Want Siri-like abilities on your Mac? Nuance has just launched their latest Dragon product onto the Mac App Store. Called Dragon Express, the $49 app brings Nuance speech recognition to your menu bar… the same powerful engine Siri uses to crunch your voice!
Apple’s iPhone 4S is one of the hottest smartphones available right now, spawning lengthy launch-day queues outside of Apple stores all over the world. In Hong Kong, where the device goes on sale in just a few hours’ time, police have been called to settle violent fights that broke out with a group of South Asian “professional queuers” who attempted to push their way to the front of the line.
Apple doesn’t really like it when its employees speak to the press. Like, at all. So it’s interesting to see a British voice actor who provided the male voice For Siri — arguably the voice of Apple these days — openly speaking to journalists about how he came to speak for every iPhone 4S on Earth, especially considering Cupertino tried to muzzle him.
Our newest Cult of Mac Apple-inspired tee will have you repeating that famous line from Jerry Maguire to all your geeky friends. Well, maybe not but your girlfriend other will think it’s cute. And if you’re single you could always just wear it to Macworld. I mean iWorld. It’s called iWorld now, right?
Unisex Tees are finely crafted right here in the USA, are limited in quantity, and are just $22 each. You can pick up our new tee and other fruit-inspired graphic tees right now over at MightTees.com.
Apple is in the cat bird seat when it comes to dominating personal computer sales in China. A new survey by Morgan Stanley finds more than 20 percent of Chinese consumers looking to buy a computer want a Mac. There’s just one hitch: few of China’s citizens are willing to pay more than $1,000.
A Hulu Plus application seems like the perfect addition to Apple’s $99 set-top box. While the device already comes packing a native Netflix app, the only way users can access current TV shows is by using the iTunes Store. According to some sources, however, a Hulu Plus app is ready to go, but Apple may not release it.
It seems that panoramic camera feature isn’t the only thing Apple is hiding inside its latest iOS 5 software. There’s also an autocorrect keyboard feature just like that found on Android devices, which suggests words as you type making it quicker and easier than ever to type on an iOS device.
Yes, cloud computing is all the rage these days; question is, d’you plonk all your stuff down on a distant server, or keep your digital junk safe and dry inside your own home, with your own personal cloud? If you picked the latter, Akitio’s new NAS device might appeal to you.
Ever faced with one of those situations where you need to give out your phone number, but you feel a bit iffy about doing it? RingShuffle is a free app that’s ideal to have on your iPhone for exactly those occasions.
I could tell what Sonos and its PR firm thought about the product as I walked in.
Festooned over a thousand square feet of penthouse atop one of San Francisco’s finest boutique hotels were samovars of fresh coffee, pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and a banquet table overflowing with edibles under picture windows filled with panoramic views of Union Square and the San Francisco skyline. The layout was also outfitted, front-to-back, in a couple thousand dollars worth of Sonos gear — including the subject of this review, the Sonos Play:3 ($299).
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsyOlwmHt5E
We told you last week that Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview would be making its way to theaters in the US starting November 19th. Now, an official teaser trailer for the upcoming movie has been posted for the world to see.
The interview consists of missing footage of author and journalist Bob Cringely with Steve Jobs from the 1995 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Landmark Theaters will distribute the movie in 19 cities, including where Steve Jobs lived, Palo Alto.
Election officials in Oregon are giving an “aye” to an iPad scheme that helped disabled voters cast ballots in yesterday’s elections.
Some 89 disabled people were able to have their say in choosing a representative to Congress thanks to Apple’s tablet computer, Politico reports.
One voter was “just so tickled with the iPad he’s committed to coming back in January to mark his ballot,” Secretary of State Kate Brown said.
A high school in Bulgaria is reportedly going to dump Lenin as its namesake for Steve Jobs. And if it does, it probably won’t be the first school named after the Apple co-founder.
If reports are to be believed, a technical secondary school in Bulgaria would topple communist politician Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as its namesake in favor of the symbolic innovation and insight offered by Steve Jobs. (Or a famous scientist. The decision hasn’t been made, yet.)
Remember when Samsung requested that Apple hand over its carrier agreements in the Australian court? Bloomberg is now reporting that the judge has sided with Samsung in the case and is demanding that Apple hand over the juicy details on its iPhone contracts.
Apple is opposing the disclosure, calling Samsung’s request “a fishing expedition.”
The console gaming industry has been suffering as of late, with companies like Nintendo reporting record losses and hardware price cuts. On the opposite side of the coin, the mobile game industry has skyrocketed to the forefront of innovation and user adoption, thanks largely to the mass distribution provided by the App Store.
A new report by Flurry Analytics shows how the iOS and Android platforms are absolutely dominating the US mobile game industry, with over half of the revenue in the US coming from the App Store and Android Market.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple’s former VP of retail, Ron Johnson, is tapping former Apple colleagues to join him at his new job as CEO of JC Penney. Next to Steve Jobs himself, Ron Johnson has had more impact than anyone on Apple’s incredibly successful retail division over the years.
Johnson officially left Apple nearly two weeks ago for the position of JC Penney CEO. He is reportedly coaxing former Apple talent to join him at JC Penney, including two men that used to be very high up on Apple’s employee food chain.
On the iPhone 4S, you can trigger Siri in one of two ways. You can either long press the home button, or you can turn on the “Raise to Speak” option under System Preferences and trigger Siri just by lifting your 4S towards your face.
That might not seem like a big deal, but that little feature led to Apple redesigning the way the iPhone’s IR proximity sensor works in the iPhone 4S.
We’ve mentioned before that TextEdit’s icon under OS X has Apple’s entire “Think Different” essay written on it, if you blow it up big enough.But this one’s new to us: it also appears in its majority on Lion’s new All My Files icon.
Here’s to the crazy ones indeed… crazy to write an entire essay on an icon meant to be rendered in less than 80 pixels squared. Very cool.
[via Finer Things In Mac]
I had previously written the following short article in response to a reader’s question about their MagSafe power adapter. Although the recent class action settlement has seemingly resolved this particular issue, some readers might find it helpful to look at this article as a case study, which may offer some points relevant to other product defects.
“Hi Cult of Mac,
About four months ago I purchased a used 2007 MacBook Pro online from a seller on eBay. Two weeks ago I noticed the charger was discolored and looked like it had started to melt! I can now see the wires inside the cable near the base of where it connects to my MacBook Pro. I don’t think I caused any damage to the cable. I never purchased AppleCare. What should I do?”
Some people count down the days until Christmas, but for me, Christmas is coming early this year with the December 1st debut of Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade 2, their widely-anticipated sequel to a game I still think is an elegiac action masterpiece.
I’ve only got another three weeks to wait, but in the meantime, Justin Davis over at IGN got a chance to take Infinity Blade 2 for a hands-on. What to expect? Don’t expect just a couple new areas, a few new helmets and a cool new sword or two. This isn’t just a phoned-in sequel, it’s a generational leap at least four times beefier than the first game… already one of the most sizable titles on the App Store.
Although the iPhone 4S might be dismissed as nothing but a spec bump phone, it does have one distinctive advantage over every other smartphone out there: Siri. Anyone who wants to compete with the iPhone 4S (and, presumably, the future iPad 3) will have to come up with their own answer to Siri, or be lost.
Well, what do you know. The hunt by Apple’s competition to find small voice recognition startups and absorb them has already begun with the revelation that Amazon has already picked up a company in the hopes of launching their own would-be Siri-like speech recognition service.
I’m beginning to like using the keyboard a lot more these days and the tip today shows how useful a keyboard can be. I use Safari a great deal and I download a lot of content from the internet using it. Every so often I need to see the current download list, which is easily accessible from the keyboard.
Over the course of the last ten years, Apple has built over 350 Apple Stores, so Thomas Park decided to put up a huge gallery of every single one of their store fronts.
The results are here, and it’s actually fascinating to be able to scroll past of all the storefronts in a go. Early on, Apple seemed to favor flanking each entry way to the Apple Store with a piano black monolith emblazoned with the Apple logo, but that quickly fell out of favor in lieu of brushed aluminum and glass whenever possible. As always, though, it’s the exception Apple Stores that are the most interesting in their design: places like the 5th Avenue location, or Convent Garden.
You can find the whole gallery here.
Apple would love to sell the iPhone to China Mobile’s 628 million subscribers, but there is a hitch to any agreement: the carrier wants a piece of the App Store pie. But a pact isn’t needed, argues one Wall Street watcher, especially since there are already 10 million Apple smartphones on the China network.
Despite losing its exclusivity to the iPhone back in February when Apple introduced the CDMA iPhone 4 for Verizon, AT&T is still the most dominant iPhone carrier in the United States, enjoying 60% of iPhone 4 subscribers.