarded SE line well beyond the SE535, previously their top, most expensive IEM.

Since the beginning of February, Mophie has gone from having zero iPhone 5 battery cases to having three. Today the popular case maker announced yet another battery case tailored for the iPhone 5, the Juice Pack Plus. The case costs $120, and it contains more juice than its predecessors.

Apple has fallen under plenty of scrutiny for storing a majority of its $100+ billion cash horde overseas to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes, the highest tax rate in the world. Now Apple CEO Tim Cook has been summoned to speak at a Senate hearing next week as part of an investigation into the offshore tax practices of U.S businesses.

Last week we told you that Verizon would be selling the iPhone 5 for 50% off later this month. The promotion has now begun, and the iPhone 5 is being offered for $99 with a carrier contract instead of the normal $199 retail price.

But there’s a catch that severely limits eligibility.