Logitech has today announced a new addition to its growing family of iPad keyboard cases, but this one is unlike anything the company has offered before. It’s called the FabricSkin, and it offers a fabric keyboard much like that that comes with the Microsoft Surface tablet.
The great thing about a fabric keyboard is that its super slim and liquid resistant.
Twitterrific for iOS has received yet another new update that’s packed full with new features and improvements. In addition to app badges for push notifications, you’ll also find Favstar support, Twitter trends, and a long list of tweaks and bug fixes that’ll improve existing features.
GeoTag Photos Pro just hit v3.0, and with the update comes a new, less-ugly UI. It also adds automatic Dropbox uploading, making it just about the easiest (and still most battery-friendly) photo-tagging app for the iPhone.
FocusTwist attempts to turn your iPhone into a Lytro Light Field camera, complete with photos that can be focussed after you take them. How does it perform this technological magic? It cheats.
Timebar is an ultra-simple timer app for your Mac. Click! its icon up in the menubar, drag! to select a period of time and then Go About Your Life! as it ticks the seconds away by running a blue progress bar across your menubar.
Netflix has announced a new family plan that will allow an account holder to have four simultaneous streams. The plan will cost $12 per month. A specific launch date for the plan has not been announced, but Netflix revealed the news in a letter to shareholders today.
Kids. Can't live with them, can't manage their allowance.
I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.
Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.
Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.
So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!
Last week saw popular photo-editing iPhone app FX Photo Studio go free for a day. MacPhun, the app’s developer, then extended that free day indefinitely — a result, they say, of the app’s overwhelming popularity as it’s blown through a million new downloads since going free.
Now the developer’s doing the same thing with the even-more-fantastic iPad version of the app, FX Photo Studio HD. Only this time, they say the app will be free until it hits 10 million new downloads. Since this is such a stellar app, ten million is not nearly as steep as it seems.
Welcome back, AppShopper. I mean, AppShopper Social.
Alternative iOS informational website, AppShopper, had an app that was pulled from the App Store last December due to a conflict with new App Store rules that went into effect at that time. The team behind the app, who also run the website, have spent the hiatus working hard on a new app that is both compliant with Apple’s current App Store rules and useful to consumers.
AppShopper Social was announced today as live in the App Store, bringing with it a host of new social discovery systems along with the familiar Wish List functionality it’s always had.
This is a completely separate app, so if you still have the original AppShopper app on your iPhone or iPad, you can use them both alongside each other.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has officially ruled in favor of Apple against Google’s Motorola Mobility in a patent case that began in 2010. The last patent Motorola was using to sue Apple for infringement has been ruled invalid by the ITC.
Motorola sued Apple for allegedly violating six of its patents three years ago, and today’s patent was the last of six patents to be thrown out of court. If Motorola would have proven Apple’s infringement of this particular patent, the ITC could have possibly blocked sales of certain iPhone models.
Apple and Samsung aren’t on the best of terms. Since Apple won a $1 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung in U.S. court last year, the two have been at each other’s throats in the media. Samsung’s Galaxy TV ads depict Apple customers as mindless sheep. Apple’s Phil Schiller recently went on the offensive against Samsung on the eve of the S4 announcement. The two are clearly at odds.
Would Samsung result to bashing Apple in online article comments? It appears so. In fact, the Korean company may have its own army dedicated to trolling the comments sections of blog posts.
Apple has added a small but notable option to the iTunes Store. You can now choose to download movies and TV shows later. When you make a purchase, a new dialog box asks if you want to download the media now, or store it in your purchases list.
While the feature itself isn’t anything new—you’ve been able to download previously purchased items for awhile—the option to postpone a download until later is something Apple just added.
Yahoo! has been undertaking something of an iOS App Store renaissance lately. First, they made their Flickr app into a bonafide Instragam challenger; then their new Yahoo! Weather app effortlessly fused beautifully wrought weather information with the best photographs on Flickr; and now Yahoo! has updated its iOS app with natural language summaries of all the news likely to be of interest to you.
VoiceOver is the name of the amazing text-to-speech feature in iOS and Mac OS X that allows those with visual impairments to use their Apple devices right out of the box, without needing help from a sighted person. On the iPhone or iPad, it empowers those with a visual disability to become more independent and function on a day to day basis in a world that isn’t really set up for them.
As an individual without a visual impairment (aside from a slight nearsightedness), I use VoiceOver to have my iPhone read to me when I’m in the car but need to catch up on email or want to hear what folks are doing on Twitter. Here’s how to set that up.
The future of computing might be in wearable computers like Google Glass and the rumored Apple iWatch, but you’re still going to have to wait before getting to try them out.
Google has never commented on a launch date for Google Glass, but Eric Schmidt says it’s not that far away. In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s “World at One” today, Schmidt says that he thinks the consumer version of Google Glass is “probably a year-ish away.”
Before the disastrous launch of Apple Maps, one of Apple’s biggest failures of all-time was the launch of MobileMe. Apple set a group of engineers out to rebrand .Mac and create a new cloud-based product that totally fell over the night it launched.
Steve Jobs famously met with the entire MobileMe team in the campus auditorium and fired the manger of the project on the spot. Then he told everyone, “you’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation … You should hate each other for having let each other down.” It was one of Steve Jobs’ most famous tough-leader moments, but according to one insider, Steve should have been yelling at himself because the MobileMe launch failure was really his fault.
I’ve been writing for Cult of Mac for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve covered some pretty farfetched Apple rumors. But the latest from Forbes comes with a whole new level of crazy.
“Some Wall Street sources close to some Apple executives” say the Cupertino company could be searching for a replacement for Tim Cook, it claims, before suggesting Cook could turn Apple into another Hewlett-Packard or JC Penney and insisting “Apple’s shine has faded” since the passing of Steve Jobs.
Earlier today, we reported that the Wall Street consensus was that Apple’s profit in this last quarter probably shrank for the first time in a decade, and that results will be even more dire next quarter, with iPhone sales units being extremely low.
But Wall Street’s pessimism in regards to Apple is, as usual, nuts. For Apple to perform as low as Wall Street thinks it will next quarter, Apple would have to show zero growth in the iPhone market compared to the same spring quarter a year ago. This would rank it as one of the smartphone industry’s worst disasters ever. Which is crazy, because Apple’s selling more iPhones than ever.
Over the last few weeks, T-Mobile has stolen a lot of the prepaid carriers’ thunder with its new “Uncarrier” plans. But Cricket Wireless is eager to make sure no one forgets about it.
Starting today, Cricket Wireless is cutting the price of its iPhone plans to help it compete against the likes of T-Mobile and AT&T. The new family bundle plan offered by Cricket includes two smartphone plans for $40 each a month. If you just want an iPhone on your own plan, individual plans now start at $50 a month.
Supposedly, these nanoSIM trays are for the iPhone 5S. They look exactly like nanoSIM trays for the iPhone 5, except for one thing: they are in gold and gray. This is notable because in the iPhone 5 the nanoSIM trays were silver and black, and the iPhone 5S is rumored to come in different colors.
Except… gold seems like a pretty gaudy color to release a new iPhone in, don’t you think? And gray is sort of an anti-color, not the kind of thing you get excited about buying a new iPhone for. “Check out my cool gray iPhone!”
iPhone and iPad owners who love watching video will appreciate a new update coming from Netflix to iOS. The video giant just released Netflix 4.0 for iOS that makes navigating to your favorite episodes even easier.
The update includes UI changes that make it easier to find new episodes for shows, as well as better navigation for changing the audio and subtitles for a video. There are also some little bug fixes in the update as well.
My girlfriend and I aren’t so much collectors of books and records as we are black hole like vortexes to which books and records are inescapably drawn, gravitational wells from which any media that passes our event horizons can not escape.
As such, we’re constantly trying to keep track of the books and records we already have. One of our favorite apps to do so is Delicious Library, a fantastic media cataloging application that lets you keep track of your stuff by using a webcam as a barcode scanner (as well as manual entry), but it hasn’t really seen a serious update in years.
Thankfully, that’s about to change. Delicious Library 3 is coming soon, and it apparently will have some pretty rad new functionality: a recommendation engine, and a corresponding iOS app.
There are plenty of Mac users out there that need (or want) to have a Windows OS installed on their trusted machine as well. The problem is that with the Windows environment comes a greater risk of infection from spyware, malware, and viruses. The Mac isn’t impervious to these, either, but when you’re trying to protect both sides of your Mac it can be a daunting – or expensive – task.
This Cult of Mac Deals offer makes it that much easier to do because we’ve got Bitdefender up for grabs – and for only $40!
Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and others sold Apple stock at a time when it was hitting record highs.
Apple’s quarterly profit probably fell for the first time in over a decade, thanks to new products with lower profit margins and a slowing demand for the iPhone, Bloomberg reports. Fourteen analysts have reduced their estimates for Apple in recent weeks, and on Friday, the Cupertino company’s share price fell below $400 for the first time since December 2011.
iPhone 6 maker Foxconn is looking to lower its reliance on Apple.
A Chinese paper is reporting that Apple and Foxconn may have had a staggering setback in the production of the iPhone, with up to eight million iPhones returned to Foxconn because they didn’t meet Apple’s standards.