Cult of Mac

Apple has all but confirmed it will be announcing the iPhone 5 on September 12, and if recent rumors are correct, it’ll start shipping around a week and a half later. But according to a leaked training manual produced by Sprint, Apple’s next-generation iPhone may not be making its debut until at least October 15, or it’ll be launching with different carriers at different times in the U.S.

That’s if this training document actually means anything. And we don’t think it does.

Here’s the scenario: You invite a date over to impress them with your cooking skills. The house is tidy and you look sharp. You’re slaving away in the kitchen when your date innocently asks to check their email and you absentmindedly oblige. Then it hits you… You left your download folder open! Yeah, that dreadfully unorganized file that looks more like your trash bin. You run to try and save your dignity, but it’s too late; you have been exposed and the date is a solid block away in a dead sprint.

Don’t worry, we’ve all been there before. Lucky for you we have a download manager that is here to put your worries at rest so you can move on with your life once and for all. Folx Pro packs a ton of nifty features to get you on the fast track literally and figuratively. Here is what you can get for 3 bucks:

IStabilizer’s Monopod is just that – a monopod. Only instead of being optimized to work as a disabled tripod, a camera stand with one leg instead of three, it is made to be used with lightweight cameras like the iPhone to snap pictures from more than arms’ length.

When Apple announces the iPhone 5 next week, its features and specifications will be of little surprise to most of us. If you’ve been following the rumors, there’s a good chance you already know what it looks like, and most of what’s inside it. But will the iPhone 5 been right for you, and does it do enough to keep you devoted to iOS?

There are some pretty great smartphones out there right now, including a handful that were announced by Nokia and Motorola just this week — the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920, and the DROID RAZR HD, DROID RAZR MAXX HD, and DROID RAZR M. So how do you choose between them? Well, we’ve put together a handy chart that will help you establish which smartphone is right for you.

Have you ever broken your iPhone 4 or 4S’s glass? Felt that it was Steve Jobs’s fault for sucking you into his reality distortion field and convincing you that the iPhone 4’s glass was thirty times harder than plastic? Angry enough to want to try to sue?

Tough. A San Jose federal judge has just thrown out a class action lawsuit over the strength of the glass in the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

Ubisoft has announced a brand new Rayman game that’s coming to Android and iOS on September 20. It’s called Rayman Jungle Run, and it looks absolutely awesome. Inspired by the treasure chest chase levels in Rayman Origins, it’s a fast-paced platformer in which you never stop running. Never.

When I first saw the PR blurb for the Quicam app, I thought “What could possibly go wrong?” After all, who could ever foresee a problem with an app that lets you snap photos and immediately send them to Twitter and Facebook, automatically and without a single extra button press.

Really, what could possibly go wrong?

Fujifilm has – as expected – announced the X-E1 mirrorless compact camera. If it had come a year ago, we’d all be going crazy about it. Now, though, it’s little more than a cheaper version of the X-Pro1, without that all-important hybrid viewfinder.

Sonny Dickson got his hands on some pictures in which the “mysterious” chip shielding in the front assembly of the iPhone 5 was peeled back.

So what was underneath? The rumored, then discredited, NFC chip? A fingerprint sensor to go along with Apple’s recent, hasty acquisition of Authentec?

Nope, it’s definitely not either of those, but no one still knows for sure. The chances are, though, it’s nothing very exotic, but a required silion to make the new iPhone’s In-Cell touchscreen work.

Source: Sonny Dickson

Apple’s been working to make the Apple TV “more than a hobby” for a long, long time now, but it looks like it won’t happen this year, with a new report saying that a new Apple TV — whether a full HDTV or a new set-top box with content deals from the cable system — definitely won’t happen this year.

It took Apple a long, long time to bring customizable wallpapers to the iPhone, so who knows when — or indeed if — the Cupertino company will make them scrollable. But rather than waiting, why not install the WS Wallpaper tweak on your jailbroken device and add scrollable wallpapers yourself?

Apple seeded another new OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 build to registered developers through the Apple Dev Center. This one, with build number 12C35, comes just one week after the last build, suggesting Apple is moving quickly to bring this update to the public. Of course, this is the update that will bring Facebook integration to the Mac.

We’ve seen a couple part leaks for the upcoming iPad Mini over the last few weeks, but a great shot of the casing for the iPad hasn’t been seen until now. A Chinese site that claims they have received the rear shell for the iPad Mini from an OEM in Shenzhen, China, has posted a series of photos that show some great details of what the iPad Mini will look like.

There were a few Hollywood celebrities on hand at the Democratic National Convention tonight – Jessica Alba, Eva Longoria, Will.i.Am, Ashley Judd, Bill Clinton, etc. One semi-famous person we weren’t expecting to see was Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, hanging out with Chelsea Clinton.

For me, one of the most annoying tweaks in OS X Mountain Lion was the change of the default save location for many of apps I use on a regular basis. Any app that uses iCloud now displays its save dialog box differently than it would have before its integration into OS X. Due to this, upon saving files in many applications, instead of being presented with a view of the filesystem, the default save location is now just “iCloud”, and saving the file anywhere else has become somewhat of a chore. Thanks to some Terminal commands, though, this behavior can be reverted to its pre-Mountain Lion state, as i’ll show you in this video.

Grove, maker of quality bamboo cases for the iPhone, has just begun pre-orders for its new iPhone 5 case. The design of this case is milled from a solid block of bamboo and sanded/oiled by hand. You have the option to get a custom engraving too.

Apple devices currently account for over half of all mobile web traffic in the U.S. and Canada, according to Chitika. During August 2012, Apple’s share of web traffic on mobile devices grew from 63.75% to 65.03%. Samsung trails behind at a distant second place with a 12.47% share.

“With the iPhone and iPad, Apple dominates the mobile market when it comes to web usage,” reports Chitika. “The company had another stellar month, and now its devices generate over 65% of all mobile traffic.”

Let’s be honest, finding apps on the App Store sucks. There isn’t a great way to find new apps, other than looking at the top of the charts and seeing which apps are most popular. Even though Genius support is coming to the App Store in iOS 6, we’re not getting our hopes up that Apple will be able to fix app discovery on their first shot.

There are a couple websites out right now that focus on discovering new apps, but one of the more exciting startups right now is Ooomf, which offers a set of tools for both developers and app users, to find new apps or promote current content.

In the days leading up to an Apple product announcement, the rumor mill goes into full swing. This year’s iPhone 5 is definitely no exception. We’ve already seen dozens of part leaks of the new hardware, and the latest series of hi-res photos to surface reveal an assembled iPhone 5 next to the current iPhone 4S.

Today’s pics show just how much thinner the iPhone 5 will be.

The NFL season kicks off tonight with a game that pits the New York Giants – last season’s champions – against the Dallas Cowboys. For many teams, this season also marks the first use of iPads instead of the traditional paper playbooks. A handful of teams pioneered the iPad as a complete replacement for playbooks last year. Although the iPad was only used as a playbook replacement by a few teams last year, it was more broadly used as a training tool and a companion to traditional playbooks. This year many more teams are investing in the iPad as a digital playbook and a player training solution as well as a way for coaching staff to communicate more directly and effectively with players.

There’s certainly a cool factor that any technology and football fan will appreciate. There’s also a lot that many businesses can learn from the NFL teams about how the iPad can be secured, managed, and used in almost any professional context.