Designer extraordinaire Jeff Broderick has created yet another tool for enhancing your productivity on your iOS devices. QuickContact is a beautiful web app that allows you to create app icons for quickly initiating calls or messages from your Home screen.

Pixelbit’s Reckless Racing quickly became a hit when it first came to iOS back in October 2010, so it’s no wonder the company has been hard at work on a sequel. Fans of the top-down arcade racer will be pleased to know that Reckless Racing 2 is on its way, and it’ll hit the App Store next week.

If you regularly use any X11 apps in Lion, such as the Gimp image editor, then you might dislike to the confusion of each X11 app utilizing its own menu bar. A way to make X11 apps easier to work with is to integrate X11 with Mission Control’s spaces and to run X11 full screen. Here are the steps.

If you thought there would be little interest in an Apple event that didn’t include new hardware, think again. Following the unveiling of iBooks 2 with support for textbooks last week, Apple saw an incredible 350,000 textbook downloads in just three days of availability.

Apple is set to roll out support for 802.11ac “Gigabit Wi-Fi” this year to a range of devices including its Apple TV, MacBooks, Time Capsule, and possibly even its iOS devices, according to a new report. The new specification offers speeds around three times as fast as the existing 802.11n wireless technology, with speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.

Did you choose to purchase an iPhone over the Android-powered Galaxy S II? Well, congratulations. Like many of us here at Cult of Mac, you’ve been “Samsunged!” 

Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.

It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.

The New York Times on Sunday published a provocative piece asking whether Apple has an obligation to make its products at home in the U.S.

The article describes how, in 2007, just before the iPhone hit stores, Steve Jobs angrily discovered that its screen was easily scratched. He ordered the plastic screens be immediately replaced with scratch-proof glass ones.

New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

The Times notes that General Motors in its heyday employed 400,000 U.S. workers. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas. An additional 700,000 workers build and assemble Apple’s products, mostly in China.

The Absinthe for Mac jailbreak tool has been updated with several bug fixes for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners looking to jailbreak on iOS 5.0 or 5.0.1. We’ve covered Absinthe in detail since it was released to the world yesterday, and this second update addresses key issues that users have been experiencing.

The Chronic Dev Team has updated its Absinthe jailbreak tool with support for Windows users. iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners can use Absinthe for Windows to install the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1.

A smattering of journalist authors are freaking out over Apple’s license agreement for the free new iBooks Author tool.

ZDnet’s Ed Bott called the license agreement “greedy and evil.” PCmag.com’s Sascha Segan wrote: “Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you.” Even Daring Fireball’s John Gruber called it “Apple at its worst.”

Et tu, Gruber?

What’s strange about these emotional responses to Apple’s legalese is that they fail the reality test. Apple’s iBooks Author terms are neither greedy nor evil; they don’t mean Apple’s “owns you;” and it’s certainly not the worst thing Apple has ever done.

Here. I’ll prove it.

Out of the box, the iHealth HS3 Wireless Bluetooth Scale ($70) is somewhat impressive. With its digital (albeit not backlit) display and snazzy looking-glass top, this is a scale that will at least look spiffy in your bathroom when company is over. Even in the box, the scale makes a good case for gadget adoption: It promises to keep track of your weight, calories and exercise easily using only the scale itself and an accompanying app that can be used on your iPhone or iPad. Technically, the iHealth Scale does do that, but there are a few kinks that make this product’s promises fall flat.

Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?

After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: Which is better? Android’s three virtual buttons or iOS’s physical home button?

In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!

Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.

Purple Siri is soo boring. Why not change it up a bit? If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone 4S, then you can take advantage of a fun tweak called Siri Mic Colors. Once installed for free in Cydia, this simple package spices up your iPhone’s digital assistant with some rainbow flair.

The iPhone Dev Team has released a tool for jailbreaking A5-based iOS devices. Dubbed “CLI” (Command Line Interface), this Mac-only tool is not for the faint of heart. It’s a unix tool for jailbreaking and troubleshooting. Tinkerers can play with advanced settings to create custom firmware installs. If you think you have what it takes, CLI is available now.

Hours after the initial version was released, the Chronic Dev Team has updated its Absinthe jailbreak tool with a way to handle the intense amount of strain that the Greenp0is0n servers have been receiving. The untethered iOS 5 jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 was released earlier today, and many have been unable to successfully install Cydia due to high traffic.

Have you checked out our new Instagram feed yet? It’s pretty sweet and we’ve been having a lot of fun seeing snapshots of our readers’ lives as well as giving you guys some behind the scenes looks at Cult of Mac. This week we were inspired by Austin Radcliffe’s blog Things Organized Neatly so we asked our Instagram followers to upload pictures of their Apple products organized neatly and include an #AppleOrganizedNeatly tag so we could share them with the rest of the world. Here’s a gallery of the best pictures we saw on Instagram this week:

If you’re a Dropbox user, uploading images to your Dropbox account directly from your iOS devices can be incredibly handy. And with QuickShot ($1.99), it couldn’t easier. Simply link the app to your Dropbox account and images are automatically uploaded as you snap them.

This is great if you often use public computers and you need to upload multiple images, but you don’t want to send them all via email. You can also use the app as alternative to Photo Stream. Sure, Photo Stream’s great, but until Apple allows us to delete our photos individually, it’s not ideal for everyone.

By uploading your images to Dropbox instead, you have access to them on pretty much all of your internet-connected devices. Here’s how to get setup with QuickShot!

There’s continued speculation Apple will unveil its next iPhone with a 4-inch screen. A Wall Street expert lent his voice to the chorus, telling investors the new device will begin production in June. But how will Apple increase the 3.5-inch screen and retain the iPhone’s iconic style?

I cried like a kindergartener on the first day of school when I watched Water For Elephants. Sure, while I was really sad about the elephant, most of my tears were spilled for Robert Pattinson because he’s so stinking dreamy. Even so, the film opened my eyes to the plight of the big top pachyderm. Compared to me and Robert Pattinson, PETA is about a year late to the scene, but they’ve recently released a new iOS game that gives tortured circus elephants the last laugh while also raising awareness of animal cruelties by raining down horror on humans. Sounds like fun, huh?

The untethered iOS 5 jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 has become available, and we have tutorials up for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 already. This is a highly-anticpated jailbreak, and millions will likely use it to jailbreak their A5-based iOS devices.

As you can imagine, many are trying to jailbreak their iPhones and iPads right now with the Chronic Dev Team’s Absinthe tool, and the Greenpois0n servers are getting hammered. This means that it may be nearly impossible for many to actually get Cydia up and running right now. If you can’t manage to finish the Absinthe jailbreak on your iPhone 4S or iPad 2, we have a handy fix.

The untethered jailbreak for the iPad 2 has finally been released. After months of waiting, you can download the Chronic Dev Team’s free Absinthe Mac tool to jailbreak your iPad 2 in a matter of seconds.

We’ll show you how to jailbreak your iPad 2 running iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1 the right way in this guide.

The untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S has finally been released. After months of waiting, you can download the Chronic Dev Team’s free Absinthe Mac tool to jailbreak your iPhone 4S in a matter of minutes.

We’ll show you how to jailbreak your iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1 (both versions) the right way in this guide.

It’s here! It’s finally here! The long-awaited Absinthe jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 is finally here. The server’s getting hammered, but you can download the Absinthe app directly here. Download the latest version here.

You can download a Windows version of Absinthe, too.

We have a tutorial for jailbreaking your iPhone 4S with Absinthe and jailbreaking your iPad 2 with Absinthe. If you’re getting errors when trying to install Cydia, you can also try this handy fix.

Apple first announced its incredible new Thunderbolt interface technology way back in February of 2011. Combining PCI Express and DisplayPort technology into a serial data interface, Thunderbolt allows for up to 20Gbit/s transfer rates, as well as the ability to daisy chain multiple devices, all in a tiny form factor that can fit even in the MacBook Air’s slim housing.

As usual, with Thunderbolt, Apple was at least a year ahead of the rest of the industry… and that’s not hyperbole. Only now are Acer, Asus and Lenovo getting ready to put Thunderbolt in their ultrabook offerings.