Cult of Mac

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.

It’s Day 12! That means KitCam, one of the best camera apps for the iPhone.

from Vimeo.

So you wanna be the next Jony Ive and make beautiful and intuitive products that are just like Apple’s? Good for you. But figuring out how to replicate Apple’s design philosophies isn’t all that easy – look at RIM.

To help you out, Online MBA created this two minute video that boils down all of Jony and Steve’s design insights into five bite-sized nuggets. Maybe you won’t invent the next iPhone but if you follow their advice it should at least prevent you from becoming the next Scott Forstall.

Source: OnlineMBA
Via: Gizmodo

In the battle of the mobile platform wars, Android has been extending its lead over Apple’s iOS platform at a steady rate for over a year. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt believes that the battle between Android and iOS is similar to Microsoft’s desktop expansion in the 1990s.

Schmidt say down with Bloomberg to talk about the mobile war with Apple and said that with 1.3 million new Android devices being activated per day,  he thinks it’s pretty obvious that Android is winning now.

A day after Twitter unveiled its first foray into photo filters, here’s a whole new app from the folks at Flickr. They know a thing or two about photography, and this new version of their iOS app is fantastic. It has filters, but who cares? Flickr is about a helluva lot more than just filter effects.

When Apple decided to give Google Maps the boot and deliver its own Maps app for iOS 6, it teamed up with TomTom to provide users with turn-by-turn navigation on their iOS devices for the first time. Now it seems the Cupertino company may be looking to acquire its new navigation partner in an effort to fix Maps.

Hans Slob, an Utrecht, Netherlands-based analyst at Rabobank, believes there’s a 30% chance Apple will acquire TomTom. It is reportedly interested in the Dutch company’s capacity to make prompt changes to correct mapping errors.

The PocoWool might have the worst Kickstarter video yet seen, making the clothes-fitting-room scene in Pretty Woman look like a Jim Jarmusch movie, but it looks to be the hottest iPhone bag/purse/clutch around.

Logitech produces some of the best portable keyboards there are for the iPad, and it’s just announced another that will also work with your Mac, too. But not only is it compatible with both Mac and iOS devices, its awesome ‘Easy-Switch’ feature allows you to connect to up to three via Bluetooth at the same time and then quickly switch between them at the touch of a button.

A working Apple I, the first computer built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, has been sold at auction for a record $640,000. That’s considerably more than the machine’s original asking price of $666.66, and almost $270,000 more than the previous Apple I record set by Sotheby’s back in June.

December looks set to be a good month for Apple fans in Russia. Just over a week after the Cupertino company rolled out the iTunes Store there, a local Apple Premium Reseller, re:Store, has announced that the iPad mini will be launching on December 14, the same day Russia will get the iPhone 5. That’s a week earlier than local media have been reporting, but an official date is yet to be confirmed by Apple.

After rolling out a redesigned Yahoo! Mail on Tuesday, Yahoo! has launched a brand new Flickr app for iPhone this morning that appears to be going head to head with Instagram. It’s a completely redesign of the previous version, and it promises to be easier to use and more beautiful. It also offers new features, including 16 filters for your photographs.

Remember iDisk? It was a great feature of the otherwise forgettable MobileMe service, and it let you access your free Apple-provided internet disk space just like Dropbox or Google Drive do now.

Interestingly, you can make iCloud work the same way, with a little app called iClouDrive, from Zibity Software. Here’s how.

Apple has begun testing high-resolution television set designs with manufacturing partners in Asia, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal that cites unnamed sources within Foxconn. Both Foxconn and display manufacturer Sharp are said to be involved in the process, which is still in its early stages.

Netflix video streaming remains one of the largest sources of peak downstream Internet traffic in the US. With over 1 billion hours of Netflix being watched per month, it’s safe to say they have a pretty good idea of the strains their service puts on ISPs. In fact, Netflix has been keeping tabs and gauging these ISPs to see just how well they perform.

SantaKid, a children’s picture book by an author more known for his prolific career as a thriller writer, James Patterson, is now coming to the iPad.

It’s been released by the Hachette Book Group for Little, Brown publishers, the iPad-only app is available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store, just in time for…well, you know.

Calling GODUS “a delightful reinvention of the god game from 22cans and Peter Molyneux,” the game’s Kickstarter page has some new details on the project, the second from Curiosity’s 22cans games studio. With nine days left to go and about half of its funding goal met, Project GODUS just may be worth a look. Originally set to release on iOS, Android, and PC, the game will also be available on the Mac platform: welcome news indeed for those of us firmly in the Mac camp of gaming.

A group of high-tech companies, including Samsung, Apple, Research In Motion, Intel, and others petitioned the US Congress today to provide more broadcast bandwidth, ostensibly for smartphones and tablets like the Galaxy, iPhone, Nexus, and iPad. The group sent a letter to both House and Senate technology committees, asking them to auction off some of the spectrum that is being used by the federal government.

Google is finally getting around to updating the Google News experience for tablet users. While this change most likely has to do with the surge in Nexus tablet sales, it’s a welcomed update for all. Tablet users (yes, even you iPad users) will now enjoy a more intuitive experience when catching up on current news via the Google News website.

LTE smartphones are all the rage these days, and Apple only has one: the iPhone 5. That hasn’t stopped Apple from quickly gobbling up nearly 30% of the global LTE market, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

While Android handset makers have been churning out LTE devices left and right in recent months, Apple accounts for 26.7% of all LTE devices in use around the world—and that’s with only the iPhone 5, Retina iPad, and iPad mini.

In my review of Twitterrific 5, I commended the app’s incredible attention to detail. Today The Iconfactory released its first update to Twitterrific 5, and version 5.0.1 shows how a great app treats the finer details with great importance. There’s nothing groundbreaking included, but there are some wonderfully subtle improvements and a decent handful of bug fixes.

Earlier today, it was revealed that Apple rejected an update to Microsoft’s SkyDrive iOS app in the App Store. The reason was rumored to be because Microsoft didn’t want to share a percentage of subscription revenues from inside the app, and Apple has a blanket policy about all App Store developers sharing a 30% cut.

While the two companies are indeed arguing about Apple’s App Store policies, the issue actually surrounds the upcoming Office for iOS suite that Microsoft plans to launch in early 2013.

We’ve seen a number of stories over the years where Find My iPhone helped iPhone and iPad owners reunite with their lost devices. Now Apple’s making things even easier for people hunting down their devices by including driving directions to each device.

Find My iPhone for iOS will now tell you the exact route you should take to get your lost iPhone back. To use the driving directions features, users must be updated to iOS 6 because Find My iPhone gives driving directions through Apple Maps.

Twitter might have been a bit previous announcing it ahead of its actual appearance in the App Store, but it’s here now: Twitter for iOS 5.2 is out, and comes with Twitter’s very own Instagrammish photo filters. Are they any good?

Coming on the heels of the new Instagram update, Twitter announced yesterday that their iPhone app was coming soon and that it would have all kinds of photo filters. The updated Twitter app just hit the App Store and is ready to be downloaded.

The free Twitter 5.2 update comes with photo filters powered by Aviary. The eight different filters will make your Twitter pictures more like Instagram photos, which is kind of nice seems how Instagram decided to stop displaying their pictures inside of a Twitter, but does the world really need more filters?

Here are the full release notes on Twitter for iOS version 5.2:

Think Tank’s new Airport Commuter camera bag ($199) is something of a paradox: Though it’s the size of a normal backpack, it manages to fit an abnormal amount of glass, gear, a full-size a Macbook Pro, and an iPad.

But could such a compact bag hold so many precious items in harmony? I packed it up, strapped it on, and set out to find out.

If you have faith in the supernatural deity named Gene Munster, and believe with all your heart that Apple is going to release the iTV in 2013, then you’ve probably got all your pennies saved so you can drop some fat stacks on Apple’s flatscreen next year.

Apple products usually aren’t cheap, and we figure the iTV will be no different if Apple ever releases one, but according to a new survey, over 46% of Americans are totally fine with having to pay over $1,000 for an iTV.