Meet Carrot, the getting things done app with an attitude. If you’re good and you actually do the things you add to its list, you’ll be rewarded. But if you don’t … actually, things get much more fun if you don’t.
In just the last fifteen years, a lot has changed for Apple. The company has transformed itself from a dying corporation teetering on the brink of bankruptcy into the most powerful technology company in the world, a giant that has revolutionized pretty much every aspect of technology.
Given the extraordinary changes that have happened to Apple in the last fifteen years, you’d think that the Apple.com homepage would have gone through a lot of changes too. But it hasn’t. Why not?
Going back through fifteen years of Apple.com homepages, it is clear that for Apple, their website is just another product, just like an iPhone or iPod. When Apple wants to make a new product, they first find the ideal form they think that object should be, and then endlessly iterate upon it over successive generations to bring the function of that form into sharper relief.
Apple’s website is no different. Here’s how Apple has refined it over the years.
Samsung has surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors, according to Gartner. The Korean company’s hugely popular smartphones, such as the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, led to a 29% surge in chip purchases in 2012, taking its semiconductor spending past that of any other company.
One of the best things about owning an Apple TV is the ability to share everything on your Mac’s screen with the flatscreen in your living room. It works perfectly. If there’s video on the Internet that you can’t find on one of the Apple TV apps, you don’t have to worry about it; you just screen share and enjoy.
Google and Netflix are tired of Apple having all the fun with wireless video streaming between devices, so they’ve brewed up their own solution to compete with AirPlay. The new protocol is called DIAL, and like Android, it’s free and already has some big companies backing it.
App.net might be quickly turning into the recumbent bicycle of internet services, frequented only by anorak-wearing beardoes, but a new ADN client has a feature so neat that it should be included in any app which logs into a third-party service.
It’s called Riposte, and when you log in for the first time, it has a button that will send you straight off to 1Password.
When I’m not seated in front of a computer, I use my iPad mini for almost everything I need to do online. Checking my emails, banking, streaming movies and music, and reading the day’s news — it’s all done on a tablet. And it turns out I’m not the only one who’s abandoning my PC for a handheld.
Perion, the creator of IncrediMail, today unveiled the results of its latest survey of 4,400 iPad owners in the United States. The majority of respondents said they consider Apple’s popular tablet their favorite device for reading and writing emails, beating PCs and smartphones by a wide margin.
Tonido, a new service from CodeLathe, is a great way to access the music, movies, photos, and documents you have stored on your Mac or PC using another computer, or an Android or iOS device. Unlike cloud-based storage services, which require you to upload your content just to download it again, Tonido turns your computer into your storage locker and then provides other devices with direct access to it.
It’s easy to set up, and you sync up to 2GB of data without paying a penny.
Like a dummy, I bought a waterproof iPhone pouch without checking whether it fit my iPhone 5. It did, but only with some scary squeezing and bending. I bought the case to see me through a rainy trip to Paris at the end of last year, but when I discovered the mismatch (Paris Mis-Match?) I used my formidable mental powers to solve the problem – I hid in bars and coffee shops every time it rained.
If I’d had the mentalKase, though, I could’ve explored the city a little better. Well, almost.
Having utterly failed in my efforts to not buy an iPad mini, I have already started a collection of cases. Most of them are review units, and almost all of them add too much weight and bulk to the tiny mini. But the Booqpad mini seems to have a different idea: If you’re going to add weight anyway, why not just go the whole way and make the extra grams worth it?
A while back, we wrote up a tip on reindexing the hard drive on your Mac using Terminal. Recently, a Cult of Mac reader emailed us to let us know it wasn’t quite working on his end.
Rob,
I read your post on using terminal to reindex the hard drive on a mac. Any idea why when the command is executed the terminal displays “Indexing disabled.”?Thanks,
Mike S
Here’s what he had to do to get it working again.
Oh man. I know I get a little too excited about device chargers, but the brand new PlugBug World from Twelve South will get even the most anti-gadget of you fired up. It’s a new version of the already clever universal charger, only now it also works anywhere in the world (making it global as well as universal? I don’t know).
Mobile ecosystems analyst firm, VisionMobile, today released its fourth Developer Economics report. The 2013 report, sponsored by AT&T, Mozilla, and Nokia, looked at developer opinions, charting out which platforms have the highest mindshare among developers as well as which platforms make their devs the most money.
Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs threatened Palm CEO Edward Colligan with patent litigation if he did not agree to stop poaching Apple employees, according to a court filing that was made public on Tuesday.
Confidential emails between the pair, along with documents from Adobe and Google, have surfaced in a civil lawsuit that claims a number of major companies in Silicon Valley violated antitrust rules by entering into agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Five employees are now fighting for class action status and damages for lost wages as a result of the “no-hire” agreements.
You’ve always wanted to put a dent in those hard-to-modify PDF files of yours. There are only a few solutions out there, but one stands ut from the rest in both feature and value – and that’s PDFpen by Smile. But with this Cult of Mac Deals offer, we’re upping the ante, and giving you 50% off of its power-packed sibling, PDFpen Pro. For just $50, you can take your PDF manipulation to a whole new level – and you can do it with ease!
PDFpenPro offers a powerful all of the editing capabilities that PDFpen portrays…and a whole lot more.
Regularly $0.99, Screen-Recorder is available now for free on the Mac App Store, letting you capture video of your Mac’s screen for no money at all.
Version 3 came out in January of last year, while the original app was released in May of 2011. The latest update brings some minor bug fixes to the table, along with the price drop to free.
Siri wasn’t always baked into iOS. It started out as a standalone iPhone app that launched in the App Store almost three years ago. Three weeks after it went live to the public, Apple showed interest. Siri was bought by Apple a few weeks later for hundreds of millions of dollars. The personal assistant was then reborn in the iPhone 4S in October 2011.
Many don’t know the fascinating history behind Siri, like the fact that it started as a research project for the U.S. Defense Department, or that Steve Jobs personally spearheaded the acquisition. Apple is lucky it swept in when it did, because Siri was almost made a default app on Android.
Apple’s iPhone continues to beat out Android as the best selling smartphone platform in the US, showing 51.2% of the market for a twelve month period which ended December 23 of 2012. According to the data released by market-analyst Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android has remained stable in market share since the same period of time in the previous year, at 44.8%, while Windows phone brings up third place at 2.6 percent of smartphone sales sold in that time period.
You just got a new laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed. The new UI is beautiful, but you’re confused. Everything’s weird. You can’t find any of your files and apps. Things don’t work the way they have for the past 20 years. It’s a nightmare and you just want the old Windows back.
Don’t worry, there are Microsoft Certified Professionals out there who will help you out. And by help you out, I mean they will charge you $125 to downgrade your PC to Windows 7 so you don’t have to have Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system. This can’t be a good sign for Microsoft.
Source: Michael Jurewitz
If you’ve ever wished you could stream audio wirelessly to your car or home stereo, Blue Ant’s Ribbon ($69) might be just the gadget for you. Ribbon, tiny as it is, adds Bluetooth streaming to any set of headphones or any device with an auxiliary input. But, as you might’ve surmised from its unique shape, its abilities don’t stop there.
When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad back in 2010, he probably didn’t realized that the tablet would one day be used by Orangutan Outreach in zoos around the world. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo has adopted the “Apps for Apes” program, a totally nonfictional initiative that hooks monkeys up with shiny iPads.
Zookeepers let the orangutans play with different iPad apps and the zoo “hopes to connect its orangutans with those at other zoos using video conferencing platforms.”
Apple will announce its quarterly earnings for the 2012 holiday season tomorrow, and investors are nervous. The company’s stock has been on quite the roller coaster ride since its $700 high back in September 2012. AAPL is now trading right around $500, which is the lowest it has been in more than six months.
Recent reports have said that demand for products like the iPhone is faltering. That’s why it may come as a surprise that Wall Street expects Apple to have its best earnings report ever tomorrow. So is it a good time to sell AAPL? Now may actually be the best time to buy.
iOS and water usually don’t play nicely with each other, but if you freeze it, then it’s a heck of a good time. Gamago’s got a new ice tray that will turn your H2O into little iOS icon ice cubes, so your next beverage can be cooled by iOS.
Google just announced its earnings for Q4 2012, and guess what? They made a ton of money. We’re shocked.
Actually, Q4 2012 was really great for Google. The company earned $14.4 billion in revenue, which is 36% better than what they did last year. While we tend to think of Google as an American company, only $5.99 billion of that revenue came from the U.S. while the rest was made in international markets.
The debate over illegal immigration isn’t just about adults hopping the border. Oftentimes, children are caught in the middle: kids who were brought to the United States illegally when they were young, and who are now facing being deported as adults, having never known any other country besides America?
Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is now trying to put a face on this side of the immigration debate. To help her promotion of the Dream Act, she has launched a new website called The Dream Is Now.
There has been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about how Apple is failing. That the iPhone isn’t cool anymore, and that basically Apple is just too old and stubborn to be successful.
We won’t know until tomorrow how many iPhone 5s were sold last quarter, or if there’s any truth to the claims that Apple is stumbling, but if Verizon’s financial report is any indication, Apple’s probably doing just fine right now.