This iPhone Smartcover Turned Two Design Students Into Entrepreneurs [Interview]

The TidyTilt.

TidyTilt is a nifty earbud cord wrap, multi-position kickstand and mount for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that looks a lot like Apple’s iPad Smartcover.

The brainchild of Zahra Tashakorinia and Derek Tarnow, students at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, TidyTilt was so popular that its massive overfunding on Kickstarter turned their little project into a business.

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6 Tips For Better Street Photography With Your iPhone [Interview]

"They Thought I Was A Jumper." @Travis Jensen.

Like many of us, Travis Jensen spends his lunch hour taking iPhone pics.

Unlike most of us, however, his moody urban landscapes and punchy black-and-white portraits have been the object of two photo books, shot with fellow street photography veteran Brad Evans, Tenderloin U.S.A. and the #iSnapSF Field Journal.

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Cleaning Up Your Messy iTunes Playlists Can Boost Your Brain Power [Interview]

You might have suspected that the right music – whether it’s thrash metal or Mozart – keeps you more focused or relaxed.

Now a trio of brain researchers have studied the effects of playlists on the brain, resulting in a nifty little book called  Your Playlist Can Change Your Life. In the book’s 200-or so pages, they explain how to use specific playlists to alleviate anxiety, promote concentration, get happy or move into a flow state thanks to Brain Music Treatment or BMT.

If you can’t make it to New York for BMT therapy, for $9.99, you can also download a Common BMT File. Created from more than 2,000 people’s brain waves with the help of evidence-based BMT tech, they say it acts as a kind of aural “first-aid” before you get your own playlists together.

Intrigued (my current nightstand read is Mark Changizi’s excellent Harnessed about music and the brain), I talked to author Dr. Galina Mindlin about what playlists have the most impact, cleaning up your music collection and her current heavy rotations.

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iOSOpenDev Is A “Shortcut” For Cydia Devs, But Is That A Good Thing? [Interview]

The jailbreak community is full of talented developers and innovative ideas that have kept Apple on its toes for the past several years. The time and effort that goes into creating a quality tweak is often unappreciated by the average jailbreaker.

A free tool called iOSOpenDev was recently released for developers. Those with basic programming knowledge can use Xcode templates for creating jailbreak-style apps and tweaks that can be easily published to Cydia, the jailbreak version of the App Store. While iOSOpenDev is attempting to make it easier for developers to code tweaks, apps and plugins, we sat down with a prominent jailbreak developer to ask if iOSOpenDev is really a good thing for the jailbreak community.

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Apple TV Hacked To Run App Store Apps, What It Means For Developers [Interview]

Known developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been able to run iOS App Store apps on the Apple TV fullscreen at the device’s full, 720p resolution. Troughton-Smith also worked on the Siri port that was demoed months ago and made available for jailbroken iOS devices last week.

With the help of another developer by the name of TheMudKip and Grant Paul’s MobileLaunchpad launcher, Troughton-Smith has been able to run iOS apps natively on the Apple TV without using AirPlay.

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Meet iPadre: Q&A with priest who convinced the Vatican they need an app for that

Father Paolo Padrini is the Italian priest who developed iBrevary, an app that puts morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayers on the iPhone.  It was the first iPhone application sanctioned by the Holy Roman Church, Padrini also works with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
Cult of Mac talked to him about what’s next app-wise and what place religious apps have in iTunes.

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Sparrow Was Born From Letters.App, And Why Tweet-Like Email Is Just The Beginning [Exclusive Q&A]

Last week, one of the most interesting Mac programs to come out in years hit the App Store in Sparrow for Mac, an elegant and attractive e-mail client that looks and acts a lot like Twitter.

I loved it, comparing it to more full-featured clients like Postbox 2 by saying Sparrow was “the equivalent of skipping stones, not piloting a submarine.”

I decided to reach out to Sparrow for Mac team member Dom Leca and ask him a few questions about the origins, inspiration and future of the e-mail program that treats your Gmail as if it were Twitter.

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Interview: Arc90’s Richard Ziade Explains Why Readability Is Now A Whole Lot More Than Just Javascript [Exclusive]

Readability is an excellent bit of Javascript that strips online content down to its barest and most readable elements, and was borrowed wholesale last year by Apple for the new Safari Reader option in Safari 5.

Late last month, it became even more excellent by relaunching itself as a reading platform in its own right. Launching aside a native iOS app powered by Marco Arment’s excellent Instapaper, Readability is now more than a snip of Javascript code but instead a monthly subscription service that pays 70% of its collected fees directly to the writers and publishers being read.

We reached out to Arc90’s Richard Ziade for a quick chat about what Readability’s new change in scope would mean not just for existing users, but for publishers of web content looking to get paid.

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The Agony & The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: Q&A with Mike Daisey [Interview]

Mike Daisey isn’t afraid to rant. The mercurial storyteller first made a name for himself on stage by decrying the state of American theater. Tech is a natural target for him – he’s survived a stint at Amazon.com and takes apart computers to relax – so he really makes his point forcefully with a two-hour monologue called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” onstage now through Feb. 27 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. (See our review of the show here.)

During our 40-minute conversation, I get the uncomfortable feeling he’s ranting directly at me. In fact, the show takes tech journalists to task for being subservient to the industry as well as missing the whole story of where all the shiny gadgets we report about so breathlessly come from. Ahem.

Cult of Mac talked to Daisey about why both Apple fans and PC people will enjoy his show, as well as his own gadget gear and why donning Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck on stage would’ve been “fucking stupid.”

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The Designer Behind Those Stunning Apple Mosaic Portraits [Interview]

Experimental portrait of Steve Jobs. @Charis Tsevis

Visual designer Charis Tsevis creates high-impact images by piecing together digital minutia into stunning mosaics.

Tsevis, based in Athens, Greece has worked for Toyota, IKEA, Bradesco Bank, Saatchi and Saatchi, BBH and media like Time, Fortune, Los Angeles Times, Sunday Times and Forbes, to name a few.

But you probably know his work from the intricate portraits he created of Steve Jobs from Apple-related images, which frequently grace the covers of international magazines.  (He starts with a Mac-only software called Studio Artist by Synthetik before heading to Photoshop.)

These odes to Apple can sometimes take a week or so of 16-hour days to put together — it’s the kind of work only a Cupertino fan could love.

Cult of Mac talked to Tsevis about how he got started, getting the portraits into T-shirt form and his favorite piece of Apple technology.

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