This post is brought to you by 4K Stogram.
For many of us, Instagram is the primary place to get our daily fix of fresh images and videos. We’ll spend hours browsing the feeds of friends and family, and our favorite artists, public figures or journalists. But all that addicting content — including what you post yourself — stays on Instagram’s servers, where it’s a bit of a hassle to find and only accessible by logging in.
This post is brought to you by iMyfone Technology Co., maker of iMyfone D-Back.
Conversations, photos, notes — with the iPhone, the data we rely on most has never felt closer or more convenient. But when something goes wrong and that data disappears, it’s anything but convenient. And iTunes, with its tricky backup scheme based on bulk syncs rather than individual selections, doesn’t always help.
Coming up short on storage is frustrating and all too common, and the solutions often come with their own drawbacks. Upping drive space usually means adding a bulky external drive to your computer bag, or having an SD card sticking out the side of your laptop. Nifty’s MiniDrive Air offers a much less irritating solution, with a MicroSD adapter that disappears into the contour of the computer while adding serious storage. No wonder it’s been one of our hottest deals this month — right now you can get a MiniDrive for $33.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
If you’re developing a Mac app, you’re faced with a major either/or decision: whether to distribute inside or outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). Sticking to the MAS means you’ve got access to tools for licensing, hosting, crash reporting and other necessary tasks. However, Apple’s tools may not be what’s best for your app.
This post is brought to you by Paragon Software Group, maker of Paragon NTFS for Mac.
Mac and PC are like yin and yang, or oil and water — essentially similar yet significantly distinct. It’s not just a difference in personal computing preference: The two platforms are literally built not to communicate with one another.
Apple and Microsoft coded their operating systems using completely different languages for writing files to drives, HFS+ and NTFS respectively. OS X offers only limited support for files written to a Windows-formatted drive, whether an external hard drive, SSD or USB stick, which can mean major headaches if you’re living or working in a cross-platform world.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
So you’re going to launch an app for Mac. Congrats! Now you’ve got to figure out an app marketing strategy that will get it to the widest audience possible.
There are many ways to approach the birth of a new product, but even in a field as fast-growing and dynamic as the world of apps, experience has yielded accepted wisdom about the best ways to start and maintain a successful campaign. Here are great rules of thumb for maximizing impact and customers for your app.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Like death and taxes, distributing your new app through the Mac App Store can seem inevitable. It’s widely considered the easiest way to get the widest exposure for an app, a centralized marketplace for software with a captive audience of buyers.
But ever more developers are looking beyond the Mac App Store (MAS) for distribution options that best serve their app. MacPaw, maker of DevMate, performed an interesting survey of developers to ask if they prefer MAS or another app store alternative, and why.
This post is brought to you by i2e Consulting.
Keeping any project on track is like cooking a meal, requiring close attention to all the ingredients as well as the sequence and timing of critical tasks. In the kitchen you use a cookbook; in the digital workplace, you face a dizzying array of platforms and software for keeping all the goals, team members, deadlines and contingencies in order.
Project Planning Pro streamlines all that, and right now Cult of Mac is offering a special 30 percent discount on the Mac version of the easy-to-use software.
This post is brought to you by Digiarty Software.
Anyone who keeps half an eye on the world of Apple knows that iOS 10 and iPhone 7 are about to drop. This is a big deal: These major upgrades will bring a wide range of new capabilities and features, so you’ll likely be feeling the itch to upgrade soon.
But before you install iOS 10, or migrate to the iPhone 7, you ought to make sure you properly manage the data on your outgoing device. MacX MediaTrans offers a way to do just that, and it’s easier to use and more reliable than iTunes.
This post is brought to you by Game Insight.
If you’re a fan of base-building strategy games, there’s a good chance you’ve been playing Cloud Raiders on your mobile phones and tablets in the last few years — but you might not know that Cloud Raiders recently made the jump to the Mac App Store. We’ve been playing it on Mac, and as a geeky crew of gamers, we’re impressed.
This post is brought to you by Elgato, makers of Eve Energy.
We’ve been told for a long time to expect the Internet of Things to give us a new relationship with our homes. By releasing HomeKit, Apple took a big step toward turning that prediction into reality, offering a platform for apps to interact with your home right through your iPhone.
This post is brought to you by Jamf Now.
Work has gone mobile, and businesses large and small must now keep up with the growing number of devices used by their employees to get the job done. Maybe you’re a contractor keeping track of repair crews from a field office Mac, or a store owner with iPhone-enabled inventory runners. Or maybe you run a coffee shop using iPads to process sales.
There are many reasons you might want a mobile-enabled workforce, and a lot of ways to go about setting one up, but many of them are quite expensive.
This post is brought to you by XwaveSoft.
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly once said. “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This idea underpins a way of organizing tasks named for the former general, using a grid to position tasks in the order they should be taken on.
Focus Matrix turns this time-honored approach to task management into a feature-rich app for both iOS and Mac.
This post is brought to you by Invoicely.
With the exploding number of freelancers and independent business owners, we might need to rework an old phrase to say, “Nothing is certain but death, taxes and invoices.”
Keeping track of which clients need to pay you, and which vendors need paying, is a mind-numbing but necessary part of surviving in today’s economy. Many of us utilize our own DIY systems for invoicing. But Invoicely — a free, cloud-based service designed for freelancers that can scale up to work for businesses of all sizes — delivers handy features that make invoicing the least of your worries.
This post is brought to you by LG Electronics.
Even if you’ve never heard of DevinSuperTramp, it’s a good bet your eyeballs have engaged one of his gorgeous videos of people at play.
Whether it’s parkour in the Shire, boogie boarding off wet rocks, parasailing, base jumping or squirrel suiting, you name the ill-advised activity, and this guy’s probably shot it — with glorious production values.
With 200 videos, 4 million YouTube subscribers and over 765 million views, he’s doing something right. One of the keys to his success is keeping on top of the latest, greatest gear.
This post is brought to you by GraphicStock.
Having worked as a graphic designer years before my official role as a YouTuber, I know the importance of having ready-made graphics and photos at my disposal.
Lately I’ve been using GraphicStock, which is the place to go for all your illustration, vector and stock photo needs (and also a sponsor of Cult of Mac‘s YouTube videos). For a guided tour of GraphicStock, and to take full advantage of a free seven-day trial of the service, check out the video below.
This post is brought to you by EdX.
It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.
A joint effort between Harvard and MIT — dubbed EdX — is aiming to provide not only a place for learning new skills, but a platform for innovating new ways of teaching and learning over the web. It’s a nonprofit online education platform partnered with nearly 100 of the world’s leading universities and institutions — Harvard, MIT, Microsoft, Caltech, Columbia, you get the picture — to provide students anywhere in the world access to more than 1,000 certified courses. As an open-source platform, it also offers educators an opportunity to design and implement their own modes of teaching.
This post is brought to you by VMware AirWatch.
Let’s face it: Asking a person to carry around two devices all the time, one for work and one for play, is just inefficient. When organizations implement overbearing management or ignore privacy concerns, they almost force users to carry a device for work and a device for personal use.
While a few employees may enjoy the air-gap separation of church and state, most people buckle under the stress of having two separate devices to potentially forget in a cab or leave on the airport bathroom sink (true story!).
This post is brought to you by VMware AirWatch.
If you know what the word “containerization” means, you probably work in IT (or you’re tech-savvy and adventurous enough to run afoul of your IT department on a regular basis). Containerization is the method of securing a device for corporate use by putting a part of it behind some type of authentication — without managing the actual device.
It’s a common practice in the corporate world, especially for bring your own device (or BYOD) environments, because containerization is often viewed as more lightweight than mobile device management, aka MDM. Users also may assume that MDM is overly intrusive and that containerization is a good compromise.
However, many of these issues are already solved for iOS. By leveraging Apple’s built-in privacy protections, AirWatch allows IT departments to preserve the native device experience while protecting corporate data.
This post is brought to you by Kraftwerk9, maker of 1Sync.
For all the fancy features on our phones, somehow keeping our many streams of contacts organized remains a tedious hassle. When you meet someone on Facebook, get a phone number, connect via Gmail, or get in touch through any of the other myriad forms of communication we use daily, you create a new contact in an isolated contact category.
This post is brought to you by Sony.
Competition among low-profile, high-definition cameras keeps getting tougher. For proof, look no further than the latest Sony Action Cam lineup.
Looking something like a futuristic Super 8 in pill form, these powerhouse cameras are as feature-rich as photo gear five times their size. Sony sets its new cameras apart by throwing in attractive goodies and improving upon the previous Action Cam iteration.
This post is brought to you by SmartDraw Software.
Plenty of jobs nowadays involve creating visual aids for clients, bosses and co-workers, from project flowcharts and building schematics to medical diagrams, you name it. But getting a BA typically doesn’t teach digital draftsmanship, which is why apps that make it easy to create compelling, clear graphics and illustrations have become so popular.
SmartDraw is an intuitive, powerful and fun app that’s become a contender against the big legacy software brands. More than half of the Fortune 500 and over 250,000 public and private enterprises of all sizes use SmartDraw now. But until today, SmartDraw has been available only on Windows machines. That changes with the release of SmartDraw Cloud, which lets Mac users get in on the action.
This post is brought to you by Avi, maker of Smart-Spools.
“Cable organizers” is one of those useful product categories that no one can quite seem to get right. The engineering problem seems simple enough: Give me a way to neatly wrap up and stow my peripherals, like earbuds and power cables, ideally in a form that’s compact and not overly complicated to use.
Many have tried, but too often — whether due to improper sizing or an emphasis on form over function — cable organizers end up being less convenient than simply wrapping your headphones around a few fingers and stuffing them in your pocket.
Smart-Spools finally got it right, though.
The challenge: You want to commemorate Valentine’s Day by getting your significant other something they don’t already have. But like so many people, you find yourself poring over product reviews, wondering which new shiny thing your loved one wants or could use but doesn’t already have.
Which version of the iPhone do they have again? Was that a PlayStation 3 or 4, or maybe an Xbox One, and are they more into RPG games or RTSs? Pretty sure they already have a lot of thumb drives…
This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of ReiBoot and iPhone Care Pro.
Too many of us know the sense of powerlessness that comes with staring at a red Apple logo on an iPhone screen for minutes on end, or seeing the device stuck in an endless restart loop. When the time comes to restore a corrupted or compromised iPhone, the simplicity of an iOS device can turn into an imposing, tangled mess as you use iTunes to wake it up from its digital coma.