Cult of Mac

Now that Apple has apologized for its decision to release a half-baked Maps app in iOS 6, the vast majority of us will carry on with our lives and use a third-party solution until Apple’s is fixed. Right now, it seems Apple is a company that can achieve anything. So it won’t be too long before Maps is as good as — if not better then — Google Maps. Right?

Maybe not. You see, Apple’s Maps problem could be much bigger than we think, and it could be a long time before we can say goodbye to third-party alternatives.

If you’re going to add retro-style filter effects to your photos, then you might as well use Instant, a new app for the iPad (and Mac) which goes the whole way: not only does it Instagrammatificate your images, but it forces you to watch the results pop out of a Polaroid camera, and then you have to wait for the pictures to “develop.”

Which is not to say that I don’t like the app. In fact, it turns out to be rather excellent.

Apple has a cash hoard that is worth more than one hundred and ten billion dollars, but that money doesn’t just sit in a bank collecting interest. Apple invests it, using a Nevada-based asset management corporation called Braeburn Capital. And it might just be the world’s largest hedge fund.

Have you ever looked at your iPad and wished it ran OS X, Apple’s desktop operating system? I have — like when I attempted to use WordPress in mobile Safari. But a Mac-powered tablet is no longer just a dream, thanks to the Modbook Pro. The Modbook Pro comes with all the benefits you get with an iPad, such as a touchscreen and excellent portability, but it runs Mountain Lion. And you can pre-order yours from October 3.

FastTrack Navigator is just about the simplest navigation app you could ever want: It’s a big arrow on the screen telling you the direction of your destination, along with a number telling you how far away it is. But that’s not to say that it isn’t beautifully designed.

In a post by Jeff Atwood over at the excellent Coding Horror, there’s this brilliant chart showing the “hyperbolic performance improvement” of the iPhone since it first debuted in 2008. As Jeff points out, in just five years, the iPhone has seen a factor of 20 performance improvement in Browsermark and a factor of four improvement in GeekBench, at least doubling performance every year.

Remember, way back in July, when we told you how to bring Save As… back to OS X Mountain Lion? Basically, we showed you how to add an Application shortcut to the Edit menu, and then create a keyboard shortcut to invoke it.

The problem with that helpful advice, though, is that it modified both the original file and the newly saved file if you’ve changed stuff before invoking the Save As function.

However, now with OS X 10.8.2, you can fix this behavior. It’s really quite easy–here’s how.

So, hey, guess what? You can now set up more than one signature in the new iOS 6 Mail app for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Each email account you have set up will allow you to have a specific signature attached to just that email address.

So, from now on, you can have “–Sent from my iPhone 5” for your personal email, and your professional information sent out whenever you use your email from work. You can create a signature for that secret Yahoo! email account you keep for special purposes, and your boss will ever see it.

Here’s how.

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has called for Apple’s warranty adverts to be examined in the European Union’s 27 states. Reding hopes to establish whether or not the Cupertino company fails to mention a buyers’ right to a minimum two-year warranty for all electronics, including Macs and iOS devices.

When Apple was doing its damnedest to kick people out of MobileMe in June this year and get them to use iCloud instead, one of the incentives they gave the soon-to-be disposessed was a free offer that former MobileMe members would get 20GB of iCloud storage gratis, instead of the 5GB Apple gives the rest of us suckers. But it was only for a limited time, until September 30, 2012.

Looks like Apple may have extended their offer, though. Some iCloud usersare now noticing that they’ve got 25GB of iCloud storage to play around with until September 30, 2050, when their free 20GB should have been snatched away from them yesterday. Even more interesting is that some non-MobileMe users are seeing the same deal, and have found themselves getting a free 20GB bump in storage.

Apple has issued its first software update to the iPhone 5 just over a week after the handset was released — but you’ll only see it if you’re on Verizon. No, the update doesn’t make Maps work. Instead, it “resolves an issue in which, under certain circumstances, iPhone 5 may use Verizon cellular data while the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network.”

There’s an important list every serious outdoor junkie has at least heard of — it’s called the Ten Essentials, and it lists gear no adventurer should journey into the wilds without. But it was codified long before the digital age arrived; now that power-hungry electronic gadgets are a part of adventuring, a relaible backup fuel tank is pretty important. It could even make the difference between life and death.

That’s where Mophie’s Juice Pack Powerstation Pro ($130) comes in. It’s a monstrous 6000 mAh chunk of a battery guarded by a ruggedized, military-spec housing — and it’ll charge practically anything short of a laptop.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — To the world, he’s known only by his online pseudonym, “pod2g.” On Twitter, he has amassed over 340,000 followers. As one of the most respect iOS security researchers today, he frequently fields job interview requests from the biggest technology companies in the world. To the millions who jailbreak, he’s a living legend.

At JailbreakCon, pod2g gave a fascinating talk on his past experiences as a hacker and mastermind jailbreaker. He’s been immortalized by jailbreakers and the security research community, but in his own words he’s just a “lucky guy.”

My iTunes collection is a mess. Ripped CDs, music transferred through home sharing, obscure collections, and then there is the classical and opera that I enjoy. Gee I wish there was a way to fix all the “Track 1 by Unknown Artist” music that I have. And duplicates. Yeah I have some when I pulled in whole albums but already had a few singles. I’m not a huge cover art fan, but gray boxes are boring. I wish I could fix them…

Oh wait—Cleanup Your iTunes With TuneUp: Clean & Organize Your iTunes Music Collection in Just a Few Clicks

P.S. My iTunes is still a mess…maybe I need to get my stuff together…

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Apple has Twitter and Facebook integration in iOS 6, but for some reason you can’t easily share the music you’re listening to with friends. Apple has never been great at social music discovery (just ask Ping), but it’s surprising that there’s still no sharing integration in the native Music app. Sometimes you just want to tweet a song you’re enjoying or email the track listing to a loved one. That’s where Scale, a new jailbreak tweak for the iPhone, comes in.

Unveiled by Joshua Tucker at JailbreakCon, Scale adds a new button in the Music app for sharing your tunes over Twitter, Facebook, email, or iMessage.

The iOS App Store has seen unprecedented success since its launch in 2008. Apple undoubtedly boasts the largest and most vibrant app ecosystem in existence, but the App Store’s success has come at a cost.

Apple’s ‘walled garden’ approach gives the company complete control over which apps are published in the App Store. If an app doesn’t follow Apple’s playbook, it doesn’t get in. You may work for months and months on an app only to get it rejected. Publishing in the App Store can be a huge gamble. But if you get lucky, the payoff can be huge.

Aaron Ash kicked off JailbreakCon with a talk on developing for the App Store vs. Cydia, the alternative storefront for jailbreakers. Ash has an unusual perspective because he has seen incredibly success has a developer in Cydia, and he is also a developer in the App Store.

Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is an awesome new Twitter client that reminds me of the old (and awesome) Tweetie app — before Twitter bought it and ruined it. It’s accompanied by Camera+, which now supports the iPhone 5’s larger display, and comes to the iPad; an awesome new update to Mixel; and more.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Jay ‘saurik’ Freeman just finished his presentation at JailbreakCon, and the creator of Cydia gave some interesting numbers regarding the jailbreak storefront. According to Freeman, Cydia developers were paid an estimated $8 million in sales last year. While it’s difficult for Freeman to specifically track the number of jailbroken iOS devices that are out in the wild, he said that an average 1.5 million users open Cydia each day.

You’ve heard the collective judgement by the tech echo chamber: The new iPhone was just like the old iPhone, only taller.

The iPhone 5 is boring. Apple is too conservative. They didn’t really change the phone, but only made minor tweaks.

And that’s what’s wrong with the iPhone 5: It’s just not radical enough.

Here’s the problem: The echo chamber not only got this wrong, they got it backward.

The trouble with the iPhone 5 is that it’s too much, too soon.

Let me explain. 

You never meant for this to happen. In your rush to dive into the ocean, you forgot to take your iPhone out of your pocket, and didn’t realize it till you came out of the water. It’s a disaster. You leave your drowned iPhone 4S in a bag of rice for three days, praying to God, Allah, Jehovah, Moses, Shiva, and Oprah Winfrey that some magical power will make it work again. It doesn’t. You blow-dry it. Nada. Every conceivable way to resurrect your iPhone is met with failure and a blank screen.

Because you know the iPhone 5 is coming out in three months you decide not to waste your money and upgrade eligibility. Once you get home you rummage through your desk and find the Galaxy Nexus Samsung sent you three months ago. You sit in your chair staring at it almost hesitant to turn it on. You run your hands along the contours of its plastic grey body, pop in your new SIM card, take a deep breath, and then you dive in. This is it – your new digital home and the beginning of a three month exile into Android.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 —Jailbreak hacker extraordinaire Cyril, or “pod2g,” just took the stage to talk about jailbreak techniques and the future of iOS 6 jailbreaking. After giving a technical run-through of his past exploits in iOS 4 and 5, Cyril explained that there is no working untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.

Considering that this is the world’s only jailbreak convention, many speculated that Cyril and the Chronic Dev Team would announce an iOS 6 jailbreak today, but that is not the case.

Cyril opened the iOS 6 section of his talk with, “Will I release the iOS 6 jailbreak today? No! Of course not!”

Remember how I was talking recently (like, umm, yesterday) about getting good tools in your toolkit? Apps that you might not need right now, but you’ll certainly need later? Not to mention that the apps (or bundle) are at a great price. Right. Well today is another of those times/deals—The Web Dev Power Pack Bundle: Get Three Mac Apps + 1,001 Design Assets That Will Turn You Into a Master Web Developer.

You get three solid apps plus a ton of clip art (don’t think for a moment that you won’t need some clip art at some point) for $89. It’s a nice, and inexpensive, way to get a solid dev environment started.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Since Apple added iMessage to the Mac in OS X, there’s even more ways to communicate between Apple devices. The iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac can all send and receive via iMessage, but one person usually sends from multiple addresses across devices. You may, for instance, send a message through your phone number on the iPhone, and then later send another through your Apple ID email address on the Mac.

Apple recently introduced iMessage contact unification in iOS 6, meaning that you can now be reached at both a phone number and email address on a device like the iPad. But there’s still an annoying problem with iMessage: messages from different IDs create new conversation threads. Conversations in the Messages app are not always up to date and properly synced between devices, and it can be confusing to track down which thread to reply to.

Developer and designer Joshua Tucker introduced a jailbreak tweak today called Merge. Tucker’s new tweak solves the aforementioned problem with an elegant, Apple-like solution.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Joshua Tucker, a leading interaction and interface designer for iOS, just unveiled several new Cydia projects at JailbreakCon. After explaining his approach to design and past jailbreak tweaks, Tucker announced the release of Emblem, a complete rethinking of iOS push notifications. Emblem is available now in Cydia $1.99.

Emblem can best be described as the way Apple should have done notifications on the iPad. Instead of iPhone-like banners, Emblem introduces OS X-like banners with intuitive gestures and message handling.

Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English. You can discover more siri tricks to help you get the most out of your device in this article.

Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.