Cult of Mac

Apple has released the first beta of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 to third-party developers. “Please be aware that you will not be able to revert back to your previous system after updating,” warns Apple. “Please install this update on a system you are prepared to erase if necessary.”

The seed’s release notes don’t contain anything significant, but devs will surely find new stuff once they get to digging through the OS. 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.

It was February of last year when Apple unveiled Mountain Lion as the successor to Lion. Bets are on for what cat the next major OS X release will be named after.

Source: Apple

HD Voice offers higher voice quality for networks and devices, like the iPhone 5, that can support it. T-mobile has already announced its own plans to deploy the technology when it begins selling iPhone 5s later in the month. Sprint also has plans for the higher resolution mobile audio.

AT&T today announced its own support for HD Voice, with senior VP Kris Rinne telling group of technologists at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit that AT&T plans to roll out HD Voice support later this year, at the same time it starts running voice calling on its own LTE network.

Apple has revealed that it will announce its official earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2013 on Tuesday, April 23rd. The call will be held at 2:00 P.M. Pacific, and anyone can stream it from Apple’s Investors Relations page.

If you ever had hopes of cashing in your iTunes library to make ends meet, think again: a federal judge has declared reselling your MP3s online, saying the first sale doctrine is not applicable.

iPhone theft has become a huge problem in places like New York City and San Francisco.  District Attorney George Gascón is on a mission to curb smartphone theft by having manufacturers implement a kill switch once a phone has been reported stolen, but that’s proven more difficult than Gascón imagined.

During his crusade to get answers from manufacturers, Gascón talked with Apple’s government liaison about getting a kill switch added to the iPhone, but was told that might not be possible because the next two iPhones were developed while Steve Jobs was still CEO at Apple.

With Google Reader set to close up shop on June 3oth there have been a number of apps competing to replace the dying RSS service. Digg and Reeder have emerged as popular replacements, but Feedly has seen tremendous growth thanks to Google Reader’s death.

Since Google’s announcement that it’s killing Google Reader, Feedly has seen more than 3 million new users joined the service. To make things even better, Feedly just released a big app update for iOS that includes a new discovery engine, better sharing, and a must read section. With the new update and the development of a Google Reader API clone called Normandy, Feedly is looking like it will be one of the best replacements for Google Reader.

Here are the release notes on what’s new in Feedly version 14:

Notifications on the iPhone can be annoying. Right? They drop at inappropriate times, and I always end up accidentally activating them. Of course, my iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There are, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.

Reeder has long been our favorite newsreading app on the iPhone and iPad, but with Google Reader set to be discontinued on June 30th, the future of Reeder has been up in the air. Google Reader is the engine that drives Reeder, but with no clear alternative right now, it’s not exactly sure what Reeder’s new engine will be come July 1st.

So Reeder’s doing the right thing and not making people pay quite as much for an app with a seemingly uncertain future. Developer Silvio Rizzi are making the app free on both iPad and Mac, and they are halting development on the app until July 1st to wait until the dust settles and a clear Google Reader replacement emerges.

Unfortunately, Rizzi’s largesse only goes so far: the iPhone version still costs $2.99. I think it’s a price worth paying for the only iPhone feedreader in my view worth a damn, and with Reeder set to add Feedbin support sometime soon, my guess is that it will continue to be a strong app going forward.

Source: Reeder

After Judge Lucy Koh decided to invalidate $450.5 million of the original damages owed to Apple in its trial against Samsung, most of the press believed this meant Apple wasn’t going to get anywhere near the original $1.05 billion owed to it by Samsung. Turns out everyone was probably wrong.

Even though Judge Koh ordered a new trial to determine the proper damages to award Apple for 14 of the 28 infringing Samsung devices, Apple could actually get more than the original $1.05 billion figure.

On April 1st, 1976, Apple Computers was officialy founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple I computer kit, personally hand-built by Wozniak himself. Thirty-seven years later, Apple is the most successful and profitable technology company in the world.

There’s no way to celebrate an anniversary that weighty with proper due reverence, so let’s celebrate it in a more frivolous (and delicious) way: looking at the best Apple-themed birthday cakes ever baked!

Cult of Mac Deals has partnered with 6 of the world’s finest indie gamer developers to bring you The Name Your Own Price Indie Gamer Bundle!

You pay what you want for three cross-platform, DRM-free games that will keep you gaming for hours on end including: The Journey Down, Aztaka, and iBomber Defense, and if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Spades of Time, SpaceChem, and Cubemen.

Your purchase will also do some good. We’ve chosen three charities, Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of three charities of your choice: Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons. You get to help choose which charity raises the most!

Apple has been getting pounded by the Chinese press lately for its warranty policies service and not talking to the press whenever they want a statement (welcome to Apple news my friends). Hoping to end the onslaught from the government-supported press, Apple issued an apology letter to Chinese customers signed by Tim Cook.

The letter, which was written in Chinese and posted to Apple’s website, said that Tim Cook and the rest of the company have been reflecting on the feedback regarding its warranty policies and apologizes the poor communication that has made customers so angry.

Using map apps on the iPhone can be a pain when you’re trying to zoom in to check out some specific detail of where you’re going.

Usually you have to use one hand to hold your iPhone and the other to pinch and zoom, but Google just made an awesome new zooming gesture that only requires one hand and one finger. 

Apple has a strict “no porn allowed” policy on the App Store, but what if your softcore porn magazine is also known for its thoughtful writing, its incredible reviews and it’s award-winning journalism?

Simple. You launch your magazine in the App Store without any nudity at all. And that’s just what Playboy is doing.

The biggest Apple expo in the world is moving to a new date for 2014 in order to avoid the Super Bowl and CES. Macworld/iWorld 2014 has been rescheduled for March 27th through March 29th.

Last year’s Macworld/iWorld expo was held from January 31st to February 2nd, which coincided with the Super Bowl and is only a few weeks removed from CES and holiday travel.

Speck is the Trojan of iPhone cases: you might not want to wear one, but they’re everywhere, and it’s better than going bareback. Speck’s colorful, buttony cases are pretty much ubiquitous, and one of the most easily recognizable iPhone case brands out there.

In fact, Speck is so recognizable that there are aapparently counterfeit Speck cases on the market… and Speck is so honked off about it that they are suing the maker of these fake Speck cases for mllions.

Late last year, Cult of Mac reported that New York City’s crime rate had increased for the first time in twenty years, not due to the resurgence of criminal gangs like the Warriors and the Baseball Furies, but because the iPhone was just such a popular thing to steal.

Why are criminals so interested in ripping off iPhones, though, and not, say, Samsung Galaxy S III’s? What it all comes down to is two things. One, the predictability of the resale market: you can predict what you can pawn an iPhone for, but other gadgets are harder. Two: an iPhone or iPad is easy to identify at a glance, where as other lucrative gadgets are harder to spot.

Apple and Foxconn’s jumper problem might not be a thing of the past after all, as reports over the weekend broke that two workers have jumped from the roof of Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory on Friday in reaction to job cuts, lowered wages and the end of free amenities at the world’s largest gadget manufacturer.

The iPad mini is one of Apple’s biggest successes to date, but that doesn’t matter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has turned down Apple’s request for a trademark on the iPad mini because it is “merely descriptive.”

Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!

Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.

iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.

Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.

Facebook invited the media to “Come See Our New Home On Android” on April 4.

The most likely prediction for Facebook’s project, code-named “Buffy,” is that it’s a modified, Facebook-centric version of Android on an HTC handset with a promise of other handsets — some insiders call it an “application layer.”

The dark horse contender is a Facebook-branded phone.

That’s great, right? Facebook has now friended Google and will join the growing family of Android-loving companies. Uh, right?

Wrong. Facebook is joining the club of Google’s enemies who are using Android to take business away from Google.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to Apple has now happened: The company has run afoul of the authoritarian government of China. 

Gatekeepers of the world’s largest and one of the fastest growing markets for every product Apple makes, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government has decided to stop and reverse Apple’s growth in the country.

Here’s what’s going on.

I have done a lot writing in my day, and there are times when I want to just let the words fly freely faster than I can possibly type them. When I’ve worked on my talks for seminars or wanted to work out some thoughts on a major piece of writing, I have given the reins to Dragon Dictate.

This Cult of Mac Deals offer has a huge savings on Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac – which has been an indispensable tool for me as a writer. You can get it for only $100 – that’s 50% off the regular price!

iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection