Cult of Mac

Battery life in the iPhone age, right? It’s a conundrum we’ve all had to adjust our behaviors for. Before the iPhone, I can remember going days, maybe even a week or so in between battery charges. The advent of an iPhone in my life brought with it a new behavior – charging it every night. I use my iPhone for almost everything these days, including getting around town, communicating with loved ones, and checking email while out and about, so it makes sense that the battery drains quickly.

There are a few third-party apps out there that keep track of your battery usage for you. Turns out, though, if you just want a quick looksee at how much life you have left in your iPhone or iPad’s battery, you can look in the iOS Settings app itself.

Even though the iPad mini and iPad 4 have been on the market for over 5 months, Apple hasn’t offered any refurbished models until now.

The Online Apple Store just added refurbished iPad Minis and 4th-gen iPads to its catalog, so if you’ve been waiting to get a better deal, this is your chance.

The photograph at the top is from the announcement of the new Pope, Benedict XVI back in 2005; the photo at the bottom is from the announcement of Pope Francis yesterday. Says everything that needs to be said about how Apple has changed the world, don’t you think?

Via: Soff.es
Photo: Michael Sohn/AP

The #1 rule about owning an iPad: don’t use it to take pictures or videos in public. I don’t care if you’re freaking Spike Lee. You’re going to look silly.

Google doesn’t care about none of that though. They’ve just released YouTube Capture for iPad, so you can shoot videos with your giant iPad and upload them straight to YouTube.

It’s coming.

At 7:30PM Eastern tonight at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Samsung is expected to unveil their newest flagship phone, the Galaxy SIV. This is going to be a heck of an event: not only is Samsung about to unveil the most important Android phone out there, but the Galaxy SIV is going to be the device most likely to challenge the iPhone 5 as the most popular smartphone out there. Apple knows this, and they’re clearly worried enough to be denouncing the Galaxy SIV before it’s even official.

In short, whether you love Android or you love Apple, this is a device you’re going to want to know all about, which is why we’ll be at Samsung’s event today, live-blogging the announcement from the scene.

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!

Repix is a universal app for editing your pictures. Stop me if you’ve heard that before. But even if you were to just on level of polish alone, Repix is already way above the competition. And if we take a look at what it does to your photos, we’ll see that the developer, Sumoing, has a potentially huge hit on its hands.

There are a ton of ways to stream TV shows to your iPhone and iPad, but CBS is ready to give you another. CBS just launched their new app that will let you stream some of their most popular shows, right to your iPad or iPhone, for free.

Fans of the great B&W-shooting iPhone app Hueless will be happy about the launch of Huemore, a color version of the app from the same developer, Curious Satellite. Huemore takes the simplified yet powerful, pared-down interface of its older brother and turns the color back up.

You know how much you hate table drummers and air-scratchers (those morons who tilt their head to hold their air-headphones to their ears while spinning an imaginary vinyl record with their fingers and saying “wika-wika-wik” as they do it)? Well, don’t ever let one of them near Urbanears new Slussen. It’s like giving crack to a baby… Or something.

Bill Karas isn’t your typical biker. Yes, he’s got the type of facial hair that would make ZZ Top proud. He’s even got his own custom shop where he can build you anything your bike or hot rod needs.

But behind all the facial hair, metal music, and hot rod loving exterior, Bill Karas and his crew at Karas Kustoms have found something far more exciting and lucrative than building hotrods: making iPhone cases.

How does a group of bikers go from building custom steering columns to iPhone cases? It was pretty much a compete accident, but it starts with a pen and Kickstarter.

Alfred 2 makes its debut today, delivering a whole host of improvements and new features to the best launcher utility available on the Mac. Users can now enjoy an app completely rebuilt from the ground up to introduce things like Workflows, the ability to apply new themes, and improved search.

Google has separated the mapping and commerce unit headed up by executive Jeff Huber in a “two-part management shift” that also saw Android chief Andy Rubin leave his position on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reports. Huber will now join the Google X unit run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Our fearless commander-in-chief Leander Kahney is a strange cuckoo. He is, of course, a dashing and famous technology journalist par example, while his family is inexplicably a bunch of Luddites.

So check out what happened when Leander tried to coach someone in his family how to set up an extra Airport Extreme base station over the phone. No matter how many times he explained how to do it, it wouldn’t work… so Leander drove over to see what the problem was. This is what he saw.

What’s the most ridiculous tech support problem you’ve had to solve for a family member? Let us know in the comments.

Okay, this is interesting: Apple has published a patent for a Smart Cover with a battery inside, that would wirelessly charge an iPad when it was connected to it or used as a stand, and could also potentially wirelessly charge, say, an iPhone when rested on top of an iPad.

Rovio and DreamWorks Pictures have today launched The Croods, a new mobile game based on the upcoming motion picture. The free title throws you back into the Stone Age for a “pre-hysterical” adventure in which you’ll have to hunt and gather through colorful landscapes in a bid to survive.

This photograph of a Foxconn line worker working on what appears to be a yellow iPhone 5 is doing the rounds, with the suggestion being that Apple slipped up and accidentally leaked an upcoming colored iPhone on their System Reliability page.

I have no idea if Apple will colorize the iPhone 5S, but I can comfortably say that Apple’s not that stupid, and isn’t going to leak a photo of an upcoming product on their own website. That’s not a urine yellow iPhone 5S: it’s an iPhone 5 with a yellow protective coating to keep the bezel from being scraped or chipped during manufacturing.

Apple’s latest iMac can’t be mounted to a wall like its predecessor can, at least not if you buy the regular version. However, the Cupertino company has today updated its online store to add new iMacs that come with a built-in VESA mount adapter for an additional $40 fee. The feature is available on both the 21.5- and the 27-inch models.

BlackBerry has today announced that it is extending its gold standard security service that provides complete separation of work and personal data on your mobile devices to Android and iOS.

Called Secure Work Space and managed through BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, the service includes secured client apps for email, calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, and more to allow you to have one device for both work and personal use without compromising security.

Remember the days pre-OS X, when you could hit the Spacebar on your keyboard as your Mac started up, giving you access to the Extensions Manager? Man, I surely do not miss those days. Startup items are now called Login Items, and they just happen, right?

OS X really doesn’t give us much choice in how these apps and features that we blissfully add to our Macs launch on startup, though, does it. If you want to have some control over the Login Items, check out this free little app, Exhaust.

After more than 14 months of watching the clock in tense anticipation, today I finally downloaded Super Stickman Golf 2, the sequel to the fantastic physics puzzler/golf game Super Stickman Golf.

If you are a fan of the original, you’re likely hitting the App Store link right now. If not, read on.

You may have figured that the rhythm game genre was finished, what with nary a Rockband, Tap Tap Revenge, or Guitar Hero game to grace the App Store in recent months.

You’d have figured wrong, at least as far as the devs behind updated iOS game, Duck & Roll, are concerned. WildFactor released Duck and Roll last November at a premium price. We can only assume that after several price drops and price increases, they weren’t finding much success.

Luckily, free games can attract an audience. Even more luckily, this one is pretty darn fun.

Goodbye Google Reader, we hardly knew ye.

In an official post at the Google Reader blog and the Google blog, the search giant has announced today that it will retire Google Reader, a fantastic RSS service in its own right, shutting it down on July 1, 2013.

Whenever rumors about a new product from Apple begin to pop up, so do the concept drawings, 3D renders, and mockups. The latest rumored Apple device to get the mockup treatment has been the iWatch, Apple’s supposed foray into wearable computing.

Already, I’ve seen no less than half a dozen concepts illustrating what people think the iWatch might look like. Some play heavily off of the design of iOS, others take design influences from the iPhone and iPad, and others yet attempt to emulate the 6th generation iPod nano, the closest thing that Apple has made to a watch so far. While all of these designs take influence from what Apple has already created, none of them take into consideration the external influences that shape the way Apple designs their own products.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, has called out Android multiple times recently. It’s only been a few days since Schiller warned Android users to “stay safe out there,” and now he’s gone on the offensive in a brief interview with The Wall Street Journal.

None of Schiller’s comments are particularly surprising, as Apple executives (Schiller included) frequently make jabs at the competition from the stage of a new product keynote.