2012 was a great year for Apple, and one of the most exciting for them in years. This year brought not only a myriad of new products, like the iPad mini and iPhone 5, but innovative software and services as well such as OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6.
As 2012 comes to a close, let’s take a look back at Apple’s accomplishments for the year. If you’d like, you can also take a look back at 2011’s year in review here.
My hands shake worse than a crack addict when I take video. I’m too cheap to go buy a tripod, so I just don’t try and take video anymore. There’s a new app that’s ready to cure some of my problems though. It’s called Cycloramatic and it’s the most amazing app you’re going to see today.
Rather than forcing you to buy a tripod to take perfect 360º videos, Cycloramic uses the vibrations of your iPhone 5 to swivel around and get a clean shot every time.
Our favorite iPad magician, iSimon, is back at it again with some awesome iPad magic. To help you get ready for Christmas tomorrow, iSimon has some magic tricks to help you out. iSimon even has a magic app that will give you a White Christmas no matter where you live. Checkout all his tricks in the video above.
Source: YouTube
Via: Gizmodo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWyZUszyJHg
Apple just posted its new iPad mini ad, “I’ll Be Home,” in which an adorable young girl, shown on an iPad, plays “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” on the ukulele via FaceTime to her Grandfather, who is shown on an iPad mini.
It’s thirty seconds of holiday cheer, presented without comment or text, with only an Apple logo and some suggestion of snow at the very end. It’s a sweet little video, and honestly, Apple, you had me at ukulele music.
Source: YouTube
If you pop into your local Microsoft store and ask for a demonstration of Windows 8, there’s a chance the store assistant will disappear and send over an 11-year-old child to help you. That’s what the company is doing in Portugal in an effort to prove its new operating system is so intuitive, even a child can use it. Either that or it’s taking advantage of cheap child labor.
Despite ailing on Wall Street and criticized by analysts for somehow being “disappointing,” Apple’s iPhone 5 launch is the biggest one for the company yet. How big? Not even getting into units sold, the iPhone 5 has been responsible for an influx of about $75 billion into the U.S. economy in 2012… and that’s not even taking into account the rest of the world.
Not impressed yet? iPhone 5 sales could move the entire $15 trillion GDP of the United States up by half a percent.
Crazy, huh? This and other interesting facts in tech are part of Mobile Future’s 2012 Mobile Year In Review. Well worth a watch. The future’s just starting.
I’m tired of seeing your crappy vertical videos on YouTube. I mean, I’m not saying the content of your videos are crappy, but black bars on the sides are annoying and they’ve destroyed my desire to watch whatever cute and silly things your cat is doing on YouTube.
The war against Vertical Video Syndrome has been waging for years, yet the horde of black-barred videos that have infested YouTube have continued to multiply. However, in an unexpected move that may finally cure us of vertical videos, Google’s new YouTube Capture app has the greatest video recording feature of all-time – you have to rotate your iPhone into landscape mode before it will let you record a video.
The Daily was the first bold publishing experiment on the iPad, the project that was supposed to be a shining light to show journalism the way through the murky path of the 21st Century.
Instead, it was sadly shut down earlier this month, with December 14th marked as the last day for the world’s first iPad-only newspaper.
Well, today’s December 14th, and the remaining staff of The Daily have opted to go out in style, sweetly releasing their own version of “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music… with modified lyrics calling out various Apple products and the newspaper they’d worked for. Here’s the video.
Ever since 2008, when its first smash-hit, Ocarina — an app that turns your iPhone into a playable flute — debuted, Smule has proved itself over and over again as a magical outfit guaranteed to drop jaws with every release. Their newest app, Strum, is out today, and it’s no less wondrous an app than any of their previous efforts. But there is one very big difference: Instead of sticking to their musical background (one of Smule’s founder is, after all, an assistant professor of computer music at Stanford), they’ve taken their music fairy dust and sprinkled it on the world of video.
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.
It’s Day 12! That means KitCam, one of the best camera apps for the iPhone.
from Vimeo.
So you wanna be the next Jony Ive and make beautiful and intuitive products that are just like Apple’s? Good for you. But figuring out how to replicate Apple’s design philosophies isn’t all that easy – look at RIM.
To help you out, Online MBA created this two minute video that boils down all of Jony and Steve’s design insights into five bite-sized nuggets. Maybe you won’t invent the next iPhone but if you follow their advice it should at least prevent you from becoming the next Scott Forstall.
Building an extremely useful and cool app is a start but just because it’s built doesn’t mean the customers will come. In fact, building the app is just the beginning. Now you need to spread the word, and that requires a whole other set of skills – skills you may not have.
We’re here today to help you acquire some of those skills with this free informative video course.
If you’re a gamer, enjoy yourself this lazy December Friday afternoon through this wonderful, whimsical two-and-a-half minute video — in which Link, the elven, immortal hero of the Legend of Zelda series — travels across a series of Macs and iOS devices in a university computer land in order to rescue Princess Zelda from the evil wizard Gannon.
Just incredibly well done. Makes me want to load Majora’s Mask up in an emulator on my MacBook Air and while the afternoon away.
We already posted the transcript to Tim Cook’s full interview with Brian Williams on last night’s NBC Rock Center, but here’s the video, covering everything from his CEO role at Apple, the failure of iOS 6’s Maps, the future of the Apple TV, and more.
Part one is above, and part two is below the jump. Sorry, NBC insists on posting their videos in Flash, so you’ll need to watch this on a Mac or PC.
We’re continually seeing examples of how the iPhone has exploded its horizons to become much, much more than just a phone. Case (ha) in point: Why shell out $300 for an action cam when you already own a video cam with stellar optics and image-stabilizing, a big, beautiful screen and the ability to upload your exploits whenever you damn well please? All you need to turn your iPhone from video cam to action cam is a rugged, weatherproof case with a wide-angle lens, and the ability to stick the whole thing onto a helmet or such. And that pretty much describes the $150 Mophie OutRide system.
Props to the indefatigable Onion News Network for breaking this important story: Apple is promising an update by Christmas that will fix iOS 6 Maps’ unreliable mapping results by physically altering the shape and geography of the Earth’s crust. That’s a solution that Steve “you’re holding it wrong” Jobs could be proud of.
Source: The Onion
I’m an avid Instragammer. And yes, I even take pictures of food, and clouds and all that stupid stuff. It’s horrible. It’s a bad habit. I need to stop. But I can’t. Maybe if the most loathed band in the world would just make a song about how awesome Instagram is then I’d be motivated to kick the habit.
Nickelback still hasn’t worked Instagram into the lyrics of their next mega-album, but CollegeHumor just created the perfect Nickelback video that destroys Instagram and its users with such perfection it’s unbelievable.
Will it keep me from snapping a pic of the French Toast I’m going to eat for breakfast tomorrow? Nope. But I’ll get rid of all my beautiful fingernail pictures now.
Source: CollegeHumor
Each month I get my AT&T bill there are usually some small charges hidden away somewhere and I have to hunt through the endless pages of info trying to find out why my bill is off. The cascade of frustration usually results in me calling AT&T asking for an explaination on why this bill is different from last month if I didn’t have any overages.
AT&T customer care is probably tired of talking to people like me, so to make things easier they’re creating monthly personalized videos that will explain all of the charges on your wireless bill.
Here’s an example of what the videos will look like:
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is making its way to Android and iOS on December 6, and I couldn’t be more excited; it’s my favorite title in the series, and I’m looking forward to playing through it again. To celebrate its release, Rockstar Games has just launched a new Vice City trailer. If you’re a fan of the game, you have to check it out.
After being delayed a month, Apple finally launched iTunes 11 today, a complete rethinking of iTunes as we know it. Ditching much of the bloat that accompanied iTunes 9 and 10, iTunes 11 brings many iOS-inspired features over to the Mac. In this video, we’ll walk you through iTunes 11’s new interface.
Like many of you, I love Instagram. It’s one of my top 5 most used iPhone apps. Lately I’ve started to get tried of Instagram’s user interface. While the app’s design has certainly evolved over the years, the overall aesthetic has stayed the same since 2010. I really like the minimalist, Metro-ish design taste, and apparently so does a concept designer named Stephen M. Levinson.
Stephen has uploaded a short video of how he has re-imagined Instagram, and it looks awesome. “I redesigned parts to be a bit more intuitive to gestures, removed the top menu bar that felt unnecessary, and I wanted to make the shots look like actual polaroids,” he told TechCrunch.
I’m not sure about all of Stephen’s design choices, but I love the idea of Instagram having a more gesture-driven interface. What do you think?
Source: Vimeo
Via: TechCrunch
Were you crazy enough to brave the murderous masses of people looking for deals on Black Friday this year? If you stopped by the Apple Store to get a cheaper MacBook or something, you probably noticed that the Apple Stores were even more crowded than usual. But then if you went over to a Microsoft Store it looked like just a normal day.
Here’s a video that compares the amount of people visiting the Microsoft Store and the Apple Store. Surprise, Apple won on Black Friday.
If there’s any company that gets content creation on the iOS platform, it’s Algoriddim. The Germany-based development firm is behind djay, the most intuitive and polished software of its kind on iPhone and iPad.
Music mixing isn’t Algoriddim’s only forte. Back in June, vjay for iPad was announced. The app brought live video remixing to the tablet experience, and today vjay has arrived on the iPhone. To celebrate the release, Algoriddim is also discounting all its iOS apps for a limited time in the App Store.
We think the design of the iPhone 5 is pretty stinkin’ gorgeous. Only problem is that its anodized aluminium casing has a tendency to scratch up very easy.
Once you’ve accrued a few scratches on your iPhone 5 you might mourn the loss of its brand new look, or you could just scratch it up even more to make it look totally awesome. It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s what one YouTube user did and the results are pretty awesome.
Take a look at the video below to see the result –
Apple’s new 4-inch iOS devices — namely the iPhone 5 and the fifth-generation iPod touch — appear to be suffering from a strange glitch that means they struggle to keep up with rapid touch inputs, particularly when scrolling at a 45-degree angle. The problem, which isn’t present on older iOS device like the iPhone 4S, is demonstrated in the two-minute clip below.
