Cult of Mac

Here’s a great tweak if you’ve jailbroken: QuickShoot allows you to take quick pictures right from your iOS homescreen just by tapping the app icon. You can’t frame a shot or anything, but it does allow you to quickly (and secretly!) snap a picture of someone without anyone being the wiser: not the subject, not the person looking over your shoulder. And you can even change settings for Flash Mode, Camera Device, and HDR in the settings. Totally rad, and totally free.

Source: Big Boss
Via: Lifehacker

If you’ve been catching our Daily Freebie posts, you’ve no doubt snagged some of the fantastic free apps out there — or been alert enough to snag an amazing deal when this or that killer app goes free for a short time. But there are other tools that help make sure you don’t miss out on all those great free apps. Hubbl is one of those tools and we’ve mentioned it in the past — but now it’s got a cool new trick that we’ve never seen before.

Any of you out there familiar with the Muji CD player? It is/was a cute little box which you’d hang on the wall, press a CD onto and enjoy the tinny sound of tiny speakers spitting high-grade digital files into your ears.

Now you can — like any civilized person — ditch the spinning disk and just enjoy the music. Muji has now launched a Bluetooth speaker that looks a lot like the old CD box.

While the Google Glass may look slightly ridiculous hanging off your face, it’s hard to deny it has some pretty nifty uses. The ability to navigate your way around a new city with directions in the corner of your eye, or record things like concerts and sporting events from your own perspective is pretty cool.

And there’s another feature that could prove incredibly useful. According to New Scientist, Google Glass has the ability to find your friends in a crowded place, such as a shopping mall or a busy bar, based on the clothes they wear.

But there’s a catch.

Remember Blux Camera? Back in October of last year, I described it as “the camera app Rick Deckard would use.” I stand by that, only now Blux has gotten a little remote companion which makes it even more Blade-Runnerier to use.

Enhance!

App Cubby’s popular Launch Center Pro has received its first major update since hitting the App Store last June. In addition to a number of new actions, the version 1.1 update also adds better Text Expander support, a reorganized action composer, and plenty of bug fixes and enhancements.

China Times is reporting this morning that Apple is going to save costs on a budget iPhone for emerging markets by using a 28nm Snapdragon SoC which has Bluetooth, WiFi and 3G all on the same chip, but wouldn’t support LTE.

Interesting theory, but it’s not going to happen.

This week on The CultCast—finally—it’s time to talk iPhone 5S and iPad 5! We’ll tell you why April and August might be bringing you the tasty new iDevices, and if they’ll be drastically different than the models we’ve already got.

Then, is Apple is a innovation lull? Ex-Apple CEO John Scully thinks so. We’ll tell you what we think is really going on.

Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes to download our newest episode, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Show notes up next!

Gorgeous. Etsy shop owner Peter Morris has rejuvenated an old Atari 2600 by turning it into an iPhone speaker dock, replete with 6 equalizer settings, an FM radio and a 3.5mm input jack. It’s one of a kind, but if you get in quick, you can buy it for the pricy-but-still-tempting sum of about $230.

Source: Etsy
Via: TUAW

Oh Lord, the end is clearly, nearly nigh. Why? Because Kickstarter is now hosting a project to make aluminum notebook covers. No, not covers for your notebook computer. Covers for your hardcover paper notebook. The pull quote at the top of the pitch page says it all:

5052 Aluminum-Magnesium Alloy notebook & journal covers to keep your corners and pages straight.

Rovio has taken some time away from Angry Birds and Bad Piggies to focus on its next project, the official game for the upcoming DreamWorks movie The Croods. Believe it or not, it’s not a physics-based puzzle game, and Rovio has released the game’s first trailer to prove it.

We’ve provided a couple of tips to help you prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you don’t want to, from a time-based app called Sleep No More to some Terminal magic that can do something similar. Unfortunately, both solutions are based on time. What if you want to keep your Mac from sleeping while it’s running a specific app, no matter how long it takes?

Free Mac app, Wimoweh, may be your answer. Check it out.

Apple and Samsung are both looking to bring wireless charging to their smartphones this year, following in the footsteps of rivals like Nokia, LG, and HTC. The feature will come to flagship devices, such as the upcoming Galaxy S IV, according to industry sources who have been speaking to DigiTimes.

Have an idea for a mobile app? Getting it developed and into the App Store is not as hard as you think – and this Cult of Mac Deals offer will help you take all of the steps you’ll need to go from idea to app.

This guide will teach you how to identify key features, how to find development and marketing talent, how to make sure your developers meet timelines and budgets, and all of the other essential requirements for getting your app published on the Apple App Store. And for a limited time it’ll do that for just $29.

In-Flight Wi-Fi service, Gogo, released some numbers today on their blog, showing that Apple devices are still the most popular way passengers are accessing the internet via the service while flying above 10,000 feet.

Tablets and smartphones, according to Gogo, make up 67 percent of the devices used to connect to the Wi-Fi service on airplanes. Tablets themselves are the most popular, with 35 percent, closely followed by 33 percent of folks using laptops and 32 percent using smartphones for their mile-high internet surfing sessions.

It gets even more interesting when you break down which tablets and smartphones are being used.

John C Dvorak, Leo Laporte, and a couple of other folks involved in This Week in Tech (TwiT) had a meeting together at the Apple campus at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino this past Monday, and they ended up having an informal battle of the navigation apps in the three cars they were each driving. TWiT CEO Lisa Kentzell and marketing guy Glenn Rubenstein were in one car, using Apple Maps, while Laporte was using Waze, Dvorak using Google Maps.

Dvorak wrote the story up over at PC Magazine, and claims that Apple Maps got the TWiT folks to the Apple campus faster than either Waze, which came in dead last, or Google Maps. We can count on this being the truth of their experience, as anyone of Dvorak’s stature might have a hard time admitting that he lost a race.

The interface designer behind the Auxo app-switcher concept (@Sentry_NC) has come up with another fantastic idea, this time aiming his attention at the Lock Screen of iOS. In this new concept, iPhone and iPad users would be able to swipe over from the right hand side of their device screen, revealing a host of settings that typically require launching the Settings app for.

I sure hope Apple implements something similar.

Frayed charging cables are nasty, and they can shock you. Over the last couple days, there has been a lot of discussion on Reddit about the best solutions to keep Apple’s new Lightning cables from fraying.

Some people go to some crazy lengths to keep their cable’s in tip-top shape. One guy coils the end of his cables with a paperclip. Another redditor actually dips his Lightning cable in Plasti Dip. But my_clock_is_wrong has the best solution of all, grip the cable at the proper spots. It’s fool proof.

Source: Reddit

It’s always nice to be able to split the cost of something with a group of friends, except when it comes time to actually pay up. There’s always one or two people that suck at paying on time, but GroupMe’s got a great new feature for the app to help out with that.

GroupMe just released version 4.1 of their iOS that adds a couple of great new features, including the ability to split a bill with friends.

Dropping your iPhone is a horrific experience. You don’t know if your precious slab of glass and metal is going to shatter or just walk away with a few scratches. If you’re the type that is always dropping your iPhone, you should consider paying $20 for this iPhone 5 tether.

Prepare to riot. Facebook — the social network you obviously spend every single second of every single day upon — is about to change their Newsfeed… and it’ll never be the same again! Up is down! Left is right! Zig is zag! Ahhhhhhh!

Just kidding. It’s not that bad, although those who fear change won’t be fond. The new design is “mobile-inspired” and is basically aimed at making it easier for you to filter the kinds of things your friends are sharing with you, and making them look better and less cluttered when you do.

Even though Apple and Google hate each other now days, that hasn’t stopped Google from making some really great apps for the iPhone. Google’s latest creation just hit the App Store today and it’s focused on local discovery.

Field Trip has previously been an Android-only app, but Google is bringing it to the iPhone today for free. The app is kind of like Google Now. It runs in the background and then automatically alerts you of interesting information in your area based on location data.

Intel and Apple, teaming up to make A-series chips for the iPhone and iPad? That’s what the rumors are saying, with a recent Reuters report going so far as to claim that executives from both companies have actually met to discuss the possibility of the x86 maker pumping out ARM chips custom designed by Apple!

“Intel Once Again Rumored To Be Working On iOS Device Chips With Apple,” read our headline this morning. But would Intel really cash in on its x86 heritage to make ARM chips? And if Apple did switch, would that really be a win for everyone?

The short answer? Yes, Intel would make ARM chips for Apple. But no, it probably wouldn’t be a win for either company. Here’s why.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with Apple Maps in its current iOS 6 incarnation, but many people have. Now that Google Maps is out for iOS, though, there’s an easy way to get around using Apple Maps, using the transit option.

Here’s how.

For the longest time, there were no Lightning docks available for iPhones or iPads, and it looks like Apple will never make one. I have some thoughts on why that might be, but we’ll get to that in a bit. For now, we’re going to take a quick look at the seemingly crappy dock I picked up from Amazon last month. It’s called the “White Wave Lightning Dock Docking Charge Station for Apple iPad Mini/ iPad 4G/ iPhone 5/ iPod Touch 5G/ iPod Nano 7G,” which should give you some idea of the kind of SEO-mad company behind it.