Cult of Mac

Apple won’t let you put the iOS Newsstand icon in a folder for some ridiculous reason. It’s annoying. A lot of people don’t use Newsstand on the iPhone, and after awhile that wooden bookshelf icon seems to just sit there, mocking you. Wouldn’t it to be nice to hide it in a folder with all the other stock apps you don’t you use, like that stupid Compass app?

There was a trick discovered in iOS 5 that lets you hide Newsstand with some finger magic, but the process is a little tedious. A new utility app for the Mac called StifleStand puts Newsstand in an iOS folder for you, no jailbreak required.

Headquake is a music sound enhancement app for iOS. It claims to “flat narrow sounds to an enormous yet perfectly balanced 3D Sound experience surrounding your head.” But hearing, like music, is a very individual thing, and Headquake’s efforts aren’t always much of an enhancement.

The iPhone 5 has a slightly larger display than the iPhone 4S, but come on, no one wants to watch movies on a tiny little 4-inch screen. You could go and buy an iPad or iPad Mini if you really want to watch movies on your iOS device, or you could save your self a few hundred dollars and buy this odd accessory that magnifies your screen size.

We don’t often praise Microsoft here at Cult of Mac, but with this game they’ve got almost everything right. It’s a cool action-adventure romp with great visuals and a sense of humor. The only thing that leaves me boggling is the ridiculous name: “Tentacles: Enter the Dolphin.” I beg your pardon?

Some gadgets pick one thing, and do only that thing. And they do it very, very well. Other gadgets try to pack in everything possible, and they usually end up doing everything badly. This is called the Swiss Army Knife Approach (SAKA), and if you ever wondered why the Swiss are neutral in all wars, now you know.

The ReadyCase takes the latter approach, and like any good SAKA device, it’s way more fun to marvel at the amount of widgets the makers packed in than it would ever be to use.

Oh man. Just this weekend I was poking around my kitchen, trying to find a stand to turn the iPhone/iPad into a scanner. And then this morning I open up the internet and find this, the Nimbus Cloud Dome, a plastic light-diffusing bowl which could double as a receptacle for making cakes.

We’re expecting Apple to announce the iPad Mini really soon. Production is ramping up, and the keynote is rumored to take place next week. By now Apple’s got all the details in place for the first generation iPad Mini, and it’s more than likely only going to come in black and white, but what if Apple made the iPad Mini as colorful as the new iPod Touches?

Gizmodo’s been playing around with iPad Mini concept art, changing the back plating to match the new colors of the iPod Touch, and it looks really good. A red or yellow iPad Mini would look pretty sweet, and because it’s going to be a cheaper tablet, parents are probably going to be buying a lot of iPad Mini’s for their kids at Christmas, and kids love the hell out of colorful products. Do you think Apple should release the iPad Mini in a rainbow of colors like they do with iPods and the original iMac? Tell us what you think over at the Cult of Mac forums.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and share what you think about the idea of colorful iPad Minis

Last week we discovered the funniest way to play Connector Four on an iPhone. It’s silly and slightly painful, but completely awesome in a nerdy way. Now someone’s raised the stakes and figured out that you can also create games of Checkers or Chess using emoji. If you’re really bored trying to figure out how to celebrate Columbus Day today, now you have an activity that’s guaranteed to take up a few hours of your time.

Source: Reddit

Sometimes 10-digits can be a few too many numbers to remember or too boring to want to remember. That’s why Sprint has decided to spice up your phone number with its new StarStar Me service. Forget those boring digits and have people call you using a unique name or handle. Perhaps all your friends know you as the baconater and you want to keep it that way. Simply sign up for the number **baconater and allow anyone with an iPhone or Android-powered smartphones to call you by dialing **baconater.

It has been brought to my attention that people still use laptop computers when they travel. Instead of tossing a keyboard in with their iPad and calling it good, these masochists lug along an entire MacBook with them, just to do some work.

For these people, the Stukk stand exists. It is super-light and folds up ultra-small, helping you to not break your shoulder as you lug your behemoth around with you, and can be quickly assembled to keep your hot-running machine cool. Or cooler, at least.

Well that didn’t take long. It’s only been three days since Rovio teased us with the possibility of an Angry Birds Star Wars game, and today, it’s official. Rovio has announced that they will be launching Angry Birds Star Wars worldwide on Novemeber 8th and a barrage of merchandise starting October 28th (in time to get your kids into Angry Birds Star Wars costumes).

Apple’s overactive approach to defending its patents may sometimes make it look like one of the industry’s biggest bullies, but you may be surprised to hear that the Cupertino used to patent hardly anything. In fact, it only began patenting its inventions after years of patent suit losses, one of which saw the company fined $100 million for creating the iPod.

The DNG spec has been updated to v1.4 by the folks at Adobe, and it brings support for cropping, HDR, panoramas and lossy file compression. With these changes, maybe it's ready to replace JPEG in iDevices?

How do you get a printed, paper photograph from your iPhone? The easiest way is probably to use an app which lets you pick a pic, and then get a print delivered to your door a few days later.

But the funnest way is probably the one used by Adam Rhoades: he prints them in a traditional darkroom, using the iPhone’s screen as both negative and enlarger bulb.

Following reports of a riot between 4,000 employees earlier this month, Foxconn has acknowledged that two disputes between workers did take place at one of its Chinese plants. However, the company has denied claims of a strike over iPhone 5 production pressures, and says that production is on schedule.

Given Twitter’s recent history of slowly locking down its service for developers and third-party apps, you may be looking for a way around using a special app to send out a Tweet from your Mac that doesn’t include logging into your web browser, logging in to Twitter, then adding your message. Maybe you want to just send out a quick tweet about something, but want to avoid the hassle of launching Tweetbot or the official Twitter app. Either way, you can send out tweets from Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion.

You need to enable it, first, though. Here’s how.

Apple has reportedly placed an order for 10 million iPad mini units ahead of its much-anticipated launch this fall, according to component suppliers in Asia speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The figure indicates that Apple expects the device to be a big seller this holiday season, despite strong competition from the likes of Amazon and Google.

It seems impossible for a new Apple product to launch without the idiots and morons crawling out from their dark shells of ignorance, their subhuman bodies propelled only by the motion of a jerking knee as they regain consciousness for just long enough to write a blog post about some perceived “problem.”

Today’s example: purple fringing.

AT&T is once again hard at work trying to win that customer satisfaction award… said no AT&T board member ever. Those of you who have enjoyed having 30 days to decide whether or not your AT&T device or service is right for you, are going to have to cut your indecisiveness in half. Starting today, when you sign up for AT&T service or purchase a device on AT&T, you’ll have 14 days to return or cancel without being liable for an ETF (early termination fee).

We’ve got a first here folks. Today, we have a “Name Your Own Price” (NYOP) bundle of 9 awesome Mac apps like Forklift 2, Typinator, MacFlux 4, and a little twist. See, in addition to naming your own price (yes you can even buy it for a $1, though the suggested prices is $49), 10% of what you spend goes to either EFF, charity water, or Stand Up To Cancer.

See? Sure you might want to just name a cheepo price for the bundle…but that means a great charity gets less money too. Hmmm.

As a gadget reviewer, I go through a lot of shipped packages. Which means I have to deal with a logistical nightmare second only to the Allied supply lines following the D-Day landings (except my packages tend to be, for the most part, somewhat less liable to explode or cause diarrhea). But that’s OK — I have a secret weapon to help keep everything straight.

Junecloud‘s Deliveries Status ($5) tracks shipments in a wonderfully simple, easy-to-read, straightforward manner; and like many of Apple’s own products, it just works.

It’s beginning to look a lot like an iPad Mini Christmas. Credible reports say over-worked factory employees in China are already churning out small iTablets in large iQuantities, and that Apple will summon fawning journalists Wednesday to participate in an October 17 iPad Mini infomercial — I mean product launch.

I predict that the iPad Mini will dominate holiday sales, take over the education market and destroy three current products on the market. 

True, email is boring. However, it’s something we all use everyday to communicate for work, home, and pleasure. In iOS 6, Apple made a few changes to the way the Mail app works, tossing in new ways to sort, sign, and attach things to emails. Using the iOS 6 Mail app effectively takes a little bit of practice, a few tweaks, and the following five tips for using iOS 6 Mail the right way.

There are some rather prodigious — nay, daring — affirmations made about the gratuitous ($0.00) iPad / iPod app Finger Cut by its developer, Poland’s Jan Mazurczak: “It’s the most stupid app on the App Store!” he asseverates, appending, “downloaded three million times!” Well it’s certainly cutting edge….

Kyle Buckner has been inspired by Steve Jobs his whole life, ultimately choosing a career in design due to the Apple founder’s influence.

Today, he announced a new tribute piece in honor of the first anniversary of Jobs’ passing: a specially designed desk, available in two colors from his website. The desks are a labor of love from Buckner that include a special Steve Jobs logo, designed specifically for this project. The result is a piece of furniture that’s both functional and beautiful, much like the product designs Buckner’s hero was a lifelong advocate for.

The desks are selling fro $999.99 apiece, with a portion of the proceeds going to The American Cancer Society. We took a few minutes to chat with Buckner via email.