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.

Google Maps for iPhone is out, and it’s a solid replacement for Apple’s Maps app in iOS 6. Jailbreakers can make Google Maps the default maps app on their iPhones, but everyone else has to deal with the fact that Apple will never let you fully replace its own Maps with Google’s. It’s a shame, but it’s the walled iOS garden we all live in.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use Siri to get directions with Google Maps, however. You don’t even need to jailbreak. There’s a simple trick that makes it possible.

Google Maps for iPhone was basically a hit before it even launched in the App Store. Anticipation was so high leading up to the release last week that the app shot to the top of the App Store’s charts in only a few hours. Given the widespread criticism of Apple Maps in iOS 6, Google Maps is a breath of fresh air for those that miss the iOS Maps of old.

While Google Maps may be great in its own right, Apple’s restrictions mean that it cannot replace the new, default Maps app in iOS 6. You can choose to use Google Maps for iOS whenever you want, but map links and directions in other apps will always open Apple Maps no matter what.

Luckily, jailbreakers now have a way to make the new Google Maps replace Apple Maps and become the default app of choice. If you’re wondering how to make Google Maps default on iPhone, there are methods to set it as your preferred navigation tool.

We’re very stingy with our five-star ratings, and it’s even more rare for us to slap all five onto a gadget.  So pay attention — because today we’re awarding the full five stars to the Logitech UE Boombox ($250), a portable, battery-equipped, eight-driver Bluetooth speaker that sounds absolutely astounding. In fact, the Boombox does a better job of rocking out than some non-portable, home systems costing much more.

We’re all busy people, but around this time of year that level of “busy-ness” seems to increase exponentially. We seem to have less hours in the day, and that means we need to make the most out of each and every minute. And your Mac can help you do that – with the right apps in place, that is.

There’s no better opportunity than now to start building your software stack than with today’s Cult of Mac Deals offer. The Mac Variety Bundle 2.0 from Macbundler includes 9 top Mac apps valued at $527 for the amazingly low price of just $45! That’s a savings of 91%!

So, it’s finally here — Google released an official Google Maps app for the iPhone, and we love it. Not only is it back with a brand new look, it also has new features, and of course, the accurate data we’ve all been missing since Apple released iOS 6. Also in our roundup is a brand new 1Password app from AgileBits, a new Flickr app from Yahoo!, and more.

These Scosche Realm RH656 ($130) headphones compete in the same league as with headphones like the Beats (formerly Monster) Solo HD, the Incase Reflex and the Fanny Wang 1000 Series. These ‘phones have a lot in common: they have smallish earcups that sit on the ear, instead of over; they all have track and volume controls (remember though that the volume control won’t work on Android devices); and they’ve all had a dash of fashion added.

But there are some key differences too. And as you’re about to find out, the RH656 does pretty well against its competition.