If you’re anything like me, you leave all your files in one big clump on the Desktop for later “sorting.” Then, again if you’re like me, you put all these files into a hastily constructed “Sort Me” folder right before you connect the projector for that big presentation you have to do so no one sees just how many LOL cat pictures you have. Right? No? Ok, skip the LOL cat part. Today’s tip is a “search-not-organize” user’s dream, allowing the best of both worlds.
New technologies could make the next iPhone significantly thinner than its predecessor.
The iPhone 4S is hardly a fatty, but it is thicker than many of its Android-powered rivals. However, thanks to in-cell touch technology and other improvements Apple is expected to make to the sixth-generation iPhone, the handset could measure in at just 7.9mm thick — 1.4mm thinner than the iPhone 4S.
Could Apple replace the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro with one MacBook that has it all?
We’ve heard plenty of speculation surrounding the future of Apple’s 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros in recent months, which are soon expected to adopt a new form factor and Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors. However, according to one analyst, there may no longer be a MacBook Pro… or a MacBook Air.
Instead, Apple will release an all-new MacBook that combines the qualities of both, while the 17-inch MacBook Pro will be discontinued completely.
It’s a big day for Adobe, with the announcement of two new products: Creative Suite 6, and a new subscription service called Creative Cloud, which it describes as “a hub for making, sharing, and delivering creative work, and a radical new way of providing tools and services that will change the game for creatives worldwide.”
Clear, the hugely popular to-do list management app from Realmac Software, has received its first major update since hitting the App Store back in February. Version 1.1 brings new themes, new gestures and new features, in addition to a whole host of tweaks and fixes that make Clear even more of a joy to use.
Now you can write your wiki notes in Markdown, as God intended
VoodooPad, Gus Mueller’s amazing little desktop Wiki, has been updated to v5 on the Mac and v2 on iOS. The big news is that it has dumped Mobile Me syncing and instead now syncs via DropBox. There are lots of other tweaks and new features, but Dropbox — and by extension any cloud-syncing service — is the big one.
National Geographic streaming live on the iPad for free
Update:It appears that the app’s developer has started replacing the channels with ads for “Futubox.” A classic scam. The app did work at one point, but we no longer recommended buying it now.
Update 2: It looks like Apple has yanked it from the App Store.
A $0.99 iOS app has surfaced over the weekend in the App Store called “TV English Premium.” The universal app allows anyone to stream 55 premium TV channels live without paying for a subscription. An iPhone or iPad also does not need to be jailbroken to stream for free. For only $0.99, you can have access to many BBC and premium U.S. TV channels in HD on your iOS device.
A number of recent opinion posts have suggested that Apple has a real shot at the gaming market.
Part of this flurry of commentary stemmed from a rumor, which turned out to be false, that Apple CEO Tim Cook met with executives at game publisher Valve.
“Apple is Set to Change Gaming,” said one headline. The deck went on: “It’s just a matter of time before Apple storms into the console business.”
We’ve seen quite a few hardware/app combinations that promise to turn your iPhone into a beautifully simplistic remote control for your TV, but most of them fall short with a level of complexity that always brings us back to our old remote control setup. The VooMote is different. Not only is it ridiculously easy to use, but it looks great, has a minimal footprint, and is completely customizable so it adapts to whatever configuration you might need. Just plug in the Zapper to your 30pin connector and that’s it. Boom! You’re ready to go.
Its light-weight design is the size of a paperclip which maximizes the convience factor as it effortlessly converts any iOS device into a smart universal remote that controls virtually all your A/V gear. Within the app you can customize the layout and look of your remote screen so you don’t have a bunch of buttons bothering you that you never use. You can even create macros to execute a series of functions with only one touch. There’s no extra hardware to setup. No messy menus. Just a simple accessory to rule your television dominion. It’s available in a multitude of vibrant colors including, Red, Pink, Blue, Green, White and Black. The VooMate Zapper is awesome, and at $69.99 it’s cheaper than most universal remotes on the market.
Today we’ve teamed up with VooMote to giveaway two brand new VooMote Zappers to two of our lucky readers. Entering the giveaway takes less than a minute and you’ll be that much closer to having the best universal remote on the market.
Apple adds page highlighting iPhone apps for business users
Apple has added a new page of iPhone app suggestions for business users. The page, titled iPhone at Work, lists apps broken down into five major categories: organize your day, view your business, manage projects, meet anywhere, and travel light. Each of those sections is further divided to show off the ways that the iOS apps Apple bundles with the iPhone and third-party apps can be used in business.
Cult of Mac Deals has another stellar app bundle lined up for our readers — with a total savings of over $400 on 9 great Mac apps! The apps in this bundle can help you in a wide variety of activities, from digital media with Roxio Toast to searching for files more efficiently and effectively with Houdah Tembo to keeping track of your home inventory easily with Compartments.
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!
If you’ve ever wanted to know the pros and cons of jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad, episode 9 of The CultCast just hit iTunes, and you’re not going to want to miss our breakdown of everything jailbreak. Interestingly, Apple seems to have covered up the word “Jailbreak” in the show title on iTunes, but you should see the full word when you actually download the show. (Apple can’t have the big bad j*******k word in its iTunes Store, now can it?)
And speaking of iPads, is your new retina-beauty plagued with the same yellow-tinted screen others on the web are experiencing? We’ll tell you what the problem is and what to do about.
All that, iPad mini rumors, and a whole lot more on this week’s CultCast — subscribe now on iTunes!
I know, I know — it’s yet another power plug. But you’ll like this one, I promise you, because it solves a headache I guarantee you’ll have experienced.
It’s called the Plug Power, and it frees up that pesky leftover socket on the power-strip that has been hemmed in by all the other odd-sized adapters.
Microsoft plans to expand Intune to manage iOS devices
Microsoft has decided to jump into the mobile management marketplace. The company has announced plans to retool its Intune cloud-based desktop management service to manage iPhones, iPads, and some Android devices. The news follows RIM’s similar decision to include iOS and Android management in the new BlackBerry Mobile Fusion console that it designed for its PlayBook tablet.
Microsoft’s Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the company’s management and security division division showed off the new version of Intune at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas. Anderson’s presentation, however, wasn’t able to illustrate Intune’s upcoming iOS management capabilities because the iPhone used in his demo failed to perform properly with the Intune release being used – an event that The Register reported as seeming “as though the spirit of Steve Jobs was in the room.”
Chinese ingenuity and resourcefulness is an amazing thing, and we see it in action every time we pick up an iPhone or iPad. We also sometimes see it when iPhones are smuggled into China. First, Chinese iPhone and iPad smugglers were using crossbows and ziplines to get over the border, and now they’re cutting open glass beer bottles, stashing iPhones inside then gluing them shut.
This woman was caught trying to smuggle over 200 iPhone 4s and iPhone 4Ses at the Sha Tau Kok border this way. Wonder what she did with all that beer. And imagine finding an iPhone at the bottom of your brew. Usually the only thing I see there is pink elephants… and maybe the occasional dead mouse.
Here’s a scary scenario: you’ve spent hours and hours creating the perfect Keynote presentation for your job, and you show up to the room you’re going to show it off, only to find that you’ve forgotten your little white dongle that connects the iPad to the big screen TV in that room. Uh oh. Luckily, there IS an Apple TV sitting there (conveniently). Lucky you, you get to keep your job. Getting the iPad signal up to the big screen isn’t quite as intuitive as connecting it to a HDMI cable, but it is pretty simple.
The United States Department of Justice has already filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five other e-book publishers for alleged e-book price fixing in the lead up to the launch of the iBookstore, breaking Amazon’s wholesale monopoly on e-books and forcing them to adopt the agency model.
Apple believes it’s got a really good case against such allegations, and wants to go to trial to fight the charges. So do publish Macmillan and Penguin, who have refused to settle the case. But it looks like they won’t *just* have to defend themselves in the United States, but now up north as well, as price-fixing class action lawsuits against Apple and other publishers have started being filed in Canada as well.
Apple, Google, Intel and four other tech giants failed to convince a judge to dismiss an antitrust suit brought against them. The suit alleges that the companies conspired against hiring each other’s employees and District Judge Lucy Koh in her decision said:
“The fact that all six identical bilateral agreements were reached in secrecy among seven defendants in a span of two years suggests that these agreements resulted from collusion, and not from coincidence,”
While Apple, Google, and Intel are the three largest firms in the suit, other major companies, including Adobe, Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit are included.
For the price, the Sony RDP-X500iP is a hell of a lot of sound. In fact, it’s the best-sounding iPhone, iPod or iPad dock we’ve seen in its price range, and it even manages to match the audio quality of some speaker docks that cost $100-$200 more. If you’re looking to buy one, though, you should be aware of a couple of niggles before you drop your dough.
Flashback threat may be fading, but companies shouldn't get complacent about Mac malware
With the number of Flashback-infected Macs dwindling more each day and Apple’s release of software updates that can both clean an infected Mac and prevent infection or reinfection, it’s easy for IT departments and individual Mac users to think that the crisis has passed. That doesn’t mean that it’s time to forget about the issue of malware targeting Macs, however. In fact, the entire event has been a wakeup call to IT and security professionals as well as to the wider Mac community – Macs are not invincible.
When reflecting on the Flashback events of the past couple of weeks, there are five major themes or lessons for businesses and IT department to consider when it comes to supporting Macs going forward.
Month view in Awesome Calendar - but where's the new event button?
Awesome Calendar is a Google Calendar client for iOS, priced at three dollars on the iOS App Store (although a free Lite version is also available). Is it as awesome as its name implies? I wouldn’t say so.
645 Pro bills itself as an app which will turn your iPhone into a DSLR. At first glance, it seems like this has been achieved by mimicking the buttons and LCD panel of a modern SLR, and to an extent that’s true. But the real meat here is under the hood: 645 Pro shoots uncompressed JPEGs and TIFFs, and gives the closest that we’re likely to see to RAW images from the iPhone’s camera.
The Audio Cube really is a go-anywhere Bluetooth speaker
Way back in the dark days of the 1990s, when smartphones had styluses and mobile apps were made from Java, I yearned for a way to stream music from my Sony Ericsson P900 to my stereo via Bluetooth. At the time, it was impossible.
Fast forward to the present day (by drilling down through several hard-to-navigate menus and hitting the tiny “skip” button with the tip of the stylus) and there is an embarrassment of choice. These days I’d rather pick up my JamBox and carry it into the living room rather than fire up the proper stereo that’s already in there.
Joining this wealth of wirelessness is the Audio Cube from Satechi, an inexpensive, pocket-sized Bluetooth speaker with all of the features you’d expect.
The iPad is hands-down, one of the best platforms to play video games on. Games just seem to envelop you in a wave of child-like wonder once you start playing. One of our favorite types of iPad apps are Tower Defense games that force users to employ strategy combined with realtime action. There are hundreds of games out there, but one of the coolest and unique games we’ve played is Tesla Wars by Synaptic Wave.
The padcaster turns your iPad 3 into a movie-making powerhouse. Photo The Verge
Remember the Padcaster? It was a photography rig made to turn the new iPad into a shallow-focusing movie camera, and it was [teased](https://www.cultofmac.com/156157/padcaster-turns-new-ipad-into-shallow-focusing-movie-camera/) by the makers Manhattan Edit Workshop last month. Now, the Padcaster has been revealed at NAB 2012, and it is just what we thought it would be — a way to mount big lenses on the iPad 3 and turn it onto a movie camera.
