Cult of Mac

We all have too many apps, I’m guessing. As an app aficionado, I have hundreds of apps across several pages, many of them buried within folders. iOS is organized for visual memory; I’m usually flipping through pages and looking for the app I need based on where it is on the page, how the icon looks, and what other apps it’s near.

Once past the first page or two, however, and especially in folders filled with a bunch of apps, that visual strategy starts to break down. Typically, I’ll swipe right from the Home screen and type in the name of the app, then tap on it to launch it. This works fine, but eventually takes more time than just knowing what folder the app resides in. Here’s how to find out.

Back in the good old days of the 20th Century, a person’s edge-beaten leather suitcase might be the accessory they traveled with the most, with which they had visited the most exotic of foreign, jasmine-scented climes, and it would be covered with stickers of all the places they’d visited.

These days, people don’t have as personal of a connection with their suitcases, and showing someone you’ve been somewhere is usually done by checking-in on Foursquare. Your iPhone is the accessory you’re most likely to travel the world with, which is why I love the iPhone (Suit)Case, a conceptual iPhone case by Dallas illustrators / artists David Soames and Dustin Taylor that makes your iPhone look like a miniature suitcase.

Sadly, it’s just a concept right now, but voting’s open on Threadless to turn this product into a reality. Hopefully one made with real leather.

Source: Threadless
Via: Laughing Squid

99.95% of the time I pray that my Mac will never get a bug, but now part of me holds on to a sliver of hope that I will one day see an OS X bug that is as beautiful as this. A very small number of Mac users have reported that Launchpad has thrown out a new bug that crystalizes all of the icons on the Launchpad screen.

The way the bug occurs is pretty simple – the blur effect and crystallise effect are two built in core image filters and somehow Launchpad is applying the crystallise effect when it should be using blur. It’s a bit whacky and goes away after a bit, but it sure is spectacular.

Here’s how the bug morphed another Mac user’s screen:

As Apple and Samsung try to purge themselves of dependency on one another things are bound to get even more ugly over the next 12-18months. A report came out earlier this week that Samsung was planning to raise the price on Apple’s processors by 20%.

The significant price increase would mean Apple’s cash cow – the iPhone – wouldn’t have as profitable margins which would negatively effect Apple’s bottom line. However, an official at Samsung has come out today to deny the changes and says that a 20% price hike isn’t coming.

Apple is not a company that is afraid to introduce a product that will cannibalize other Apple products. No one buys iPod Classics anymore, they buy an iPod Touch or iPhone. The MacBook Air cannibalized sales of regular MacBooks. And many assumed the iPad mini would cannibalize sales of the iPad, but that assumption is false.

Some analysts believed the iPad mini would cannibalize sales of the iPad by a rate of 10 to 20 percent. A new survey by Cowen and Co. shows that while the iPad mini has been selling well, it hasn’t been cannibalized its bigger sibling, but it is killing PC sales.

Although the iPad mini is well-reviewed, a constant complaint that has been leveled against Apple’s smallest tablet is that the display isn’t Retina. In fact, in my review of the iPad mini, I could barely see past the terrible fuziness of the on-screen text, and considered it an otherwise perfect device’s Achilles’ Heel.

Over the last day or so, a lot of thinkers in the Apple space have piped up, saying that it would essentially be impossible for Apple to make the iPad mini with a Retina display.

Summarized, the argument is this: A Retina iPad mini would be too expensive for Apple to make right now, and it would come with other tradeoffs, like a significantly reduced battery life and a much thicker and heavier form factor.

I was curious if this was actually true, so I decided to try an experiment: I’d build an imaginary Retina iPad mini out of technology that Apple already has access to, add up how much it would cost, and then see what the design tradeoffs would be.

What I found out was that Apple could indeed have shipped an iPad mini with Retina this generation without significantly changing the form or battery life of the device, but it would have cost $379. Here’s why.

While Apple Stores across the U.S. continue to enjoy a lot of success, Apple is looking to expand their retail operations overseas in countries such as China, Turkey and now Brazil.

According to a new press release, Apple has informed the Brazilian press that they plan to open their first Apple Store in Rio de Janerio next year. If the Rio de Janeiro store is successful, Apple is likely to follow it up with more retail locations in Brazil, which is also where Foxconn has built new factories to assemble iPads.

Anyone with fond memories of playing Zoo Keeper on a Nintendo DS a few years ago probably doesn’t need to read any further. Just go get it for iOS now, and have fun.

If you missed out on Zoo Keeper first time round, or if you’ve simply never encountered it, allow me to enlighten you: this is fantastic fast-paced color-matching puzzle fun. And for the time being, it’s free.

Apple has appealed an $84,000 fine from a Chinese court that alleged it had profited from sales of a pirated encyclopedia that was sold through its App Store. The Cupertino company refuses to accept responsibility for the infringement and argues that it was nothing more than a store operator.

Apple gadgets you buy in the future may have been assembled by machines as Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner, Foxconn, begins replacing its workers with robots. The move is expected to improve efficiency in Foxconn’s Chinese plants, as well as combat rising labor costs.

1. Fact: I carry my iPad almost naked (the iPad is naked — not me thank God).
2. Fact: I often want to prop the thing up in portrait mode to use with a Bluetooth keyboard
3. Fact: Penguins and polar bears would never meet in the wild.
4. Fact: Most portrait-capable iPad stands are just too unwieldy to live in a bag permanently.

Considering these amazing facts, it should come as no surprise that I’m about to tell you about a stand which will in fact hold the iPad in pretty much any orientation. What’s more, it does it whilst looking like a love egg that has sprouted a long, long pair of huggy arms. Let’s be honest — it’s pretty creepy-looking.

To say Samsung and Apple have a strained relationship would be quite the understatement. A once symbiotic partnership has turned into an all out war over claims of patent infringement and design copying. Their global legal battles have disgusted enough judges and consumers to spawn serious debate over the current status of our patent system and a call for reform.

Lightning chargers! Get your Lightning chargers here! Scosche has finally announced a set of basic home and car chargers for the current crop of iDevices, and you can actually buy the things.

Power users know that the more you can keep your hands on the keyboard, the faster you can get things done on your Mac. That’s the reason keyboard shortcuts exist, like Command-C to copy text, or Shift-Command-3 to take a screenshot. It’s perfectly acceptable to move your mouse to select the command from a menu, of course, but the keyboard shortcuts are just faster.

Spotlight, like most other OS X apps, has several shortcuts that can help you get around much more quickly.

Tap Tap Tap has updated its hugely popular Camera+ app for iPhone today, introducing a stack of great new features and lots of improvements. It claims to have “made the impossible possible” by introducing a front-facing flash, in addition to a horizontal level, live exposure, and more.

It used to be so simple: you grabbed your gadget, and you plugged it into the nearest available USB hole. Then, a few minutes or hours later, your device was fully charged.

Now we have retina iPads with laptop-sized batteries, 5W, 10W and 12W chargers, and even differently-rated USB ports in our Macs. It’s so confusing.

Let’s make this problem disappear by throwing some money at it. $49 worth of cash-money, to be precise. And that $49 will get you the… DoubleUp!

If you haven’t already installed Apple’s latest EFI firmware for your 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, you may want to avoid it for a little while. Users on the Apple Support Communities forum are reporting that the update causes reduced frame rates and processor slowdowns when using graphically-intensive applications.

Every time Apple introduces a new product they love to compare it to a common object that shows just how magically small it is. The MacBook Air fits inside an envelope. The iPod Classic is the size of a deck of cards. The iPad mini is thinner than a pencil. And the 4th generation iPad with Retina display is thinner than a penny! Wait, what?

A typo on Apple’s website says that the depth of the iPad is .37mm, which would make it about as thick as four sheets of paper copy. For sake of comparison  a penny has a depth of 1.57mm, so the new iPad is hella skinny. Obviously the image should show .37 inches thick, not millimeters. We’re just surprised this little mistake has slipped through Apple’s perfectionist fingers without much notice.

Source: Apple

Via: Reddit

Today’s tech gives us access to the photos we care the most about. Whether we’ve used our mobile phone or a high-quality digital camera to take these photos, they’re incredibly accessible – no matter where we are. But wouldn’t it be great if you could take any of those photos and create a piece of art that you can hang on your wall?

With this Cult of Mac Deals offer from CanvasPop you can make a gallery quality canvas print out of any image – but this deal is almost up!

If you’re into iPhoneography, chances are you’ve heard of Olloclip. The company sells one of the best lens kits there is for the iPhone. Apple gives you the ability to digitally zoom in the Camera app, but Olloclip takes photography to the next level with fisheye, wide angle, and macro lenses.

Olloclip is now offering its 3-in-1 lens kit for the iPhone 5.

If you don’t know by now, Mujjo makes the sexiest sleeves around for Apple products. If you just bought or plan on picking up Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, then Mujjo has you covered. The Dutch company has announced its new sleeve for the 13-inch Retina MacBook.

When Apple released the iPhone 5 three months ago, jailbreak hackers were sent back to the grindstone. Like a new version of iOS, new Apple hardware almost always kills the current jailbreak. It’s a ruthless game of cat and mouse.

Has the iPhone 5 been jailbroken? Sort of. A picture of what looked like a jailbroken iPhone 5 spread like wildfire several months ago, but that’s only part of the story. An iPhone 5 jailbreak is being worked on, and good progress is being made. For jailbreakers, now is the time to have hope.

Today a free version of popular photography iPhone app “Over” launched in the App Store called “Overgram.” With Overgram, it’s easy to add beautiful typography to pictures taken on your iPhone. As the name implies, you can easily share your creations on social networks like Instagram.

Check out Overgram, and if you like it, the full version of Over is on sale in the App Store for a limited time. Your Instagram feed will never be the same.

The last few weeks have been a bit rocky for Apple and its new CEO Tim Cook, but that hasn’t stopped it from enjoying record breaking successes thanks to the iPhone 5 and iPad.

Every year the people at Fierce Wireless rank the top 25 most powerful people in the U.S. wireless industry, and for their rankings this year Tim Cook managed to grab the number one spot.

So, you think the panorama feature on your new iPhone is pretty sweet, right? It allows you to take panoramic photos without any special post-shot software, and you can shoot left to right or right to left.

But what if you want to take a picture of a super tall Sequoia tree, for example? Or a skyscraper, for that matter? Turns out you can shoot really tall things, too, using this vertical panorama picture tip.