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BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the things that first inspired me to be a professional writer was sharing my early fiction experiments as a 10 year old on the discussion boards of the old dial-up service, Prodigy. The instantaneous feedback, the helpful advice, the suggestions from other people about what should happen next to my character (a monster-killing, Nazi-loathing private dick named Dr. Crypt, a name which I still use as my Twitter handle): all of this was a formative experience for me, and without it, I never would have dared to dream that someday, I would make my living putting words down on paper.

Prodigy’s bulletin boards aren’t around anymore, but a new start up is trying to encourage kids and teenagers to write the same way. The company’s called Movellas, and it’s taking the concepts of Twitter, LiveJournal, Kickstarter and the Kindle self-publishing platform to help identify and nurture the next Stephanie Mayer or Stephen King when he or she is still a kid. And, of course, they have an app for that.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Forget a bigger screen or LTE. Ask anybody who has ever dropped their iPhone in a sink, puddle or toilet what they want from the iPhone 5 and waterproofing is number one on the list.

The good news is that there are now a number of companies who are bringing to market superhydrophobic technologies that will help make the soggy iPhone or iPad a thing of the past. Don’t expect a waterproof iPad 3, but an iPhone 5 by the end of the year isn’t just possible, it’s probable.

Our new podcast has been on iTunes for barely more than 24 hours, but The CultCast has already skyrocketed up the charts and is now the #1 Technology Podcast on iTunes. We’re blown away with how successful the podcast has been and we owe it all to our incredible fans who have been downloading it like crazy. Being on the same page as shows like TWiT, 5by5, NPR and Lifehacker is very flattering, and to be at the top of that list is ridiculously exciting. Thanks a bunch, guys!

We’ll be coming out with an new episode every Thursday, but if you haven’t checked out our first 30 minute episode of The CultCast you can subscribe to it right here. Give it a listen. Tell us what you think. And if you have time to give us a rating on iTunes as well, that’d be awesome.

Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.

We’re starting a new series called Wallpaper Weekends. We’ll be bringing you a fresh new wallpaper for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Here’s what we’ve got this week.

Have you ever wished you could use Siri to control Spotify instead of Apple’s Music app on your iPhone? How about using Siri to get directions with your favorite GPS app?

A really cool jailbreak tweak called AssistantLove was released today in Cydia that lets you do those things and more.

We’re huge fans of the simplistic to-do app called Clear here at Cult of Mac. We’ve been captivated by its entrancing gestures and sexy design ever since we saw it at Macworld last month.

Following the highly-anticpated release of Clear in the App Store, Realmac Software has confirmed that the app has moved a staggering 350,000 copies since its launch on February 14th. Nice!

Let’s face it, RIM has been suffering from a serious personality conflict. The company is trying to cling to its enterprise business while also making its brand more attractive as a consumer alternative to iOS and Android.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the company’s PlayBook tablet. RIM initially pitched the PlayBook as being all about consuming content like movies and other media. At the same time, RIM was also trying to sell it as a business device when paired with a BlackBerry even though it lacked core enterprise apps (including email) that could run on the device when it wasn’t tethered to a BlackBerry – a fact that led to RIM hyping the PlayBook’s email app (introduced this week in PlayBook OS 2) as an exciting new feature.

RIM may be caught in this consumer/business identity struggle, but Netflix made it clear today that it doesn’t see RIM as a consumer company – or at least not as a viable one.

Are you still emailing contact cards and photos to your friends? Did you know that you can transfer them instantly with a fist bump using the free Bump app? The best thing about Bump is it’s not just available on iOS, so you can use it to send contacts and images to friends on Android devices and other smartphones, too.

Here’s how to get started.

Although Apple just announced OS X Mountain Lion last Thursday, Mac apps are already getting updated for compatibility with the next-gen OS. Mountain Lion is only available as a developer preview, but that hasn’t kept Smile from updating its popular PDF editor for the Mac, PDFpen, with Gatekeeper compatibility.

Smile makes great productivity apps for the Mac, like TextExpander. With this latest update to PDFpen, a Gatekeeper-friendly Developer ID has been added to help future Mountain Lion users install the app in a secure environment.

In her work as a marriage and family therapist, Sharon Gilchrest O’Neill often finds her patients bring in some common baggage: their smartphones.

Last month, OnLive launched its free cloud-based Windows desktop app for the iPad. OnLive Desktop provides iPad users with a cloud-based Windows 7 desktop that comes complete with the standard Microsoft Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and 2GB of storage. This week, the cloud-gaming company expanded the features and storage available to OnLive Desktop users via new subscription plans – one of the most notable being that OnLive Desktop can now play Flash videos and content.

The company will also be adding a more full featured “Pro” plan that will let users install additional Windows applications and an enterprise service that would allow companies to configure and manage virtual Windows desktops on the iPad’s of employees.

Working in a Chinese factory doesn’t pay that well. When you can’t afford to buy an iPhone, even though you make 5,000 of them a day, the next best thing is to buy a fake iPhone. And when you can’t pay for a fake iPhone, people in China just pay for a cheap service that makes their friends think they have an iPhone by adding a “Sent From My iPhone” signature at the end of their texts.

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

The fantastic Letters of Note blog has posted an amazing letter that a 30-year old Bill Gates sent to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassée back in June of 1985.

In the letter, Gates argues that Apple should license their hardware and operating system out to other companies, making Macintosh a “standard.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it should: after being ignored by Apple for six months, Microsoft took the idea and ran with it, bringing Windows to the world.

The rumors are true. Cult of Mac has been working hard on a podcast and it’s finally here for your listening pleasure. Episode one of Cult of Mac’s frosty new podcast, The CultCast, is ready for your listening pleasure. And if you subscribe right now, we’ll throw in our “Welcome to The CultCast!” episode absolutely FREE!

But wait, what is this CultCast, you ask? Why, it’s the best 30 minute conversation about Apple you’re going to hear all week long. Join Leander Kahney, Buster Heine, and me, Erfon Elijah, as we banter about all our favorite Apple news, gossip, products, and Cult of Mac stories. Get caught up on all the best things from the world of Apple in just 30 fun-filled minutes.

Sound good? Well, alright! We’ll be premiering new 30minute episodes every Thursday night. You can subscribe to The CultCast in iTunes and listen to our first full-length episode right now. After you’ve given it a listen we’d love to hear your thoughts. What did you like? What could we do better? Let us hear about it in the comments.

CineSquid Suction Mount from Cinetics on Vimeo.

Remember the Cineskates? They were a Kickstarter sensation, a bendy Gorillapod married to three roller skate wheels and useful for anything from smooth dolly shots to crazy bullet-time-like movies. Now Cinetics, the folks behind the Kickstarter project behind the Cineskates have come up with the Cinesquid, a tripod with suction cups for feet.

The year’s biggest phone expo is about to kick off in Barcelona, Spain. The Mobile World Congress always seems to have an unofficial theme. Last year it was non-Apple tablets and bad 3-D. In 2010 it was Windows Phone 7.

This year? This year looks set to be all about the Phablets. And Cult of Mac is going to be there first-hand to laugh at report on them.

Intego, the company behind the popular VirusBarrier security software for the Mac, has uncovered a new trojan horse called ‘Flashback.G’ that infects Macs running older versions of Java Runtime. The software installs itself on your system without your acknowledgement when you visit a malicious webpage, then it will record usernames and passwords for sites like Google, eBay, PayPal, and more.

Healthcare was one of the first fields to adopt the iPad after it launched two years ago. As with other fields, the initial use of the iPad in healthcare came from doctors and other professionals buying their own iPads and bringing them into their practices or along with them on rounds – a move that predated most of today’s BYOD planning.

A recent study of mobile technology in healthcare clearly shows that the iPad is the number one device used by doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers with significantly greater use than Android or BlackBerry devices or even the iPhone.

Fifty-seven years ago today, Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California.

If he hadn’t been, none of us would be here. There’d be no Cult of Mac. It wasn’t just Steve Jobs who was born that day, but the iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. The Mac. Apple itself.

If you’re serious about your iPhoneography (and you should be, with such a great camera always in your pocket), then you might want to take a look at the ridiculously over-achieving iPhone Rangefinder case, from our fine friends at Photojojo. The two-piece polycarbonate case slips over the phone and adds a shutter button, a viewfinder and even interchangeable lenses. It’s pretty neat.

While the majority of mobile devices now ship with micro USB connectors, Apple has remained dedicated to its 30-pin dock connector. But that could be about to change, with sources claiming future iOS devices will employ a “micro dock” that will be significantly than the existing connector.

We were looking forward to EA’s latest Battlefield title for iOS before it hit the App Store. But when it finally arrived, we couldn’t have been more disappointed. Battlefield 3: Aftershock offered only online gameplay, with just one map and a very limited variety of arsenal. Gameplay was frustrating at best, plagued by unbearable lag on top of server and connection errors.

It’s no surprise, then, that EA has now pulled the release from the App Store.

Photo of Zias used with permission

This smiling youngster is Zias Kool, and he’s happy for good reason: as a birthday present, the makers of cult iOS puzzler Edge are going to add his Lego-designed custom level to a future version of the game.