Cult of Mac

Browsers on iOS run with a major disadvantage to Mobile Safari. Not only are they obliged to use Apple’s built-in WebKit rendering engine, but they have to use a slower version of Apple’s speedy Nitro JavaScript engine. The result? If you use any third-party browser on your iPhone or iPad, it will run slower than Safari… at least without a jailbreak.

It’s unfair, but various companies have still made excellent browsers for iOS, including Google Chrome and Opera. Mozilla, though, will not follow these company’s lead, having said at this weekend’s SXSW conference in Austin that Firefox won’t be coming to iOS any time soon.

As the story goes, before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye, Jonny Ive came to him with a prototype for a tablet based on some new touchscreen technology he was working on. Steve Jobs took one look at it, and said it was the future, but “let’s make a phone with it first.” And that’s how the iPhone was born.

Now, an early prototype of a very iPad-ish iPhone prototype from 2005 has turned up, and it’s a marvelous beast, filled with USB, Ethernet and even serial ports.

Anyglove is a gel which turns any glove into a touch-screen-friendly glove. Buy a bottle, drip-drip-drip some drops onto the fingers and thumbs of your favorite gloves and voila! (or “viola!” or “walla!” as they say in internet forums) you can now operate a capacitive screen.

Samsung smartphones outsold those from rivals Apple, Nokia, and Lenovo in China throughout 2012, allowing the Korean company to claim the biggest share of the Chinese smartphone market, according to the latest report from Strategy Analytics.

Nokia had claimed the top spot in 2011, but the Finnish firm has struggled to compete with Samsung’s Galaxy devices this time around, and couldn’t even make its way into the top five.

For some reason probably having to do with design or layout, Apple’s spreadsheet program, Numbers, can split large tables in some less-than-ideal ways when printing. They can be split up, down, and across multiple pages.

If you want to print it all on one page, however, there’s another way: use Preview. Here’s how.

Apple works hard to ensure that inappropriate content doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, and it has strict ratings and approval processes for content distributed through the App Store, the iBookstore, and the iTunes Store. But it would seem the Cupertino company isn’t quite as careful with its social media accounts.

On Sunday night, Apple’s official iBookstore account on Twitter retweeted a lewd message that would certainly get a 17+ rating from the company.

EA has updated The Simpsons: Tapped Out to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on Sunday, March 17. Available on both Android and iOS, the update brings a new storyline, new characters, and new buildings that deliver a taste of Ireland to Springfield.

Noise-cancelling headphones are suddenly all the rage. It certainly seems as if every big player in the audio game has at least one model that features active noise-canceling, usually accompanied by other luxury features — and with a corresponding luxury pricetag. Even manufacturers who’ve only recently begun making cans, like Logitech UE and Klipsch, prominently feature active noise-canceling in their model lineups.

It may even seem as if the technology has been added to some models simply because it’s become the feature du jour — an impression strengthened by the fact that not all noise canceling is the same. Not even remotely.

None of the headphones in our showdown — the Klipsch Mode M40 ($350), the Logitech UE 6000 ($200) or the Monster Inspiration ANC ($300), the noise-canceling version of the regular, passive Inspiration model we reviewed last year — exhibits the powerful noise-canceling ability that can almost completely drown out noise, like that of the Bose QuietComfort 15. Nor do they sit on the next level down, with NC performance similar to, say, Audio Technica’s ATH-ANC7b (although one here comes close).

An unpleasant phone call with AT&T yesterday highlighted for me what I consider to be the biggest unsolved problem in mobility: using a smartphone in a foreign country.

Phone calls are expensive. Mobile broadband is either expensive, hard to find or both. And even WiFi can suck.

According to the UN’s World Health Organization, the human race takes more than 900 million trips to countries other than their own each year. It’s a huge problem affecting a very large number of people.

I’m a digital nomad and I live abroad. In the past nine months, I’ve lived in Greece, Turkey, Kenya and Spain. Believe me: Getting connected abroad is harder, more expensive and less satisfying than it should be. 

Your Mac is an incredibly capable device – one that, when armed with the right apps, can take your productivity to a whole new level. This Cult of Mac Deals offer will help you reach new heights with your Mac as we’re hooking you up with 10 elite Mac apps in The Spring 2013 Mac Bundle. These apps are valued at over $390 – and you can get them here for only $50 for a limited time!

Apple was caught last year selling Apple Certified refurbished hardware on eBay using the pseudonym Refurbished-Outlet. Allegedly.

The prices and details of these products were generally the same as refurbished products sold on the apple.com site. The products come with a one-year warranty and mobile devices contain a new battery.

But this week it emerged that Apple is lowering the prices on eBay, sometimes by quite a bit. For example, Apple normally charges $999 for a refurbed MacBook Air with 128 GB. But that same system with the same Apple inspection and one-year warranty went on sale in the eBay store for $899. Prices on other hardware products were slashed similarly.

(In addition, we learned, the company as been apparently working with “power sellers” on eBay to sell Apple hardware. For example, until they ran out of the 500 units put up for sale of 13-inch MacBook Pros selling for $999. These are new devices, not refurbished, and Apple is probably using the “channel” to clear out inventory.)

It seems to me that Apple is working behind the scenes to experiment with different models for selling refurbished and excess inventory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple was also trying other channels for doing the same thing that we don’t know about. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if refurbished gadgets vanished from the Apple site altogether, and for those items to be sold in the darker alleys of the Internet (like eBay) exclusively instead.

But I think there’s a ginormous opportunity here for embracing “used” in a big way — and it’s something only Apple could pull off. 

This week’s must-have apps roundup features three awesome new games that’ll keep you entertained this weekend, plus three new apps that’ll transform your photographs and help you explore the world around you. We have the latest releases from Sega and Google, the awesome 8 Ball Pool from Miniclip, and more.

Sometimes, when Friday rolls around, it’s all we can do to relax. I like to play games on my iPhone and iPad to chill a bit at the end of a long work week. Today, I spent some time with brain-teasing puzzle game, Sporos. It’s got a gentle vibe, calming electronica music, and a ton of challenging puzzles to keep your brain meats engaged and your anxiety level low. I’m enjoying it, and you just might, too.

In case you’ve missed it, there are currently two cases being heard by US District Judge Lucy Koh in the Apple v Samsung patent legal struggle. The first one, Apple won a $1.05 billion verdict last fall against Samsung, which Judge Koh pulled about $450 million off of, and then ordered a new damages trial. She also rejected Apple’s request for a permanent sales ban. Apple appealed, but we’re waiting for a ruling till September, most likely.

Well, you know a meme is winding down in “cool factor” when developers start creating videos like this one. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the following video of iOS development objects and assets do the Harlem Shake, like any number of thousands of videos on YouTube.

There are a lot of silly apps out there that want to send you notifications whenever someone you know is nearby, or if you’re in the area of something cool.

There’s a new app for iPhone though called Now, that wants to take a different approach to local discover: it’s only going to alert you when your friends are doing really cool stuff nearby.

It seems like Angry Birds has been out forever. It’s probably one of the first iOS games that you decided to bust out your credit card for, and it was totally worth it, right? Well if you only had the patience to wait three years, then you could have scooped up Angry Birds for free.

Under no circumstance does Apple want to part with its company secrets. Even when it’s been ordered to do so by a U.S. Judge.

Apple must show in detail how it’s complying with a court order to turn over evidence related to its privacy lawsuit, because U.S. Judge Grewal says he can no longer rely on what Apple tells him in the case.

The Philips Hue LED lightbulbs were one of our favorite new gadgets of 2012. You can use your iPhone to turn the bulbs on, change colors, and create different themes.

Utilizing the power of Philips Hue, an iOS developer has made a crazy new app called Ambify which changes the color of your bulbs in tune with the music you’re listening to. It’s either the most fun thing to happen to your music since iTunes Visualizer, or the best way to self-induce a seizure. Or both.

There’s been a lot of noise lately surrounding smartphone unlocking. On October 28, 2012, the Library of Congress said it was going to be illegal to unlock your smartphone starting on January 26, 2013.

Since then, Obama has stepped in and said that’s totally not fair. And then a few legislators have brought up bills to make sure people can unlock their smartphones without facing criminal charges. Now AT&T says it wants to be perfectly clear that they don’t really want you to go to jail for unlocking your smartphone.

This review is slightly unusual: We already published a review of the same device a couple of weeks ago: the Logitech Easy-Switch keyboard. I liked the look of it so much that — on Killian’s recommendation — I went out and bought one of my own. Or rather, I bought one, returned one and searched the internet high and low for another one.

So why the “duplicate” review? Because I use a keyboard in a different way than Killian. Where he sits at the dining room table surrounded by iDevices and Macs, I work not only in different rooms but in bars (cafes), on buses, wherever I might be. So I figured I’d write a very different review.

Interested?

It’s no secret that the best place to buy a MacBook or iMac is from the online Apple Store’s refurbished section. You get the same products, with the same warranty, for a few hundred bucks cheaper than buying it brand new.

But what you probably didn’t know is that Apple has a secret eBay store which sells the same refurbished items you can get from the online Apple Store, except they’re even cheaper.

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Last week we had a lot of fun coming up with our vision for the next Mac operating system, OS X Lion-O. We then turned to our amazing readers and asked you guys to dream up the the perfect mascot for the next version of OS X.

We had a ton of readers submit their entries to our new Flickr Group, and the results were amazing. We’ve selected five winners who will get a free copy of Photoshop Touch for iPhone or iPad, along with our grand prize winner, who will get a free copy of OS X 10.9 when it comes out.

Here are the best mascot ideas for OS X 10.9:

Did you know you can search your iPhone’s notes using Siri? Neither did I. But according to Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger, you can not only get Siri to flip through your notes for you, you can even find notes from a particular day.