Cult of Mac

Steve Jobs’s life was full of lessons on how to be successful, as well as the pitfalls to avoid when pursuing your dream. Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs has had a huge impact on people across the globe, so THNKR sat down with some of the journalists, authors, and tech entrepreneurs to get their thoughts on Steve Jobs one year after his passing.

Steve Jobs: Life & Legacy Reexamined features interviews with Walter Isaacson, Steven Johnson, Guy Winch, Steve Kroft, and many more, including our very own Leander Kahney. You can watch the episode above, or go to BOOKD’s YouTube page to find out more about Steve Jobs’s legacy.

The rumor mill is churning out iPad Mini like a savage beast now. Yesterday we got word on the date of the iPad Mini announcement along with some new mockup pictures, but today we’re finally getting to see some leaked iPad Mini parts that we haven’t seen before.

UkrainianiPhone has some leaked photos of the iPad Mini that show what the black casing will look like. Most mock ups have shown the iPad Mini to have the same grey aluminum back casing as the new iPad, but these new images make the iPad Mini look a lot more like the Nexus 7 because the back panel uses the same iPhone 5 anodized aluminum material.

Take a look:

Steve Jobs was always a deeply private individual. Even though he gave Walter Isaacson access to his life for the official Steve Jobs biography there are a lot of stories about Steve that have never been told.  With the anniversary of Steve’s death coming this Friday, October 5th, a collection of untold Steve Jobs stories coming from friends and colleagues has been rounded up by Forbes.

One of the funnier stories in the collection comes from Randy Adams, former Apple and NeXT employee. Adams and Jobs both bought Porsche 911s during the early days of NeXT and parked next to each other at the front of the office to avoid car-door dings. Then one day Steve came rushing in and told Adams he needed to hide his Porsche.

Google has started to index the contents of your e-mail attachments, and you can now search on them in the Gmail interface. This is new, and pretty great.

But if you’re using the iOS Mail app to wrangle your Gmail accounts, it works there too. I discovered this in the process testing out the browser version and — as you might expect — Apple’s version is both more elegant and less useful.

iOS 6 is spreading like wildfire across Apple’s iDevices. Within two days of its release a quarter of all iOS devices had adopted Apple’s newest mobile operating system, and its use continues to grow. Chitika Insights has released their new data on iOS 6 adoption rates and they’ve found that 60% of iPhone users have already installed iOS 6, but only 39% of iPod touch users are on the new iOS.

Sick, enraged or just plain glum about the fact that your new iPhone 5 won’t work with your multiple and expensive speaker docks? Then you should probably lose that sense of entitlement.

Or you could move to Brazil (where an iPhone costs the same as a small private plane, more or less) and start buying paper magazines. Because a recent Coca Cola ad turns a copy of Capricho magazine into a passive cylindrical speaker dock.

Remember those novelty retro cellphone handsets? The ones with curly cords that attached to your handset’s proprietary connector and made it look like you were making a call on a rotary telephone circa 1970? In the pub?

Well, the Swissvoice ePure is something like that, only more useful, and way, way cooler looking.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent that covers its controversial iTunes logo that first made its debut with iTunes 10 in September 2010. The company’s late co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs is credited as one of the logo’s designers, and the patent covering its design first filed for in October last year.

The New York Times has today launched a new, “experimental” web app designed for optimal reading on the iPad. Built using HTML5, the app is available exclusively to digital subscribers with tablet access, as well as home delivery subscribers who link their account for digital access.

The app boasts a number of unique features, including four new ways to read the NYT, new “swipe-friendly” navigation gestures, and more.

A study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found a massive boom in tablets over the last 12 months, with 25% of American adults now owning a tablet of their own. As you might expect, the iPad is the most popular device out there at the moment, claiming more than 52% of the market. But that may not be the case for too long.

Android tablets are rapidly catching up, and in the not-so-distant future, there’s a good chance they will be king.

“Father of the iPod” Tony Fadell’s company Nest has released version 2.0 of its Apple-like thermostat. And like any good Apple update, the Nest 2.0 is thinner, better and good-looking-er.

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Slashdot persuaded former Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak to answer some questions thrown at him by the site’s readers. Woz took the time to answer a number of questions on Apple and his thoughts on how the company is doing without Steve Jobs at the helm, jailbreaking, the iPhone, and more.

Here are some of his best responses.

It’s pretty much an open secret that I can’t stand Twitter, and about the only thing I really like about Facebook is photo sharing, so I really love Instagram. In many ways, it’s against my better instincts, since I’ve always hated the romanticizing of Polaroid and other low-grade cameras of the 1970s by millennial hipsters… a romanticizing Instagram is pretty much built around.

But Instagram’s a lot more than that, and I think this video by Casey Neistat nicely illustrates why: regardless of what filters you use, Instagram is about sharing your life openly, honestly and without being disingenuous. While Twitter is all bluster and sanctimony, and Facebook is all mindless affirmation, Instagram at its best is about sharing the essence of your life.

There are also some great tips in Casey’s video on how to not be an annoying jackass on Instagram, so that helps too. If you love Instagram, check it out.

Via: Laughing Squid

If you thought you had seen your last Apple Maps parody, think again. Mad Magazine, a purveyor of satire, has joined in on the fun with its latest parody of The New Yorker featuring Apple Maps. It’s starting to look like Mapgate will remain a staple of satire much longer than the once hilarious Antennagate saga.

App and file launcher, search helper, and all-round work of genius Alfred has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves. One of those is a clever built-in text snippets manager.

There are many third-party apps out there that let you dictate on your Mac. Dragon Dicate is one, but it costs $199, and includes a ton of extra stuff, like controlling your Mac with your voice. If you just want to talk instead of type, say in an email, Tweet, or Facebook status update, you already have what you need built right in to your Mac running OS X Mountain Lion.

If someone told you that iOS 6 Maps had one advantage over Google Maps, and that it was 80% more efficient in using data, you’d probably quip, “That’s because it’s 80% less accurate” then do an air drum roll and punctuate the whole thing with the sound of a cymbal crashing that you made with your mouth.

Joking aside, though, it’s true. iOS 6 Maps uses way less data than Google Maps, and it has nothing to do with accuracy, but with its beautiful new vector graphics.

Conan O’Brien loves to do bits on the latest Apple product, and the latest iPhone 5 feature to become the fodder for laughs is the new Panorama feature, which Chris Parnell & Deon Cole says is the perfect photographic equipment for the well-endowed male. While Deon Cole’s delivery is perfect, it’s Chris Parnell’s matter-of-fact dissection of the joke — “that Deon is implying that his penis is too large to be capture in a normal camera aspect ratio’s field of view” — that pushes this bit over the top for me. Tell me about it. Just don’t shoot it in bright light or it’ll get a purplish hue, although chances are, if you need to shoot your penis in panorama, it’s already got one.

Source: Team Coco

We had a sneaking suspicion Samsung would add the iPhone 5 to its patent infringement complaint against Apple shortly after the device made its debut. And the Korean electronics giant has now done exactly that, asking Judge Paul Grewal for permission to include the device in its latest countersuit against Apple.

Lex from Modahaus got in touch to let us know about this post on their blog, comparing the macro photography capabilities of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.

It won’t add transit directions, nor will it stiffen those melted roads which are draped, Dalí-esque, over the underlying terrain. But this simple, one-setting tweak will make iOS 6’s beleaguered maps app a whole lot more useful.

Imagine powering through your work day, high off the anticipation of a new iPhone 5 waiting for you at home. You keep checking the UPS package tracking to make sure they drop it off and leave it on your back porch because you’re not there to bring it inside.

Pulling up to your house, you can feel your heartbeat pulsing with excitement in your fingertips, so you run to the backyard to retrieve the new love of your life. And there it is. Shredded to pieces by your cute doggy who really, really needed a chew toy. Does AppleCare+ cover dog attacks?

Source: Reddit

US Dictrict Court judge Lucy Koh today granted a request from Samsung for the dissolution of a preliminary sales injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The case had been taken out of Judge Koh’s hands for a bit, but was remanded to her docket by the Court of Appeals.

Apple can still win a permanent ban if its request is granted, but for now, Samsung can continue to sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the US.

I love my iPod Nano so much, it’s almost irrational. I know it doesn’t have bluetooth or wifi, or any other wireless connectivity, but the form factor is so perfect! I even have a Hex leather watchband for it, wearing it when I’m out on the town.

But it’s tiny. I lose it often. I’m actually on my second Nano due to accidental loss. The clip on the back sucks for anything but casual clipping on clothes when I’m working out, or attaching to my Hex watchband.

The iHook, then, aims to fix these problems, with a funky little bent metal mounting bracket that the manufacturer promises will change your Nano’s life. And yours, by association.

Apple updated iPhoto ’11 today to version 9.4.1, which includes several bug fixes, including an issue with downloading or viewing photos synched from Facebook albums, a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion. The update can be found in the Mac App Store directly, or pulled up in the Software Update item in the Apple Menu.