It’s always tempting to avoid the high prices of a Genius Bar screen repair and find a third-party repair center that can fix your iPhone for fraction of the price. I’ve done it. You might want to think twice before you take your iPhone repair off the grid, though.

Late last year news broke of an iPhone that ignited into flame on board an Australian flight. No one was hurt, and at the time no one knew what caused the iPhone to spontaneously erupt. After further investigation though, it looks like a careless third-party repair agent might be the one to blame.

Jailbreakers will rejoice to hear that third-party warranty provider SquareTrade has expanded its coverage to include jailbroken Apple iPhones. Unlike Apple’s own AppleCare+ program and standard warranty, SquareTrade will give you customer support and even replace your iPhone whether it’s jailbroken or not. This is the first time a warranty has been offered that specifically covers jailbroken iOS devices, although it’s currently unclear if jailbroken iPads and iPod touches are included.

Kids – iPads should not be used as chew toys. They’re made of metal, and glass. Both of which don’t like to play friendly games inside your mouth. Apparently this whole thing needs to be stated for children and parents alike, because some people like putting their iPad in their mouth to hold it.

A little girl from Taiwan obliterated her front teeth while she was laying on her bed playing with her iPad. She got tired of holding it and slipped down to her mouth and found out the iPad treats teeth like sledgehammer would.

There is one huge problem with iPad styluses: the rubber tips tend to drag or even stick on the screen, especially when the screen gets greasy (which is always). Some styluses are better than others: The Wacom Bamboo manages to glide right up until Peak Filth, and the latest Alupen Pro comes with instructions to never touch the tip with your fingers (as you’d expect, I touched it immediately and often after reading that).

But the TruGlide Stylus takes a different take altogether: it ditches the rubber and replaces it with something that looks like a tiny metal scouring pad. Only it doesn’t scour — it glides.

Inpaint4 is an image editor for OS X, available for $10 from the Mac App Store. It’s designed for a specific task – removing unwanted visual elements from photos. That tourist who walked through the background of your snapshot, that hanging camera strap that spoiled an otherwise good image, or that weird bit of junk you just want to take out of shot. Unfortunately it is let down too often by unreliable results.

BYOD programs have a tendency to worry IT departments. After decades of being charged with keeping computers, supporting devices, and data safe and in working order, losing control of hardware is a massive culture shift. Even absent a BYOD program, the growing number of mobile devices that are used outside of the office and take corporate data outside the security of an enterprise network can be disorienting for long term IT professionals.

That leads to a tendency to clamp down with every ounce of security muscle available – mobile device management (MDM) can’t entirely secure an iPhone or iPad, but they can do a pretty good job of locking it down, monitoring it in the office or on the road, and make it easy to wipe everything off of it at a moment’s notice.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Centrify’s DirectControl for Mobile offers free device management capabilities. Unlike many other management solutions, device management can be performed using mobile-specific Active Directory group policy extensions rather than any additional interface (though a cloud service interface is also available). Being a free solution, DirectControl for Mobile focuses on a handful of device security functionality. Centrify plans to extend the offering over the course of this year with a full featured premium edition. Although completely functional (see our review), Centrify still lists DirectControl as being a beta release. For organizations with minimal needs or limited budgets, DirectControl is a good option. Centrify also produces a Mac client management tool called DirectControl for Mac that uses Active Directory extensions for securing and managing Mac workstations.

Greenpeace likes to target Apple every year or so to keep them environmentally honest, and lately, the environmental access group has been going after Apple’s giant data supercenter in Maiden, North Carolina, claiming that it helps make iCloud one of the dirtiest things on the planet.

What Greenpeace is upset about is how much of the data center’s power comes from non-renewable resources, particularly coal. And they don’t think that Apple’s going far enough with its plans for solar energy plans.

Now the protests are getting real, with seven Greenpeace activists blocking train tracks used by Duke Energy and Apple use to ship coal.

Everyone knows that Apple leads and others follow, right? It’s iOS that people are copying elsewhere. No-one would ever dream of making a music player for iOS that uses the same UI as Microsoft’s Metro) mobile OS design language. Would they? Wait – would they?

The screenshot above might look like the typical UI mess of an Android phone, but it’s actually an iOS reflex game called Slide To Unlock, in which the only goal of the game is to eponymously unlock slider after slider in all directions — up, down, left and right — but not through multiple dimensions, like time and space. It’s like a lock screen Simon.

Remember the Glif? It was probably the first Kickstarter project to take off, and of course it was an iPhone photography accessory. The original Glif probably went on to make its creators — Studio Neat –billionaires, and now it’s back, in the form of the Glif Plus. And what’s more, it comes with a bunch of bad new typography-based puns.

Type “Mother’s Day” into Google and right above the search results it’ll say “Mother’s Day is on Sunday, May 13, 2012.” Put it in your diary, order some flowers and get ready to spend some money on the woman who gave the best part of her life just so you could sit around reading sites like Cult of Mac on your iPhone.

To help you repay her frankly pointless sacrifice, here’s our Grand Cult of Mac Mother’s Day Gift Guide 2012, the best and most definitive gift advice guide you’ll read this year. Whether you mother is a nerd, a technophobe, a globetrotting traveller or just plain lazy, we’ve got you covered. There’s a Mac- or iOS-centric  gift for every kind of Mom in here… even yours!  Read on:

When most of us here words like forensics, we picture an episode of CSI or NCIS. We think of ballistics results form a murder scene or fingerprints on a gun. An iPhone or iPad isn’t the first automatic visual that comes to mind. Yet more and more iPhones and iPads are becoming the subjects of forensic investigations according to warrants issued via the U.S. federal court system.

Today we have the perfect video to satisfy a very particular demographic. If you love the whole 8-Bit aesthetic, and yet remain confused by the interactions of the three basics of photographic exposure — aperture, shutter speed and ISO — then sit back, relax and hit the play button on the Vimeo video above.

In a mobile industry that’s simply booming, there’s only two phone vendors reaping the majority of the benefits: Samsung and Apple. In Q1 of 2012, Apple and Samsung combined for 99% of mobile phone vendor profits — the remaining 1% belonged to HTC. Independently, Apple holds the lion’s share of profits with an incredible 73% of operating profits thanks to carrier premiums for the iPhone 4S. Samsung, while leading in mobile phone shipments, only grabbed 26% operating profits — which isn’t really that bad considering every other carrier (other than HTC) managed to face significant losses.

Yesterday, Samsung announced their new Galaxy S III smartphone, a 4.8-inch monstrosity that doesn’t look a thing like an iPhone, but of course rips off Apple in many other particulars.

But let’s not pay attention to that. Instead, let’s ask ourselves what we can glean from the first Samsung Galaxy S III ad, especially when comparing it to a thirty-second iPhone 4S commercial.

TriggerTrap is another app which works with an accessory cable to remote trigger you DSLR. Compared to other trigger app/cable combos, TriggerTrap distinguishes itself by also triggering the iPhone’s own camera, should you wish, and by its crazy range of triggering modes.

Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it was spinning off its Nook business and that Microsoft would be a significant stakeholder in the new company raised a lot of eyebrows. The partnership seemed unnecessary in order to meet the goals of settling a patent dispute and ensuring a Nook app for Windows 8 tablets.

It turns out that Barnes & Nobel will be shifting its textbook business to the new company along with the Nook and that Microsoft’s $300 million investment will likely be centered around creating an e-textbook initiative that will likely compete head-on with Apple’s fledging iPad-based e-textbook business.

When Apple first released iPhoto for iOS, it quickly became clear that the new app was Apple’s first app to distance itself from Google’s Maps API in favor of OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative online project aimed at making a free and complete map of the world. When you checked in iPhoto where a photo had been taken, you were seeing maps built upon the foundation of OSM. The only problem? Apple wasn’t bothering to credit them.

Now with the latest update to iPhoto, Cupertino’s decided to do the right thing. OpenStreetMap is credited in the app’s acknowledgement section.

What you’re seeing above are Steve Jobs’s speech notes that he brought with him on January 9, 2007 when he announced the original iPhone, and they are in many ways a telling encapsulation of the man himself. Jobs was a natural showman who needed only the barest outline to announce the changing of the world, and his notes here are so simple that they could have been scrawled on the back of a napkin, but Jobs was also a perfectionist: he had them expertly type set, printed out and bound.

Amazing. Also, if you’re wondering what those three devices are below the notes on Steve’s podium, they’re actually iPhones with special attachments so they can do video on the big screen behind him. Steve would only use one; the others were probably backups.

Source: Wahaha
Via: Reddit
Image: Flickr

VSCO’s Cam is a film emulation app for the iPhone and iPad (pixel doubled). It is also one of the new generation of “serious” iPhone camera apps which capture uncompressed JPG files before applying filters, for a much higher quality end product.

Let’s face it, having the best laptop in the world doesn’t exempt us road warriors from having to deal with reality. Batteries are so much better these days, sure, but they’re still the failure point for most of us traveling types. In between charges and external battery boosters, it’s up to us to keep an eye on how fast the old power cell is draining. The app in today’s tip should help with that very thing. Go figure, right?

My kids fell in love with Toothless, the lovable fire-breathing dragon, after watching DreamWorks’s hit 2010 animation How To Train Your Dragon. Today he makes his debut on iOS in DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonTap, a colorful physics-based puzzle game from development studio PikPok.

An iTunes customer who was billed twice for the same song has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple after the Cupertino company refused to refund his money. Robert Herskowitz $2.58 for Adam Lambert’s pain-inducing pop song “Whataya Want From Me,” but he should have paid just $1.29.

He’s now taking Apple to court in an effort to make refunds easier for iTunes customers.

When Apple introduced the new iPad earlier this year, it didn’t just discontinue the iPad 2; it dropped its price and sent it out to do battle with cheaper, Android-powered tablets from the likes of Amazon. But that’s not the only change the Cupertino company made to the device.

Although there’s no mention of it, if you buy a brand new iPad today, it will pack a new A5 processor under the hood that’s a little different to earlier A5 chips, and delivers much better battery life.