Cult of Mac

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.

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.

Day 17: the PadPivot, the best iPad stand around.

On Friday Walmart announced that they were going to sell the 16GB iPhone 5 in stores for only $127. It’s the cheapest deal on the iPhone 5 all year, except Fry’s has decided that they want to undercut Walmart so they’re now selling the iPhone 5 for only $126!

Similar to the Walmart deal, Fry’s big iPhone 5 discount is only available in stores. They also have the 32GB and 64GB iPhone 5 on sale for $226 and $326 respectively.

Source: Fry’s

Via: DealNews

After months of steady growth, Apple stock hit an all-time high of $705.07 in late September, and it seemed there was no sign of stopping it from breaking through the $1,000 barrier and making Apple the world’s first trillion dollar company. Take a look at the market today, however, and it paints a very different picture.

Apple stock fell a whopping 25% in November, and on Friday, it hit a ten-month low. Today, shares dipped below the $400 mark. This is despite the recent launch of the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini, both of which appear to be selling incredible well. Can the Cupertino company put an end to this nasty slide? Analysts don’t think so.

Imitating Apple design is a great idea, except when it comes to chairs.

A chair that doubles as a MacBook looks pretty cool in theory, but what happens when you sit on the keyboard? Is that where dubstep comes from? Not to mention the fact that the lack of cushioning on this thing means sitting on it for hours would be more torturous than listening to Ke$ha on repeat.

Source: Reddit

Towards the end of each year, IBM Research publishes a list of five things it predicts our gadgets will be capable of within the next five years. While some of its predictions seem a little too outlandish and farfetched, others — such as its 2006 prediction for realtime speech translation — become a reality.

IBM’s 2012 list is all about the five senses. It predicts that by 2018, our gadgets will help us touch, see, hear, taste, and even smell. Your smartphone, IBM believes, will use new technologies to simulate the physical sensation of touching something, while your tablet will be able to taste your food.

Ensoul Contacts is such a great idea that it seems sure to be Sherlocked in a future version of OS X. Then again, Apple has so neglected both iPhoto and the Mac Contacts app that maybe the Ensoul app is safe. Here’s what it does: Takes photos from the Face section in iPhoto and assigns them to your contacts.

It’s genius, and it’s just $5 (for now at least).

This Cult of Mac Deal sounds great…literally!

The AFS1 Portable Bluetootk Speaker offers great sound – wherever and whenever you want it. You can easily sync this powerful little speaker to your tablet, phone, computer, or bluetooth compatible music player to enjoy stereo quality tunes anywhere. And for only $39 you’re gettinga deal that sounds great on a whole other level!

As soon as Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion earlier this year, we knew it was only a matter of time before Instagram became more like Facebook. Eventually the two service have to converge in some ways.

Instagram has updated their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to let users know that starting on January 13th, 2013, all your data is going to be shared with their owner, Facebook. If you don’t want Instagram to share that information with Facebook, well there’s no opt-out so you’re tough out of luck.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was rarely seen with anything other than sneakers on his feet — except in the early 1970s when he went everywhere barefoot — and so it’s hardly surprising that at some point the Cupertino company was producing sneakers of its own. They weren’t on sale, though I’m sure they’d have been a hit, but they were issued to employees in the early 1990s.

There are more pictures below.

It’s December, a traditionally slow news month, and it seems this December is even slower than most, because even organizations as solidly grounded in reality as All Things D are now posting elaborate wishful thinking exercises about what the much rumored Apple HDTV will actually be. This one, however, is more interesting and plausible than some… at least in a few key regards.

Late last week, Instagram — now owned by Facebook — confirmed it had disabled Twitter integration, and the ability for users to see Instagram “cards” or previews in their timelines. While it’s not a massive issue for Twitter users, who will still gets links to Instagram photos, it marks the first major breakdown between the two social services since the Facebook acquisition.

But things could have been very different. Weeks before Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter was close to acquiring the photo sharing service for just $525 million.

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.

Day 16’s a day late, which just means you get to open two squares today instead of one. Behind the first? Monolith’s excellent wood backs for the iPhone.

One day, I promise to stop writing about little candybar-shaped Bluetooth speakers, but today isn’t that day. After all, these things are so handy, and so excellent for their size that more choice has got to be better, right? Today’s offering comes from somebody we already know – Braven – and it has the dubious distinction of having appeared on the QVC shopping channel.

There are bound to be times when you would like your OS X Mountain Lion Mac to not go to sleep. You can set you Mac to Never sleep in the System Preferences, Energy Saver preferences pane, but that’s not always going to work. Even when it’s set to Never, your Mac may still, in fact, go to sleep. The other problem with the Energy Saver preference is that you only have the ability to set the sleep action to hold of foor three hours, or never. What if you wanted to keep it from sleeping for four hours? Or four and a half hours? Or eight hours?

With a neat little Mountain Lion-only Terminal command, you can set it to whatever you like. Here’s the scoop.

Sprint has announced today that it is set to acquire 100% ownership of Clearwire in a deal worth $2.97 per share — or roughly $2.2 billion. The carrier says it plans to utilize Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, which will be migrated to 4G LTE standards, to achieve “operational efficiencies and improved service for customers.”

Australian iOS developer Halfbrick has made all of its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch games free for just 24 hours. That means you can now pick up popular titles like Fruit Ninja, Age of Zombies, and Monster Dash without paying a penny. Check out the full list of titles below.

The iPhone 5 officially went on sale in China only a few short days ago, and tonight Apple announced that sales topped 2 million during the first three days of availability.

When Apple originally started selling the iPhone 5 back in September, the handset sold 5 million units during launch weekend in 9 nine countries, including the United States. Just like the domestic launch, this initial turnout in China shows incredible demand for the iPhone 5.

Alfred is a beloved and widely-used keyboard shortcut utility for the Mac. It can do everything from launch an app in three keystrokes to quickly eject an attached disk.

Fans will be happy hear that Alfred 2.0 is in the works, and soon a completely new version of the app will be released with loads of shiny features. Private betas will be sent out in early 2013, and the folks at Alfred have already started teasing version 2.0.