Cult of Mac

iPhoto has several Special Effects ready to play with, accessed with a tap on the little sparkly icon, the fifth from the left in the lower left corner of iPhoto on the iPad. Tap that, and a fan of special effects swatches will rise up from the bottom of the screen. There are six filters there, including Warm & cool, Duotone, Black & White, Aura, Vintage. and Artistic. Tap on a swatch you’d like to apply, and then tap or drag along the strip to select the effect that you prefer. Many of the filters can be further tweaked by pinching or dragging around in the photo itself. For example, the Vignette effect, found at the right within the Black & White strip, can be enlarged with a pinching out gesture, and moved around to a new center point with a simple drag. Play around and have fun here. Tap the question mark icon at the top for a tooltip for each of the effect swatches.

Apple touts their new 3D maps in iOS 6 as being brand new, but as it turns out, Nokia — of all companies! — beat them to it. That’s right, if you head over to maps.nokia.com right now, you can use what is essentially iOS 6 maps from your desktop browser.

It’s inevitable that any review of the Braven 650 portable Bluetooth speaker compares it to JawBone’s JamBox, and so will this one. Short answer? The Braven sounds better. Long answer? That’s a bit more complicated.

This is really great. Apple has taken the initiative in iOS 6 to update the operating system’s selection of emoji — or visual characters — to now not have some options for gay and lesbian users, including a gay and lesbian couple holding hands. Sweet!

That’s not all, of course. There’s also some cute new monkey who can do no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil, apparently. Hope they can’t smell evil, either, because they are just a few columns down from a grinning, anthropomorphical piece of crap.

I wish there were some gay and lesbian monkey emoji, but I guess Apple had to leave something back for iOS 7.

Source: Techcrunch

Samsung rips off everything about Apple.

They’ve ripped off the iPhone. They’ve ripped off the Mac mini. They’ve ripped off  the iPhone 3G. They’ve ripped off the iPad Smart Cover. Heck, they’ve even ripped off Apple’s commercial actresses.

We were wondering, then, what it would look like if Samsung just went whole hog and decided to design themselves a new logo the same way they “designed” their smartphones and tablets: by stealing their ideas wholesale from Apple.

Ready? Without further ado, here’s Samsung’s new logo:

Gameloft continues to make friends with all the right people as Hollywood seems to be trusting them to create the official mobile games to accompany their summer blockbusters. First they teamed up with Marvel and Sony Pictures to bring the official Amazing Spiderman and now they’ve teamed up with Warner Brothers Games and DC Comics to bring the official Dark Knight Rises to Android and iOS this summer.

The iPad might seem to be the ideal tool for medical professionals — lightweight, always connected, reliable and with an all-day battery. But none of that will help you if you slip with a scalpel and suddenly have a gusher on your hands, or someone evacuates the contents of their ungrateful stomach all over your tablet.

What you need, doctor, is Griffin’s new AirStrap Mad.

It’s nearly Father’s Day, the time to say thanks to the man who took you fishing, taught you to ride a bike, built a radio for you from something called a “cats’ whisker” and was standing at your side when you killed your first deer. And maybe your second.

Or he just used to sit you in front of a DVD, while he microwaved dinner for both of you. Either way it’s time to give something back. And if you’re anything like us, that “something” will be an awesome iGadget. So sit back, add this page to your Instapaper, make yourself a bottle of milk with a tot of rum in it and enjoy the Cult of Mac Bumper Father’s Day Gift Guide. You’re welcome.

Apple’s Flyover feature in the new iOS 6 Maps app gives users are really cool way to explore their favorite cities by looking at 3D renderings of major metropolitan areas. You can zoom in and out to view buildings in greater detail kind of like you’re really there. Right now there are a limited number of cities that Apple has created 3D renders of, but here’s a look at all the cities currently supporting Flyover in the new Maps app.

If you’ve been an iPhone user for a number of years, you may remember that Siri was a third-party app long before it was purchased by Apple and integrated into the iOS operating system. Back then, although it couldn’t remind you to take out the trash or compose text messages, it offered a lot of the same search functionality it does today.

In fact, according to Steve Wozniak, Siri was actually better back then.

There’s something about a really well-edited photo that just “pops”. And then there are the photos that have had creative filters applied and you just see the image in a whole new way. You know it’s not magic right? You know that all it takes is practice, the right image, and…the right software.

Sure, iPhoto is pretty good and Aperture is powerful, but neither of them are really designed for effects (or layering effects), which is where FX Photo Studio Pro comes in. Part of the Cult Of Mac Deals FX Photo Studio Pro is usually $40 in the Mac App Store, but you can get it for $20 now!

Foxconn has confirmed that a 23-year-old worker committed suicide this week by jumping from his apartment in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The worker only began his employment with Foxconn last month. Police are investigating the death.

Skype has just pushed out its latest update for Mac OS X, which includes a number of enhancements to existing features, as well as support for OS X Mountain Lion. The company promises that contacts lists, video calls to mobile devices, and screen sharing are all much-improved in version 5.8.

Imagine that you could just point your iPhone’s camera at your baby and it would immediately tell you his vital signs: heartbeat and so on. Or that you could fire up an app and it could pick out tiny, invisible movements from what looks like a still video. Using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification, boffins at MIT are doing this already.

The iOS 6 beta has been available for four days now, but we’re still stumbling across new features that Apple didn’t mention during WWDC. One of those is the ability to receive government AMBER and emergency alerts automatically on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Itching to get your hands on the iOS 6 beta Apple released on Monday? Well, right now, it’s only available to registered developers. But according to some, there is a way you can install iOS 6 on your device. The process is incredibly simple, and all you need is the latest iTunes release and the iOS 6 .ipsw file for your device.

Nikon has made two new lenses available for your photographic delectation. One is a dim superzoom for DX (crop-sensor) cameras — the 18-300mm ƒ3.5-5.6G ED — and the other is an equally dim short zoom for full-frame bodies, the 24-85mm ƒ3.5-4.5G ED VR.

You guys, we all have a ton of photos! We take them on vacation, during school plays, on walks with our dogs, and while drinking at the bar with close friends (careful with that last one, folks). The upside of carrying around cameras of all kinds, from iPhones to iPads to serious DSLR cameras, is that we can record our lives at any given moment. The downside, of course, is that we have a veritable flood of images to sort through whenever we get them back to our computer.

iPhoto is a great virtual shoebox for keeping our photos handy, and it’s pretty good at basic editing tasks as well. There’s value, however, in viewing our photos in something other than the standard photo view.

It’s been just four days since Apple released its first iOS 6 beta to registered developers, and it has already been jailbroken by the iPhone Dev-Team. There was some concern that the Cupertino company’s latest iOS release would make jailbreaking very difficult, but the team behind the latest iOS 5.1.1 untethered exploit have now released an iOS 6 beta jailbreak for developers.

Being a Brit, one of the most disappointing things about Siri is that it doesn’t support location services in the United Kingdom. Unlike iPhone 4S users in the United States, I can’t ask Siri to find me a nice restaurant nearby, or for the nearest gas station. However, that’s no longer the case in iOS 6, because Siri now supports location services internationally.

Reeder is, in my opinion, by far the best Google Reader client for both Mac and iOS. And it just got even better on the iPhone. After being rewritten from the ground up, Reeder now offers stacks of new features, like Fever syncing, support for multiple accounts, the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from feeds, and more. It even has a pretty new icon.

The Kindle app has been updated to – supposedly – improve the reading experience on the iPad, and to add support for books with pictures: essentially kids books and graphic novels. And while the second is welcome the first – -to my eyes – actually looks worse.

Apple really wants you to buy into their beautiful Retina display future. So much so, that if customers want to buy an old style MacBook Pro with the same specs as the new MacBook Pro with Retina display, they’re going to have to pay an extra $300 to get it. That extra $300 comes with an optical drive, one extra pound of aluminum, and a lower resolution screen, just so the fatty MacBook Pro can keep up with its slimmer sister everyone’s drooling over, but hey, at least you’ll still have an Ethernet port.

A year ago, I whined and complained that, although the iPad is “awesome,” it’s also a “dandy fancy boy” — for indoor use only.

Yes, there are water-proof “cases” that are little more than industrial-strength zip-lock baggies and bulky padded covers that look like crap and, in any event, aren’t waterproof.

But now it looks like LifeProof is working on an iPad case that both water-proofs and ruggedizes your favorite tablet, without ruining its appearance.

The company hasn’t announcing pricing, but since the iPhone version is $80 the iPad version won’t be cheap.

Go here to pre-order.

Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption for email in the 1990s, has come to the forefront yet again as the spokesman for Silent Circle, a company planning to beta test an encrypted phone call and text message app for the iPhone and other smartphones. The app will be free when it’s released in July of this year, but the service itself will cost somewhere in the $20 per month range.

Zimmerman, long a proponent of technological solutions to civil liberties, thinks people will pay for the privacy.

“I’m not going to apologize for the cost,” he told CNET, “This is not Facebook. Our customers are customers. They’re not products. They’re not part of the inventory.”

That may well be the case, but getting consumers to pay subscription fees is notoriously difficult. Silent Circle plans to offer a solution for easily encrypted email, phone calls, and instant messaging to start, with plans for encrypted SMS in the future.

In addition to the iPhone release, Zimmerman told CNET that the company was planning to roll out an app for Mac and PC as well, but that it’s not ready, yet. They’ll focus on the mobile app first, allowing customers to communicate securely if they both have the app installed. If only one does, the information will be encrypted to Silent Circle’s servers, but not from there to a recipient’s phone.

This sounds great for most consumers needing to keep their legal communication safe and private, but it’s unlikely that lawmakers will see it the same way. It’s possible that Phil Zimmerman may yet again fall under scrutiny as he did when he released his first encryption product nearly two decades ago.

Via: Boing Boing