Cult of Mac

Of the many keyboard options available to the iPad-toting traveler, one that is often forgotten is Apple’s own aluminum Bluetooth keyboard. It is light, tough and slides easily into a bag. But if you want it to last more than a few trips, you should probably use a case.

This last weekend I did what every good Englishman should do and returned to Blighty to get drunk in the name of the Queen. And as I figured there might also be some work to do, I packed my keyboard in Waterfield’s $29 Keyboard Slip case.

We first looked at Mobilisafe a couple of months ago when the company’s signature mobile management suite was still in private beta. The company, which was started by former T-Mobile Android engineers, seeks to offer broad mobile device and data security without requiring the types on-device agents or profiles used by most mobile device and application management suites.

Mobilisafe executives describe their product as a mobile risk management solution rather than as a device or application management tool. The distinction being that Mobilisafe helps IT departments identify specific threats that can then be mitigated rather than simply locking specific apps and restricting access to on-device features like blocking an iPhone user’s ability to snap photos and upload them to iCloud.

Microsoft has officially announced their newest product for the Xbox 360, Xbox Smart Glass, and it will turn your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into an extension of your favorite console games.

Imagine playing a game of Halo and using your iPhone to show you the mini-map, or your iPad to talk with team mates, and you have the right idea. And while you won’t be able to stream full games from your Xbox 360 to your iPhone or iPad, this still sounds pretty great.

In case you haven’t heard, Instapaper quietly snuck its way into the Google Play Store today. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Instapaper, its significance to Android, and why this Android user won’t be buying it. Instapaper is a popular service for saving web pages for reading later. It not only saves pages for reading later, but also strips them down to a clean text-only format for easy reading.

It’s a nice concept, which when released back in 2008 for iOS, was original and extremely useful. But over the course of the last four years, Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment has spent most of his free time insulting Android and its fans… and now he wants us to give him money? Let’s take a brief look at the Instapaper app and its history to show just how insulting this is.

Cult of Mac’s favorite iPhone case for photographers — the Gizmon Rangefinder Case — has just been improved with new functions, plus a leather strap. And what’s more, it’s actually cheaper than it used to be.

If you’ve had problems jailbreaking your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with the Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak released a couple weeks back, good news: the indefatigable iPhone Dev Team have updated their popular jailbreak tools with iOS 5.1.1 untether compatibility, including redsn0w (for all factory unlocked devices), PwnageTool (for devices reliant on software unlock), Cinject (for already jailbroken but tethered iOS 5.1.1 devices) and Ultrasn0w 1.2.7.

The entertainment industry may be bracing for further disruption by Apple when the company finally unveils its HDTV and related television plans, but at least one major player in the field is refusing to show any sign of fear.

In a move sure to be followed by other industry executives, DirecTV chairman Michael White downplayed the potential for an Apple television during a conference attended by other cable and satellite company leaders late last week. While other executives were fairly noncommittal about an Apple HDTV and what it could mean for the entertainment industry, White was emphatic in deriding the idea that Apple could deliver a better user experience to viewers.

Speaking at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, White specifically called out two of the most anticipated features of an Apple television – a superior user interface and a better selection of content – and described them as unrealistic and unimportant to his company’s customers.

Love the idea of a Thunderbolt docking station but hate the idea of paying $1,000 for an Apple Thunderbolt-equipped display? Then why not save yourself $750 and opt for the Matrox DS1?

A new rumor suggests that come next week’s WWDC, Siri is finally making its way to the iPad. Or, at least, it will when iOS 6 is finalized in September later in the year.

There’s an old and very accurate adage that says the second you drive a car, it begins losing value the second you drive it out of the showroom. It also immediately becomes an ongoing expense. The biggest sign of that expense is the number of trips to the gas station. Most of us tend to tend to just pay for the gas, regular maintenance, and monthly payments and not think about whether we’re getting the best gas mileage possible.

Tracking fuel economy and other car expense data can ultimately save you a fair amount of money. Tracking gas mileage and common maintenance tasks can help you optimize when to have your oil changed for maximum oil life and fuel economy, encourage you to check your tire pressure, and even plan more fuel-efficient routes for your daily commute and other regular trips. All of that can add up to real savings over the long-term.

I test a lot of gadgets, and so I inevitably have stacks of USB cables left over. I’m pretty sure that a geek like you also has more than his or her fair share of wires. But I’ll be that none of them is as handy as the Twig, a bendable, pose-able iPhone cable that doubles as a tripod.

Owning an iPhone is a great thing, but the plans sure aren’t. Favoring the carriers more than the consumer, up until now, if you wanted to use an iPhone in the United States, you had to sign yourself up to have your bank account drained for nearly $100 a month for the next twenty-four months.

Last week’s announcement that Cricket Wireless was entering the iPhone game radically changes the carrier landscape in the United States, at least as far as we customers are concerned. The prepaid carrier isn’t some regional oddjob: they service $7 million customers in all fifty states. For $55 a month, you get unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited texts… and no contract. The only rub? You have to lay out $500 for the iPhone up front.

It’s worth it. I decided to sit down with my calculator and figure out how much users can save if they get their next iPhone through Cricket instead of one of AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The answer? A LOT. Here’s the data.

Unlimited data plans are becoming scarce options for smartphone and tablet users. Sprint remains the only carrier to offer an unlimited data plans. Most Verizon and AT&T customers, however, need to make do with tiered data plans. Tiered data plans get more cash from customers and deter customers from overloading mobile networks with excessive data use.

As a result, a lot of us try to avoid excessive data use by limiting the types and amount of content that we access when using a device’s 3G or LTE connection. That, in turn, blocks many content companies from capturing ad or subscription revenue from mobile users. That reality is leading major content companies to complain to the carriers and which AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said may lead to “toll free” data plans.

Along with Instapaper, the iPad gets another big app update today. Comic Zeal — long my favorite comic-book reader — has gotten Retina support for the new iPad, along with a few interface tweaks which makes organizing your comics easier and sometimes a little less confusing.

Newer Macs, both portable and desktop, come with keyboards that have shortcut keys on the top row, where the F keys are. These F keys allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the display, control iTunes playback, and raise and lower the volume.

You may also know that these features have associated preference panes in System Preferences as well. You can find them by opening System Preferences, which can be found in the Applications folder. Then you can click on the specific Preference pane you need, like the one for brightness or Mission Control. There’s also a way to get directly to these preference panes with a keyboard shortcut.

According to pre-WWDC scuttlebutt, iOS 6 won’t be a huge departure from what we’ve got now, at least when it comes to stand out system features. What we will see, however, is a total revision of Apple’s core apps, most noticeable in Apple’s totally overhauled, Google-free Maps app, along with a sexy new silver UI.

What will it all look like in action, though, on the new, possibly elongated iPhone 5, when it ships in September or October? Over on the Apple Core forums, user gizmosachin created some nice mockups of what all the pieces will look like when glued together.

According to the latest data from comScore, Android might have peaked. Meanwhile, iOS is still going strong.

New smartphone users — individuals trading in their own feature phones for their first touchscreen, Android’s core constituency — are at their lowest level since 2010: just 300k new smartphone users a week in the last quarter, compared to 1.5 million in November.

It gets worse for Google. Android added the fewest number of new users than it has since 2009. It’s effectively an all-time low for Android growth, which, as Horace Dediu points out, equals four straight months of decline.

The friendly skies have been cozying up to the iPad for awhile now. First, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allowed pilots to replace hundreds of pounds of flight manuals and log books for Apple’s tablet, and now a new airline is promising to save fuel, increase profits and make their customers happier by phasing out the in-flight entertainment system in favor of a fleet of iPads.

Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.

It happens to all of us. You’re at your computer, ready to work, and you’ve forgotten your password. What should you do? Don’t worry, all hope isn’t lost. In this video, I’ll show you how you can reset your account password in OS X Lion, in just a few easy steps.

It’s the future, already, right? While we may not have flying cars or jetpacks, we do have computers ad mobile devices that we can speak to and that can speak to us.

Here are a few ways to make your Mac speak to you in a variety of ways. Make it read books to you right from the Kindle app, change text documents into audio files for easy transport, and even let you know when your Terminal session is finished. If that isn’t enough, we’ll even show you how to get better voices to do all this with, even in different languages. So settle in and let us know what you think in the comments below.

If you’ve ever wanted to build apps on the iPad, then keep reading, because we’ve searched high and low for a solid iPad development course…and we’ve finally found a great match. Cult of Mac Deals is offering an informative iPad programming video course is amped up with more than 9.5 valuable hours of iPad development training.

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Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a beautifully simple timer app for the iPhone that could mean you never need to set timers manually again. There’s also a terrific app for beaming your photographs to almost any display — without additional hardware or software. Plus lots more.

Summer time is travel time for a lot of folks here in the US and abroad. In the US, at least, it’s a time for families with kids home from school to head out into the great wide world and see places, people, and resorts across the country.

Traveling with an iPhone is inevitable. If you’re heading abroad or staying in your own country, there are tips, tricks, and potential pitfalls when using your calling and data plans. There are lots of apps, cases, and extra power solutions out there, as well. We’ve spent a little time figuring some of this out so you don’t have to. Keep reading for some great tips on using your iPhone when you’re traveling. As always, let us know what you think in the comments, as well – we love a good conversation.

MG Siegler posted a scoop on TechCrunch yesterday about the “relationship status” of Apple and Facebook.

Now the echo chamber is talking like Facebook is suddenly BFFs with Apple, similar to Apple’s relationship with Twitter.

That’s not true, and would be bad news if it was true.

Facebook is a lousy partner for Apple. Here’s why.