Cult of Mac

Those Chinese censors are at it again… and this time the popular Flipboard app is the victim.

Patent troll Lodsys — the company who threatened to sue multiple iOS indie devs on Friday for using Apple’s own in-app purchasing mechanism — has responded to the widespread furor over their actions in a series of Q&A posts. And guess what? It turns out we were all wrong about them being dicks. In fact, they’re the real victims here! Boo hoo!

Seagate is set to launch a new addition to its GoFlex range called the Satellite – a battery-powered hard drive that connects to any device equipped with Wi-Fi, including your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Apple is reinventing the way we think about accessing application windows, organization of those windows, and the way we access running applications. A new feature called Mission Control in Mac OS X 10.7 lion makes it all easy.

Initial reviews deeming the device “half-baked” meant a bad start for the BlackBerry PlayBook, and things just got a little worse as RIM recalls nearly 1,000 units.

We’ve been speculating on Apple’s partnership with Nuance for some weeks now, and confirmation the two companies are working together comes with the new speech technology discovered in the Mac OS X Lion beta.

Apple is offering free repairs to those with Macs and iOS devices who had their equipment damaged in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March.

In a video interview on Vokle, it was said that iDevice hacker @p0sixninja mentioned a possible iPad 2 jailbreak release within the next couple of weeks.

The new SportWatch GPS offers Nike+ functionality without the need for an iPod or iPhone. There’s lots to like about Nike’s latest toy, but early teething trouble combined with poor GPS accuracy are currently letting it down.

Looking for a cool new case to protect your magical iPad from slime, scratches, termites, and falling debris? Yesterday we published our review on the beautiful, wooden BrudaCase and now we’re giving our readers a chance to win a Cherry BrudaCase for free (retail value $150).

We’ll select one reader at random as the winner of the giveaway and have a BrudaCase mailed out to you. The contest will run from Friday, May 13th til Monday, May 16th at 12PM PST. Limit of one entry per person.

Green Farm is Gameloft’s answer to popular farming sims such as Farmville. It’s a free, online ‘social game’ that can be played on your iPhone, iPad, or through Facebook. It boasts a fresh design and huge variety that attempts to “take farming apps to the next level.”

Hector is the hugely entertaining detective from Telltale Games who’s been solving crimes on our iPhones for some time — and now he’s brought his foul mouth and vulgar wit to the iPad. We Negotiate with Terrorists is the first episode of this law-enforcement comedy in HD.

Find out more about the applications above and check out MetalStorm: Online and Samurai Girl below.

Sometimes, even Macs get laggy. Logging in can be sluggish, and even just routine tasks can start to crawl. Whether you know it or not, resource hogs can be lurking in your system and slowing down your work. After following these five simple steps though, your Mac can be almost as good as new.

Components purported to be for the fifth-generation iPhone have sparked new rumors that the device’s camera and LED flash will be separated, and will no longer sit snuggled up to one another in the corner. Strengthening these rumors is a case discovered on trade site Alibaba for an ‘iPhone 5G’, which features a mysterious new hole in its rear.

Rumors are circulating about a new design feature in the upcoming iPhone 5: An edge-to-edge screen.

The scuttlebutt originated a couple of months ago with a post on iDealsChina, and has been re-enforced by the appearance of a case for such a design on AliBaba, a disreputable online clearinghouse for buying cheap crap from China.

It all sounds pretty shady, but these kinds of sources predicted other Apple products in the past. Even more compelling is that the Wall Street Journal claims a source that has seen a prototype of such a design.

The rumor is either true or false. Who knows? Regardless, an edge-to-edge screen makes sense. If it’s possible to engineer, it’s likely to be built.

Here’s why: There is a fundamental tension in mobile design between minimum case size and maximum screen real estate. For the overall size of the phone or tablet: the smaller, the better. For the size of the screen: the bigger, the better.

Something’s gotta give.

Google announced this week the June 15 launch of its shiny new Chromebook product. People are comparing it to the Apple iPad, with some even saying the iPad doesn’t stand a chance.

The Chromebook is a laptop designed to run only browser-based applications. The idea is that nothing resides on the device. Everything is in the cloud. The Chromebook is cheap, gets great battery life, and because data resides in the cloud, idiot users can’t screw up.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that with PCs, “the complexity of managing your computer is really torturing users… It’s a flawed model fundamentally.”

True enough. What you didn’t hear anywhere in the Google announcement is the dreaded “i” word.

The iPad has already solved the problem for consumers that Brin talked about. And that’s the biggest reason Chromebook will fail.

Go here to read the whole story.

At the top of this week’s list of must-have iOS applications is one of our favorite instant messaging tools: IM+ Pro. It has already featured in our list of the ‘Best iOS Apps for Instant Messaging‘, but the introduction of its new Neighbors service meant we couldn’t help but shout about it again.

TweetyPop is a super new Twitter application from TapFactory that allows you to view and interact with your tweets in a unique new way. It throws away the chronological list you get with every other Twitter client and delivers a 3 dimensional Twitter space.

Adobe first announced its first three Photoshop Touch applications at Photoshop World back in March, and they’re now available to download from the App Store. Color Lava, Eazel and Nav are all designed for the iPad and aim to enhance your desktop Photoshop experience with the help of a touch-based device.

Find out more about the applications above and check out OmniOutliner – this week’s final must-have – after the break.

(Update: Many — but not all — of the users in the Apple Support Communities are now reporting that the activation servers are back online, and their devices working again.)

Looks like the Lion Beta 3 Preview might not be the only problem Apple’s dealing with this morning.

As of last night, an ongoing problem with Apple’s activation servers seems to be leaving many iDevices recently updated or restored to iOS 4.3.3 bricked around the world.

Apple has released the fifth version of its developer preview for Xcode 4.1. But what’s new?

We’ve received various reports from developers testing Lion Developer Preview 2 that the Preview 3 update is no longer appearing in Software Update on machines running Lion Developer Preview 2 released on March 30th.

Here are the new wallpapers in OS X Lion Developer Preview 3, released this afternoon. There are poppies, ducks, and an actual lion.

They come courtesy of it’s all tech, who bundled them up into a downloadable zip file (26.1MB).

Check them out:

This is new the login screen in Lion Developer Preview 3, which was just released this afternoon. And we also have a list of some of the biggest changes.

Apple has just released the third major Developer Preview of Lion, the upcoming update of Mac OS X.

The 1.07GB update is avaliable to registered Mac developers running developer preview 2 update 2.

There’s also an update to Xcode, which is now version 4.1. Developers must upgrade Xcode to 4.1 after installing Lion Preview 3.

We’ll have more details soon…

Look, memory and me just don’t get on. I forget where I’ve left my keys, even when I’ve left them on the Special Key Hanging Hook that I put up precisely to avoid that.

I forget why I went upstairs. I forget why I walked from one room to the next. Once, I forgot why I stood up from my chair, stayed there swaying in confusion for a moment, then just sat down again.

Imagine, then, the state of dribbling horror a game like Memneon leaves me in.

After indie dev James Thomson was threatened with a lawsuit earlier today by a patent troll called Lodsys for using Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism in his pCalc iOS app, his first instinct was to play things cautious and not release the update scheduled for today.

Several hours later, though, and Thomson is feeling bolder: he’s decided to release the update to pCalc anyway. But will the other devs hit with shakedowns today be so plucky and defiant?

Have you ever watched a YouTube video on your iOS device, and wish that you could download it and have the video forever? If you’re jailbroken, then YourTube 2 is the tweak that you’ll want to check out. Available in Cydia for $5.00, YourTube 2 is capable of downloading YouTube videos from right within your stock YouTube app. It’ll also give you the ability to add the video directly to your video library. Is it worth the $5 price tag?