The New York Times published a story recently that attacks Apple for avoiding billions of tax dollars every year, but does it matter in the court of public perception?  A new study says that Apple’s reputation score in the aftermath of the report remains relatively unscathed. Compare this to General Electric (GE), a company also reported to be avoiding paying their fair share of taxes. GE’s score dropped considerably in the same amount of time after a similar New York Times story on them last month.

Compared to GE? Apple’s Teflon.

Taking photos is a ton of fun, especially with our nearly ubiquitous iPhones or iPads. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen in the last month or so snapping pictures with the big tablet device. Looks silly, but makes sense.

How do you get them to your Mac, though? You could email them, one at a time, or you can connect the device to the Mac and grab them via iPhoto. These days, you can even use PhotoStream in iPhoto to see the latest photos you’ve taken on any PhotoStream-enabled iOS device. Todays tip is even faster than that.

Update: Looks like Padbury has taken the screensaver off his Dribble account. If anyone has a mirrored link for others to download, please post in the comments.

We love beautiful wallpapers and screensavers here at Cult of Mac. When Apple User Interface Designer Robert Padbury posted a beautiful screensaver to his Dribble account, we fell in love. The “Minimalist Clock Screensaver” comes in 12-hour and 24-hour versions, and you can grab it now for free to install on your own Mac.

While we may not have jetpacks or flying cars, the future is here. Lilliputian Systems, originally part of the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), is releasing a new fuel cell external battery pack that they promise can charge smartphones like your iPhone up to fourteen times per single charge.

AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring add a lot of value to the second and third generation Apple TVs. Paired with a recent iPad or the iPhone 4S, an Apple TV can instantly become a gaming solution and a theater for home movies – and will be amazing when combined with Mountain Lion when it ships this summer.

AirPlay also turns that Apple TV into powerful and extremely portable presentation system that’s a great fit for the classroom or the board room. The only challenge is that the Apple TV’s only output option is an HDMI port, which can be a big problem for connecting to older display technologies including many projectors and computer displays – a problem solved by cable and adapter maker Kanex.

The Touchtype is a new Kickstarter project that aims to be the ultimate case for iPad typists. Like the Incase Origami Workstation, the Touchtype conveniently holds an Apple wireless keyboard and iPad inside a thin design.

Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard can be stored underneath the iPad, and the case itself props up any iPad model to let you type. With support for all of Apple’s tablets and a sleek, utilitarian design, the Touchtype looks like an awesome accessory for those who still want to use a physical keyboard with the iPad.

There are probably a thousand different flash-diffusing accessories out there that claim to transform your DSLR Speedlite’s sickly beam of photons into one that’s more soft’n’dreamy. Problem is, many portable diffusers are tricky to use, don’t work well, or both.

But the Gary Fong Lightsphere Collapsible ($60), though it looks a little too much like a flash’s top hat, is surprisingly effective at softly lighting all that surrounds it.

It looks like Square has yet another competitor in the mobile payments arena. Global payment leader VeriFone has announced SAIL, a credit card reader much like Square’s, that will attach to a number of mobile devices. While VeriFone may have a little catching up to do, they have the advantage of an extensive network with a commanding percentage of retail transactions passing through their service.

Seemingly in response to word that three new small regional carriers were going to be offering the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S with a $50 discount, RadioShack has just announced that they’ll be matching the offer.

Starting immediately, if you buy an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S at RadioShack, you’ll get $50 off the normal price on all carriers. That means that the iPhone 4S will be priced at $149/$249/$349 and the iPhone 4 will be available for $49.

If you’re in the market for an iPhone, this is a pretty killer deal. Better act soon, though: the offer ends at the end of June.

World World Robots is a great series by artist Ashley Wood Three A that describe a grungy apocalyptic world in which gas-masked humans are openly at war with various cool looking models of murderous rogue robots, spanning the surface of the earth, the moon and even mars.

There’s an accompanying toy line by Three A, and one of their latest models is this awesome robot inspired by our favorite company. Bearing the designation STEVE-J, the Caesar APP-EL comes with a rainbow shield after the style of the vintage Apple icon, his own miniature iPad and some vintage iPod styling. It even comes in an Apple-inspired box.

Source: The Fwoosh
Via: Reddit

WWDC may have sold out quickly, but as we reported there are alternative events for IT professionals  and developers that want to network and hone their skills. One of those is the annual European Macintosh System Administrators Meeting, which began accepting registrations this week for this year’s event, which will be held in Sweden this September.

Unlike WWDC, MacSysAdmin isn’t intended for developers as much as it is IT professionals that need to deploy and manage Apple technologies in business and education.

What if I told you that you could buy a Bluetooth speaker than you would never need to charge again? “Charlie!” you would say, “Have you lost your mind? Have you been drinking again?” To which I would answer “No” and “Yes” respectively. Because such a speaker does indeed exist. It’s called the Rukus Solar, and it gets its power from the 620 million metric tons of hydrogen fused each second by the Sun’s nuclear furnace.

Hands up if you like counting things. Keep still while I count you all. Wait – arg. This isn’t working. How can I keep count? Maybe Tallywag will help me.

During Steve Jobs’s so-called “Wilderness Years” after he left Apple in 1985 but before his triumphant return to the company in 1997, the company went woefully astray, releasing dud product after dud product and seeing its market share and influence erode as PC makers like Dell took Cupertino’s once proud crown.

Only Steve Jobs’s triumphant return to the company in 1997 righted Apple’s course and made it the company it is today, but speaking to journalist Brent Schlender — who interviews Steve dozens of times over a quarter-century — Jobs said that watching Apple’s disgrace while he was away from the company was like watching your own child turn into a serial killer.

As spotted by MacRumors, it looks like iCloud.com might soon get iOS 5 and Mountain Lion style notifications, with Apple currently testing a new notification service on the website.

What do you think? I’m not sure I need yet another place to get notifications, thank you.

Source: MacRumors

If you don’t think that your Mac is susceptible to a virus, then you couldn’t be more wrong. With the popularity of the Mac growing every day, they are becoming more of a target. If you want to protect your computer — and speed it up at the same time — the latest Cult of Mac Deals offer is just for you! But the time to get it is almost up!

With VirusBarrier X6 you’ll be able to protect your Mac from network threats, viruses, trojan horses and all other malware. Washing Machine 2 enables you to clean up web files that compromise your privacy and slow down your Mac in the process.

Steve Jobs dressing up as Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rally Apple’s troops is one of the weirdest bits of ephemera about Apple history.

The internal video — which followed Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial and was meant to motivate Apple’s international sales force — features Jobs doing a bizarre caricature of the beloved four-term president that borrowed just as much from FDR’s real mannerisms as it did from Burgess Meredith’s interpretation of the Penguin.

How the heck did something this weird come about?

Verizon’s LTE domination continues as they get set to roll out 4G LTE to five more towns in Virginia. Virginia already enjoys the blazing fast speeds of LTE in a number of areas such as: Richmond, Roanoke, Blacksburg, Greater Hampton Roads, and Northern Virginia — but come May 17th, that list will also include:

I’m not a big fan of music processing. As a child of the 1980s, I spent more time tweaking graphic equalizers than I did listening to actual music. And now, I figure if my iPad can’t manage to make an over-compressed MP3 sound good, then not much will help.

But those who prefer their music to be all big bass and punchy highs might find the SRS iWOW-U to be a compelling purchase. The dongle dangles between your iDevice’s jack socket and your headphones, and “will make you say ‘WOW’ within 10 seconds of turning it on,” according to the blurb. Then again, that same blurb also claims that the iWOW-U offers “an amazing HD-quality listening experience,” so take from that what you will.

Would you like to share your monthly data allotment between you and your partner, or your iPhone and your iPad? AT&T and Verizon have been hemming and hawing about shared data plans since 2011, but recent comments by Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s mobile business, seemingly indicate that for Ma Bell’s customers, shared data plans may be coming very soon indeed.

comScore’s new mobile behavioral measurement service, Mobile Metrix 2.0, has revealed that the lion’s share of media engagement comes from apps. I don’t find this to be surprising, as apps are usually much easier to use versus most mobile site counterparts. However, I was a bit surprised to learn that as much as 82 percent of time spent with mobile media happens via apps. That’s a pretty high percentage and makes having a mobile app for your media almost a necessity.

Apple’s explosive success since the launch of the iPad has helped propel the company higher up the ladder of of the Fortune 500. This year the company broke into the top 20 – nabbing the number 17 spot.

The higher ranking shows consistent growth by Apple – last year the company broke into the top 50 to land at number 35. In 2010 and 2009, the company scored 56 and 71 respectively.

It’s likely this would be an entirely different story if Steve Jobs was still at Apple’s helm, but the Cupertino company has now agreed to drop a number of its infringement claims against Samsung, roughly cutting the case in half, in a bid to ensure that a trial goes ahead this summer.

Likewise, Samsung has agreed to do the same — dropping five of its 12 complaints  — but both companies continue to bicker over the “copycat products” that have made Samsung the world’s number one smartphone vendor. 

NFC isn’t a new technology. Android and BlackBerry phones with NFC capabilities have been available for a while now and various companies have started looking at implementing NFC as a mobile payment or digital wallet solution. Google Wallet being the most well-known while MasterCard’s new PayPass Wallet Services, which the company announced on Monday is the newest and potentially broadest in scope

Apple, however, hasn’t shown much interest in adding NFC to the iPhone. The lack of NFC hasn’t kept mobile payment options off the iPhone – as we’ve recently reported T.G.I. Fridays and Tabbedout, Boston’s light rail commuter service, and AmTrak have all moved to offer mobile payments using the Starbucks app/virtual card model.

A new deal between Apple and location-based deals startup Pirq, to offer daily food and drink deals to the company’s employees in silicon valley could be a sign of Apple testing the waters with both a deals network and whether such ecommerce options make sense for iPhone users.

Recent data shows that nearly half of all companies offer or provide Macs to employees and that the Macs represent about 7% computers in the workplace. That’s according to a Forrester report that was issued last month and that prompted me to write a feature about how deploying and managing large Mac populations in enterprise environments differs significantly from supporting a handful of Macs.

In that that article, I covered a lot of the tools IT departments rely on to handle large scale Mac deployments. Knowing what those tools are is a great starting point, but there are also several key skills that IT professionals managing and/or supporting Macs in business need regardless of whether they’re dealing with a half dozen Macs or upwards of a thousand.