Cult of Mac

Perhaps you caught our recent review for the killer iOS photo app, FX Photo Studio. If you didn’t rush out and buy it right away based on the stunning (cough, cough) examples in the accompanying gallery, or – heaven forfend – on the basis of its five stars, then here’s your chance to get it on your device for FREE.

Just go to Cult of Mac’s Facebook page and like us before midnight Friday PST (that’s about 36 hours from the time of this post) and you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of six free download codes for FX Photo Studio for iPhone and iPad.

That’s it. If you already like us on Facebook (yay!) you’re already entered, so don’t feel the need to “unlike” and then “Like” again to get in on this awesome opportunity.

Winners will be notified of their bounty and good fortune during the day on Friday.

If you are looking for a deal on a MacBook Pro, we have several choice. First up is a selection of 20 MacBook Pro laptops from the Apple Store, starting at $929 for a 2.4GHz model. Next is a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro from ExperCom for $1,049. The last item in today’s spotlight is a 32GB iPod touch for just $275.

Along the way, we check out a solar charger for your iPhone, a 93 percent discount on select iPhone 4 cases, and a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad. These and many other deals can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The big news today is all about how Apple has apparently been busy secretly squirreling away data about your movements on your iPhone 4 or GPS-equipped iPad, and storing it in a file on your computer via syncing. Is this a big deal, or business as usual, just a giant tech company doing its thing?

[polldaddy poll=4946757]

The next time sharp-eyed citizens in Philadelphia see waste, fraud or abuse in their local government, they can report it directly to the city controller with an app.

Called Philly Watchdog, the app offered gratis for the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad in iTunes has been available since April 12 but officially launched yesterday.

“When it comes to reporting fraud and waste in Philadelphia, I’m proud to say that ‘we now have an app for that,'” said City Controller Alan Butkovitz, at a press conference. “Like any investigative unit of government, we often rely on the public to help us identify waste and fraud in city government. It is critically important for government to be on the same technological page as our citizens.”

Needless to say, the iPad is utterly dominating the still nascent tablet market… but the extent of its domination might surprise you: according to New York based ABI Research, Apple controls eighty-five percent of the tablet market.

If you travel around with an iPhone in your pocket or an iPad 3G in your bag, Apple knows everywhere you’ve ever been since the moment you started using your device. Even worse, it stores that information in a non-encrypted file structure that is synced with your computer every time you plug your device into iTunes.

If the iPad “owns” the tablet category, Amazon’s Kindle device arguably controls the e-reader sector. In a move that may both aid the Kindle brand as well as e-reading in general, the Seattle-based online bookseller Wednesday announced an agreement with 11,000 U.S. libraries. The lending library service permits owners of either the Kindle device or a Kindle e-reader application to also access their notes, highlights and bookmarks.

“Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no,” Amazon announced. However, if you check the book out again, or purchase the title, all annotations are preserved. Your notes won’t be available to other library patrons who check out the library e-book, though.

Apple could announce higher sales, but a lower profit margin due to increased supply costs, analysts warned ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled quarterly financial report. Profit margins for the tech giant may slip to 35 percent, down from 38.5 percent in December, one San Francisco expert projects.

A 13 percent jump in the cost of 64GB flash memory is just one area of concern for Apple watchers. The tech giant is widely viewed as the world’s largest consumer of flash memory with its iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and iPod all relying on Japanese memory suppliers.

Do you love Apple? No, really. I mean, do you looooooooooooooooove Apple? A new documentary traveling across Europe and the United States this summer wants to interview you.

According to producer Dimitri Kourtchine, the documentary film will be 52 minutes long, and examine Apple’s “brand, its fans, the enthusiasm and the criticism that it provokes around the word.” Fifty-two minutes doesn’t seem long enough to even begin to cover it, does it?

None the less, Dimitri and his crew will be traveling across Europe in May and America in June, looking to interview people who love Apple so much they want to get married in an Apple Store, or hate Apple so much they can’t even hear Steve Jobs’ name without punching something, or have created works of art on their iOS devices, or fired a Mac Pro into space.

Basically, if you are foam-at-the-mouth passionate about the subject of Apple — hate or love, it doesn’t matter — they want to talk to you and get you on film.

If you think you’re that kind of guy, you can email DImitri and his crew at appledocfilm at gmail dot com. Can’t wait to see some of you weirdos on screen when the documentary debuts later this year.

Between services like Dropbox and Amazon’s new Cloud Locker, not to mention Apple’s presumed imminent entry into the market, cloud storage is pretty hot right now, and it’s all done in software. That inevitably means that cloud storage will start creeping out to markets oversaturated with competitors boasting pretty much identical hardware… markets like USB hard drives.

As far as I know, Hitachi’s new Touro Pro line of USB hard drives now come with up to 3GB of free online cloud storage, which is upgradeable to 250GB for $49.99 per year.

That’s actually a pretty fantastic deal, considering 100GB of Dropbox storage costs $19.99 per month. On the other hand, while Hitachi is delivering native applications to allow users to access the data they’re storing in the cloud on their iPads and iPhones, but given that Dropbox is the de facto iOS standard for cloud storage, Dropbox will still have the advantage of cross-app compatibility.

Otherwise, Hitachi’s line-up of Touro Pro hard drives are pretty standard 7200 RPM drives. The desktop models come with storage capacities between 1TB and 3TB, and are priced between $130 and $230. The Mobile Pro drives, on the other hand, come in 500GB and 750GB capacities, and are priced at $110 and $130 respectively.

An update to Firemint’s Real Racing 2 HD game today sees the company introduce dual-screen gaming to the iPad 2 using the new Digital AV Adapter accessory. When hooked up to a HDTV, users can enjoy their race in 1080p on their TV, while their iPad displays an alternative image from the game – such as a map of the circuit – simultaneously.

The iPad continues to act as a controller, so you can control the car on your TV using the iPad’s gyroscope controls, as demonstrated in the video below.

If you want Lion on your Mac, you’ve either got to be a developer or, in the immortal words of Malcolm Reynolds, “aim to misbehave.” Even if you just want your Mac to look like it’s running Lion, you’re out of luck.

But are you the kind of person who sometimes stumbles across a pungent pile of offal in the streets outside of your local butcher’s shop, and instead of crinkling your nose and walking quickly past, stops to adorn it with an array of sparking gemstones, festive ribbons and pretty flowers? Do you also use a PC? You’re in luck.

As it turns out, it’s a counterintuitively easy process to make your Windows 7 install look like Apple’s still unreleased operating system. All you need to do is download the Lion Skin Pack and run the installer, no patching required.

[via Lifehacker]

Remember all the questions and concerns about how AT&T would cope after the iPhone became available at Verizon Wireless? Well, despite losing its exclusivity, AT&T Wednesday morning announced it activated 3.6 million iPhones during the first quarter of 2011 – a 33 percent jump from the same time in 2010. Compared to the last financial quarter in 2010, that 3.6 million iPhones is down slightly from 4.1 million.

But what about subscribers? Certainly, given the option, AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon, right? Not really. The carrier said 23 percent of its iPhone activations were from new subscribers. In other words, the vast majority of AT&T customers who owned an iPhone didn’t budge.

I live on this long, steep hill that some days just feels so infinite and Sisyphean that I fear I might be the character of some inexplicably forgotten short story by Jorge Luis Borges. On particularly hot summer days, I’ll sometimes muse to myself, halfway up this interminable hill, that walking really is for suckers, and I should just lop off these wimpy locomotive appendages and treat myself to some of those robo-legs I’ve had my eye on for so long.

Apple doesn’t make robot-legs, unfortunately. What they do make are MacBooks that come with SSD drives… and to me, investing in one was pretty much the direct equivalent of having my computer’s old weak, broken legs cut off and some rocket-powered karate kickers transplanted in their place. You simply will not believe how fast computing can be with an SSD, or how slow your current “fast” computing experience is without one.

Need more proof than my say so? MacWorld tested a few MacBook Pros — a couple with SSDs, a couple identically specced without — and found notable speed improvements.

Given its execrable reception and terrible performance, you’d expect an RIM BlackBerry Playbook — viscera spilled across a white room table — to contain nothing but 400 grams of dirty sand and several old marbles and rusty jacks.

But no! The boys over at iFixIt split the PlayBook open, and found a circuit board, a touch panel and some big batteries inside. Who’d a thunk?

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty troubling. It was hard enough to accept the PlayBook’s woeful deficiencies (including features as simple as native email, contacts or calendar) under the assumption that it had no silicon at all inside, and was, in fact, some sort of glorified ant farm sold at a premium to unsuspecting suckers. That there’s actual hardware inside makes its deficiencies inexcusable, especially when that hardware is virtually identical to that of the iPad 2.

One thing I love about tablet breakdowns is the way they just casually reveal exactly which technology has become super-efficient, and which technology still has a long way to go. That tablets like the PlayBook and iPad 2 are essentially just huge batteries with a single tiny, index-card sized circuit board attach really show you how far CPUs have come in thirty years… and how much battery technology still has to go.

I’m a huge bluetooth headset fan. In fact, I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been doin’ it “hands free” since the early aughts. So naturally when I heard Jawbone had a hot new headset on the market, the Jawbone Era, I was excited to get my hands on it and give it a go.

The App Store has spawned some pretty good looking applications for iOS devices; apps for iPhone and iPad are largely renowned for their simplicity and alluring design. With that said, you’d think iOS applications that have an Android sibling – from the same developer – would be just as pretty, right? Wrong.

Here’s a gallery of screenshots that compares iOS apps with their Android versions and highlights some of the differences:

Image editing application Acorn has been updated to version 3, and now comes with a boatload of new features for you to play with.

With Sonos announcing only yesterday that Airplay support was coming to the Sonos range, as well as updating their iPhone and iPad apps – we thought it was about time we took the Sonos for a spin.

Let me start this by saying the Sonos multi-room system is the best solution available for getting multiple sources of music playing throughout your home – period. It’s not necessarily the cheapest, but it is without doubt the most complete solution you will find – and we love it!

Plans to invest in a Sharp production facility have been reportedly dropped by Apple, with the company choosing instead to use Toshiba as the sole supplier of liquid crystal displays used in the iPhone.

A report in Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyu Shimbun claims that “Sharp was no longer a candidate for Apple’s investment,” and that the company wishes to avoid placing full dependancy on one country for the production of iPhone LCDs. It is believed the Tohoku area earthquake – which could have effected component production – may have persuaded Apple to think twice about its investment in two suppliers located in Japan.

Sharp has since issued a public statement denying the rumors, insisting that the report “contradicts the facts,” and requesting the paper retracts its report. If the rumors are true, however, it would be a substantial loss to Sharp.

Three people with knowledge of Apple’s supply chain have revealed that the iPhone 5 will feature a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, according to a new Reuters report. The device will look similar to the iPhone 4 and will go into production around July/August.

The rather short report doesn’t really give us any juicy details, and only ties in with previous rumors that have already suggested the next-generation iPhone will feature a faster processor, and will ship before the end of 2011.

Other reports have speculated the device will boast an 8-megapixel camera, increased storage options, a dual-mode wireless chip to support both CDMA and GSM carriers, and will be capable of shooting 1080p video. Some have also claimed the device will feature an aluminum rear casing, similar to that of the iPod touch.

The faster processor will inevitably be Apple’s new dual-core A5 chip which features in the iPad 2.

If you’re still taking time out of your day to call every Apple reseller in your area in the hope of finding that iPad 2 you’re after, the new FindOne app for iPhone could save you a lot of time and effort.

You select which model of the iPad 2 you want and FindOne checks the inventory of every Target and Walmart store in your vicinity to see if they have your chosen device in stock.

The iPhone is a phenomenal tool for a bit of tromping about in the bush; navigation, stargazing, photographing/filming and even staying alive can all be accomplished with the help of the little gadget. That is, if it’s got any juice left.

Solio’s Rocsta ($80) — a solar panel mated to a thin slab of a battery in a sleek, flat, user-friendly housing — seems to have been created with a nod to minimalist adventurous types who want a rugged, no-fuss solar charger aong on their next Iditarod or photo shoot for National Geographic.

As a man who leaves as many discarded pens as his wake as a molting peacock after a spontaneous squid attack, one of my many problems with styluses for iOS devices is where to put them when you’re not using them. Unless I can physically attach the stylus to my iPhone or iPad itself, it’s gone.

When the iPad 2 came along with its Smart Cover in tow, I thought I had the answer. The Pogo Stylus has a clip to attach to shirt pockets and the like, and I thought it could fairly easily slip on the Smart Cover itself. In fact, this does work, but it pushes the Smart Cover away from the iPad 2 display just enough for the detritus at the bottom of my bag — a fragrant snuff made up of tobacco detritus, cookie crumbs and Cheetos dust — to siphon its way through the gap and onto the screen. Blech.

Here’s a smart alternative, though. Applydea (short for Apply the Idea, and not pronounced “Apple Idea” or “App Lydia”) designed a very clever aluminum stylus called the Maglus, which comes replete with magnets that allow you to stick the stylus directly to the Smart Cover or iPad 2 spine.

Earlier today, we linked former Engadget editor Nilay Patel’s incredible breakdown of the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit, largely to discuss Apple’s sales numbers for iPod Touches and iPads and the like.

We thought, though, that Patel’s most compelling argument that Apple was in the right was worth its own post: check out the “borrowing” Samsung did from iOS for their TouchWiz homescreen icons.

We’d realized, of course, that Samsung’s icons had been “inspired” by Apple, but putting them side-by-side really just makes the theft look totally shameless. How does a company like Samsung think it’s cool to openly rip-off one of its biggest customers like that? I’m shocked it took Apple this long to sue.