“Unopened! Still sealed in original retail box!” cry the Craigslist ads advertising “new” iPhones and iPads at lower-than-retail prices, but the truth is far more insidious: many of the “new” iPhones you see on Craigslist and eBay are actually old, used iPhones repackaged and sold as new using the hardware equivalent of meat glue.
Despite steady demand since the device made its debut back in March, Apple has still been able to maintain a speedy international rollout for its latest iPad. The new device is now available in 57 countries around the world, and what’s more, its shipping delay in the U.S. has now dropped to just 3-5 days.
Merely two years after the launch of the iPad, Spotify has finally released a big-screen edition of everybody’s favorite music-streaming app. In short, it works a lot like Twitter for the iPad, and it doesn’t have Spotify apps. The app is Universal, so when it hits the store (it’s still not showing up in some places), it will do so as an update, and while it is free, you’ll need to be a paid Spotify subscriber to use it.
Even with iCloud now up and running, Dropbox is still one of the best ways to sync documents between your Mac and iOS devices. It’s so great that all kinds of iOS apps — task managers, word processors, and even games — use Dropbox to send your data to the cloud so that you can access it on any of your devices.
However, Apple just turned up to the party swinging its banhammer. The Cupertino company has begun rejecting certain iOS apps that use the Dropbox SDK simply because they link to the Dropbox website.
Many of us are dreaming of a liquidmetal casing for the next iPhone which will sport a tapered, teardrop design that will help make the sixth-generation device thinner than its predecessor. However, a SIM tray that is believed to be destined for the new device suggests it could feature a box-like design similar to the iPhone 4S.
Apple released a slew of iOS app updates today in the App Store. iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband, Cards and iTunes U were all updated with various improvements and bug fixes.
All of the updates can be downloaded for free and are available now.
Apple has seeded an update to its third OS X Mountain Lion developer preview alongside Xcode 4.4. Preview 4. Registered developers can install the new software now in Software Update and the Mac Dev Center.
The update doesn’t seem to pack any major new features, but it looks like Apple is gearing up for the public release of Mountain Lion this summer.
Author of the new book, “Insanely Simple,” Ken Segall got to do something most can only dream about: work one-on-one with Steve Jobs, creating some of Apple’s most iconic products and ad campaigns.
From naming the iMac, to helping develop Apple’s famous Think Different ad campaign, Ken has 12 years of stories to tell about what it’s really like to work with the man most of us Apple fans revere: Steve Jobs. And on episode 10 of The CultCast, Ken opens up on who Steve was, what his creative process was like, and the best ways to not get yelled at.
To hear Ken’s fascinating insights and amazing first-hand accounts, subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes.
The jailbreak community has always been striving to improve the way iOS handles system settings. iOS 5 failed to introduce a quicker way of managing preferences like screen brightness and Bluetooth, and jailbreakers still use tweaks like SBSettings to toggle prefs without popping into the Settings app.
More elegant solutions for enhancing iOS have started coming out in Cydia over the last year or so, and a jailbreak tweak called Swipebright brings very useful functionality to the status bar.
The Instagram phenomenon continues to captivate mobile users across the globe and now generates over 5 million new users a week, according to its API. Those are absolutely amazing numbers for the once iOS exclusive photography sharing app that now boasts over 50 million total users thanks to its recent launch on Android. With numbers like this, it’s no wonder Facebook reached deep in their pockets to snatch them up.
Siri is already about as simple as it gets, but that hasn’t stopped freelance journalist and TV host Marc Saltzman from creating Siri For Dummies. The 192-page book “shows you all the cool things Siri can do for you, so you can get the most from your iPhone’s voice-activated personal assistant.”
Say hello to John Tambunan. This five-year-old resident of Indonesia published his first book on the iBookstore a few days ago – a cute tale about catching fish.
Are you curious about what it’s like to work for Apple? Here’s a chance for you to find out. Career advice site CareerBliss recently complied a list of the “Happiest Companies For Young Professionals” – a top ten list for which Apple didn’t make the cut. Even though Apple didn’t make that list, CareerBliss does offer a lot of insight into what life is like for Apple employees.
CareerBliss allows people to rank and describe their experiences in their current or past workplaces. Users researching potential jobs and companies can then see overall rankings (based on a one to five ranking scale) and browse through the individual reports. For Apple fans, that means a treasure trove of data about what it’s like to actually work for the company.
We here at Cult of Mac just can’t get enough of Instagram. It’s really hard to not love the little photo sharing app, even after it got bought by Facebook for $1 billion.
Have you ever wondered why images upload so quickly in Instagram? The whole app feels super snappy, and images can seem to upload instantly after you take a picture and apply a filter. What kind of magic is going on in the background?
As it turns out, the app’s design tricks you into believing its working faster than it really is.
Notifications on the iPhone are annoying. There, I said it. They drop at the most inopportune times, and I always end up activating them, while the iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There is, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.
Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising announcement, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to a deal that resolved their ongoing patent dispute, spun off the bookstore’s Nook business as a subsidiary into which Microsoft invested $300 million, and ensured that a Nook app will be available for Windows 8 when it launches later this year.
Although rumors have been floating around for months that Barnes & Noble was planning to spin of the Nook as a separate company or subsidiary, Microsoft’s involvement came as a surprise – one that raises interesting questions about what the two companies have in mind for their new joint business.
Cult of Mac Deals is wrapping up another stellar app bundle lined up for our readers — with a total savings of over $400 on 9 great Mac apps! All of these apps would normally retail for $453 on their own. But thanks to Cult of Mac Deals you can get all of them for only $49 for a limited time. That’s an 89% savings!
But time’s running out to get your hands on The Mac SuperBundle…because it ends in just a few hours!
The projected May release of Cognovant’s health record management app, PocketHealth, looks to become a reality thanks to a recent $500,000 seed round closing. The announcement was made today by Cognovant, the Kansas City, Mo.-based startup that specializes in personal health record technology for mobile devices.
“This seed round of funding enabled development of PocketHealth and its forthcoming introduction into the Android and iOS markets,” Ketcherside said in the release
The Gary Fong Puffer ($22) has one function: diffuse your popup flash’s harsh light, making it softer, more eye-pleasing, and eminently more usable. It mostly delivers on that promise, but will it cure my distain for actually using popup flash? Doubtful.
Last week, Eugene Kaspersky — the eponymous founder of the industry leading Kaspersky security company — made some waves by claiming that OS X was “at least 10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security.”
Since Kaspersky’s eyebrow-arching claim, there’s been a lot of bickering about whether what he said was true, or whether his comments were self-serving. Maybe Kaspersky’s right, though, and Apple should follow in Microsoft’s footsteps and outsource OS X security to the anti-virus industry?
Instant is a five-dollar retro photo filter app for OS X, replicating the look and feel of a Polaroid camera, and it does the job with style.
At BlackBerry World this week, RIM began giving prototype BlackBerry 10 phones to developers. The prototype, known as BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha is an effort by RIM to drive developer interest in its upcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system with the hopes of building an app catalog for the platform before it launches the first BlackBerry 10 phones later this year.
While that’s a laudable and important idea, the handsets RIM delivered are lacking critical features like the ability to make calls or connect to wireless networks. RIM even pointed out that the actual user interface for BlackBerry 10 isn’t even running on the Dev Alpha devices because the company hasn’t finalized what that interface will look like.
SloPro is an app that magically makes the iPhone’s video camera shoot at 60 frames per second. And while the developers are being coy and refusing to reveal the mechanics behind it, the product does indeed let you double the camera’s frame rate, and therefore let you shoot some excellent slow-motion footage.
Thanks to the good folks at Digiarty, we’ve been able to bring you some great video software that will rip your DVDs and stream video anywhere. Both the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition and the MacX Video Converter Pro have been free to all Cult of Mac readers over the last 7 days, but the window to grab these awesome freebie is closing tomorrow, May 2nd.
By using the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition package that includes Air Playit, and MacX Video Converter Pro, we’ve shown you how to rip your entire DVD collection to your Mac, stream video files to your iPhone or iPad, and convert any video file to play on your iOS devices. Unfortunately, after May 2nd the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition will go back to its full price. If you want some truly phenomenal and easy-to-use software that will change the way you use video on your iPad or iPhone you better hurry and get your free copy now before it’s too late.
Here’s how to get your copy right now:
Think that Apple is already making Macs as tiny and tightly-packed as they possibly can? Think again. Intel is showing off a new demo spec that could shrink down Thunderbolt-compatible, Sandy Bridge Mac minis to the size of the current Apple TV.