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.

What if you tok Twelve South’s neat Plugbug Mac charger extension and shrunk it down to work with the iPad charger? You’d get Scosche’s CoverCharge, that’s what. Just like the Plugbug, the adapter slides onto its host and adds an extra USB port.

T-Mobile will begin selling the iPhone 5 on April 12th, but the model that they’re selling isn’t exactly like those found on other carriers. T-Mobile’s iPhone 5 is actually a tweaked model A1428 iPhone that Apple sells for AT&T, except it comes with AWS support.

Updating your apps on iOS isn’t hard, but for some reason, I suck at remembering to. There are always about nine update notifications waiting for me in the App Store, and I always think I’ll get around to it in a minute, but never do.

One of the best new reasons to jailbreak though, is an app called Auto App Updater. Like its name says, the app makes it so you never have to think about updating your apps on your iPhone or iPad again.

Okay, this is rad. YouTube user HM231 had no use for his car stereo’s old, crusty audio cassette slot, so what did he do? Hollow it out and mount a 30-pin connector inside it so he could slide in his iPod instead to pump up the jams. Rad!

Via: Reddit

If you own a Retina MacBook Pro, here’s a nice little perk to upgrading to OS X 10.8.3: you’ll get about 20 minutes more battery life per charge.

Here’s another one of those tips that should be blindingly obvious, but isn’t. At least, it wasn’t to me, at first.

If you try to send a photo via iMessage (or text message), you’re limited to one photo at a time. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll wait. No, really–give it a shot.

See? From the Messages app on your iPhone, you only have the option to take a photo or choose an existing one. What if you want to send more than one photo at a time, though?

Portability and ease of use makes the iPad the perfect product for staying connected – whether you are on the move or in the comfort of your bed. At its core, the iPad is essentially the screen portion of a Macbook with touch capabilities. But there hasn’t been a true keyboard that acts like an external keyboard – one that you can use that keeps the iPad the tablet it was meant to be.

Until now, that is.

The Touchfire keyboard is our latest Cult of Mac Deals offer and you can get it for a limited time at the low price of just $50 – with FREE shipping to the US and international countries included!

You know when you unplug your iPhone and your $20 Lightning cable goes slithering to the floor? I hate that, and it used to happen to me all the time in the morning when I set free my phone from its charging cable, and each time it happened, I thought to myself, “there’s gotta be a way to prevent this.”

Well, with the MOS securely attached to my bedside table, now there is.

Harnessing the power of magnets, MOS (Magnetic Organizing System) is a handy little puck that keeps your cables stuck to its surface and ready for use instead of lying listless and tangled on your desk or floor.

The iPad is great for photographers, but the built-in Photos app sucks. You can’t change the viewing order. Making albums and moving photos is a multi-tap pain in the ass, and navigating is confusing even for the experienced user.

That’s where Focus Point comes in. It’s a photo-viewing app that’s been around for a while, but the latest update adds enough new goodies to make it worth a look.

For Apple to really compete with Samsung in terms of global smartphone marketshare, many analysts believe Apple will have to release a cheaper iPhone to appeal to customers in India and China.

As talk of a cheaper iPhone has ramped up over the last few months, Apple is also planning to increase its presence in India by tripling the number of exclusive authorized reseller stores in the country from 65 to 200 by 2015.

There’s no denying that Twitterrific 5 is a beautiful third-party Twitter client for the iPhone and iPad, but the app has been lacking a huge feature until today: push notifications. Now that push has become an expected feature in modern Twitter apps, it was only a matter of time before The Iconfactory added it to their app.

You can get push notifications for new mentions, direct messages, favorites, retweets, and followers. The catch is that only 1,000 Twitterrific users will get access to the feature initially. Availability will be then rolled out gradually to new users.

Hey, T-Mobile is finally an iPhone carrier now! Not only that, they’re a pretty competitive one, offering you an iPhone 5 for just $100 down and $20 a month over 24 months in what the nation’s fourth-largest carrier is calling a “no bullshit” plan. If you buy an iPhone 5 at T-Mobile, you can leave at any time as long as you pay off your device; otherwise, your service is provided month by month.

Sounds pretty great, but how competitive is T-Mobile’s new iPhone plan compared to the competition really? We compared the cheapest T-Mobile iPhone 5 plan you can get against the 24 month cost of getting one from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Cricket, Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk. The result? T-Mobile is one of the cheaper plans around… but it’s not the cheapest.

Tempted as I am by the likes of the amazing Fujifilm X100s, I know that I’ll keep coming back to my iPhone 5 camera thanks to its combo of convenience, quality, connect-ability and apps. But the Sun & Cloud camera has just the right balance of price to quirky novelty to get me interested.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere kicked off the company’s press event in New York City today with an aggressive yet entertaining onslaught against rival carriers. He called for the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to “stop the bullshit” with traditional subsidy models, which T-Mobile has now abandoned in favor of its new “Uncarrier” plans.