OS X is sometimes known for its visual flair and neatly implemented animations. If you’d rather just get down to business and lose the visuals of OS X though, there’s a neat Terminal trick that will let you either speed up, slow down, or lose the animations in Mission Control all together. This little tip can make work in Mission Control feel faster and help especially on slower systems. In this video, I’ll show you how to accomplish this.
Apple has aired a new commercial for the iPhone 4S. Simply called “iCloud Harmony,” the 30-second TV spot highlights iCloud’s ability to sync your media and apps between devices. “Automatic. Everywhere. iCloud.“
While there are many features in OS X Lion that excite me, one that does not is the Resume feature. Clearly, Apple thought that opening windows from the last time an App was open would be a time saving feature, but I just find it annoying. Are you with me?
If so, we’ve got three separate ways to get rid of this behavior.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the things that first inspired me to be a professional writer was sharing my early fiction experiments as a 10 year old on the discussion boards of the old dial-up service, Prodigy. The instantaneous feedback, the helpful advice, the suggestions from other people about what should happen next to my character (a monster-killing, Nazi-loathing private dick named Dr. Crypt, a name which I still use as my Twitter handle): all of this was a formative experience for me, and without it, I never would have dared to dream that someday, I would make my living putting words down on paper.
Prodigy’s bulletin boards aren’t around anymore, but a new start up is trying to encourage kids and teenagers to write the same way. The company’s called Movellas, and it’s taking the concepts of Twitter, LiveJournal, Kickstarter and the Kindle self-publishing platform to help identify and nurture the next Stephanie Mayer or Stephen King when he or she is still a kid. And, of course, they have an app for that.
Aurasma marketing boss Tamara Roukaerts fights Lion-O. Cheetara won
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.
Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Forget a bigger screen or LTE. Ask anybody who has ever dropped their iPhone in a sink, puddle or toilet what they want from the iPhone 5 and waterproofing is number one on the list.
The good news is that there are now a number of companies who are bringing to market superhydrophobic technologies that will help make the soggy iPhone or iPad a thing of the past. Don’t expect a waterproof iPad 3, but an iPhone 5 by the end of the year isn’t just possible, it’s probable.
SuperTooth's prototype Mini speaker is cute, cute, cute
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — SuperTooth, the company behind the excellent, beat-pumping SuperTooth Disco, are ready to boost their product lineup like their speaker boosts your music’s bass. First will be the imaginitively-named SuperTooth 2, followed by the dinky SuperTooth Mini, and some SuperTooth Bluetooth headphones.
On Voicefeed will make you not hate your voicemails. Photo Charlie Sorrel (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Our new podcast has been on iTunes for barely more than 24 hours, but The CultCast has already skyrocketed up the charts and is now the #1 Technology Podcast on iTunes. We’re blown away with how successful the podcast has been and we owe it all to our incredible fans who have been downloading it like crazy. Being on the same page as shows like TWiT, 5by5, NPR and Lifehacker is very flattering, and to be at the top of that list is ridiculously exciting. Thanks a bunch, guys!
We’ll be coming out with an new episode every Thursday, but if you haven’t checked out our first 30 minute episode of The CultCast you can subscribe to it right here. Give it a listen. Tell us what you think. And if you have time to give us a rating on iTunes as well, that’d be awesome.
Cathy Edwards was the CTO and cofounder of Chomp, an innovative app search engine acquired by Apple. She is now a senior iTunes engineer. She'll be working on one of the thorniest problems faced by the iOS users -- how to find the best apps.
Apple announced this week the acquisition of Chomp, an app-search startup.
Chomp CEO Ben Keighran is reportedly working already in Apple’s marketing department, and CTO Cathy Edwards is already employed as a senior iTunes engineer.
Chomp crawls the data associated with all the apps in an app store and uses a sophisticated algorithm-based search function to enable people to search and actually find the apps they really want. Less appreciated by the public (but not Apple) is what appear to be incredible analytics tools, enabling a deep understanding of what people are searching for, how successful they are at finding it and detecting meaningful trends in app demand.
Sound familiar? Search algorithms and analytics are Google’s core competency.
Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.
We’re starting a new series called Wallpaper Weekends. We’ll be bringing you a fresh new wallpaper for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Here’s what we’ve got this week.
Have you ever wished you could use Siri to control Spotify instead of Apple’s Music app on your iPhone? How about using Siri to get directions with your favorite GPS app?
A really cool jailbreak tweak called AssistantLove was released today in Cydia that lets you do those things and more.
We’re huge fans of the simplistic to-do app called Clear here at Cult of Mac. We’ve been captivated by its entrancing gestures and sexy design ever since we saw it at Macworld last month.
Let’s face it, RIM has been suffering from a serious personality conflict. The company is trying to cling to its enterprise business while also making its brand more attractive as a consumer alternative to iOS and Android.
Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the company’s PlayBook tablet. RIM initially pitched the PlayBook as being all about consuming content like movies and other media. At the same time, RIM was also trying to sell it as a business device when paired with a BlackBerry even though it lacked core enterprise apps (including email) that could run on the device when it wasn’t tethered to a BlackBerry – a fact that led to RIM hyping the PlayBook’s email app (introduced this week in PlayBook OS 2) as an exciting new feature.
RIM may be caught in this consumer/business identity struggle, but Netflix made it clear today that it doesn’t see RIM as a consumer company – or at least not as a viable one.
Are you still emailing contact cards and photos to your friends? Did you know that you can transfer them instantly with a fist bump using the free Bump app? The best thing about Bump is it’s not just available on iOS, so you can use it to send contacts and images to friends on Android devices and other smartphones, too.
So you’ve got your mobile app idea and you’ve learned Objective C / Java and are ready to start coding. Now all that’s left to do is to create an elegant and inviting user interface so that people will actually use your app.
And now you’ve hit that roadblock.
Today we’re introducing you to design guru Jen Gordon as part of our newest Cult of Mac Deals offer that will help you become a mobile design rockstar – and at a savings of 61% off the normal price!
There’s a certain kind of computing nostalgia that holds that the art of typing has been steadily wussified since the late 1980s, when the venerable IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard went out of favor.
These keyboards, it is held, were the last of a breed of keyboards for men. Like a vintage Underwood typewriter, these mechanical marvels were made for those who meant for their words not just to be heard, but to be felt: the hefty chunk of each key smashing into the mechanical switch underneath shouldn’t just make a letter light up on a screen; it should land with such authority it shakes your teeth loose.
For the last month, I’ve been trying to become one of these burly typist he-men. I put my Apple Wireless Keyboard — as pale, thin and pretty as the world’s most anemic twink — and have instead replaced it with the Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac. Now when I type, it sounds like ten tiny John Henrys working away under my fingers, pounding spikes through the invisible gold-plated key switches beneath each key.
Although Apple just announced OS X Mountain Lion last Thursday, Mac apps are already getting updated for compatibility with the next-gen OS. Mountain Lion is only available as a developer preview, but that hasn’t kept Smile from updating its popular PDF editor for the Mac, PDFpen, with Gatekeeper compatibility.
Smile makes great productivity apps for the Mac, like TextExpander. With this latest update to PDFpen, a Gatekeeper-friendly Developer ID has been added to help future Mountain Lion users install the app in a secure environment.
Make AR shooters more realistic -- perhaps too realistic -- with the Xappr
Hey, iPhone users with death wish: We have just the thing to tantalize your suicidal tendencies. It’s called the Xappr, and it’s an augmented reality gun for your beloved iPhone 4. Simply pre order the Xappr for $30, hop on the plane to any decent-sized U.S city and wait for the cops to see you and mow you down in a glorious rain of lead.
Unbelievably, Instamatch makes the memory card game non-boring
Are you a fan of Instagram? Of course you are. And are you also a fan of those frustrating memory games where you have to flip over cards and match the pictures? I thought not. But if you are — you freak, you — then InstaMatch might be right up your alley.
Last month, OnLive launched its free cloud-based Windows desktop app for the iPad. OnLive Desktop provides iPad users with a cloud-based Windows 7 desktop that comes complete with the standard Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and 2GB of storage. This week, the cloud-gaming company expanded the features and storage available to OnLive Desktop users via new subscription plans – one of the most notable being that OnLive Desktop can now play Flash videos and content.
The company will also be adding a more full featured “Pro” plan that will let users install additional Windows applications and an enterprise service that would allow companies to configure and manage virtual Windows desktops on the iPad’s of employees.
Working in a Chinese factory doesn’t pay that well. When you can’t afford to buy an iPhone, even though you make 5,000 of them a day, the next best thing is to buy a fake iPhone. And when you can’t pay for a fake iPhone, people in China just pay for a cheap service that makes their friends think they have an iPhone by adding a “Sent From My iPhone” signature at the end of their texts.
The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.
