Cult of Mac

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Calendar apps are usually pretty boring. You log an appointment in it and then you never think about the app again. Fantastical is here to bring a little bit of flavor and awesomeness to your drab calendar app. Fantastical allows you to create events instantly via natural language input. One of the great things is that the app works perfectly with iCal, Entourage, and Outlook so you don’t have to change over to a new calendar system.

Lucky for you, the team behind Fantastical, Flexibits, wanted us to share the love with all our readers, so today we’re giving away 3 promo codes for this awesome new calendar app. Soon enough you’ll be using natural language to create events in no time. Of course you have to enter to win. Here’s how to enter today’s contest.

Responding to RIM’s layoff announcement yesterday, Wall Street said the BlackBerry maker had met its worst nightmare in Apple… a one-trick pony about to be dragged to the glue factory by iOS 5 and iMessage.

Oh, man, finally. Years after showing Europe how a streaming music service ought to be done, and just a couple of weeks after Apple made it clear that their own iTunes-In-The-Cloud service wouldn’t do streaming at all, Spotify has officially confirmed that it will be coming to the United States within a matter of weeks.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg scoffed that there was no reason to release a native Facebook iPad app because the “iPad’s not mobile!”

Guess he’s changed his mind: Facebook’s prepping an official iPad app, and it’s already in final testing.

The iPad 2 jailbreak we’ve all long been waiting for could arrive as early as this evening.

Don’t mess with Apple’s designs. That’s the message as the iPad and iPhone maker steps up its attacks on rival Samsung. As the two prepare to face off in court today, Apple has now amplified its verbiage, claiming that Samsung products “blatantly imitate” the iPhone and iPad’s sleek appearance. Earlier, the tech giant referred to Samsung as merely the “copyist.”

Apple may be considering licensing Rosetta to developers whose software might otherwise be left behind in the transition to Lion.

If the rumors are true then iWeb will go away along with MobileMe in 2012, but luckily for you there is plenty of time to look for alternative applications. Giles Turnbull offered up a few ideas on What To Do With Your iWeb Site that you should take a look at if you haven’t. I’d like to add to his advice by recommending four popular desktop web design applications that run on Mac OS X.

Ball Frenzy isn’t a game I expected to like – but I do.

If you’ve ever used RSS feeds to keep track of new stuff the web (and people used to, before Twitter and Facebook came along), the chances are good that you’ll have heard of an application called NetNewsWire.

I always had a heck of a time figuring out what to get my dad for Father’s Day; he never wore ties, didn’t have patience for gadgets and wasn’t a big sports fan. I might have sent him one of these, though (and if he had ever read his email, he might have received it).

Life doesn’t get any better than lining up tracks at a party, armed with an iPad and DJ tools like Griffin’s iRig and StompBox. Oh wait — it does!

FaceKandi is a new app that uses Apple’s FaceTime chat to hook you up with real live people to “chat, flirt, make friends or simply have a bit of fun.”

The live, one-on-one FaceTime chat works on the iPhone 4, the iPad 2 and the fourth-gen iPod Touch. The devs say the app does not store your personal data, or record your Facetime ID.

Anyone playing around with an iPhone 4 for any length of time will have realized that its compactness, decent sensor-processor combo and the huge selection of editing apps available make the darn thing is a superb platform for making both films and still photographs — if you can work around some of the gadget’s limitations. In this case, Habbycam, a small Southern Camifornia-based company that supplies all manner of rigs to the film industry, came up with the Habbycam iGrip ($140) as a better way to hold and position the iPhone for extended shooting. We think it needs work.

There’s no rest for the suits: just days after iCloud Communications announced it filed over the use of the iCloud name, publisher J.T. Colby and Co. has filed a suit against Apple over the use of the term “iBook.”

The publisher claims the trademark was bought from Byron Preiss Visual Publications in 2006 as part of a bankruptcy sale. Priess registered his first ISBN for an “iBook” back in 2000 and published over 1,000 titles under the “iBooks” brand.

As neat as Apple’s FaceTime service is, for many people, it tends to be just a novelty. With two FaceTime capable devices though, it can become a lot more useful. In this video, you’ll see how you can expand the possibilities of FaceTime beyond video conferencing.

It’s been a bad year for RIM so far. Their BlackBerry business has been harried on all sides by the iPhone, and their stock has delated largely thanks to the arterial spray of customers they are losing to Apple.

Worse, in response to the iPad, RIM released the much heralded BlackBerry Playbook, which might just go down in the books as one of the worst, least functional and woefully misguided pieces of consumer technology ever.

Finally, just last week, Apple totally eliminated RIM’s sole advantage over iOS by announcing iMessage, which Wall Street is already saying will kill BlackBerry’s remaining prospects in enterprise.

Anyone surprised that RIM”s now announcing layoffs after seeing their first quarter results? I thought not.

We start the day with Apple’s new back to school sale. Get a $100 Apple gift card when you buy MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or iMac from the Apple Store for Education. The gift card is a change from last year, when Apple offered a free iPod when you purchased a Mac. The gift card can be applied to the App Stores, iTunes, and the iBookstore. Next is a deal on a 30GB iPod video for just $100. We wrap up the spotlight deals with a 24-inch Cinema Display.

As always, details on these items and more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

This is not how you make a universal remote for the iPhone.

Apple’s new iTunes Match functionality is an incredible boon to music lovers, effortlessly matching your local music to Apple’s cloud servers, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Instead, iTunes Match is the product of numerous inked deals between Cupertino and music publishers: no deal, and iTunes Match can’t mirror tracks from that label.

So bad news, soul and R&B fans. Numero Group has just vocally drawn a line in the sand: iTunes Match legitimizes piracy, and they won’t be part of it.

Wondering just where in the hell those Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs with Thunderbolt are? Sitting in a warehouse, just waiting for OS X Lion to go gold, according to the most recent report.

Neat spot by Alam van Roemburg: the iCloud icon uses the Golden Ratio, which has been thought since the 16th Century to lead to pleasing, harmonious proportions in aesthetic design.

What do you know? Think Geek has taken their excellent chrome suction joystick for the iPad, shrunk it down and brought it to the iPhone and iPod Touch. $17.99 will buy you one, and while I’ve always thought these miniature controllers were more trouble than they are worth, the iPad version of Joystik-It works pretty well.

If you do a lot of gaming on your iPhone, specifically in games which have a virtual D-Pad, you could do worse than one of these.

Social networking giant Facebook is secretly working on a way to put their own App Store on tens of millions of iOS devices. It’s called Project Spartan, and it’s an aggressive attempt to build an HTML5 front end for all of Facebook’s existing apps on any Apple device, even without Flash installed.

We can all recall the terror-filled moment when we decided to create a home network. Just as two programs to ease the process gain steam, iCloud comes along, and risks making the whole concept of home AV networks obsolete.