STM has just busted out a whole new range of tech-carrying bags, from small purse-a-likes to hefty schlep-it-all backpacks. But the one I fancy most out of the new lineup is the Velo 2, and not just because it sounds like you’re meant to use it while riding a bike.
My iPhone is magical. It can do all kinds of crazy stuff to help me with dates, like finding the best sushi place, directions to a park, and nearby events.
The problem with my iPhone being so damn fantastic is that a lot of times on dates I’m too engrossed with what’s happening in the digital world, that it distracts me from the real life gorgeous woman sitting across the table from me.
I don’t know how many times it’s happened that I’ll be sitting in a restaurant and take out my iPhone because I’m bored. It’s become a nervous tick. I’ll chuckle at something and say, “Holy shit, did you see this hilarious Vine that Matt just posted?” And then she rolls her eyes at me, and I apologize, and the mood is destroyed with no hope of me ever getting any action or advancing the relationship further.
I’m not alone, right? I’m sure a lot of our readers have some amazing horror stories of using their iPhones on dates, and we’d love to hear them. Come over to the Cult of Mac Forums and tell us all about the worst, or best, experiences you’ve had when your iPhone has gotten mixed up in your love life.
Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and post your story.
Pinbook is an excellent iOS client for the excellent paid anti-social bookmarking service Pinboard. Imagine if De.licio.us had never been sold to Yahoo and had instead started charging money to keep your bookmarks tagged and organized online. Further, imagine that the developer kept a Twitter stream that read something like the crotchety ramblings of your drunken (and outspoken) uncle. That service would be Pinboard.
The (non-affiliated) Pinbook client has just been updated to v1.3, and with the update come some fantastic new features. Let’s take a look:
Can an iPad really replace a “proper” computer? Can a ten-inch, 128GB tablet do the work of an eleven-inch 128GB MacBook Air? The answer is yes. Kinda. If your work involves having two windows sitting permanently open side-by-side, then the iPad might not be for you (although you might consider whether you need both windows open together).
For most other regular workaday work type work, though. the iPad is ideal. And here’s our guide to replacing your Mac with an iPad. Specifically a Retina iPad, but you might even manage with a mini.
This day was bound to come sooner or later, and finally, it has arrived. You no longer have to pull out your iPhone when you’re at work if you want to check your Instagram feed to see all your friend’s latest pictures. You can do it all on the web.
When you go to your Instagram.com page and sign in you’ll now see all the photos that would appear in your stream like it would if you were using a smartphone.
Apple has today introduced a new featured section to the U.S. iTunes Store called “Breakout Books,” which offers a hand-picked collection of self-published iBooks from emerging talents. New books are added “as the begin taking off,” according to the Cupertino company, helping you quickly discover your next great read.
What could be less creepy than secretly snapping close-up pictures of people without their knowledge? Nothing, that’s what. Well, not unless you do it whilst dressed as a clown I guess.
The MirrorCase is a hefty box that hangs off the back of your iPhone and uses an optical-grade mirror to let you shoot pictures at right angles to the screen.
It’s taken nearly five months, but Mophie has finally announced its battery case for the iPhone 5. The Mophie Juice Pack Helium for iPhone 5 contains a 1500mAh battery in a case that’s 13% slimmer than its predecessor. The pack promises to give six to seven more hours of battery life to the iPhone 5 in normal use cases. The Juice Pack Helium costs $80 while supplies last, and shipments start going out on Valentine’s Day.
Fact: If we keep consuming magnets at the current rate, the world’s magnet mines will run empty by the end of December this year. And yet this ecological disaster waiting to happen hasn’t stopped the likes of Tim Angel and his case company ZooGue from exploiting these “blood magnets” for his own ends.
The latest example is the Prodigy case, a fat, padded folio with an adjustable stand.
If you took the plunge and jailbroke your iPhone yesterday, you may have noticed that the Weather app in iOS doesn’t really work anymore. Like, at all. When you try to open the app on iPhone it just crashes, and then crashes some more.
Evad3rs figured out that the jailbreak screws up some files like com.apple.mobile.installation.plist. It’s not a big deal, and every jailbreak has its little quirks, but if you can’t wait for evad3rs to push their fix to Cydia you can fix the problem on your own manually.
Here’s how to do it:
You probably made a lot of New Years resolutions to get off your butt and work out. You probably said you were gonna work out five times a day. Maybe more. Maybe you said you’re going to do one of those cool juice diet cleanses with a side of anorexia.
For those of us who made all these exercise goals, but are still binging on cheeseburgers, there’s an amazing — if not extreme — FitBit hack that can help. With just a FitBit activity tracker and a Belkin WeMo internet-controlled power outlet, you can set your daily activity goal, and if you don’t reach it, the system cuts power to everything plugged into your Belkin Wemo to give you some extra motivation to go jogging.
Amazon prides itself on offering affordable Android tablets, and so it likes to point that out whenever it gets the opportunity to do so. Usually this means taking a swipe at more expensive devices, and it’s Apple’s iPad that’s on the receiving end again in the company’s new commercial.
Focusing on the high-resolution displays in both devices, Amazon suggests that “you may not be able to tell the difference” between them… until you look at the price tags.
It won’t — unlike a boat — float, but Braven’s new BRV-1 All Weather Speaker will survive squally showers and poolside splashes with aplomb. It’s a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker, and it looks ideal for taking anywhere this summer.
iPod socks are so passé. So passé, in fact, that Apple doesn’t even sell them anymore. The new hotness? These sleeveless $13.75 iPod hoodies, just like Rocky Balboa might wear during an inspiring montage filmed in the post-apocalyptic wreck of mid-70s Philadelphia. You’re welcome.
If you run a Mac server, check your Mac App Store updates: OS X Server 2.2.1 has arrived, bringing a panoply of new features and bug fixes.
Headlining is a new feature called Caching Server, which Apple claims will speed up Mac App Store downloads. Although the exact mechanism isn’t stated, it’s easy to imagine that what will happen is if one Mac connected to the server downloads an update, it’ll be cached locally for other Macs to download instantly.
There’s also a monitoring service for Time Machine, telling admins which Macs have backed themselves up and when. Wiki Server support for Retina MacBook Pros and a new Centralized Certificate Management interface are also new.
You can download OS X Server for any Mac running Mountain Lion at the link below.
Source: iTunes
This may be a first: The iOS game Can Knockdown 2 is coming to arcades as a fully-sized, coin-operated console — complete with a massive, 42-inch touchscreen.
The game — developed by masters-of-3D Infinite Dreams — is a hot item at the App Store, racking up over 11 million downloads, according to its developer.
If you don’t want to wait for the game to hit the arcades, it’s a buck at the App Store. Or try its predecessor, Can Knockdown, for free.
There are plenty of tangle-wrangling, clutter-cutting, cable-tidying solutions out there, but none of them looks as delicious as this one: the Cord Taco.
The official WordPress app for iOS has been updated to introduce a number of new features, including push notifications for “everything happening on your blog.” The company has also improved the way in which you manage comments, allowing you to view, moderate, and edit them from one screen.
Back in 1997, Michael Dell famously said that if he were Apple, he’d “shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Now, Dell’s taking at least part of his own advice, having worked out a deal fifteen years later with Microsoft and Silver Lake Partners to buy back his company from shareholders and go private again.
Don’t get too excited, though. It’s not official yet.
There are seventeen rare earth elements in the periodic table: fifteen lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium. About nine of those elements go into every iPhone sold… and if China were suddenly to disappear from a map tomorrow, Apple would lose about 90% of those elements.
Those nine rare-earth elements are used in all sorts of things to make your iPhone, including providing the LCD display, help polish the glass, build the speakers, make the phone circuitry and even allow your iPhone to vibrate on silent mode. But they are also an environmental nightmare to actually claw out of the earth, which is why China — which doesn’t care much about such issues — has a stranglehold on them.
You know what surprised me last week? That the iPad mini is almost as capable a work computer as my Retina iPad. The screen isn’t quite as readable, and you have to wait for Safari to reload pages and for apps to cold boot more often thanks to the lack of RAM, but as a machine to write on, it works amazingly well.
Which is why Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard for the Mini is a very welcome little accessory.
Yesterday, we spent some time with Terminal commands that tweak the Finder in different ways. Today, we’ll look at some commands you can issue in the Terminal to mess around with the user interface. Let’s get started.
The new 128GB iPad with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. The device is priced from $799, and it’s currently shipping in 1-3 business days. You’ll also be able to find it in your local Apple retail store.
We told you about Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, the new hack-n-loot game from American McGee’s Spicy Horse Studios that got greenlit on Steam just a while back. The game has now hit its Kickstarter goal of 200,000, so the team has posted some news about its plans for the game in the coming months.
The highly anticipated Evasion jailbreak was released earlier today for all iOS 6 devices, including the iPhone 5. The release saw incredible success with over 100,000 downloads in the first 10 minutes of availability. As we said in our official guide to jailbreaking with Evasi0n, this really is one of the smoothest jailbreaks of all time.
But every jailbreak has its initial quirks, and the main issue with Evasi0n is how it affects Apple’s stock Weather app in iOS 6. On the iPhone, the app instantly crashes. However, the iPad is a different story. Apparently Apple has been hiding a Weather app in the iPad this whole time, and Evasi0n reveals it.