Cult of Mac

It’s being reported that a new Mac trojan is in the wild, but in truth, it’s pretty hard to infect your machine with it as long as you play it smart.

Samsung’s Android smartphones have this nifty feature that lets you quickly make calls from within contact cards and messages simply by raising the device to your ear. And thanks to a new tweak called RaiseToCall, you can now get the same feature on your jailbroken iPhone.

Apple’s suppliers are to begin shipping components for the next-generation iPhone by the end of May, ready for the handset’s launch during the third-quarter of 2013, according to sources in the supply chain. As suspected, the device won’t be a major upgrade, the sources claim, but rather a “slightly enhanced” version of the iPhone 5 that’s likely to be called the iPhone 5S.

When you use Evernote, you already have two backups of your notes. You have the copy which resides on your Mac, and you have the synchronized copy which resides on the Evernote cloud servers. So, aside from local, non-synched notes, you’ll always have access to them no matter what happens to your Mac.

If you want to be totally sure you’ll always have your notes, however, you might want to make a manual backup. Using Time Machine is an obvious way to do this, but maybe you just want to backup and restore your Evernote notebooks and notes right from the Evernote app itself.

You can, and here’s how.

We’ve seen a lot of iPad-enhancing accessories over the last couple of years. Speaker cases like the Belkin Thunderstorm, bring-your-own-keyboard cases like the Incase Origami, and even iPad battery cases. But here’s a new one: DOCKr, an accessory that brings all these advantages together in one Skittle-colored package.

NetNewsWire is a classic RSS reader. It came out on the Mac more than a decade ago, and it’s still used on OS X and iOS. As a staple application in the Mac community, NetNewsWire has remained a fan favorite despite the lack of updates it has received in recent years.

The world of RSS got rocked last week when Google announced that it was killing Google Reader, one of the most-used RSS aggregators on the internet. In the wake of Google Reader’s death sentence, NetNewsWire is about to be reborn.

If it isn’t already obvious: I’m a huge bike nut. I’ve sold bikes, fixed them, raced on them and even slept on one once (hey, cycling is tiring). So I get pretty excited when fellow bike nuts make something ingenious that’ll let my bike haul my Apple gear. Case in point: Timbuk2’s new Basket Case duffel and their Cog Pannier.

Demiurge Studios (Borderlands, Mass Effect) teamed up with Owlchemy Labs (Snuggle Truck, Jack Lumber) to announce that the Android version of Shoot Many Robots is now available for free on Google Play. Originally released in March 2012 for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) and the PlayStation Network (PSN), Shoot Many Robots came out a month later on PC, via Steam, and should be released on iOS soon.

Apple has released a big update to GarageBand for iOS that brings support for Audiobus, an iOS app that routes audio between other apps. This means that GarageBand can record and work with other music creation apps from the App Store. You could make a beat in DM1 and bring it right into a multi-track GarageBand project, for instance.

In this latest version of GarageBand you can “turn off grid snapping to get finer control over region and note editing.” A feedback issue has also been resolved.

GarageBand costs $5 in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Good news for BioShock fans: the latest installment of the hit game will be available on the Mac this summer. Aspyr Media has confirmed that BioShock Infinite will be hitting OS X in a couple of months. A specific release date has not been given at this time. The PC and console version will ship on March 26th.

Looking for an alternative to Google Reader? The might I suggest Skimr, a rather minimal web app which will let you read your feeds right there in the browser. It shows your feeds in a big, bright and beautiful single-column list, and when you open a feed it shows you the articles in a similarly cruft-free view.

It’s just about perfect, as long as you don’t have more than a few feeds.

Wish you could access your computer located a thousand miles away?

Now you can.

Jump Desktop is your solution to staying connected to all of your devices while your out on the road, in a plane, or simply down the street. And you can get it simply – and inexpensively – right here courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals for 50% off the regular price: only $15!

A couple of days ago I showed you two handy jailbreak tweaks for Notification Center. “Compose” and “Kamera” give quick access to Mail, Messages, and the iPhone’s cameras. Along with tweaks like NCSettings, there’s a lot you can do enhance Notification Center on a jailbroken iOS device.

A Cydia tweak called “Tap to Widgets” is one of the most useful Notification Center tools I’ve seen for jailbreakers.

A joint venture company between Philips and Sony called Intertrust, has decided to file a patent infringement suit against Apple, asserting that 15 of the company’s patents have been violated.

Intertrust’s patents cover a range of devices and services for digital restrictions management (DRM) to protect intellectual property.

If Apple sold an iPhone 5 dock designed to work alongside the iMac, then the OCDock would probably be it. Born on Kickstarter and provided by the fine folks at BiteMyApple.co, this device fixes to the base of your iMac or Apple Thunderbolt Display and provides you with a beautiful built-in dock that looks like it was always a part of your machine.

The OCDock has a paper-thin wire that runs under the base of your iMac’s stand, so it looks like it’s completely integrated. It also has a spring-loaded base that moves up and down, so it will even accommodate your iPhone in a case — providing the case isn’t too thick.

Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.

One of our biggest hopes for iOS 7 is that it will come with a huge update on UI. iOS is starting to look a bit old and everyone’s tired of the skeuomorphic features. It needs some innovative minimalist touches from Jony Ive.

Mohamed Kerroudj has created his own vision for what the iPhone’s Lockscreen should look like. The linen backgrounds have been replaced by flat white surfaces, but what’s better is you can actually respond to message right from Notification Center, or trash them, or schedule a date in your Calendar, or toggle your Wifi. It’d be great.

Take a look:

So, there you are, typing a long note on your iPhone or iPad, when you suddenly realize that you need–gasp–a special symbol or accented character. Perhaps you want to use the £ (British pound) symbol, or the é symbol when sending an email to a business associate or family member.

No, you don’t have to use the Emoji keyboard (unless you want a copyright (©) symbol), but there is a bit of a trick to it. Here’s how.

Tap Tap See is a camera app for blind people. Sure, any partially or non-sighted person could just snap bad, out-of-focus pictures of their shoes, or of the backs of their friends heads, with any camera app. But only Tap Tap See will then say to them, out loud, “Shoes,” or “Head.”

You see, Tap Tap See is like a sighted assistant that never grow tired of you asking “what’s that?”

WWDC 2012 sold out in under two hours last year. It was insane. A lot of people on the West Coast didn’t even get a chance to buy a ticket because Apple announced tickets were available at 5am.

Everyone who’s really wanting to go to WWDC this year is probably looking for the best method to alert them on tickets, so Oisin Prendiville has created a service that will call you as soon as tickets are available.

Wacom has announced a new baby Cintiq graphics tablet. The new 13-inch model joins the plus-sized 22 and 24-inchers in the lineup, and will let travelling designers and artists work on the go.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets have been some of the best competition to the iPad, mostly because they’re cheap but come with good software. It seems like Amazon would sell the Kindle for as cheap as possible if it meant taking a slice of Apple’s pie.

Earlier this morning, a rumor was floated by TechCrunch that Amazon is making a $99 tablet to compete with the iPad mini. It sounded crazy at the time because the Kindle Fire is already $130 cheaper than the iPad mini. Turns out that the rumor was too good to be true and Amazon’s already shot it down.

iOS 6.1 had not one, but two security exploits that allowed an attacker to bypass an iPhone’s lockscreen to gain access to a users’ data. Apple finally patched up those two holes yesterday with the iOS 6.1.3 update, yet the new version of iOS contains another passcode security flaw.

Using the iPhone’s Control feature, attackers can still bypass your lockscreen. The good news is that the new lockscreen exploit only works on iPhone 4 units right now.

Ex-Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, hasn’t been working at Motorola for even a month yet, but he’s already dropping hints on what Motorola’s next flagship smartphone might be like.

Earlier this week, Guy Kawasaki hinted on his Google+ page that Motorola’s next phone will have customizable hardware options.

Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.