Here’s how you start an e-mail pitch:
In your last post about the Braven 570, I loved how you said that someday you might stop writing about candy bar shaped speakers. Well, today is the day for a Bluetooth speaker that shaped like, well, paper.
That speaker is the CoverPlay Mojo, a skinny speaker that will snuggle into your luggage between your shirts, instead of needing to be jammed inside a shoe like all its stupid, oafish rivals.
A free SpongeBob Squarepants game from Nickelodeon has had to be pulled from the App Store following complaints that it violates children’s online privacy rights. SpongeBob Diner Dash asked children for their names and email addresses without parental permission — so that it could fill their inboxes with spam, no doubt — causing an advocacy group to report the app to the Federal Trade Commission.
Like many modern human beings, I keep electronic calendars. I use Google calendar for many of them, but I also have a couple on my Mac, a couple on my iPhone, and the like. I have a calendar for each of my three jobs, for family events, I have shared calendars for groups I belong to, and, of course, Birthday calendars. My Calendar app is a many-colored thing.
But what happens when you just want to see one of these calendars at any given moment? Just birthdays, for example, without cluttering it up with a bunch of job-related stuff? If you use the built-in Mac OS X Calendar app, this is pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.
Apple’s 4G-equipped iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad have taken a step closer towards a launch in China today after receiving their network licenses from Chinese telecommunications certification center TENAA. Like the iPhone 5, the tablets are expected to be available on the China Unicom and China Telecom networks.
Korean electronics giant Samsung has today announced that it will drop its patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The announcement comes just hours after Apple was denied its request to have 26 Samsung devices banned in the United States — though the two cases are unrelated.
It’s one of the most iconic products of all time, and now, Apple holds a design patent for the original 2007 iPhone, with the US Patent and Trademark Office granting Cupertino a design patent for the smartphone that started it all.
The invenotors of the design are credited as Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Bartley Andre, Daniel Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Richard Howarth, Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Rohrbach, Douglas Satzger, Calvin Seid, Christopher Stringer, Eugene Whang, and Rico Zorkendorfer.
Source: USPTO
Via: Patently Apple
We’ve had many deals of note here at Cult of Mac for quite some time, but this is one is “noteworthy” in the most literal sense of the word!
The Ultimate Music Bundle offers 8 top music applications (including TuneUp) for a fraction of the regular price. You’d normally pay $355 for all of these apps, but Cult of Mac Deals has it for you for a mere $39!
Another chapter has closed in the Apple/Samsung patent saga thanks to a couple decisions handed down today by Judge Lucy Koh. Apple has been denied its bid for a permanent sales ban against the 26 Samsung devices found to have infringed on a handful of Apple’s patents back in August. According to the Koh, those infringed patents are but a small fraction of the overall features that make up Samsung’s devices and thus do not warrant a permanent ban.
Apple is looking to evolve its own Maps app in iOS 6 by potentially partnering with Foursquare to provide local listings, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Talks between Apple and Foursquare are still in the early “preliminary” stages, according to the report, but Apple is definitely interested in what Foursquare has to offer.
Yelp is already integrated into iOS 6 Maps, and Apple partners with other services to offer more than 100 million business listings. A partnership with Foursquare could help enrich Apple’s location data and even help fix inaccuracies in iOS 6 Maps.
‘Tis the Season for icy corpses and carnivorous reindeer. Okay, maybe not the reindeer part, but there’s definitely a legion of undead terrorizing the North Pole and spreading Christmas fear. That’s right, our favorite zombie shooter title Dead Trigger has received a freakishly festive holiday update full of cold corpses, new weapons, and a jolly dead soul called Zanta.
Loren Brichter’s Game Center success story, Letterpress, has been updated today in the App Store with a couple of new features and improvements. Version 1.2 of the popular, Scrabble-like word game introduces a new HTML5-based feature called “Share Replays.” You can now share a link from the iOS game that shows a word-by-word progression of how a match progressed.
The last update to Letterpress brought the ability to quickly demand a rematch, and now you can see a history of your skills as a wordsmith with Replays. The game’s dictionary has also been tweaked and improved.
Google Maps for iPhone rocketed to the top of the App Store in just 7 hours, and today Google confirmed that the app was downloaded over 10 million times in less than 48 hours. Those are crazy numbers. People clearly wanted the triumphant return of Google Maps to iOS, but how many downloads are a result of Google’s own promoting?
I’m tired of seeing your crappy vertical videos on YouTube. I mean, I’m not saying the content of your videos are crappy, but black bars on the sides are annoying and they’ve destroyed my desire to watch whatever cute and silly things your cat is doing on YouTube.
The war against Vertical Video Syndrome has been waging for years, yet the horde of black-barred videos that have infested YouTube have continued to multiply. However, in an unexpected move that may finally cure us of vertical videos, Google’s new YouTube Capture app has the greatest video recording feature of all-time – you have to rotate your iPhone into landscape mode before it will let you record a video.
Apple has released a minor Wi-Fi firmware update for “late” 2012 Macs in the Mac App Store. Mac Wi-Fi Update 1.0 address compatibility with the 5GHz Wi-Fi band, a more modern band that offers greater signal quality and less interference than the 2.4GHz band. The update is available for free and clocks in at less than 2MB.
We all know that the new Google Maps app has been a big hit on the iPhone since it launched last week. The highly anticipated app shot to the top of the App Store’s charts in a matter of hours. According to Google Senior VP of Geo and Commerce Jeff Huber, Google Maps for iPhone was downloaded a jaw-dropping 10 million times in the first 48 hours of its release.
Google just released a new app that is going to make it even easier to share all your funny and embarrassing videos on YouTube. YouTube Capture is a new iOS app by Google that records videos and uploads them to YouTube straight from your iPhone.
YouTube Capture is designed to get videos on to the video sharing service as easily as possible by keeping the interface clean and simple. Once you open up the app it’s ready to record and after you stop recording a video it’s immediately ready to upload to YouTube. It’s simple and awesome.
Here’s a video of how the app works:
It’s possible that you’ve been unable to save Facebook photos to your camera roll since upgrading to iOS 6. Maybe you’ve just given up on saving photos from the iOS Facebook app, even. Several users reported this issue when iOS 6 first came out, but maybe you missed out on any solutions.
Well, there’s a potential simple fix that might make it possible for you to start saving Facebook photos to your Camera Roll again.
As the largest social network in the world, Facebook has a crap-load of data on everything from nightlife, restaurants, shopping, and much more based on Likes and checkins. Facebook is ready to start using that information to help users find cool stuff with their revamped Nearby feature.
Nearby is basically Facebook’s answer to Yelp and Foursquare, except it’s got a lot more users ready to jump on board, a whole lot more information, and is going to be better at recommending places to you.
I’ll admit it: I loved the BookBook for iPad. Yet less than a week after I’d written the review, the BookBook Case for iPad was already in a bin with all the other iPad cases that I’ve tried (and failed) to love longer term.
Why? The issue is pretty simple. The BookBook for iPad is a wonderfully made case, but at the end of the day, I find myself using needing a case for my iPad that is effortlessly pulled off and re-applied. Ironically, the reason why is because I’m constantly using another TwelveSouth product with my iPad: the HoverBar, a fantastic articulating arm for the iPad that I’ve got attached over my bedboard as a makeshift streaming video and audio console. Ironically, there’s just no way to fit an iPad into the Hoverbar if you’re using a BookBook as your case.
Now that the BookBook for iPad mini is here, though, I think I finally have a BookBook that will stay on my iDevice for more than a week or so. The iPad mini is simply the device the BookBook was made for.
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 $100, for people you like quite a lot, but not that much.
Apple just started seeding iOS 6.1 beta 4 to developers in the iOS Dev Center. The update 98MB update is available over-the-air to devs already on the iOS 6.1 beta. There doesn’t appear to be anything big in this particular update, but let us know if you find anything new in the comments.
When the App Store first came into being in 2008 the majority of new apps released were paid apps. Times have changed and more and more app developers are electing to go with free or freemium models rather than charging users to download their app.
Appsfire just posted their 2012: A Year In The App Store review that analyized the 1 million apps that have been sold in the App Store and they found that only 34% apps released in 2012 were paid apps – down from 74% in 2008.
Camera+ for iPad just got a brand new update that introduces a high quality setting for snapping — you guessed it — high quality photographs. It comes in addition to the two quality settings already offered by Camera+, and its creators warn that using it will cause your storage to get eaten up a whole lot quicker.
There’s a problem I often run into with my mobile devices, and that’s not enough storage space. I insist on purchasing devices with just 16GB of memory, and then I have to find ways to manage that storage the best I can. Some devices will take microSD cards that will allow you to bump their storage as and when you need it, but others — like Apple’s iOS devices — don’t come with that luxury.
Vantec’s new NexStar WiFi hard drive dock lets you bump your smartphone, tablet, and even PC storage over Wi-Fi. You can use it to store your audio and video collections on your home network, then use Vantec’s dedicated apps to access them wirelessly when you need to.
What was the best iOS app of 2012? We need your help to find out. Read on to see our longlist of candidates, and cast your vote for a shortlist later in the week.