Cult of Mac

You can add another name to the list of companies dropping Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap. When Wikipedia announced its new app for iOS today, they also announced that they would be using OpenStreetMap exclusively for the nearby view in both their iOS and Android mobile apps. Wikipedia feels this change will be a better fit for their goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone.

This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.

While many federal agencies have been defecting from RIM’s BlackBerry to iOS devices, the Department of Veterans Affairs seems poised to make a much more dramatic transition. The agency recently canceled its participation in Microsoft’s Software Assurance program. While the move isn’t likely to mean the VA is replacing all of its PCs with Macs, it may signal a significant transition to non-Microsoft mobile devices like the iPad.

It looks like Apple is finally starting to swap out old iPad 2 billboards around the country for new iPad ads. We highlighted the odd fact that Apple hasn’t updated its signage for the new iPad yesterday, although a new billboard was spotted in sunny Hollywood, California.

In less than 24 hours, Apple has replaced the iPad 2 billboard hanging above one of its larger stores in New York’s Meatpacking district. Dan Frommer snapped a pic of the above billboard today in front of Apple’s 14th Street store in New York City.

If you spot a new iPad billboard, let us know by tweeting to @cultofmac on Twitter.

About.me has been creating significant buzz as a popular web service for creating personality profiles. You can create a free, one-page website with About.me to share your bio, social network activity, work links, photos and more.

Today, the folks at About.me are announcing their official iPhone app for free in the App Store.

Tired of using USB and Bluetooth dongles to power your presentations? Sick of dealing with device drivers for remote mice and remote controls that never seem to be there when you need them? How about an app for controlling presentations from anywhere in the room? Here’s a tip for you, then.

One disadvantage of using an iPhone or iPad as a camera is that you’re stuck with a single, fixed focal-length lens. Optical zoom can work only so far before even Instagram photos start to look bad, and phones with built in optical zooms tend to resemble actual cameras.

The solution? Add-on lenses. Today, we’ll take a look at Photojojo’s four-in-one set of fisheye, macro, wide angle and telephoto lenses. These accessory lenses stick magnetically over the iDevice’s camera, changing the point of view.

Apple’s market cap has been worth more for a while, but now even a single share of AAPL stock is worth more than Google’s, having reached that milestone today at 12:26PM EDT, as noted by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt. Boom.

Popular belief is that if Apple does end up releasing their long-rumored smart TV, they’ll call it the iTV… but there’s problems with that, not least of which is that there are at least two companies out there called iTV who are threatening to sue if Apple does so.

So what will they call it? Analyst Peter Misek — who believes the Apple TV is imminent — thinks it’ll be called the iPanel, and Apple will be building up to 5M of them starting in May.

If you’re looking to create some smashing iOS apps and want to get all the goods delivered to you in one comprehensive course, we’ve got a Cult of Mac Deals offer that more than fits the bill…but time is running out!

This is the most comprehensive iOS app development course we’ve ever seen, containing over 66 lectures and 11 hours of content. To get this kind of training in a live setting would cost you upwards of $3000 – but Cult of Mac Deals is bringing it to you in an on-demand capacity for only $89!

Remember way back last year, when some poor soul of an Apple employee reportedly lost a prototype iPhone 4S that he was testing out in a San Francisco tequila joint?

A great deal of controversy surrounded the case after it came out that Apple employees had reportedly posed as police officers when they investigated the property to which they’d tracked the lost iPhone. Afterwards, the owner of the house, Sergio Calderón, threatened to sue over the incident, and even hired a lawyer who tried (and apparently failed) to negotiate the case with Apple.

It looks, though, like Apple eventually settled after all… and possibly fired the director of security who was responsible for the raid over it.

There are plenty of stories out there about schools that have already launched large-scale iPad programs or that are considering them for next year. Many U.S. school districts have yet to determine an iPad strategy, however, and are still moving forward cautiously.

In a small survey of public school IT managers, research firm Piper Jaffray identified the iPad as a new technology being tested by the majority of public schools. The survey also offered insights into the the pros and cons that school IT managers are weighing when it comes the iPad and some competing technologies.

Richard Gray teaches what may be the UK’s first college-level iPhone photography class.

Gray, a street photographer whose work you can check out under the handle “rugfoot” on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram, just wrapped up the first course in iPhoneography at the photography department of Kensington & Chelsea College in London; the next two sessions of the five-week course start April 26 and May 31.

He shared with Cult of Mac the required app downloads for the class and the four most common mistakes iPhone photo students make.

Marine authorities estimate that there are only 350 to 550 whales left in the world, making the mammal an endangered species. Those that are left are at risk of being killed by deadly collisions with ships, but conservationists are hoping Apple’s iOS devices can help save the species from extinction.

A new Forrester report on Apple in the enterprise shows that nearly half of all companies (46%) issue Macs to at least some of their employees. The report also notes that Macs make up a thin slice of the overall computing population in most of those companies – an average of just 7%.

While the report notes that Apple’s overall sales of Macs to businesses increased by more than a third (34.9%), it seems that Macs remain a distinct minority in most businesses. Given the business and enterprise dominance of the iPad and iPhone, the much slower growth of Macs in business can seem surprising by comparison. This issue has been debated time and again over the years and the more common reasons offered tend to be IT professionals having a preferences for Windows, corporate cultures favoring uniformity, and Apple’s refusal to act like most enterprise vendors.

All those are valid points, but one issue that rarely gets raised is that supporting a handful of Macs is a very different experiencing than deploying and managing a larger number of them. It takes a different set of skills on the part of IT professionals and, in most cases, it requires investing in a different set of tools.

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If you were to only read about his antics, Norbert Wittekindt might appear like some kind of psychopath. He takes top-end Carl Zeiss lenses and drops them onto hard floors. Not only that, he freezes them and then brings them into warm rooms and clamps them onto machines which try to shake the lenses apart. What’s going on?

Apple is set to overhaul its online store to introduce a “dramatically simplified user interface” that will make spending your hard-earned cash on Apple goods easier than ever before. And this isn’t just another story fresh from the rumor mill; it was revealed by Apple itself.

When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.

That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.

On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.

Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.

A Mac infected by a virus used to be something of a rarity, and it was the best argument you could bring to a Mac versus PC debate. But with Mac adoption surging in recent years, it was inevitable that Apple’s operating system would become a target for hackers.

Variations of one Flashback trojan, which first surfaced back in 2007, are now affecting more than 600,000 Macs around the world. Here’s how to find out whether your machine’s affected and kill the malware.

Aereo is a great service for denizens of New York City. For $12 per month, you get to stream local live TV direct to your iPad, iPhone, Roku box, Apple TV, or just about anything with an internet connection. It’s simple, it does nothing but relay the free-to-air channels already available to any New Yorker, and of course the TV companies are already trying to shut it down.

Dragging media files to iTunes after you’ve downloaded them is so last year. All the hip kids get their downloaded files into iTunes without any intermediate steps. Here’s how to be one of the auto-adding-to-itunes elite.

Following comments made by Google co-founder Larry Page yesterday, which suggested Steve Jobs’s thermonuclear war against Android was simply “for show” to rally the troops, Walter Isaacson has confirmed that Page is wrong, and he has insisted that Steve’s war against Android was real.

Ticket to Ride has become one of the most popular board games adapted for iOS devices, selling 800,000 copies and picking up a whole host of accolades since its debut back in November 2011. It has now made the leap from iOS to the Mac and is available to purchase from the Mac App Store from today.

Following reports that the new iPad may be experiencing Wi-Fi issues that lead to unreliable connectivity and slow connections, a leaked AppleCare document confirms that Apple is investigating the issue, and will replace units that are affected… in the U.S., at least.

Three words: Angry. Birds. Helicopter. What more do you need to know before you peel a crisp $50 off your money roll and place your order?

Sonos is ditching its dedicated CR200 remote control in favor of mobile apps. According to Sonos boss John MacFarlane, this was the plan all along. Now, though, there are enough people with smartphones and tablets to finally make the hardware controller obsolete.