Cult of Mac

Since the death of Steve Jobs, many have wondered whether Apple’s core senior management team would stick around to continue Apple’s success. Most of Apple’s senior VPs are incredibly wealthy and extremely tired after launching Apple’s hugely successful products over the past decade.

For the most part, Tim Cook has been able to keep everyone on board. Retail VP Ron Johnson decided to leave before Steve’s death, but none of the important VPs have tried to call it quits other than Bob Mansfield who announced his retirement earlier this year. According to insiders, once Mansfield announced his retirements members of his engineering team complained about his replacement, and Tim Cook set out to get Mansfield back by offering an exorbitant salary.

Isn’t it frustrating when you need to reply to an instant message from a friend, but you don’t want to leave the app you’re already in and lose what you’re working on? With QuickIM, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones, you can quickly respond to messages on Facebook and Google Chat without switching apps.

Even though Apple has already debuted the new Lightning connector, there still aren’t any third-party accessories that actually boast Lightning compatibility. Part of that is because Apple has still not made Lightning connectors — which are hard to counterfeit by design — available to third-parties. Even when Apple does make the connectors available, though, any accessory makers who wants to make gadgets that are “Made for Lightning” will have to do so in Apple-approved manufacturing facilities, which won’t be an option until at least November. That could make it tricky, but by no means impossible, for some accessory makers to get their products on the shelves in time for Christmas.

While iOS 6 may be “the world’s most advanced mobile operating system,” its new Maps app is, quite frankly, a heap of trash. It boasts some terrific features, such as 3D Flyover and voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation, but they’re only terrific when the Maps that power them actually work. And Apple’s don’t in a lot of places.

The Cupertino company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has apologized to customers for the frustration the new app has caused, and it’s led us to wonder why Apple even released it. It still had a year left on its contract with Google, so why did it rush into releasing its own, half-baked service so quickly?

Well, one reason behind the move is that Steve Jobs had grown to hate Google. So much so that he set up a new Maps team just to kick Google Maps off the iOS devices.

The rumors of a T-Mobile/Metro PCS merger have been burning hot over the past 24 hours and it appears for good reason. The merger is real and was announced by T-Mobile a short while ago. T-Mobile USA will be merging with Metro PCS in a $1.5 billion deal. Not only will MetroPCS Shareholders receive $1.5 Billion in cash, but they will also have a 26% ownership in the combined company. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

When you think about it, the iPad 3 is possibly the best platform for simulated pinball, like, ever. Why? Because even though it’s very small, it has a high enough resolution for even the most complicated tables. And it has an accelerometer to activate the tilt warning. But more importantly, the iPad’s great accessibility options (like voiceover) mean that even a deaf, dumb or blind kid should be able to play a mean pinball.

All you need are some buttons to flip the flippers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zjrv9-Botx8

You know, I really like this Nokia ad mocking iPhone users over their lack of color choices.

Featuring a joyless, shifting line moving slowly forward to consume the monochrome iPhone 5, it shows a gray world thrown into anarchy when one customer dares to ask about their color choices. Then, when that customer steps out of line, he sees a number of bright, vibrant, colorful people wandering around, uniquely bopping and having fun. They are all carrying Lumias.

Samsung has asked Judge Lucy Koh to throw out the patent infringement verdict that saw Apple awarded more than $1 billion in damages this summer and order a new trial. The Korean electronics giant claims that the foreman of the jury, 67-year-old Velvin Hogan, is guilty of misconduct after he failed to answer the court’s questions truthfully and did not disclose a potential conflict of interest.

The iPhone 5 might be the thinnest, sleekest iPhone yet, but it’s not the most environmentally friendly. It’s close, though.

Lots of folks might like to remember to follow up on specific emails. I know my life is full of email that, honestly, I don’t care much about, but really need to get back to at a certain point. Or that one email that needs a return reply but gets forgotten in the deluge of other, equally important emails during the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do this in Mail. There should be, of course, but there isn’t. Outlook has this functionality within a contextual menu, and there is a service for Gmail that lets you do something similar, but Apple’s Mail does not.

Luckily with a little ingenuity, we can get around this missing feature in Mail.

While the App Store has listed Things as an “amazing app” for iPhone 5 for the past week or so, the app didn’t actually support the new handset’s larger display. But it does now, thanks to a brand new update, which also delivers the ability to create new to-dos using Siri.

The Wall Street journal reports that Apple’s upcoming iPad mini has now entered mass production with component suppliers in Asia. According to two people familiar with the matter, the device will have a 7.85-inch LCD display — as previous rumors have suggested — and it will be priced to compete with cheaper tablets like the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Apple Maps has taken a lot of heat over the last few weeks for its abysmal performance. The data on Apple Maps is pretty terrible, but there’s no denying it’s one of the prettiest maps apps on available. Case in point, take a look at the detail on Apple’s highway icons on their maps verses that found on Google.

Apple’s icons contain details for each particular state, while Google’s is just a bland icon that’s used for every state highway. Now if Apple Maps could just get their data to be as good as Google Maps they might become everyone’s favorite maps app.

Source: Reddit

The developers behind Rubber Bandito, an upcoming retro-styled platform game for Android and iOS, want it to mean something when you beat their game. They envision a world where gaming is so much more than clicking trees in endless social games in a web browser.

They want you to play Rubber Bandito, and they want you to help fund it. On Kickstarter, of course.

Since I’m sure you all stay awake at night worrying about the latest developments in ITC complaints and patent disputes, you’re all probably dying to know that Motorola has withdrawn a complaint it made against Apple back in mid-August. We have absolutely no idea why the sudden change of heart, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. The web is abuzz with theories, but the truth is most likely much less controversial.

Feral Interactive is finally getting around to releasing the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham City for the Mac. The second installment of the critically acclaimed Arkham series, which started with Batman: Arkham Asylum, itself released on PC and console versions in 2009. The Mac OS X version of Arkham Asylum came out in November of last year, and now, a year later, we’ll have the pleasure of playing this fantastic game on our Macs.

The Walking Dead: Episode Four – Around Every Corner is coming this month to Mac, PC, and consoles like PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Publisher Telltale Games promises only a short lag before the final episode is released, thereby capping the entire five episode series.

The video game is set in the same Walking Dead universe you know from the comic books and AMC television show, but follows different characters, including Lee Everett, the main protagonist for the episodes. The new trailer takes the cast, many of whom will change due to a persistent game system that forces players to live with their own tough choices in each episode. Who did you save? Who got killed? The survivors and mounting dead characters are your own fault, a result of your own heroism.

Sums is a gesture-based calculator for iOS, and whether you like it will, I suspect, largely depend on how much you’re already accustomed to using traditional calculators.

There isn’t anyone with a model catalog quite like Sony (how the hell do they keep track of these things?). The company has just refreshed their line of midpriced, bass-heavy MDR-XB headphones with three new models, replacing four previous ones.

The three new models, the XB800 ($150), XB600 ($100) and XB400 ($60), all follow Sony’s headphone design template: soup-bowl sized, perfectly circular cups attached to massive headbands (the headband on the XB800 is so formidable it looks like it could maybe double as a helicopter landing strut).

There really aren’t that many home automation products that blow my mind, but Lockitron has got me drooling. I want to live in the future. A place where my cellphone is the only thing I need to carry with me. I hate carrying keys, and Lockitron just might help me ditch them completely with its simple keyless entry beauty that’s something out of Star Wars or Minority Report or any other sci-fi movie.

Brian Eno has a new app out. It’s called Scape. Like other apps he’s produced, it’s about making music – even for people who have no musical skill or knowledge whatsoever.

I use email for a ton of different reasons. I use it to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, and business partners. I use email to keep track of things I need to get done today, tomorrow, and far into the future. Chances are, you do, too.

One of the ways I use email to keep myself on track and informed is by flagging emails for later perusal. I also mark things as read and unread to signal that I am done with the email, or that I need to actually read it later.

Now you can do these things right in the iOS 6 Mail app. Here’s how.

Phiaton’s new Moderna MS 200 earphones ($149) sound good and have great sound isolation, sure, but what’s more important is how good they look plugged in to your new iPhone 5.

Before the touchscreen iPhone was revealed at MacWorld in 2007, Apple had a team of engineers working on a click-wheel phone that was kind of like a mashup of an iPod and a phone. It was never released, but the work that went into it is pretty fascinating.

In an interview with TechCrunch, former Apple engineer and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers talks about what it was like to work on the click-wheel iPhone when no one else at the company even knew Apple was developing a phone.

There’s so much wordplay to be had in this post that if I start now, I might just forget to write about the product itself. So if you want dick jokes and Star Wars references, you’ll find them at the end of this post. In the meantime, let’s take a look at Richard Solo’s horribly-named FreeWheelin Audio System For Helmets.