Nicole Martinelli - page 8

Nowbox is a slick iPad app that allows you to waste spend many hours watching YouTube.

Nowbox was co-founded by Thomas Pun, who worked at Apple for six years, including stints as technical manager for the team responsible for the H.264 encoder technologies that shipped with QuickTime 7 and on the first video iPod.

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.

Life is too short to date PCs. That’s the belief of dating site Cupidtino, which since its 2010 launch has amassed 32,000 Apple aficionados.

Whether you believe that affinity for a consumer electronics brand can spark romance or not, narrowing down the dating pool by trying to find some commonality can’t hurt. And Apple’s insanely great devices are as good a place to start as any. With Cupidtino, you can use the website and recently-released iPhone app for free; for $4.99 a month you get unlimited access to messages and a chat feature.

Cult of Mac got these Mac-loving dating tips from co-founder and CTO Amol Kelkar. Kelkar, once a PC by day and a Mac at night (he worked for nearly a decade as a software engineer at Microsoft), tells us what kind of opposites attract on a Mac-centric dating site, a place dripping with single Macs in the real world and whether a PC-version is in the works.

Tourists wandering into Apple Stores in six cities around the globe found themselves in the middle of a media storm about the Cupertino company’s labor policies in China.

Members of two protests groups, who say they represent Apple customers, delivered petitions they claim are 245,000 signatures strong. Change.org and SumOfUs delivered petitions  to Apple Stores today in Washington, DC, New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore.

Though the San Francisco protest appears as tiny as the one in New York, it did have one participant of note: Apple retail worker Cory Moll, who works at the downtown store.

DUET is one of those products designed to elicit “aha” moments: it’s a vibrator that looks like a USB key. Small, slim and discreet, it has no cords, no bulky buttons and requires no batteries.

Despite Steve Jobs’s well-known war on porn, he might have approved of the guiding principles behind its luxe yet functional design.

The San Francisco-based startup behind it, CRAVE, hopes to do what Apple did for MP3 players: create a breakout product that people will want to carry around.

No more hiding your sex toys in a drawer or worrying about airport security sniggers; a soon-to-ship version dubbed DUET LUX packs memory storage like a regular USB key – an enticing twofer if ever there was one.

Touchable design and tablet computers like Apple’s iPad are revolutionizing the way companies brand. This new platform demands a new way of thinking and designing and a radical shift in customer experience and understanding.

Cult of Mac got these exclusive excerpts from iPhone photography and design guru Dan Marcolina, also the author of iPhone Obsessed. His thoughts about where the world of iPad design is headed are part of the forthcoming fourth edition of  “Designing Brand Identity”  by Alina Wheeler. The book will be published in March, 2012.

Some voters in Florida’s Republican primary elections will be choosing the man they want in the White House with the touch of a finger using iPads.

Although Lori Steele, Chairman & CEO of Everyone Counts, the company behind the iPad voting scheme, was tight-lipped on details about how many of Apple’s magical tablets will be ticking boxes in today’s elections, she was quick to say that a similar program in Oregon led to an increase of voter participation by 1,500%.

One thing she’s certain of though: the iPads will ensure there’s no hanging chads or lost votes.

Cult of Mac asked her about the cost, security and software behind it. We’re planning to follow up on how the battle between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich played out over touchscreens.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Those brainstorming sessions that we’d all like to eavesdrop on at Apple are managed using an iPad system.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Gregory Wyatt is a fast-talking coroner with a touch of gallows humor and a soft spot for cases involving kids. Wyatt is also the only “official” Mac user out of about 10,000 state workers. As the coroner for Sacramento County, Wyatt heads up a staff of 34 who investigate about 8,000 deaths a year and perform 1,000 autopsies.

“I’m also my own Mac support guy. The only reason I can do that is because they work,” Wyatt said during a talk titled “Apple in Life & Death: The REAL CSI.” Outgoing and confident, he joked he was “not used to speaking to people who speak back.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Next time you’re nodding off at school or in the office because there’s too much C02 in the room, a sensor can open the window and wake you up.

This is just one of the cool functions that a group of uber-smart high school students and an affable professor have designed through virtual reality in Hawaii.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — If you want to create great photos from your iPhone, start by shooting everywhere. Including the dentist’s office or out the window of a friend’s bathroom.

Photographer Jonathan Marks has snapped his evocative pics in both those places, plus waiting at a traffic light and at a Whole Foods parking lot. He shoots and processes everything directly on his iPhone, thanks to a handful of key apps.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — The inaugural edition of the Original iPhone Film Festival (OIFF) gave out awards to small-screen Steven Spielbergs.

OIFF founders Corey Rogers and Matt Dessner were on hand to talk about common iPhone filmmaking problems, like getting release forms and copyright snafus. (If you want to take your iPhone videos from crappy to snappy, check out our exclusive interview with some great tips from Dessner.)

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — If your iPhone videos are so lame that even your loved ones won’t watch them anymore, we’ve got some advice for you.

Cult of Mac talked to Matt Dessner, co-founder of the Original iPhone Film Festival (OIFF),  about choosing a subject, keeping it steady, getting enough b-roll and what he calls the Golden Tip of Editing.

The OIFF is about to announce 2012 winners here; with a little practice you might win next year’s competition and a MacBook Air.

Help on those tricky algebra problems could be a touchscreen away thanks to a new iPhone app.

A company called Does That Make Sense? (DTMS, for short) plans to offer live help to students using Apple’s smartphones.