Cult of Mac

Apple has produced some of the most memorable adverts in history. Its “1984” commercial for the original Macintosh is still talked about today, and we can all remember the “Mac vs. PC” commercials, and the dancing silhouettes that were used to promote the iPod. However, it hasn’t quite been the same story in recent years.

Despite promoting incredibly popular products like the iPhone and the iPad, Apple’s most recent commercials have been far from unforgettable. In fact, the CEO of one ad-tracking firm has revealed that Apple is being mocked for its latest Siri commercials, which employ celebrities to sell a feature that rarely works in real life.

Canon has announced a brand new video-shooting DSLR, the EOS 650D. This freaks me out a little bit as I used to sell the EOS 650 to people as a part of my Saturday job in a camera store. The 650 was a 35mm SLR that Canon made from 1987 to 1989, and it was the company’s first auto-focus SLR.

Back to today. The 650D has all that you’d expect from a modern camera, plus a swing-out touch-sensitive LCD screen.

The principal at my elementary school was fond of saying that every privilege comes with a new responsibility. That phrase often comes to mind when I think about BYOD programs. The ability to use your personal iPhone, iPad, or other mobile devices in the workplace is a privilege. Even though it may make you a happier and more productive employee, using your personal device means that you take on certain responsibilities once taken care of by your IT department.

Tasks and costs like cell service, supporting technical problems specific to your device, choosing and purchasing apps, and even maintaining some aspects of data security become your responsibility. Then there’s the ultimate responsibility question – what happens if your iPhone or iPad is damaged?

While most BYOD programs are designed to incorporate issues around support, expenses, and security, many don’t include a policy for physical damage to a device.

When Apple pulled Airfoil Speakers Touch from the App Store last week, many believed that the Cupertino company was gearing up to introduce the same functionality to iOS 6 later this year. It seems, however, that this was just wishful thinking. In letter to one customer obtained by Cult of Mac, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, explains the real reason why Airfoil Speakers Touch was pulled.

I used to work as a the sole waiter in a restaurant where the cash register consisted of a wooden cigar box and a solar-powered Casio calculator. I’m an honest chap, and the chef was also the owner, so it worked just fine. But times have changed, and now there exists a modern alternative to our old cedar box. It’s called the Cashbox and it is fashioned from beautiful bamboo varnished to look like a hideous high-school craft project.

If you’re a Mac user of some length of time or experience, you know that there are a ton of keyboard shortcuts laced throughout the operating system. In addition, every application you run on your Mac has a ton of these same shortcuts.

One easy way to see them is to click on a menu in a running application. To the right of each menu command, you’ll see the Keyboard shortcut for that particular menu selection. For example, clicking on the Edit menu in most applications on the Mac will give you the Cut (Command-X), Copy (Command-C), and Paste (Command-V) shortcuts.

There’s an easier way, however, to see all the application’s associated keyboard shortcuts, in the form of an application you can download right now.

I don’t know about you, but I find my iPhone’s speaker just isn’t loud enough. I’m forever propping it up against a wall to amplify its sound while I’m in the shower, cooking dinner, or assembling the flat-packed furniture my wife insists on purchasing all too frequently. But AudioGlove is an iPhone case that solves my problem.

It’s the first case that features an “acoustically engineered retractable waveguide chamber that “naturally” amplifies the sound coming to and from the iPhone.” It requires no batteries, cords, or docks — it just makes your iPhone louder using the power of science.

Color Splash Studio, a terrific photo manipulation tool for Mac OS X, has made the leap from Mac App Store to iPhone today. Priced at just $0.99 — with 60% to celebrate its launch — the app allows you to convert your images to black and white, and then inject color back into specific areas.

“You have tools and powers no similar app offers,” its description promises.

Macs equipped with Retina displays are high on everyone’s wish-list right now, but despite many rumors claiming we’ll see them announced at WWDC, we’ve still had our doubts they’ll arrive this year. However, we’ve been handed a glimmer of hope this morning after Retina-ready Mac applications began appearing in the Mac App Store.

Verizon continues to put other carriers to shame with their 4G LTE network. In one day, Verizon manages to blanket more markets than most carriers do in months. At the current rate of expansion, I’d say most other carriers are year’s behind, and according to Verizon’s current forecast, it’s going to get worse.

Taking standardized tests is rite of passage of sorts in our world. It starts in elementary school and continues through to professional certifications and exams. And for better or for worse—how you do on some of these tests can steer the course of your life. With all that’s riding on doing well on the SATs, GREs, the Bar Exam, a lot of people get pretty wound up about taking the test. Stress, cramming, practice tests, more stress.

It doesn’t have to be like that. You can prep for these tests and learn what you need to learn and get a better score if you have the right tools to help you. Not a replacement for studying or learning the material, but helping you learn how to take the test better. This is what BenchPrep is for. An online test prep package that will help you get ready for the tests and hopefully take some of the stress out of taking them.

The wedge design of the MacBook Air has been patented by Apple, meaning that the Cupertino company now owns the rights to “the distinctive wedge or teardrop profile” of the sexy notebook. Apple’s D296 patent means that the MacBook Air has solidified the tapered, wedge-like design for its class of computer.

Instead of focusing on concrete details, the new patent covers the general aesthetic of the MacBook Air’s design. Over the past year or so, dozens of laptops, dubbed “Ultrabooks,” have been copying the metallic look and feel of the Air. Could this new patent mean that Apple is setting its legal sights on Ultrabook competitors?

Google shook up the mobile business landscape by announcing its acquisition of mobile office powerhouse Quickoffice. That move might not seem terribly large, but it creates a very different and unexpected dynamic in the business mobility world. It also sets up a showdown over business capabilities that could have lasting ramifications.

Why is this move significant? It means that every company that produces a major mobile platform now also owns a serious office and productivity solution. Microsoft has Office, Apple has iWork, RIM has Documents To Go (which it acquired nearly two years ago), and Google now has Quickoffice as well as Google Docs. Each company can now ensure that its mobile business customers will have at least one solid option for working with Office files on their smartphones or tablets.

Sharing photos from the iPhone is great in a pinch, but wouldn’t it be nice to see them on a much bigger screen? Say, a computer screen, or in a web browser? Guess what? The folks at Scalado AB have solved this problem for you already! Their app, Scalado PhotoBeamer, is available now for a mere $0.99, and they claim to allow you to share photos to any browser.

The Omni Group offers a powerful range of Mac business tools that meet several key professional needs including mind mapping and brainstorming, data graphing, diagramming, task management, and project management. Over the past two years, the company has been porting its award-winning software the iPad and delivering great mobile business functionality in the process.

Today the company release the iPad version of its OmniPlan project management software.

We covered Pix & Stix back in May, when they were just a Kickstarter project looking for funding. A year on, they’re now in full production.

The rubberized drumsticks and guitar pick are designed to make iPad apps like GarageBand a much more enjoyable experience, allowing you to rock out on the drums or on guitar just like you would in real life, without brusing your finger tips. But are they any good?

Up until a year and a half ago, U.S. customers had almost choice of carrier or rate plans when buying an iPhone. That’s something that has changed dramatically. The iPhone’s launch on Verizon and Sprint followed by several regional carriers across the country and the recent introduction of the iPhone as an option on prepaid networks Cricket and Virgin Mobile.

The new prepaid iPhone options may seem pricey because Cricket offers a very limited subsidies to attract iPhone 4 and 4S buyers and Virgin offers no discount or subsidy at all. As we noted earlier, however, paying the cost of the iPhone up front can actually save you money overall if you go with either Cricket or Virgin.

Beyond the upfront costs, however, there’s a big question to consider: will either prepaid carrier be included in the launch of the iPhone 5? While there isn’t a solid answer at this point, it seems likely that they won’t.

Facebook’s been planning an HTML5 app center to try to tackle Apple’s App Store for quite a while, and now Techcrunch has what they say is the first shot of what it’ll look like in the official Facebook iOS app. In fact, we might all see it as soon as tonight, at an app-themed press event to be held in San Francisco.

Facebook on their part is playing mum, saying: “Since we announced the App Center to developers last month, we’ve been testing it with a small percentage of users. We have no further details to announce at this time.”

For me, all I can say is if App Center requires me to load Facebook’s execrable app, I doubt Apple has anything to fear.

Source: Techcrunch

The last two days we’ve given away two MacBook Airs to lucky readers, but if you haven’t been lucky enough to win yet, don’t fret, here’s your last chance.

Even though we have this really cool internet technology thing called the “cloud” that stores all of our pictures, music, documents, videos, and anything else we want to throw at it, searching for stuff inside the cloud still sucks. Most people use Gmail, DropBox, iCloud and Google Drive to store certain things, but the problem is that they’re not connected, so files become fragmented across multiple services. Found is a brand new app that just launched on the Mac App Store, and it’s ready to change the way you search for files by making them easy to find regardless of which cloud service you stored them in.

Not only is Found a deliciously simple app for finding stuff, but it works across multiple services at once and is completely free. Best of all, to celebrate the launch of their app, Found is giving away one last MacBook Air today. So not only are you getting a sweet new app that will make your life easier, but you might win a new MacBook Air to run it on.

Here’s How To Enter:

WWDC is only a few days away and the event is shaping up to be filled dramatic announcements. Expectations include an Apple HDTV, a new Mac lineup that includes an updated Mac Pro, the unveiling of the next iPhone, iOS 6 with Siri support for the iPad, updates to Siri’s functionality, and load of additional details about Mountain Lion.

Whether all those expectations are met or not, WWDC and its keynote will pack lots of information for developers and IT professionals as well as various Apple product announcements and previews. The big announcements may be the best part of WWDC for most Mac users and Apple fans, but the event is, at its heart, a giant powwow for developers. It also offers IT professionals and CIOs their best glimpse at Apple future plans and the new technologies that they will need to support and/or manage.

So what are IT leaders and business professionals going to be looking for at WWDC? Here’s our IT wish list for this year’s WWDC.

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo has been chock full of mobile news and is a testament to the future of mobile gaming. Major gaming companies such as EA took stage to not only show off their console offerings, but their future mobile versions as well. This year, EA showed off a number of titles, two of which will be hitting Android and iOS later this fall.

TwelveSouth is a company as known for their fantastic innovations (for example, the PlugBug) as their curiosities (the BookBook case). The SurfacePad for MacBook doesn’t fall in either category: it’s a strictly utilitarian accessory, a thin leather sticker for the keyboard of your MacBook Air that makes it feel more pleasant to type on by putting an almost imperceptibly thin layer of dyed cow flesh between your palms and the cold unibody aluminum.

My favorite gadget is most certainly my iPhone… or my iPad. I have a tough time choosing between the two, but it’s definitely one of those devices. And I’m sure many of you feel the same way about your smartphone or tablet, after all, we use things every single day for all kinds of tasks.

But for Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, it isn’t either of these things. His favorite gadget is his aging transistor radio, which was given to him by his parents when he was eight years old.

Street View is fantastic. You can check out a hotel’s façade before you even book a room, you can walk down a street where you remember there was this awesome store, only you can’t remember its name, or you can wander through far-off cities.

Now, you can make your own Street Views, with this camera and software kit from DIY Streetview.

Apple offers a number of search engines for iOS users, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing. According to a new report today, Apple will be adding Baidu search engine support for iPhone owners in China as early as next week. The feature will likely be announced alongside other iOS 6 announcements at WWDC.

Baidu is basically the Google of China, owning 80% of the market there while Google only owns 17%. It’s not surprising that Apple would want to support the largest search engine in the iPhone and iPad’s fastest growing market. Not to mention that this is another move that pushes a certain company farther away from iOS.