Cult of Mac

Let’s face it: the iPhone is the Hot Rod of smartphones. If Steve McQueen was still alive, he’d own one; Jay Leno probably has a hanger filled with a hundred of them. Nothing seems more appropriate to me, then, but to see a Hot Rod style exhaust snaking out of an iPhone. The iPhone is the most powerful thing you can drive that fits in your pocket.

That’s just what the iXoost dock does. It’s a speaker dock handbuilt by Xoost in Italy that grafts some gorgeous aluminum exhaust pipes onto your iPhone.

Cricket Mobile’s recent announcement that they will be selling the iPhone 4 and 4S to prepaid customers (while offering enormous savings over traditional plans) seems to have started an avalanche, as now Sprint’s Virgin Mobile prepaid brand is reported to be following their lead.

You might have heard that today’s a pretty special day, astronomically speaking. Venus is in transit between Earth and the Sun today, which is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Today only, right before sunset in the United States, if you look up at the sun, you’ll be able to see the silhouetted Venus passing between us and our life-giving star. And due to the differences between Venus’s solar year and our own orbit around the Sun, you’ll have to wait a hundred years until this event happens again.

In other words, if you’re American, you don’t want to miss this if you have any curiosity about the heavens at all. And luckily, there’s an app that will help you make sure you don’t.

Remember Favs, the Mac app which collects your favorite items from pretty much any service on the internet and puts them all together in one place? Well, now you can use it on the iPhone, too: Favs for iOS just launched and it looks like a great way to keep track of your starred items when on the go.

I want to lose weight. Really. I mean, I just gained 30lbs over the last 18months thanks to the magical folks at Chipotle and it’s time for a change. Problem is, every time I invite my friends to come jogging with me plans fall through and then I have another excuse to inhale half of a blueberry cheesecake.

Admittedly, I’ve sunk pretty low, but I’m not sure if I’ve reached the point where I need a robot to whip me into shape. Maybe I do though, and the guys behind the Joggobot have created one of the oddest contraptions to help nerds lose weight by chasing them around with a deranged robot quadrocopter.

There are a few record player simulation apps for the iPad, but attention to detail and awesome graphics may make Vinyl Tap the best. And better still, it comes with not one but two turntables, with more promised in future updates.

Apple began sending out MobileMe eviction notices last week. The notices remind anyone still using MobileMe that they have until the end of June to transition to iCloud and/or copy all data stored in their MobileMe accounts to their Mac or PC. Any files stored in MobileMe’s range of services that can’t be converted to iCloud will be deleted. If you opt not to use iCloud, all data in your MobileMe account will be deleted.

Although iCloud offers several advances over MobileMe, there are some MobileMe services that don’t have direct iCloud equivalents. These include MobileMe Galleries for sharing photos and videos, website creation using Apple’s iWeb, and iDisk remote storage and file sharing. File and information sync is available using iCloud, but the functionality is implemented a bit differently than in MobileMe.

There isn’t a single online service that delivers quite the same mix of features and functionality that Apple offered with MobileMe but by combining some apps and services, you can get pretty close to MobileMe’s feature set.

Following the trend of stolen technology turning in thieves red-handed, a man was recently arrested after the MacBook he stole secretly uploaded his picture and sent it to its rightful owner.

Logan Chadde’s laptop and other belongings were stolen by a 19-year-old thief over the weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While the crook raided Chadde’s room, he grabbed a backup containing a MacBook. Little did he know that Chadde had installed anti-theft software that would lead to the police catching the 19-year-old.

The new 1.3 update to the stop-motion-animation app Frameographer has a new feature called Smart Zoom, and it is so obviously good that every video-shooting app for iOS should be using it already.

These official Star Wars iPhone cases just announced by PowerA are just super cute. At $40, they’re pretty pricy, but LucasArts licensing ain’t cheap. Each case distills the iconic style of Star Wars‘s core characters — C-3PO, Darth Vader, R2-D2 and Chewbacca — into an attractive, quasi-abstract pattern. I particularly like the fur matting on the Chewbacca one.

Hey, who says a fanboy can’t look smart? These cases should be out later in the year.

Source: PowerA

When former Apple retail boss Ron Johnson took his leave from Cupertino to become the new CEO of JC Penney late last year, there wasn’t as much “WTF-ing” as you might expect. Sure, there was some incredulity as Johnson left the gleaming stores he had founded for JC Penney’s chain of mouldering clothing outlets, but there was also a lot of optimism: if anyone could turn around a business like JC Penney, it would be Johnson.

Johnson may still succeed, but his first moves at rehabilitating JC Penney have been failures. The stock is tanking and JC Penney posted a $163 million loss last quarter alone. Customers, it seems, are not reacting well to the new JC Penney, which eschews sales, circulars, coupons and fine print for plain, honest pricing… the kind of store where all the .99s are dropped from the price tag.

Why? Honest pricing might work for Apple, but in most of the retail word, it appears to be a sucker’s game. Customers, it turns out, only say they want fair pricing. What the really want to do is treat shopping like a game.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to copy and paste anything into automator or know any Applescript for this tip. However, I’m sure there’s some of you out there that would like to customize iTunes in the ways this freely downloadable application/script allows you to.

It’s really hard to verify this, and it flies in the face of all of the most recent rumors about the latest MacBook Pro line, but a new photo of what is purported to be the new 13-inch MacBook Pro’s specs, and they are underwhelming to say the least.

There is an 2.5GHz Ivy Bridge chip, and there is a USB 3.0 port, but across the board, pretty much everything else is the same: no Retina Displays, same thickness as before, the optical drive’s still there, same RAm, hard drive and SuperDrive specs.

In short, a speed bump, not a major revolution. Is it possible this is the base model of MBP Apple will unveil to keep people who still need an optical drive happy, or have we all got caught up in a maelstrom of wishful thinking?

Source: Weiphone
Thanks: Chesh!

SnapFocus is a clever camera gadget from Brandon David Cole. It’s a rig made from bike brake levers, cables and cogs, and it allows a single person to both operate a camera to shoot video, and to pull focus at the same time.

Following numerous claims that Apple will abandon Google Maps and release proprietary mapping technology this year, The Wall Street Journal today reports that Apple is indeed throwing out Google Maps once and for all. Apple showed signs of moving away from Google Maps when it used open-source mapping technology in its recently launched iPhoto for iOS app.

Apple has been reportedly “hatching the plan to evict Google Maps from the iPhone for years,” and the company is expected to debut its completely new app “later this year.”

Have you ever wished that iOS would automatically fill in your Apple ID password when making purchases in the App Store? Apple requires the user to confirm the password associated with an Apple ID before purchasing and downloading new apps and updates. Once you enter your password, iOS keeps your account logged in for a short time, but you’ll have to re-enter your password again after a few minutes.

What if you only had to enter your password once and never worry about it again? A new jailbreak tweak called PasswordPilot Pro automatically inserts your Apple ID password for you, making the process of buying and updating apps faster and more efficient.

Gameloft is at it again, teaming up with Marvel to produce yet another hit mobile game. After the success of Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, Marvel knew just who to go to for the creation of an Amazing Spider-Man mobile game that they planned on launching in conjunction with the new film. Gameloft has been working closely with Marvel and Sony Pictures to ensure the game stays as true to the film story as possible.

Wouldn’t it be freaking cool to hangout with a couple thousand other iPad owners and make the world’s biggest interactive billboard? You could create some pretty amazing stuff – like a huge video of that Helicopter Cat thing. We’re always so separated and alone when using our cool new gadgets, but Nate Bolt, Ryan Schude, and Lauren Randolph think it’s time to make something together out of them, so they created a huge jumbotron out of their iPads.

Here’s a video of the iPad Jumboltron in action:

The jailbreak community has fostered incredible iOS innovation and created friendships that span continents, but there’s an unfortunate underbelly associated with jailbreaking that continues to thrive: app piracy. Sadly, millions of people still jailbreak their iOS devices only to download paid apps from the iOS App Store for free.

Installous, the main hub of iOS app piracy, just received a big update that makes the process of downloading cracked apps even easier.

The iPad continued to dominate the tablet space through the first quarter of 2012. That’s the news from ABI Research, which publishes a quarterly report known as the Media Tablet Market Share Tracker. Although most companies with products in the tablet space did see year-on-year growth, none was able to come close to wresting the number one spot away from Apple.  Apple’s commanding lead translated to 10 times the number of shipments by Samsung, which returned to being the second biggest player in the tablet space.

According to the latest report by ABI Research, there is no tablet market… only an iPad market.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that the ubiquitous iPhone had its genesis as a humble music player, the iPod. Remember those? In fact, the Music app was originally called iPod app, right?

Sometimes, when you have a particularly long song name, like with the podcasts or compilation albums in the images above, the small screen of the iPhone doesn’t quite do the full info name justice, leaving off with a disappointing elipsis. What if you want to see the whole thing? With iOS 5.1, you can.

Photographer Henry Hargreaves did the unthinkable. He took the world’s most beloved Apple gadgets and submerged them in deep-fried, fattening, greasy goodness. Call it sacrilegious, but the photos turned out pretty well.

Of the many keyboard options available to the iPad-toting traveler, one that is often forgotten is Apple’s own aluminum Bluetooth keyboard. It is light, tough and slides easily into a bag. But if you want it to last more than a few trips, you should probably use a case.

This last weekend I did what every good Englishman should do and returned to Blighty to get drunk in the name of the Queen. And as I figured there might also be some work to do, I packed my keyboard in Waterfield’s $29 Keyboard Slip case.

We first looked at Mobilisafe a couple of months ago when the company’s signature mobile management suite was still in private beta. The company, which was started by former T-Mobile Android engineers, seeks to offer broad mobile device and data security without requiring the types on-device agents or profiles used by most mobile device and application management suites.

Mobilisafe executives describe their product as a mobile risk management solution rather than as a device or application management tool. The distinction being that Mobilisafe helps IT departments identify specific threats that can then be mitigated rather than simply locking specific apps and restricting access to on-device features like blocking an iPhone user’s ability to snap photos and upload them to iCloud.