How would you like to win an entire library of 10 Apple-related books? Everything from Insanely Great to Steve Jobs: A Biography to Inside Steve’s Brain by our own fearless leader Leander Kahney? There’s even a chance to just win Leander’s book (one lucky winner a week!), and how does one achieve this awesome feat?
Well, then it’s all on the iApple Book Giveaway page here on Cult of Mac. Read on for all the details…
Some people dream of flying sheep, but blogger Mike Cane thinks different, dreaming of flying toasters. His dream – in November 2011 – was to see the classic Macintosh OS running on a nook Simple Touch, the eInk reader from Barnes and Noble. His dream seemed far-fetched, perhaps, even to him, but consider the following specs:
Original Macintosh: 68000 Motorola CPU at a blistering 8MHz(!), 128K(!) of RAM, and 512×342 screen
Nook Touch: TI OMAP3621 (ARM Cortex-A8 core, 800MHz), 256MB RAM, and 600×800 screen.
The Nook Simple Touch outperforms the original Mac by quite a bit. All he needed was someone to bring his dream to life.
According to a report by ABI Research, Apple and Samsung have 50 percent of the smartphone market, and 90 percent of the global profits from that market. These top two companies dominate the smartphone industry so thoroughly, claims the research firm, that there is no one even close to becoming a third player.
“At this point in the year, Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000 percent in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments,” Michael Morgan, senior analyst for devices, applications & content at ABI, said in a statement.
If you’re a dad like me, the only tie you want for Father’s day is this one. What we do want, are some kick ass games for guys. EA has answered our plea, and graciously discounted a slew of manly titles across multiple platforms.
The implementation of podcasts in iOS has traditionally seemed like an afterthought. In order to find a podcast, you had to jump over to iTunes, find the episode you wanted, download it, and then hop back over to the music app to play it, in the same fashion as you would a playlist. Apple provided no options to automatically download episodes, subscribe to certain shows, or sync podcasts across devices. With iOS 6, this could all change, according to All Things D.
This NFL season is about to get squawky thanks to Andy Reid and his decision to sign five new free agents to the Philadelphia Eagles. At a brief press conference, Andy Reid announced the five newest players, and boy were they an Angry bunch. Newly signed Red Bird, Bomb Bird, Yellow Bird, Terrence, and The Mighty Philadelphia Eagle, are ready to crush all the swine populating the NFC East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gn4sXgZbBM&feature=player_embedded
It’s Friday afternoon, and we’re all a little tired. So if you missed Monday’s WWDC keynote, and missed it when Apple put the video up on iTunes, why not make it through the remnants of your work day watching the WWDC keynote in total on Apple’s official YouTube channel.
Leaving work sooner than that? Here’s the keynote in 90 seconds.
If you take a photo in a forest but do not share it with others, does it really exist? Well, yeah, it probably does, but you know what I’m talking about. Sharing photos is really the point, right? Why else take them?
iPhoto for iPad has several ways to share your photos across social networks, to other iOS devices, and even right on the iPad itself. Let’s run through a few of them, yeah?
Remember that incredible remix of the Marimba iPhone remix from earlier today? When I originally posted it, I suggested it’d make an incredible music track for an official Apple ad. Little did I think that Cult of Mac reader Ryan Simmons would actually edit one together for us, using footage from previous Apple iPhone ads.
Fantastic. Ditch John Malkovich, Apple… go with Marimba.
How much extra are you willing to pay to get the best iPad keyboard case possible? If your answer topped out at $10, then we’ve got the keyboard case for you, courtesy of Cirago. It works just fine, really, but you won’t mistake it for a Zagg.
I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.
What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.
Earlier this week during its WWDC keynote, Apple announced that nine automakers have committed to introducing a special Siri button into their upcoming vehicles, allowing you to activate your voice-controlled assistant without removing your hands from the steering wheel. However, it seems the Cupertino company forgot to tell some of those manufacturers about its plan.
New Macs! Mountain Lion! iOS 6! The second part of our WWDC special edition CultCast is now on iTunes, and in this brand new episode, no fruity pebble is left unturned.
Join us as we discuss the pros and cons of Apple’s new Macbook Pro with Retina display, the mysteriously missing iMac and Mac Pro updates, and the best and worst new features of Mountain Lion and iOS 6. Yes sir, we cover it all on this special WWDC edition MEGASODE of the CultCast.
Subscribe now on iTunes, and find out why 2012 is going to be a great year to be an Apple fan.
Full show notes ahead!
Apple’s attention to detail, its subtle understanding of the way we interact with our machines, just never ceases to amaze. Case in point: did you know that Apple precisely angles all of the screens on its Apple Store display units to encourage you to walk up and touch them? It’s true!
Every alternative punk in the 90s knows Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins’ bald, amorphous, nasally-voiced lead singer. And he can sometimes be an idiot. Now he’s being an idiot about iTunes.
Does Instagram really make your photos better? If you’re shooting them with the crappy camera in the original iPhone – for which the app’s grungy filters were designed – then the answer is yes. But what about the iPhone 4S, or any other camera – even film?
Allen Murabayashi decided to find out. He grabbed a handful of famous images from the web and ran them through everybody’s favorite photo grungifier. From Neil Leifer’s iconic 1965 shot of Ali vs Liston through Steve McCurry’s Kodachrome-tastic Afghan Girl to a shot from the royal wedding, all of them suffer from being Instagrammed.
If you’re an iPhone user who plays Angry Birds and watches YouTube videos all day long, you probably think your handset’s battery life is terrible. In reality, the iPhone often provides you with a lot more energy than many rival smartphones, and as for the iPad, well, no other tablet beats it when it comes to staying awake.
But there are some things you can do to make your battery life even better. In addition to obvious fixes — like turning down your brightness when you don’t need it to melt your retinas, or killing apps like Skype that constantly run in the background — identifying buggy apps that might be using battery unnecessarily could make a huge difference. And Carat for iOS helps you do that.
Normally we leave camera rumors alone until the actual real thing is launched. But the stories whirling around the internet regarding the Nikon D600 are too much to resist.
The D600 is said to be an entry-level full-frame DSLR, coming in at a price way below the new D800, and also the amazing D700. This is a big deal as full-frame (35mm film sized) DSLRs have always been reserved for the high (and expensive) end of manufacturers’ lineups. And now, we have (purported) photos to prove it.
Canadian lawyer Perminder Tung is suing Apple over a Time Capsule failure that cause him to lose laptop backups that included precious photographs of his child’s birth. Tung wants $25,000 in compensation for the broken device and the lost memories after Apple told him the data on his Time Capsule could not be saved.
Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.
The iPhone Marimba ringtone is iconic. It’s just a few notes played on an African xylophone, but somehow, it captures everything that is light and breezy about Apple’s platform.
The problem is, everyone uses it as a ringtone. Like Nokia’s overexposed ringtone before it, Marimba’s musical resonance has been oversaturated for most of us.
That’s why I really like the Marimba Take Two mix by Will Neaverson, embedded above. It takes the original Marimba and builds layers upon it, until it almost sounds like a Coldplay track.
As one of Reddit’s commenters note, it sounds so good, you can imagine Apple even using it in a commercial. That’s an ad I’d like to see. (Update: One of our readers made one!)
Source: Soundcloud
Via: Reddit
Apple’s new MacBook Pro follows the fine tradition of the iPhone 4 and third-gen iPad in that it has a super high-resolution Retina display: a 2880 x 1800 panel with an amazing 220 pixels packed in per inch.
It’s an incredible display. In fact, it’s such an incredible display that it actually has about one million, seven hundred thousand pixels more than it needs to satisfy Apple’s definition of Retina, leading some to claim that those pixels are all going to waste.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Apple’s new MacBook Pros have absolutely great displays, but they need every single pixel they have, because the truth of the matter is that Apple’s got a long way to go before it catches its display tech up to the incredible power of human vision. And that’s a good thing, because it means we’ve got a lot to look forward to.
As we detailed in another post earlier this week, Apple’s new iOS 6 beta features a nifty new status bar that changes color to match the app you’re currently running. We provided a number of screenshots that showed the status bar in three different shades of blue, and in silver — colors the status bar never displayed in iOS 5.
So how does the status bar determine which color to use? Well, it’s actually pretty simple.
Like he did when he ran for President back in 2008, Obama is seriously leveraging the power of mobile in his campaign for re-election. The mastermind behind that mobile campaign? Steve Jobs. And the iPhone and iPad are Obama’s secret weapons.
Aviary is a weird old service. It’s a web-based photo-editing suite that runs in HTML (and therefore the iPhone and iPad), but there’s no actual Aviary site where you can upload images and fiddle with them.
Previously, the easiest way to get access was to go to Flickr, but since nobody uses Flickr anymore, that was kind of lame. Now, though, somebody has licensed the Aviary APIs and made an iOS app. Right now it’s iPhone-only, but it’s pretty damn good.