Cult of Mac

The first travel guide apps for Cuba are arriving in iTunes as a record number of Americans visit the country.

iCuba is billing itself as the first travel app for the island nation. In truth, it arrived in iTunes about a month after the Cuban Beaches in HD app, which offers hotel as well as beach info, and the Havana Travel Guide which promises an augmented reality feature.  There are also a number of map apps for Cuba.

iCuba is offered in English, Spanish and Italian for $5.99. There are a few hiccups — notably, the English translation offers a category of “luxory” hotels — and other tourism info looks scarce. Still, the maps are available offline which makes consulting them easier when traveling and you can make hotel reservations via the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch versions.

The Havana Travel guide for $4.99 offers up to five days of itineraries, hotels and restaurants by budget range, nightlife info, public transport and safety tips.

Havana Good Time, by resident expat author Conner Gorry, promises to “open doors to the forbidden city” with 160+ entries that will have you living like a local. If you want to check out the $2.99 app, though, you’ll download it in the U.S. iTunes store before you go — since restrictions will keep you from getting it when you are actually local.

The bump in travel to the communist-ruled island is attributed to the U.S. government easing some travel restrictions to Cuba, mostly for “purposeful” travel (family, some business and religious activities). However, a battle is currently ensuing to turn back restrictions to the Bush-era bans.

Via iPhone Italia

Second-generation Apple TV users across the globe are reporting that they are not able to update their devices to the latest firmware. The complaints can be seen on a sizable thread on Apple’s Support Communities website.

Now that the iPhone has sent the the common point-and-shoot camera the way of Kodachrome, there’s no excuse for bad pics.

Designer and photographer Dan Marcolina wrote a well-received book on iPhone Photography called iPhone Obsessed. Now he’s got an iPad app companion to the book, which teaches even more tips and tricks.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.8 last week while I was traveling and I managed to find a nice Wi-Fi connection to use to update my 13-inch MacBook Air. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with the new OS release until today. I found something nice while looking through the System Profiler for any changes. Mac OS X 10.6.8 had added TRIM support to all Macs that have SSD drives installed — a feature that will benefit my MacBook Air.

There’re absolutely zero reasons not to get this incredibly slick, fly-by-the-seat-of-you-pants remake of the 90’s classic racing shooter Death Rally iOS game unless you hate fun or you’re dead.

I picked up a Magic Trackpad this weekend, and while browsing Apple’s instructions printed on the box was struck by the similarity between the tagline and photo of the hand with the trackpad, and the original ads for the Macintosh and its revolutionary mouse back in 1984. As well as how much simpler the directions for use are today.

Look familiar?

Beating Skype to the iPad by just one day, VoIP app Fring is now available as a universal app on the iOS App Store, and it has one big advantage over Skype: not only can it work as an IM client, playing nice with Facebook, MSN Messenger, GTalk and more, but it’s also the first iPad app to support group video-calling over WiFi and 3G.

A fantastic update to a fantastic app. You can download it here.

iPhone and PS3 hacker extraordinaire George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, has gone establishment, but the Limera1n hacker wasn’t scooped up by Apple or Sony: instead, the famously anti-establishment jailbreaker is now employed at Facebook. Say what?

“Dude, your laptop case is, like, totally sick, brah!”

I looked up. It was my waiter, every inch of him a bro. He looked like the kind of guy whose cocktail of choice was a pounder of vodka and Mountain Dew, who spelled extreme with triple x-es, who never met a problem he couldn’t jump a skateboard over. He wore an Offspring t-shirt and a wallet on a chain covered in stickers. His goatee looked like a mullet growing out of his face.

I looked down. The “sick” case in question was the BookBook Case by TwelveSouth ($80) — a case which was designed to make my 11-inch MacBook Air look like some dusty vellum tome plucked from an ancient library.

Notorious hacker group Lulzsec finished off their string of fifty high-profile server hacks yesterday with a bang: they released some AT&T internal documents that reveals that AT&T have already tested the iPad running on their next-gen 4G LTE network.

Wondering what’s changed in the latest developer preview of iOS 5? Although there’s always countless tweaks to be found in every beta of a major new iOS release, here are twelve of the bigger changes that have caught our eye so far.

It’s been a great week for iOS gamers, with fantastic new releases from Gameloft, Chillingo, Sega and Telltale Games. Picking our favorites has been some task.

Here’s this week’s roundup — featuring the return of Sonic in a brand new arcade kart racer, an iPad platformer that uses your iPhone as a controller, and the final episode of Monkey Island.

We come to the last week of June with three hardware deals: two max-out iMacs and a number of MacBook Air laptops. First up is an iMac desktop sporting an Intel Core i7 quad 2.93GHz engine. The iMac with a 27-inch screen is also bundled with a 2TB hard disk drive for just $1,828. Next is an iMac with an Intel Core i3 dual 3.2GHz processor. The iMac with a 27-inch screen is bundled with 8GB of RAM and a 3-year AppleCare plan – all for just $1,519. Finally, if you’re looking for a more light-weight mobile option, check out a number of MacBook Air units, starting with a 1.4GHz model with 64GB SSD and 2GB of RAM for just $829.

Along the way, we also check out a number of other Apple-related items, including a bike mount for your iPhone, a 72 percent discount on select tablet accessories, and other gadgets for your iPhone, iPad or Mac. As always, details on these and many others can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page starting right after the jump.

Sick of juggling multiple data plans across your iPhone and iPad? That could soon be coming to an end, as US carriers stroke their chins and openly muse about shared data plans.

It’s a total embarrassment, but less than a year after Microsoft finally “caught up” with Apple’s three year lead and released a modern, multitouch smartphone operating system in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is having to do it again, this time having been caught with their pants down by the iPad.

Their solution? Windows 8, the next version of their desktop operating system, carefully optimized to support power-sipping ARM processors and skinned with a special, tablet-specific operating system. Now a report suggests that Microsoft will rush Windows 8 to market to make sure that the iPad 3 doesn’t eat Microsoft’s tablet lunch before they’ve even sat down to the table.

If you want to find a Symbian owner in Australia, the best place to look might be in line at the Apple Store. Apple is now Australia’s No. 1 mobile phone vendor as Symbian maker Nokia lost nearly half of its market share during the first quarter of 2011.

In an attempt to comply with pro-consumer laws, Apple is going to allow customers who mistakenly purchase an iOS app or get burned by a shoddy one the ability to get a refund within seven days of purchase. Don’t get too excited, though: you’ll have to live in Taiwan to take advantage of the revised return policy.

While the most war many of us will see on our iPads is a spot of Angry Birds, Singapore’s got bigger plans for Apple’s tablet: they’re issuing an iPad to each new recruit to use in action on the battlefield.

All that’s left for BlackBerry-maker RIM is to rearrange the deck chairs. After losing its smartphone market, its smartphone subscribers, and Wall Street, the Waterloo, Ontario handset company now sees its developers manning the lifeboats headed for Apple’s iOS. Coders say they’re tired of inconsistent interfaces and applications that just won’t work.

Remember Marathon? If you’re a long-time Mac user, sure you do: back in the early 90s, Bungie’s sci-fi FPS series was the one shining light illuminating the Steveless Dark Ages of Macintosh gaming. Even if you’re only a recent convert to Mac, though, you’re probably familiar in a roundabout way with Marathon: it takes place in the same universe and is the direct prequel to Bungie’s bestsellingHalo series for the Xbox 360.

Either way, we’ve got great news for any Apple gamer. Marathon’s coming back… this time for the iPad.

Here’s a little gem I found on the App Store this week. +Loop is a video recorder app for iDevices, but it stands out from the crowd because it records multiple mini video clips in one, and costs nothing.

On June 14 Apple began selling its GSM iPhone 4 unlocked in America, but what if they don’t have any left when you go to pick one up at your local store? Well, the guys at the checkout can now take an AT&T iPhone and unlock it instantly for you.

This is Monster Soup, my latest favorite puzzle for iOS. It’s a fast-paced color-matching game with lots of personality and a great sense of humor.

Starting in 2012, if you want to see Samsung and Apple together, your best bet is in a courtroom. The two rivals’ “frenemy” status apparently has reached the breaking point, with a “deafening” roar of leaks indicating the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant will dumping Samsung built A5 and A6 processors as part of a larger purge that could completely eliminate the Korean manufacturer from Apple’s entire supply chain.

Come iOS 5, Apple might finally win the war against jailbreakers. Even if the Dev Team prevails, though, Apple still might succeed in limiting jailbreaking to tethered exploits only, as well as finally axe the ability for users to downgrade to older versions of iOS.