Back in August, Square announced a huge partnership with Starbucks. The coffee chain giant will be integrating Square’s mobile payment system into many of its U.S. stores this fall, and Starbucks has also invested $25 million in Square.

While we knew that Square was coming to Starbucks sometime later this year, it’s now been revealed that the partnership is launching in early November. Instead of having to use your credit card or cash, you’ll be able to use the free Square app to pay for your skinny vanilla latte.

You’ve seen Microsoft’s famous Internet Explorer 9 commercial, right? You know, the one with that catchy dub-step song and all the crazy graphics of IE being like superhero fast? They play it on TV all the time and the at movies so you must have seen it by now. It’s not really that realistic though, so World Wide Interweb made an “honest version” of the commercial.

Bottom line: Switch to Mac and use Chrome.

If you’re reading this website on a new iPad or MacBook Pro with a Retina display, you may have noticed how crisp the logo is. Go on; take a good look. Zoom in with your fingers. Also check out the navigation bar, and the graphics for Reviews, Tips and How-Tos. See how clear and crisp they are?

That’s because we’ve upgraded the site to Retina — Apple’s marketing term for screens that are so dense with pixels, they’re practically invisible.

We think it looks really sharp. And next week, we’ll be giving the mobile site a complete overhaul to make it pretty for the iPhone 5.

Here’s what the site looks like on Retina and non-Retina devices.

Hit the jump for some of the geeky details:

There’s not a lot I need say about today’s Best Thing Ever, so I’ll keep it brief.

Manga Camera does exactly what its name suggests, and it’s no surprise that it’s a sudden huge hit on the iOS App Store.

The iPhone 5 is the most complex phone Apple’s ever made, which makes it extra hard for Foxconn’s employees to assemble. There’s so much pressure at Foxconn to produce an increased amount of iPhone 5s that some managers have been beat up by their workers after demanding too much.

According to a new report by China Labor Watch thousands of Foxconn workers have gone on strike due to the immense pressures involved with building the iPhone 5. The main problem is that unqualified workers are being asked to build intricate devices without proper training. They keep messing up and the quality control gets on to them and they get pissed.

We’ve seen enough Apple tattoos to last a lifetime. Most of them are terrible, and some are cool, but it’s Steve Jobs Day so why not show off another one?  Here’s one Apple fanboy’s memorial tattoo for Steve Jobs to help “keep him in mind,” which isn’t really our sort of thing, but if you want a permanent reminder about El Jobso, go do your thang.

So, until iOS 6, in order to email photos, you had to drop into the Photos app, open one photo at a time, and tap the Share via email button. You can still do this, or you can tap the Edit button in Photos and share multiple photos to email or other services like Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, however, you can insert pictures into an email right inside of Mail app, without ever having to leave the app to get your images, which is much more Mac-like, to be honest. I mean, if you’re sending an email, you want to be able to add photos right there. Right? Right.

Here’s how to do just that.

Bodymedia’s Fit fitness tracker is a hideously ugly, and is supported by one of the most willfully customer-hostile web services I have ever seen. Yet despite this, it actually does its job very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AXaFlIFQA&t=29s

Steve Jobs did plenty of great things in his time, but one thing would have surely shone through whatever path his life had taken: his cutting wit.

That Jobs was a perfectionist is undoubted. That he expected greatness of others is also clear. And — if you’ve read Walter Isaacson’s bio Steve Jobs —you’ll know that the great man was also something of a sociopath.

Add these traits together and you get some of the best, most barbed remarks ever uttered by a CEO in public.

Microsoft is gearing up to launch Windows 8 really soon along with Windows 8 Phone and the Microsoft Surface to compete with the iPad. The Surface might even be released around the same times as Apple’s iPad Mini, which could make the tablet wars pretty interesting.

Getting a jump start on their Surface ad campaigns, Microsoft has littered urban areas with guerrilla Surface ads and the lastest ones have been placed near a highly trafficked Apple Store in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago.

It’s $5 Friday and we’ve got our first game deal for you!

Tiny Bang Story is a complex, immersive puzzle game based on a little moon with a big problem. This Steam-powered game can be yours for just $5 today, and if you like puzzle games, that sounds like a deal to me—Your Game On With The Tiny Bang Story: Help Restore the Lost Beauty & Population of an Entire Planet](https://deals.cultofmac.com/sales/get-your-game-on-with-the-tiny-bang-story)

The advocacy group Consumer Reports wasn’t too friendly toward the iPhone 4, even after Apple offered free bumpers. They didn’t even like the iPhone 4S either. But with the iPhone 5 they’re changing their tune and saying that the iPhone is “among the best smartphones in our Ratings and the best iPhone yet.”

After conducting a series of tests on the iPhone 5, Consumer Reports concluded that the iPhone 5 doesn’t just surpass the iPhone 4S but also a number of other Android smartphones. They even said that despite the widespread criticism its received, Apple Maps is “competent enough.”

I love the iPod Classic. I don’t own one. But I love it all the same and wish it still played an important roll in my life, the way it used to back in 2006. Luckily, the iPod Classic is now alive on your computer.

Inventika Solutions created this virtual iPod Classic that functions just like the real deal. You can play music on it, move your mouse around the click-wheel to navigate through the menu options, and click play and fast-forward. It’s beautiful time waster for a Friday, so you should go play with it right now in honor of all the iPods you’ve loved.

Source: Inventika Solutions

Via: Gizmodo

The visionary co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, may have been dead for a year today, but the fruits of his incredible imagination, indefatigable quest for perfection and keen design eye are still ripening and shaking from the tree of the company that he created. The recently released iPhone 5 and new Lightning Connectors were  approved by him before he died,  the upcoming iPad mini was greenlit personally by Steve, and Apple’s upcoming roadmap for the next couple of years will probably be filled with projects that he personally oversaw.

Some of Steve Jobs’s last unrealized products loom larger than others, though. Here are the five incredible products from Steve Jobs that we still haven’t seen.

How does an Angry Bird hold a lightsaber if they don’t have any hands? Maybe they’re able to use The Force and to help the weld a lightsaber and slice through mean little piggies. I don’t know. But we might find out real soon. On Twitter this morning Angry Birds posted a linkto their Tumblr where readers can find a GIF of an Angry Bird wearing a jedi cloak with a lightsaber.

The only info we’re given is, “Times Square, New York, October 8th, 10am EST. HINT: Head to Toys R Us at 8am EST!” Is Rovio launching a new Star Wars Angry Birds game, or will it just be Angry Birds Star Wars toys? Your guess is as good as ours.

Source: Tumblr

Did you know that “rucksack” is German for rucksack? Neither did I, until I just made a guess and wrote it down. And Fabric Horse’s new Rucksack Luxe (Luxus, in German) sure is a Luxe sack for your back (Ruck, in German).

Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?

It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.

Let me explain.

You broke the back glass of your iPhone 4, but you’re not eligible for an iPhone 5 upgrade just yet. Maybe you forgot to buy AppleCare+. Yeah, you could go and get the back glass replaced for $29, but if you want to save some money and make your iPhone look unique while you wait for your upgrade eligibility you can try what this Redditor did.

Rather than buy a new back plate they added splashes of paint or nail polish into the cracks to give it a funky look. Who knows what will happen if that paint seeps into the components, but when your iPhone is already busted, you might as well throw caution to the wind and try something weird.

Source: Reddit

PadPivot is one of those gadgets which at first appears completely absurd, but then grows on you as you see what it can do. It starts off looking like an over-engineered solution for an non- problem: putting an iPad on your lap. But then you see it stick, prop, and fold, and it all starts to look rather compelling.

Steve Jobs was passionate about a lot of things: simplicity, challenging the status quo, creating products that people loved, etc. He was a man of many shining strengths and deep personality flaws. As one of the most dynamic titans to ever grace the tech industry, one can only imagine what Jobs would think of Apple in 2012. How would he have handled Mapgate? We’ll never know.

Based on what we do know about the late CEO, there are several things Jobs would have definitely been proud of at Apple in 2012.

You know those old-style video demos which presented images as an endless wall, and your point of view was that of a tiny creature as the wall sped past you? Gridditor is that, only its also an iPad photo editing app.

Steve Jobs had a stage presence like no one else. He was just pedaling tech products, but the man captivated his audiences like he was Jimi Hendrix or Elvis or John Lenon. Steve didn’t just introduce a new computer or new iPod, he was selling a philosophy and way of life, and once he activated his reality distortion field on stage you were spellbound by his performance.

There are tons of amazing Steve Jobs videos on the internet, but we’ve gone out and collected the ones that we think are the best. Not just the videos where he introduces products, but also his candid interviews where Steve reveals his thoughts on life. We hope you enjoy them just as much as we do.

On the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, Cult of Mac is marking his passing with a series of tributes running throughout the day.

Apple has turned its own homepage over to honouring Jobs, including a message from Tim Cook. It’s stirring stuff, the kind of thing you’d simply never see from any other company. But then Steve wasn’t just any other boss.

The whole web is full of Jobs comment and tribute articles today, so here are some links to some of the ones we’ve read and enjoyed this morning.

Plug in your iPhone or iPad and charge it up, and you’ll notice that while the first 80% or so will go by pretty fast, they actually kind of suck at charging up that last 20%, taking a lot more time to do so than it feels like they should.

There’s a reason for this. Charging batteries up to “full” is a complicated process. There’s no real way to tell if a battery is completely “full” so all you can do is measure the voltage, which (and this is a vast simplification) tells you how much resistance is being met when you try to put more electricity into the battery.

That’s why it takes so long for an iPhone to charge that last 20%. It charges full blast until it measures a certain voltage, then goes into what’s called “trickle mode” to slowly allow small sips of electricity into the battery until it thinks, based upon some software calculations, that the battery is more or less full. But a new algotihm could make the time it takes to charge your iPhone or iPad go by a lot faster.

Hey, you know what’s getting a bad rap these days? Apple Maps! Sure, the app’s got issues, but it’s not all bee stings and bug bites, and on this episode of The CultCast, we’ll tell you exactly why some of us actually love the new Google usurper.

And then, with the anniversary of his death on Oct. 5th, we remember the life and works of Steve Jobs; ponder why the things he touched all turned to gold; and examine the price he paid for conquering the world of tech.

All that and so much more on our newest CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes or easily stream it via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Show notes ahead!