The Omni Group has been testing its new OmniFocus Mail Drop, a service which lets you forward emails to a secret address, whereupon they end up — moments later — in your OmniFocus inbox. This means that we can finally (finally!) add emails direct to our Omnifocus from our iPhones and iPads.

But with a little jiggery-pokery, you can finagle some automated internet services to do much more. In this post I’ll show you how I now collect news items from Google Reader and have them waiting for me in Omnifocus and Writing Kit, ready to be written up.

What I am about to share with you will likely blow your mind. It will change your perspective on the world forever, and give you a new understanding of the word “convergence.” Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Lens Strap, a device which hovers uncertainly in the quantum foam between iPhoneography accessories and collars for poodles from Beverly Hills.

I warned you.

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.

On day 18 we’re kicking out the jams with the Libratone Zipp.

Despite ailing on Wall Street and criticized by analysts for somehow being “disappointing,” Apple’s iPhone 5 launch is the biggest one for the company yet. How big? Not even getting into units sold, the iPhone 5 has been responsible for an influx of about $75 billion into the U.S. economy in 2012… and that’s not even taking into account the rest of the world.

Not impressed yet? iPhone 5 sales could move the entire $15 trillion GDP of the United States up by half a percent.

Crazy, huh? This and other interesting facts in tech are part of Mobile Future’s 2012 Mobile Year In Review. Well worth a watch. The future’s just starting.

Filling Steve Jobs’ shoes is not an easy task, but Tim Cook has done an incredible job leading Apple in 2012. There were some big bumps in the road but Tim navigated past them with great poise and as a result he’s one of eight frontrunners to be named TIME’s Person of the Year.

Since 1927, Time magazine has given out the Person of the Year award to the person that most influenced the world – whether for good or evil. Steve Jobs was nominated a few times but never received the award.

Along with Tim Cook, the list of eight nominees includes the following people:

Music streaming service Rhapsody has finally made itself available on your iPad with a brand new app that promises to deliver “a visually stunning and immersive experience for the music lover!” It brings more than 16 million songs to your tablet, with support for offline playlists, AirPlay, and unlimited downloads. What’s more, it offers a 30-day free trial for those who aren’t already signed up.

I’ve been a fan of Wunderlist for a long time. When it comes to task managers, it has just always been one of the best. Today it has been taken to the next level. In version 2, Wunderlist has been redesigned and rebuilt into a native application on all devices. The app is faster with more features, a web version, and a social experience that makes sharing and collaborating on lists feel smooth as butter.

6Wunderkinder, the Berlin-based company behind Wunderlist, recently canned another app called Wunderkit. The collaborative, team-focused backbone of Wunderkit has been infused into Wunderlist 2. Whether you want to get things done by yourself or with the help of others, Wunderlist 2 is an excellent task manager for all of your devices.

Keeping up with your popularity  in the digital age is exhausting. You have to switch to Instagram to see if people think you’re artsy. Then open to Twitter to see if anyone’s retweeted your joke from an hour ago. And then you gotta make sure people are reading your blog so you open up Google Analytics.

Once you’ve finally made the loop through all the apps you’re ready to start over again, but a new app called Static for iOS is ready to make all that stat checking a whole lot easier for you by giving you all your social networking stats on one easy to read screen.

Scannner Mini is a new iOS scanning app from Readdle, and it has one big feature: it’s free. Scanner Mini is a no-cost version of Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro app, giving you everything it’s big brother has, minus the document sharing.

Viber, the popular cross-platform mobile communications service, has today announced that it has now surpassed more than 140 million users across six platforms, with 400,000 people joining the service each and every day. To celebrate the milestone, the company has introduced a number of new features to its Android and iOS apps, including the ability to send “fun stickers” and “playful emoticons,” and support for the iPhone 5’s larger display.

Remember the amazing Popsicolor? Of course you do (and if you don’t, go check it out). It’s the app that turns your photos into colorful watercolors that actually look like real watercolors, not terrible 1990s-era Photoshop-plugin-style watercolors.

It’s about to get a rather splendid 2.0 update, and the teaser video is above.

Looking to pick up some last-minute Christmas gifts this week? If you’re buying from the Apple online store, you can get them delivered the very next day and it won’t cost you a penny extra. The Cupertino company is now offering free next-day shipping on everything — if you live in the United States, that is.

The iPhone and iPad are the perpetual accessories of today’s office warrior, yet even so, the pickings are slim for the professional who wants an app suite capable of reading and writing Microsoft Office documents on the go.

Luckily, that’s all changed. Polaris Office is here, and it’s not just Microsoft Office on your iPhone or iPad: it’s better.

Here’s how you start an e-mail pitch:

In your last post about the Braven 570, I loved how you said that someday you might stop writing about candy bar shaped speakers. Well, today is the day for a Bluetooth speaker that shaped like, well, paper.

That speaker is the CoverPlay Mojo, a skinny speaker that will snuggle into your luggage between your shirts, instead of needing to be jammed inside a shoe like all its stupid, oafish rivals.

A free SpongeBob Squarepants game from Nickelodeon has had to be pulled from the App Store following complaints that it violates children’s online privacy rights. SpongeBob Diner Dash asked children for their names and email addresses without parental permission — so that it could fill their inboxes with spam, no doubt — causing an advocacy group to report the app to the Federal Trade Commission.

Like many modern human beings, I keep electronic calendars. I use Google calendar for many of them, but I also have a couple on my Mac, a couple on my iPhone, and the like. I have a calendar for each of my three jobs, for family events, I have shared calendars for groups I belong to, and, of course, Birthday calendars. My Calendar app is a many-colored thing.

But what happens when you just want to see one of these calendars at any given moment? Just birthdays, for example, without cluttering it up with a bunch of job-related stuff? If you use the built-in Mac OS X Calendar app, this is pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.

Apple’s 4G-equipped iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad have taken a step closer towards a launch in China today after receiving their network licenses from Chinese telecommunications certification center TENAA. Like the iPhone 5, the tablets are expected to be available on the China Unicom and China Telecom networks.

Korean electronics giant Samsung has today announced that it will drop its patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The announcement comes just hours after Apple was denied its request to have 26 Samsung devices banned in the United States — though the two cases are unrelated.

It’s one of the most iconic products of all time, and now, Apple holds a design patent for the original 2007 iPhone, with the US Patent and Trademark Office granting Cupertino a design patent for the smartphone that started it all.

The invenotors of the design are credited as Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Bartley Andre, Daniel Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Richard Howarth, Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Rohrbach, Douglas Satzger, Calvin Seid, Christopher Stringer, Eugene Whang, and Rico Zorkendorfer.

Source: USPTO
Via: Patently Apple

We’ve had many deals of note here at Cult of Mac for quite some time, but this is one is “noteworthy” in the most literal sense of the word!

The Ultimate Music Bundle offers 8 top music applications (including TuneUp) for a fraction of the regular price. You’d normally pay $355 for all of these apps, but Cult of Mac Deals has it for you for a mere $39!

Another chapter has closed in the Apple/Samsung patent saga thanks to a couple decisions handed down today by Judge Lucy Koh. Apple has been denied its bid for a permanent sales ban against the 26 Samsung devices found to have infringed on a handful of Apple’s patents back in August. According to the Koh, those infringed patents are but a small fraction of the overall features that make up Samsung’s devices and thus do not warrant a permanent ban.

Apple is looking to evolve its own Maps app in iOS 6 by potentially partnering with Foursquare to provide local listings, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Talks between Apple and Foursquare are still in the early “preliminary” stages, according to the report, but Apple is definitely interested in what Foursquare has to offer.

Yelp is already integrated into iOS 6 Maps, and Apple partners with other services to offer more than 100 million business listings. A partnership with Foursquare could help enrich Apple’s location data and even help fix inaccuracies in iOS 6 Maps.

‘Tis the Season for icy corpses and carnivorous reindeer. Okay, maybe not the reindeer part, but there’s definitely a legion of undead terrorizing the North Pole and spreading Christmas fear. That’s right, our favorite zombie shooter title Dead Trigger has received a freakishly festive holiday update full of cold corpses, new weapons, and a jolly dead soul called Zanta.

Loren Brichter’s Game Center success story, Letterpress, has been updated today in the App Store with a couple of new features and improvements. Version 1.2 of the popular, Scrabble-like word game introduces a new HTML5-based feature called “Share Replays.” You can now share a link from the iOS game that shows a word-by-word progression of how a match progressed.

The last update to Letterpress brought the ability to quickly demand a rematch, and now you can see a history of your skills as a wordsmith with Replays. The game’s dictionary has also been tweaked and improved.

Google Maps for iPhone rocketed to the top of the App Store in just 7 hours, and today Google confirmed that the app was downloaded over 10 million times in less than 48 hours. Those are crazy numbers. People clearly wanted the triumphant return of Google Maps to iOS, but how many downloads are a result of Google’s own promoting?