Cult of Mac

Believe it or not, Christmas is almost here, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.

Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts that cost less than $30. Yes, that means you are cheap, and — seeing as you still haven’t bought anything despite it being almost Christmas — lazy.

The Mummy from Loop Attachment — the creators of the wonderful Loop wristband for the sixth-generation iPod nano — is a premium silicone case for iPhone 5 that aims to provide your handset with all-around protection while preserving its identity.

It’s designed to leave a lot of your handset on show, so you can admire its sleek and sexy form factor, and its Apple logo, while still providing plenty of protection against scratches, scuffs, and drops.

The case boasts an incredibly lightweight design that provides easy access to all your ports, buttons, and switches. Its special feature is that it allows you to slip a credit card into the back of the case so that you can grab a coffee on your way to work without taking your whole wallet.

The Mummy costs $25, and it’s available in a whole range of colors — ten in total.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

T.G.I. it’s Day 21, and today’s delicious little morsel? The addictive iOS game 10000000.

While Apple fans will argue that Android copied iOS, it’s hard to deny that Apple didn’t take a little bit of inspiration back from from Android, too. Its Notification Center is an almost identical copy of Android’s — that’s easy to see no matter which side of the fence you’re on. In fact, Samsung’s now using this as another reason to sue Apple in South Korea.

Our readers have spoken. The best iOS app of 2012 has been selected. And the winner, by a considerable margin, is: Google Maps. Woot!

Screen protectors are big business, apparently, judging by the number of people I see with the filthy, peeling prophylactics stuck to screens, bubbles pushing through. But they all have one big problem – feel. No matter how fancy they are, those plastic skins will never feel as good as the silky, slippery glass of the naked iPhone screen.

Which is why Seidio will now sell you a tempered glass protector for your iPhone 5.

Apple has set the gold standard for warranty and customer support with its successful AppleCare program, and now Amazon apparently wants in, having filed a trademark for a service that sounds suspiciously like, well, AmazonCare.

Apple’s iOS operating system is great, and I love it. But five years on, there’s certainly some room for improvement all over the place. Take the app switcher, for example: sure, it does its job, but it’s very basic — Apple could a lot more with it. And one developer has proven that with Auxo, the best app switcher ever designed for jailbroken iOS devices.

Auxo doesn’t just look great, displaying live previews of all the apps you have open, but it’s also intuitive and offers lots of innovative new features. It started off as a concept, but after receiving lots of positive feedback, its creator brought it to life. Apple, take note.

Raise your hand if you think spelling and grammar are fun. Raise it up. A little higher. Aha, I see you there. And your friend! Both of you, come closer and listen, because I need to tell you about this unique new iOS game where you win points by spotting spelling mistakes.

The second-generation Nest thermostat has begun reaching Apple retail stores across the United States and Canada just in time for Christmas. Designed by Tony Fadell, a former Apple employee who’s often referred to as the father of the iPod, the Nest thermostat is an intelligent device that learns exactly how warm or how cool you like your home to be at different times during the day. It can also be controlled remotely via your computer or iOS device.

Oh man! The Mac Belt is an amazing combination of flat-out utility and naively wrongheaded design. It is exactly the kind of thing you expect a mad professor to come up with, except this crackpot product is actually out there on Kickstarter.

Here’s a brief description: The Mac Belt is a belt (the kind that holds your pants up) with a giant novelty buckle. And that buckle folds out to make a little bracket for your iPad or iPhone. Yup. An iPad stand that mounts on your junk.

Going to the store at this time of year is an excruciatingly painful affair. We begin our Christmas shopping months early, and anything we need to get in December is bought online. Unfortunately for some, however, not everything they order online actually shows up.

As courier companies struggle to keep up with the surge in packages, it’s not uncommon for items to go missing, or for them to be delivered to the wrong address. But in some cases, shameless delivery drivers think it’s okay to reward themselves with items you’ve paid for during gift giving season. In the video below, a UPS driver is caught stealing an iPad that was left by FedEx just hours earlier.

Who’s winning in the United States: Android or Apple? If you’ve been watching AAPL’s shares, you might think Google’s mopping the floor with Apple, but you’d be wrong. According to new data, Apple now commands 53.3% of the U.S. smartphone market.

While Apple has managed to keep the App Store free from malware, it seems the Cupertino company has a hard time filtering out scams. Every so often, a shameless developer tries their luck at selling a title that promises to be something it isn’t. The latest claims to be a Halo 4 clone that is “iPhone/iPad exclusive.” They’ve gone through the trouble of writing a lengthy App Store description in an effort to fool you into thinking it’s the real thing. But in reality, it’s just a $4.99 game of chess.

There’s been a lot of talk about Project Azalea, Apple’s rumored $10 billion project with TSMC to build a top-secret chip plant on domestic shores. We’ve heard it might be built in New York. We’ve heard it might be built in Portland. Wherever it’s built, though, it’s believed to be a major blow against Apple’s frenemy Samsung, who currently builds the majority of Apple’s custom ARM chips.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Project Azalea might not have anything to do with Apple after all, with TSMC’s CEO himself now denying it.

Unbound app is a Dropbox-linked photo viewer. Imagine if iOS’ built-in Photos app linked to Dropbox instead of needing you to dick around with iTunes and the flakey Photo Stream, and you have pretty much imagined Unbound.

Apple’s guidelines for its new Lightning connector have forced a popular Kickstarter project that sourced almost $140,000 in funding — more than twice the amount it required — to close and refund all of its backers. Electronics firm Edison Jr designed a charging station compatible with a multitude of Android and iOS devices called the POP. But after exceeding its funding goal, it quickly realized that Apple wouldn’t approve it.

The yacht Steve Jobs was building before he passed away on October 2011 has been impounded over a €3 million (approx. $3.96 million) fee owed to designed Philippe Starck. Called Venus, the yacht cost Jobs more than €100 million to build, but he never got to use it. Now it will remain in Amsterdam port pending payment by lawyers representing Jobs’s estate.

On this week’s CultCast, we’re ending the year with our favorite gear! Don’t miss our “End of Days, Faves ‘N Raves,” where pitch our favorite apps, accessories, games, even shows, of 2012.

But before that, we’ll break down the whole Instagram debacle for you, and tell you why you should be paying attention to the big I’s plans for your personal pics.

All that and Tim Cook, person of the year?

Join us, friends! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Show notes ahead!

Instagram’s iOS app has been updated to v3.4.0. It fixes a few ridiculous omissions from the last version, and adds a new filter, no doubt as a way to get users to shut up about the Terms of Service debacle.

VESA is the standard for display panel mounting, and Apple’s desktop displays have supported it for years. Unfortunately, the completely redesigned and ultra thin 2012 iMac can’t be legitimately mounted, according to a comment from Apple given to MacTrast.

“The new iMac is not VESA mount compatible at this time,” an Apple representative said. “We appreciate your feedback on this feature and will take it into consideration.”

Apple’s own VESA mount adapter kit actually notes incompatibility with the 2012 iMac. The $40 adapter does work with 2009-2011 iMac models and Apple’s Cinema/Thunderbolt displays.

Source: MacTrast

Image: OSXDaily

One doesn’t see too many battery cases for the Galaxy S3. Unlike the glass-fortress iPhone — for which battery-cases are more numerous than species of bird — the S3’s battery is easily removable, somewhat lessening the usefulness of an external battery. But that didn’t stop iWalk from coming out with the Chameleon Easy, an impossibly sleek monster of a battery case with 2800 mAh on tap — which iWalk says is the highest capacity of any S3 battery to date.

Madfinger Games announced on its Facebook page today an update to multiplayer FPS game, Shadowgun: Deadzone on both Google Play and the iTunes App Store. The update includes two new maps, new weapon upgrades, a chat feature in the main menu, a new way to play with groups of friends called Gangs, new hats, Rewards for finishing Zone Control or DeathMatch, and an increase to max player ranks (up to 50).

Blake Krikorian, the guy who made the Slingbox, founded a new startup last year called “id8 Group R2 Studios.” Since then, R2 Studios has released an Android app for controlling a home’s heating and lightning with Cestron. The firm also owns some secretive patents relating to remote device and interface control.

According to a new from The Wall Street Journal, a number of big tech companies (including Google and Apple) have been in talks with R2 Studios about a possible buyout:

Ever wanted to view your videos, pictures, or documents from your Mac without having to put them on Dropbox or Google Drive? If you know you need specific files from your Mac desktop at home, you’d probably just use one of those cloud services. But what happens when you get to work and need a file you forgot about, or a family member’s house and want to show off some photos or video from home?

That’s where QuikIO comes in.