Cult of Mac Magazine June 9 Edition, Free on iTunes

Every week, we serve up the best of the Cult of Mac website as a magazine so you can download and read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.

When the Yosemite posters first went up in Moscone Center ahead of  WWDC, a thought lodged in my brain that continued to tumble around all weekend: Apple drew inspiration for the name of the new OS from David Hockney.

It’s not as much of a stretch as it sounds. After all, Hockney recently had a major show at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, where he debuted a series of 12-foot-high tributes to Yosemite National Park made with an iPad. The big, bold, bright works with clear blues and greens were absolute show-stealers.

Cult of Mac Magazine June 2 Edition, Free on iTunes

Every week, we serve up the best of the Cult of Mac website as a magazine so you can download and read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.

There’s an ongoing question in hit comedy show Silicon Valley: do you have to be a jerk to succeed? For the entire first season of Mike Judge’s HBO comedy about the new economy gold rush, it’s been Steve vs. Steve 2.0.

Part of what makes the show a resounding success – it’s already confirmed for season two – is how realistic it is. The startup lads at Pied Piper have been under the gun preparing for a big demo: they have a spot at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. Yeah, that’s an actual thing. The show is set where TCD takes place, in the barn-like San Francisco Design Center Concourse, and some 400 companies have duked it out in demos that raised over $2.4 billion in funding.

Nota bene: teensy spoilers follow.

Thanks to its amazing products, Apple already runs your social life, your work life and your downtime. But what if the Cupertino company designed products for the rest of your world? Over the years, there’s been much speculation about the company branching out – especially the Jetsons-like iWatch that will sync all our data and make sure the burrito is at the perfect temp when we get home.

Here are a few items we wish Sir Jony Ive would turn his hand to — because we’d like to take a dip, drop trou, drink and drive with that sweet Apple logo. Maybe just not in that order.

What would you like to see Apple’s design team dream up? Let us know in the comments below.

As warmer weather hits even San Francisco, we’re pooling our beer money for a robot bartender. And some wasabi-flavored toothpicks. Our ever-expanding crew could use some of these modular Modos bookshelves and stools, too. There are so many things on Kickstarter that we want — jeans, maps, comic books — that we’re sharing our wish list with you.

Even cranky futurist Jaron Lanier supports Kickstarter — it “turns consumers into a priori funders of innovation” and we’re pretty sure that translates into robotic cocktails for everyone.

Apple’s video chat feature FaceTime has bridged the miles for families, sparked a ton of romances and probably shattered a few marriages.

This may be the first time it’s ever shipwrecked someone, though.

John Berg was sailing off the coast of Kona, Hawaii when a FaceTime login request started messing with the navigation app on his iPad. Although sailing apps on smartphones and tablets so popular they’re credited with having sunk the market for Garmin products,  imprecise navigation has been a concern.

Thailand is one of the world’s most coup-prone countries. It’s also home to people who smile the most in selfies. So even when the tanks roll in, the urge to snap takes over. Better yet: get that shot with the soldiers. Or the tank. That’s what’s happening in Bangkok, where the smartphone set is taking keepsakes as the coup comes to town.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to hire more hackers — and that means changing the rules about how much pot you can smoke on the job.

“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cybercriminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” FBI Director James B. Comey told the Wall Street Journal.

SAN FRANCISCO —  Brendan Nee is a walking contradiction. He’s car guru who doesn’t own one, a 21st-century geek with an 18th-century mustache who has come up with a novel bit of nagware that could help Americans get off their spreading behinds.

An engineer working on “smart car assistant” Automatic, he spends many of his weekends at hackathons and has a coder’s physique to show for it. In January, he won the Clinton Foundation Code4Health Codeathon by developing a working prototype of an app called Walkoff in just a weekend. A few months later, Nee and team rolled out a more polished version that mashes up the data Automatic pulls from cars with info gathered by a Jawbone Up fitness tracker, showing a user how much time they’re spending behind the wheel versus walking.

“Clearly, without an actual car, I’m not the ideal tester,” admits Nee. The closest he comes to owning a set of wheels is a retired public bus dubbed the PlayaPillar that he only rolls out for Burning Man.

Silicon Valley, much like the place it depicts, is one big sausage fest. An “inclusive” tech conference is one where there is almost a line for the women’s bathroom and flirting involves some guy trying to exchange PGP keys with you.

So it makes sense that the show’s only main female character — Monica, the right hand of billionaire VC Peter Gregory — feels obliged to tell the crew of Pied Piper before they head to the battle at TechCrunch Disrupt that the place is a “vortex of distraction.” But it’s not the gizmos or other gimmicks, it’s the women.

“Normally, the tech world is 2 percent women, the next three days it’s 15 percent,” she warns gravely.

“It’s a goddamn meat market,” Gilfoyle deadpans.

The episode is all about how sparks fly when sex meets the single startup guy.

Some spoilers follow. Medium, though. 

Angry Birds is coming to a big screen near you. Rovio Entertainment is taking the epic battle of birds-versus-pigs from your iPhone to the cinema, in 3-D, and launching it into the wide, wide world in July 2016.

We’re aflutter with anticipation: Can they actually make a movie based on a video game worth watching? It’s happened time and time again that our favorite living room brain-cell killer was transported to the land of plush seats and buttery popcorn only to disappoint.

Most video games turn into celluloid duds even though we stupidly paid to see them; Rotten Tomatoes gives Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within only a 44 percent approval rating. The rest go down from there.

In the gallery above, you’ll find a brutal rundown of the best of the worst video game-cum-movies that Rovio should watch — as a reminder of what not to do.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even in a town populated by ninjas, gurus and rockstars, Mario Estrada may have the coolest job around.

He’s the Director of Fun for digital photo app Hipstamatic and hopes you won’t hate him for it.

“Most people don’t believe that’s my job, but a lot of thought went into the title,” he says, enjoying the sun from the rooftop lounge of the startup’s SOMA headquarters. “Someone asked once why I wasn’t the VP of fun, but that implies there’s someone more fun than I am. And you can’t be the president of fun, because, actually, being president is never fun.”

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

Every week, we serve up the best of the website as a magazine so you can download an read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.

This week Buster Hein foraged for the best in movies, books and music in the iTunes store, his picks include an album of flamenco-rockin goodness, plus a haunting Southern drama and a riveting nonfiction book how the modern office got “cubed.” We also review the best in apps as well as take a look at the best minimalist iPhone cases and the most awesome Apple-related gadgets we found this week.

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

The greening of Apple: it took almost 10 years for the Cupertino company to turn around its dismal eco-scorecard.

But that worm has truly turned: in this week’s edition of Cult of Mac Magazine, author Luke Dormehl talks to former Apple exec John Sculley and other insiders about why this change is all about current Apple CEO Tim Cook.  Apple’s green day means a better future and even better products, they say.

Also this week, we’ve got reviews editor Charlie Sorrel taking a deep dive into underwater iPhoneography, plus his reviews for the best in Apple-related paraphernalia — including a mullet-style notebook (you know: business up front, party in the back.) Our tastemaker Buster Hein has once again sifted through all the offerings in the iTunes store to serve up the most scrumptious offerings in music, books and movies and Evan Killham rounds up what you need in apps.

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Image: Wikipedia

Apple has turned even the most modest weekend strummer into a guitar hero.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, our games editor and disco band frontman (!) Rob LeFebvre takes you on a magical mystery tour of Garageband’s latest and greatest features. He’ll walk you through a shiny new piece of kit called Drummer, plus get you ringtone making and learning from the pros in the Lessons store.

Rob has also kept his ear to the ground for all the other great gear you need to make your homegrown music making hit the right notes and, well, sound better. And definitely louder. Whether you’re rocking at home or taking your iPad with you on stage.

So. The beat goes on with Charlie Sorrel sifting through MacBook stands to single out the best, plus his picks for the best Apple-related gear and Buster Hein’s top choices from iTunes for music, books and movies you’ll be grooving to all week.

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“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” ― Brené Brown

Help us make the magazine better by chiming in to report anything that needs fixing or can be improved.

Some of the improvements on the upcoming version of the app were suggested by readers, so give us a shout if you have a wish list.

And, if you enjoy Cult of Mac Magazine, please give us a review.

Credits

Publisher Leander Kahney

Editor Nicole Martinelli

Cover design Rob LeFebvre

Contributors Evan Killham, Buster Heine, Luke Dormehl, Rob LeFebvre and Cult of Mac staffers.

@2014 Cult of Media Corp. Produced using Packagr and the Baker Framework.

If you didn’t win the lottery for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, you’re in good company. For the third year in a row, AltConf is hosting a get-together for the rest of us.

Formerly called AltWWDC, the conference will boost Fog City’s already-high nerd quotient by hundreds of developers who didn’t get the golden tickets. AltConf will be held in parallel to WWDC at the Children’s Creativity Museum in Yerba Buena Center near Moscone West — which means that haves and have-nots will be waiting at the same stoplights and heading to the same bars after hours.

If you’re like Cult of Mac Magazine staffers, you want to use your iPad as more than a photo album.

Our reviews editor Charlie Sorrel even went as far to ditch his Mac for the magical and revolutionary tablet back when it first came out – before having to give up the ambitious plan, and not for the reasons you’d think. This week, he delves into all the ways you can power up your iPad for work without sacrificing your sanity.

They say that Macworld doesn’t break news as much as soft launch it: Cult of Mac Magazine
begs to differ. This week, we bring you news you won’t find elsewhere from the Moscone floor.

You’re probably the go-to person in your circle of friends, family and maybe even your company when it comes to cracked iPhone screens, waterlogged iPads and battery-dead iPods.

That’s why the team over at iFixit is planning to launch a section for third-party repair services, which they previewed at Macworld. CEO Kyle Wiens says the project was a natural outgrowth of the numbers: on average, iFixit members have made seven repairs. “We figured if you can do that many, you should be making money from it.”

Don’t be a tool
Wiens asked for a show of hands of people who had tried to repair an iPad and broken the screen taking it apart instead: a dozen arms shot up from the 50-or so aspiring repair people at the conference. If you want to go into the repair business, you’re going to need the right kit, so consider which tools you’ll need for the bulk of your repairs and add that to your business plan, Wiens said.

For example, after realizing the iPhone 5 fingerprint sensor is easily busted when pried open, they created the iSclack, which pops it open without damaging it. (Bonus: it also works on other versions of the iPhone 5 , but is not suitable for previous generations.) The new repair biz section of the site will have tool kits aimed at third-party repairs.

Follow the money
A good rule of thumb for pricing your services? Half to two-thirds the cost of the device. Keep in mind,

Luke Soules, iFixit COO said, that iPads have higher margins for the repair person since the owner’s perception is that it’s a more expensive device. (The “free” or subsidized iPhones that come with call plans or trade-ins mean most American consumers perceive the phones as costing less.)

Consider the scale
“You could charge $150 to fix an iPad and customers are OK with it,” Weins said. “There’s more potential there, once you get up to scale.” He reiterated that iPhone owners, especially under warranty, will go back to Apple but watch those same customers come crawling back, he said, when it expires.

Pick Your Battles
“Figuring out when to say no is essential to success,”  Soules told a breakout group of would-be third party repairers. “You’ll want to pick the repairs where you know what you’re getting into.” A cracked iPhone screen can be a quick turnaround with “instant gratification” for the owner, and a borked home button can also be an easy fix.

Keep in mind “broken” can sometimes be easier to fix than “damaged” (especially when it comes to water damage, he said.) And when a customer brings in a device but doesn’t know why it’s not working, troubleshooting can end up being costly — for the repairer. There are obvious things like the water sensor which turns pink when there’s damage — though pristine sensors can be bought bogus online, he noted. Sometimes, you’re going to want to tell the customer that the device can’t be fixed and offer $50 for parts. That may end up being a much better deal for everyone involved.

Parts is Parts
On the question of parts, Wiens admitted that iFixit’s parts are more expensive than other options: “We spend more because we want quality.” It’s buyer beware if you’re going through eBay or Amazon, he said, noting that often the reviews don’t accurately reflect the overall quality of the parts on sale. Apple still refuses to offer original equipment manufacturer’s parts (OEM) to third-parties, despite the fact that not every Apple customer lives close to store or certified technician. “Tim Cook has not returned any of my phone calls about OEMs yet, but I will keep calling.”

The preview of the repair info was clean and organized – like you’d expect from iFixit. You’ll have to wait to check it out, though. Soules told us that it will probably debut in a couple of months. “It’s one of our more long-term projects,” he said. Not a quick fix, in other words.

This week, our intrepid Games Editor Rob LeFebvre brings readers of Cult of Mac Magazine all the news from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

There were dueling VR 3D headsets, discussions about sexism in the games industry, contests, awards and plenty of action on the show floor.

But the million-dollar question this year was: How do I make the next Flappy Bird?

Here are some of the more curious sights spotted at GDC, where legions of developers, journalists and marketing folks from around the globe descended on San Francisco…

Analog In The Mix

Surprise: it wasn’t all digital. Here are some folks playing Tash-Kalar a board game with wizardry from the Czech Republic.

Look To The Skies

A GDC goer tries on the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 for size. It will go head-to-head with the Sony Morpheus Playstation headset, also showed off here in San Francisco.  3D and VR were some of the major themes of the show.

Back To The Future?

Even with all the bells and whistles offered by 3D and VR, it was worth whiling away a few minutes with early interactive game Zork,  especially since it was offered up on these vintage Macs!

Tastes Great With Kashkaval

Photo: Rob LeFebvre

Cold War “comedy adventure” game Jazzpunk’s promo swag at the indie games festival was crazy topical, or wildly insensitive given the recent events in Crimea. We’re still not sure, but either way, we’re keeping the box for posterity.

Paper or Plastic?

With dozens of sessions, pressers, conferences and events, keeping track of what to do next required brain power and a lot of planning.

Unless otherwise noted, @all photos courtesy Official GDC, CC-licensed on Flickr.

This week  Cult of Mac Magazine looks at vice in the iTunes store.

Reporter Luke Dormehl talks to the devs who are making a living — if not a fortune — skirting the Apple censors, in a store that’s intended to be squeaky clean and suitable for minors.

He also looks into why, despite the Cupertino company’s rigid guidelines and “boob ban” of years past, there are plenty of questionable apps available to all. Sex, drugs and drinking games are the available in app form by the dozens, some of them rated suitable for ages 4+. This cat-and-mouse game to keep the store family-friendly yet appeal to developers with a gold-rush mentality has also given rise to a cottage industry of consultants who help app makers get into the store with more adult content than Apple intends to allow.

If you’ve got some of that content on your device and want to hide it, we take a look into Apple’s methods to put that stuff under a virtual mattress and apps that let you “vault” material you don’t want prying eyes to see.  We also look into some of the outrageous apps Apple has banned over the years after they slipped into the store as well as the risqué ones that are still available today.

As always, send your comments, feedback or any troubles you may have with the app to me via email or using the “send” button top right from our site.

Cult of Mac Magazine

Quick Save For Snap Chat

Apple has approved a number of apps that allow users to save, forward, email and otherwise capture that fleeting moment from Snapchat. This one, Quick Save, is approved for users over age 4, and the preview gives an idea of the kind of person whose photo you might hope to save for posterity.

69 Places – Sex Locations & Fantasies

This one is approved for ages 17+ — but look and feel is so ludicrous it could only appeal to people who have not yet hit the age of consent. Who is up for a fast food drive thru quickie?

iQuarters

Of the gaggle of digital “quarters” drinking games, this one promises to make “corner  pubs and frat houses rejoice,” and got the green light from Apple for ages 4+.

Leafly

Think of Yelp, but for pot. This 17+ app provides the low-downon 500+ strains, sorted alphabetically and categorized by indica, sativa, and hybrid and the dispensaries near you.

Down Dating

Apple banned Bang with Friends, but undeterred the company returned with an app called Down that includes the same anonymous pairing feature as before in a slightly more discreet package. You will find out just which of your Facebook pals are up for something more – though beware, in our tests it also suggested family members of the opposite sex.

Adult Frames

Here’s another one that has “adult” in the title but is more likely to appeal to a much younger set – going by the cursive script and exclamation points.

Evil Apples: A Filthy Adult Card and Party Game

A riff on Cards Against Humanity, this one promises filthy fun for ages 17+. One reviewer says it’s keeping them away from “homework” and another says it’s “great fun for the obscene mind” and that you can be “so dirty with complete strangers.”