iOS 8’s new Family Sharing feature makes it easier than ever for your entire family to share purchases on iTunes, iBooks and the App Store.
Family Sharing is about more than just sneaking copies of apps off your siblings’ accounts, though: It can bring harmony to your entire digital life by sharing photos, creating a family calendar and even keeping track of each others’ locations.
With minimal effort, you can sync up to six accounts. Here’s how to maximize Family Sharing’s potential.
Popcorn Time is finally out for iOS, giving iPad and iPhone users direct access to “The Netflix of Pirated Movies” service for the first time ever. There’s just one catch: it requires a jailbreak.
Over 50% of iPhone and iPad users have already upgraded to iOS 8 and a jailbreak isn’t coming out anyday soon, but if you want to stream movies to your iOS device you’re still in luck. A competing service called MovieBox does pretty much the exact same thing as Popcorn Time, and you can get it on your iPhone 6 and 6 Plus 8 without needing to jailbreaking.
Here’s how to install it:
Popcorn Time, the service that allows users to stream movie torrents, today makes its debut on iOS. It’s available only to jailbroken devices — there’s no way Apple would have approved it for the App Store — and it can be obtained through Cydia via a dedicated Popcorn Time repository.
The Microplane Classic Zester Grater ($12.95) looks more like a bastard file than a kitchen utensil. But don't let its woodshop aura fool you: If your recipe calls for a little lemon zest or grated Parmesan, this inexpensive tool will get the job done right — pronto.
It's quicker and more precise than a standard box grater, especially for small jobs, and it's far easier to clean. Run it over a hunk of hard cheese and you'll be rewarded with thin shreds that seem lighter than air. Rub the Microplane over a nubbin of ginger and you'll reduce that root to a juicy pulp.
So, what makes this Microplane a "Classic"? The company peddles a "Premium" model that, for a measly two bucks extra, puts a prettier face on the grater. It's essentially the same design, only with brightly colored soft-touch handles and "non-scratch end tabs." I've tried them both, and the Classic's old-school black plastic handle works fine for me. Try either model and you'll wonder how you ever got through your kitchen routine without it. — Lewis Wallace
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
If you’ve ever visited the subway platforms in the Big Apple, you know they’re plastered with advertisements. That’s where a free new app called NO AD comes in.
The work of Re+Public, a team of devs who use technology to “alter the current expectations of urban media,” NO AD is an augmented-reality app that strips the New York City subway system of its ads — and replaces them with art.
Just point your iPhone camera at a billboard and, hey presto, you’ll see it vanish and a piece of street art will seamlessly appear where there was once corporate propaganda.
Pretty neat, huh?
The ability to add widgets to your Notifications dock is easily one of iOS 8’s most useful additions. The new functionality puts some of your favorite apps’ features right at your fingertips.
Only a limited number of apps offer widgets currently, but with developers hard at work you can be sure many more are on the way. In today’s Cult of Mac video, we show you how to install widgets in iOS 8 so you can get started enjoying what’s available now.
In this instructional video, we also give you a look at some of our personal favorites. See how widgets can make managing your to-do list, journaling and checking out your favorite teams’ sports scores easier than ever.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.
Woody Allen famously called pigeons flying rats. Photographer David Stephenson calls them thoroughbreds of the sky.
He also realizes the common perception of the pigeon skews more toward Allen’s view. But Stephenson has a growing body of work that could make people reconsider the much-maligned bird.
Stephenson, aka The Pigeon Photographer, runs a website and Instagram feed where his photos attempt to show the intelligence, strength and iridescent beauty of homing pigeons, which he raises in his backyard near Lexington, Kentucky.
“When we see them circling in the air, they move so fast our eye can’t comprehend the beautiful details, the way the feathers curve, the upstroke or downstroke of the wings,” Stephenson told Cult of Mac. “I just want people to appreciate them more. They are beautiful, insanely tough and intelligent.”
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?
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a home-improvement app, a bunch of motivational quotations, and some virtual flooring.
Here you go:
You probably have a few improvements you’d like to make to your home, but it’s possible you have no idea how to do them yourself. Or maybe you do, but you’d like some handy tips on how to store and maintain your paintbrushes or something. This app has you covered either way; it comes from Skil Power Tools, and it contains a wealth of information including tips on removing broken spade handles, tips about proper tool usage, and step-by-step directions on a ridiculous number of projects.
So now I can finally build that deck for my apartment. The landlord will love that.
DIY 4 Beginners – Free | Skil Power Tools
Style My Floor is a decorating app that lets you sample an assortment of different hardwood materials and styles. And even cooler, you can request a “Quick Key” that’ll let you see how different floors will look in your house. You just print out a PDF, lay it in a corner, and then point your iPhone or iPad camera at it. Magic does the rest.
Or technology. Probably that.
Either way, it hits my “easily impressed” button.
Style My Floor – Free | QuickStep Flooring
A lot of apps hope to inspire you to improve yourself and focus by offering you words of wisdom from people whose names you recognize. Like that rather stern one up there, which comes courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Maybe you’ll get something out of this app, which gives you a new quotation every day to make you work harder and feel better. But I’m going to use it to reply back to coworkers who have silly inspirational quotes in their e-mail signatures. It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive office way of saying, “Leave me alone, and get back to work.”
I’m sure my boss will love that.
Daily Productivity Quotes – Free | Michael Paddock
Cigar is a new aggregation app that pulls in new content from crowd-funding site Kickstarter, Netflix, TED Talks, and the App Store and presents it to you in a giant pile for your consideration. You run through them one at a time, swiping up to dismiss ones you don’t like and double-tapping to save some for later.
It can be a little daunting when it throws like 300 things on your stack. But Cigar also e-mails you a digest of things you liked, so you don’t have to go back to the app and sort through your “Liked” list again.
Which is nice.
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 a place to keep your timers, some flirty pics, and the most extensive color app we’ve ever seen.
Here you go:
Emoji are versatile and cute, but if you want to get a little … direct with your significant other, you have to get pretty creative. SinkFoot wants to help with its small fleet of increasingly specific pictures that you can send via text or e-mail directly from the app. No nudity in here, but if you have a thing for cheerleaders, nurses, doctors, or members of SWAT, SinkFoot will help you communicate that.
Yep. SWAT. I guess that’s a thing.
Anyway, it has some other options, too. Although I’m not sure what this one means. I don’t really see what someone would do with an–Ooooooh. Alright, I get it.
Huh.
SinkFoot – $0.99 | SinkFoot LLC
Snoozing is great, but oversleeping isn’t. That’s why Alarm Clock Reboot approaches rousing you from your slumber in a different way. Instead of waking you up when you tell it to, it starts the process with a series of smaller alarms spread out before your wake time. You tell it when you want to wake up, and it starts the process before that with a series of snooze alarms that build in intensity until they reach your desired alarm time.
It’s a cool idea. The lens flares may be a bit much, but they are pretty sweet.
Alarm Clock Reboot – $0.99 | Every Penny Apps
A lot of apps will let you turn your iPhone into a scanner, but Scantilly lets you turn your snapshots into PDFs quickly and easily. All you do is take a picture of the thing you want to preserve, crop it down using a very simple tool, and then you can e-mail it to whomever you want. You can even add extra pages with a single tap, which is pretty handy if you have things to scan other than crudely drawn cartoons of dubious quality.
Not that I know anything about that.
This timer app might not be super useful for everyone, but if you have certain things that you time regularly, you might want to check it out. Scooby lets you build up a list of items and timers that you can easily access anytime you want to save yourself the slight inconvenience of setting the one on your iPhone.
I’m going to use it for the shared washer and dryer in my apartment building because neighbors appreciate it when people don’t leave their clothes in there forever, Steve.
Color Suite is a ridiculously comprehensive color-identification app with an easy sampling tool and a wealth of information. Just point the little dot at the color you want to identify, and it’ll tell you pretty much everything about it, including its complementary color, how it appears to eight different kinds of color-blindness, and even which Crayola is most similar.
It actually has an insanely long list of products you can match, like several brands of house paints, colored pencils, and make-up.
So basically, if you see a color, you can use that color for everything. This app really, really wants you to do that.
Less than a decade ago, Apple was singled out by Greenpeace as one of the least environmentally friendly tech companies on the planet.
Apple has since turned over a new leaf, embracing environmentalism as something every bit as central to the company as the latest iPhone.
Just how important became evident a few months ago, when, during a routine earnings call, Cook spoke of his dream for Apple as a “force for good in the world beyond our products.” The recent global celebrations for Earth Day for the first time in nearly a decade mean that his dream is closer to becoming a reality.
So what changed exactly?
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
We’ve some hard-rocking Flamenco (!), a love story that stars Siri, and a moving book about the Civil Rights Act.
Enjoy!
Rodrigo y Gabriela – 9 Dead Alive
Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero had trouble launching their careers as heavy metal rockers in Mexico, so they turned to something more traditional: Flamenco. Your eardrums will be shocked how well the heavy guitar licks from metal translate into traditional Spanish folk music. No dueling guitar duo is more entertaining than Rodrigo y Gabriela, especially as they opt for a more minimalist production on their fifth studio album 9 Dead Alive, giving it the feeling of an intimate conversation between two virtuosos.
iTunes – $9.99
Ought – More Than Any Other Day
Montreal-based Ought hit the music scene this week with their debut album, More Than Any Other Day, that is electrifying, endearing, and bubbling with thoughts on disaffection and dislocation. The band’s talkative brand of art-punk is full of anxious energy thanks to singer Tim Beeler’s lyrics that flip between panic and ecstasy over the band’s gritty grooves.
iTunes – $7.92
Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots
After serving as the frontman of Blur for 20 years, Damon Albarn has perfected the art of writing sad songs, so why should his first solo album be any different? Albarn combines dub-oriented elements with a dazed electronic ambience that’s rich in emotional depth. Albarn’s experimental rock simplicity provides the perfect notes of melancholy as he reflects on the album’s theme of isolation in the digital age.
iTunes – $14.99
Her
What happens when you fall in love with Siri? That’s pretty much the plot for Spike Jonze’s acclaimed film, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching letters. Heartbroken after the end of long relationship, he is intrigued with an advanced new operating system called “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) to which he finds himself developing an unconventional love for.
iTunes – $19.99
Blue Ruin
Blue Ruin follows Dwight, a gentle Southern drifter who embarks on a mission of vengeance once he learns of a convict’s release from prison. Extracting revenge proves more difficult than imagined, and Dwight finds himself on the run from an escalating cycle of bloodshed that threatens to consume him in this darkly entertaining indie thriller.
iTunes – $19.99
The Legend of Hercules
Hollywood loves making the same movie twice, so before you go watch Dwayne Johnson don the mantle of Ancient Greece’s most epic hero this summer in Hercules, you should catch Kellan Lutz in the titular role of The Legend of Hercules on iTunes to see who wins the title of most bad ass dude in a loincloth.
iTunes – $14.99
Natchez Burning
by Greg Iles
Greg Iles returns with an explosive crime thriller set in his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi. The novel weaves the legacy of the Deep South’s disturbing racial violence of the 60’s, into the narrative of Penn Cage (the mayor of Natchez in 2005) and small-town doctor father who was accused of murdering a black nurse.
iTunes – $12.99
The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act
by Clay Risen
After being submitted to the racist bile of Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy, we could all probably use a little reminder on the battles America has been through just to pass the Civil Rights act, as well as the obstacles still ahead, which is exactly what Clay Risen offers in his new book The Bill of the Century.
iTunes – $14.99
Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace
by Nikil Saval
Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world’s work gets done. From open farm cubicle plans to The Office, Cubed gives readers the fascinating story of how the white-collar work world came to be the way it is, and what might lay ahead.
iTunes – $11.99
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
We’ve got a rap-tastic future you’ll either love or hate, a yummy comeback from Kelis, a dark indie movie you may have missed and a soul-searching memoir from Barbara Ehrenreich.
Enjoy!
Future – Honest
You will either love or hate Hate HATE Future. His raw, emotive, and heavily Auto-Tuned rap vocals have caused a split among rap fans, but we love it, especially paired with a heavy hitter like Pusha T on “Move That Doe.” Honest surges with a new self-assurance of the artist coming into his own as Future has become more comfortable letting the grit of his rap show. Anchored by giants like Kanye West, Drake, Pharrell, Wiz Kalifa, and Pusha T, Future’s second LP is the rap album you can’t miss this week.
iTunes – $12.99
Neon Trees – Pop Psychology
Neon Trees are the pop-alt icons of the aughts. Their catchy electric tunes induce involuntary foot-taps, head bops, and before you know it you’re singing along whether you like it or not. Pop Psychology is the inevitable progression from hits like “Everybody Talks” and “Animal,” but it also contains deeper conflicts as singer Tyler Glen opens up about coming out of the closet in an all-Mormon town.
iTunes – $7.99
Kelis – Food
When I think of Kelis, my mind naturally turns to milkshakes bringing boys to yards, but on Food Kelis sheds both her contemporary R&B sound as well as the futuristic electro-pop that made Acappella a hit, in favor feast of impeccable soul melodies served next to sweaty funk grooves. Food is different from anything else she’s made in her career and boy, is it delicious.
iTunes –$9.99
Struck By Genius
by Jason Padgett
At 31 years-old, Jason Padgett was a dude who cared more about his biceps than his career. Ironically, a savage mugging forever altered the way his brain works, giving him unique gifts like the ability to see water in crystalline patterns or fractal patterns emerging from the movement of tree branches. His unique case of acquired savant syndrome makes Struck by Genius a fascinating read as Padgett recounts how he overcame huge setbacks and embraced his new mind.
iTunes – $12.99
The Remedy
by Thomas Goetz
In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, causing over a third of all deaths. The Remedy presents the riveting history of the world’s most lethal disease, but also taps into the life of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his link to the birth of medical science by exploring his history of debunking a lauded TB cure.
iTunes – $13.99
Living with a Wild God
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Not only is she an educated scientist,but she’s also an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With A Wild God, Ehrenreich recounts her quest to find truth about the universe and everything else, presenting a book that can be enjoyed by the religious and atheists alike.
iTunes – $12.99
Small Time
I only watched Small Time because as a Breaking Bad fan, I’m hoping that Dean Norris (Hank) can make it in comedies as well. He doesn’t get as much screen time as I hoped for in this comedy about a high school graduate who shuns college to work at his dad’s used car lot, but the moments he does get in provide the perfect amount of relief in this heartwarming comedy.
iTunes – $12.99
Omar
Turning political issues into effective personal stories is incredibly difficult – possibly more so when the backdrop is set in Palestine – but that’s exactly what filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad does in Omar, a 2014 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. The film’s titular character is a amiable baker who conspires to gun down an Israeli solider with two friends. Omar is subsequently captured, tortured, imprisoned, and then forced to make a horrible bargain for his freedom.
iTunes – $4.99
Favor
Favor is a riveting indie-gem about Kip Desmond, an affluent guy with a beautiful wife. Kip’s lifestyle isn’t that interesting, but when the waitress he’s been sleeping with on the side is accidentally killed all hell breaks loose and Kip finds himself committing horrible act, the kind he never suspected himself capable of, with his buddy Marvin.
iTunes – $12.99
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?
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a timer inside of another timer, something to keep track of where you’ve been, and some fancy new fonts for your iWork.
Here you go:
It’s nice having some record of the places you’ve visited, but FourSquare is a little granular for my liking.
Traveler’s Badges keeps it simple and broad. You just let it detect your location, and it generates a unique badge for your current city that you can collect and add to your collection. It even logs the date and time you were there, in case anyone asks.
If you want to get all global with it, you can even display all of your badges on a map. It’s not the most practical app, but it is pretty cute (and free). And it’ll kill like five seconds of a layover. Every bit helps.
Traveler’s Badges – Free | Yangfan Qi
If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.
It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.
Nevermind; just use it for intervals.
Practice Time – Free | Mal Function
Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.
Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.
You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.
Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic
Your iPhone and iPad already have some fonts on board, but what if you want to make something that looks like it was stenciled or written in cursive? Or maybe you just like knowing that you have like 800 typefaces to choose from, just in case? Install New Fonts has you covered with enough options to keep you out of trouble for a while.
It’s free to download, but most of it is locked behind a $2.99 in-app purchase. But everything’s licensed for commercial use, so think of it as an investment.
Install New Fonts – Free | Denis Tokarev
Every once in a while, I find an app that shows me just how much I need it. This time, it’s Keep Calm and Breathe On, which offers you seven guided breathing exercises (based on cycles per minute). The goal is to relax you and “calm your heart activity,” and when I tried it out for this write-up, I realized that I’m apparently really bad at breathing.
It has two sounds to accompany your oxygenation: Wind and River. I preferred the wind. It just made more sense because if I’m in a river, breathing might be a problem. And that’s less than calming.
This week we get ready for springtime excursions with three portable speakers that shrug off splashes and are happy to be used in the shower. Which one will you take to the lake, pool or beach? Let’s take a look.
Bluetooth Guitar Pedal Will Thrill Your Ears But Hurt Your Brain
IK Multimedia is responsible for a veritable boat-load of music peripherals and apps, like the hard-rocking guitar crunch of effects app Amplitube and the portable MIDI keyboard iRig Keys. If you’re a musician interested in working with iOS devices on stage, IK Multimedia is the place to go.
It was with excitement, then, that I opened the latest review gadget from the musical company, the iRig BlueBoard, a small footprint Bluetooth-enabled pedal board meant to help you switch effects in a guitar app like Amplitube or piano sounds in something like iLectric Piano, both IK Multimedia apps.
The BlueBoard is a great idea, especially if you’re working with a guitar or keyboard hooked up to an iPad or iPhone. Being able to switch settings on the fly with a foot-operated switch is something I do all the time with my analog guitar foot pedals. Having it do so via Bluetooth is even better, as it won’t take up the 30-pin or Lightning connector, leaving that free to connect a guitar or MIDI interface, like the iRig HD guitar adapter or the iRig Keys.
Unfortunately, that’s where the great idea stops and the difficult to figure out begins.
Garageband has forever changed the way weekend headbangers create music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs and available in the Mac App store for free, it gives brand new as well as seasoned musicians a way to record all kinds of music, letting them connect real instruments, MIDI devices and microphones to the Mac for easy music sessions.
It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.
The latest version of Garageband, 10.0.2, offers an amazing new piece of kit called Drummer. This one deserves a standing ovation. For years, I’ve used Garageband to mock up demos for my disco band. (Yes, we do weddings.) Anyway, the software makes putting together a quick multi-track song super simple and I’ve always enjoyed making sound loops–especially drum loops–to give my demos a more professional feel than I’ve ever been able to with a drum machine or synthesizer module.
I’m a guitar player who understands vocals, bass, and drum parts, so it’s usually pretty simple to drag Garageband loops to the editing area then let the software make everything sync up easily. The Smart features of Garageband have made it chimp simple for me to create an entire song without touching an instrument besides my guitar.
Garageband’s latest feature, though, way above what drum loops could ever do — it’ll make you want to sway with a flickering lighter like a stoned fanboy in utter appreciation.
So. Drummer offers several ways to make it sound as if Neal Peart is banging on his 360-degree drum kit from your humble home studio. Simply click on a drummer profile to customize the sound and feel of that virtual drummer’s playing in real time with just a few clicks and drags. What would take quite a bit of time with drum loops is now seamless and simple. Garageband is simply taking care of changing drum loops in the background, but what comes out of the speakers will be music to your ears.
You’d be playing a different tune (probably to the ca-ching of several thousand dollars) to get this kind of subtlety from a drum machine or drum loops — or giving it up for your own damn drummer. Garageband’s new Drummer feature gives all of that to us for free. Free!
Ok, so the basic package comes equipped with one drummer (Kyle), but still. TK KYLE’S DRUMMING STYLE. But an entire troop of 18 timpanists will set struggling musicians back just $4.99. Heck, Apple just added three new ones (plus a seriously useful MP3 export function) just last month, FOR THE SAME IN-APP PURCHASE?
All of this to say: you’ve now got a fully responsive session drummer with personality, style, and variety sitting on your Mac, just waiting for your latest song idea. Each drummer gets their own custom kit with its own specific sound, just like a real drummer.
While the latest version of this fantastic (and free!) music production suite has lost some functionality like podcasting and Magic Garageband, it still has plenty to recommend it for those new to music or old vets alike.
One of these cool features is the Learn to Play function, which has some pretty good basic music tutorials baked right in, along with the capability to purchase videos from hit artists like Sting and Norah Jones, who teach you how to play some of their famous songs.
It’s a pretty heady set of music learning; here’s how to access it. Getting really good at your instrument will take more than watching a video or three, but this is a great start if you want to try your hand at the guitar or piano.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
Enjoy!
The Afghan Whigs – Do To The Beast
The Afghan Whigs haven’t released an album in over 16 years, but that streak finally dies with the release of Do to the Beast. Rather than picking up right where they left off, the Whigs have shunned 90s nostalgia and leaned on influences in R&B, soul and funk, for an album that’s rich, dark, and raw even if it misses the mark as a true rock album.
iTunes – $9.99
August Alsina – Testimony
August Alsina first broke big when his single “I Luv This S**t” became a viral hit in 2013, and although some fans are worried he might be coming on too hot, he’s ready to mine his hip-hop connections for gold in his debut album, Testimony, that features appearances by Young Jeezy, Pusha T, Rick Ross, B.o.B., Chris Brown, and Yo Gotti. But August is never overshadowed by his rap overlords, thanks to his sweet evocative vocals that are something of a mashup between Usher and Omarion.
iTunes – $13.99
Chet Faker – Built on Glass
Melbourne-based Chet Faker established himself as one of the most alluring voices in electro-soul thanks to his cover of “No Diggity” in 2012 and the series of sultry singles that followed. Built on Glass, his first full-length album, is a swirl of blues-inflected ruminations on love, loss, desire and emotional desolation. Combined with spare beats, hypnotic samples and yearning melodies, Built On Glass is an imaginative, soulful delight.
iTunes – $9.99
Creativity Inc.
by Ed Catmull
Thousands of books have tried to formulate the secrets of creativity, but as one of the co-founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull is uniquely positioned to dispense advice on creativity in business. In Creativity Inc., he explores the lessons learned while creating some of the most beloved animated films of the last 20 years and the ideals and techniques that made Pixar so widely admired – and so profitable.
iTunes – $11.99
Can’t and Won’t
by Lydia Davis
Rick Moody once called Lydia David “the best prose stylist in America,” but you can make that judgement for yourself as her fifth collection of stories Can’t and Won’t hits iTunes this week, demonstrating all the power of her sly humor and finely honed prose, as her stories seek to untangle the predictable patterns of daily life.
iTunes – $12.99
WAR! What Is It Good For?
by Ian Morris
Ian Morris’s new book makes our list for its excellent title alone (seriously, no one else thought to name a book after the popular song?), but there’s more to WAR! than just its catchy title as Morris explores one of history’s greatest paradoxes to see how war has changed our society for the better. With all of those unmarked tanks edging towards chaos in Ukraine, it’s a timely read.
iTunes – $12.99
The Unknown Known
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the most powerful men behind the scenes in Washington for over three decades. In this shocking documentary about the use and abuse of American power, Academy Award winner Errol Morris sits down with the former United States Secretary of Defense to discuss his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
iTunes – $6.99
Joe
Nicholas Cage is the probably the most hit-or-miss Academy winner of all time, which makes recommending any movie he’s in tricky. This one, however, is a safe bet: Cage has his best role in years with a film about a hard-living ex-con who inexplicably becomes a role model to a 15-year old homeless boy as he teeters between redemption and ruin.
iTunes – $6.99
Beneath the Harvest Sky
Fans of Game of Thrones will enjoy seeing Aiden Gillen (who plays sinister Little Finger in the HBO series) put his devilish charm to good use in Beneath the Harvest Sky. Here he plays an outlaw character teaches his struggling teen son the business of smuggling drugs in an indie film that was all the hype at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
iTunes – $4.99
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 _____, _____, and _____.
Here you go:
This new self-improvement app from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance has a simple premise: Trying to do everything is hard, but doing one thing isn’t.
Sounds obvious, but what you do here is select a few habits you’d like to form; pre-loaded examples include drinking more water, inviting friends over, and going to bed early. You can also devise your own if you want to do something that isn’t on the list. The app sets goals, and you check them off when you do them. Eventually, you can “commit” to doing a thing without prompting and start on something else.
Do One Thing by SCCA – Free | 2Morrow Mobile
I know that your iPhone already has a calculator in it, but here’s a specialty app for people who suffer from the curse of Man Thumbs.
SwipyCalc is a basic calculator that gives all the screen space to the numbers. Only the numbers. You enter your basic functions — adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing — with swipes in one of four directions. It’s fast and easy, especially once you realize that the comma in the lower left corner is what you use for a decimal point.
Unless you’re in one of the 60+ countries that uses the decimal comma. That won’t slow you down at all.
SwipyCalc – Free | Domenico Scalambrino
Spring is here, and–holy crap, do you see that bird? No, the other bird. It’s over by the tree. No, the tree by the shrub. Yeah. That bird there. Do we have those here, or is it some kind of bird-stranger?
Local Birds will help keep inane, interminable thought processes like that one from happening. You tell it your location, and it shows you birds in order of commonality to your region. So when I told people the other day that I saw a Western Scrub Jay, and they were like, “Nuh-uh,” and I was all, “Uh-huh”?
I can totally prove that that was possible now.
Local Birds – Free | Thomas Benner
This isn’t the most practical app for everyone, but it’s certainly interesting to look at.
Re(play) features six clips of athletes being all athletic and stuff. High-speed cameras captured the footage at 236 frames per second, and you can either watch the maneuvers play out or scrub back and forth to study the movements in detail. That could be nice for people studying movement for art or animation.
But even if you don’t have any professional or artistic need for Re(play), it’s really just kind of hypnotic to watch.
I don’t know if I’m just ridiculously clumsy or what, but I’ve had times where I saw something happening that I wanted to record, and by the time I got my camera app up and switched over to video, that thing had stopped happening. And regret is a powerful thing.
So Blink (or [Blink], if you’re super fancy) is a new app that starts recording the instant you open it; it also lets you take still photos while capturing with a single button press. And that’s slightly faster than opening your iPhone’s camera and then fumbling my stupid, giant thumb around trying to switch to video.
I feel like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial when that happens.
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old rocker: you people just have no idea how good you have it.
The ease with which you can put together a fairly amazing-sounding song with that iPad and a few peripherals is darn near insulting, considering the kind of stuff we used to have to do, back in the day.
When I was in a band in Los Angeles in the 1990s (no applause, really, please), we recorded a little demo on a friend’s recording set up. This was a full-on audio workstation that used, joy of joys, Alesis Digital Audio Tape, (ADAT) a thrilling new technology that let you record up to eight tracks at once. My buddy linked up two of these bad boys for a full 16-track mini studio, and we spent weeks in that smelly room playing the same 10 songs, over and over to get them right. If we screwed up a part, we’d have to back up to the beginning again, a laborious process that certainly extended our timeline exponentially, newbie recording musicians that we were.
Soon after that epic effort, I wanted to do some of my own recording, but I really didn’t have the money to buy the kind of crazy-expensive equipment that we had used on our demo tape (remember tape?), so I turned to my Mac, a Performa 638CD that the salesman at Circuit City had sold me without mentioning that PowerMacs were just about to come out. Jerk.
Anyway, I lost a few brain cells learning some arcane audio recording software enough to just scrape by. I’m not sure I remember which software it was (brain cell loss, remember?) it might have been Cubase, Logic, or ProTools, but to say these were overkill (and darn pricey) is an understatement. They were hard to learn, and you needed a ton of weird equipment to connect MIDI keyboards or drum machines to the thing, so I didn’t even bother.
Macs continued to play a role in my music, but not to any huge extent. I’d rather be a musician than a recording engineer — and that was what you’d need to be to make older equipment and software sound halfway decent.
Flash forward to 2004. Steve Jobs announced Garageband, with a little help from John Mayer. Here, finally, was multi-track recording software for the rest of us. A little program that would let me record live music, use pre-recorded loops like the most expensive software at the time, and mix it all down to something that I could then burn to a CD and play in my car? All for the cost of, well, next to nothing? Sign me up, right now.
The next few iterations of the Garageband software added amazing technological advances, like recording more and more tracks at once, pitch correction and automated pan tracking (moving the audio from one side of a stereo signal to the other). The ability to easily create and edit Podcasts led to my short stint as a podcaster, in fact.
Now you’ve got this ridiculously advanced audio recording software on an iPad. A tablet that you can slip into a backpack and just go. It’s a glorious time to be a musician with this kind of ability within your reach. Just be sure and know you’re totally spoiled.
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” ― Brené Brown
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Credits
Publisher Leander Kahney
Editor Nicole Martinelli
Cover design Rob LeFebvre
Contributors Evan Killham, Buster Heine, Luke Dormehl, Rob LeFebvre and Cult of Mac staffers.
@2014 Cult of Media Corp. Produced using Packagr and the Baker Framework.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Sage the Gemini – Remember Me
Los Angeles is getting a lot of credit for the west coast’s rap resurgence thanks to Kendrick Lamar, YG, and the A$AP crew, but Sage the Gemini would like to turn your attention to the Bay Area this week with his debut album that has everything from hopping instructional dance floor drills like Gas Pedal and College Drop to your bravado tracks, while also exploring Sage’s variety combined and garrulous charm.
iTunes – $9.99
Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
I fell hard. It took me just 30 seconds to love, love, love Todd Terje’s new album. The other 3,520 seconds weren’t bad either as Terje mixes a delicious cocktail of disco and surf tone instrumentals. It’s kind of like elevator music, only really fun danceable elevator music.
iTunes – $9.99
EMA – The Future’s Void
Erika M. Anderson, better known by her stage name EMA, perked ears up with her debut album Past Life Martyred Saints due to the brutal intimacy of her songs, but with her latest effort, The Future’s Void, EMA goes for something new by turning her focus to things and issues rather than the people she cut herself off from in the first album.
iTunes – $9.99
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
by Carlotta Gall
Many many books will yet be written about the war in Afghanistan, but few will have a deeper personal acquaintance with Afghanistan and Pakistan New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall who has been reporting from the area for almost the entire duration of the American invasion. Now that the U.S. is on its way out, Gall’s book outlines how we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy, in the wrong country.
iTunes – $18.99
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
by Gabrielle Zevin
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, the third novel from Gabrielle Zevin, is about a 39-year-old widower named A.J., a cranky drunkard with a bookstore in shambles, but mostly it’s about reading. Each chapter starts with the title of short story or book and note from A.J. that introduces each new character along with what they read, using literature as his prism for judgement.
iTunes – $11.99
The Divide
by Matt Taibbi
The yawning economic gap has promised to be a huge issue coming up in this year’s midterm elections which makes Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap a timely read if you’re curious about two alarming trends – growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration.
iTunes – $13.99
Philomena
Philomena is based on the incredible true story of British journalist Martin Sixsmith, who reluctantly decides to accompany Philomena Lee on her search to find the son who was taken from her at a convent 50 years ago. The film could’ve been a sentimental nightmare in other hands, but thanks to the stellar cast, journey is both smart, funny and heartfelt.
iTunes – $14.99
Ride Along
I usually find Kevin Hart’s hyperactive comedy riffs too exhaustive to be enjoyable, but tempered against the stone- cold attitude of Ice Cube he’s pretty great. Here in Ride Along, the two actors are a police duo out on ride-along designed to scare the hell out of Hart’s character so he’ll stop foolin’ around with Cube’s sister.
iTunes – $14.99
Patton Oswalt: Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time
Technically you can also get Patton Oswalt’s latest stand-up special as an album, but Patton’s jokes on the trials and tribulations of frozen foods, failed outings with prostitutes, fatherhood and other uncensored topics are so much more entertaining watching them on the big screen with your friends.
iTunes – $14.99
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
The little Luxi turns your iPhone’s front camera into a light meter. A what? A light meter, a device that measures the amount of light falling on a subject so that you can set the exposure correctly on your camera.
But wait, doesn’t you camera already set its own exposure? Doesn’t it have a light meter built in for when i want to kick it old school in manual mode? Yes and yes, but this $30 widget might still be handy.
Buy it $30
Ever wanted to take photos of people without them knowing? Perhaps a sneaky shot of a pretty girl to help you “remember” her later, or some equally creepy bit of deceit? Well then, we have good news for you, you pervert: it’s the COVR Photo, an iPhone case which lets you shoot in secret.
The COVR has a little prism stuck on the back, and when want to use it you slide it into place. Now you can hold your iPhone like a TV remote and shoot whatever is in front of you while looking down at your iPhone’s screen.
Buy it $75
Here’s the Das Keyboard 4, possibly the most bad-ass clacky keyboard in existence. No keycap markings, USB 3.0, Cherry MX switches and a huge knob. All that plus Das’s trademark feature: it’s as big as a boat. A “Das Boat” if you will.
You know how when you leave a pack of cookies open instead of sealing them in an airtight jar? They still taste the same, but they get all mushy: the satisfying snap has gone out of them. That’s how I feel now when I use even Apple’s excellent keyboards. They’re mushy compared to my clackety Filco keyboard.
Buy it $169
Elgato’s Thunderbolt Dock has a few unique features that are appropriate for a company that makes video accessories for Apple devices. First, there’s an HDMI port around back, and second, the USB ports put out enough juice to charge your iPad at a decent speed.
Buy it $230
Pad&Quill is at it again, this time with a low-profile rear-shell style case for the iPhone 5/S. While calling anything from Brian Holmes’s P&Q “minimal” would be a stretch, the Traveler Case gets pretty close. It is also gorgeous to look at, and would surely be just as lovely for the hands. It looks like the kind of case you couldn’t stop fingering.
Buy it $80
The Confidant is a 192-page notebook, packed with blank, ruled or dot-grid paper. It opens flat, has its own cotton bookmarker, is covered in pale gray fabric and has neat, extra-wide pages.
There are also 12 perforated pages at the back of the book so you can tear them out without ruining the binding. My copy doesn’t have these, so maybe I have a beta version.
Buy it $16