From Saturday, January 26, you’ll have to ask your carrier to unlock your smartphone if you wish to use it on another network. It will become illegal to do so yourself using unauthorized unlocking methods — even if your contract has run its course and you no longer have a commitment with the original provider.
Wow, talk about a stealth release. First released in 1998, Half-Life has never been available on OS X through Steam for Mac, even though every other Valve game — including Half-Life 2 and its episodic sequels — have. Sometime in the last few hours, though, Valve quietly released Half-Life for Mac on Steam… and still hasn’t apparently officially announced it.
By Andy Patrizio
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Guitarists have long had the option of a wallet-sized amp with a headphone plug, so they can plug in their guitar and no one else hears them play. But what if you are stuck on a six-hour plane ride? You can’t take a nail clipper on the plane these days, let alone a guitar.
Well, if the TSA doesn’t confiscate your iPad, yo uczn use MoForte’s Power Chord, an app that turns your tablet into a guitar. All you need to do is strum the screen. You can strum or pick strings, adjust the effects and even shake your iPad like using a whammy bar to channel your inner Hendrix. You can even do string scraping, where you simulate the effect of running a guitar pick down the string for that descending screech sound.
Griffin has finally admitted to itself that no matter how good an iPad or MacBook case it makes, you are – eventually – going to toss it away. So the Paper Nomad is designed to decompose gracefully, kind of like the opposite of every aging Hollywood star, ever.
Google Currents 2.0, the latest edition of Google’s magazine-like news reader, has today arrived on iOS — just over a month after it launched on Android. The update brings a whole host of new features and improvements, including the edition sidebar, fast scan, and breaking stories ranked by Google News.
By Andy Patrizio
ANAHEIM, Calif. – If it’s late January in Anaheim, that means one thing: the North American Music Merchant’s (NAMM) convention turning the area around Disneyland into an even bigger madhouse. NAMM is for musicians what CES is for consumer electronics junkies; just a lot more hair and tattoos. More than 90,000 people will descend on this modestly-sized convention center best suited to hold about 10,000 max.
NAMM has run continuously since 1901, making it one of the oldest trade shows in the country. For the last 35 years it has come to Anaheim and has clearly outgrown the modest convention center, but NAMM is reluctant to leave.
Cyclemeter, long my favorite iPhone app for tracking and recording my rides using GPS, has been updated to support the iPad. This makes it — as far as I know anyway — the only app which will natively turn your iPad mini into a dash-mounted in-flight computer for your bike.
The official YouTube Capture for iPhone and iPod touch has today been updated to introduce support for 1080p video uploading — a feature which many felt should have been included from day one. Prior to this update, which also promises improvements to audio sync and upload speeds, users were limited to uploads in 720p resolution.
Samsung has today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, which slightly exceed the estimations that were set by the Korean company earlier this month. It recorded an operating profit of 8.84 trillion won (approx. $8.27 billion) during the three-month period, on 56.06 trillion won (approx. $54.45 billion) in revenue. That’s a 10% increase in profit over the previous quarter, and a whopping 89.3% increase in profit over the fourth quarter of 2011.
We showed you a handful of fantastic, instant keyboard shortcuts to shut down, reboot, or sleep your Mac, but an even safer way is to bring up the Power button dialog box that happens when you hit the, well, Power button on your Mac. That’s the one in the upper right corner of the keyboard on most modern Macs, while some older Macs have it as a separate button integrated into the body of the Mac itself.
Either way, hit that Power button and then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to activate the different options in the dialog.
You should probably check if your cash is still in your wallet… ’cause according to Apple’s recent earnings call, they just made all the money. We put some perspective on just how huge Apple’s Q1 cash hoard was on our all-new CultCast, then expertly deconstruct Tim Cook’s cryptic words about new and unannounced products.
But wait, there’s more! From iOS 7, to bigger-screen iPhones, to our favorite Mac apps, we answer your Facebook questions in our newest segment, CultCast Q&A.
Get a fun weekly dose of all things Apple! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
Vine is a new, free toy from Twitter. It replaces text with video, but only six seconds of it at a time, shot instant-by-instant. And it’s much cooler than I expected it to be.
Adobe has been making their “creative suite” for years, and while it is robust on so many levels, it is also daunting on just as many. There’s so much to learn and wrapping your head around each component is key in order to get the most out of each of them. Our latest Cult of Mac Deals offer will give you a chance to get the most out of Adobe Creative Suite 6 so that you can get more results from your creative work.
The Adobe CS6 Training Bundle offers over $891 worth of education on Adobe Creative Suite 6 – with over 1000 lessons making up over 100 hours of practical training – and Cult of Mac Deals has it available for only $99 for a limited time!
Apple has just released its annual Supplier Responsibility Report, a document that sheds light on the Cupertino-based tech company’s findings about its suppliers’ business practices in 2012. It takes into account excessive work hours, underage labor, and environmental impacts of the manufacturing process, including things like conflict-free minerals.
In the report, the company notes that it is the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association (FLA), and had the group audit Apple’s biggest supplier, Foxconn, finding that the Chinese manufacturing company is on track to meet the recommendations of the FLA this year.
Not all in the report is positive, however.
Apogee is the first name that pops into my head when I think “mobile, Mac-powered music-making studio.” Today, the company has revamped three of their user-friendly recording devices: the One, the Quartet and the Duet, upgrading their capabilities and making them all iPad-compatible.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy was created. (OK, so it wasn’t that far away, but Wisconsin, apparently home at the time of developer Raven Software, is an alien world.) But now this classic first-person shooter is available at the Mac App Store — so you can experience how much fun your PC friends were having a decade ago.
Siri has enjoyed mild success since her debut on the iPhone 4S. She’s not the world’s greatest personal assistant, but she gets the job done most of the time, which is better than a lot of other voice recognition options out there.
Now Amazon is preparing to do battle with Siri thanks to a new digital assistant they just bought. Her name’s IVONA, and we’re pretty sure it’s not the same Ivona from Austin Powers.
Even though Apple has tried to slowly wean itself from being dependent on Google Maps, YouTube, Search and other fun stuff, Google has managed to become one of the top developers for iOS.
In 2012, five of the six most-used apps in the U.S. were made by Google. Facebook just barely beat out Google Maps for the number one spot.
Following Verizon and Apple’s quarterly earnings reports, AT&T has just released their numbers for the last quarter, and the iPhone 5 made it another banner period for Ma Bell: they activated 8.6 million iPhones last quarter, with 16% going to new AT&T customers.
Before his death in 2011, Steve Jobs was the biggest shareholder of Disney stock thanks to the fact that Disney acquired his company, Pixar, in 2006. But before Disney and Pixar merged together, things weren’t always so rosy between Steve and Disney.
Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Bob Iger eventually had a great relationship, but in the early days, Steve Jobs wasn’t afraid to release an atomic bomb of cruelty on Disney. He would even call Bob Iger on Saturdays just tell him that his films sucked.
The first video clip of Ashton Kutcher’s Steve Jobs movie just hit the Internet this morning. We were actually impressed with Kutcher in the preview, which isn’t saying much, but still.
This movie could be slightly better than we are expecting it to be, except according to Steve Wozniak himself, that scene in the preview never actually happened.
Sometimes, it takes a bit for an email to come through on your iPhone via the Mail app. That might be due to the way your iPhone checks mail servers. Here’s a quick way to find out what type of email access your iPhone is doing, and then what kind of fix might be in order.
The Bookcase is a three-dollar pocket database for your book collection, one that takes its role very seriously and might be best suited to people with a professional requirement to manage a large library.
An iOS 6 jailbreak has been in the works since Apple released the iPhone 5 last fall, and it’s taken a long time for hackers to crack the enhanced security measures in Apple’s latest mobile operating system. After many months, the pieces have finally been put together. There is a full jailbreak for Apple’s latest iOS devices, and iOS 6.1 is the key to unlocking it.
While the jailbreak could be released for everyone now, trusted hackers behind past jailbreaks are waiting to see if Apple squashes any of their exploits in the final version of 6.1. If the bugs that form the jailbreak are still working, the iOS 6 jailbreak will be unleashed on the world after 6.1’s release.
You probably don’t give much thought to your chargers – after all, they come bundled with your devices, and Apple’s especially are mostly well-designed (MagSafe 2). But Kanex’s DoubleUp – which I took with me on a recent whistle-stop tour of Las Vegas and San Francisco – is worth a look if you travel a lot, or even if you just want something a little better, and a little more convenient, than Apple’s free option.