Cult of Mac

I get a boat-load of email everyday. Every morning I have pretty much the same routine, skim through my inbox to try to find the important stuff, skip the cruft, and prioritize. After that skim, I need to delete most (if not all) of the cruft. Annoying, time consuming, and worst of all sometimes I miss important emails buried in the cruft. Now, I’m also very skeptical about services that interact (or intervene) with my email. I don’t want to lose or miss something important. I also don’t want spam, bacon, or cruft in my inbox either.

Enter SaneBox—Spend Less Time In Your Inbox With SaneBox (1-Year): Keep Your Inbox Clutter-Free & Your Mind Sane With a 1-Year Subscription—which after watching the intro video (below) I figured I’d give it a shot. Why not, I can try it for a couple weeks for free before I even have to enter my credit card. Yeah, well I’ve pushed a few email accounts through it this morning and…wow.

This is Rubbernet, a network activity monitoring tool for OS X. If you really need to know what’s hogging your bandwidth, Rubbernet can tell you.

HEX3's JaJa is one of the first pressure-sensitive styluses on the market, and it is also the most unique. Instead of using low-power Bluetooth 4 to talk to your iPad, it uses high-frequency sound. This not only lets it work with the iPad 1 (or any capacitive-screened device whether iOS or Android), but means that the battery lasts for weeks.

I have been testing one out for a month or so now, and some big apps have now added support. So how does it do?

Apple fans have been disappointed that the iPad mini cost $329, while other 7-inch tablets cost significantly less. Phil Schiller defended the price saying consumers will pay for a quality product. He’s right. Apple’s going to sell a gazillion iPad minis, but the reason for it’s higher price tag might have a lot more to do with problems manufacturing the touch screen.

According to Digitimes, Apple’s $329 price tag for the iPad mini is largely due to low yield rates for the device’s GF2 (DITO film) touch screen technology.

If the Apple used a real apple and an MRI scanner to make their logo it’d probably look something like this. Brazillian physician Gabriel Camargo was at work the other day, eating an apple, when a thought popped into his brain that it’d be pretty cool to create an MRI scan of the Apple logo.

So he placed his apple in the idel MRI scanner that was nearby and the result was the image you see above. Even though the placement of the bite is a tad off, we think it looks pretty sweet.

Source: WIRED

ThrowMeApp is a camera app which will magically turn your Android phone into something useful. The idea is that you keep your precious iPhone safe in your pocket and then toss your Android phone into the air as high as it will go.

The app then takes over, firing the shutter automatically and snapping an aerial shot of you. neat, right?

The iPhone camera has sparked a revolution in self-portraits – both above and below the belt. One Apple fanatic in San Francisco has turned the habit of iPhone users to say cheese into inspiration for a new kind of portrait.

Igor Capibaribe takes the nude iPhone photos people send him and turns them into one-of-a-kind art works.

The final effect is so far away from DIY nudie shots that the photos here don’t really do them justice. If you’re in San Francisco, you can check them out on this weekend at his studio. (October 26th from 6-9 pm, October 27 and 28 from 11 am – 6pm, Studio 3A 2150 Folsom Street. You can also see more on his site.)

One of my favorite things about OS X is that if the need ever arises where I absolutely have to use a Windows only application, I don’t have to borrow a friend’s PC, I can just run Windows via Bootcamp right on my Mac. It’s not something I do often, but it has happened a few times.

Parallels makes the experience even better by letting you run Windows while you’re still using OS X so you only have to taste Windows for a brief momemt. With the release of Windows 8 approaching though Parallels posted a critical and urgent advisory note today telling Mac users that they should hold off on upgrading to Windows 8 for a little while.

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Just $124 will buy you the mCAMLITE, an aluminum case for your iPhone 5 which lets you attach all manner of photo and video accessories, as well as making it easier to hold.

No, this isn’t a stylish retro-camera case for fauxtographers, but it is a serious tool for photographers and videographers.

Each time Apple releases a shiny new device lusted after by consumers across the globe, workers at Chinese factory manufacturers pay the price more than anyone who waits in line at an Apple Store for five hours to shell out $329.

As soon as production of an Apple product goes into launch mode, Chinese factory workers get hit by a wave of chemical fumes, 12-hour work shifts, unpaid overtime, and even explosions, as they are hurried to assemble the device.

After over a year of rumor and speculation, we’re less than a day away fr0m the iPad mini finally going up for preorder. Starting at 12:01AM Pacific Time, the iPad mini (Wi-Fi version only) will be available for preorder on Apple’s official site, with units delivering on November 2nd.

It’s always hard to tell with a new product, but if history is anything to go by — the iPhone 5 preorders sold out within hours, and stock is still short — the iPad mini is going to be crazy in-demand. If Apple starts preorders in the middle of the night, it’s because they’re anticipating a madhouse… such a madhouse that if they held it in the middle of the day, their servers would crash under the pressure.

Hence this guide. We’re going to walk you through the best ways to make absolutely sure you get your iPad mini preordered right at the stroke of midnight and in your hands next Friday when it officially launches in the minimum amount of time, so you can go right back to sleep.

Wondering which iPad mini to buy? Check out our guide to finding the one that is right for you.

I confess, I was prepared to dismiss Pocket for Mac when I first heard about it.

After all, I thought: I already have Pocket on my Mac. It sits in my browser, where its life began and where I think it belongs. It is software born of the web. It should live on the web.

But I changed my mind pretty fast after trying out the native app, downloaded from the Mac App Store. Because it’s gorgeous.

Why buy a whole new stylus and carry it around with you when you could just buy a little capacitive tip to slip onto the top of your biro/ballpoint pen/pencil? That’s the thinking behind Stylus Caps.

Each time Apple releases a new product, American TV show hosts rush out with their jokes about it. Conan O’Brien consistently comes out with the best Apple jokes, and he’s got another great one with this new video that uncovers the real reason why you want to buy an iPad mini.

Source: YouTube

[polldaddy poll=6632040]

Over 45% of iPad owners are a little upset that Apple announced the iPad 4 on Tuesday. Even though the iPad 4 is a small spec bump, the iPad 3 has only been on the market for six months, making some iPad 3 owners feel like they got screwed out of having the latest and greatest iPad.

Toluna QuickSurveys conducted a study involving 2000 iPad owners, and they discovered that  50% of iPad 4 owners are upset about the launch of the iPad 4, followed by 45% of iPad 2 owners and 40% of first-generation iPad owners being upset as well.

We love DODOCase here at Cult of Mac. They are the finest of a surprising number of purveyors who makes cases that turn your iDevice into a simulacrum of the Moleskine, and now they’re doing the same by selling three new products for the iPad mini.

There’s the classic DODOCase, which starts at $59.95, the DODOCase Hardcover, which starts at $35,94, and the BookBack, which affixes the back of your iPad mini with a Moleskine-like leather and costs just $19.95.

All of Dodocase’s products for the iPad mini are available to buy now. Stay tuned for a Cult of Mac review.

Source: DODOCase

Chances are you’ve heard of the popular app iTranslate Voice that made a splash when it landed on the App Store earlier this year. iTranslate voice made it easy to quickly translate phrases and sentences, right on your iPhone.

Well, the folks at Tapity and Sonico Mobile haven’t been standing still, releasing a brand new app today called Languages that builds on the foundation of iTranslate Voice. I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks, and it really is an incredible application.

It used to be that Mac owners had to wait for an OS update to get RAW support for their new cameras. This — of course — meant a long wait. Now they pop out whenever they're needed, and you don't even have to restart your Mac.

It's like we're living in the future and, with Marty McFly arriving on his hover-board in just three years from now, that's exactly how it should be.

I seldom let my geekiness get in the way of my nerdiness, but even I’m slavering over this Eye of Sauron iPhone 5 case designed by Shapeways user joabaldiwn, “in which the Apple logo becomes the evil eye of Sauron, in the tower of Barad-Dûr, by the fiery pits of Cupertino… I mean, Mordor.”

I own a cheap plastic tape measure. I also own (or rather, haven’t yet tossed out) a conference lanyard with a retractable card holder for my laminated ID.

Why am I telling you this? Because both of them look just like the Memoto, a teeny-tiny lifeblogging camera which you wear around your neck or clip on your clothes. Like both of my crapgadgets, the Memoto is small and inconspicuous. Apart from the bright-orange color…

Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, is much like Apple’s products: at best, he only comes in two colors. Even though he has been used in promotional videos for eight new Apple products in just the past three years, he has only ever worn two shirts through all of them.

Luckily, he’s Lon Chaney-like in regards to the number of expressions he can put on his face. Unfortunately, not all of them are what we would call strictly dignified.

Along with AT&T yesterday, Sprint tosay has announced their third quarter 2012 results, and activated 1.5 million iPhones during that period, 40% of whom are new customers… essentially the same number of new iPhones per quarter Sprint has maintained for the entire year of 2012 to date.

It wasn’t all sunny, though. The company reported a net loss of $767 million for the third quarter against $7.3 billion in revenues.

Source: Sprint

So, Apple likes to change things; this much is a given. The software developers behind the operating system, OS X, are no different. They’re constantly changing the way things work from iteration to iteration of Apple’s computer software.

In Snow Leopard, when you made changes to a document and tried to close that document, you’d be asked by your Mac, in essence, “are you sure you want to do that?” and you could tell it to save the changes you made, or discard them. It was a way to let us know that there had, in fact, been changes to the document, whether we meant them or not.

In Lion, that little “feature” went away. Documents in Lion were always saved, regardless. This is a neat feature, in some ways, but it keeps you from knowing if you’ve made any unintended changes.

Luckily, Mountain Lion lets you choose the way you want it to work. If you want to have that failsafe “are you sure” save changes dialog, you can enable it. If you don’t want it, you can disable it.

As is their wont, as if their drive, the lovely boys over at iFixIt have already ripped apart the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to check out the gooey silicon insides of Apple’s latest laptops.

Hey, Pocket users, good news: today sees the release of Pocket for Mac, a native OS X app which you can download for free from the Mac App Store.