Cult of Mac

Losing your iPad is probably a horrifying experience. It’s never happened to me, but if it did I would probably roll up into the fetal position and sob uncontrollably on the hard floor of the city bus until someone gave it back. Maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit, but it’d be a really really sad day in my life.

The worst part about losing your iPad is knowing that someone else is going to find it and they’re not going to give it back. All of your photos, iBooks, and hard work on Fieldrunners 2 is now theirs. Except sometimes an incredible story pops up that restores your faith in humanity, like how this kid on Reddit found a lost iPad and worked on finding the owner for 4 months.

Algoriddim, creators of popular music player djay on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, today announced a huge update for the Mac version. Not only has djay been updated with support for the newly-released OS X Mountain Lion, but Algoriddim has also optimized the app for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display. Thanks to the enhanced AirPlay functionality in Mountain Lion, djay users can also wirelessly stream audio from the Mac app to any AirPlay-enabled speakers or Apple TV.

Optrix’s XD camera case for the iPhone looks like just another ruggedized box, but it distinguishes itself with a low price ($100), a whole bagful of included accessories, and one unique feature.

Since Apple unleashed Mountain Lion, we’ve been showing you tips and tricks for customizing the new OS down to the gritty details. A neat app called Lion Tweaks allows you to access a host of hidden settings in the previous version of OS X, and the developer has now updated the app for Mountain Lion.

Jony Ive is responsible for overseeing the birthing of Apple’s entire product line, including the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs was his best friend, and he is considered a legend in the design community. Heck, the Queen of England has even knighted him twice!

So, when Ive talks, the world listens. Speaking at the British Embassy’s Creative Summit recently, Ive shared some of his own philosophies, including a core belief he shares with Apple as a company: the desire to not make money, but a good product.

This post is brought to you by Chase — innovator of the Tech Warehouse program. The program was designed to leverage the benefits of sustainable management of resources at their end of life in order to make a positive impact on the world. Learn more here.

Computers that were once employed for business purposes at JPMorgan Chase and have reached their end of usefulness are not going to waste anymore, thanks to the the Tech Warehouse program.

Through Tech Warehouse, JPMorgan Chase and Good360 are providing non-profit organizations and schools with refurbished computers that are equipped with basic peripherals and OS software, allowing them to enhance their tech capabilities…. and their local communities.

Apple released a range of updates to the its Mac applications last week along with the release of Mountain Lion on Wednesday. Most of those updates were to integrate new Mountain Lion technologies and provide general compatibility with the new OS.

Among them were updates for  Apple Remote Desktop, Apple’s extremely powerful and flexible remote management solution for Mac systems. In addition to offering support for Mountain Lion, the update also added a couple new features focused around some of Apple’s latest hardware, but no major changes. In fact, one has to wonder why this amazing Mac IT solution has gotten so few updates over the past few years.

If Crocodile Dundee had been a digital artist instead of a hardened Aussie hunter, and if you had pulled your iPad stylus out in the middle of a heated argument somewhere in NYC, then he would have said this:

“Call that a stylus? That’s not a stylus… This is a stylus.”

And then pulled out the JaJa, an iPad stylus that is not only pressure-sensitive (with 1024 levels), but manages to communicate its intent to your iPad without a cable, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or any other radio protocol. How the hell do it work?

Once a staple of any vacation, the postcard has since faded into obscurity due to the advent of technology and instant sharing. One company meshing the best of both worlds, Touchnote Ltd., has a popular app on both Android and iOS that allows users to turn photos into personalized postcards and have them sent for around a $1.49 per postcard. In celebration of the 2012 Olympic Games, both Touchnote and Samsung want users to have the luxury of sharing their amazing moments via a postcard without having to visit a local London gift shop. That’s why Samsung is sponsoring a promo that will allow users to send free Touchnote postcards up until August 31st.

A couple of rumors hit the web today claiming that the iPhone 5 will supposedly be revealed in just 6 weeks. We’ve seen a lot of iPhone 5 parts leak out from manufacturers over the past couple weeks as well, so it sounds like the rumored September 21st release  date might be true.

So if the if the iPhone 5 really is going to be announced on September 12, what new hardware features do you want it to come with? 2GB of RAM? 128GB storage? NFC? New dock connector? 3D Display? Also, what’s Apple going to name this bad boy? “The new iPhone,” or something else entirely? We want to hear what you want out of the next iPhone you buy, so come over to the forums and let us hear about it.

CLICK HERE TO TELL US WHAT NEW  FEATURES YOU WANT IN THE IPHONE 5 AT OUR FORUMS.

Image: InventHelp

We just heard that Apple plans to announce the next iPhone, iPod lineup, and iPad mini at an event on September 12th, and now more rumors have surfaced regarding Apple’s iPhone and iPad roadmap, including the iPad 4 and some new cases.

While Apple is expected to ship the iPad mini by November, it’s currently unclear if the smaller tablet will ship at the same time as the iPhone 5 or not. The next major version of the current iPad is rumored to be a more of an evolutionary upgrade to the third-gen iPad, and Apple is expected to implement the same smaller dock connector that will be in the new iPhone.

In 2012, there’s nothing that lends prestige, luxury and credibility to a shopping space like an Apple Store. From that perspective, it’s the Tiffany’s or Sak’s of the 21st Century.

In fact, it looks as if the Apple Store was considered to be such a prestigious draw that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bent over backwards to make sure it could get Apple to lease a space in the famous Grand Central Terminal… at the expense of other applicants.

In addition to launching Mountain Lion Server last week, Apple rather quietly released a Mountain Lion Server version of Workgroup Manager – the traditional Mac management tool included in previous releases of OS X Server. The move was unexpected after Apple released the Advanced Administration guide for Mountain Lion Server, which implied that administrators would need to begin an almost-immediate shift to Mountain Lion Server’s Profile Manager.

The move is good news for many organizations that have an existing investment in OS X Server and Mac clients. Although Mountain Lion Server’s Profile Manager is arguably a more modern and enterprise-friendly solution, it only supports Macs running Lion and Mountain Lion. Any schools or businesses with clients still on Leopard or Snow Leopard would be out of luck if Profile Manager were the only available option.

If you carry a stylus for your iPad, it’s fair to say you like writing (or at least doodling). And – by extension – it’s likely that you also carry a pen. Now one of our favorite styluses – – the metal-mesh-tipped TruGlide from Linktec – has been turned into the Duo, a single stick with a different writing technology at each end.

The patent war between Apple and Samsung is just starting to heat up, with both tech giants scheduled to appear in U.S. court today. Apple accused Samsung of copying the iPhone and iPad back in April 2011, and Samsung countersued with similar accusations. In the months leading up to the trial, there have been treasure troves of previously hidden information uncovered, including hundreds of early iPhone and iPad prototype designs.

One design in particular, aptly named “Jony,” sparked an accusation from Samsung saying that Apple borrowed from Sony’s designs to create the first iPhone. To combat Samsung’s claim, Apple has since produced an early (and possibly first) prototype design of the iPhone from circa 2005.

The Samsung vs. Apple legal brouhaha has been a pretty tedious story to cover up until now, but over the last week, those of who with a professional interest in paying attention to the bickering were finally rewarded when Apple started coughing up images of their early iPhone prototypes in the court filings.

On Saturday, though, in preparation for the start of today’s trial, Apple released a new filing with dozens of sketches, prototypes and 3D models of early iPhone prototypes. We’ve seen some of them before, but a lot of them are new, and one thing that is abundantly clear is that back in 2006, Apple has already thought out every possible shape an iPhone could be.

We’ve put together a gallery below of all of Apple’s iPhone prototypes, culling the images from a longer slideshow from All Things D. Check it out: not only will you see iPhones that never made it in there, you’ll see the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4 and even a longer iPhone that could be the iPhone 5!

If you thought that all apps that turn photos into “paintings” and “drawings” were total gimmicky junk, you’d be dead right. Applying a “find edges” filter and desaturating the result into grayscale doesn’t make a picture look like you drew it. It looks like you’re a dummy for even using it.

But things have changed: Glaze is an iPad app which actually makes faux paintings that look good.

Adding Twitter information to your contacts has been a slow, manual, one-contact-at-a-time affair. If you wanted to get all your friends’ Twitter names into the Contacts App before OS X Mountain Lion, you’d need to open Contacts, edit each contact, and paste or type their info into their specific contact card. The length of time that would take, depending on the number of folks you know and/or follow on Twitter, kept most of us from even thinking about doing it.

However, with Mountain Lion, Apple and Twitter have made it a lot easier. Here’s how to add them all in one fell swoop.

Apple has just announced that OS X Mountain Lion is the most successful launch of Mac OS X ever, with over three million copies sold in four days.

“Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

Last year, Apple sold over 1 million copies of OS X Lion in the first day of release. It looks like Apple managed to not just match that rate, but exceed it with Mountain Lion.

Apple’s press release is after the jump. Have you updated to Mountain Lion yet?

September 21, 2012 is looking increasingly likely as the release date for the next-gen iPhone and upcoming iPad mini, as a new report from a trusted site pegs the date.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Apple was in talks to invest a significant amount of cash into Twitter. The multi-million dollar investment would raise Twitter’s company valuation to a healthy $10 billion.

But that doesn’t really sound like something Apple would do, does it? If you thought that when you first read this rumor, then you had the right hunch. Apple and Twitter have talked, but not recently. Beyond the current Twitter integration in iOS and OS X, the two companies are merely friends.

We thought about simply updating our original post on this story, but a separate article to debunk the former seemed more appropriate in this case.

This isn’t the smallest headset. In fact, Motorola’s Elite Sliver Bluetooth Headset ($130) is actually bulkier than many other personal BT headsets. Its trick, though, is to hide most of the bulk behind the user’s ear, leaving just a sliver — hence the name — of technology visbile.

But the Sliver isn’t just a one-trick pony; its case also doubles as a battery that will top off the Sliver when the headset is housed in the case (which actually does triple duty as a charger).

Rumors surrounding Apple’s next-gen iPhone are started to pick up steam leading up to the device’s rumored release this fall. We know that the sixth iPhone will probably have a 4-inch display, slimmer design, smaller dock connector, and launch before November.

Leaked snapshots of purported next-gen iPhone parts have surfaced in recent months, but nothing as complete and authentic-looking as a series of images published over the weekend.

Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a stunning new weather app called Solar, which boasts a simple, intuitive user interface and a no frills approach that doesn’t suffocate you with information you’re not interested in. There’s also a great new drawing and animation app from Disney that you and your kids will love; a great new photography app that adds bokeh light effects to your photos; and updates to Google Earth and Yelp.

Instead of talking about something new here today, we thought it would be a good idea to do a little recap of some deals, freebies, and giveaways that, well, you should know about!

Like the iStack Bundle (extended through tonight!) or Website optimization ebook or the Retina MacBook Pro giveaway. More after the jump.