Tag Archives: Top stories

Cult of Mac’s 2011 Holiday Gift Guide Kicks Off With Gifts for The Working Stiff

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We’re pretty passionate here at the Cult of Mac. What are we passionate about? Well, the pecking order goes something like this (although maybe the order is flipped for one or two CoM writers):

1. Our loved ones

2. Gadgets

Of course, we’re also passionate about sharing our knowledge of gadgets and technology with the rest of the world. Combine these three passions, and here’s the result: our Holiday Gift Guide.

We’ve crafted this Guide — which we’ll be sprinkling here and there as we get closer to Christmas — with an eye toward the different spheres that dominate our lives. We’ll have gifts for working, playing, creating, living — and one just for kids (because kids have their hands full just being themselves).

We’ll kick things off by getting down to business with Gifts for The Working Stiff. Happy Hunting.

Steve Jobs Personalized Stationery ($20)

“Stay foolish, stay hungry” — Steve’s words vibrate with visionary fire. YellowBrickGraphics have taken this mantra and stamped them onto cardstock, paired each card with an envelope and bundled the whole thing into sets of ten. Perfect for celebrating the wisdom of a giant.

“Mac Baby” Coffee Mug ($19)

What’s work without coffee? Crappy, that’s what. Show your coworkers where your loyalties lie with this mug from Coolkidstees. Yeah, $19 is a little pricey for a mug, but it’s better than trying to pour scalding coffee into your bare hands. Or there’s this Mac Special Operations Group mug, presumably for those of you who use iPads during Special Forces missions (seriously, we have no idea).

Pad & Quill The Little Black Book for iPhone 4/S Case ($45)

One day, near field communication will make wallets, and the things we carry in them, archaic. Till then, Pad & Quill’s stylish Little Black Book will keep not only the iPhone 4/S warm and safe, but also let you carry credit cards, IDs and the ilk in its hidden card pocket. Like P&Q’s other creations, the charismatic Little Black Book case is handmade in the U.S. from wood and leather using the mystic art of bookbinding.

Sena Florence iPad Case ($70)

Practicality. Portability. Panache. We raved about this iPad case when we reviewed it a few months back; Sena did a great job here  of wrapping useful features — like a magnetic cover and two viewing angles, perfectly suited for work — in a sharp-looking, surprisingly slim Napa leather skin.

Doxie Go Portable Scanner ($199)

Here’s another tip from the future: It’s going to be paperless. Doxie has a jump on this shift with their just-released, portable Doxie Go. The primo, battery-equipped scanner can store scans in its memory for later downloading to your Mac or scan directly to Doxie’s cloud service. Or pop for the iPhone/iPad Sync Kit and scan straight to your iDevice. The less-spectacular standard Doxie is $149, but needs to be hooked up to a Mac when scanning.

Roots Milano Bag Prince Messenger Bag ($398)

This unisex bag’s interior sleeves can’t accommodate a laptop, and it’s about a third the price of a 13″ MacBook Pro. But heck, who cares? Just imagine your giftee marvelling, slack-jawed, at the rich, handcrafted Italian leather. And even though there’s no laptop pocket, the Milano isn’t completely without amenities: For small gadgets, there’re twin exterior side pockets with magnetic buckles, and an external zippered pouch on the back for documents or an iPad. You might want to throw in a Taipan  MacBook sleeve ($35) from Booq, though.

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Flipboard For iPhone Is Like Having A Personalized Magazine In Your Pocket [Review]

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Flipboard released its official iPhone app last night. Many users were frustrated initially with error messages during installation and adding services.

The initial surge in traffic caused Flipboard’s servers to buckle under the strain, but the app came back online for most people this morning and it’s been working fine for me since. After playing with Flipboard on the iPhone, I love the way that it aggregates my news and social network feeds into a personalized magazine. The future of media consumption is here, and it’s all about curation.

Flipboard isn’t perfect, but the new iPhone app is about as good as it gets. There are some minor things I would like to change, like setting the ‘star’ option to save links to Instapaper instead of adding them as favorites to Twitter, but I have very few complaints overall. The folks at Flipboard did a fantastic job on this release, and all of the attention the app has been receiving is well deserved.

If you’ve used Flipboard on the iPad then you already know how it works. You add feeds and services (Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) as separate tiles. The app offers all kinds of recommended sources to add (Cult of Mac is proudly featured in the “Tech & Science” section) with a variety of topics (Travel, Sports, Entertainment, etc.). The most trusted brands and sites can be added there, or you can search for other RSS feeds and add those manually.

From a design perspective, Flipboard gets a lot of things right. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d like the card-like flipping animation that remains incredibly prevalent throughout the app, but the idea of flipping up and down through stories isn’t as non-intuive as I thought. Everything feels smooth and fluid.

The biggest feature that Flipboard is touting in its iPhone app is Cover Stories. The creators call Cover Stories the “place to quickly catch up on some of the most interesting news, updates and photos being shared with you right now.”  It’s also a curation tool, as the “more you interact with your friends and the stories being shared, the smarter Cover Stories gets.”

While I haven’t used Cover Stories enough to really see if it actually does adapt to my habits, I appreciate that Flipboard is trying to quiet the noise by offering a simple, relaxing way to consume news and social media in one place. It’s meant to give you the news that you care about, not everything that’s posted in the ether. Cover Stories is supposedly coming to the iPad soon, and I can see it being an even more attractive feature on a bigger screen.

The best thing about Flipboard for iPhone is that it’s free, so you have absolutely no reason not to try it. From what I can tell, this is only the beginning of what Flipboard has planned. The company wants to take the way we’ve traditionally read the internet and turn it on its head. And I’m ok with that.

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iPad 3 Will Be Backwards Compatible With All Smart Covers, But Not Current iPad 2 Cases [Report]

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According to Japanese Mac blog Macotakara, the iPad 3 will be backwards compatible with current Smart Covers, despite the fact that it will be so thick as to not work with iPad 2 cases.

Macotakara claims that they don’t know the reason the iPad 3 will be thicker than the iPad 2, but we do: it’s necessary in order to install the twin-light system needed to lluminate the iPad 3′s Retina Display.

As for the image above, your guess is as good as ours. Macotakara seems to think it somehow relates to an iPad 3, so maybe it’s the unbranded aluminum back panel of one or something? As for the Smart Cover backwards compatibility, considering that all that is necessary to keep a Smart Cover on are magnets in the right places, I wouldn’t be surprised if Smart Covers continued to be backwards compatible for future iPads for many generations to come.

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Apple’s Not Making An iTV, They Are Just Bringing The iMac To The Living Room [Analyst]

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We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the so-called iTV, Steve Jobs’s “cracking” of the HDTV problem. But what if the iTV is just a rumor, and Apple instead plans on fixing television by making iMacs into HDTVs?

According to Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, the iMac could work as a “bridge” TV to the eventual iTV:

Blair envisions the company pushing the largest screen sizes of the iMac toward the TV market by integrating Apple TV and iCloud features into a slimmer all-in-one PC with TV capabilities.

“We think this makes sense because while we typically think about the newest TV’s hanging on the wall in large form factors, Apple could effectively start with what they already have on the manufacturing line and slowly push their offering from 27 inches and scale up from there to 32 inches and then move on to the 42, 50 and 55 inch market,” he writes. “In short, we believe the initial Apple TV is their iMac computer that can function as a TV, over the iCloud platform.”

In essence, what he’s saying is that if you turn Front Row into the Apple TV’s interface and make iMacs in slimmer sizes up to 55-inches, Apple can have their cake and eat it too: iMacs could work as both mountable HDTVs and desktop computers, just by knocking off the base.

That’s interesting, but what will ultimately make or break the Apple TV isn’t the hardware, it’s how you control it. The iTV is all about the interface, and it’s the minutiae of how Apple intends for us to finally get rid of our remotes that will really prove if Steve Jobs really did “crack” the HDTV problem.

[via MacRumors]

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Apple Submits Revised Plans For Its New ‘Spaceship’ Campus, Including New Rendering

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We first heard about Apple’s new “spaceship” campus when the company’s co-founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs, presented its plans at the Cupertino City Council Meeting on June 7. The company has now submitted revised plans for the campus, in addition to a new rendering.

There seems to be only one new render in the revised plans, which is the image above, while the rest appear to be the same as those initially submitted. However, there is a detailed floor plan that illustrates how the four-story building will be laid out.

Once built, the new campus is expected to house 13,000 Apple employees over 2.8 million square feet. Steve Jobs was the first to give it the “spaceship” name when pitching it to the council earlier this year:

It’s a pretty amazing building. It’s a little like a spaceship landed. It’s got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle… It’s a circle. It’s curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It’s all curved. We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building… It’s pretty cool.

Apple is hoping to have the new campus completed by 2015.

[via MacRumors]

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Flipboard Launches Beautiful New iPhone App

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Flipboard has launched its official iPhone app with a gorgeous design and the new “Cover Stories” layout, or “the feed to check when you’re in line at the coffee shop, commuting on the train or just hanging out at home.”

Riding the coattails of a phenomenal iPad app, Flipboard is looking to be the best place for reading the internet on your iPhone.

Cover Stories come from all your Flipboard tiles, including social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. As you add more sources to your Flipboard, their posts will begin to appear in your Cover Stories.

If you want to mute a specific source from Cover Stories, tap a source’s avatar, then tap the head icon to access the mute button. You can always unmute any source from Flipboard’s settings.

The more you use Cover Stories, the smarter it gets. Wherever you may be when reading Cover Stories, we hope it will become an indispensable part of your day, multiple times a day. (Cover Stories will be coming to your iPad in the near future.)

An interview with the CEO of Flipboard:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=11pQ5sb5wME

Flipboard for iPhone is now available for free in the App Store.

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This Chinese MacBook Air Ripoff Would Probably Fool Jony Ive

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this Chinese imitation of the MacBook Air is the biggest compliment that Apple has received in a long time. Cleverly called the “AirBook,” this feat of design plagiarism looks exactly like Apple’s MacBook Air.

Costing only $499, the AirBook possess many similarities to Apple’s notebook, but there some crucial differences. Did we mention that it runs Windows?

M.I.C Gadget has posted a review of the AirBook. Here’s an excerpt:

The AirBook is an incredibly thin and light notebook computer. It measures just 13.1 inches by 8.82 inches (with a thickness of 0.75 inches tapering to 0.2 inches at its smallest point), and weighs a meager 3.1 pounds. We spent a lot of our time with it, and we can tell you that it’s even thicker and heavier than Apple’s Air, but it is as portable as the real thing. We think the knockoff makers have tried their best to perfect the AirBook down to the millimeter.

In the land of knockoffs, it doesn’t surprise us to see products like this coming out of China. (If you’ll remember, the Chinese have already replicated entire Apple Stores.) But the AirBook’s insane level of detail puts it in a category all its own. The ripoff boasts a 1.8GHz Atom dual core processor, 32GB SSD, and 2GB of RAM. Not too shabby for the price of an iPad.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb1eDOesRpI

Here’s how the AirBook stacks up against the competition performance-wise:

M.I.C Gadget calls it the “best-looking Windows laptop on the market,” and we would attribute that to the fact that it looks absolutely nothing like a Windows laptop. There are, however, small differences in the AirBook’s design (such as its unibody enclosure) that reveal how even the best knockoffs can’t match Apple’s design prowess.

We’ll see how long this thing stays on the market when Apple’s legal team pounces.

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Jailed Russian Blogger Tweets Instagram Pic from Police Van

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Protesters inside the police van via Instagram. Photo: Alexey Navalny.

The smiling faces make it look like a rowdy night out, but this jubilant photo was snapped with an iPhone in the back of a Russian police van.

Yesterday, Moscow-based blogger Alexey Navalny was carted away by the authorities while documenting the massive protests following the country’s contested parlimentary elections.

“With my lads on the police bus. They all say hi,”  Navalny tweeted in Russian. An hour later, he posted another Instagram photo, this time a group portrait in the Izmailovo jailhouse of everyone arrested.

Fittingly, Navalny’s trial was live-tweeted and documented with photos from the courtroom today. Along with Iliya Yashin, an activist from the Solidarnodst movement, Navalny was sentenced to 15 days in jail for his role in a protest against Vladimir Putin’s rule. He was charged with obstructing the course of justice.

“There is not a single doubt that my case is under the special control of the party of crooks and thieves,” Navalny told reporters in a courtroom before being charged, referring to the term he uses to describe Putin’s United Russia party, Reuters reports.

This is the latest we’ve seen of Instagram’s “fun and quirky” iPhone app capturing the news of the day – it was used to create some of the most haunting images of the London riots.

Via IJNet


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Why Android Will Always Be Laggier Than iOS

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One of the things that really stands out using an iPhone is just how smooth it feels compared to using Android. Where as Android is laggy, with a measurable interim between when you touch the screen and when the OS responds, iOS almost seems to anticipate what you want to do before your finger touches the display.

How has Apple managed this incredible feat? A better question might be: “How has Google managed to screw up Android’s multitouch so much?” According to Andrew Munn — a software engineering student and ex-Google intern — Android is so messed up that Google might never be able to match an iPhone or iPad’s performance. Ouch!

Before we begin, here’s some background. In the past, it has been said that Android’s UI is laggy compared to iOS because the UI elements weren’t hardware accelerated until Honeycomb. In other words, every time you swipe the screen on an Android phone, the CPU needs to draw every single pixel over again, and that’s not something CPUs are very good at.

That argument makes sense, except if it were true, Android would have stopped measurably lagging in touch responsiveness compared to iOS when Android 3.0 Honeycomb was released. Except guess what? Android devices are still laggy even after Honeycomb is installed on them.

Most modern Android phones have specs that are equivalent or even better than the iPhone’s (for example, most Android phones ship with 1GB of RAM, compared to the iPhone 4S’s 512MB); the problem isn’t hardware. So what’s the issue?

Here’s why Android can’t render its touch UI without lagging, according to Munn. In iOS, UI rendering processes occur with dedicated threads in real-time priority, halting other processes and focusing all attention on rendering the UI. . In other words, every time you touch your finger to your iPhone’s display, the OS literally goes crazy: “Someone’s touching us! Someone’s touching us! Stop everything else you’re doing, someone’s touching us!”

In Android, though, UI rendering processes occur along with the main thread with normal priority. In other words, it treats rendering the UI the same way as it would, say, downloading a podcast in the background, checking for SMSes, or anything else. Hence, a choppy UI.

Here’s Munn explaining what this all means, and why Google was stupid enough to design Android this way.

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority

Even with a Galaxy Nexus, or the quad-core EeePad Transformer Prime, there is no way to guarantee a smooth frame rate if these two design constraints remain true. It’s telling that it takes the power of a Galaxy Nexus to approach the smoothness of a three year old iPhone. So why did the Android team design the rendering framework like this?

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

So why hasn’t Google just changed the UI framework? Well, it’s a daunting task that would involve every app on Android Market to be rewritten to support the new framework. That’s at least a year away, and may never happen.

In other words, for Google to ever fully deal with Android’s lag problems, it needs to basically hit the reset button and destroy its app ecosystem. iOS, on the other hand, was built from the ground up to support multitouch smartphones; hell, Apple was the supreme visionary of it. It’s important to get things right.

[via Redmond Pie]

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The iPhone Is About To Become The FBI’s Newest Crime-Fighting Partner [Exclusive]

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The MobileOne iPhone Fingerprint Device (Photo/Provided)

The next time you are pulled over by police you may encounter a familiar face: your iPhone. Faster than you can say “Book ‘em, Dano,” Apple’s handset is quickly becoming law enforcement’s favorite tool for identifying unknown fingerprints. The iPhone’s touchscreen will even be enlisted by the FBI to spot terrorism suspects.

Time counts when you’re trying to identify and find a perp, so using an iPhone  could significantly shorten the time police officers need to wait while fingerprints are run through a national database, says Ken Nosker, president of Fulcrum Technologies. Fulcrum’s mobileOne device is just one product using the iPhone to create biometric devices for law enforcement.

The chief benefits of using an iPhone fingerprint device are saving time and money. If an officer must take a suspect in for fingerprints, the delay could be hours, and although there are mobile fingerprinting units, their high price means more delays as police search for the one or two they can afford. On the other hand, many police officers already have iPhones, and the cost of the mobileOne device is within reach of even the smallest police departments.

The mobileOne device slips over an off-the-shelf iPhone or iPod touch, which can be easily slipped into a pocket. The device then can take high-quality fingerprints that even pass the rigorous requirements of the FBI. Because of the iPhone’s Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity, fingerprints obtained can be quickly compared to those in national databases, including the FBI’s recently introduced Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) database.

In 2012, the mobileOne iPhone will be among devices that undergo trials by the FBI. Once approved, the iPhone fingerprint product could be available to all U.S. law enforcement looking for serious criminals.

At a recent International Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago, Fulcrum representatives were mobbed by local law enforcement officials asking when the mobileOne iPhone device would become available in their area. The holdup is getting the device approved by state IT departments. Nosker said the steps required to get iPhone fingerprinting approved are “pretty significant.”

But why not Android? For biometrics — which can include fingerprints, facial analysis – even voiceprints — “Apple provides the most stable platform, bar none,” Nosker said. He dismissed the vast array of Android handsets, complaining that 30 or 40 Android smartphones had 30 or 40 different ways to interface with his fingerprint device. In other words, Google’s OS can forget about being deputized, and Android will never be a RoboCop.

The mobileOne device is expected to cost $600, much less than another iPhone fingerprint option known as MORIS.

MORIS stands for “Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System.” Along with fingerprints, MORIS offers law enforcement officials facial and iris recognition. An officer snaps a photo of a suspect and the iPhone compares 130 facial landmarks, including the distance between the eye and nose. The same high-resolution photo is used to compare more than 200 features of the human iris. Both facial recognition systems use the iPhone to tie into national databases, cutting delays by a factor of ten, according to the system’s maker, BI2 Technologies.

The system, which attaches to an iPhone and weighs 12.5 ounces, is already paying off for Florida law enforcement. Since 2004, deputies in the Pinellas County, Fla. sheriff’s office have nabbed 700 people. In Brockton, Mass., the MORIS iris scans quickly link suspects’ prior criminal history.

Forget guns, or CB radios, or even in-car computer systems. In the next year, the iPhone could become the most important crime-fighting tool a cop has at his disposal. Just as the iPhone has reshaped what we expect from smartphones, it’s now set to overhaul law enforcement. Criminals beware!

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