Using Apple Maps in Australia is freaking dangerous. Like, if you’re just trying to get directions to your girlfriend’s aunt’s house, you might get navigated to a cave full a flesh-eating mutant wallabies. Or it might just navigate you off the road and into the wilderness if you’re not paying attention to where you’re driving, but whatever.

Samsung has decided that Apple’s Map fiasco in Australia should not go unnoticed, so they’ve created a guerrilla marketing campaign to lure people into using a Samsung Galaxy SIII because it has dependable maps.

Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, releases a list of the best places to work for every year. A lot of other websites comprise similar lists, but what makes Glassdoor’s list unique is that it’s based on feedback from anonymous employees who actually work at the companies.

For the last three years Facebook has been in the top three while Apple has appeared in the number spot in the past as well. For 2013 Glassdoor ranked Apple as the 34th best place to work at, while Facebook grabbed the number one spot.

The distinctive startup chime that greets every Mac owner when they start up their machine in the morning? That sound of a synthesizer playing a “slightly flat, by about thirty cents, G flat/F sharp chord” that tells you everything’s all okay and right with your Mac? Apple now owns a registered trademark for that sound. Hoorah!

Source: Patently Apple

New York has reportedly been pitched a proposal that would see a 3.2 million square foot computer chip factory built in the state… and Government Andrew Cuomo is slyly hinting that the proposal might come from Apple as part of a big to start building their A-Series iPhone and iPad CPUs domestically.

The iPad mini is such an incredible device that many of us assumed it will start to cannibalize sales of the iPad early on.

Last month we saw some early analysis that claimed the iPad mini is cannibalizing the sales of PCs, not iPads. However, a new report from Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu is predicting that the iPad mini is starting to eat into the iPad’s sales.

Qualcomm, the company that manufactures Apple’s baseband chips for iOS devices, has slammed the Cupertino company in an official ITC filing over its response to questions regarding the availability of injunctive relief over SEPs and criteria for FRAND royalty rates.

Qualcomm says Apple’s thoughts on the subject are a “sham,” that the company “should be ashamed of itself.”

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.