Look, every once in a while a Mac app comes along that’s so incredibly useful, it becomes one of those rare staple apps no Mac should go without. On this week’s CultCast, we’ll introduce you to the incredibly talented Alfred, and reveal all the time-saving totally amazing feats this little bit of code can perform for you.
Plus! Word on the streets is T-Mobile’s getting the iPhone and their new plans could give the industry a shake down. We’ll tell you the pros and cons of big T’s contract free “uncarrier” plans and explain what makes them different from the pack.
All that and more on this episode of the CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes to download our new episodes or just hit play below.
Major League Baseball is getting ready for the 2013 season by updating its official apps on both Google Play and the App Store. Today MLB.com At Bat was updated with live audio access for At Bat 13 subscribers and other features for various devices.
Twitter has a released an update to its video sharing service Vine that adds a couple of new features. You can now quickly share videos taken by other people in your feed on Twitter and Facebook. Just tap the ellipsis on the bottom right of a video and then “Share this post.”
Another addition is the ability to embed Vine videos on the web like tweets. Anything in your Vine feed can be embedded with the new option. Getting the actual embed code is a little clunky in the app right now. Tapping “Embed” in the iOS app creates an email with instructions to use the code on the web. You can choose from the “Simple” and “Postcard” frames along with the width of the actual video.
Today’s update also includes some bug fixes, so be sure to grab it for free in the App Store.
Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.
Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in 2013, and now a new report says the company is “pushing hard” for a launch this summer.
iOS is the most popular gaming platform in existence, and Apple has managed to create an incredible ecosystem of titles with only iOS devices. The company sells no actual controllers or joypads; everything is touch-based.
So does it make sense for Apple to make a physical game controller that somehow connects to your iPhone and iPad? According to a new report, the answer is yes.
LEGOs are one of the greatest toys ever invented. You can build pretty much anything you can dream of with them. Even a car. They’re amazing.
We’ve seen tons of Apple-inspired LEGO projects over the last couple of years, from LEGO Apple Store replicas, to a working LEGO Mac Pro. There is no limit to the creativity you can achieve with LEGOs, but these best LEGO projects we’ve ever seen:
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Artist Maico Akiba takes everyday gadgets and then imagines them as they would look if dug up from a landfill a hundred years from now. This is what Akiba thinks the iPhone 3G will look like in 2107.
Got to say, I’m skeptical the screen will hold up that well. There’s more art by Akiba at the link below.
If you think that last week’s huge security hole that allowed anyone with your Apple ID email address and birth date to reset your password was just a fluke, this damning report by Tim Carmody over at The Verge might just change your mind.
It’s a compelling argument that says that Apple is being extremely negligent and sloppy when it comes to your iCloud data’s security.
The latest Facebook SDK makes the Facebook on iOS experience even greater.
There have been rumors for over a year that Facebook is trying to make its own smartphone to compete with the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S3, but we haven’t had much reason to believe in them until now.
Facebook sent out invitations last night to an event on April 4th at its headquarters, where the company will allegedly unveil its own smartphone that was built in partnership with HTC.
Tired of scrolling through endless songs from burned CDs from years ago and having no idea what each one is because the tracks didn’t quite register with iTunes? Wish you could have more cover art in your collection? Is your iTunes Library teeming with duplicate tracks? This Cult of Mac Deals offer will magically eliminate what ails your iTunes because TuneUp transforms your music collection. Automagically™.
With over 12 million downloads, TuneUp is the best iTunes companion app in the industry, and in a just a few clicks your entire music collection will be fresh and clean. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $30!
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of speculation suggesting that Google is in the process of releasing a unified chat application called Babel. Babel is rumored to have merged services such as Voice, Talk, and Google + Messenger. The new service is also rumored to be a cross-platform chat service, allowing users on iOS and Android to communicate with each other, within Babel itself. It’s like Google’s version of iMessage.
Things are crazy in North Korea right now. After hanging out with Dennis Rodman for a bit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has decided to step up his propaganda by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S.
There’s no question that North Korea’s got nukes, but they might not be able to hit the U.S. for another few years. Plus, Kim Jong-un is running the show from an old 21-inch iMac that’s probably still running on OS X 10.5 Leopard, so we’re safe for now, right?
For the last two years, Best Buy stores across the country have hosted a mini Apple Store within a store to bring more attention to Apple’s iMacs and MacBooks. As a point of solace from the barrage of tablets, desktop PCs, and laptops in Best Buys busy stores, the little Apple Stores give customers more time and space to play with Apple’s PC products, so Samsung has decided to take a similar approach with their mobile products.
To kick off the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4, Best Buy plans to setup a Samsung store-within-a-store in some of its highest traffic stores. Rather than hawking PC products, the Samsung store-within-a-store will focus on Samsung’s mobile offerings.
Do you hate in-app purchases? Sick of downloading an app only to discover its borderline unusable until you drop an extra five bucks? Sick of games that aren’t play to win, but pay to win?
Tough noogies. In-app purchases account for a staggering 76% of all iPhone App Store revenue, with 71% of all iPhone app revenue coming from in-app purchases for total free apps.
If there’s any comfort to be had from U.S. IAP haters, at least there’s this: Americans spend, on average, only about a buck in in-app purchases per download. In Japan, it’s four times that amount.
Without a doubt, my favorite Mountain Lion feature is AirPlay Mirroring, which allows me to easily mirror whatever is happening on my Mac to my Apple TV. My girlfriend and I use it pretty much all the time to watch movies at night — I digitized our vast DVD collection long ago to save space. It’s truly indispensible to me.
Although I love AirPlay Mirroring, the feature still has two main issues. First of all, AirPlay Mirroring doesn’t work at all on Macs released before 2011, meaning that my 2009-era 27-inch iMac can’t easily stream anything off of its 3.25 TB (rolled-at-home) Fusion Drive. There are apps like AirParrot that get around that limitation, but I’ve always found them to be a little bit strange and laggy, doing weird things like letterboxing my iMac’s display on all sides.
Even if you have a Mac that is newer than 2011, though, there’s one major limitation of AirPlay Mirroring: if you’re streaming a movie to your Apple TV using AirPlay Mirroring, you can’t actually do anything else with your Mac while the movie is playing. If you switch away from the video player to check your email or your Twitter account, it’s all mirrored on the screen.
What I have always wanted is this: the ability to easily stream a movie to my Apple TV from any Mac in my house, while allowing me to still use my Mac without disrupting the viewing experience.
Today, I discovered a gem of an app that lets me do all of this. It’s called Beamer and it frickin’ rocks.
Here’s a fantastic blast from the past. Back in the early 80s, there was a show called Computer Chronicles that was sort of a televised proto-podcast about the world of personal computing. In this episode from back in 1985, the Computer Chronicles put the vintage Apple Macintosh — released just a year before — through its paces, including a talk with Larry Tesler, a legendary engineer who was part of the Xerox PARC team, Palo Alto’s famous R&D center that gave Steve Jobs the idea for the Macintosh GUI and the venerable computer mouse.
Sadly, we can’t get the video to embed, so if this piques your interest and for more information on the show, be sure to check out this article on Wired for the whole thing. It’s a great way to wile away the morning on this Good Friday.
iTunes Match lets you access your music library from any Mac and any iOS device, as long as you are authenticated to each one. It uses the power of iCloud to see what music tracks you own, so you don’t have to sync each individual track to each device like the olden days. With iTunes Match enabled, you can play and download tracks to up to ten different iOS, Mac or Apple TV devices you log in to. Here’s how to manage your subscription.
We’ve openly speculated that the Evasi0n jailbreak might be the last public jailbreak now that Apple has closed the security holes that makes evasi0n work, but maybe we spoke too soon: well-known jailbreaker posixninjasays he’s collected enough new exploits in iOS 6.1.3 to patch together another jailbreak.
Apple can’t catch a break in China lately. The Chinese state run press has been targeting Apple in a series of increasingly vicious attack pieces, while Apple simultaneously defends itself in court against allegations of patent violation. Now, China’s oldest animation studio is accusing Apple of stealing their movies and selling them on the iTunes store, without paying a cent.
Hold the phone! Or, rather — don’t. Martian Watch models see much of its promised potential unlocked With the launch today of iOS and Android apps, just ahead of their estimated ship date(s).
The app finally adds two major features to the watches — remote camera control and social media updates — along with a few smaller ones.
Glympse is a clever — and potentially lifesaving — feature that we’d love to see in more smartphone-connected cars.
It started out as a free app that can broadcast the user’s location to selected contacts, Facebook friends or Twitter followers. But it’s become a valuable tool for drivers of smartphone-connected Fords and Merecedes-Benzes, allowing them to broadcast their location without taking their hands off the steering wheel.
Now BMW and Mini have partnered with Glympse, raising the marque total to four.
The ugly tan leather and stitching is still there, but Apple has a new feature for its Find My Friends app that users will find pretty useful. Apple just updated Find My Friends so that users can setup up geofences and receive a notification once a friend leaves a designated area.
Last week Apple launched its new ‘Why You’ll Love iPhone’ webpage that many viewed as a defensive effort to combat the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S 4. Today, Apple unleashed a similar website, only for the iPad.
The “Why You’ll Love iPad” webpage on Apple.com gives potential customers a number of reasons why the iPad and iPad mini are the best tablets on the market, including it’s apps, precision design, brilliant display, and battery.
Looks like even Steve Wozniak wants Apple to release a Siri API to third-party developers, and he has a pretty good idea how it would work: a lot like AppleScript, basically. For example, to do something in Foursquare, you’d launch Siri, say “Foursquare” and then anything you said after that would be parsed through the Foursquare app. Sounds good to me… maybe with iOS 7?
