Cult of Mac

Once you get on Apple’s bad side, it’s hard to climb back into its good graces, and AppGratis is starting to learn that the hard way. After pulling AppGratis’ app from the Apple Store last week, Apple has also decided to kill push notifications on the app for users that still have it installed.

This is the first time we’ve seen Apple kill certain functionality on an app after users have already installed it. AppGratis was banned from the App Store after Apple decided violated multiple rules of the App Store, but AppGratis says its already working on a comeback.

If you love to game, and you’ve never played a roguelike, shame on you. You can hardly call yourself a gamer at all.

We’ve all seen those fake iOS devices that are being made in China, but did you know that Apple’s App Store is being cloned there, too? A service called KuaiYong, which means “use quickly” in Chinese, according to MIC Gadget, lets iPhone and iPad users download and install pirated iOS apps without jailbreaking.

The service has been around for almost a year, so how has it gone unnoticed for so long?

Evernote’s free image editing app, Skitch, now allows you to annotate and share PDF files on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You can then share those PDFs with other Skitch users, who will get a nifty summary view of all your annotations.

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you: even as Apple’s stock price has plunged below $400 as twitchy Wall Street investors panic upon rumors that iPhone and iPad demand has slowed, Verizon Wireless has reported that they activated 4 million iPhones in the last quarter. That’s 500,000 more than was estimated, an 84% increase year-over-year in iPhones activated: overall, it means that almost 56% of all phones Verizon sold last quarter were iPhones.

So can everyone calm down about iPhone growth slowing, already? We’ll know the truth when Apple announces their financial earnings next Tuesday, April 23rd.

Source: Verizon

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Facebook Home — the new app that deeply-integrates Facebook into Android smartphones (and probably most notable for its system-wide Chat Heads messaging) — doesn’t work as intended on iOS… but it was actually prototyped on Quartz Composer, Apple’s visual development environment distributed as part of Xcode!

Facebook brought its new Chat Heads feature to iPhone earlier this week, but it doesn’t offer quite the same experience as the Android version. The feature is designed to make your Facebook Messenger conversations easy to access from anywhere, but on iOS, it only works when you’re within the Facebook app — which kind of defeats its purpose.

But as is often the case, the jailbreaking community has a solution. A new tweak that allows you to use Chat Heads as Facebook originally intended on iPhone is coming soon to Cydia.

Yahoo! has just released a stunningly beautiful Weather app for the iPhone. It’s a beautiful piece of digital art, fusing two of Yahoo’s best remaining properties — their weather service, and the photo-sharing group Flickr — into something lovely that manages to not just give you a forecast of the weather of the city you’re in: it also captures some of that city’s soul.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is one of the most reliable analysts out there when it comes to predicting upcoming Apple products. Whomever his sources are in the Far East, they run deep. So when Kyo says that the iPad 5 will be 15% thinner and 25% lighter than the iPad 4, and it will take significantly less time to charge, that’s a prediction worth taking seriously.

Remember that Reuters report floated last month that Intel might start fabricating ARM chips for Apple?

It’s not going to happen, says no lesser authority on the matter than Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

Remember that fifth-generation iPad mould that we reported on earlier this week? Well, its source has now obtained what is believed to be the casing for Apple’s rumored low-cost iPhone.

It’s made of polycarbonate plastic just like the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS, and it will reportedly pack a 3.5-inch display like previous iPhones — yet it’s both taller and wider than the iPhone 4S.  It may also get its grand unveiling this October.

Alfred has a ton of ways to make your Mac life more productive, like launching apps, commanding your OS X system, and even sending quick emails to your contacts. With the £15 Powerpack installed, Alfred lets you create incredibly detailed and complex customized commands using keywords, hotkeys, and actions, all within the app itself.

But if you’re like me, you’re not a huge fan of re-inventing the wheel. There’s a whole community of folks smarter than me who have made their own Workflows with Alfred and have exported these for everyone to download, import, and use with Alfred.

Let’s take a look at how you can grab some of the best of these, and get them working for you on your own Mac.

Twitter Music is launching on iPhone and the web today, and you no longer have to be a star to enjoy it. After a short period of testing with select music artists and celebrities, the music discovery service will be made available to everyone later on today.

Apple has reportedly stopped placing Mac component orders after overestimating demand and placing “aggressive” orders at the end of 2012. DigiTimes reports that suppliers haven’t received any information from the Cupertino company to indicate when orders may resume.

Despite its obvious problems, it’s hard not to love this little iPad lap desk from Kikkerland. It’s not just that it would look so cute perched on your thighs with a snack and a suitable beverage, but that somebody thought to update the TV dinner for the internet age.

The Intimo Secretary Desk might sound like a place your assistant would keep his or her sexy underwear, but it is in fact a modern bureau-style desk for your MacBook (or any laptop, I guess – not that PC owners would have this level of style).

It’s gorgeous, and when you’re done working for the day you can close it up and grab your iPad for some light reading.

Check out Adobe’s amazing new blur-reduction tool. Likely coming to the next version of Photoshop, the feature examines your shaky photo, analyzes just how badly you screwed it up and applies a fix to clear things up again.

The video below shows a quick look at it in action.

LinkedIn has rolled out new apps for Android and iOS that boast brand new designs, faster navigation, and new features. Users will now find an increased focus on their news stream, with conversations, network updates, and more now front and center. The update even comes with a fancy new demonstration video; check it out below.

My favorite read-later app, Pocket, has revamped its sharing options to make it way easier to send articles and snippets to other people. It’s powered by email, although once you’ve set it up you wouldn’t know it. And yes, for those who have been following along, it totally lets you save your favorite passages as highlights, although you’ll need to hack things to get that working.

Auxo is one of the best jailbreak tweaks out there, period. It started as an iOS app switcher concept and has since matured into a full-fleged jailbreak tweak that puts Apple’s switcher to shame. Instead of tiny app icons, you can jump between apps by viewing large, card-like tiles. There’s also an enhanced music player and quick access to system settings, like screen brightness and WiFi.

While it works great on the iPhone, I’ve always thought that Auxo was better suited for the iPad’s larger display. The good news is that Auxo will finally be coming to jailbroken iPads everywhere sometime next month. An exact release date and price have not been given yet. Auxo for iPad will be going into private beta testing soon, and I’ll have more to share then.

Source: A³tweaks

Moxtra is a great, free app that allows groups of users to collaborate using files — video clips, images, PDFs — that they’ve stored in virtual notebooks; some collaboration can even be conducted in realtime.

Back in January, when Moxtra launched, I described the app as a sort of Evernote-Pinterest blend. Now there’s even more blending with the former, because Evernote has added Moxtra integration.

Apple’s making a big push in India, and it appears to be paying off. According to an article in The Times of India, Apple India’s revenue already rose by a factor of three last year, and analysts there expect the current brisk sales of iPhones to boost the company’s bottom line to over $1 billion in the current year.

While Apple does not disclose financials for the Indian sales unit, it does file with the Indian Registrar of Companies. In that filing, Apple reported a 431 percent rise in net profit this year, which the Times attributes to iPhone sales.

Apple has been keeping developers busy with a steady stream of beta builds for OS X 10.8.4.  The latest beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 Build 12E33a was just seeded to developers.

Like the last build of 10.8.4, the release notes don’t contain anything significant, but devs will surely find new stuff once they get to digging through the OS. Apple asks developers to focus on Wi-Fi, Graphics Drivers, and Safari and says there are no known issues with build.

OS X 10.8.3 was released to the public a couple weeks ago after going through 13 beta revisions over a period of nearly 5 months. The next version of OS X should be revealed by WWDC this year, if not before.

The French were everywhere at this year’s CES, measuring everything. Everything. The most imaginative expression of this peculiar (but useful) French obsession was the Hapifork, a Bluetooth-connected utensil that measures the user’s eating habits.

If that sounds interesting, good news: Hapifork has finally made it to Kickstarter, just two months behind schedule.

Cultured Code has updated its popular to-do app, Things, with several nice improvements and a lot of bug fixes. Moving in and out of different time zones no longer causes a task to show up on the incorrect day. General performance should be much faster for the Mac app in just about every way. Things Cloud Sync, a feature that was introduced last year, has also been made snappier.

Over 50 additional bug fixes have been included in Things 2.2, so you should no longer be seeing random crashes or weird glitches. Things 2.2 is available now on iOS and OS X. The app costs $50 on the Mac, $20 on the iPad, and $10 on the iPhone.

Source: Things Blog