AirPlay - page 5

We all know that Samsung loves to copy Apple more than anything in the world. It’s embarrassing  And while most of the copying has been limited to hardware, Samsung’s decided to step up its game on the software front, too.

Yesterday Samsung introduced its version of Apple’s iTunes Store, except it’s got a really bad interface and even worse name. They’re calling it “Samsung Content & Services“, and with a little magic pixie dust, Samsung hopes its customers will think it’s as good as the App Store or Google Play.

I thought I’d heard everything there was to hear from wireless speakers. I have tested everything from the smallest, crappiest pocket speaker to the big booming Big Jambox. Then I “hooked” the Libratone Zipp up to my iPhone, and I started to enjoy music again.

YourTube, a popular jailbreak tweak that brings new features to the official YouTube app — including video downloading and ad-blocking — has been updated to support jailbroken devices running the latest iOS 6 firmwares. The latest version is available to download from Cydia now, and it’s free to existing YourTube and YourTube HD users.

Got a new Mac? Trying to get the most out of it – or perhaps the one you’ve had for a few months? There are countless tools out there than can help – but rarely can so many of them be found in a bundle such as this: The Mac Essentials Bundle.

Cult of Mac Deals has assembled 9 apps that can take your productivity on your Mac to the next level…and we’re offering it at a fraction of the regular price. You can get The Mac Essentials Bundle for only $49.99 for a limited time – that’s 84% off the price you’d pay for all of these apps separately!

Google has a released a pretty big update for its YouTube iOS app that adds a “send to TV” option. The feature was added to Android last year.

This is basically Google’s version of AirPlay. It’s an open protocol that’s in Google TV, Xbox, PS3, and some new HDTV sets. Once you’ve paired with the device, the YouTube iOS app becomes a remote for discovering and playing back videos on the big screen.

Got a new Mac? Trying to get the most out of it – or perhaps the one you’ve had for a few months? There are countless tools out there than can help – but rarely can so many of them be found in a bundle such as this: The Mac Essentials Bundle.

Cult of Mac Deals has assembled 9 apps that can take your productivity on your Mac to the next level…and we’re offering it at a fraction of the regular price. You can get The Mac Essentials Bundle for only $49.99 for a limited time – that’s 84% off the price you’d pay for all of these apps separately!

HBO has been holding out on embracing the future of technology and AirPlay, but it looks like they’re ready to get serious about customer who want to cut the cord.

While speaking at All Things D’s Dive Into Media conference today, HBO’s Eric Kessler announced that starting today, the company will be enabling AirPlay for HBO Go.

If you’ve got your music stored in the cloud, then streaming it to your iPhone might be difficult. Depending on which service you use, you may need to find a third-party app — one that actually works well, and is designed specifically for music playback. AudioBox is exactly that.

Compatible with a whole host of cloud-based storage services — including Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, and Dropbox — AudioBox ensures that you can take your entire music library with you on your iPhone.

One of the best things about owning an Apple TV is the ability to share everything on your Mac’s screen with the flatscreen in your living room. It works perfectly. If there’s video on the Internet that you can’t find on one of the Apple TV apps, you don’t have to worry about it; you just screen share and enjoy.

Google and Netflix are tired of Apple having all the fun with wireless video streaming between devices, so they’ve brewed up their own solution to compete with AirPlay. The new protocol is called DIAL, and like Android, it’s free and already has some big companies backing it.

According to the manufacturer Teenage Engineering, the original OD-11 speaker was hot stuff in Sweden in the 1970s. The OD-11 was a cube which packed an amp, subwoofer and speaker into one box, and it sold over 100,000 pairs in Sweden alone.

Now it’s back. The new version is called the Cloud Speaker, and it packs Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with all the rest.

If you own a relatively recent Android device, it’s likely to support a nifty feature called DLNA, which allows you to stream content directly from your device to a whole host of compatible devices, including televisions, stereos, and Sony’s PlayStation 3. It’s very similar to AirPlay, only it supports a far greater range of devices, and doesn’t require an Apple TV.

Well now you can enjoy DLNA streaming on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch thanks to Skifta, a new iOS app from Qualcomm Atheros.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Wanna stream video from your Mac but don’t have an Apple TV? No problem. This dongle by Plair will let you stream any video you want to your TV’s HDMI port over WiFi.

Why not just use an Apple TV? Maybe you don’t have Mountain Lion on your Mac and can’t share your display over AirPlay with your TV. Maybe you got a PC in the house too and want to stream video from that as well. There are lots of reasons, but basically, Plair is more universal than a lot of options out there.

When you’re using your iPad and want to send the signal up to the big TV in your living room via Apple TV and AirPlay, you can double click on the Home button, swipe to the right, and you’ll see the Media bar, with the brightness, volume, orientation lock, and AirPlay destination settings.

But on the iPhone, when you swipe once to the right, all you’ll see is the orientation lock (or Mute, if you’ve set your hardware switch to lock orientation), and the play, forward, and reverse buttons for media playback via the Music app. Where is the AirPlay setting button? And what about a volume slider?

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

On day 18 we’re kicking out the jams with the Libratone Zipp.

Music streaming service Rhapsody has finally made itself available on your iPad with a brand new app that promises to deliver “a visually stunning and immersive experience for the music lover!” It brings more than 16 million songs to your tablet, with support for offline playlists, AirPlay, and unlimited downloads. What’s more, it offers a 30-day free trial for those who aren’t already signed up.

There’s a problem I often run into with my mobile devices, and that’s not enough storage space. I insist on purchasing devices with just 16GB of memory, and then I have to find ways to manage that storage the best I can. Some devices will take microSD cards that will allow you to bump their storage as and when you need it, but others — like Apple’s iOS devices — don’t come with that luxury.

Vantec’s new NexStar WiFi hard drive dock lets you bump your smartphone, tablet, and even PC storage over Wi-Fi. You can use it to store your audio and video collections on your home network, then use Vantec’s dedicated apps to access them wirelessly when you need to.

Sonos has updated its iOS app and introduced the ability to wirelessly stream music AirPlay-style to your Sonos speaker directly from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Until now, users have had to have a Mac or PC acting as a middleman, but Sonos latest iOS apps remove that requirement.

The People People Speaker is a clever solution to a persistent, cruel and terrible first-world problem: big, ugly speakers eating up the visual space of your home. The answer isn’t to make the speaker smaller, but to make the speaker less visible.

Thus the almost invisible speaker was born.

AirPlay is one of Apple’s killer features in iOS or the Mac. As long as you have an AirPlay-compatible speaker or, better yet, an Apple TV in range, you can automatically stream video or audio to another device, all without pairing first.

Now according to a new report, Google wants to not only launch its own bonafide AirPlay competitor, but one-up AirPlay by offering true second screen capabilities to customers using Android devices with their Google TVs.

Priced at only $99, the Apple TV is a pretty awesome deal. But if you thinking streaming movies from you Mac to your LED Plasma 3D Ultra High-Definition TV isn’t worth that much, then maybe you just need a cheaper Chinese knockoff solution.

Xiaomi Box looks pretty similar to an Apple TV, it’s cheaper than an Apple TV, it even comes with the ability to use Apple’s AirPlay protocol like an Apple TV, but it only costs $64.

Apple Head of Marketing, Phil Schiller, took the stage today and asked a very important question. “What does the iPad mini do that the iPad doesn’t already do?” he wondered aloud.

His answer was only half as good – “It can fit in one hand.” Here at Cult of Mac, however, we think that’s only part of the story. The fact is that Apple’s newest, smallest, thinnest iPad makes a perfect gaming controller.

The iPhone 5 has been on sale for nearly a month now, but we’re still yet to see any official third-party Lightning accessories. It’s not that accessory makers are slow at producing them, it’s that Apple is yet to finalize its Lightning policies and give manufacturers the go-ahead to use its new connector.

Fortunately, this is expected to happen next month. Apple will hold a conference in Shenzhen, China, between November 7 and November 8 with its Made for iPod/iPhone/iPad (MFI) program partners to finalize its Lightning plans, according to a source “close to Apple’s accessory manufacturing partner.”

I’m one of those people that loves background noise. I like listening to podcasts when I cook; I love a running telly while I’m doing chores; and even when I’m in the shower, I’ve either got Spotify or those podcasts going again.

Previously, this love of shower-time bluegrass meant bringing my iPhone into the bathroom, cranking up the volume on its little speakers, then straining to hear its tinny audio through the whir of water and intense loofahing. But the iShower ($100) Bluetooth speaker fixes this problem simply and wonderfully. It brings your iDevice’s audio anywhere where water would usually kill it, like your bathtub, shower, or sink, and works so well, it’s quickly becoming my favorite new iPhone accessory.

With the 30-pin dock connector on the brink of extinction, you’re probably wandering how you’re going to hook your iOS devices up to your TV without the help of an Apple TV. Your old HDMI and VGA adapters won’t work, and Apple didn’t announce any new ones at its iPhone 5 event. So does that mean AirPlay is the only option?

Thankfully, it does not. Apple has confirmed that Lightning-compatible HDMI and VGA adapters will be arriving for your new iOS devices “in the coming months.”

One of the first thoughts I had when Apple announced AirPlay Mirroring as a feature in Mountain Lion was that it would make an excellent mobile presentation tool and one that would be far easier to bring to business meetings, trade shows, or client-site training events than hauling a projector. With just a MacBook Air and Apple TV, you can plug into any HDTV, display, or projector that supports HDMI and be ready to go. That’s a great combination for any business traveler.

If Apple does announce AirPlay Direct, a new version of AirPlay that doesn’t require a Wi-Fi network, the company will have made the lives of business travelers, trainers, and educators even easier. It will probably also make network administrators in both business and education a bit happier as well.