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When I moved to the States 20 years ago from the UK, I had two suitcases. One contained my clothes and other worldly possessions. The other case was filled with my crappy old Macintosh.

The Mac was obsolete even then, but leaving it behind was unthinkable. I held on to it for decades, hauling it across the country and multiple house moves. I’d still have it now, if I hadn’t cooked it showing my kids the joys of OS 6. Moronically, I blocked the top vents with a box and the explosive pop of overheated circuits nearly gave me a heart attack.

The busted Mac was just one of a garage-full of creaky old Apple technology I chucked out recently in a major de-cluttering (mandated, btw, by the wife). The list is too heartbreaking to mention in full, but included dozens of desktops and laptops, as well as boxfuls of obsolete iPods, mice, keyboards, modems, printers, monitors and cables.

Other things that I threw out and probably shouldn’t have? I also disposed of boxes of Apple press passes and press kits, including one for the special-edition U2 iPod that included a nifty poster. I kept one “Think Different” poster (featuring Gandhi) but recycled a bunch of others.

Why did I hoard all this stuff? Mostly laziness. eWaste is a headache. It’s easier to just hold onto it. But part of it was because a lot of this stuff still worked! I might have gotten a new, bigger monitor, but there was nothing wrong with the old one. Sure, it’s VGA resolution, but it still functions!

And then, I always felt there would be a time when I needed that FireWire extension cord, or a serial-to-USB adapter. Right? I’d kick myself if I had one once but threw it out when I needed it. But mostly it was sentimentality. Each item had a specific memory, triggered by softly stroking its chunky beige keys.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius who answers all your questions about working at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.

This week our Genius dishes on how to make sure technicians don’t snoop through your personal data when you bring your Mac into the Genius Bar to get fixed. We also talk about the most polite ways to explain to a genius that you’re not an idiot, as well as other secrets the Genius Bar staff won’t tell you.

Got a question you want an inside scoop on? Send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

The first time I met Jony Ive, he carried my backpack around all night.

Our paths crossed at an early-evening party at Macworld Expo in 2003. As a journeyman reporter hustling for Wired.com, I knew exactly who he was: Jonathan Paul Ive was on the cusp of becoming the world’s most famous designer.

I was surprised he was willing to chat with me.

We discovered a shared love of beer and a sense of culture shock, too, both of us being ex-pat Brits living in San Francisco. Together with Jony’s wife Heather, we reminisced about British pubs, the great newspapers and how much we missed British music (electronic house music in particular). After a few pints, though, I leapt up, realizing I was late for an appointment. I hurried off, leaving without my laptop bag.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include one that’ll help you mix paint, another that will help you keep tabs on your Twitter numbers, and something for the little monsters.

Here you go:

Roman Ruins HD — Reference — $4.99 (special launch price; reg. $9.99)

If you’re a fan of ancient Rome — and who isn’t? — but can’t justify the expense to actually go and look at its old buildings, you might want to have a look at Roman Ruins HD. It’s a new iPad app that collects a wealth of high-definition pictures, virtual tours, and/or 3D overhead shots of over 350 sites. You can read all about the places, and some locations also use the app’s cool Google Street View integration to let you pretend you’re walking through them. But you’ll have to provide your own bored, screaming children, tired feet and sunburn for the full experience.

Roman Ruins HD

True Color — Entertainment — $1.99

True Color is one of those apps that definitely has a practical application but is also just fun to mess around with. Its purpose is to create “formulas” for different hues so that artists can properly mix paints to match and you can easily take samples from your photos. You can also just mess around with the four component colors — red, yellow, blue, and white — to get the tone right before you go wasting all your acrylic on experimenting.

But it’s also good for curiosity. The picture over there, for example, is the exact color of Jake from Adventure Time. Did you know he was 24 percent red? Because I didn’t.

True Color

Followers on Twitter — Social Networking — $0.99 (Pro version)

Alright, maybe it only does that for me, but what Followers on Twitter definitely does is give you a quick look at your follower numbers. In addition to what Twitter will tell you, it also lets you know when people take you off of their feeds, how many users aren’t following you back, and how many you’re snubbing. You can also easily delete multiple tweets at once, and I know a guy who could probably make good use of that feature after some unfortunate late-night drunken tirades.

Oh, you don’t know him. He lives in Canada.

Followers on Twitter

Relaxia — Health & Fitness — Free ($3.99 unlock)

The App Store is full of things that play white noise or some ocean sounds to punch your ticket for the Sleepy Train to Snoozeville, but I haven’t seen one as good-looking and versatile as Relaxia. It has six noise “themes” with about eight sounds in each; you can play multiple files at once and adjust their volumes to make your own custom mix of sleep fuel, and you can set a timer so it’s not still playing in the morning.

Because it would really be awful if you woke up, thought it was raining and then it wasn’t.

Relaxia

Artpop — Music — Free

Are you a creative, psychic Lady Gaga fan with an interest in intergalactic travel? If not, does any of that at least sound like something you’d like to see? Hey, Artpop.

It’s a slick, shiny app that ties in with Gaga’s latest album, which is also called Artpop. It’s also a social-media platform, a music player, an art creation and sharing app, and a chatroom. You create your “Aura” (read: avatar), and then you can make projects using a combination of preloaded shapes and patterns and your own pictures and share them with all the other little monsters on the app.

Plus, it’ll tell you if Lady Gaga actually looks at your creation, so it’s kind of the ultimate super-fan experience.

Artpop

Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again compiled a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Best New Movies

Man of Steel

Superhero movies are a dime a dozen now, but “Man of Steel” takes action fans back to where it all began: Superman. From Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures comes “Man of Steel” starring Henry Cavill in the role of Clark Kent/Superman, with the special visual direction of Zack Snyder. The film opens with the story of Superman’s homeworld, Krypton, and how it was destroyed. Safely evacuated to Earth as an infant, Superman is raised by Kevin Costner in Smallville while coming to grips with extraordinary powers that are not of this world. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and become the symbol of hope for all mankind.

iTunes – $19.99

Red 2

A very safe sequel bet with a cast of friendly, recognizable, and bankable stars, “RED 2” is a breezy romp of global espionage and superhero superspies where the wealth of violence is played for laughs and the sly grins stay firmly planted on the faces of everyone involved. As fans of 2010’s RED will fondly remember, the hero characters are from the AARP generation, which is also what drives the primary conceptual joke and defines the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous. In round two, former secret agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is drawn out of retirement (again) by his former cohort Marvin (John Malkovich, acting Malkovich-crazy and loving it) to service a plot that involves a Cold War-era nuclear bomb hidden in Russia and the international effort to retrieve it.

iTunes – $19.99

Best Kept Secret

This documentary takes you into the lives of students at JFK High School in the middle of a run-down area in Newark, New Jersey. The public school is designed for all types of students with special education needs, ranging from those on the autism spectrum to those with multiple disabilities. Janet Mino has taught her class of young men with autism for four years. When they all graduate in the spring of 2012, they will leave the security of the public school system forever. “Best Kept Secret” follows Mino and her students over the year and a half before graduation. The clock is ticking to find them a place in the adult world – a job or rare placement in a recreational center – so they do not end up where their predecessors have, sitting at home, institutionalized, or on the streets.

iTunes – $12.99

Best New Albums

Blood Orange
“Cupid Deluxe”

Singer, songwriter, and producer Dev Hynes’ follow-up to “Coastal Grooves” is a mix of hazy electronica, treading bass lines, and waves of stirring Prince-inspired vocals. From the stark mid-tempo rapping on “Clipped On” to the blog-buzzing harmonies of “Chamakay,” “Cupid Deluxe” is dimensional, hypnotizing, and amorphous. With contributors ranging from Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek to Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, “Cupid Deluxe” is a distinct and mesmerizing album that proves Hynes is as talented at a soundboard as at a microphone.

iTunes – $7.99

Lady Gaga
“ARTPOP”

Lady Gaga’s music is fueled by wild creativity and artful provocation. With her third studio album, “ARTPOP,” Gaga reunites with Born This Way co-producer Madeon. T.I. Too $hort & Twista work out alongside her with “Jewels N’ Drugs” and R. Kelly can “Do What U Want” in no uncertain terms.

Gaga explains in interviews that she’s seeking “the reverse of Warhol,” where she brings high art to pop music, where once Warhol brought a pop sensibility to high art. Lady can theorize all she wants, but she also knows that it don’t mean a thing it if ain’t got that swing and “ARTPOP” is loaded with hyperactive beats and hyper-caffeinated compositions like “G.U.Y.” (Girl Under You – yhatzee!), “Manicure” and “ArtPop” where even when she’s tributing Versace in “Donatella,” she kinda means herself, too. How much “art” is delivered is debatable, but she’s certainly not shy delivering her truth. Ten of the album’s 15 tracks come with an “explicit” tag. Now outrageousness is something we expect from Lady Gaga.

iTunes – $14.99

Jhene Aiko
“Sail Out”

“Sail Out” is the debut extended play (EP) by American recording artist Jhené Aiko, released through Def Jam Recordings. The trippy RB fueled EP features 7 haunting tracks with special appearance from some of the biggest names in hip-hop, such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Ab-Soul, and Vince Staples.

iTunes – $5.99

Best New Books

“The Essential Calvin And Hobbes”
by Bill Waterson

Bill Watterson hasn’t put out a new “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip in nearly 20 years, but every kids’ favorite troublemakers have made it to iBooks for the first time ever.

The strip follows the richly imaginative adventures of Calvin and his trusty tiger, Hobbes. Whether a poignant look at serious family issues or a round of time-travel (with the aid of a well-labeled cardboard box), “Calvin and Hobbes” will astound and delight you.

Beginning with the day Hobbes sprang into Calvin’s tuna fish trap, the first two Calvin and Hobbes collections, Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under The Bed Is Drooling, are brought together in this treasury. Including black-and-white dailies and color Sundays, “The Essential Calvin and Hobbes” also features an original full-color 16-page story that will transport you back to the very first time you fell in love with Calvin and his stuffed tiger.

iTunes – $12.99

“Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products”

by Leander Kahney

Did I include my boss’ new book in the weekly roundup just because he’s the dude writing my checks? Maybe. It never hurts to get on el jefe’s good side, but Leander’s book is also packed with some of the most insightful Apple revelations about Apple’s design processes since Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” is well worth a read for any Apple fan who wants to know all about the guy who crafted the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Air, and every other major Apple product you’ve fallen in love with over the past two years.

iTunes – $11.99

“Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him”
by David Henry & Joe Henry

Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century,and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic in his lifetime, Pryor’s performances opened up a new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn’t just new—it was unthinkable.

His childhood in Peoria, Illinois, was spent just trying to survive. Yet the culture into which Richard Pryor was born—his mother was a prostitute; his grandmother ran the whorehouse—helped him evolve into one of the most innovative and outspoken performers ever, a man who attracted admiration and anger in equal parts. Both a brilliant comedian and a very astute judge of what he could get away with, Pryor was always pushing the envelope, combining anger and pathos, outrage and humor, into an art form, laying the groundwork for the generations of comedians who followed, including such outstanding performers as Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.

Now, in this groundbreaking and revelatory work, Joe and David Henry bring him to life both as a man and as an artist, providing an in-depth appreciation of his talent and his lasting influence, as well as an insightful examination of the world he lived in and the influences that shaped both his persona and his art.

iTunes – $12.99

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius who answers all your questions about what it’s like to work at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.  

This week our Genius dishes on what it’s like to go through the hiring process at Apple, along with details on the best ways to score a gig working behind the Genius Bar and how to ask out that hot genius you’re crushing on.

If you’ve got a question you want an inside scoop on, send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

What’s the best way to get hired at the Apple Store?

Apple looks for talented individuals who are passionate about helping people enrich their lives through their products and services. They want happy, friendly people who can start up a conversation with anyone. If you’re interested, spiff up your resume and apply for the retail store at apple.com. If you know anyone at the Apple Store you are applying at, ask them to submit a employee referral. If at first you do not succeed, try again. Stores receive a huge amount of applications so it may take a couple tries to get an invite to an open house for an hiring event.

The hiring events usually have a large group of people. While Apple looks people who know their product, they first look for someone who is nice, whether talking to a fellow applicant, a manager, or a disgruntled customer. Participate enthusiastically in all steps of the interview process even if it seems a little cheesy. Make sure to show a passion about providing the best experience in and out of the store for Apple’s customers.

If you get a second interview it will most likely be in a group setting again although smaller. Make sure not to get too boastful of your achievements. If you must brag, mention the successes of your team as a whole. Team players are a must. Show interest in other people’s responses and make it a group activity. Those who are willing to learn and work as a team to provide the best customer experience will make the cut.

How did you deal with the ridiculous and humiliating interview process? Did the lobotomy hurt?

I really needed a job at the time. I talked with someone who had already been through the interview process that gave me a heads up of what to expect. I knew they’d be looking for someone with an attitude that followed the company’s values. I went along with it all and said what I thought they wanted to hear. I even clapped when everyone else clapped.

I had several group interviews and they were pretty tough. You weren’t just on the spot with an interviewer but also with the other applicants listening to your responses. I was glad to be done with it all once I got the job offer. As for the lobotomy, it may have made the core training a little less torturous.

Can you date customers? Any tips on how to ask a Genius out?

Dating customers is against Apple policy. The policy protects both the employee as well as the customer. I have seen customers who come in consistently to get “help” from the same employee multiple times who are definitely interested but this only makes the employee less likely to actually pursue something.

If you are love struck by your technician at the Genius Bar, I suggest the straightforward approach. Ask for a card and give them your number maybe or ask them if you can have their number. Don’t be surprised if they say they can’t contact you, but tell them to call you outside of work. Don’t let a little Apple policy keep you from your love connection, but don’t make them completely say no by coming on to someone while they are at work.

Sir Jonathan Ive is extremely self-effacing. The only time he says “I” is when he’s talking about the iPhone or iPad. Talking about his work, he replaces “I” with “we.” It’s always about his team, his collaborators, and Apple, the company he works for. For Jony, it’s all about the work.

As senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, the world’s most valuable company, he’s been the world’s leading technology innovator for more than two decades. He’s led the design of a string of iconic products: the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, plus a score of other innovations in between. He’s won every design award under the sun. He’s even been knighted.

In 2011, Sir Jonathan Ive was promoted to Apple’s overall design guru, in charge of both hardware and software. It was a position formerly held by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Jony provides direction and leadership for industrial design, the group primarily responsible for hardware, as well as the human interface software teams. Hardware and software have traditionally been run as separate divisions at Apple. Only one man straddled both groups — Steve Jobs. Jony has stepped into the role that Jobs left with his passing. Tim Cook is CEO, but Jony is Apple’s creative driving force. He’s Apple’s MVP.

You wouldn’t know it if you met him. Born in Chingford, Essex, the 43-year-old Brit is quiet, even shy. He’s super friendly and soft spoken. He is extremely private. Even Apple says it doesn’t know his precise date of birth. He dresses in jeans and T-shirts and always seems to be carrying something in a plastic bag. He speaks softly but he doesn’t look like a wallflower: he’s big and muscular, a legacy of a lifetime working out. He has close-cropped hair, which might make him look menacing if he wasn’t so obviously a nice guy.

Jony is the most celebrated designer of his generation. In 2002, he was named the first Designer of the Year by the Design Museum, which he won again in 2003. That year he was inducted as a member of the Royal Designers for Industry (extremely prestigious). The following year he was given the Royal Society of the Art’s Benjamin Franklin Medal and the BBC named him the “Most Influential Person on British Culture,” beating out JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais.

In 2005, Jony was presented with three Silver Pencils from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD) association, some of the most prestigious awards in the industry. In 2006, he got a fourth, the most Silver Pencils ever awarded to an individual. One Silver Pencil is a career maker; four the mark of an off-the-charts genius. He subsequently got six Black Pencils, more than anyone else, ever. Jony has a record number of D&AD awards; and he got them in a stretch of just 10 years. In 2006, he was made a Commander of the British Empire; and in 2010 he was knighted by Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace. By March 2013, he was named in more than 600 design and utility patents.

In 2011, D&AD bestowed another giant award on Jony: it named Apple’s design team the best design studio of the last 50 years. It was one of the first public recognitions for the group as a whole, and Apple felt the award was important enough to fly the normally reclusive, ultra secretive group en masse to London to receive it — the first time ever.

While racking up awards, he’s helped push Apple’s sales off the charts. In the nearly two decades that Jony has been at Apple, the company has pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies. In 1992, the year he joined Apple as a designer, the company made $530 million profit selling beige computers. In 2012, Apple’s made $41.7 billion profit on $156.5 billion revenue. Yeah, billion!

The company makes gorgeous products that compel customers to camp out overnight and sometimes even riot. AAPL, as it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, currently has a market cap of about $475 billion, making it the biggest company on the planet after the oil giant Exxon.

A lot of this had to do with Steve Jobs of course, the genius who toiled for three decades to bring personal computers to the masses. Jobs always had an eye for talent, launching Apple in 1977 with the hardware genius Steve Wozniak. For the last dozen years, his chief creative partner at Apple was Jony Ive. Jony is a genuinely original thinker. His products are not just the same old things repackaged to look new; they are new. They are products no one could have imagined a few years ago.

I’ve been to Apple’s current campus a few times, mostly for product presentations at a modest theater Apple calls the Town Hall.

When I went down to see the introduction of the iPod Hi-Fi, Apple’s attempt at a boombox, Steve Jobs had had a warren of nearby offices transformed into an Ideal Home exhibition.

It was February 2006, a couple of years after Jobs’ first treatment for cancer but before his liver transplant. He tried his best to get through the presentation with his characteristic charisma and energy, but he seemed to tire quickly and towards the end he obviously just wanted to get it over.

However, after introducing the iPod Hi-Fi and some other products, everyone was herded across the hall. Jobs wanted to showcase the iPod Hi-Fi in its “natural” surroundings and some offices had been dressed up to look like your typical living room, bedroom and den.

The iPod Hi-Fi was a $350 white plastic boombox — Apple’s attempt at replacing customer’s home stereos. During his presentation, Jobs said he’d spent small fortunes over the years on audiophile gear, but the iPod Hi-Fi sounded so good, he was now he was replacing his home stereo with one.

As we trooped from one room to the next, I found myself beside him. Ever the intrepid reporter, I introduced myself, thrust out my hand and asked him if really had replaced his Marantz stereo with a boombox? As he towered over me, he just looked down contemptuously at my outstretched hand, and said one word: “Yes!”

Of course, there was no way to use this in my story. But I was impressed with his antisocial nerve. Many people buckle in the face of social niceties like shaking hands: not Jobs.

Apple’s HQ isn’t exactly Grand Central Station, open to all. I’ve never eaten at Caffè Macs or played foosball on the grass in the middle of campus. I did get a walkthrough once, when I visited someone’s office, but was told to keep looking straight ahead and not snoop into anything.

You can drive around the campus on Infinite Loop, the ring road surrounding the nerve center of Apple operations, but the only place for the public to visit is the Company Store in the first building: One Infinite Loop.

Here you can pick up Apple-branded pens, mouse pads and T-Shirts. I bought a shirt that said, “I visited the Mothership.” Apparently, the most popular shirt says “I visited the Apple campus. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.”

It’s unclear what public access anyone will have to the new spaceship Apple Campus 2. The theater, where Tim Cook will presumably preside over future product presentations, is outside the main donut (and underground to boot!).

Let’s hope there are opportunities to visit, even if it’s only to shop at a small company store.

Before he died, Steve Jobs said architecture students would be able to marvel at the huge headquarters, which he envisioned as the best in the world.

Let’s hope Apple honors this, and doesn’t close off access to outsiders like a glass prison you can’t break into. We all deserve to spend some time in the fantastic space that Jobs envisioned.

Leander’s new book about Jony Ive and the Apple design studio is out in November. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Apple Campus 2 isn’t set to open for a couple of more years, but once Tim Cook and his merry band of Apple fellows finally cut the red ribbon, Cupertino’s skyline will forever be changed by the Apple’s giant loop of circle and steel.

Rather than wait for the mothership to land in 2016, we’ve created this 3D-rendering of Apple Campus 2 based on proposals presented by Foster & Associates. The video begins with an aerial view of the entire campus before slowly rotating while zooming in on the exterior details of the building before finally dropping you off with all the iPod people at the main entrance.

The Apple Campus 2 project has received its fair share of criticism, and the complaints run the gamut: some small and petty, some erudite and long-winded, and still others self-aware.

The traffic is going to get too heavy. The bike lanes are going to go away. The pollution will be too high. All in all, complainants say, there goes the neighborhood!

A couple of weeks ago, the Cupertino City Council approved the massive Apple Campus 2 project after a long meeting that included final environmental impact studies and overwhelmingly positive live public comment, lots of it from local business owners, like the one who owns a coffee shop and hopes to sell lattes to the thousands of workers headed off to Apple’s proposed new campus.

Not everyone is super happy about the mega-campus coming to small-town Cupertino and its surrounding bedroom communities. Many of the concerns deal with the already slow-as-a-modem Silicon Valley traffic, others are about designs of the campus that effectively cordon off the tech giant from regular residents.

A New Look

Sunnyvale resident Yair Barniv is really upset that his residential neighborhood will be disrupted in character.

“I STRONGLY object to Apple’s plans affecting my Sunnyvale neighborhood!!!” he shouted in a public comment email.

“I don’t want them to convert my quiet Sunnyvale residential area into—effectively—an Industrial area! Playing with words isn’t going to change reality. I chose to live in a RESIDENTIAL area—not in an INDUSTRIAL one!”

Other residents echo similar sentiments, all accessible on the Cupertino City Council website, archived as part of the public comment process.

Another Sunnyvale resident, Stephen Rohde, is concerned about the median planned to run down Homestead Road, near the building site.

“Now, a tree line median may look nice,” he writes, “but did anyone consider the inconvenience to the Sunnyvale homeowners being able to get in or out of their own driveways? It you want to head east toward Lawrence Expressway you would have to go up to Wolfe to make the U-turn. And each time to turn into your driveway you would have to go down to Tantau to make the U-turn. This is absurd, and I am totally opposed to removing the turn lanes.”

Traffic Woes

There are pages upon pages of concerns of increased and re-routed traffic in the public comment section, and even some proposed alternatives.

Cupertino resident Wahila Wilkie writes, “As mitigation for the traffic issue I suggest having Apple pay for electric school buses to serve all schools in the affected areas to reduce the number of cars on Wolfe and Tantau and compensate for the increased air pollution from addition Apple commuters.”

Robert Neff from Palo Alto worries about bike lanes along streets Tantau and Pruneridge, which he uses to commute to work daily. His concern is that the bike lane allows cyclists to cross the busy 280 freeway without an interchange.

“The plan suggests removing bike lanes where Tantau crosses Calabazas Creek,” writes Neff, “replacing them with a shared bike/ped facility at that point. This is a bad idea, and a definite downgrade for the bike facility.”

Healthcare Matters

Still other residents worry about potential issues to local healthcare facilities. One anonymous poster, known only as Ann, wrote a letter to express her concern for the potential air quality issues resulting from construction of the facility, as well as its operation soon after.

“Which way would prevailing winds blow that excess emission,” she asked, “i.e. toward the Hospital or towards Cupertino High School or towards Birdland or Portal neighborhoods?”

Similarly, Ann wants the council to consider the impact the extra traffic might have on, say, a vehicle attempting to get to the emergency room during peak traffic hours. “Already Homestead frequently experiences gridlock,” she said. “What would be the extra time required to arrive at Kaiser starting from the intersection of Homestead/Hollenbeck? What would be the extra time required starting from Wolfe/Iris? These inquiries should be modeled explicitly.”

Apple Creates Jobs

All of these concerns are valid, of course, as a project of this size can in no way fail to disrupt the lives of the people that live nearby.

Berkely economics professor Enrico Moretti, however, feels that there is an upside to such a large undertaking.

Moretti is the author of “The New Geography of Jobs,” a book about the positive impact gentrification and development can have on communities.

“I think Apple in Cupertino brings jobs and salaries to the local community outside the constructive workforce,” he told Cult of Mac in a phone interview. “By my own estimate, one job in a high tech company can support five local services in the same metropolitan area–jobs outside the company.”

Moretti says that a company like Apple brings both specialized positions like IP lawyers to the community, as well as more generalized jobs, like taxi drivers and cafe workers.

The professor is excited about the new Apple campus, saying that the proposed Apple Campus 2 “fits in with the Apple vision of environmental responsibility.”

Moretti believes that the rooftop solar panels and other environmental features are the most positive feature of the new campus. “Frankly,” he said, “it’s going to be an improvement over what is there now.”

The issue Moretti has concerns about, however, have more to do with the disconnect of the campus from the local community.

“I’m a little surprised they are so isolated,” he said. “I don’ t think they’re thinking of the future. The more modern approach to corporate integrated with the city, can actually walk outside and go to local shops, restaurants, etc.”

That’s not to say the old Cupertino campus is integrated, either, but Moretti feels like current and future employees in the high tech sector will continue to ask for more connected work places. “You see this need for a better connection with the local community,” he said. “They are all demanding campuses that are downtown, near stores, walking environments.”

Bottom line, the Apple Campus 2 is getting built. It’s on delayed schedule to finish up by 2016, so any concerns the residents may have will play out during the construction and beyond. If Moretti is correct, though, the city should see more benefit than cost as Apple brings in more jobs and more income to the local area.

Did you know that the new Apple Campus 2 “spaceship” is wider across than the Empire State Building is tall? It’s going to cost 60 times more than the Pentagon did back in 1943, too. Heck, you’ll be able to cram up to 35 jetliners full of passengers in its rounded confines without breaking a sweat.

The Cupertino City Council unanimously approved Apple’s plans for the tech company’s a couple of weeks ago, after a long, heartfelt public comment session.

We thought it would be great, then, to take a look at some of the details of the new campus, set to finish construction in 2016.

The proposed Apple Campus 2 is huge. Apple plans to put a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 11,000 parking spaces, 2,000 bike parking spaces, 2.8 million square feet of office space, and a 100,000-square-foot lab. Oh, and a restaurant. All of this in four stories, housing 12,000 employees.

The Pentagon, in contrast, which itself was completed in 1943, has 3.7 million square feet of office space, is seven floors tall, and houses 25,000 people.

The Apple Campus 2 will have a 1,522 foot diameter, which means the Empire State Building could comfortably lie down somewhere inside its massive circular footprint. Heck, a T1-class Supertanker could fit in there, as well, with its 1,246 foot length, and you’d have to get somewhere around seven or eight blue whales–the largest known mammal on Earth–just to get across half of the diameter of the new Apple Campus. That’s a lot of krill.

The spaceship campus has plans to hold 12,000 employees within it’s solar-panel-using, green technology hallowed halls, which would fill something like 160 double-decker buses, or 35 Boeing 747 jets. The Apple folks will have it easier, as they’ll at least be able to get nice food there, and a much less foggy view in Cupertino than in London.

Of course, no look at anything tech-related is complete without a comparison to a fictional starship, and since we’ve been calling this the spaceship campus since Steve Jobs unveiled the design two years ago, it seemed fitting to see how it stacks up against the USS Enterprise. Unfortunately for trekkies, the new Apple Campus 2 has a diameter quite a bit larger than the original Gene Roddenberry creation.

The city of Cupertino itself, home not only to Apple founders Woz and Jobs but also author Raymond Carver and actor Aaron Eckhart, only has around five times the population as will work in the Apple Campus 2. Interestingly, the median income of Cupertino-based Apple employees is a bit lower than that of Cupertino in general, but perhaps that’s just a function of how much larger the city is than the building. Which, to be honest, doesn’t seem to be that much of a news item. It is, however, funny that a .27 square mile building can cause the kind of traffic jams that the city of 11.26 square miles seems to be mostly worried about.

Image: City Of Cupertino

Boo Halloween — Entertainment — Free

Alright, so today’s app isn’t the most practical one you’ve ever seen. It’s not even the most clever. But it’s fun and easy to use, and it’s Halloween, damn it. Boo Halloween is a quickie photo app that lets you put a variety of spooky faces on pictures of you and your friends using reasonably accurate facial recognition. It comes with six masks — four of which are pumpkins — and you can buy nine more for a dollar if you think your buddy would look better as Batman, a zombie, or Billy, the puppet from Saw. Not much to it, but it’s silly, and it made me chuckle.

Boo Halloween

BestRoute Free — Navigation — Free

Now that Halloween is over, the rest of the holidays are clamoring for our attention. And some of them require shopping, which can mean a lot of driving all over town. And if you want to make sure you’re taking the most efficient route possible, you might want to plug your stops into BestRoute Free, a new app that lets you quickly and easily mark waypoints (by searching or just a long tap on the screen). It’ll then tell you the best order in which to make your stops.

It would probably also come in handy if you suddenly had to deliver a bunch of pizzas or something.

BestRoute Free

Coloring Pages for Zane — Education — Free

Coloring Pages for Zane is a simple app that contains coloring-book-style pages you can send to your AirPrint-enabled printer with just a few taps before you let your little ones loose on them with all the crayons. It’s so simple, in fact, that the kids can run it themselves, and that’s by design. The developer made it for their autistic son so that he could easily print out his own pictures and get right to the important business of coloring them in. It launches with a selection of images; additional pictures are available via in-app purchases. But that warm feeling you’re getting in your heart right now is free.

Coloring Pages for Zane

Cocktail Academy — Food & Drink — $3.99

Cocktail Academy is a new app for people who would like to make their favorite drinks themselves or try some new ones without embarrassing themselves in front of their friends. It has directions to create 110 cocktails and even includes video tutorials in which international-award-winning bartender Giancarlo Di Niso shows you exactly what to do (spoiler alert: It involves a lot of measuring and shaking and/or stirring). You can search for drinks several ways including alphabetically and by percentage of alcohol, and the app even lists caloric content for each concoction for your dieting convenience. Grog, for example, has 186 calories, and I never realized I was curious about that until just now.

Cocktail Academy

Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has compiled this list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Best New Books

Hatching Twitter

by Nick Bilton

In 2005, Odeo was a struggling podcasting start-up founded by free-range hacker Noah Glass and staffed by a motley crew of anarchists. Less than two years later, its days were numbered and half the staff had been let go. But out of Odeo’s ashes, the remaining employees worked on a little side venture . . . that by 2013 had become an $11.5 billion business – Twitter.

That much is widely known. But the full story of Twitter’s hatching has never been told before. It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles, as the founders went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities featured on magazine covers, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show, and Time’s list of the world’s most influential people.

New York Times columnist and reporter Nick Bilton takes readers behind the scenes as Twitter grew at exponential speeds and gets inside the heads of the four hackers out of whom the company tumbled: Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Christopher Stone, and Noah Glass.

iTunes – $11.99

Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.

by Rob Delaney

Rob Delaney is a father, a husband, a comedian, a writer. He is the author of an endless stream of beautiful, insane jokes on Twitter that force you to pause with their absurdity. He is sober. He is sometimes brave. He speaks French. He has bungee jumped off the Manhattan Bridge. He enjoys antagonizing political figures. He broke into an abandoned mental hospital with his mother.

He’s also one of the funniest stand-up comics I’ve seen in person with a weird cornucopia of recklessly imaginative jokes that are both hilarious and repulsive at once. His new book – Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. – reveals the hilarious and heartbreaking true stories of how Rob came to be the funniest man on Twitter today.

iTunes – $10.99 

Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football

by Rich Cohen

For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the 1985 Chicago Bears were more than a football team: they were the greatest football team ever–a gang of colorful nuts, dancing and pounding their way to victory. They won a Super Bowl and saved a city.

In Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, Rich Cohen tracks down the coaches and players from the team to find out what made the fantastic offense of Walter Payton and QB Jim McMahon work so well. Did they really hate the guys on the other side? Readers who don’t even like sports will still enjoy Cohen’s story about the love of his favorite game. The end result is a portrait of not just a team, but a city and a game: its history, its future, its fallen men, its immortal heroes. But mostly it’s about being a fan, about loving too much.

iTunes – $10.99

Best New Albums

Cut Copy – Free Your Mind

Melbourne’s Cut Copy came to ether in the early ’00s, when the rediscovery of ’80’s electro and dance pop was in full flower. Yet one of the group’s great strengths is the fact that it is a group, with a flesh-and-blood rhythm section–not just one person behind a bank of gear. The Aussie quartet’s fourth album reinforces that notion, putting crucial yuan muscle behind the sparkling synth riffs. Sure, tunes like “Footsteps” are fueled by an Italo-disco-flavored, club friendly feel. But it’s Ben Browning’s bass guitar lines that lend the greatest gravitas to the elegant synth-pop of “In Memory Capsule,” while Mitchell Scott’s analog drum kit brings a bit of vital rock ballast to “Dark Corners & Mountain Tops” and the luminous, power ballad-esque “Walking in the Sky.” So while there’s little on Free Your Mind that couldn’t drive dancers to exhaustion, the album’s essence is more than just momentum.

iTunes – $11.99

M.I.A. – Matangi

“Paper Planes” launched M.I.A. into fame but if you’re not familiar with the singer’s entire musical arsenal, her latest album provides a fun and crazy take on pop culture. Matangi is the fourth studio album by English-Sri Lankan recording artist M.I.A., released on 1 November 2013 on her own label, N.E.E.T. Recordings, through Interscope Records.

The album, which is the follow-up to her 2010 album Maya, features collaborations and production from The Weeknd, Switch, Hit-Boy, Danja, The Partysquad, Surkin and others.It also features songs like “Bad Girls,” “Bring The Noize,” “Come Walk With Me,” and “Y.A.L.A.”

iTunes – $11.99

Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP 2

Few figures in hip-hop have changed the game as fundamentally as Marshall Mathers. The Detroit emcee’s cutting wordplay and playfully sadistic wit have earned him fans beyond hip-hop’s borders and made him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 –Eminem’s first solo endeavor since 2010’s multiplatinum Recovery–comes charging out of the gate with “Bezerk,” a Rick Rubin-produced track that chopps up the heavy guitars of Billy Squier’s “The Stroke,” name-checks Public Enemy, and delivers a flurry of jabs at celebrities. In short: classic Eminem.

Combining forces with Rubin and longtime collaborator Dr. Dre, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is gritty, raw, and an appropriately provocative sequel to Eminem’s groundbreaking 2000 release. Huge, hard-hitting singles like “Survival” and “Rap God” make it one of the artist’s most uncompromising albums to date.

iTunes $11.99

Best New Movies

Blackfish

Killer whales are beloved, majestic, friendly giants, yet infamous for their capacity to kill viciously. Blackfish unravels the complexities of the dichotomy, employing the story of the notorious performing whale Tilikum, who–unlike any orca in the wild–has taken the lives of several people while in captivity. Blackfish expands on the discussion of whether it’s ethical to keep orcas and other whales in captivity, as well as the consequences of continuing to do so.

iTunes – $14.99

We’re The Millers

David Clark is a small-time pot dealer who likes to keep a low profile. His clientele includes chefs and soccer moms, but no kids. He learns the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished when he tries to help out some local teens and winds up getting jumped by a trio of gutter punks. Stealing his stash and his cash, they leave him in major debt to his supplier, Brad. In order to wipe the slate clean–and maintain a clean bill of health–David agrees to become a big time drug smuggler for Brad and bring a shipment over from Mexico. What could go wrong?

The comedy finds David twisting the arms of his neighbors to create a fake family and roll their RV to the border of Mexico and back during Fourth of July weekend where everything ends with a bang.

iTunes – $19.99

2Guns

Okay get this, there’s a cranky undercover operative who’s a total badass–played by Academy Award winner Denzel Washington–who begrudgingly joins forces with a young, up-and-coming badass undercover operative–played by none of than Mr. Funky Bunch himself, Marky Mark Whalberg.

The two badass undercover operatives then take on a drug cartel but it blows up in their faces. Once they join forces everyone suddenly wants them dead so they have to strip themselves of the hatreds for each other and work together to get out alive. Yes, it’s your buddy-cop action movie with a new twist, but there’s no one funner to watch on the screen than Denzel Washington strutting around like the coolest cop to ever walk the planet.

iTunes – $14.99

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius who answers all your questions about what it’s like to work at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.  

This week our Genius dishes on why Apple raised the price of AppleCare+ replacements on the iPhone 5s to $79. They also talk about how hard it is to get fired from the Apple Store and the biggest daily annoyances of the job.

If you’ve got a question you want an inside scoop on, send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

1. Why is the replacement fee for an iPad $50 but the replacement fee for an iPhone 5s is $80? Wouldn’t the iPad cost more to replace?

As crazy as it seems, there is no difference in fees for AppleCare+ replacements between iPad and iPhone. It has always been a $49 fee, up until the release of the iPhone 5s. With its release, Apple changed the fee for AppleCare+ repairs or replacements to $79, whether it be an iPhone, iPad, or the recently added iPod, which was not previously eligible for AppleCare+. If you purchased the AppleCare+ protection plan before the change then you still get the $49 price while any plans purchased after the change will have the new cost of $79.

With the price change, Apple also announced that the protection plan coverage would extend to any of the other countries where it is offered. Keep in mind there are some countries that don’t carry specific models.

I’m not so sure offering the coverage outside of your own country justifies the $30 price change. My guess is manufacturing costs for retina displays and newer silicon chips, like the A7, may explain the cost increase but of course they’d never tell a Retail employee why. The real question is whether the price change is a deal breaker. As for me, I still see it as a great protection from having costly accidents which, for many, happen all too often.

2. What are the most common reasons for getting fired at the Apple Store?

I really haven’t seen very many people get fired. The only guy I ever saw get fired was arguing with management on a regular basis. After he messed up and still argued with managers, he was asked to leave. Apple has many strict policies that result in termination if its policies are not followed. Outside of these policies, management will make every effort to work with individuals who are having any problems at work.

Managers seem to notice the smallest of errors and are sure to let people know when they make mistakes. Constant policy and procedure changes can make it pretty tough to do everything right. Even those who are trying to follow all the rules can feel bombarded by “fearless feedback” as Apple calls it, otherwise known as constructive criticism. Some just can’t take it so they end up leaving to find more suitable employment. You either get with the program or face the music.

3. What’s the most exhausting (or even annoying) situations that a genius has to deal with every once in a time or on daily basis?

The toughest part of my job rarely has anything to do with Macs or iPhones. People seem to be the hardest part about my job. Dealing with a difficult customer while trying to make the experience positive is sometimes impossible. People can be outright rude, impatient, and childlike with temper tantrums and all in order to get things their way. Keeping the “act” of an Apple Genius can be tough.

These situations often involve partnering with a store manager and rarely get resolved quickly. Trying to stay on time with all the appointments while dealing with these issues and other technical issues can be a nightmare. Nothing that a nice bottle of scotch can’t fix, though. It’s all just part of the job after all.

https://vine.co/v/huHUPLnx1dg

Apple is still moving forward to build its $5 billion, 176-acre campus Cupertino “spaceship” Campus 2 headquarters, expected to open in three years.

Critics have been attacking it since Steve Jobs first proposed it to the Cupertino City Council.

And since that poignant moment, which was Jobs’s last public appearance, the campus project has evolved and changed and, as I write this, the old HP buildings on the property are being demolished.

Here’s what we know about the spaceship campus so far, and also what the critics have been saying. 

The property will be capable of holding 14,200 employees. Some 12,000 of those will be in the circular mothership building, and the rest in 600,000 square feet of office, research and development buildings along one of the adjacent streets. Due to ballooning costs, the extraneous buildings have been delayed for phase 2 of the project, to come later. So the initial project will include only the giant bagel and supporting infrastructure at a cost currently estimated at $5 billion.

The spaceship building will be four stories high, but continue underground. The radius of the underground portion will be much wider than the visible above-ground part. In fact, so much of the campus, parking, underground tunnels and facilities will be underground that trucks will be removing soil 24/7 for six months in order to make space for these structures.

The main building will be a marvel of innovation in heat and energy. The roof will hold 700,000 square feet of roof-mounted solar panels. That energy source, plus a natural gas facility, will provide most of the campus’s electricity. Combined with solar and wind contracts, the building will achieve a net zero energy state, meaning that it will consume the same amount that it produces.

Because the building’s exterior walls will be all glass, a crazy computerized temperature control system will open and close giant shutters and windows. “Solatubes” will pipe sunlight throughout the structure to reduce the need for electric lights.

The campus will have a four-story garage that’s massively larger than the largest parking structure in the city of San Francisco — the one at Moscone Center where Apple will stop holding announcements in favor of an underground 1,000-seat amphitheater at the new campus. The total campus will support 10,980 parking spaces.

The giant spaceship building was originally white. It has since been upgraded to black (no “gold” or “champagne” option has yet been proposed).

As Jobs emphasized at his City Council product announcement, the building will feature a historically unprecedented use of glass. The building will have nearly 4 miles of curved glass, manufactured and bent in Germany, then shipped to California in 40-feet by 26-feet sheets. These panes are being manufactured with a very sophisticated process that cold-bends them and laminates them to prevent clouding.

In the City Council rollout, Jobs said: “It’s a circle, and so it’s curved all the way around. As you know if you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building, it’s all curved. And we’ve used our experience in 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.”

What the Critics Are Saying

The New Yorker suggested Apple’s plans are a sign of “imperial hubris,” a “twenty-first-century version of the Pentagon.”

Gizmodo said it will be “ridiculously lavish.”

And one Apple investor publicly said, “It would take some convincing for me to understand why $5 billion is the right number for a project like this.”

These neatly summarize the criticism. Basically, what they’re saying is that it’s too awesome, too far-reaching, too ambitious and too expensive. It would be better to build another set of cookie-cutter boring buildings that blight the Silicon Valley landscape.

To these critics I say: You’re wrong.

Why the Critics Need To Calm Down

The critics on this project are dead wrong, and for four reasons.

1. Utopia fuels genius. By creating a breathtaking architectural wonder, Apple will inspire its employees. You know, the people who are the sole source of everything that Apple imagines and builds. One good example of this phenomenon is Google, which smartly creates corporate campuses that are equal parts playground, Disneyland and City of Tomorrow.

2. Utopia builds the brand. Apple is an aspirational brand. Apple’s amazing spaceship HQ will become part of the iconic nature of the Apple brand, driving sales just by its very existence. When Apple announces new products, the invited press will gape at the wonder of it all, and this will ignite their worshipful gushing over whatever Apple announces. And good press is good business.

3. The new campus honors Steve Jobs. The spaceship campus was Jobs’s last vision for the company, one meant to last. While his direction and input into the iPad will quickly fade away, to be replaced by democratic decision-making and possibly a slouch toward mediocrity, the campus will serve as a reminder of the uncompromising visionary who made Apple what it is today. Who would deny this to Jobs, really — especially investors, whose wallets are burdened by the man’s vision. Besides, if you don’t want to be involved in a visionary company, sell your Apple stock and buy Exxon Mobile.

4. A visionary campus attracts top talent. It’s really hard to recruit and retain top engineering and design talent in Silicon Valley. Apple’s HQ will provide one additional incentive for the best people to stay with Apple.

Apple’s Campus 2 budget has ballooned from $3 billion to $5 billion and, guess what? It will probably grow to as high as $10 billion.

So what?

This is a company with $150 billion in cash, all of it generated by the executives and employees, many of whom will work at this campus. The new campus is good for Apple’s business, good for the environment and good for Silicon Valley.

It’s time for the critics of Apple’s spaceship Campus 2 to pipe down and marvel at Steve Jobs’s last breathtaking visionary gift.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine 

Architecture hasn’t really ever been important in the brick and mortar-averse tech industry. It wasn’t all that long ago that digital utopians proclaimed physical geography dead altogether, with a vocal minority apparently pleased to leave the actual world behind them and embrace the cyberspace of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley have advanced almost inversely to the region’s architecture. In a brave new world of lush rolling hills and the always impressive San Francisco Bay, the most that the majority of companies have managed to come up with are drab industrial parks filled with two-story, cubicle-lined buildings.

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.  

Answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

It’s easy to think of David Scott Leibowitz, whose work fronts this week’s magazine cover,  as kind of a renaissance man 2.0: the artist, app developer and author is a tireless champion of the new when it comes to visual arts.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Matthew Watkins spends a lot of time fingerpainting, but has also brought his handiwork into the real world on carpets, cars, plexiglass and the more usual prints.

He caught our eye in 2009, when his one-man show went up in an Apple reseller, the first of its kind. His early playful works seemed to dance across the iPad screen or knowingly frame scenes of daily life with his iPhone. Watkins lives in Southern Italy – by way of England and Canada – and has recently been involved in iPad art mash-ups and live fashion shows in Manchester, England and Florence, Italy. He’s also a founding board member of iAMDA (The International Association of Mobile Digital Artists).

We caught up with him to find out what apps have taken over his toolkit, why you should think big when it comes to printing and how he’ll be picking up a shovel for inspiration near Verona, Italy.

Cult of Mac: What have you been up to lately?

Matthew Watkins: 2013 was a year full of travel and fingerpainting, new technology and new collaborations.

In February, I worked on a multi-discipline project with the 154 Collective.  I was invited to participate on their two Manchester dates at the Lowry theatre. It consisted of an exhibition, theatrical production (for which we provided collaborative finger painted animations) and concert with live collaborative projected fingerpainting featuring Fabric Lenny, Benjamin Rabe and myself…

March was my biggest show so far. I was given a one-man exhibition at the Verona Natural Science Museum called “Uncontainable Art.”

The show was coordinated by the University of Verona in concurrence with the yearly science event “Infinitamente” (Infinitely) which showcases a new artist every year…It figured four works about three meters high and about 40 medium 50x70cm pieces.

I kicked it off with two days of workshops. It was great to be in such an old institution in an old city. The show ran through June and counted about 15,000 visitors.

CoM: These robotic fossils are a new thing for you. How did that get started?

MW: I was shown the museums collection of fossils from Bolca. It’s the largest collection in the world. Bolca is a very small area about the size of a fair sized pub. A geological fluke of nature with stacked a motherlode of perfectly preserved fossils with unprecedented biodiversity.

Fish fossils have inspired me since I was a child, but this was over the top.  I worked on my robotic fish fossils for a couple of months. First I started with robotic fish, then I inserted common everyday elements, including a broken iPhone 3g. Imagining a distant fossilized robotic future juxtaposed with our culture. Maybe 50 to 100 million years from now.

Then a funny thing happened. I got a phone call from the head of the fossil collection at the museum.  I went back to Verona and we chatted for two hours about fossils and art. He explained all about the strange origin of the Bolca fossils, and I explained what I was thinking. T

The deeper we got into it the more it seemed like a scientific/artistic collaboration. I had just made stuff up. He told me under what conditions things fossilize and how they might be preserved. For example, a jellyfish is 99% water, but in the right conditions it will fossilize and even retain some of its color.

So I am invited back in November to participate in some digs. I will dig for fossils and inspiration. I hope to be given some samples of Bolca rock from which to make to make my own real, robotic, fossils.

CoM: What else are you currently working on?

MW: Other than the fossils I am painting imaginary cities. I am fascinated by urban decay and architectural artifacts.

CoM: What new tools or apps are you using?

MW: My favorite painting app is by far Procreate by Savage Interactive. It has a perfect painting engine, amazing brushes, awesome resolution and as of recently video playback. Almost all of my recent work is done on it.
Sketchbook Pro is a great app.  Paper53 is also a fun app.

Brushes 3  and 4 are no longer supported, but the developer Steve Sprang has made his delightful vector app InkPad open source. This should be interesting. It’s like Illustrator for your iPad. I have used it for a number of logo designs.

One of the coolest apps is Tagtool for doing live shows. It allows you to create looping moving art on multiple layers. You can connect multiple iPads in a session for collaborative work. It’s one of the more expensive apps, but well worth the money. Looking forward to getting my hands on the iPad Air. Sounds perfect for tagtooling.

There are also some fun designing apps like Phoster and Over. You can comp quick fun designs from your art. Sometimes very convincing.

Stylii have improved since we last talked. There are a number of options for a pressure sensitive stylus. I use the Pogo connect. But mostly I just use my finger.

CoM: Any advice for artists looking to get their works off the iPad and into the real world – about printing, finding sponsors, opportunities?

MW: When you create virtual art how you output it becomes very important. I would think beyond letter size glycee prints. Experiment. There are no limitations. Paper, plastics, I have had great results with plexiglass. I have been commissioned to do a glass door, I am looking forward to that.

You should get your work out there, online, social media…make connections. Don’t be timid. People will notice you. Participate in competitions. But mostly, to paraphrase the great cyclist Eddy Merckx, “Paint lots.”

CoM: What are some ways that newbies can become a part of the online community?

MW: Don’t be shy and start uploading. All social media channels are open.
It seems a lot of the community has moved from Flickr to Facebook. It’s a big tribe now with lots of great art and lots of people getting their fingers dirty, so to speak, for the first time.

They are a very sharing lot and you can’t go wrong.

CoM: What mobile art shows or conferences will you be attending in the next six months or so?

MW: The curators at the museum would like to see me set up a show with my work hang side by side with some original fossils from Bolca. I think the result would be intriguing. I think it would make a great story. I am hoping for international interest in this show as the Museum has given me permission to ship the fossils.

I am participating in a show in Phoenix with some of my original core group of fingerpainting friends. That will be nice.  The show is to start February 2014 and run for a year.

I am also talking about going back to Bosnia and Herzegovina for another show. I had a great reception last time. I would really like to do workshops and some live painting shows this time.

You can check out more of his work on Flickr or his website.  

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Roz Hall is a UK-based artist who employs his iPad as a canvas to create some stunning portraits.

Hall wasn’t always a painter with pixels: he studied Fine Art at the Winchester School of art and is currently at work on a Master’s of Fine Art at the University of Chichester.

He’s worked as a filmmaker and in video production, but his main love since 2010 has been painting, at first on the iPhone, and now on the iPad.

This father, student and self-described beard enthusiast told Cult of Mac about his artwork, the perks of tablet painting and why naked Apple devices are best.

Cult of Mac: What apps do you use, and why? Any apps you started using but don’t anymore? What’s the evolution of your process?

Roz Hall: My two favorite apps are Procreate and Inkpad, and I use them both for two very different things. Procreate is great for recreating that paint or ink feel as it has some wonderful brushes, which are completely customizable if you wish. Inkpad is a vector app, like a stripped down version of Illustrator, but very intuitive to use and awesome if you want to print off something really large! I used to use Sketchbook Pro as it’s a very advanced app and lovely to use, but I feel like the brushes are a little small and I like to start out with a large brush to block in shapes. I prefer to stick to a single brush type for each painting and just adjust the size and opacity, this probably comes from my background as a traditional artist.

CoM: What device do you use? Why? Any covers, cases, or peripherals you prefer?

RH: I started painting on my iPhone 3G but upgraded to the iPad and am now on the 3rd Generation iPad. The screen size is perfect, small enough to paint with on the train without drawing too much attention, and large enough to not feel restricted. I mainly just use my finger but have used a few different styluses.

My current favourite is the Sensu Brush, which has a small rubber tip on one side and an actual brush on the other. I was genuinely surprised at how natural that would feel, as I’d thought it sounded like a gimmick. I have played with a couple that offer pressure sensitivity but couldn’t get on with them, although the new JOT Touch looks promising. I like to have my Apple gear fairly naked as it feels criminal to cover them up, so I just have my iPad in its Smart Cover.

CoM: How do you sell you art work? What are the unique challenges of creating commercially viable artwork on a digital device? The unique rewards?

RH: I have sold a few postcards on Zazzle and have painted a couple of commissions, but apart from that I don’t see it as a hugely commercial venture. I won’t be quitting my day job quite yet. Companies have send hardware to me to use and blog about, including tablets, which is a huge perk.

I was recently flown to New York to attend the launch of the Microsoft Surface 2 and to demonstrate to the press. So if you’re reading this, Apple, I’m available! The art community is getting less suspicious of digital art with artists such as Tracey Emin and David Hockney producing work on the iPad, which is making it easier to get work into serious galleries.

CoM: How do you exhibit your work?

RH: I am fortunate enough to have had work exhibited across the globe but the format changes depending on the gallery requirements. Some like to have your work printed and framed traditionally, where as others like to project or display using LCD screens. The Saatchi Gallery in London exhibited some of my portraits on a large LCD screen but had it in landscape mode, which didn’t look good at all. I have just started to get pieces printed onto perspex glass, it looks gorgeous as the colors are really strong and the glossy look mimics that of the iPad screen.

CoM: What kind of community to you belong to or facilitate for digital artists? Is there an “I make art on an iPad” group you hang out with?

RH: When I started out painting on the iPhone, I got myself a Flickr account and posted them up there. The reaction was incredible and immediate!

That’s what I love about creating work digitally. I have oil paintings which have been seen by maybe five or six people and now just sit in my attic, but when I paint on the iPad, I post up to Flickr and can get 500-600 views in a day. Flickr has a strong community of mobile digital artists, who mainly share their work in groups dedicated to different hardware and apps.

Good ones to check out are iAMDA (The International Association of Mobile Digital Artists), iPad Creative, iPad Art and Fingerpainted. Facebook has iPad Artists and iPad painters Groups, which are great places to share tips and comment on each others work.

CoM: Any advice for artists looking to work on the iPad or other devices? Would you recommend it to new artists?

RH: Painting is a hobby of mine. I have a full-time job, a growing family and I’m studying part time, so if I get an opportunity to paint, I have to be quick. Using the iPad means that I can paint wherever I am and whenever I have a free few minutes. You don’t need to have a room set up with canvases and an easel permanently taking up space. It’s inexpensive too, after the initial hit of the hardware itself, you can realistically paint for as long as you like without having to order in new paint…

You can check out more of Roz’s work at his website.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that the iPad was going to be great for drawing. Writing in cursive on a capacitive screen is still an exercise in frustration, but for drawing and painting the iPad is a legitimate new medium, like oils, charcoal or gouache. It even brings something genuinely new to the game: light. Unlike all other painting methods (except perhaps matte painting for the movies), the iPad’s paintings actually glow.

There are many, many painting and drawing apps in the App Store, so here I’ll write about my favorites.

Procreate

Procreate is the app I use when I paint on my iPad. When I went to a life-drawing class a couple months back in Berlin, I took my iPad mini and my finger along. After getting over the disappointment of a last-minute switch from a female model to an (admittedly hot) male model, and also convincing said model that I wasn’t pointing my iPad’s camera at him, I got some pretty good results.

Procreate distinguishes itself by being easy to use yet powerful. After a brief learning curve, where you discover some of the “hidden” controls (the layers panel was something of a dark art in earlier versions), it all but disappears. The brush size and opacity controls are persistent at the screen edge, and you can long-press to bring up a color picker. Pro tip for all painting apps that have this feature: Paint a few swatches of your colors into the corner and you can quickly sample them with a ling press. This is a lot like having a palette of paints when painting in oils.

Procreate also lets you import images from the camera roll or Dropbox, to use various pressure-sensitive styluses, and to record your paintings so you can play back the creation process step-by-step.

But what really makes it my go-to app is that it’s so easy to use. Head to the settings and you can see a section explaining all the gestures available. Undo/redo, clear layer, zoom; plus a whole lot of gestures to use when doing things like managing layers. This means that you never really have to stop painting and think about the interface. Kind of like a real canvas and paint.

Brushes

Brushes was one of the first drawing apps for the iPhone, and then the iPad, and it’s still one of the best. Brushes first distinguished itself by great brush feel, and it still has that. The basics of the app are similar to any other painting app, but Brushes has, well, great brushes. The textures are excellent, and the responsiveness is top-notch, and it really is an app you can lose yourself in for hours, painting away and zooming onto the details over and over. I lost many hours to the app when I first loaded it onto an iPad, although these days I prefer Procreate, as the brushes are more plentiful and, well, now I’m just plain used to Procreate, which counts for a lot.

Still, Brushes remains the only app that, as far as I know, was used to paint a New Yorker magazine cover.

Vector Apps

All of these painting apps are bitmap apps. That is, a 1000×1000-pixel canvas has 1,000,000 pixels. And if you zoom in past a 1:1 view, those pixels will get blocky or blurry.

If you use a vector app like Inkpad or iDraw, then your strokes are described in terms of length and direction. If you sketch a straight line that is 200 pixels long and 20 pixels wide and runs at 40 degrees from the horizontal, it can be described mathematically. And when you blow the picture up to the size of the building, those same lines and shapes can be mathematically expanded too, redrawn at the new size with no pixel artifacts. This also means that file sizes are usually much smaller, as they don’t need to record every pixel’s color.

Inkpad

My favorite of the two is Inkpad, and it’s also the only one of the pair that has been updated for iOS 7 (iDraw’s last update was way back in February 2013). Inkpad is from Taptrix, the folks behind seminal iPad painting app Brushes (more on that in a sec).

The best thing about Inkpad is that you don’t need to know anything about vectors to use it. Anyone who has had to learn Adobe Illustrator will know how frustrating vector apps can be. Inkpad on the other hand is as intuitive as a bitmap painting app. You can paint strokes onto the canvas, and then, because they’re vectors, you can grab the little Bezier handles and adjust the length, the shape and son on. Everything you’ll need is there, including text tools, layers, blend modes, and tools for arranging all the elements by depth.

You can also import photos (although clearly you can’t do any vector voodoo on them).

But the best part of Inkpad is like the best part of Procreate: ease of use. Somehow the app seems to just know when you want to select a whole shape with a tap, or to just drag one corner of a line over a few pixels. The toolbar can be dragged anywhere, and it runs like a flash (although not like Flash, thank God) even on an underpowered iPad mini, and you can even use the camera to grab quick snaps for reference purposes.

Inkflow

Here’s a radical idea: what about using a pen and paper to draw, and then somehow adding that to your iPad for editing? That’s the idea behind Inkflow. Or rather, that’s one small feature of Inkflow, a note-taking app for the iPad.

Inkflow is a drawing app in its own right, although it’s really aimed more at sketching and handwriting than at full-on painting. There are several brushes, plus colors, zoom and editing features, and even a text tool. But it’s the vector import which makes the app really special.

Draw your pictures or diagrams on paper, using color if you like, and then use the “Inkport” feature to import your sketch using the iPad’s camera. It is converted into Inkflow’s vector format on import, and you can then select and resize the picture as you like. You can’t edit and adjust the lines like you could in an actual vector app, but it’s a pretty great way to mix paper and pixels.

It’s also free, although you’ll have to pay to get brushes, colors and Inkport.

Tayasui Sketches

Tayasui Sketches is a minimal sketching app, although that doesn’t mean that it’s missing features. Rather, it offers the usual set of tools, only it does it in a very unobtrusive manner.

The tools are standard – pens, pencils, brushes – but in the same way that Penultimate offered the best iPad ink for a long time, so Sketches has a fantastic painting engine. The airbrush is especially good.

The IAP adds a color-picker tool (long press to bring up the loupe), more brushes and brush controls (wet vs. dry, different tip sizes). Whatever the paid status of your copy, you can export pictures by flicking them into an envelope (it’s pretty cute) and zoom/undo/redo/move with pinches and swipes.

Like many of these apps, Tayasui Sketches is free, and the extras come in the form if an in-app purchase. Many people moan about this, and I would prefer it if I didn’t have to restore my damn purchases every time I reinstall it, but IAPs are the modern equivalent of demo periods, so we should just quit our whining already.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This week, our picks include one that tells you when famous people die; a DVR for your commute; and pretty, pretty weather forecasts.

Here you go:

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99

It’s the witching season and there’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.

It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?

Well, you do now.

R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App

Nice Weather 2 – Weather – Free

I appreciate a simple, uncluttered interface and that’s why I hate the Weather Channel app. But I’ve replaced that table-laden monstrosity with Nice Weather 2. It’s a jumble-free program that has all the information you need that still manages to look neat and clean. The curved line at the bottom represents the temperature over time, and you can drag that little ball along it to get actual numbers. You can also check humidity and the wind’s speed and direction, and the high and low temperatures are marked for your convenience.

Beyond that, it’s just striking to look at. And I know I’m talking about the weather here; that’s how good-looking this thing is.

Nice Weather 2

My Mountain of Debt — Finance — $0.99 (50%-off launch sale price)

My Mountain of Debt, a new financial app by developer Fun with Data, believes that paying off your debt is as hard as removing a giant pile of bricks from over the opening to your anthill. At the start, you enter your total debt in up to four categories, and then adjust the amounts as needed.

Each time your debt shrinks, the formic hero mounts the pile with his trusty pickaxe and whittles down the stack. It could be a valuable tool to keep your debt in perspective and show your progress — plus that ant looks pretty cute in his little miner’s helmet.

My Mountain of Debt

Save Drives — Navigation — Free

You can prepare all you want, but accidents happen. When they do, Save Drives thinks that you should have documentation. It’s an app that turns your phone into a dashboard camera to log your drives. It maps your courses, tracks your distances driven, and records the last 30 minutes of your drive. You can cut the video into 10 or 30-second chunks as needed, which could come in handy if you need to present something in court or if something crazy happens in front of your car that you want to show your friends later.

If you are in an accident, it’ll even send out some e-mails or post something on Twitter to let people know, which is simultaneously handy and random. It’s handom.

Save Drives

Maps© — Social Networking — Free

If you want to use Google’s Street View function without having to go into Apple’s occasionally dodgy Maps, you might want to check out Maps©. In addition to letting you look at people’s lawns like you’re there, you can also drop pins between two points to calculate distance (this gets less accurate the farther apart your points are), check traffic, and get directions. And if you want to see where your friends live (which is creepy, but I’m sure you might have innocent reasons), you can import their addresses from your contacts and drop pins there.

It does a bit of everything, really.

Maps©

Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has compiled this list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Best New Albums

Arcade Fire – Reflektor

With a penchant for theatrical indie anthems, Montreal’s Arcade Fire has amassed a broad international following without compromising its restless artistic vision.

For the follow-up to 2010’s Grammy-winning releases “The Suburbs,” the band has enlisted the production skills of LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy. At more than seven minutes long, the title track’s hypnotic, futuristic disco groove demonstrates some sparkling chemistry, making a bold statement to Arcade Fire’s fourth studio album.

Clocking in at over 1 hour and 15 minutes in length, “Reflektor” is one of the band’s most interesting journeys as the group reflects on issues of morality, community, anti-capitalism and much more while still providing tunes that will get your body moving.

iTunes – $11.99

Sky Ferreira – “Night Time, My Time”

After her second EP “Ghost” was released in 2012, Sky Ferreira quickly became one of the most promising artists to watch. Her single “Everything Is Embarrassing,” was well received but we’ve been waiting to see how those skills will translate into a full-length album for the 21-year-old pop artist and “Night Time, My Time” is the answer.

The debut full-length release was produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen, and features steep hooks, expansive beats, along side a glitchy rave-girl esthetic. Tracks such as I Blame Myself, Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay), 24 Hours and of course the title track will cause you to listen compulsively listen as Sky dishes out her frustrations and uncertainties in search of her sound and potential.

iTunes – $6.99

CFCF – “Outside”

Michael Silver has explored several different sounds via a series of EPs since since releasing his first album four years ago, but with the release of “Outside,”  Silver has chosen to focus on his impressions of travel, motion, stability, and exploration, and the results are just as conceptual as those EPs, musically it’s another shift.

Often, the album feels like the flipside of the still-hip ’80s sounds he played with on his debut: “Outside” overflows with breathy synth pads, new age-y pan flutes, and approximations of exotic instruments that often read as cheesy to listeners decades later. Coupled with his soothing vocals, these songs are reminiscent of hypnagogic pop. Silver’s reproductions of this glassy ’80s sound are extremely faithful — “Strange Form of Life” could have soundtracked an episode of Miami Vice. The way “Beyond Light”‘s smoothly pulsating beat and melody gradually build in speed like a train pulling away from the station makes it a highlight, while “The Crossing” and “Jump Out of the Train” bring some passion to the proceedings.

iTunes – $9.90

Best New Books

“Johnny Cash: The Life”

by Robert Hilburn

As music critic for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Hilburn knew Cash well throughout his life: he was the only music journalist at the legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968, and he interviewed Cash and his wife June Carter for the final time just months before their deaths in 2003.

In “Johnny Cash: The Life,” Hilburn conveys the unvarnished truth about a musical icon whose colorful career stretched from his days at Sun Records with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the remarkable creative last hurrah, at age sixty-nine, that resulted in the brave, moving “Hurt” video.  Hilburn’s rich reporting shows the remarkable highs and deep lows that followed and haunted Cash in equal measure. A man of great faith and humbling addiction, Cash aimed for more than another hit on the jukebox; he wanted to use his music to lift people’s spirits and help promote what he felt was the best of the American spirit.

Drawing upon his personal experience with Cash and a trove of never-before-seen material from the singer’s inner circle, Hilburn creates a compelling, deeply human portrait of one of the most iconic figures in modern popular culture – not only a towering figure in country music, but also a seminal influence in rock, whose personal life was far more troubled, and whose musical and lyrical artistry much more profound, than even his most devoted fans ever realized.

iTunes – $11.99

“Hyperbole and a Half” 

by Allie Brosh

If you’ve never heard of Allie Brosh you will definitely want to check out her popular blog, Hyperbole And A Half which has been condensed into book format for release this week. The 28 year-old comic utilizes MS Paint-style doodles to tell stories about everyday things like cake, poor spelling, dopey dogs and becoming an adult.

The book features a mix of new and old material where Brosh unleashes her absurdist take on the world by using very elementary but effective illustrations to bring home the point in a simple but powerful way. Brosh’s work is both funny and dark, yet incredibly touching as she drops some of the most insightful meditations ever on topics like depression, childhood, and sneaky scary spiders.

iTunes – $11.99

“S.”

by J.J. Abrams Doug Dorst

The mult-talented J.J. Abrams – director of the Star Trek movies and upcoming Star Wars sequels – collaborated with author Doug Dorst on S. a spectacularly inventive book that’s perfect for reading on an iPad. Reading S. is an exciting adventure that slowly draws you into two parallel stories. For starters, there’s an intriguing novel, Ship of Theseus, written by the fictional author and revolutionary V.M. Straka. Scribbled with multi-colored ink along the margins of this book, there’s also fervent correspondence between a college student named Jennifer and a disgruntled scholar named Eric.

As these two strangers pass the book back and forth, they delve deeper and deeper into the mystery shrouding Straka’s life and death – and into the secrets, dilemmas, and dreams shadowing their lives. Also tucked into the book’s pages are various letters and documents which the reader can tap or click to rifle through and swipe or drag aside, making for one of the most unique reading experiences we’ve seen on the iPad yet.

iTunes – $12.99

Best New Movies

“Cutie and the Boxer”

Looking for something a little more indie and informative this week? Try this endearing documentary about two elderly artists living in New York. “Cutie and the Boxer” offers an intense look into the sometimes volatile balance between Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko Shinohara as their two combative peronsalities clash in the pursuit of art.

In 1972, Ushio was a 40-year-old artist who had been living in New York City for three years and had won a small but distinguished following for what he called his “boxing paintings,” created by dipping gloves in paint and literally pounding the canvas. Ushio met Noriko Shinohara, a 19-year-old art student who had just arrived in the United States; the two fell into a relationship that was destined to become permanent when Noriko became pregnant a few months later. Four decades on, Ushio and Noriko are still together, but their relationship is not always a healthy one; he’s an alcoholic who dominates the marriage and is clearly resentful that his career in art has not been more successful, especially since Noriko has caught the attention of critics with her own work, which uses comic-style images to express messages of female empowerment inspired by her own life.

iTunes – $14.99

“RIPD”

Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds headline this family action-adventure as two cops dispatched from the “Rest In Peace Department (RIPD)” with the sole mission to serve and protect the living from the evil destructive spirits that hangout everyday among unsuspecting not-dead humans on Earth.

It’s basically like MIB — only Jeff Bridges is a funnier, more brash version of K, while Ryan Reynolds does his best to fill the shoes as the young, funny, motivated-but-totally-dead-and-bummed-out agent who keeps The Dude from getting to crazy.

The two eventually uncover a plot that could end life as we know it, so the two partners have to turn to each other with begrudging respect and work as a team to restore order to the cosmic balance – ya know, just like MIB, Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour and every other superhero-buddy-cop movie, making it a sure bet for decent entertainment this weekend if you just need something, anything.
iTunes – $14.99

“World War Z: Extended Cut”

Halloween might be over but that doesn’t mean we have to wait another 11 months before busting out the zombie movies again. iTunes has an extended cut version of World War Z on offer, which means we get even more scenes of the always-lustworthy Brad Pitt destroying zombie hordes.

The suspense is killer in this fast-paced epic of the potential last days of the human race based on the popular novel by Max Brooks. Former United Nations employee Gerry Lane is called upon to help stop the chaotic zombie pandemic that has destroyed populations around the world. Lane fights to keep his family safe, while searching for an answer to the outbreak before it destroys all of civilization- perfect for some mindless late-night entertainment.

iTunes – $12.99

When we were kids, my brothers and I drew all the time. We drew monsters, cartoon people, and faces. Tons of faces: goofy ones, serious ones, ugly ones, and beautiful ones.

We were fanatics. We thought we had talent. We’d take anyone aside every artist we met and beg them for tips and tricks any chance we got. Our granddad, an artist by profession, was our greatest source of inspiration. Our parents proudly hung every scribble on the walls.

I wanted to go to art school, but was persuaded to go to university instead. Academia instead of art. In college, I roomed with a gal who did charcoal figure studies. Our shitty apartment in Brighton, Sussex, was covered with the black dust as she churned out image after image of human figures in various states of undress. I, of course, recalled my artsy leanings from my youth, and headed to the art store to buy pastels, charcoal sticks and reams of thick, heavy, expensive paper.

I spent tons of money that I should have used to pay rent to buy watercolor paints, brushes and paper. I found a cheap easel for sale on a student bulletin board and spent many afternoons up on the roof, smoking hash, painting sheets of rain marching slowly over the South Downs.

Then I grew up. I got a job, a wife, kids. Painting? Drawing? Who has time for that anymore? Who has the money to do it, right? The space to store all the material needed to pursue such a dream, let alone the room to actually engage in artistic endeavors.

Luckily, I have an iPad. And judging by the amazing artwork out there, and indeed in this very issue, I might very well have all I need to rekindle my early love of artistic expression.

There are apps for painting, drawing, illustrating, photo re-touching, and the like. Tons of them in every category. There are styluses and capacitive brushes that rival the analog materials you’d end up paying a fortune for in an art store, and these can be used in the comfort of your very own touchscreen.

No wonder why Roz Hall, the iPad artist we talk to in this issue says, “I turned my back on the canvas and fell in love with the pixel.”

Honestly, why didn’t I think of this before? Who needs a room full of dusty, messy crap to just produce more work that end up in the basement? Not me – I’ve got an iPad and a few inexpensive apps.

Here I come, art world…