Another year, another iPhone. Since 2007, Apple has been churning these gadgets out like it’s a bodily function. Each iPhone is undeniably better than the last, although sometimes not in every respect.

iPhone fans always say it’s the best phone because it has the best overall user experience, best out-of-box experience, best industrial design, best selection of apps and a few other things perceived as being “best.”

But the iPhone itself is not the best thing about the iPhone platform. It’s the universe of crazy customization and expansion products that support the iPhone. 

It’s the weekend, and if you’re looking for a cute little romp through the monster-battling arena for some down time, Mo’ Monsters just went live. It’s a free to play game from Rumpus, a development studio out of San Francisco, and it’s fairly typical tap-tap-tap fare, with some cute characters and fun monster capturing mechanics in addition to the standard battling.

If you’ve been wanting to play The Witcher, CD Projekt’s well-regarded RPG based on the book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, now might be a great time to do so. The game has just been patched with support for Lion and Mountain Lion, letting more modern Macs join in the fun.

As you know, the upcoming media event for Apple’s smaller, thinner, and less expensive tablet, the as-yet-named iPad Air iPad mini, is being widely reported as happening on October 23,2012.

While the invites haven’t gone out yet, we’re seeing a rumor that the event will focus on iBooks, which makes a ton of sense considering that a smaller iPad is in the same market category as a device like the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is kind of like a souped-up eReader, with media consumption its main purpose, at least from Amazon’s perspective.

While this seems like a plausible rumor, I’m not ready to fully embrace it yet.

I bet you weren’t aware of the real reason why Batman couldn’t save Rachael in The Dark Knight or why Katniss had a bit of trouble finding the Cornucopia in Hunger Games? What if I told you it was all Apple’s fault? Well it is! Don’t believe me? We’ve uncovered the deleted scenes to prove it.

Enjoy!

Grove has long made some of the sexiest Apple accessories around, hewing them out of polished bamboo and then laser etching them with attractive designs of your choice, so it’s no surprise that the Portland, Oregon based outfit now have cases available for the iPhone 5. Also unsurprising is just how gorgeous they are, especially in their etched incarnations.

You’ll pay, of course — Grove’s iPhone 5 cases start at $79 without any engraving, and go up from there to $99 for one with a design and $129 for a custom engraving. Fashion never comes cheap.

Source: Grove

In our Ten Killer Tips for iOS 6 feature, we showed you how easy it is to reply to a phone caller with a text message in iOS 6. When the call comes in, tap on the little phone icon in the lower right and slide up. You’ll get the option to either reply with a message or have your iPhone remind you to call the person back later.

If you choose to reply with a text message, you get a couple of built in replies–Call you later, I’m on my way, What’s up–or you can type a custom message. Ever wanted to change those pre-written messages? I know I have. Here’s how.

The Internet is filled with tons of beautiful wallpapers to decorate your iPhone 5 with. The problem is in order to find the high quality ones you have to sort through an endless pile of crap. You don’t got time for that, so one benevolent person has created this massive collection of high quality iPhone 5 wallpapers just for you.

You’re bound to find something you like in the collection, and the layout of the Tumblr page is great for quick browsing on your desktop, and it works fine on the iPhone 5 too. Hurry up and dig in.

Source: iPhoneFiveWallpapers Tumblr

Need to round out your app toolkit? New a few new WP themes? How about some graphic elements for projects? Oh yes, it Productivity bundle time and we have another fantastic value pack for you—The Mac Productivity Bundle 2.0: Get 11 Best Selling Mac Apps & Design Goodies For One Shockingly Low Price.

Remember, picking up bundles isn’t about needing all the apps, but needing a few of the apps or goodies that you need right now and tapping into the others when you need them.

Apple Maps have received a WWE beat down of bad publicity since iOS 6 launched a few weeks ago, but maybe all the drama was a bit overblown. In a survey of 4,300 customers conducted by ChangeWave Research, ninety percent of iPhone 5 owners claimed they “haven’t experienced any problem” with Apple’s Maps app. Six percent of those surveyed said that they think Apple Maps is somewhat of a problem, and only three percent claimed it’s a very big problem

The survey also discovered that one-in-three consumers plan to buy the iPhone 5 in the future, and that 31% of consumers think that Apple switching to the new Lightning port will be “somewhat of a problem” because of the extra costs of buying new cables and adapters.

Source: ChangeWave Research

Going down a storm on the App Store this week is the brand new version of Crazy Taxi from Sega. Yes, it’s just like Crazy Taxi you used to play a decade ago. And that’s a good thing.

When Apple first unveiled the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro back in July of this year, they used two images to specifically highlight the incredible resolution of the new display. The first was a shot of a herd of zebras running through the grass captured by photographer Steve Bloom. And the second? A photograph of an eye in full Ziggy Stardust make-up, taken by Swiss photographe Sabine Liewald.

The only problem with that latter photograph? According to the photographer, Apple never properly licensed it to be used in Retina MacBook Pro marketing materials. And she’s now suing over it.

Passbook is supposed to be one of the big new features of iOS 6. Its magical card keeping system is supposed to help you ditch all your coupons, tickets, passes, rewards cards, and maybe even replace your wallet all together someday. The only problem is that there aren’t a lot of places you can actually use Passbook yet.

It’s not that Passbook isn’t a great feature. It’s awesome. People really want to use it. The MLB wants it to replace their ticketing system someday. But because it’s only been out for a few weeks, there are a limited number of apps that take advantage of it, which makes it seem like a bit of a let down. On the CultCast last night we talked about how we haven’t had the opportunity to use Passbook much, but we’re wondering what your experience has been with it so far. Have you actually used it? If so, what do you think? If you haven’t used it, what can be done to get more businesses and people on board?

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and tell us about your experiences with Passbook so far.

I was craving a pumpkin spice lattee from Starbucks the other day. I didn’t have time to go get one myself, but one of my friends was going later in the day. He offered to pick one up for me. Yay!

Starbucks recently added support for Apple’s Passbook service in iOS 6, and I hadn’t yet been able to try paying for Starbucks with Passbook. I had already added my Starbucks Rewards Gold card to Passbook on my iPhone 5, and I like using my Gold card to pay whenever I can because it earns me points towards free drinks. So I had three choices: pay my friend back in cash, give him my Starbucks card from my wallet, or let him use my Passbook. I went with the third option, and it was as easy as taking a screenshot.

It’s been just three weeks since the iPhone 5 started shipping, and Apple’s latest smartphones already accounts for more web traffic than the Samsung Galaxy S III, according to a new report.

It’s thought the handset’s “record-breaking sales numbers” — which have made it the fastest-selling iPhone to date — plus its “new 4G browsing speeds which encourage data usage” are just a couple reasons why the iPhone 5 is so big when it comes to web browsing.

The iPhone 5’s been on sale for three weeks now, and as is always the case with a device this popular, a long list of defects is already building up. There’s Maps, of course — though that’s not really exclusive to the iPhone 5 — the purple haze that sometimes appears in photos, and the black model is susceptible to chips and scratches.

And now some users are reporting that an odd green glow, described as “plasma bleed,” is plaguing the handset’s display.

If you’ve opened up Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6, you probably have a good idea of the faults everyone’s been complaining about. But it does have one feature that works well: turn-by-turn navigation. In fact, when compared to Google’s turn-by-turn feature on Android, Apple’s service is actually much better in many ways.

What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. Apple gives other companies a lot of flack for ripping off their intellectual property, but in iOS 6, they ripped off the design of a classic clock designed by Hans Hilfiker which has been both trademarked and copyrighted by the Swiss Federal Railway Service.

It seems unlikely that the transgression was willful, but it was still sloppy of Apple to not do their due dilligence when it came to researching the clock, or seeing if its design was trademarked.

Luckily, Apple has now chosen to do the right thing, having reached out to to the Swiss Federal Railway Service, who today announced that the companies have signed a licensing deal for the famous clock. It’s unknown what the terms are, but it’s good to see Cupertino do the right thing here.

Source: SBB.CH
Via: The Verge

Here’s a hidden little piece of OS X Mountain Lion: you can view your friends’ tweets from within the Contacts app, provided you’ve added your Twitter account to OS X, and then updated your Contacts with the social networking service. Now that Twitter is directly integrated within OS X, you can connect to the service with many different apps, like the Notification Center and Contacts.

Here’s how.

With iOS 6, Apple has officially deprecated the UDID as a valid means for advertisers to track app users. The UDID functioned sort of like a Social Security Number for your iPhone, allowing advertisers and third parties to track your behavior across multiple apps… a troubling privacy concern for many. But UDID tracking also had many beneficial advantages, like allowing developers to troubleshoot crashing apps and the like, which inspired some third-parties when their many companies started releasing their own alternatives to UDID.

Apple wasn’t going to leave advertisers and developers without an alternative to use in their apps, though. New in iOS 6 is two new IDs: IDFA and IDFV. Yes, both IDs still track you, and the IDFA is specifically used by advertisers to collect data on you. But the good news is that this tracking can easily be turned off, and it’s much less invasive than the UDID.

While Apple’s new Maps app has received a lot of criticism since its debut last month, it does offer a number of nifty features that weren’t available in iOS 5, including 3D Flyover and voice-guided, turn-by-turn navigation. However, these are features that are only available on the latest devices, including the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5, the new iPad, and the fifth-generation iPod touch.

At least that’s the case if you handset isn’t jailbroken. If it is, you can now get these features on A4-powered devices like the iPhone 4, and the fourth-generation iPod touch thanks to a new tweak called ‘Unlock iOS 6 Maps’.

Take a magazine. Put an iPad behind an advert on a printed page. Behold: moving pictures.

This is one of the latest advertisements from Lexus, and in reality all the paper is doing is acting as a screen, with images projected on to it from behind. Just as huge buildings have become popular film backdrops using projection mapping technology, now simple printed pages are doing the same thing.

Apple was expected to send out invitations to an upcoming iPad mini announcement on October 10, but that date has now come and gone, and we’re still left wondering when the tiny tablet is going to get its grand unveiling. Recent reports have suggested that the device has been postponed due to production delays, but according to AllThingsD, that’s not the case.

Instead, Apple will be holding its event on October 23, sources claim — just three days before Microsoft’s new Surface tablet begins shipping in the United States.

The just-released seventh generation iPod nano has just started being seen in stores and shipping from online pre-orders, but it already has a software update waiting for it. If you get a new iPod nano and plug it into iTunes to set it up and sync, you’ll likely see a new update that you’ll need to apply before you can use it.

It only took two days, but ClassicMap is no longer available on the Apple iTunes App Store. We reported on the app a couple of days ago, but now clicking on any iTunes link for the app returns a “No longer available in the US iTunes store,” which basically means it’s no longer for sale.