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!”

So I’m a little skeptical. What do you think?

Source: Moumantai.biz
Via: iDownloadBlog

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.

Here are the full release notes:

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!

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.

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.

I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of case maker Tactus until last week, but in the space of just a few days it has published an unveiling date and specifications for the fifth-generation iPad, the plastic casing for Apple’s rumored low-cost iPhone, and now the fifth-generation iPad’s new aluminum shell.

When downloading updates in the Mac App Store, it’s a simple thing to start and pause your download. Make sure you’re logged into the correct iTunes account for the specific update, and hit the dark gray Update button when you’re ready. If you want to pause the download, simply hit the same button, which now says Pause.

But what if you want to completely cancel the download and start again later?

Luckily, this is a pretty simple thing to do.

Apple’s hard-to-meet high standards and its low price expectations have earned it the nickname “Poison Apple” with Asian suppliers, who say they are feeling the affects of decreasing demand of the iPhone. Several have told Reuters that they are trying to reduce their reliance on Apple amid increasing competition from companies like Samsung.

Twitter recently announced that it’s killing TweetDeck for Android, iOS, and Adobe AIR, and we now have a date for the operation. TweetDeck will stop functioning and be pulled from Android and iOS on May 7, according to an announcement on the TweetDeck website.

Apple has donated ¥50 million ($8 million) to those affected by the recent earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. The Cupertino company made an announcement on its Chinese website, which was accompanied by a message of condolence that pledges support for locals and schools.

Hooooo! That, apparently, is the sound of an iPhone whistling. At least, that’s the sound of an iPhone whistling when its inside the WhistleCase, a combo tweeter and phone protector that actually looks cool enough to buy and use.

Remember when we used to switch resolutions on our computers? No, probably not. That’s because only old people experienced the pain of doing such a thing manually – these days our monitors are built in to our computers, and the pixel-mapping is done by the OS.

Unless you have a new Retina MacBook Pro that is. Now there might actually be a reason to switch resolutions. But who wants to dig around in System Preferences? Instead, you can use Pupil.

Cult of Mac reader Derek Stein put me on to this hot hot leather case for the iPhone 5. It’s similar in intent to the TwelveSouth SurfacePad I re-reviewed on Friday in that it’s a simple wraparound leather cover. The differences are that it looks less functional and much longer lasting.

Yeah, you could buy reams and reams of bound notebooks all pre-printed with iPhone-shaped templates for your UI-designing needs. But what will that get you? Boxes of crappy notebooks all filled with quad-printed paper and covered with little iPhone outlines.

Worse, you’ll have to carry these with you along with your proper Moleskine notebook if you want to do any real sketching or note taking.

But what if you could add an iPhone page to any book, any time you like? With this stamp, you totally can.

It’s funny: Back in high school I had a project called "Mount Julie" (which Julie never knew about), and now here in 2013 we see a new project called "Mount July." Coincidence? Probably…

Anyhow. Mount July will be a set of camera filters for film, stills and video which will add Instagram-like effects, using old-fashioned analog glass filters.

I almost never (except when shooting video) wish that I had a wider angle lens – it would just mean that I have to poke my camera even closer into the face of my subject. But I do often reach for the telephoto lens that isn’t there. After all, apart from a long lens’s ability to squish elements together in a picture, sometimes you just can’t walk any closer to your subject.

At those times, you can now reach for the iPad Telephoto lens for Photojojo.

We learned a lot about Google Glass this week. In doing so, we also learned a lot about Google.

It’s tempting to look at Google’s vast range of products and research projects and conclude that the company has more ideas than vision. (The difference is that ideas tend to be disconnected, whereas vision involves a coherent strategic direction.)

Where is Google going? Does Google even know?

A closer look suggests that Google is, in fact, an increasingly visionary company. And the fate of many Google projects is predictable.

Some are predestined to die eventually in the hellfire of “spring cleaning” (Orkut), many will live on forever as useful, profitable but not centrally strategic products (Gmail) and others form the strategic centerpiece of Google’s longterm future (Google+).

If we’ve learned anything from the truckload of Google Glass details this week, and from prior revelations that I’ll tell you about, Google Now is absolutely strategic and central to the future of Google.

More interestingly, Google Now’s cards metaphor looks likely to become one of the main interfaces for interacting with Google’s many cloud services.

Jailbreaking is great for fine tuning the iOS experience. Abstergo is a new and excellent jailbreak tweak that does just that, and it’s available in Cydia now for $2. Developed by Joshua Tucker and Andrew Richardson, Abstergo improves Notification Center by adding some subtle features. It won’t blow you away, but it will make interacting with notifications less annoying—and sometimes that’s all it takes for a tweak to be great.