Cult of Mac

Although Apple’s own Game Center once threatened to topple it from its perch as iOS’s most popular gaming social network, OpenFeint is still going strong, largely thanks to an open, cross-platform approach that allows iOS and Android devices to play with one another on equal social footing.

But that’s not to say that OpenFeint hasn’t had its missteps. Last month, a security researcher discovered that OpenFeint commonly linked iOS devices’ unique device identifiers (or UDIDs) to the phone owner’s Facebook profile. The result? A list of names for 75 million registered OpenFeint users, linked to their iOS devices and Facebook accounts.

OpenFeint has since closed the security hole in their system, but as security researcher Aldo Cortesi tells Wired, if a network as big as OpenFeint managed to link UDIDs with specific user accounts across games as popular as TinyWings, Pocket God, Robot Unicorn Attack and Fruit Ninja, there are probably a lot more apps out there flying under the App Store Approval Team’s radar. And those app developers could, even now, be selling your information to advertisers.

Last week it was Hearst Corp. Today, Condé Naste, publisher of magazines such as the New Yorker, announced an iPad subscription deal with Apple. The agreements appear to mark the end of a stalemate which devalued publishers’ iPad applications while also keeping some of the most popular periodicals from the best-selling tablet.

Readers of the New Yorker can now pay $5.99 per month for the iPad version, instead of $4.99 per issue. Most importantly, subscribers to the print magazine now get the iPad app for free. Previously, print subscribers were required to pay extra for each issue available on the iPad.

A sex offender was recently put behind bars for 20 years after engaging in sexually explicit chats and exchanging photos with two young teens. 

The 35-year-old man used a social media app called Whoshere on his iPhone to instant message the girls who used it via iPod Touch.

Social networking-cum-hook-up opps like Grindr have occasionally been in the news in sex assault cases involving minors. An iPod Touch was recently taken as evidence by police in a sex blackmailing case involving an 11-year old girl said to be chatting via an app with a person she thought was a 12-year-old boy.

Cult of Mac talked to Stephen S. Smith, co-founder myRete, the makers of Whoshere about the case involving his app and why perps and pervs should think twice when they use it.

The iPhone comes with a pre-installed weather application that takes its data from The Weather Channel. While it looks okay, it isn’t exactly crammed with features, it doesn’t go into any detail, it doesn’t come with the iPad, and I find its weather forecast to be far from accurate.

That being the case, over the years I’ve been trying out all sorts of third-party weather apps that do a far better job – here’s my list of the App Store’s best weather apps.

Apple. The brand is worth $153 billion and this year tops uber brandname Google, according to a new survey. The Mountain View, Calif. company, which topped the list in 2010, slipped to second place to $111 billion.

“Apple earned an 84 percent increase in brand value with successful iterations of existing products like the iPhone, creation of the tablet category with iPad, and anticipation of a broadened strategy making the brand a trifecta of cloud computing, software, and innovative, well-designed devices,” announced Branz, a subsidiary of advertising giant WPP.

Apple has invested a considerable amount of time and money on iOS, the mobile version of Mac OS X, that powers the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. So it just makes sense that Apple would re-invest iOS technology into the Mac version of OS X. Steve Jobs has pretty much said so himself and we’ll start to see this happen with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 bearing the code name Lion.

First of all it is no secret that Apple plans on bringing a number of features to the Mac from iOS. These features include the following:

Resuming Applications

Mac OS X will allow applications to remember open windows, etc. similar to resuming apps when launched on iOS. Automatically saving application documents will also be an integrated feature similar to what happens on iOS when you suspend or quit an app.

Everyone’s favorite former Apple co-founder, Woz, gave a speech to Michigan State University grads last week, declaring: “Every time we invent a computer to do something else, it’s doing our work for us, making ourselves less relevant.”

He went on: “How does a computer ever create art, for example, if it can’t sense things that a human understands, like the wind on a beach. Well, our computers have gotten hearing and seeing, they’ve got feeling, touch sensitive; they can sense motion, just like our inner ear. Pretty soon we’re going to have holograms, which are much better than what you call 3D television. We’ve created a new species; no question. We’re creators and, like I said, we’re making ourselves less relevant.”

I, for one, welcome our new more-relevant computer overlords. They can do all the dull stuff to do with managing finances and designed sewage systems, and while we irrelevant humans go to the beach with a good book.

In the history of technology, most successful formats go from a nascent birth phase to market popularity with the assistance of a Killer App. A major program, activity or use for a new technology that drives rapid adoption of the medium.

The Apple II had VisiCalc. The IBM PC had Lotus 1-2-3. With the Macintosh came PageMaker and desktop publishing. Arcade Games had Space Invaders. Xbox had Halo. VHS had porn.

Many technologies have benefited from porn, actually. It’s a pre-internet fad.

But there is no one Killer App for the iPad. There are dozens of categories of uses, thousands of apps. The iPad started out popular, then became a phenomenon. But nobody can agree on what it’s best used for.

Cloud Player, the recently launched online storage service from Amazon, now works on iOS devices through the Safari web browser. When it first went live, the service – which offers 5GB of storage for free – was only accessible from Flash-supported browsers and Android devices.

When you first navigate to Cloud Player on your iOS device, you are greeted by a warning that tells you your browser isn’t supported. You can just ignore that and proceed into your music collection. Once there, you can use Cloud Player flawlessly: it will pause when you receive push notifications and incoming calls, you’ll get the blue “playing” icon in your device’s status bar, and you can control playback from the buttons in the multitasking tray.

If you’ve got iEverything Else in your home, perhaps it’s time you announced the fact to your visitors, by declaring your love for Apple products in doormat form.

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Rovio’s Angry Birds is one of most successful iOS games of all time and it seems like everyone who’s ever used an iOS device has played it. But it’s not just humans who enjoy catapulting birds into pigs: OptoFidelity has created a robot with the sole purpose of playing Angry Birds.

The Finnish company uses its robots for touch panel testing and performance testing for mobile devices using video and optical measuring systems, so they already had the components required, and say it wasn’t hard to build a system for “this particular need.” The difficulty was getting the robot to play through every level of the game and achieve a three-star rating for each one.

Microsoft’s latest attempt at persuading customers to buy a Windows PC rather than a Mac is an advertising campaign that compares the price of Apple machines with computers from Asus, Dell, HP, Sony, and others; and then asks buyers to “do the math” and look at the money they could save – which they could then spend on a trip to Hawaii.

For example, compare Apple’s MacBook Air with a selection of Windows netbooks and straight away you’ll notice the difference in price – with the MacBook Air listed at $1,049 compared to netbooks for as little as $299. We’ll ignore the fact that Microsoft has classed the MacBook Air as a netbook and move on to specifications.

A few months ago, we reported that AT&T is starting to crack down on iPhone tethering usage. Jailbroken users are able to tether without subscribing to an extra plan. Some new information has emerged regarding how AT&T determines who’s tethering.

One of the most interesting revelations of the Fortune piece “Inside Apple” that’s making headlines this weekend is how Steve Jobs thinks Apple will be OK without him.

Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky writes:

“Jobs himself believes he has set Apple on a course to survive in his absence. He has created a culture that, while not particularly jolly, has internalized his ways.”

Kicking off this week’s selection of must-have iOS games is a brand new soccer game from X2 Games – the team behind the award-winning X2 Soccer titles. First Touch Soccer promises to be the true next-generation of soccer on iOS, offering the “most complete, realistic and addictive soccer sim available.”

Spider Jack is the latest puzzle release from Chillingo and I’m betting this game will be the next iOS game craze. Inspired by Cut the Rope, this game features a similar gameplay mechanic and all the ingredients needed to be a fantastic iOS puzzler.

Frisbee Forever is a whole new way to play frisbee and the only official frisbee game for iOS. It boasts super crisp 3D graphics and a frisbee experience like no other!

Find out more about the games above and check out Pulse: Volume One – this week’s final must-have – after the break!

GeekTool is a neat little System Preferences add-on that  lets you expand the usability of your desktop. Whether it be adding the time, date, weather, or even your Twitter feed, GeekTool can change your desktop from a boring backdrop to a useful information center. This video will show you how to setup GeekTool to fit your needs, as well as where to find many useful add-ons for it.

My wife and I sat down at a nice restaurant last week. Our table was right next to a larger party of four adults and two young children — both girls under the age of 7 years old or so.

Each of the girls had her own iPad, and each iPad had some high-end noise-cancellation headphones plugged in. One girl was engrossed in a children’s movie, and the other was enjoying a series of apps designed for kids.

So of course I whipped out MY iPad and blogged about it.

Granted, this scene took place in Silicon Valley, where there’s no such thing as an inappropriate social context for consumer technology and, in fact, in the very town where Steve Wozniak lives (Los Gatos). Still, it was a remarkable scene, and one that will be repeated across the nation as the iPad phenomenon spreads.

Letting kids use or own iPads is controversial. Parents, teachers and others aren’t so sure about letting kids get sucked into yet another electronic diversion. Pilot programs at a few schools around the country to experiment with iPad-based learning tools are often met with criticism by parents and teachers alike.

Everybody’s asking: Are iPads healthy for children?

I’m here to tell you: That’s the wrong question.

Chinese American Carol Chow runs a trendy bakery in Beijing called CCSweets. Her most popular items are iPhone cookies and iPad cakes, which take hours to make. One iPhone cookie costs about $35. An iPad cake costs almost as much as a real iPad.

Chow says the popularity of her desserts has spawned local imitators, who simply copy her designs. (I wonder if they’re really Android-based pastries under the frosting….)

Read the whole story and watch the video.

At the top of this week’s list of must-have iOS apps is the awesome comic creation tool that previously came bundled with Intel Macs. Comic Life from plasq allows you to use the photos in your iPad’s camera roll to create your own comic masterpieces.

Notificant is a brilliant new productivity app that makes is fast and simple to create reminders for the things you’d usually forget. Choose to have notifications alert you on your iPhone, as well as any of your other iOS or Mac devices.

Exploring your music collection has never been as stunning as it is with Planetary – a free iPad app that has climbed rapidly to the top of the free app charts. Fly through a 3D universe dynamically created by information about the recording artists you love.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves – including Cadence.fm and 4oD Catch Up – after the break!

As WWDC and the unveiling of iOS 5 approaches, we’re all wondering what Apple may or may not bring to its devices with the next major iOS release. One thing that could be introduced is speech recognition, courtesy of Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad.

According to a TechCrunch report that cites “multiple sources,” Apple has been negotiating a deal with Nuance which could see them integrate the company’s speech recognition technology into the iOS platform. While negotiations could have potentially been about an Apple takeover of Nuance, TechCrunch believes that at this point that’s unlikely.

Apple’s iOS updates lately have been interesting because they haven’t performed a complete restore and recovery of my data — in other words I didn’t have to reload all my apps, media, etc. after the firmware was updated. This happened recently with iOS 4.3.3 and previously with iOS 4.3.2.

In some cases after short firmware updates like these I’ve experienced problems with apps, my internet connection, multitasking, and a few other things. Here are some tips that will help you eliminate these problems if you encounter them.

I often take these basic iOS troubleshooting tips for granted and I thought that this would be a good time to share them with all of you.

The iPad 2 came to China this morning and sold out in less than 4 hours, according to our friends at M.I.C. Gadget.

Apple’s flagship store in Beijing attracted a massive crowd of customers and scalpers, who started lining up at 5 p.m. on Thursday. Overnight customers were treated well: there was a special waiting room for them to sleep in, and everyone got a wristband, allowing them to leave the line for an hour and return to their place in line.

There was even a special section for scalpers, who set up shop behind a barrier. Here’s the details:

When people look for cases and other accessories for their new gadgets, they tend to turn towards name-brand manufacturers. Me? I head straight for eBay. For years, I’ve purchased dozens upon dozens of cases and screen protectors for extremely good prices on eBay, and the quality of most of them were quite exceptional.

For less than $17, you can order a faux-leather iPad 2 case (in white), an iPad 2 screen protector, and a stylus. After about 2 weeks of using all of them, I’m ready to give you my verdict.

In an effort to appease the angered politicians in Washington, Apple is sending VP of Software, Bud Tribble, to the Senate hearing to discuss the storage of location data on iPhones. Location-Gate became one of the hottest topics concerning privacy and the use of cellular phones recently. At the center of the controversy, Apple quickly released an update to iOS (4.3.3) to amend the issue of iPhones storing user’s location data, which could possibly be acquired via a third-party to discern everywhere the user has been over the past few months. Senator Alan Franken has been the most vocal opponent of the recent discovery and was the one to initiate the hearing.

Bud Tribble has been with Apple since the 80’s, but as a Jobs loyalist, he left the company when Steve was ousted and became one of the founding members of NeXT, serving as the company’s VP of Software Development where he worked on projects that would later become the foundation for OS X.

We close another week of bargains and deals. In the spotlight are a number of Mac minis, starting at $599 for a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo desktop. Next is a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad from the Apple Store for just $349. Finally, several leather iPad cases are available from rooCase.

Along the way, we also check out various accessories for your favorite Apple product, plus software for the Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.