Cult of Mac

There are all kinds of services out there that will paint your iPhone into a crazy colored mess, most notably Colorware. But what about taking it to the next level? When each iPhone is made and assembled in a factory, Apple uses a process called anodization to color the device. A new startup called Anostyle will anodize your iOS devices into another color of your choosing, thereby making you infinitely cooler than all your boring black-and-white-iPhone-using friends.

Although using a company like Colorware works fine, it’s often way too expensive and the paint finish is susceptible to cracking and chipping. Not so with Anostyle. The dye is literally charged and fused into your iPhone for all of eternity.

Apple has issued some small updates to its iWork suite in the Mac and iOS App Stores. Pages, Keynote and Numbers have been updated to version 9.3 on the Mac, and a 1.7 update is rolling out to the iOS versions.

The only thing Apple has said about the minor 9.3 update on the Mac is that it adds support for the 1.7 versions of the iOS apps. All updates are recommended for iWork users on both platforms.

Since the iPhone 5 launched in October Apple has limited the number of unlocked iPhone 5s a customer can purchase to 2 units per transaction and only 10 units per lifetime.

Now that Apple’s stock of iPhone 5 units has caught up with demand, Apple has changed its policy on how many unlocked iPhone 5s customers can purchase.

Each month I get my AT&T bill there are usually some small charges hidden away somewhere and I have to hunt through the endless pages of info trying to find out why my bill is off. The cascade of frustration usually results in me calling AT&T asking for an explaination on why this bill is different from last month if I didn’t have any overages.

AT&T customer care is probably tired of talking to people like me, so to make things easier they’re creating monthly personalized videos that will explain all of the charges on your wireless bill.

Here’s an example of what the videos will look like:

Carbon fiber tripods are great, aren’t they? They’re slim on weight, and if they’re built well, are steady as an oak. Problem is, good ones can cost $600-$800 dollars, and unless you’re regularly shooting for cash, it’s hard to justify spending that kind of cheese.

So when Manfrotto asked me to check out their 290-series MT294C3 carbon fiber tripod ($250 legs only, $319 with 3-Way Pan/Tilt Head as I reviewed it) I pointed at them, stroked my mustache, and said, absolutely. Manfrotto’s a known name in the photo world, but would their new series of affordable carbon-hewn tripods be worthy of their pedigree? I set out to see.

This is pure speculation, but I have a suspicion that when Microsoft fired the person responsible for naming the Windows Phone 7 Series Phones, that same person was snapped up by the folks at Ballistic. For how else could you explain the “IPHONE 5 BALLISTIC EVERY1 SERIES CASE,” a case so badly labelled that it even shouts its name?

This is the C.VOX, a coat with a built-in sound system so you can listen to stuff anywhere you go, while you’re going there. It’s kind of cool and kind of weird. I’ve been wearing it for the last wintry week or so here in the UK, and here’s what it’s like to own one.

Apple’s new 21.5-inch iMacs are ridiculously thin and gorgeous. They’re also one of least upgradeable/repairable desktop  computers on the market. It’s possible to swap out the RAM on the new 21.5-inch iMacs, but trying to get an aftermarket SSD into the 21.5-inch iMac might be an impossible task.

Teardowns of the new 21.5-inch iMac revealed that in order to get to the hard drive users will have to separate the display from the main body of the iMac. That task isn’t too difficult, but gluing the display back onto the iMac’s body will be pretty tough. On top of that, once you get inside the 21.5-inch iMac there’s literally no room for an SSD and nowhere to plug it in.

Want to see an amazing chart? It’s right above this post, and it shows the rise and fall of computer platforms (including mobile) as a percentage of overall marketshare from 1975 to 2012.

What does it tell us about the state of the computer industry? Even with iOS’s success, Apple is proportionally selling about the same percentage of computers as it has since the early 1980s. Windows as a platform, though, has fallen from a ninety-six percent share of the overall computer market between 1998 and 2005 to a mere thirty-five percent in 2012.

Why? Apple and especially Android are killing WinTel.

The International Data Corporation has published its most recent mobile market forecast and unsurprisingly, they’re predicting Android to maintain its strong market share lead over the next four years. In fact, there’s really not much surprising about the report at all.

If you have been trawling the internet for an iPhone 5 bike mount which looks like it was beamed forward in time from the 1980s, then stop! Your search is over. Better still, the case even has a numeral-heavy 1980s-style name: The M550.

When you think of hugely successful mobile games, Cut the Rope from ZeptoLabs is right up there with Angry Birds; it’s been a big hit on Android and iOS. With that in mind, we’re super excited about ZeptoLabs’s next game, Pudding Monsters, which it’s now teasing with a brand new trailer.

The iOS lockscreen locks in two different ways. One is by keeping strangers from fiddling around with your iPhone or iPad. The second, though, is to developers: they can’t really do much with the lockscreen except pass notifications to it or make use of the lockscreens built-in music playback controls.

What if developers had full access to the lockscreen, though? What if they could do more than just pass a notification on through? It might look something like this concept.

Around the time that Google bought Sparrow, the Gmail team was given a mission to completely rebuild the Gmail app for iOS. After months of slaving away, the app has just been released on the App Store today and it comes with a number of new features that may have been borrowed from Sparrow, even though insiders such as MG Siegler claim the Sparrow team had nothing to do with the update.

Gmail 2.0 for iPhone and iPad is faster, sleeker and much easier to use. The minimal UI athestetics of Google Now have bled over with some of the popular features from Sparrow. The free update gives users multiple accounts, infinite scrolling inboxes, better search, and more.

Here are the release notes:

Perch is a new way to use your old iOS device. Got an iPod Touch or unused iPhone/iPad laying around the house with nothing to do? Perch is an app which turns it into an always-on portal, letting you just walk up to it and show things to other Perch users in your network.

The idea is to keep this on a wall at home and treat it as a window on your family.

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.

Amazon has issued an update to its Kindle app for iOS today, introducing its excellent X-Ray for Books feature which has been a big selling point for the company’s own Kindle hardware. If you’re not already familiar with it, X-Ray allows you to see the “bones of the book,” Amazon says, helping you learn more about its characters, places, and phrases.

When a company like Apple is getting sued every other week, there’s no telling what they will and won’t try to patent and trademark in an attempt to protect their intellectual property. Apple already holds a patent on rectangles with rounded corners, and their latest trademark gives Apple exclusive use of the word “Retina.”

On December 4, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple two Registered Trademarks. One trademark covers the word “Retina” while the second trademark covers Apple’s Game Center icon.

Gifted is a one dollar gift-management app for iOS, that helps you track all the gifts for all the people at all the events you might have to deal with. It works, no doubt about that; but using it, I found myself shrinking away from the whole idea. This is not what gift-giving is all about, in my opinion.

One of the biggest reasons I switched from Windows to a Mac all those years ago was OS X’s supposed immunity to malware and viruses. I’ve quickly discovered throughout 2012, however, that my Mac isn’t as safe on the Internet as I’d been led to believe. A new report from antivirus experts Sophos today highlights that.

The company’s Security Threat Report 2013 declares 2012 to be the year of “new platforms and changing threats.” Hackers are switching their focus from Windows to other platforms, including Mac OS X. Today’s biggest target, however, is Google’s Android platform.

The new TonePrint app lets you download guitar-pedal presets to your iPhone and then squirt them into your actual pedal via the pickup of your guitar. This magical-sounding ability is actually pretty simple, but that doesn’t make it any less useful.

It seems like we’ve been waiting for Sharp IGZO technology to solve all of our battery life problems forever now. Unfortunately, Sharp hasn’t just been slow to get the exciting display tech out on the market… they’ve also struggled with financial issues relating to their core business that have threatened to put the Japanese company under.

Luckily, it looks like Sharp might be saved, with Qualcomm now apparently investing up to $120 million in Sharp, specifically to get IGZO displays out there to the masses.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Apple is how they approach upgrades. While companies like Microsoft sell their operating systems at an exorbitant licensing cost, Apple has favored an approach in which they release their operating system upgrades either for free (as with iOS) or at a low cost that anyone can afford.

The benefits are big. Updated versions of operating systems tend to be more secure, which helps guarantee OS X’s lead over Windows when it comes to malware. Naturally, then, Mac users tend to adopt new versions of OS X faster than Windows users upgrade, but the statistical disparity might surprise you.

Apple released iOS 6.1 beta 3 to registered developers yesterday, but unless your iOS device’s unique identification number (UDID) is registered with Apple’s developer program, you can’t install it. But don’t worry, we can tell you everything that’s new in this version, including some changes to iCloud setup and Passbook sample cards, new mobile-cellular data options, and more.

Imagine, if you will, a world where cellphone cameras and SLRs get along. A world where one was never teased by the other. Imagine a world where Canon and Nikon lenses can be used as easily on an iPhone as they can on their own bodies.

Now open your eyes and look around. How do you feel? Does anything look any different? It should, because the whole world just changed. Behold! The iPhone SLR Mount.