Cult of Mac

The New York Times recently said that Apple was considering a multi-million dollar investment in Twitter. The report was then refuted by other publications, including The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, Apple’s investment talks with Twitter were more than a year old. It seemed odd that Apple, a company known for rarely buying (much less investing in) other companies, would pump so much money in a financially-healthy startup like Twitter.

In a new report today, The Wall Street Journal sheds more light on Apple’s relationship with Twitter, highlighting that the two companies have been focusing on how to tie Twitter into Apple’s OS X and iOS platforms. Interestingly, Apple is currently working to add deeper iTunes integration with Twitter.

If you live in Massachusetts and are in the market for a new Mac then you’re in luck. Massachusetts will once again be holding a tax holiday on the weekend of August 11-12. This might be a great opportunity to save some money on Apple products. Here’s what you need to know.

During our Mobile Management Month series, we noted that a number mobile management vendors have established strategic partnerships with consulting firms, telecom agents, and mobile carriers. According to a study, these kinds or partnerships are paying off for everyone involved – carriers, vendors, and business customers.

It’s August, which means two things. One, there’s no news to report on, which means that most of a gadget blogger’s workday is taken up with siestas and refreshing beverages. And two, it’s vacation time! That’s right: The whole northern hemisphere likes to take a break at exactly the same time, all the better to enjoy congested roads, overpriced plane tickets and overcrowded hotels.

To ease your pain, we’ve put together a list of the best travel gadgets. You may not enjoy spending a hot and stuffy month with your in-laws, but at least your tech won’t let you down.

Here’s an obvious yet often overlooked tip – something that I’ve personally looked at every time I use the Messages app on my iPhone, but never really “connected” with.

I’ve often needed to send along a specific text message, to a boss or co-worker, or even to a family member. I’ve often copied an individual message, then pasted it into a message of my own to the new person.

Starting in iOS 5 iOS 4, though, there’s an easier way – forwarding it. Here’s how.

Samsung has been trying to accuse  Apple of ripping off Sony’s design as the inspiration for the iPhone as a way to justify Samsung’s own smartphone copying tactics. Their argument is based on a prototype iPhone mockup by Shin Nishibori created in 2006 that was supposed to look like an iPhone that Sony would make.

Shin’s mockup was requested after an Apple designer read a profile on Sony’s top designer in Businessweek. Thing is, the article wasn’t about Sony’s smartphones at all, it was about their newest Walkman – the NW-A1200 (pictured above).

We’ve taken a couple of looks at ownCloud over the past few months. The company launched its signature cloud server software in April and issued a major update about a month ago. Today, ownCloud announced its iOS and Android apps, making the product a serious option for many businesses that need to develop a secure internal cloud strategy.

If there were ever a medal for Most Staggering Misnomer, the iPhone would find itself in serious contention for gold; the little glass slab is so stuffed with useful functions it makes the “phone” element of its name ridiculously misleading. Consider the action-packed roles my iPhone has filled over the years: Bicycle computer; running partner; navigator; wilderness scout; survival guide; weather advisor; and visual story-telling tool, not to mention being able to score all these adventures to music. And yeah, it makes calls too.

The iPhone is the most indispensible piece of hardware since man discovered sharp rocks. Problem is, the iPhone is also a fragile weakling, easily damaged by sharp rocks, gravity or water — things that exist in copious amounts around precisely the places you’d want to use the iPhone to adventure with.

The people at LifeProof, however, have recognized this paradox, and they think they have a solution. They’ve come up with a quiver of clever, well-designed, mission-specific exoskeletons that work as a seamless, modular system, all designed around the core armor: a lithe, shock-resistant, fully sealed (yes, waterproof) iPhone 4/s case. And for the most part, it works brilliantly.

It’s a great time for jailbreakers. With iOS 6 and the next iPhone right around the corner, it’s never been a more exciting time to for the iOS jailbreak community. If you’re into jailbreaking, you’ll be pleased to know that the world’s first jailbreak convention is headed to San Francisco, California this September, and I’ll be there representing Cult of Mac.

We’ve already given you initial details about JailbreakCon 2012, and now the full convention schedule has been posted for all to see. The lineup of speakers and workshop leaders includes some of the premiere members of the jailbreak community, including the hackers that are already working on a jailbreak for iOS 6.

Apple is going to release the iPhone 5 in just a couple of weeks. We’re so excited that we made one of those cute little paper chain date-countdown things. You know, the kind you made in 3rd grade to countdown till the end of the school year? Anyway, the “iPhone 5” is going to be announced soon, except the problem is we know it’s not going to be called the iPhone 5.

Why? Because that’d just be silly. The next iPhone will be the sixth generation iPhone. The press has just been calling it the iPhone 5 for the last 9 months because it’s an easy-to-understand placeholder for what will come after the iPhone 4S. So what will the next iPhone be called? We’re not totally sure, which is exactly where you come in.

What do you think Apple will call the next iPhone? Will they go with “iPhone 4G” because it will have LTE? Or maybe it will follow the iPad and be called “the new iPhone? Or something completely different? Tell us what you think in the Forums.

Click here to tell us you think Apple will name the next iPhone in the Cult of Mac Forums

Twelve South has just announced a new update to its aluminum shelf accessory for the iMac and Apple Cinema Display. Called the BackPack 2, the redesigned shelf adds a couple of new features to the best wedge of aluminum you can attach to your Mac desktop, including some support pegs that can hold your hard drive or MacBook Air in a vertical position, some new rails that help with cable management and, best of all, the new ability to mount the shelf on the front of your Mac instead of the back.

The BackPack 2 is now on sale for $34.99. We’ve got a review unit: expect to see our review on Friday.

Source: Twelve South

When AT&T reported last month that their iPhone activations only grew by 3% compared to the last quarter, a few analysts were scratching their heads at first but decided people probably weren’t buying as many new iPhones because of iPhone 5 rumors.

But what if there was a more sinister hand at play in the slumping iPhone sales? According to a new report, that’s exactly what’s happening as AT&T Regional Retail Sales Managers have instructed store managers to stop trying to sell the iPhone.

Readdle makes some of the best productivity apps for professionals who want to use their iPad to edit PDFs, scan docs, create advanced calendars, write notes, or even learn a little bit about Shakespeare. Today is their 5th anniversary, so to celebrate they’re having a huge sale for the next 48 hours. Some apps have been discounted up to 70% off, which is a pretty great deal considering the quality you’re getting.

Here’s some of the apps you can grab:

Apple continues to top PC sales thanks to the iPad. Meanwhile, according to research firm Canalys, Microsoft  will likely need to heavily subsidize the price of touch-first PCs and tablets if it wants Windows 8 to be anything like a success.

Echoing Tim Cook’s about Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy being like converging a toaster and a refrigerator, the research firm notes that Microsoft’s approach could jeopardize the Windows 8 launch. Canalys notes that the big issue is that most Windows 8 features are designed for touchscreen use. That means that existing PC owners won’t get the full value or experience that Windows 8 offers unless they upgrade their hardware to a tablet, touchscreen notebook, or a hybrid device that functions as both.

Remember those neat Lightroom presets which would add Instagram filters to your big grown-up photos? Now the author Casey Mac is back with versions for Photoshop (snore) and Aperture (yay!).

Perhaps you’ve heard the “great” news about how Verizon has to dish out $1.25 million to the FCC for violating the FCC’s “C Block rules,” requiring licensees of C Block spectrum to allow customers to freely use the devices and applications of their choosing. If you’re just hearing about it, let me give you the gist of things and then you’ll get to hear me rant.

The man largely responsible for the design of the A4, A5 and A5X SoC used in every new iPhone, iPad and Apple TV has left Apple to join AMD.

Sometimes you need to create an “old-school” webpage. And by “old-school” I mean a static, html-based page that can run anywhere. Not a WordPress template or other CMS template, an honest to goodness html page. I’ve been hit with this need myself. Sometimes it’s needing a semi-complex table to go into a post. Maybe I need a quick and dirty landing page for a site-in-progess. The thing is that while I learned html back in the day (pre–1995 thank you very much), I don’t like to code by hand. Heck, few of us really like to code by hand.

This is when you need to turn to a decent (and I stress decent) WYSIWYG html editor. Have one handy? Maybe not. How about checking out MacFlux?

Traveling for business is a lot different from taking a vacation. While you may get to experience far off cities, meet new people, and have some genuine fun on a business trip, you’ll also need to work, worry about delays that could make you miss critical meetings, ensure you leave your hotel room looking your most presentable, and keep track of every expense related to the trip.

Of those stress factors, tracking expenses so that you can submit them for reimbursement or explain charges you make to a company credit card may not seem the most stressful. The majority of the time it isn’t (unless you lose some big-ticket receipts or have unusual charges to justify). It is, however, often tedious drudgery that is prone to human error and mistakes.

There are many iOS expense tracking apps out there and there are some very good reasons to invest in one of them.

Gadget Holders on your belt = dorky. However, awesome leather quick-access camera-holder on your belt = super-cool. Yes, somehow the laws of nature have been temporarily suspended to make this Japanese hand-made leather fanny pack into a desirable and stylish item.

Want a Retina MacBook Pro? Want to spend gobs more money on it? Apple has just expanded the build-to-order options for their most powerful notebook, allowing you to jack up the CPU to up to a 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, or even upgrade the SSD to up to 768GB of flash. Now the most expensive Retina MacBook Pro you can buy is a whopping $3,749.00!

Update: We originally misunderstood the nature of these new build-to-order options. It is only the 2.3GHz Retina MacBook Pro that has recently gotten the option to upgrade to up to 768GB of flash storage; previously, Retina Display MacBook Pros with a faster processor were the only ones capable of being upgraded in this manner. We’re sorry about the confusion. Either way, it now looks like Apple has pulled these build-to-order options from their online store.

Source: Apple
Via: SlashGear

We have written before about why we believe that Apple will adopt a 19-pin dock connector for the next iPhone, but a curious report this morning suggests that, instead, Apple will get by with only eight. In addition, iOS 6 will feature a new Bluetooth 4 bridging feature that will finally make a proper iPod nano watch possible. Interesting!

Lost Photos is a Mac (and – let me get that bad taste out of my mouth – PC) app which does one thing. Well, one thing, and then a few more: it finds all the photos buried in your e-mail account and presents them to you in one easy place, ready to be tagged, saved and shared.

Mail app, while not my favorite email client, is one that comes with the Mac OS X operating system. That hasn’t changed with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, either, and the Apple team has added quite a few enhancements and extra features to make Mail a nicer email client.

One such feature is In Line Find, helping you find text within the body of emails. Until now, you’d have to use a separate Find dialog that only gets you one result at a time. Hitting Command-G would take you to the next instance of the text you were looking for, and you’d repeat that keyboard combination over and over to find all occurrences of the text in your email. Not any more – it’s a lot better in Mountain Lion.

Early this morning, Apple put up a product page for a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter cable on the online Apple Store. Selling for $29.00, the cable would allow Mac owners to run their old Firewire accessories through Apple’s new Thunderbolt standard.

It appears, however, that Apple wasn’t ready for this product to be announced quite yet, as after the new product broke, the page was quietly pulled for unknown reasons. It also doesn’t show up in store search results.

It’s probably a matter of one of Apple’s web monkeys pushing the “go live” button a few hours prematurely, but we’ll let you know when the Thunderbolt to Firewire cable goes back on sale.

Update: It’s back!

Source: Apple
Via: Apple Insider