Ever wonder how those funky aperture numbers ended up on your lens barrel? Or who chose those odd f-numbers that run in the seemingly arbitrary 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 sequence? And why does the biggest number refer to the smallest lens-hole?
Now, video sketching supremo Dylan Bennett is back to explain f-stops to you. Grab a beverage, sit back and enjoy 15 minutes of easy-to-follow explanation. With drawings!
Every once in a while, you might wonder what’s happening on your home network. It’s at those times you might wish you’d have known about today’s tip, a dead-simple way to access the network activity on your network via OS X Lion’s Terminal app.
Readdle has released a major update to PDF Expert, its flagship PDF Expert app for the iPad, introducing high-resolution Retina support for the latest device, and a number of handy new features like document thumbnails and support for embedded media.
There are more iOS text editors in the App Store than there are stupid giant-screen iPhone rumors “sourced” by Digitimes. And this makes it impossible to choose. Does Elements support iCloud? Does Readdle Docs play nice with TextExpander? And have you ever even heard of FastEver XL? The answer to all these questions, plus many you didn’t even think to ask, are in Brett Terpstra’s exhaustive, crowd-sourced iOS Text Editor roundup.
Apple and Google, sitting in a tree, f-i-g-h-t-i-n-g. We know that the Apple/Google relationship has gone from best friends to hate/hate, and that Apple has done its best to distance itself from its former lover. Apple has already bought mapping company C3, and is using OpenStreetMaps in iPhoto for iOS. But the Apple-designed map tiles are a little hokey. What the Maps app needs is these beautiful CC licensed tiles from Stamen Maps.
Apple broke away from its traditional June iPhone unveiling last year, delaying the iPhone 4S announcement until early October instead. The company is widely expected to do the same with the iPhone 5 — likely to be called the “new iPhone” — this year, but according to one Foxconn recruiter, it’ll arrive in June like many of its predecessors.
Apple has updated the Investor Relations page of its website this morning to announce its second-quarter earnings call on April 24 at 2 p.m. PT.
Firefighters in China’s Yunnan Province have rescued a two-year old toddler from a 40-foot well with the help of Apple’s iPhone. After the child kept slipping out of a rescue harness that was designed for adults, an iPhone was lowered into the well so that the rescue team could use its camera to see the boy’s position.
A jailbreak tweak called Aero reinvents the interface for multitasking on the iPhone. With Aero, you use a list of animations and effects to create your optimal multitasking environment in iOS 5. It completely changes the feel of switching between apps.
Apple’s iPhone is a hot selling handset worldwide. This is evident after Apple revealed that it sold a whopping 37 million iPhones during its last holiday quarter, setting records for the company and putting it in the ranks as the world’s top smartphone manufacture. With the introduction of the iPhone 4S, Apple began selling the iPhone on the US’s third-largest carrier, Sprint, which helped boost sales, along with a larger availability worldwide.
According to a new report from Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley, Apple’s iPhone is outselling every other smartphone combined at Sprint and AT&T. However, it is facing some competition over at Verizon, specifically from Android.
Memoir Tree is a new oral history for capturing memorable moments – including those goofy things your kids say while away at pre-school or that look on your grandfather’s face as he tells those war tales.
Although there might be more iPhone diary and journal apps than pages of the daily doings of Samuel Pepys, the folks behind Memoir Tree want their iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app to become the app of record for schools, nursing homes, museums and at events, too.
If you still don’t see the value of jailbreaking after watching this 3-minute video, you’re kidding yourself. Great stuff by JailbreakMatrix.
For all of our jailbreak coverage, click here. More to come.
A new Israeli start-up on the scene named ZooZ has founded a new SDK, which allows developers to implement an in-app payment system into their apps easier. To get the system implemented, all developers have to do is add three lines of code into either an Android or iOS app, which will then get things rolling. From there, customers who would like to purchase something from within the app can use Paypal or a credit card with ZooZ’s system. Check it out:
The new American Pie film American Reunion is set to open in theaters this Friday, April 6th. To help promote the movie, Universal Pictures thought it’d be a great idea to release an app called Stifler’s App Suite featuring a soundboard of all the various raunchy sayings of the series’ infamous support character, Stifler.
Looks like Stifler was too hot for the App Store to handle, though. An anonymous source has exclusively told Cult of Mac that Apple’s App Store review team has rejected the app due to foul language. The rejection has forced the Universal team to resubmit a watered-down version of the app. Stifler’s hardly even himself anymore.
Avatron has released a new version of its popular Air Display iOS app that allows the user to view OS X Lion in hi-res HiDPI mode on the new iPad’s Retina display. Air Display turns your iPad or iPhone into a secondary display for your Mac, and the latest update takes advantage of the new iPad’s 2048×1536 screen resolution by exploiting a super hi-resolution mode in Lion called HiDPI.
The hysterical crybabies over at Consumer Reports — who, ever since the iPhone 4 came out, never have been able to let a new iOS product pass without Chicken Littling it — have just released a report “supplementing” their earlier one, saying that while the new iPad gets “harmlessly hot” in testings (more on this below), well, so do other tablets… like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which reached the same 121 degree temperature in their tests) as well as the Asus Transformer Prime (which was close, at 117 degrees).
If you’re interested, you can go read their report here. Here’s something to note, though: although in an email to Cult of Mac tipping us about their additional tests, Consumer Reports writer James McQueen said that the most they found was that the iPad could get alternatingly “harmlessly hot” or “harmlessly warm” (a direct quote), this phrase (or even just the word “harmless”) never appears in their public report, nor did it appear in their last report. Hard to get people all fired up — wokka — about harmless heat, isn’t it?
When we first saw Nokia’s 808 PureView — a Symbian-powered phone that can putput SLR caliber photographs thanks to some sophisticated, satellite-grade oversampling technology and an absurd 41MP camera sensor — we were totally blown away by the quality of the images it took, but knew it would never come to the iPhone, because the frickin’ camera module took up half the back of the camera body.
But what if it did? What if Nokia’s PureView technology came to the iPhone. Well, you’d get something that looked like this monstrosity… except it would take way better pictures, because this iPhone only has a 1.2MP cam. What?
Apple may be the largest company known to man, well-known for its industrial design and “lifestyle” branding, but it sure could use some help in the naming department. My computer has been named Macintosh HD for as long as I can remember, and Back To My Mac is a branding opportunity gone wrong. Let’s not even get started on Mobile “Me.”
Ever wanted to change the name of your iPhone, then? What if you come up with the perfect name to change to while on a commute, nowhere near an iTunes install, and want to do just that? Well, here’s how.
Barefoot Books World Atlas ($8) is a kind of digital globe for children, giving them easy access to a simplified cartoon overview of the whole world.
From the orbital view (for want of a better word), you see the globe peppered with hundreds of colorful icons. Spin the globe and zoom in. The little icons grow and become tappable controls. Each one reveals a snippet of information in text and audio form (read aloud by the UK’s favorite TV geographer (yes, we have those), Nick Crane). There’s also a photo to look at for each fact, which is often much more informative than the icon was to start with.
Crappy internships have become a sort of initiation process that American students subject themselves to in order to enter the workplace. Working for free for 4 months – making copies, fetching coffee, and filing paperwork – sounds like hell for a lot of American students, who love to complain about the hardships of their internships.
Well, turns out American interns have a pretty beautiful life compared to their Chinese counterparts at Foxconn who are forced into internships that resemble slave labor and are told they will not graduate unless they spend months working on the production lines.
When Cliff Weitzman emailed me about his Black SMS iPhone app, I was impressed by the pitch alone. An App Store app that encrypts text messages and emails between iPhones and iPads? Sign me up!
Black SMS accomplishes a task that I haven’t seen anything from the App Store come close to replicating. It does indeed encrypt your texts and emails so that they are unreadable without the Black SMS app and an associated password. CIA agents and paranoid boyfriends should take notice of this one.
Apple’s retail experiment isn’t just a rousing success, it’s an explosive engine that takes ever increasing numbers of staff members to keep under control. More and more people are getting jobs at their local Apple Stores… and Apple’s demanding more and more out of them if they want to keep their jobs.
This is one big deal from Cult of Mac Deals that will allow your creativity to go wild! Well, if you’re a designer, this one’s for you!
The Creative Design Bundle contains over 1000 icons, vector elements, Photoshop templates, an essential designer’s strategy guide and a lot of useful bonus files for just pennies on the dollar! With a total download size of 1.4GB, you’ll get all of this bundled together at an insane price – just $49! The items in this bundle are valued at over $1,000 – meaning you get a whopping 95% off!
The official Facebook for iPad app has finally been updated with Retina graphics for Apple’s third-gen iPad. Version 4.1.1 of the app is available now with offline chat mode, photo bug fixes, added language support and stability improvements.
I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.