| Cult of Mac

iPhone Home screen modders go crazy with iOS 14

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MS Paint
Wait a second, that doesn't look quite right!
Photo: Thomas Reisenegger

Ever wanted to make your brand-new iPhone look like it’s running Windows 95? That’s the outrageously novel idea that sprang into the mind of Ashley, an 18-year-old from Indiana who wants to work as a graphic designer, after she upgraded to iOS 14 last week.

Taking advantage of iOS 14’s new Home screen widgets feature, and a clunky workaround that employs the built-in Shortcuts app, she gave her iPhone 11 a vintage Microsoft-style makeover that screams retro cool and picked up 4.4 million views and 664,000 likes on TikTok.

“As someone who wasn’t even alive in the ’90s, other operating systems, such as Windows XP, are more nostalgic to me, but I went with Windows 95 because it furthered the contrast between old and new,” Ashley, who did not want her last name revealed, told Cult of Mac.

Score a massive library of royalty-free icons and stock images

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The Ultimate Design Assets Bundle
Bolster any design project with thousands of royalty-free and licensed flat icons, stock images, and more.
Photo: Cult of Mac Deals

For digital designers, assets are everything. They put flesh on the framework of your site, application or other design projects. So access to a massive library of royalty-free icons, stock images and other assets is an invaluable resource. The Ultimate Design Assets bundle includes three libraries, with lifetime access to thousands of assets.

Why Samsung will probably get away with ‘borrowing’ Face ID icon

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Samsung Pass logo
That logo certainly looks familiar.
Photo: Parker Ortolani/Twitter

Eagle-eyed viewers spotted something oddly familiar during Samsung’s CES keynote Monday. On a slide regarding Samsung Pass, its new biometric “identity management as-a-service” product, Samsung included a logo that looks (to be polite) “borrowed” from Apple’s Face ID.

Yes, this not-quite-identical logo is the latest chapter in Samsung being, err, inspired by Apple designs. But should Apple be firing up its on-call lawyers for an easy win over Samsung? Legally speaking, things might be a bit more complicated than they initially seem.

How to change the Slack logo back on your Mac

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Oh man, what were they thinking?
Oh man, what were they thinking?
Photo: Cult of Mac

Slack is everybody’s favorite way to waste time when they’re supposed to be working. And today, the biggest conversation in Slack chats everywhere is Slack’s hideous new logo.

It’s dull. It’s ugly. It has none of the personality of the original logo, and it doesn’t look like the Slack hashtag even if you squint at it hard.

If you’re on iOS, tough. You’re stuck with this awful new corporate abomination. But if you’re on the Mac, there’s good news: You can keep the old Slack app icon.

Step one is DON’T UPDATE THE SLACK APP YET!

The most popular colors for App Store icons explained

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The Top 200 iOS app icons, charted to a color wheel.
The Top 200 iOS app icons, charted to a color wheel.
Photo: Stuart Hall / Medium

There are thousands of colors an App Store icon can be … so why does it so often look like developers only had half a box of crayons to choose from when we look at our iPhones?

But App Store iconography may be more colorful than it seems at first. Don’t believe me? These color wheels show exactly how dominant certain colors are in the icons of the most successful apps.

Awesome iOS Easter egg discovered after two years, hiding in plain sight

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Say Apple into Voice Memos and you get its logo. Photo: Mike Rundle
Say "Apple" into Voice Memos and you get its logo. Photo: Mike Rundle

Apple is known for placing its fair share of Easter eggs into iOS and OS X, but this is the coolest one we’ve seen in a while.

You know the new Voice Memos icon Apple introduced in iOS 7 Beta 2? It turns out the icon is designed after the waveform representation of someone saying “Apple.”

App Watch: Stargazing, light-leaking and book-recommending

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FULLSCREEN

This Labor Day holiday we take things easy. Whether stargazing with Starwalk 2, taking a walk and remembering the hot spots along the way with Rego, getting a recommendation for a good read with Bookvibe, or adding so retro-style light leaks to our photos with a new set of Prolost Lightroom presets.

If you follow at least a few half-intelligent folks on Twitter, Bookvibe will help you out with recommendations for what to read next. It’s a service that monitors your Twitter feed and winkles out any mentions of books, sending an occasional list via email. Sometimes it’s tricked by a mention of something that sounds like a book, or presents a subject of Twitter ridicule (or Twittercule) as a recommendation, but overall Bookvibe is solid, and I’ve found a few titles from it. $Free

Rego bookmarks places. Add them from a map, from an address search, from your contacts or even by pulling in location data from a photo in your Camera Roll. Make collections, view your places on a map, add stars and customs map-pins, and share. A companion website pulls in Foursquare info and other details. Never forget a place again. $5

UpTime adds every keyboard shortcut you could need in an iPad browser. If you ever find yourself hitting a desktop shortcut on a keyboard hooked up to your iPad, and nothing happens, then you need UpTime, a simple iPad browser that can be driven entirely from the keyboard. Scrolling, searching, tab-switching and even Tweeting can all be done without once touching the screen, and it’s just $4

Your Eyefi card can now send photos straight from your camera to, well, to anywhere. Evernote, Flickr, Tumblr, OneNote… Even your Great Aunt Flo. Thanks to the new Eyefi IFTTT channel, any photos that’s uploaded from your Wi-Fi-capable card to the Eyefi cloud can be routed to any IFTTT destination that accepts photos. $Free

Jottacloud’s Drive web app pulls together all your cloud services into one beautifully-designed place, including Jottacloud’s own secure, secret, Norway-based version of Dropbox. Now you can take any photo from any of these services (Dropbox or Flickr, say), and edit them right there in the browser. $Free

Quotebook is a place to collect quotes and other text snippets. The Universal app integrates with your browser, your Mr. Reader RSS reader, IFTTT and even with Instapaper’s own highlights feature, and turns those snippets into searchable, organizable quotes. New in v3.0 is auto-lookup of sources (you get an icon and description for authors) and x-callback URL support to work with apps like Drafts. $5

When Lightroom Mobile accepts custom presets, there will be no need for any other photo editing app on iOS. Until then, you can switch back to the desktop to use things like Prolost’s fantastic Light Leak presets, a set of 480 different faux light leaks, 120 from each of four different vintage-camera styles. Just install, run your mouse over the list on the left of your Lightroom screen and hit the one that catches your fancy. Next up: a plugin that fakes leaving the lens cap on for the entire roll of 36 photos. $30

Perspective icons aren’t an app. They’re a bunch of icons to use in your OS X Omnifocus, but they’re so beautiful, simple and flat that you might want to use them elsewhere, too. For instance, I plan to add them to Scrivener so I don’t have to use the hideous 1990s-era stock icons included with that otherwise amazing app. Perspective icons come retina ready, and cost $10

Starwalk 1 was the app for showing off your iPad back when it first launched. Starwalk 2 adds new views and graphics to the stargazing guide. Hold your iPad up to the night sky and see a map of the stars overlaid on the sky using motion-tracking. You can now see a 3-D view of heavenly bodies from any point-of-view, and add satellites, deep-space objects and more via IAP. So put that bourbon down and use the nighttime for something more useful instead. $3

Give your computer a Yosemite-style makeover (even if it runs Windows)

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post-283705-image-fd00261f5b107b2dd9a25abf32d49b78-jpg

New icons in OS X Yosemite will bring the Mac operating system and iOS closer than ever visually. While Yosemite doesn’t come out until fall, you can get this cool, flat look now — without downloading Apple’s Developer Preview betas, which are buggy at best.

This short video will show you how to give your computer a Yosemite-style face-lift — even if you’re running Windows. Get the downloads mentioned in the video at the links below.

Quickly Hide All The Icons On Your Desktop [OS X Tips]

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Look, ma! No icons!
Look, ma! No icons!

There are times when you just need to clear off the icons on your Desktop, like when you’re giving an important presentation at work. No one wants to see all the images you’ve saved from the internet, right?

I used to solve this problem with a Sort Me folder on the Desktop, just select all in a Finder window focused on the Desktop, and drag it all to the Sort Me folder.

There’s an even faster and easier way to hide all the icons on your Desktop, though, using the Terminal.