Cult of Mac

The Retina MacBooks are fabulous machines. They’re super thin, powerful, and just plain sexy. But have you ever opened your Retina MacBook and watched the screen just sit there in limbo for a few seconds before it actually comes alive again? It’s frustrating that you can see the password box, but you can’t actually type anything until the MacBook fully wakes up.

Apple has baked a feature called “standby mode” into the Retina MacBook Pros and the post-2010 MacBook Airs. Standby mode is the reason newer MacBooks sometimes take a little longer to wake, and there happens to be a simple terminal command you can enter in OS X to change the timing.

There are all kinds of little tricks developers can use to try to get their app to gain some recognition in the App Store, but Matt Henderson inadvertently discovered that naming your app ‘Butt Crack’ can reap unfathomable rewards.

Has this happened to you? You’re out and about with friends, and a text message (or iMessage) hits your iPhone. Being a serious iPhone user and Tweeter, of course, you’ve left your iPhone out on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the text message that shows up on your screen isn’t very flattering to the friend sitting immediately to your left. She sees it, gets upset, and storms off. Nobody wins.

With a quick trip to Settings, however, you can prevent this tale of tears and keep your iMessages for your eyes only. Here’s how.

If you paid a couple thousand dollars for your Mac, but you’re currently not taking advantage of its hidden features, then you’ve wasted a lot of money. Your Mac has a ton of useful capabilities – don’t let those features go to waste. Especially when they’re going to directly benefit your life by saving hundreds of hours over the course of a year.

Have you ever found yourself doing tedious work copy and pasting, moving files around, or boring data entry stuff? Most likely, that’s a “yes”, isn’t it? Everyone comes across these daily tasks and sometimes this repetitive grunt-work can take up 2 to 3 hours of your precious time. Your Mac can slice that time in half if you know the proper techniques.

You deserve to work faster because the potential with your Mac is right at your fingertips. Let The Mac Productivity Course (featuring over 18 lectures and 1.5 hrs of content) turn you into a Mac dojo master for only $29!

No one launches a product like Apple. There are lines, and fanboys, and cheering, and crying. It’s truly amazing. But what if Apple Stores were stocked full of beer instead of gadgets?

Somersby Cider made an excellent ad which parodies Apple’s product launches… only it’s all about beer. They’ve even got docking stations and different storage options for your brew.

Source: YouTube

Apple’s stock hasn’t been doing too well lately. While many analysts think the problem is that Apple hasn’t released any new products in months, Microsoft’s former COO thinks it’s more of a leadership problem.

In a recent article, former Microsoft COO, Bob Herbold claimed the problem with Apple is that it doesn’t have a visionary leader who is paranoid with details, so Apple’s totally going to start sucking like Microsoft pretty soon.

As someone who travels quite a bit for work, I make sure to pack a set of headphones with me wherever I go. But when I’m sitting on a patio or in my hotel room writing away, sometimes I want to untether my ears and let the music fly. This Cult of Mac Deals offer will help you do the same – thanks to BOOMBOT2.

The BOOMBOT2 is available to Cult of Mac Deals customers for just $49 for a limited time – a great deal for a versatile speaker.

EA’s on the loose with a machete, and it’s been slashing App Store prices like you wouldn’t believe. The company has reduced 55 of its best iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch games by as much as 90% for a limited time. Check out the massive list of titles below and grab yourself a bargain.

Do you know what a hookworm is? It’s a filthy parasite which hides in your intestine, secured by a its hooks, and feeds on your blood. Ugh. They affect around 600 million people in the world, and can’t be detected with the human eye. Why the hell am I telling your about this in the Cult of Mac? Because an enterprising Canadian doctor has hacked his iPhone to diagnose the presence of these filthy animals.

Gmail is already one of the best email apps on iOS and it’s getting just a little bit better today. Google just released an update for the native Gmail app for iOS.

The new Gmail for iOS app comes with a couple of new features, including the ability to swipe left and right to move between messages, and better editing options for a batch of multiple emails.

Here are the full release notes:

As I never tire of telling people, I do all my work using an iPad. Research, communication, writing and photo editing – all of these are now second nature for me on both the iPad mini and the full-sized iPad 3. I love the portability, I love the stripped-down “workflow” which lets me get stuff done way faster than I can on the Mac, mostly due to lack of OS X’s inherent distractions.

In fact, I am so happy with the iPad as a work machine that I thought that I’d never buy another Mac. I figured that, by the time my iMac died, iOS would have caught up with most of the “truck” tasks I still need to do: keeping a big photo library, running a BitTorrent client.

So why am I writing this post on a brand-new MacBook Air? One thing: My arm is fucking killing me.

iPhone app downloads dropped significantly last month following a spike over the holiday season. According to app marketing platform Fiksu, downloads dropped 13% to 5.2 million per day in February, from 6.01 million per day in January.

Last year it seemed as though everyone was certain Amazon would follow up the success of the Kindle Fire with an Amazon branded smartphone to take on the iPhone. Instead, Jeff Bezos unleashed the Kindle Fire HD on the world.

The rumor mill is back with more Amazon smartphone rumors, as a new report claims Amazon is getting close to finishing its smartphone that will launch later this year.

My huge 27-inch iMac is currently hanging on the wall thanks to a VESA mount and adapter, which means I’m intimately familiar with the heavy aluminum leg that used to hold it up. I have been looking for something to do with it other than using it to gather up dust under my bed, and now I think I have it: An oversized iPad stand.

Or I could just give Bluelounge $40 for the Mika, a “Universal” stand for anything vaguely tablet-sized.

The tiny Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus has fallen on some hard times lately.

The bleak financial prospects facing Cyprus has resulted in the govenment having to come up with capital control measures to prevent runs on banks, and keep investors from taking money out of the country. Worse, depositors in Cypriot banks who have more than 100,000 euros in the bank could soon see 40% of their funds converted into bank shares, while those with less than 100,000 euros will not lose any funds – but face limits on what funds they can access.

It’s all looking bleak, and the Cypriot situation has all of the Euro zone panicking. What should Cyprus do? According to one commentator, let Apple buy them.

I’m a sucker for wood paneling my Apple products, and so I’m absolutely going to have to do this: the guys over at RAWBKNY (whom we’ve written about before) are now selling laser-etched replacement keys for the MacBook Pro.

They look great, and Michael over at RAWBKNY says that while they are only designed for the non-Retina MacBook Pro right now, he’s tweaking it so it should work on the Retina MacBook Pro and MacBook Airs soon.

We’ve got a review unit on the way to see how well these work, but be warned: replacing every key on your MacBook is likely to be a time consuming process. $40 will get you a set.

Source: RAWBKNY

Remember the app Dark Sky? If you’re outside the U.S., what you’ll remember is the frustration of not being able to use its amazing real-time rain warnings, which would literally tell you when it would rain on your location in the next hour or so.

Now, the developers of Dark Sky have come out with Forecast, which works anywhere in the world, and will run on Android, iOS, the desktop, anywhere. How? It’s a web app.

Wow, this is incredible. Redditor Kepgnar works in the tech department of a charter school. Every month, one of the departments has to put together a message for the school’s official announcement chalkboard.

Here’s what Kepgnar came up with: a meticulously drawn “Think Different.” logo with an actually working QR code which, when scanned, leads to the YouTube version of the original commercial narrated by Steve Jobs.

How’d Kepgnar do the QR code? They designed it, then projected it onto the chalkboard and traced it. Talk about thinking differently.

Source: Reddit

Over at Asymco, Horace Dediu has compared Apple’s retail economy versus Amazon, and while the results aren’t anything we haven’t seen before — Amazon has annual revenue about twice the size of Apple’s retail revenue, but makes only 10% of Apple’s same operating income on that revenue — it’s informative to see it laid out so clearly. Check it out.

Source: Asymco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ku0H10_G1X4

One of the curses of being an innovator is every time you innovate, someone comes along and says they had a patent on it first. Apple knows this dilemma well, and the latest patent infringement claim Cupertino has to defend itself against is in China over Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.

Apple is gearing up to send its much-anticipated “iTV” into mass production during the second half of this year, according to sources in the Cupertino company’s supply chain, who have been speaking to DigiTimes. The set will reportedly boast a 4K “Ultra HD” display with a 3840×2160 resolution, and it’ll be controlled by voice and motion.

Got a holiday or b-day wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they never need to directly ask you what you want ever again? How about a grocery list that you can add to, secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list”?

Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can make it happen fairly easily: use Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iOS devices, as well as with iCloud.com. Here’s how to set it up.

Given the success of the original Plants vs. Zombies game, which first landed on iOS almost three years ago, I’m surprised we don’t already have a sequel. But there is one on the way. PopCap has announced that Plants vs. Zombies 2 will be launching early this summer.

Your Mac is a finely tuned, intricate machine. Just like a car, every aspect of your Mac plays a crucial role in its overall performance. This Cult of Mac Deals offer is for an app that will help keep your Mac running in tip-top shape. That’s because we’re featuring xScan – the same software many professionals use to diagnose technical issues with Mac operating systems.

xScan has been specifically designed to help you monitor the behavior and health of your Mac in a simple and straightforward manner. Consider it lifetime health insurance for your Mac – and Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $10.

Today Flipboard received a huge 2.0 update that brings a slew of new features and additions, most notably the ability to create custom magazines and share them with friends. You can assemble articles, photos, audio and video into a collage of content that Flipboard will format. It’s a big step towards putting curation in the hands of Flipboard users, and it’s implemented beautifully.