Cult of Mac

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 –The world’s first global jailbreak convention is today at the South San Francisco Center, and I’ll be on the show floor all day reporting for Cult of Mac. The greatest jailbreak hackers and developers in the world are gathered together, and there’s going to be plenty of announcements regarding the future of jailbreaking, iOS 6, and possibly even the iPhone 5.

The convention kicks off September 29th at 9 A.M. PST. Make sure to tune in for breaking coverage on Cult of Mac and the video livestream below!

FIFA 13 kicks off this week’s must-have games roundup, delivering a much-improved version of everyone’s favorite soccer sim. In addition to new visuals and optimization for the iPhone 5, FIFA 13 finally boasts an online multiplayer mode, allowing you to play against friends and random opponents over the Internet.

We also have Rovio’s latest release, Bad Piggies; a stunning adventure RPG called Lili, a new Monsters Ate My Condo game, and more.

While we all know that most consumer electronics are manufactured in places like China, Apple has become the public face of the current practice. While the company continues to rake in huge profits from their iPhone and iPad devices, there has been much finger-pointing in Apple’s direction when unfair and degrading labor practices in manufacturing plants in China, like Foxconn, are brought to the forefront in Western media.

Apple seems pretty aware that it’s fighting this public relations battle on their own. The company’s Labor and Human Rights webpage has just been updated to include data on how many hours per week the 800,000 production workers in their supply chain have to work.

It’s the weekend–time to relax, chill out, play some video games. You know, the usual. We checked out the new Mac Game Store app today to see what was on special, and found a ton of great games for $15 and less. Here they are, all available from the new Mac Game Store app or website. All of these are great games (except that sixth one, but it’s great for nostalgic reasons alone), so consider it money well spent.

Apple silently updated the iOS 6 App Store today, adding more accessibility features to its VoiceOver interface for users who experience blindness and low vision. The new changes are in response to user complaints about accessibility in the iOS 6 App Store, and will help those users perform faster searches when interacting with the App Store via the VoiceOver system.

I have to admit, I was intrigued by Passbook when I first heard of it. An app that keeps my airline and movie tickets together with my coupons and customer loyalty cards seems like a good idea. For now, however, Passbook in iOS 6 seems like a placeholder to me, an app with no real purpose in and of itself, a place to link to other apps.

Apple quietly added a little explanation in the form of a paragraph in the iTunes Store page for Passbook apps which shows, at least, that they’re planning on more and that they understand that we all might feel a bit nonplused about one of the bigger features of the new iOS.

Apple doesn’t have a rich history of apologizing for their errors, big or small. When AntennaGate shook the web, Apple held a conference but they never said they were sorry. They just told us that antennas suck sometimes but they’ll give us a free bumper to be quiet. In fact, I can’t remember many times at all where Apple came out and publicly admitted a mistake.

Tim Cook’s apology this morning was a great gesture. It was almost a first for the company. Admitting that Apple’s not perfect and made a mistake isn’t easy, but did Tim Cook need to apologize to satisfy Apple customers? Could they have done something else to resolve the situation? We’d love to hear your ideas, so come over to the forums and talk to us about it.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and talk about Tim Cook’s apology

Apple did something unprecedented today.

I’m not talking about Tim Cook’s apology for iOS 6 Maps. While it’s rare, Apple has apologized before, especially recently: see John Browett’s admission that the company had “messed up” when cutting shifts among Retail Employees, and Apple’s public about-face when pulling out of the EPEAT rating system. One of the things that makes Apple great is they’re not afraid to be as harsh on themselves as they are on the competition when they’ve fucked up.

No, what Apple did today is far more uncharacteristic than an apology. They suggested that you use a third-party app instead of their own.

The weekend is a great time to hit the theater, especially if it’s cold and rainy out. Siri has been updated in iOS 6 to provide a wealth of information on movies, including local showtimes, movie reviews, and even specific information about movies themselves, like actors, directors, and ratings. There’s a ton of stuff that Siri can help you find. But how do you know what kinds of questions are even possible? Well, you can start here with the following types of questions.

Today the iPhone 5 goes on sale in The Rest Of The World, and it goes out into that world naked and empty, free of contracts and lock-ins. Yes, you can hook up with your favorite carrier and get a subsidized handset, but real men go commando.

And in this case, unless you have some forward-thinking telcos in your country, “going commando” means “cutting your own SIM.”

Which is why we’re taking a timely look at this natty Nano SIM adapter, which will let you put just about any SIM into any phone.

For the last month rumors have floated around the web that Apple is been planning to build it’s own Pandora-like music-streaming service. It makes perfect sense to us, but Apple didn’t announce it at the iPhone 5 keynote which had many people wondering if it’s going to actually happen.

A report from the New York Post this morning is claiming that the reason Apple hasn’t launched their music-streaming service is because negotiations with Sony/ATV hit a last minute snag, forcing Apple to scrap the iTunes Streamer announcement from the iPhone 5 keynote.

Earlier this morning Tim Cook published an apology letter to all Apple fans for how horrible Apple Maps have been. Not only did he apologize, but he actually told users that they should try some alternatives while Apple fixes their mapping fiasco.

It’s great that Apple is taking responsibility for their shoddy work, but now that they’ve kicked Google Maps out of iOS 6, what are the best alternative? We took a quick look at the alternative map apps that Tim suggested, to find out which one you should use if you plan to ditch Apple Maps for a while. Here’s what we found out.

Not only has Apple apologized for the embarassing state of iOS 6 Maps today, and not only has Tim Cook personally advised users to try competing app products like Bing, Mapquest and Google Maps as they get iOS 6 Maps’ shit together, but Apple is now promoting Maps alternatives at the very top of the iOS App Store listings. This is an unprecedented admission of fault by Apple. It’s mea culpas all the way down.

Via: Twitter

Would you buy an iPhone photography app that only let you take one photo? Not one per day, or one per week, but one photo ever. No? Neither would I. But I would download a free app just to see what was going on.

That app is real, and it’s called One Memento.

If there were ever a time for Google to play “good guy” it would be now. Apple has simply been piling up the negative criticism with everything from its ridiculous legal attacks to its latest Mapsgate debacle. While Google has been going down the wrong path by setting itself up to bite back (see Motorola Mobility), I believe now to be the perfect time to turn the other cheek. Specifically with their Maps service.

The iPhone 5 has been a massive success for Apple. It’s only been out a week, but it’s already the fastest-selling iPhone in history, racking up 5 million units sold during its first three days of availability. But this isn’t just having a positive affect on Apple’s revenue; it’s also big business for iOS developers, who are seeing massive boosts to their download figures.

Quick, you’ve got five minutes and no budget and you need to great an interesting logo/graphic/text graphic for a presentation. Now generally I’d say you’d be hooped, however if you had taken a couple minutes and $5 today, I’d say you’ll probably be okay.

See, today’s $5 Friday app is Logoist—Easily Create Stunning Images With Logoist: Develop Professional Quality Images With Ease—and I remember trying this out a while back for a regular priced deal. I spent about 5 minutes and had something that I would be happy with for a presentation or a website mockup. Therefore, if you take a moment and grab this deal now, you’d got another tool in the kit. Another Hawkeye coolio arrow in your quiver to pull out when the need arises.

Tripod and lighting supremo Manfrotto — the Italian company whose name seems to combine the words “man” and “frottage” — is finally getting in on the iPhonegraphy game. And its Klyp looks to be every bit as sturdy and well thought out as the rest of its products.

The iPhone 5 quietly went on sale this morning across twenty two additional countries, but not everyone is paying the same amount of money for their iPhones, between exchange rates and local taxes. In fact, according to Setteb.it, Americans pay the least amount of money overall for the iPhone 5, while overseas, those in Hong Kong get the second-best deal around.

Royally shafted? Italy, which pays as much as €949 for a 64GB iPhone 5, unlocked and unsubsidized. That same phone costs almost 25% less in the United States. Someone up there’s smiling down on us Yanks.

Source: Twitpic
Via: iClarified

If you’ve ever managed to spill liquid on an electronic device, then you’ll know that it doesn’t take too much to kill them completely; liquid and electronics simply do not mix. But you might be surprised by how well your iPhone 5 fares when it comes into contact with its biggest enemy.

In addition to posting an extraordinarily classy apology for the iOS 6 Maps fiasco written by CEO Tim Cook, Apple has also gone to the length of pushing online a page explaining how to add a website icon to your home screen in four easy steps, and while the website they use for the example is Apple.com, they clearly mean for you to do this on maps.google.com.

Source: Apple

One of the improvements Apple made to Safari 6.0 was to take the search and address bars and roll them into one — just like a lot of popular web browsers do. The change hasn’t been made to the mobile Safari app, though, which is puzzling, because it’s a more efficient use of screen space on a smaller display.

But there is a good reason for that omission.

DJing on the iPad just got real. Or something. I'm not really sure if that's how disc jockeys speak. What I do know is that Algoriddim's Djay 1.6 adds some major new features thanks to iOS 6. What kind of features? Oh, you know… Just things like full dual stereo outputs for monitoring and playing different songs at the same time.

Mixel, a wonderful collage and photo sharing app for iPhone designed by Khoi Vin, has just received what is quite possibly its best update yet. In addition to support for the iPhone 5’s larger display, Mixel boasts a number of new features, the biggest of which is the ability to send real postcards, including your own photo collages, from right within the app.

Missing Google Street View? Can't wait for it to be incorporated into a Flash-free, Mobile Safari-friendly version of the Google Maps web app? Then go download Live Street View, a Street View app which has just been updated to make it — frankly — awesome on the iPad.