Lion has introduced some new yet basic privacy settings. The new settings control how you share your location and collect usage data to send to Apple. Although now it seems to be fairly basic I think it is still important to know what if any apps on your Mac are accessing location services on Mac OS X.
I’ll show you how to find out if they are or not in this tip.
If you find yourself in a quiet environment like a meeting or at the doctor’s office you’ll usually silence the ringer on your iPhone. The iPhone will then vibrate when you get incoming calls.
Although that sounds great, the iPhone will vibrate the same way for every caller. But it doesn’t have to do that. You can actually create a customized vibration pattern for every contact in your address book.
What’s this? Looks like a unibody MacBook Air, right? Don’t bet a kidney on it: Shenzhen’s Evil Confederacy of Mad Scientist Cloners have managed to almost perfectly rip off the feel of Apple’s bestselling MacBook Air, including unibody enclosure, for under half the price of Apple’s ultraportable.
And you know what? For a piece-of-$%@! netbook dumped into a MacBook Air-like shell, it’s not a bad machine for the sub-$500 price.
Last night, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was on ABC News to discuss continuing foreign aid as well as his philanthropy work. During the interview, he was asked about Steve Jobs’s less than kind words about him in Walter Isaacson’s bio: specifically, the part where Jobs (unfairly) says that Bill Gates had no original ideas and got rich just by ripping other people off.
Gates’s response is gracious enough. He says that Steve Jobs and he had a long history with each other, and their relationship as colleagues-turned-competitors was complicated, but that he doesn’t fault Steve for anything he said about him.
For me, though, the weird part is when Bill Gates says he helped create the original Mac. Maybe Gates doesn’t spend all his time ripping off other people’s ideas, but he sure seems to like ripping off posthumous credit for them.
Over the weekend, Apple launched three new iPhone 4S ads: one for the iPhone 4S’s incredible new 8MP camera and iOS 5’s Photo Editing abilities, one for iCloud and one for Siri. They all really speak for themselves, but even so, this is Apple advertising at its finest.
You can find the other two ads embedded below.
Apple’s massive new solar farm and their next-gen spaceship campus will boost the tech giant’s 2012 expense to $8 billion — a 73% hike over this year, one analyst told investors Monday.
When I, through sheer exertion of will, lift this moribund pile of musky flab out of the desk chair to which it transhumanistically is trying to absorb, put on my sweatbands and take myself out for a wheezing, gasping “jog”, RunKeeper is my preferred app for tracking the whole ordeal.
The free app is already pretty great. It uses your iPhone’s GPS sensors to track your running speed, distance and route; additionally, it allows you to program different run templates, calculate calories burned and share your favorite runs with other users.
But today’s update makes RunKeeper even better, with a host of new features that widen the distance between all the other jog-tracking apps out there.
Today is Halloween. So here’s a last-minute Halloween themed iOS app that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. It can turn your next scary party into a real spooktacular or you can use it to enhance the fun while passing out loads of candy to all the little ghosts and goblins that visit.
I discovered this Halloween app treat last year and I had a blast with it then and I will later tonight. It is worth a look if you haven’t seen it.
This has been all over the place today, but if you’re stuck for a Halloween costume idea and have two iPad 2s lying around, here’s a great suggestion: just initiate a FaceTime call between your iPads, duct tape them to your torso, pull on a ripped hoodie and smear fake blood all over yourself. It’ll look like someone shot a cannonball right through you!
Don’t like your Halloween costume to be so gory? If you’re a fan of Valve Software’s incredible Portal series, you can follow the instructions above and instead of using fake blood. surround the two holes with an orange and blue border. Voila! You’ve been hit with a teleporter gun!
Up until now, Apple’s Siri voice-recognition system has been shown in a humorous light. However, what if Siri could save your life? People remaking next-generation 911 services see Siri as the voice of emergency victims, not just a locator of the nearest sushi joint.
This weekend broke news that Apple was already hard at work on OS X 10.8, so it would be natural to assume that in the next version of OS X, Cupertino will bring even more iOS functionality to their desktop operating system: stuff like Airplay and iMessages.
Nope. But don’t be too disappointed. AirPlay and iMessages are reportedly coming to OS X 10.7 Lion, instead.
It may sound like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel or a James Cameron film, but the parent company of iPhone maker Foxconn is working to build an “empire of robots” to replace over a million Chinese workers.
The official Apple Store app is already a useful tool if you have to sally forth into meat space, allowing you to schedule appointment times at your local Genius Bar, reserve items for pickup at your local Apple Store and the like.
Come November 3rd, though, the Apple Store iOS app is set to gain some cool new functionality: the ability to check your own purchases out at Apple’s physical retail locations.
(Photo by Chrissy Polcino, used with thanks under Creative Commons license.)
So here’s former Oasis megastar Noel Gallagher, quoted in The Mirror this weekend:
I just want a basic 1994 Nokia mobile. I can keep it in my back pocket and just do the basics with it – phone and text. What would I need a camera on it for? iPhones are for Cockneys and ****s. And they are far too big.
It’s not clear to us exactly which insult The Mirror decided to blank out with asterisks, but feel free to use your imagination on that.
The days of students lugging around massive backpacks loaded with heavy textbooks are numbered. According to a new poll of educational IT directors, signs are strong that within the next five years, all U.S. schools could adopt tablets, many as a replacement for textbooks. The good news for Apple is that in education circles (as with most consumers) the only tablet worth considering is the iPad.
It’s been three years since the last major design refresh of the MacBook Pro, and we’ve been hearing whispers for almost a year that the next major update would see Apple’s professional line of laptops take on some of the characteristics of the MacBook Air line: slimmer profiles, ubiquitous SSDs, no optical drives.
If those updates sound swell to you, good news. Inside sources say Apple’s already working on the skinnier MacBook Pro, and the new LCD displays have already been developed.
If you’d asked me to bet on it, I would have said that OS X 10.7 Lion would be the last iteration of the Big Cat family. After all, where else is there to go? All of OS X’s releases have been named after successively bigger cats, and with Lion, Apple finally reached the biggest cat of them all.
Apparently, though, Apple envisions at least one more version of OS X before retiring the Big Cat OS once and for all. MacRumors reports that Apple is already testing OS X 10.8 internally.
Any bets on what the next version of OS X will be called? There aren’t any bigger cats, at least not without dipping a toe into cryptozoology, which would be awesome. I still favor ‘Manticore.’
Upgrading a Mac running OS X Lion to the Server version is a simple process of downloading and running the Server installer app, but reverting to the non-server version is not as straightforward:
I’m using Mac OS X Server Lion 10.7.2 (11C74), I wanna change it to normal OS X 10.7.2 (not server). How do I do that? -Ahmad
UK newspaper The Independent launched an iPad app this morning, but it still needs a little work.
The free app is a far cry from the offering by The Guardian, which we raved about recently, but The Indie (as it is affectionately known by UK hacks) has had to struggle by on a tiny budget for decades. It’s not going to have the same sort of cash to spend on digital news projects.
Sadly, that shows in this morning’s newly-launched app. It’s functional, but very basic. There’s no access to an archive of issues; you get today’s paper, swiftly downloaded to your device when you open the app (so offline reading is possible).
But as a newspaper reading experience, it’s disappointing. You can’t swipe your way between articles. The primary navigation tool is an icon of a bullet list in the top left corner – tap this and you’ll see links to section front pages, and from those you can reach individual stories. The upshot is a lot of tapping to move around, which soon feels like hard work.
Stranger still, today’s launch issue shows signs of being released before it’s ready. On story pages, the newspaper’s masthead graphic doesn’t quite fit into the space allocated for it, so the line immediately below cuts through the graphic. Worse still, there are broken images all over the place, even on the front page. Teething problems, no doubt, but a shame they weren’t spotted before the app was made public.
If you’re a regular reader of The Indie and like reading news on your iPad, you’ll probably jump to get this app. But as it stands right now, there’s little on offer here to tempt people away from other news apps.
[xrr rating=40%]
There’s nothing like wandering through the Outback, camping under the stars…with an iPad: It can help identify the constellation you’re gazing at, let you sneak in a few chapters from your latest read or track your odyssey. That is, if you can keep the thing juiced.
Solar power is the obvious choice, but there aren’t many portable solar panels with the ability to charge the iPad; add the requirement that the panel be truly rugged and your choices become very, very slim. Luckily, the Joos Orange solar panel ($150), the outfit’s first product, may be the only choice you’ll need to consider.
I’ve been a bit quiet lately while considering the possible reasons why my new iPhone 4S has the worst battery life of any iPhone I’ve ever owned. Normally by now I would have written some battery troubleshooting tips to share with all of you. However, this time around the problem is anything but normal and the usual tips aren’t helping. So I’ve been quiet about this.
I cannot say the same thing about Apple’s discussion forums since the conversation about battery life there is reaching epic proportions and the conversation is rather loud.
It might be about to get a lot quieter with this tip, which seems to be working for me.
A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.
Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.
Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs’s sister, published her eulogy for her brother in The New York Times today. The piece is the most touching, intimate tribute to Steve we’ve seen since his passing.
The most wonderful time of the year isn’t Christmas, it’s Halloween. No other day on the calendar gives you an excuse to dress up like Han Solo and go out on the prowl in search of the sexiest version of Princess Leia you can find. A lot of our readers decided to celebrate Halloween with a tribute to their favorite computer company, so we asked our Twitter followers to tweet us pics their Apple inspired Halloween costumes and jack o’-lanterns.
If you have a picture of your Apple themed costume or jack o’ lantern and would like for us to include it in the gallery, tweet it over to us @cultofmac
Here are some of the best pictures from last night:
This could be fake, but it certainly looks real to us: iPhone hackers chpwn and Steve Troughton say they’ve gotten Siri working on the iPhone 4 and fourth-gen iPod touch, and they’ve got video to prove it. So it is possible. Sadly, though, both hackers say that whatever method they used for exploit is not for public release any time soon, so the rest of us poor suckers will just have to keep twiddling our thumbs.