Cult of Mac

Look around in Google’s new social network, Google+. You’ll see Apple design DNA everywhere. The clean, white space. The knowing and careful attention to typography type, shade and spacing. The icons are beautiful in a simple, balanced, Apple kind of way.

The coolest feature on the whole site, the “circle editor,” was in fact designed primarily by the same guy who was a lead designer on the original Macintosh.

Google+ presents itself as a social network that competes with Facebook. But once you use it, you realize that it’s an uber-communication device that can replace all forms of online communication, from blogging and micro-blogging to chatting, texting and e-mail. Talk about thinking different.

Google also took a page from the Apple playbook about entering late into a market that’s mature, but seriously flawed, and succeeding in that market by fixing what’s broken on the products of competitors. Think cell phones. When Apple announced its entry into the handset market in 2007, I thought it was too late for them to catch up to the dominant players, including Nokia, Palm, RIM and others. Apple caught up with and clobbered these former leaders by identifying what was seriously flawed with their products and making a product without those flaws. And this is exactly what Google is doing with Google+.

It’s clear that after many fits and starts, Google has finally built an awesome social network, in part by learning from Apple.

But what can Apple learn from Google+?

This week’s roundup of must-have apps kicks off with a brand new iPhone app from AOL Music that has been described as “Instagram for music.” AOL PLAY is completely free and focuses on music sharing and discovery, allowing you to listen to and share music with your friends on Twitter and Facebook, stream selected albums, and access over 47,000 SHOUTcast radio stations.

We also have an awesome new app called Trimit which will turn entire articles into a few short sentences, and Readdle’s latest iPad app that will turn any document into a professional PDF.

Cadence.FM (free) is an excellent iPhone app that compliments your workouts by providing you with a constant streamof music that consistently matches a chosen tempo — it’s your “on-demand personal DJ.”

Its best feature is that all of the music it plays is streamed from the SoundCloud music community and includes the best popular remixes, trance, house, dub-step and club music — so you don’t even need to store tracks locally on your device to use it. Just choose a channel and specify the BPM to which you’d like to work out and Cadence.FM will select the music for you — and it does a great job of it!

Dred Scott is a homeless musician who plays for passersby at Denver’s open-air 16th Street Mall.

A local producer heard him, recorded his music and launched an album on iTunes to help get Scott off the streets.

As the U.S. 2012 presidential election campaign gathers momentum, an app that checks the factual statements of politicians earned a thumbs up from Apple.

For the first time in history, the App Store now serves more downloads than the iTunes music store. With Apple recently announcing its 15 billionth app download, it’s no secret that the App Store has seen phenomenal success.

The App Store outpacing music is quite the impressive accomplishment for Apple, especially when you consider that the App Store has only been around for three years.

Apple has leaked an upcoming LED Cinema Display on its website that boasts a Thunderbolt connection. The new display looks exactly like the current model, but features Thunderbolt I/O technology on the back.

Does saving over $300 on 10 of the best apps for the Mac sound like a good deal to you? We think so too.

The Mac Superbundle consist of 10 Mac apps for $49. Apps in the bundle, like Parallels 6, usually run for about $50 or more, so check inside to see if something catches your eye.

Apple has just released the latest version of iOS to combat the PDF vulnerability that was uncovered by the recent JailbreakMe tool. iOS 4.3.4 is now available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. iOS 4.2.9 has also been released for the Verizon iPhone with the same fix.

We’ve had fun with the iPhone’s rolling shutter before, but this video’s especially neat because it illustrates what a rolling shutter does in real time by capturing a guitar’s vibrating strings.

For the second quarter, more apps were developed for Apple’s iOS and Android interest declined. The key: all those credit cards available via iTunes, a new report claims.

The world’s a small place, and the chance of any interaction happening between two randomly colliding human beings — a handshake, a hug, a watergun battle, a passionate embrace — are almost infinitesimally small, yet all those things happen billions of times per day. The Situationist is an iPhone app that aims to help along that random, serendipitous chance interaction between two people.

Foxconn Electronics currently assembles a whole host of Apple gear, and apparently persuaded the Cupertino company recently to make it the sole producer of a third iPad expected to launch later this year. It seems that’s not enough for the China-based manufacturer, however. It has no intention of being as loyal to Apple in return. According to industry sources, it will also produce what could be one of the iPad’s biggest rivals: an Amazon Kindle tablet.

It appears Google is learning a lesson from Apple: mobility mean big bucks. The search giant told reporters Thursday Android could become “an accelerator” for the business. There are more than 130 million Android devices now, the company says.

Apple’s App Store is a wonderful thing. When it launched in 2008, it opened up a world now home to 450,000 apps and games available to our iOS devices. There was nothing else like it. Never before had it been so easy for customers to discover and download mobile software, and for developers to distribute and sell it.

Developing for the App Store and the iOS platform isn’t without its flaws, however. As one iOS developer has recently learned, one of the biggest downsides to iOS development is piracy.

The iPod, the goose that laid the golden egg for Apple, is dying, analysts say. As the iPhone and iPad take on many of its features, iPod sales are expected to drop another 7.2 percent during the June quarter just ended.

This is hypnotic. Crowdflow.net tracked the movement of 880 iPhones through Europe in 2011 and then put together this video, showing where they ended up. The results look like stars swirling in a nebula, or bioluminescent plankton mating in the ink black sea.

[via GigaOm]

Whether or not OS X Lion shows up on the Mac App Store late next week, as All Things D believes, or on the 26th, as some Apple Store employees belive, one thing’s for sure: it’s coming before the month is out.

So it’s not totally a surprise that Amazon.com is running low on copies of Snow Leopard, having sold out entirely of retail copies of OS X 10.6 on their UK site and only selling it through third-parties on their US site.

What is surprising, at least to us, is that it’s happening so soon. How are people going to upgrade to Lion if it’s impossible to buy Snow Leopard?

Following its absence during 2010, Apple could be set to launch another round of the developer “Tech Tour World Tour” later this year to coincide with the release of iOS 5 and iCloud.

Yes, that is a Parallels Desktop 6 USB stick jammed into a MacBook Pro’s ethernet port, as seen on the official Apple Store page. I wouldn’t give Apple (or Parallels, who likely supplied the image) too much guff about it, though: I’ve made the same mistake a couple of times myself.

[via OS X Daily]

Though the iPhone is still yet to benefit from Apple’s latest dual-core A5 chip, the company has already begun testing its successor, according to a Reuters report. However, it may not be produced by Samsung like its predecessors.

Usually only a nobody walks in L.A., but the greater Los Angeles will be turned into a wasteland of nobodies when 10-mile stretch of the 405 Freeway closes July 15-17.

The locals are braced for “carmageddon,” the gridlock of all gridlocks as the most traveled freeway in the U.S. shuts down.
Some are predicting that it may also be a test of iPhone apps, mainly those designed to re-route drivers based on traffic conditions.

We apologize if this is getting confusing. At first there were supposed to be updated MacBook Airs coming today with OS X Lion, then it was reported that we’d see new hardware from Apple on July 26th.

Now, it appears that new MacBook Airs with backlit keyboards and more storage could be coming as soon as next week!

Do you remember Apple’s OS X Downloads page? That page used to be a resource for many of the best apps and widgets on the Mac.

We say “used to” because the OS X Downloads page has actually been shut down and replaced with a pretty Mac App Store banner.

Apple has come a long way since the 1970s. While the Mac was seen for years as a niche product that would never appeal to a mass audience, Apple has just been declared the third largest PC vendor in the US.

Apple went from fifth place to third this business quarter with a 10.7% stake in the US PC market.