Cult of Mac

Most presentations are boring.

Whether it’s because the slides themselves are not exactly inspiring or the person delivering them isn’t exactly…well…inspiring, you’re bound to run into more mediocre ones than excellent ones. Now what if you have to give one? Are you prepared? Do you have the tools on hand to make the process as painless and powerful as possible? Well, with Slidevana you will — and you’ll save time in the process.

But this Cult of Mac Deals offer is almost done. And when it does go, so do the 50% savings!

New on the App Store is Paper for iPad, made by the team at 53. It’s a gorgeous, simple digital notebook that deliberately ditches features in a bid to keep things simple.

The result is something that’s unusually elegant, and a delight to use.

Smartphones are close to becoming the primary type of mobile phones sold in the U.S. for the first time. Market research giant Neilsen’s latest analysis of the mobile industry shows that about half of all mobile phone owners in the country now own a smartphone – up significantly from this time last year.

In addition to smartphones gaining major traction, the company also released its data on the makeup of the U.S. smartphone market that shows gains by Apple’s iPhone and significant losses for RIM’s BlackBerry. Android, however, still manages to hold the biggest share of the market overall.

Back when I first moved back from Germany to the United States, one of the things I initially missed most about my previously Euro-centric digital lifestyle was, of course, Spotify. Depressed that the streaming music service hadn’t launched yet in the United States, I tried Rdio, a U.S. only analog.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve completely come around to Rdio as the superior service. It’s got a better interface — one that doesn’t look like it was designed as a Winamp skin circa 1997 — and really makes sharing and music discovery easy. It also, unlike Spotify, has a native iPad app.

The only problem with Rdio was that it was a fantastic music streaming service that I couldn’t recommend to my European friends. But now that’s all changed, or at least in the process of changing, because Rdio is coming to Europe.

The concept of employees bringing their own devices to the office has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of years. When the term BYOD first entered the IT lexicon, most CIOs and systems administrators tended to shrug off the suggestion that their company might consider such a non-traditional approach. Today, surveys show more than fifty percent of organizations are considering or have already adopted BYOD policies.

While the concept of BYOD is pretty easy to grasp (companies actively support user-owned devices and may even encourage employees to bring their iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office), exactly what BYOD translates to in the real world can vary widely.

During the whole ‘antennagate’ debacle back in 2010, Apple attempted to appease iPhone 4 adopters by offering them one of its bumpers, or another case from a third-party manufacturer for free. Those who didn’t think a free $30 bumper was good enough can now claim $15 compensation.

This is the Galileo, a tilting, spinning 360˚ camera mount for your iPhone. It can pan, enable cool moving time-lapses, or even just work as a powered iPhone dock (it comes with a USB cable and a lithium-polymer battery).

But when you see the video below, with its wonderful a-ha moment, you’ll want one right away.

Instapaper has just been bumped from v4.1 to 4.1.1, But despite this tiny numerical increment, there are a few big changes worth writing about.

Marco Arment, the coffee-slurping, BMW-driving playboy developer of the iPad’s best read-later app, has fixed a few bugs introduced in the Retina-ready v4.1 released last week. These include some odd rendering problems for the new default font, Elena, and some speeding up to the page animations which were slowed down by some weird iPad 3 oddities.

But there are also a few new features, and one reversion that should please the luddites who hate the cool cell-table layout of the article list.

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I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.

Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.

Mac OS X hides files in many ways. One way, a holdover from its Unix legacy, is with dot-files. In other words, if a file is named with a period before the file name (.Hiddenfile), that file will not show up in the Finder. One way to show these files is with a Terminal command like this:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

This works all well and fine, but requires a second trip to the Terminal to reverse it (by changing the YES to NO, natch). Today, we’re going to tip you off to an app that does something similar, yet without the need to hop into Terminal.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been spending some time in China this week, meeting with officials and even posing with fans at the company Xidan Joy City retail store. He also paid a visit to Foxconn’s new plant in Zhengzhou, where the company employs around 120,000 employs, some of whom are assembling Apple’s iPhone.

Ubisoft has confirmed that its future iOS games will store your save data in the cloud, allowing you to sync your progress across multiple devices. That means you can beat missions and levels on your iPhone in your lunch break, then continue your game right where you left off on your iPad when you get home.

It’s a feature that almost every game — especially those build for both the iPhone and the iPad — should not be without.

Apple has seeded a second beta of its OS X Lion 10.7.4 update to registered developers today, almost two weeks after it issued the initial release. This version contains “no known issues,” but Apple has asked developers to focus on the Mac App Store, graphics, iCal, Mail, and QuickTime. If you’re looking for an easy way to access Apple’s beta software, you can check out the Apple Seed app download to get started.

Apple is set to begin mass producing its next-generation MacBook Pros next month, according to sources in its supply chain — just in time to receive Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors. The 15-inch model will be first to hit the production line in April, with the 13-inch model, which is claimed to be the most popular, following in June.

According to an HTC patent filed back in 2011 and a new device design discovered by Patent Bolt, it appears HTC is working on a handheld PMP device to rival the ever dominant iPod Touch. With companies like Philips, Sony, and Samsung all failing to chip away at the iPod Touch’s domination, I guess it couldn’t hurt to give HTC a chance. This new device combined with the new Google Play model could give this HTC device a fighting chance but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

Announced at CES 2012 in January, Verizon’s Jetpack MiFi 4620L is finally launching on April 12th, Verizon announced today. The Jetpack MiFi 4620L packs 4G LTE and 3G and will be available for $50 with a two-year contract, after a $50 mail-in-rebate. If you don’t yet have a Verizon LTE enable iPad, this will be a nice way to get Verizon’s blazing fast 4G speeds on all of your devices. 

Most analysts have seemed to agree that Apple’s new Apple TV set, dubbed the “iTV,” is going to launch sometime during 2012. However, Asian research group CLSA has released a note today saying that Apple won’t release the product until 2013, with Sharp providing the display panels.

Apple has just released iTunes 10.6.1 with a number of small bug fixes. iTunes 10.6 was released on March 7th, which brought support for iOS 5.1 and a few other enhancements. Today’s iTunes update fixes a few bugs, like unexpected crashes and more.

News media conglomerate Gannett is making a big push for mobile reporting and they’ve decided that the iPhone 4S is the perfect tool to start with for journalists across the country. To that end, the company has equipped 1,000 print and broadcast reporters with new iPhones to use for on the spot reporting, editing, and broadcasting.

The initiative was announced in December and will eventually include iPads as well as iPhones, but it is just now rolling out after the company put journalists getting the handsets through intensive training in the use of the iPhone and of the handful of apps that Gannett has chosen for reporters to use.

Adobe released a free public beta of Photoshop CS6 last week, and the app has already been downloaded over 500,000 times. The next app up to bat from the new creative suite is the all new Illustrator. Adobe demos the design tool in the 3-minute sneak peak video above. Illustrator’s new Pattern Creation tool is the main focus. You’ll also notice that, like the new Photoshop, Illustrator sports a darker interface.

Adobe has yet to announce a free beta for the new Illustrator and a release date for CS6.

Remember when we told you about the amazing Reflection Mac app that lets you mirror your iOS device screen over AirPlay? Well, the developer of Reflection just updated the app with support for Apple’s latest iPad and its beautiful Retina display.

The huge update also includes support for recording audio as well as video from your iPhone or iPad. Several new features, including full screen ‘theatre’ streaming to your Mac, have been included in version 1.2 of Reflection as well.

With all of the rumors surrounding the possibility of a 7-inch iPad, a new report suggests that Apple is working on a totally new mobile product for 2013. The mysterious 5-inch device would feature a Retina display.

AT&T’s head device guy Jeff Bradley made a bold statement today regarding the upcoming launch of Nokia’s Lumia 900 Windows phone. The device is widely expected to be the first Windows phone to hold a candle to the iPhone, and AT&T thinks it has a massive hit on its hands.

“Before you walk into the store, you know this is our hero phone,” said Bradley. AT&T thinks the Lumia 900 has the potential to be its new heavy-hitter. Where does that leave the iPhone?

Have you ever wished that Apple would let you see App Store updates in the iOS Notification Center? Instead of having to open the App Store app to check for updates, you would be able to see new updates next to your other iOS notifications as they become available.

Thanks to a new tweak called AppUpdateNotifer, you can see App Store updates in the Notification Center drop down window on a jailbroken iOS device.

I’ve never had an insatiable hunger to fondle my MacBook Air’s screen. I got an iPad, and she gets the job done. But some people are dying for touchscreen MacBooks because of some weird delusions that having a keyboard attached to their device at all times is an absolute necessity – nevermind that voice-dictation will be the input method of the future. This MacBook Touch concept video/commercial attempts to envision what a touchscreen MacBook Air would look like. I think it’s crazy in the “damn-that’s-so-silly-ugly-it’s-neva-gonna-happen” sense, but you might think it’s crazy in the “cool” sense.

Take a look and let us know what you think: