Cult of Mac

If you’re in New York City June 21 and want to make sweet music with a bunch of strangers, take your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and head for the New York Stock Exchange.

Apple’s recent patent that would block piracy at concerts via an invisible infrared sensor has been more hotly contested than a bootleg Beatles’ concert performance.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which claims some two million members plus charter members including Lawrence Lessig and the ACLU, wants Steve Jobs to reconsider. And they want you to sign an online petition to get his attention.

Although BlueAnt focuses exclusively on Bluetooth communication gadgets (and now earphones), they aren’t as well recognized as some of the other names coming up in our review, and they don’t proffer up a ton of offerings. In fact, they currently only offer five; with the BlueAnt Q2 Headset ($100) positioned as their marquis headset.

After having his iPhone 4 literally stolen from his hand in a snatch-and-grab in San Francisco, Cabel Sasser was delighted to have it phone home two weeks later through Find My iPhone.

There was just one problem. The iPhone 4 was now 7,830 miles away. Here are the pictures, along with Cabel’s priceless reaction.

One of the big questions about Apple’s upcoming iTunes Match is how the online music service will handle songs acquired from non-standard sources, like analog LPs, or yes, file-sharing networks.

Coming this fall, iTunes Match will scan your iTunes library and make available in the cloud all the songs you’ve purchased online or ripped from CDs.

But Apple hasn’t explained what will happen with songs encoded from sources like tapes or LPs; or those couple of tracks you accidentally downloaded from a file-sharing network and forgot to delete. Will iTunes Match reject these songs or make them available?

In theory, the system should recognize most digitzed music. Apple has explicitly said it will not discriminate based on source, and someone likely ripped the songs from CD before sharing them with the world.

We’ve found a way for you to check how iTunes Match will treat your music library before Apple makes it public.

For almost twenty years now, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been toiling away, a lone developer who has single-handedly produced a library of old-school RPGs that contains over fifteen separate games.

To put the scope of Vogel’s prolificness in perspective, imagine if Richard Garriott had made the entire Ultima series by his lonesome and you’ll have an idea of the creativity and single-mindedness on display here: Vogel has collectively put together thousands of hours of some of the most intricately written and smartly crafted RPGs in computer gaming history at a pace that would give some of the biggest game design houses a permanent case of creative whiplash.

Vogel’s most recent and popular games have long been available for the Mac, but his latest title, Avadon: The Black Fortress, marks development for an entirely new platform: the iPad. It’s worth getting excited for.

Every day, there’s another app bundle, and sometimes it seems like each is more forgettable than the last. Code Canyon’s Freelance Mac App Bundle is a wonderful exception: it’s the first app bundle we’ve seen in ages worth getting excited about.

Although Apple still sells a white model, the piano black plastic MacBook is much missed. It might be Back to Black time for the MacBook line, though, as several anonymous sources are now reporting that the Thunderbolt and Sandy Bridge equipped MacBook Air could get a black anodized aluminum finish when it lands in July.

While you can hardly blame Microsoft entirely for this one, you’d think they’d at least notice that the featured Dictionary application on their official Windows Phone page had stolen its icon wholesale from the competition. Could we get a slow clap, please?

[via Craig Hockenberry’s Twitter]

We start another week of deals with two iPod bargains and software to help archive your Mac files. First up is the iMotion Kick Portable iPod speakers from Altec Lansing. Next is a 2GB iPod shuffle for just $30. Finally, there is Entropy for the Mac, an archiving utility.

Along the way, we also check out other devices of interest to Mac fans. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

When can you expect iOS 5 to drop on your iPhone? September’s a given, but the latest rumor gives an exact date that all the ripples of the iCloud will come to your device… along with the iPhone 5.

Ever since the first iPhone, bloggers and pundits have wondered what it would be like if Apple actually baked an iOS emulator into a future version of OS X that supported multitouch displays. Something Dashboard-like, called up with a function key press. I bet it would look something like this.

Many companies have stared Apple in the eye over Cupertino’s App Store ultimatum to ban links to out-of-app purchases by June 30th. Now the first one to blink is the streaming video subscription service, Hulu.

Adobe just released an update to its Flash Builder and Flex development tools, and for the first time developers can use the programs to create apps for distribution through the App Store for iOS devices. But are cross-platform Flash apps on the iPhone and the iPad really a good idea?

Are you looking for some good news about on-the-ropes RIM, battered and bruised by Apple’s iPhone and iPad one-two punch? Keep looking. Wall Street’s all but ready to throw in the towel on the punch drunk Blackberry maker.

Noterize, the popular note-taking app for the iPad mysteriously vanished from the App Store recently, with no indication of the reason for its disappearance. However, news that a takeover by voice technology company Nuance may be to blame, and could spell exciting things to come for voice recognition in iOS 5.

Turns out, creating a tablet that sells like an iPad is simple: just make it look and feel just like Apple’s device. Yes, you might run into the knee-crackers from Cupertino’s legal department, but you’re guaranteed a winner.

As we await the launch of iOS 5, jailbreak developers are creating new tweaks for the existing iOS 4 software that aims to provide us with a taste of the goodies we’ll be getting our hands on this fall. The latest is CameraLock — a great little utility that introduces a camera button to your lock screen.

Apple’s Mac Pro and Mac mini family of desktop computers are still patiently awaiting their Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt upgrades… but CNET’s Brian Tong has received word that a refresh for these machines isn’t too far away.

In an effort to compete with Apple’s latest Back to School promotion, Best Buy has launched a more attractive promo of its own that will see the retailer throw in a free $100 Best Buy gift card when customers purchase a qualifying Mac.

In an effort to deter the freeloaders who have been accessing the New York Post for free on their iPad through the NYPost.com website, the company has now blocked mobile Safari — directing readers to the subscription-only iPad app instead.

This week’s roundup of must-have games kicks off with the Nintendo DS classic Zookeeper — a vivid and engaging puzzle game in which your mission is to capture the animals and become the world’s best zookeeper. There’s more puzzle fun in Feevo HD, which boasts Bejeweled-like match gameplay from the makers of Tetris Online; and Bunny Shooter will be a huge hit with Angry Birds fans thanks to its physics-based bunny assassination with a bow & arrow.

I guess the PC dad lets the kid crash to the ground?

Spotlight, the search tool built into Mac OS X is extremely powerful if you know how to use it. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize the true power of it, and therefore lose out on a lot of functionality. In this video I’ll show you how to use Spotlight to its full potential.