The iOS lockscreen locks in two different ways. One is by keeping strangers from fiddling around with your iPhone or iPad. The second, though, is to developers: they can’t really do much with the lockscreen except pass notifications to it or make use of the lockscreens built-in music playback controls.
What if developers had full access to the lockscreen, though? What if they could do more than just pass a notification on through? It might look something like this concept.
Around the time that Google bought Sparrow, the Gmail team was given a mission to completely rebuild the Gmail app for iOS. After months of slaving away, the app has just been released on the App Store today and it comes with a number of new features that may have been borrowed from Sparrow, even though insiders such as MG Siegler claim the Sparrow team had nothing to do with the update.
Gmail 2.0 for iPhone and iPad is faster, sleeker and much easier to use. The minimal UI athestetics of Google Now have bled over with some of the popular features from Sparrow. The free update gives users multiple accounts, infinite scrolling inboxes, better search, and more.
Here are the release notes:
Perch is a new way to use your old iOS device. Got an iPod Touch or unused iPhone/iPad laying around the house with nothing to do? Perch is an app which turns it into an always-on portal, letting you just walk up to it and show things to other Perch users in your network.
The idea is to keep this on a wall at home and treat it as a window on your family.
One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.
This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.
Amazon has issued an update to its Kindle app for iOS today, introducing its excellent X-Ray for Books feature which has been a big selling point for the company’s own Kindle hardware. If you’re not already familiar with it, X-Ray allows you to see the “bones of the book,” Amazon says, helping you learn more about its characters, places, and phrases.
When a company like Apple is getting sued every other week, there’s no telling what they will and won’t try to patent and trademark in an attempt to protect their intellectual property. Apple already holds a patent on rectangles with rounded corners, and their latest trademark gives Apple exclusive use of the word “Retina.”
On December 4, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple two Registered Trademarks. One trademark covers the word “Retina” while the second trademark covers Apple’s Game Center icon.
Gifted is a one dollar gift-management app for iOS, that helps you track all the gifts for all the people at all the events you might have to deal with. It works, no doubt about that; but using it, I found myself shrinking away from the whole idea. This is not what gift-giving is all about, in my opinion.
One of the biggest reasons I switched from Windows to a Mac all those years ago was OS X’s supposed immunity to malware and viruses. I’ve quickly discovered throughout 2012, however, that my Mac isn’t as safe on the Internet as I’d been led to believe. A new report from antivirus experts Sophos today highlights that.
The company’s Security Threat Report 2013 declares 2012 to be the year of “new platforms and changing threats.” Hackers are switching their focus from Windows to other platforms, including Mac OS X. Today’s biggest target, however, is Google’s Android platform.
The new TonePrint app lets you download guitar-pedal presets to your iPhone and then squirt them into your actual pedal via the pickup of your guitar. This magical-sounding ability is actually pretty simple, but that doesn’t make it any less useful.
It seems like we’ve been waiting for Sharp IGZO technology to solve all of our battery life problems forever now. Unfortunately, Sharp hasn’t just been slow to get the exciting display tech out on the market… they’ve also struggled with financial issues relating to their core business that have threatened to put the Japanese company under.
Luckily, it looks like Sharp might be saved, with Qualcomm now apparently investing up to $120 million in Sharp, specifically to get IGZO displays out there to the masses.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Apple is how they approach upgrades. While companies like Microsoft sell their operating systems at an exorbitant licensing cost, Apple has favored an approach in which they release their operating system upgrades either for free (as with iOS) or at a low cost that anyone can afford.
The benefits are big. Updated versions of operating systems tend to be more secure, which helps guarantee OS X’s lead over Windows when it comes to malware. Naturally, then, Mac users tend to adopt new versions of OS X faster than Windows users upgrade, but the statistical disparity might surprise you.
Apple released iOS 6.1 beta 3 to registered developers yesterday, but unless your iOS device’s unique identification number (UDID) is registered with Apple’s developer program, you can’t install it. But don’t worry, we can tell you everything that’s new in this version, including some changes to iCloud setup and Passbook sample cards, new mobile-cellular data options, and more.
Imagine, if you will, a world where cellphone cameras and SLRs get along. A world where one was never teased by the other. Imagine a world where Canon and Nikon lenses can be used as easily on an iPhone as they can on their own bodies.
Now open your eyes and look around. How do you feel? Does anything look any different? It should, because the whole world just changed. Behold! The iPhone SLR Mount.
Apple increased the iPhone’s screen size for the first time when it launched the iPhone 5, giving users an additional 0.5 inches worth of Retina display. If that’s still not enough for you, don’t think you’ll have to give up on iOS and turn to Android; pick up the popSLATE case instead and add an addition 4-inch display to your iPhone 5.
If you’re a Verizon customer, you’ll want to be on the lookout for an email or text message from asking if you’d be willing to share your data usage (location, web browsing and mobile application usage data) in return for coupons or “rewards.” This sort of data farming for advertisers is nothing new in today’s world, but always a bit unsettling.
The People People Speaker is a clever solution to a persistent, cruel and terrible first-world problem: big, ugly speakers eating up the visual space of your home. The answer isn’t to make the speaker smaller, but to make the speaker less visible.
Thus the almost invisible speaker was born.
China Unicom, China’s second-largest mobile carrier, began accepting iPhone 5 pre-orders on Monday ahead of the handset’s December 14 launch. And during the first day alone, it saw more than 100,000 orders placed online. Apple devices have become hugely popular in China, and it seems the iPhone 5 will be no exception.
iTunes 11 has undergone many different visual tweaks and changes, not all of which may be welcome. One of the big ones is how the Search field works. By default, when you type in your search term, a drop down menu appears under the Search field, listing the songs, albums, or apps that include those search terms. This can be handy for searching the whole of iTunes at once, but you might want to use the older style of search, using the sidebar to filter the search results within the different media types.
Here’s how to revert iTunes 11 to the older style.
Gameloft has announced that Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour, the latest addition to its series of first-person shooters, will make its debut on iOS this Thursday, December 6, before arriving on Android “shortly after.” We’ve been following the title’s development since Gameloft released its first teaser tailer back in September, and we couldn’t be more excited. If you’re a fan of FPS games, this is the title to look out for.
Rockstar Games is bringing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — the best game in the GTA series, in my opinion — to Android and iOS on Thursday (like you didn’t already know that!) to celebrate its 10th anniversary. And to ensure we’re super excited for its release, the company has teased us with a few screenshots from the game.
They’ll look very familiar to you if you’ve already played Vice City before, because it’s almost exactly the same game. But look closely and you’ll notice the game looks a whole lot nicer this time around.
Apple has flipped the switch on the iTunes Store in a grand total of 56 new countries around the world, including key emerging markets like India. Russia, a country where Apple is expected to hold a small celebration event, also now has access to iTunes music and movies.
The iTunes Store is now available in 119 countries in dozens of currencies. Here’s the full press release from Apple:
“All work and no play makes Homer something something…”
Fans of The Simpsons will know that all work and no play actually made Homer go crazy, so to celebrate those brief times when we get to play, Cult of Mac Deals has a pretty sweet ride that will keep you entertained for hours. And (hopefully) keep you from going crazy.
This remote-controlled hyperspeed stunt flier is the most dynamic of its kind – and Cult of Mac Deals has it for just $49 for a limited time!
Android technically sells more smartphones than Apple, but iOS devices continue to dominate mobile web traffic. Chitika Insights has been tracking web traffic on the top mobile platforms, and iOS commands 67% of usage and Android only 33%.
Since May, iOS has seen 2% traffic growth while Android has seen a 2% decrease. Both parties have put out a volley of new devices in recent months, yet the percentages have largely stayed the same for both. More people may be buying Android devices, but iOS device owners appear to be more active online.
There are two Steve Jobs biographical films in the works in Hollywood right now. One is being written by Aaron Sorkin and sounds like it might be a hit. The other has been fast-tracked for a 2013 release, stars Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, and is probably going to suck.
We’ll have to wait a while for Sorkin’s flick, but Ashton’s film, jOBS, has been filming throughout 2012 and will be making its official debut at the Sundance Film Festival this January in Park City, Utah.
Since Apple released iOS 5.1.1 for the Apple TV last week alongside iTunes 11, many users have reported problems updating to the new software over an ethernet connection. This appears to be the result of nasty bug in the latest Apple TV OS. Some Apple TVs even failed to boot back up after the update wouldn’t stick.
If you’ve been having problems updating to 5.1.1 on your Apple TV, then try updating over a Wi-Fi connection or manually restoring in iTunes.