Cult of Mac

Virtual school The Khan Academy just released an official iPad app today, and if you have kids in school you might just want to grab a copy, because it’s excellent.

Four quirky creatives in New York want to make tangible those memorable moments snapped with your iPhone at a bar, a concert or your house – and possibly send them to your ex – with device called Instaprint.

They are the brains behind Breakfast, named the top innovative digital agency last year by Mashable, also responsible for a tweeting bike and the Conan Blimp. (Not bad, since the agency is a mere 18-months old.)

Breakfast is now handing the hat around to fund photobooth device Instaprint on Kickstarter, asking for $500,000.

Do you ever feel like you need a little more screen space while you’re working away on your Mac? Does your iPad sit in its dock next to your iMac staring back at your with a blank face? With Air Display from Avatron, you can put that iPad to good use by turning it into a secondary display for your Mac, allowing you to extend your desktop with an extra 9.7-inches of real estate.

Here’s how to get started with Air Display.

In 1971, Coca-Cola unleashed one of history’s most iconic commercials on the world. “I’d Like To Buy the World a Coke” showed people of various ethnicities and social classes standing on a hilltop, singing about how much they’d like to buy everyone in the world a soft drink originally based on coca leaf extract. The commercial was a huge success during its time, but watching it today becomes slightly unbearable with all of its cheesy happiness.

No one sings on hilltops anymore, so with a little help from Google, Coca-Cola has reimagined their iconic advertisement to be more fitting in the digital world. The end result is pretty crazy: rather than singing about buying the world a Coke, users of the Coca-Cola iOS app can actually purchase a Coca-Cola for people across the world.

Here’s the video showcasing the app:

Instagram is one of the most wildly successful apps to ever hit the iOS App Store. The app’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, recently revealed that Instagram now boasts 27 million active users on the iPhone alone during the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.

We’ve all been clamoring for the popular social photography app to make its way to Android for many months, and it has been confirmed that Instagram for Android is coming “very soon.” The app is currently being tested in private beta.

The boldest claim Systrom made was that Instagram for Android is, in some ways, “better than our iPhone app.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the iFrogz Boost, a magic box which amplifies the sound from an iPhone or other device just by being close. You put the iPhone on top and the battery-powered iBoost speaker goes to work, making everything louder.

The technology used is called near field audio, or NFA, but nobody would tell me how it works. Luckily, the iFrogz folks sent me one, so I took it apart to see what’s inside.

The iPad’s multitouch screen works with a fingenail… why not a hoof? Such went the thinking of Tim Cook in his first colossal misstep as Apple’s new CEO. Introducing the Horse iPad, which is optimized for the horny keratine covering of an ungulate’s foot, and feature’s Apple’s new revolutionary Horse Recognition System, as well as a bundled five horse e-books.

Very funny, very weird spoof created by The Dawson Brothers for BBC Three’s Feed My Funny.

[via ObamaPacman]

It’s a little under four days until the new iPad begins going on sale at Apple Stores around the counry, and there’s still no word when they’ll officially behin going on sale. Will Apple Stores open early to accomodatethe clammoring hordes, or will they open at the usual hour? And even if they do, will Apple start selling the iPad late in the afternoon, as they did last year?

Last year, Apple opened their stores early to help people get their iPad 2s, and it’s starting to look like Apple might do the same this year.

Will the new iPad gobble up so much bandwidth that it will cause serious network congestion and performance issues for small businesses or even major enterprises? Are businesses networks up to meet ever increasing demands of wireless devices and mobile professionals?

These are questions that networking vendor Brocade put to its customers recently, specifically highlighting the launch of the new iPad. It found that half of all businesses think that the new iPad to could add to the number of wireless devices on their networks and possibly increase the overall amount of traffic.

Apple has released a new version of its Safari web browser for Windows and Mac. Safari 5.1.4 includes multiple speed and stability improvements, including a fix for an annoying bug where web pages would flash white when the user switched between tabs. The update can be downloaded now via Software Update.

In Phoenix, Arizona, rain is a commodity scarcer than a purple elephant slowly lumbering down Main Street. Consequently, people go straight up loco when their iPhone’s weather app predicts rain. Most of the time the hours sadly glide past and the clouds and precipitation never show up. A collective mourning rumbles across the city, and meteorologists cower under their desks, ashamed at their disastrous predictions. They never can quite seem to predict the rain.

It’s sad that we can put a man on the moon but still suck at predicting the weather. IBM’s mind-blowing “Deep Thunder” iPad Weather app is seeking to change all that though, by becoming the most insanely accurate weather predicting tool ever.

Though our own reader poll and the sellout of the new iPad strongly suggest otherwise, at least one gadget site says its readers are not interested in buying the latest version of the device.
Only a quarter of readers polled on gadget news aggregator Drippler who own first-gen iPads plan to upgrade and about the same percentage of iPad 2 owners plan to pony up for the next iPad. (The site wouldn’t reveal exact numbers behind the poll but says they have predominantly U.S. readers who are gadget hounds.)

Are you an iOS/Android/Web Developer looking to work with a great group of individuals in a startup environment? Do you like Korean food and FIFA 2012? Then you might want to take a look at Boxee as they’re looking for developers in NYC to join their crew. To get potential candidates excited, Boxee is even offering up free Boxee Boxes to interviewees. That’s right, if you apply and end up getting an interview (whether in person or over Skype), Boxee will award you with a free Boxee Box. It’s like getting paid for trying to get paid!

During its iPad event last week, Apple released its latest iOS 5.1 firmware. In addition to several new features, like Japanese support for Siri and a new camera slider for the home screen, the update promises to “address bugs affecting battery life.” But does it work?

iPhone 4S users have been suffering from poor battery life most on Apple’s latest handset, so if you’re an iPhone 4S owner, tell us how iOS 5.1 has affected your battery life by casting your vote in our poll.

Double Feature is a great new iPhone app which is going to revolutionize drunken, late-night movie conversations in pubs, bars and kitchens the world over. It has two functions: Movie Match and Name Search. But all you need to know is that when you find yourself saying “Who was that guy in [x] movie? I can’t remember his name… But hey, wasn’t he in [y] movie, too?” then Double Feature is the app you reach for.

AT&T has announced a dozen new markets set to receive 4G LTE in the coming months. While they didn’t give any specific rollout dates, the following cities are next on the list for an upgrade and should see LTE soon:

The Apple TV isn’t positioned as a business or enterprise product, but its small size, easy setup, and AirPlay make it a very solid presentation tool – and the low cost doesn’t hurt, either.

While the Apple TV has the obvious advantage of being wireless and integrated with other Apple products, specific business advantages beyond its small form factor and the ubiquity of HDTVs and other HDMI-enabled display devices like projectors aren’t always immediately obvious (though those are pretty big advantages in their own right) – but at least one company is designing its business solutions around Apple’s so-called hobby device.

Business Intelligence developer MicroStrategy has taken the Apple TV/iOS combination to a new level by building its mobile apps around AirPlay and the Apple TV.

Sir Jony Ive hasn’t agreed to too many interviews during his time as Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design. But the London Evening Standard has managed to tie him down for a rare interview in which he talks about Apple’s design process, and why its competitors have the wrong goals.

Time, it just keeps on slipping. Just a couple of days after delivery times slipped to March 19th, the average wait time for any new iPad ordered off of Apple.com is now 2-3 weeks.

Last year, the waiting time slide didn’t end here, and iPad 2 delivery times slipped to greater than a month for quite a while. So if you haven’t ordered a new iPad yet and can’t wait in line for one at launch, you might want to pull out that credit card already.

The MacBook Airs are wonderful machines, let down only by the still-small storage offered by today’s SSDs. Worse, whilst external Thunderbolt drives are finally trickling into stores, they’re neither cheap nor plentiful.

Alas, Elgato’s rather awesome-looking Thunderbolt SSD drive combines the worst of both worlds — a high price and low capacity. Then again, I imagine this things is fast enough to burn a hole in your desk.

If you’re one of many lucky pre-orderers, your new Retina display iPad may already have been shipped off from Apple’s factories in China and may, in fact, be sitting in your own state, waiting for delivery. We know ours is.

If so, you might think that there’s a strong possibility your new iPad will come sooner than Friday, March 16th. Fat chance.

Apple’s latest iPad was not accompanied by the rumored “iPad mini” at its launch event in San Francisco last week. But according to sources in Apple’s supply chain, the smaller tablet is still on the way. One of its features, they claim, will be a slim bezel that will aim to maximize its viewing area.

Wondering how Spotlight works, or why it can’t find a file that you were SO SURE you had saved on your hard drive? Turns out that Spotlight is in essence an index of all the metadata from the files on your hard drive. When you type in a search query, the app searches the index, rather than the actual files on your hard drive. This is what makes it very fast in finding the info you are searching for. Unfortunately, that index itself can get out of date or corrupted, or can be deleted by mistake when restoring a hard drive, for example. Luckily, there are two ways to reindex, or rebuild, Spotlight’s database.

One of iPhoto for iOS’s most useful new sharing features is called Beaming. It lets you send your photos quickly and directly to anyone sharing your Wi-Fi network and also running iPhoto.

As good, long-time Mac users we remember the bad old days of networking, where getting two Macs to talk to each other was all but impossible, and hear-tearingly frustrating at best (even when they were joined to opposite ends of the same Ethernet cable). Clearly, something has changed. So just how does iPhoto Beaming work?

Devon Technologies offers up this free search app, EasyFind. They’re touting it as a free alternative or supplement to Spotlight, and say it’s faster and more responsive, especially when searching for text files. If you’ve used Spotlight lately, you know that it can have issues, especially due to the indexing feature, which may be out of date or corrupt.