Cult of Mac

An email arrived at Cult of Mac headquarters the other day: “Can you please let me know if it possible to make a review of our game on cultfomac site?”

It was from Andrey Uchaev, one of the team at Russian developers Manera Software, letting us know about a free iOS game called Tochki Online. We don’t often do reviews of free, ad-supported games, even less often about ones like this that we’ve never heard of and that have no user reviews in the App Store. So why are we reviewing this one? Because it’s fun.

Yesterday, we heard an analyst report suggesting that Apple would effectively kill off the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines and merge then into a single, streamlined device known only as the MacBook.

It was an interesting report, but analysts say a lot of things, including sometimes when they are at the bottom of a barrel of bourbon. But now Mactrast is saying that their own unproven source is echoing reports of a MacBook Pro/MacBook Air hybrid… boasting USB 3.0 support and a sexy, lightweight Liquidmetal chassis.

Arqball Spin is a curious mix of hardware and software, with a very niche but very cool purpose: to create interactive 3-D photos. By combining an iOS app with a hardware turntable, Arqball is able to “film” a spinning object and then render it as a touchable 3-D model which can be spun using your fingers.

A new report by the University of Manchester’s Center for Research on Socio-Cultural Change says Apple would be able to manufacture iPhones, iPads and all its computers in the United States and still maintain gross margins of 50%.

The report also concludes that Apple’s way of doing business, which involves “hoarding” cash is bad for America.

Read the report here.

(Picture courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center)

Asking people what the best iPhone carrier is usually leads to a number of thoroughly unscientific and subjective responses. For example, one person might recommend AT&T simply because they’re locked into a two-year contract with Ma Bell and don’t want to admit they made a mistake. Someone on Sprint, on the other hand, might recommend their network for the “unlimited data” to someone for whom speed — not volume — is the most important criterion.

CarrierCompare is a new iOS app that aims to moderate the debate by allowing you to see what the best iPhone carrier is at any given location. But right now, Apple’s stamping down on a key feature that makes the app less useful than it could be.

Apple recently began prompting users to select three security questions for their iTunes Store accounts. The move helps to ensure that you’re the authorized account holder if you have problems or forget your password.

The idea is well intentioned and a sensible protection for Apple and its customers. Unfortunately, Apple’s way of rolling out these security questions and the questions themselves highlight the old adage about the way to hell being paved with good intentions.

As an Englishman, I know all about rain. I’m intimate with sleet, drizzle, and driving rain both horizontal and vertical. I know about rain that slowly soaks you even though it seems that none is falling, about freezing rain that stings as hard as hail, about the rain that seems to ignore your umbrella and creep into even the best-sealed seams of your clothes.

Other countries might have spectacular monsoons, or driving rainstorms that flow for days, but for variety and ubiquity of precipitation, it’s hard to beat the British Isles. Which is why I’m sad that Dark Sky — an app that predicts the rain forecast for the next hour only — currently only works in the continental United States.

Think your Mac’s safe now that you’ve removed that Flashback infection? Think again. New research conducted by security specialists Sophos has revealed a “disturbingly high level” of Macs are currently carrying malware, though much of it is designed to attack Windows machines.

Of the 100,000 Macs that Sophos analyzed, one in five was found to be carrying Windows malware, while one in 36 was carrying malware designed for and dangerous to Mac OS X.

FOR SALE>£100,000 ($161,000): 6mm ƒ2.8 Fisheye-Nikkor

That’s what you’ll see at the top of Grays of Westminster’s used Nikon manual-focus lens listings. The London dealer has gotten its hands on this incredible chunk of glass, a 5.2-kilo (11.5-pound) mountain of a lens that makes the camera behind it look like a vestigial tail.

Ever been half way around the world wishing you could watch your favorite local sports team as they go up against their longtime rival? NimbleTV hopes to grant that wish by offering a subscription-based TV platform that would allow users to access all of their television from anywhere in the world, on any device. NimbleTV will host your TV subscription plan and deliver it to you using their cloud-based software. The NimbleTV service is a global platform that features:

Camtasia, the video and screencast editor for OS X, has been updated with two useful new features: remove color, and adjust clip speed.

Microsoft is using its home field advantage in the business market to alter the playing field between its upcoming low cost Windows RT tablets (formerly called Windows on ARM or WOA tablets) and the iPad. To date, the iPad has been the business and enterprise tablet of choice and that gives Apple a significant leg up over competing Windows RT tablets.

Aiming to neutralize that advantage, Microsoft has written Windows 8 licensing for enterprise organizations in a way that makes supporting the iPad and other non-Microsoft devices more expensive – essentially penalizing companies that opt for the iPad and want to use a virtual desktop (VDI) solution such as those from Citrix and VMWare for remote access to a Windows desktop.

Jailbreakers who rather foolishly updated to iOS 5.1 shortly after its release earlier this year are still waiting for an exploit that will allow them to reclaim root access to their device. But according to iOS hacker Pod2g, that exploit could only be another month (or two) away.

Popular OS X photo editing app Color Splash Studio has been updated with a handful of new features, but the most interesting one is the offer of a free 8×10 inch canvas print.

The most exciting part of Nikon’s [D3200 announcement](https://www.cultofmac.com/161700/new-nikon-d3200-slr-connects-to-ipad-over-wi-fi/) was the WU-1a (Woo-la!) Wi-Fi adapter, a dongle which hangs annoyingly out of the open side hatch of the SLR’s body and allows for wireless communication with a smartphone. An iOS app is promised later this year, but above you can see a demo of the Woo-la in action with an Android handset.

Good heavens there are a lot of warnings in modern computing operating systems, am I right? Yes, I totally did want to close that window. Honest.

One of the more annoying warnings in OS X is the one that pops up when you try to change the three letter extension on a file, like changing an image file to something else, say, .jpg to .gif or whatnot. Honestly, I should be able to do this. Usually, I do it when I get a file from another person who may not have such a great handle on how the file extensions work. If you want to get rid of the standard warning when you do this, today’s tip should help.

AT&T seemingly snubbed the iPhone earlier this year, choosing instead to focus its efforts on Nokia’s latest Lumia 900 handset running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. The carrier promised the device would be a “notch above” Apple’s popular handset, but as things currently stand, the iPhone is still its bread and butter, making up over 78% of its smartphone activations in the last quarter.

Remembering each and every password to each and every service you’ve ever signed up to is an incredibly difficult task. To make it easier, we create simple passwords that we’re less likely to forget, like the name of our favorite pet, our partner, or our car. The problem with that is, it’s not very secure.

Norton’s new Identity Safe is a free service that allows you to choose stronger passwords and keep your data safe while saving them all securely to your PC or smartphone to ensure that they’re never forgotten. You can then sync your passwords between your Mac, PC, Android and iOS devices so that you have them with you wherever you go.

With the widely-rumored Google Drive service set to launch sometime this week, its rivals are scrambling to ensure they still have the upper hand when it comes to cloud-based storage. We’ve already seen an update to Dropbox this week, and now Microsoft is bringing new features to its SkyDrive app for iOS.

In addition to support for the iPad and its high-resolution Retina display, SkyDrive 2.0 also offers a number of handy new features.

Photoshop Touch is a great iPad app, but it’s tightly focused on quickly gussying up your images and sharing them to the Facebook. To replicate the desktop Photoshop experience on your iPad you need to go somewhere else, and for me that “somewhere else” is Photogene, which this weekend was updated to v3.4. There are a few other additions, but the main new feature is compatibility with the new iPad’s Retina Display.

Before taking the reigns of the team building the Apple Macintosh, Steve Jobs poured his heart into another lesser known machine: Apple’s Lisa.

Don’t remember Lisa? You’re not alone. Her $10,000 price tag secured her place as one of Apple’s most epic failures, and Steve’s next project, the Macintosh, got all the fame and glory.

But we loved Lisa’s vintagy good-looks and double disk drives! So we partnered with Seattle indie brand Might Tees to bring her boxy appeal back on our new In Love With Lisa graphic tee.

This new tee is finely crafted right here in the beautiful USA, ships worldwide, and is available right now over at MightTees.com – get one!

Jailbreaking has its many benefits, but there’s always a risk that installing a certain tweak or app from Cydia will cause something in iOS to go haywire. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you want to be able to fix the problem without having to restore and lose your jailbreak.

Luckily, there’s a relatively easy way to troubleshoot your jailbroken iOS device and find out the exact tweak that’s causing the problem.

You might not know this, but back in the 1700s there was no iPhone, and therefore — shockingly– no Instagram. It may also surprise you to know that the English were once forward looking, inventive and curious as a nation, and so they came up with their own way to grungify the views they saw on vacation, and (probably) their breakfasts.

App studio Two Lives Left has launched its first App Store game for the iPad, called Cargo-Bot. What makes this release different from the thousands of other iPad games that came before it? Well, Cargo-Bot is the world’s first game to be coded entirely on an iPad itself.

Using a coding app for the iPad they created prior to Cargo-Bot, the guys from Two Lives Left designed and coded their new game on the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen.

Minecraft fans, rejoice. Minecraft Pocket Edition just got updated to 0.3.0, and the new release finally adds the feature you’ve all been waiting for: crafting. Oh, and cows and chickens too.