Just a few weeks back we brought you the then-cheap $100 ring-light for the iPhone, a cheap way to shoot flat fashion photos and videos with your favorite camera. Now, though, you can achieve the same thing for just $10.
Bonus: It’s a DIY project, so you have a great excuse to ignore your family this Christmas.
The Omni Group has been testing its new OmniFocus Mail Drop, a service which lets you forward emails to a secret address, whereupon they end up — moments later — in your OmniFocus inbox. This means that we can finally (finally!) add emails direct to our Omnifocus from our iPhones and iPads.
But with a little jiggery-pokery, you can finagle some automated internet services to do much more. In this post I’ll show you how I now collect news items from Google Reader and have them waiting for me in Omnifocus and Writing Kit, ready to be written up.
App making is competitive as ever and it’s only going to get more so. Apps are an awesome opportunity for entrepreneurs to turn an idea into a profitable product with little monetary investment. The problem is, everyone knows this and is trying to get their piece of the pie.
With that in mind, The Mobile App Design Starter Kit is exactly what any independent app creator needs to get ahead of the game.
There are a lot of great ideas hidden behind terribly designed apps. We all know the typical reasons for poor design – pricey professional designer prices, lack of themes, or mobile app design just being difficult in general – but what this Cult of Mac deal offers is a comprehensive kit that includes everything you need to give your app a snazzy design that will make it stick out among the competition for only $57.
Chances are you’ve heard of a game that’s like Words with Friends mixed with Scrabble and SpellTower. It has been taking Game Center by storm, and it’s called Letterpress.
Developed by Tweetie’s Loren Brichter, Letterpress is good, simple fun. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be tricky. Unless you’re a wordsmith and decent strategist, it can be difficult to efficiently use all of the letters on the game’s board to your advantage.
Here’s how to master (and yes, even cheat at) Letterpress:
If you preordered an iPad mini directly from Apple.com, you have probably noticed that you have yet to receive a shipping confirmation from Apple… and it’s getting close to the wire.
Considering the fact that Apple is guaranteeing a Friday, November 2nd delivery for initial preorders, and that Apple usually ships out new products directly from the factories in China, that might have you concerned.
There’s no reason to panic. Your iPad mini has, in all likelihood, already shipped, and is right now sitting in a delivery center in the United States, just waiting for Apple to give the okay to have it delivered to your door.
Here’s how to check on your iPad mini, even if Apple hasn’t sent you a shipping reference yet.
I was craving a pumpkin spice lattee from Starbucks the other day. I didn’t have time to go get one myself, but one of my friends was going later in the day. He offered to pick one up for me. Yay!
Starbucks recently added support for Apple’s Passbook service in iOS 6, and I hadn’t yet been able to try paying for Starbucks with Passbook. I had already added my Starbucks Rewards Gold card to Passbook on my iPhone 5, and I like using my Gold card to pay whenever I can because it earns me points towards free drinks. So I had three choices: pay my friend back in cash, give him my Starbucks card from my wallet, or let him use my Passbook. I went with the third option, and it was as easy as taking a screenshot.
App and file launcher, search helper, and all-round work of genius Alfred has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves. One of those is a clever built-in text snippets manager.
Regular readers will know that I now do all my work using an iPad. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go over the technical details again.
But I will tell you about this excellent new lap desk I have. Better than that, I made it myself, so follow along to see how you can make your own.
With the latest iOS 6 update, all your iPhone using buddies around the world are going to start syncing their Contacts to their Facebook account, hoping to automate what can be a fairly tedious process. Unfortunately, if you haven’t set your Facebook account settings to get your real email address into the sync information, your friends are going to just get a useless @facebook.com email address attached to your contact on their iPhone, and no one wants that.
Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this problem, and make sure Facebook’s secret switch to their own branded email addresses in your Facebook contact information doesn’t go any farther than it already has.
One of iCloud’s biggest problems comes from its iOS origins: There’s no easy way to open, say, a TextEdit document in another app for viewing and editing. To do this, you need to either open the source app (TextEdit, in this case), use the iCloud document picker and then drag the file to the target app, or you need to go digging around inside your (hidden) Library folder to find the local copies of your iCloud documents.
The first is a real pain. The second is — as anyone who has ever dug around inside an iPhoto bundle will tell you — a really, really bad idea. Luckily, for LaunchBar users, the answer is (literally) a few taps away.
For the most part, iOS’ “multitasking” does a great job of letting you get things done, and many of the apps you’d switch out to on the desktop to perform another task (mail, finding and using a photo) are accessible from the share-sheets within the iOS apps themselves.
But there’s one thing that constantly bugs me, especially as a user of Launchbar on OS X: There’s no way to make a quick note and save it without leaving the current application. But using a mixture of Twitter, iOS 6, Notification Center, and web services If This Then That (IFTTT) and Dropbox, you can roll your own.
And while the setup takes a little work, once it’s up and running it really is a helluva useful little hack.
Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable
And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.
For me, one of the most annoying tweaks in OS X Mountain Lion was the change of the default save location for many of apps I use on a regular basis. Any app that uses iCloud now displays its save dialog box differently than it would have before its integration into OS X. Due to this, upon saving files in many applications, instead of being presented with a view of the filesystem, the default save location is now just “iCloud”, and saving the file anywhere else has become somewhat of a chore. Thanks to some Terminal commands, though, this behavior can be reverted to its pre-Mountain Lion state, as i’ll show you in this video.
One of the best things about using an iPhone to shoot your photos is the huge range of accessories you can buy to help out. But what if you’re on a budget? Or you just aren’t really into photography enough to spend more money? Or if you’re just bored today and feel like playing around?
Then you’re in the right place, because we’re about to take a look at DIY iPhone photo filters. And lenses. And other modifiers. And best of all, you probably have most of them around your home or office, ready for some instant procrastination. Let’s go!
If you’re a fan of the new Notes app in OS X Mountain Lion as I am, you’re probably annoyed by the sparse list of three default fonts included with the app, just like in iOS. Sure, you can choose a different, note-specific font with a little work, but until now, there’s been no easy way to set a good default font for all of your notes.
Thanks to the easy little workaround I’ll show you in this video, you’ll finally be able to ditch Marker Felt once and for all, and choose the font of your choice within Notes.
I do all my work these days on an iPad. From organizing reviews through gathering story ideas to actually writing posts and features, and even photographing and editing gadgets for those reviews, it’s all — every last bit — done on Apple’s tablet. I just spent two weeks away from home using the iPad’s 3G connection to work, only opening up my MacBook to sync my FitBit.
And they still say the iPad is just for consumption.
One of the biggest problems with the iPad has been writing blog posts. You really did need a Mac to take care of the multiple browser windows and — most of all — the image uploading. Now, though, while there isn’t quite a wealth of options, there are certainly several credible methods to do this all from the iPad. So make a coffee, sit back and enjoy this how-to:
Was the $14 iPhone macro lens a little too rich for you? If you can’t afford to drop the price of a cheap lunch onto a DIY photo accessory for your $650 phone, then perhaps I can interest you in Zaheer Mohiuddin’s $1 version.
That’s right: a $1 macro lens for the iPhone (or iPad). The only work you’ll need to do is take a walk to the dime store and find a roll of tape.
With the debut of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple brought over Notification Center from iOS. Unfortunately, they’ve still chosen to go with the now familiar dark grey linen background. Looking to change it? Well, you’re in luck, because in this video, I’ll show you how to do just that.
Apple’s latest jungle cat is called Mountain Lion, and the new version of OS X is available as a $20 purchase in the Mac App Store. If you’ve updated to a new version of OS X before, you know that getting everything in order isn’t always as easy as Apple makes it out to be. In this how-to guide, Cult of Mac will show you how to get your Mac ready to install OS X Mountain Lion the right way.
Back in the time of the OS X Leopards, the Finder became a whole lot more useful for anyone with photos and videos on their Macs (ie. everybody)/ We got Quick Look, which let us watch slideshows and movies right there on the desktop, and the Finder itself was good enough to use as a lightweight photo viewer.
Then Lion came along and broke one essential tool: the little slider in the bottom right of Finder windows had its functionality removed. It used to let you zoom file thumbnails defaults write Finder trackpad zoom, but in Lion the tool remained, but did nothing.
Thankfully in Mountain Lion the slider now works again. And happily for the photographers out there, the Finder has some other new tricks you’re going to love.
One of the many clever little touches accompanying last week’s official unveiling of the Tweetbot alpha for Mac was the icon: signifying’s the app’s alpha status, the blue robotic bird icon we all know and love on iOS was replaced with a metallic silver egg. Get it? Because it’s still not hatched.
I still love that joke, and it’s a great example of the little things Tapbots does that sets them apart from the rest… but I have to say, over the course of the last week using Tweetbot as my Mac Twitter client, I’ve missed having Tweetbot’s iconic blue bird in my dock. Here’s how to give Tweetbot for Mac the same icon as on iOS.
Book fetishists often cite the smell and feel of a book as a reason to keep chopping down trees and wasting fuel to ship the pulp around the world. But what about something that we probably all value, whether we are paper-sniffers or we have entered the modern age – signed books? Specifically, how does one get a digital book signed by the author?
Brett Kelly has the answer.
Who needs Instagram? Well, me for one, ever since I gave up on Flickr and never really got started with the evil Facebook. But I’m pretty bored with the Instagram filters already (they could toss them all except X-Pro II and I wouldn’t even notice).
And yes, there are a million other photo-filtering apps out there, but what about a little DIY? If you’re feeling adventurous, grab some tape, some colored gels and your iPhone and head over to Lomography for this great little low-tech project.
Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.
I love having my photos on my iPad, but I hate using iPhoto to get them there. To be honest, I just hate iPhoto, along with its more complicated and even more sluggish cousin, Aperture. I use Lightroom, and up until last week I was exporting photos from there into iPhoto just to sync them. Not only was this a headache, but it was a waste of space.
Now, you can tell iTunes to sync any folder of photos to the iPad, but with a little bit of effort things can be made much more elegant. By setting up Lightroom correctly, we can have any changes to our photos mirrored to the iPad at the touch of a button, and the whole process is near-automatic.
