This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple 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 answers questions on whether Apple gives Specialists commission on sales, as well as a break down on how many employees it takes to effectively run an Apple Store.
Got a question you want the 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.
Q:How does the pay compare to other electronic retailers? Do you guys get any form of commission?
I’ve never worked at Best Buy, Staples or any of the other tech retailers, but from what I’ve heard from co-workers the pay is pretty solid at Apple which is one of the draws, along with corporate culture and getting to work for the most influential tech company in the world.
If you’re just a Specialist working the floor, don’t except to make too much more than average retail at first. There’s no commission of any kind on the sales we make, but Apple keeps track and you’re encouraged to hit certain metrics. After a few months you’ll be eligible to apply for other posts.
Genius Bar positions start out at around $17 per hour, but you can make quite a bit more than that if you work full-time and stick around for a while. I know a few making more than $25 an hour with managers making even more.
Q:How many employees does it take to effectively run an Apple Store?
A lot. Apple places a lot of emphasis on employee-to-customer ratios so that even if the store is jam packed, there will still be a Specialist available to help you.
Of course each store is different but I work at the smallest of five Apple Stores in my metro area and we still have about 40 employees on an average day. If its a launch day that number jumps between 60-90 employees, but at other stores like Fifth Ave. I’ve heard they have more than a hundred staff on-hand for a regular retail day.
Q:What is the worst thing a customer has ever brought in?
Apple is pretty laid back on what they allow you to bring into the store which makes it pretty interesting, sometimes disgusting, to see what people tote in alongside their computers to the Genius Bar.
A lot of people bring in food which is fine, unless it’s some smelly weird stuff. I had one lady bring her cat in with her to her appointment at the Genius Bar. It sat in her purse the entire time we fixed her iPod. Others have brought in dogs.
As far the worst tech that’s been brought in, one customer’s toddler stuffed a CD smothered in peanut butter into a MacBook Pros SuperDrive once. Unfortunately, peanut butter damage isn’t covered under warranty.
Taking great photos on the go is easier than ever thanks to the iPhone’s great camera and array of apps. But while some are satisfied merely uploading selfies and pictures of lunch, other iPhoneographers are trying to eek out as much performance and quality from the iPhone as possible by using an array of lenses and other accessories.
Unlike full-frame cameras, iPhone accessories won’t set you back more than your rent (and they’re much easier to carry around) but pinning down the most useful ones in a sea full of gimmicky products is still difficult, so we’ve compiled this list of five tools every iPhoneographer should start with.
Lenses
The iPhone’s camera sensor is pretty damn good for a smartphone, but if you’d like to improve it a bit for landscapes, macro shots, and telephotos, there are lots of lens options that will add more diversity to your photos.
Our favorite lens attachment is the Olloclip. The company’s 4-in-1 lens for the iPhone 5/5s only costs $70 and gives you the options of Fisheye, Wide-Angle, 10x Macro and 15x Macro. You can also pickup a 2x Telephoto lens with Circular polarizing for $99.99.
Kogeto Dot will help you take 360 panoramas if you suck at using the iPhone’s native feature. Or if you’d like your lenses to be built into your case, Factron Quatro has a nice metallic option, but it ain’t cheap.
If you’re willing to spend as much money as you’d spend on a good point-and-shoot, Sony’s attachable smartphone lenses bypass your iPhone’s image sensor with its own 18.9M pixels or 20.9M pixels sensor depending if you’re willing to drop $199 or $499.
Apps
There’s something to be said about natural talent–and lot of practice–to take your photography to the next level, but a little nudge from software magic never hurt.
Apple’s native Camera app is great for taking snaps on the fly, but if you want to really hone in and adjust the exposure with more precision, try using Camera+ or VSCO Cam. Both apps allow you to set an exposure point separately from the focus point (something Apple still hasn’t added to its own app).
VSCO Cam and Camera+ also come with great filter options but if you’re looking for something a bit new and lesser known, an app called Faded is also worth considering for its exposure controls, minimalist UI, and unique filters. And don’t forget Snapseed; one of the most complete apps for photo editing on iOS.
To add more flair to your photos try experimenting with slow shutter and time lapse apps. Our favorite, AvgCamPro just got a big iOS 7 update last week.
Tripod
Selfies were all the rage on Instagram in 2013, and while yes, your hand can do a fine job maneuvering, aiming, and snapping the camera all in one motion, those self portraits could be so much better with a tripod.
Joby’s GorillaPod is the consensus favorite thanks to its versatility and cheap $20 price tag, but you could just risk 5 bucks and can get this ATC tripod phone holder.
When it comes to tripod mounts, the GripTight from Joby will let you mount your iPhone even if it’s in a bulky case. The new Glif is also adjustable, but you have to break out a wrench to resize it your phone. It also doubles as a stand, so might be worth it to you if you don’t already have one.
Power
Snapping pictures for hours on end is quick ticket to Zero-Percent-Battery-Land, so if you’re going out on a photo excursion make sure to take extra power with you.
The Mophie Juice Pack Plus adds a battery case to your iPhone and can add up to 10 hours of talk time for $120, but Lenmar Meridian case is also worth consideration after our friends at the Wirecutter found it to be both lighter and more powerful than the popular Mophie option. Plus, it only costs $90.
Waterproof/Shockproof Case
Sometimes getting a great shot can require a little extra effort, putting you and your iPhone in dangerous spots. To ensure you don’t ruin your favorite camera, try getting a waterproof/shockproof case.
Lifeproof’s Nuud cases bring waterproofing and drop protection without covering your iPhone screen. Incipio’s Atlas case has earned top marks from reviewers for its waterproofing and the company just came out with a new case that gives you access to Touch ID.
Now you’ve got your gear list, head on out there and get some amazing shots!
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!
Albums
Angel Olsen – Burn Your Fire for No Witness
For her second LP, Missouri-native Angel Olsen mixes strummed acoustic guitar with lo-fi garage-rock for a blend that’s both creative, personal and fun. Burn Your Fire for No Witness has already received rave reviews from critics, and with jolly tracks about being lonely like “Hi-Five” it’s not hard to see Olsen’s talent.
Some bands just have a knack for making music that’s perfect for insomniacs. Phantogram is one of them and their latest LP has 11 dark tracks dancing with an electric energy. Voices is probably the duo’s most complete work, feeling thematically more consistent than Eyelid Movies, while still offering cinematic synthesized vibe that keeps you nodding along.
While Angel Olsen is getting a lot of hype this month for her second album, Marissa Nadler would like to remind everyone that she’s been playing the folksie introspective singer/songwriter role for more than a decade now. Her previous five albums weren’t commercial successes and while her sixth album, July, won’t likely top the charts its her finest work yet as the singer uses slow-paced folk rock to sing about her emotional journeys.
Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits
by Kevin Roose
The Wolf of Wall Street caused a ruckus when it shined a light on Wall Street’s greed in the 90’s but has the Recession damped its style at all? Kevin Roose’s book Young Money dives into the new Wall Street scene by following eight young brokers fresh out of college and into Wall Street, where they learn how to make obscene amounts of money– as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers
Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero
by Douglas Perry
In a time when gangsters were as famous as a Kardashian, the shy lawman Eliot Ness rose to fame for leading the Untouchables against Al Capone. The daring raids with the Prohibition Bureau squad have been immortalized by Kevin Costner, but Douglas Perry’s new book Eliot Ness: The Rise And Fall of an American Hero argues that Ness’s biggest achievement was his forgotten second act as public safety director of Clev;and. A role where he purged the city of corruption so deep the mob and the police were often one and the same
The worst thing about getting into a new trilogy is having to wait years for the next books to be published, but with Jeff VanderMeer’s new Southern Reach Trilogy, all three books will be available by September, with the first, Annihilation hitting shelves this week.
Set in Area X – a mysterious land reclaimed by nature that’s been closed for decades – Annihilation follows the 12th expedition group to enter Area X consisting of an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself
iTunes – $7.99
Movies
Nebraska
The Oscars are still a few weeks away, but one of 2013’s top pictures with 6 nominations, Nebraska, can finally be enjoyed from the comfort of your couch. Directed by Alexander Payne, the movie follows an aging, booze-addled father and his estranged son who make a trip from Montana to Nebraska to claim a million-dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize.
Unlike Nebraska, These Birds Walk won’t be all the rage at the Oscars, but it’s got a story that’s just as inspiring and brilliant as other nominees like Cutie and the Boxer. This indie documentary follows a young Pakistani runaway aided by a sympathetic ambulance driver in his quest to reunite with the orphanage he left.
We all remember all the great times and magic of summer camp – unless you went to Camp Hope. Wouldn’t it be great to quit your job and go back to the days of papier-mâché projects and archery classes? That’s pretty much what Elise Miller does in Camp Takota when her personal and professional life fall in shambles. Even better, when she takes up a job at a counselor at her old summer camp she’s reunited with two estranged friends who attended camp and never left.
I remember when the Apple Quicktake was a revolutionary new product. It was an odd, squarish thing that you held up to your eyes like a strange pair of binoculars and it took photos at a then-astonishing 640 by 480 pixels. It was bulky, though, and quickly replaced.
Yours truly, ca. 2004.The next camera I owned was a Minotla Dimage X-T, a teeny little square of a point and shoot camera with a decent 3.2 megapixel resolution that seemed massive at the time. This was the era of the megapixel wars, where every manufacturer wanted to cram as many pixels as possible into their cameras, and taking movies with these babies was the next great thing.
No one took pictures with their phones.
As soon as June of 2007 rolled around, the iPhone debuted with a 2 megapixel camera. It wasn’t as good as the point and shoot I still favored, so it stayed in my pocket (at first). More and more, though, the iPhone was with me when I wanted to take a picture, and my Minolta was not.
Each successive iPhone model increased not only the megapixel count, but the iPhone camera itself, from the lenses to the internal sensors, received update after update, until–honestly, who carries around a point-and-shoot anymore?
This week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine celebrates that fact with an entire volume dedicated to tips and tricks befitting the one camera we all have in our pockets at all times, giving you practical, technical tricks on all things iPhoneography. Cult of Mac’s own photography guru, Charlie Sorrel, weighs in with some choice technical advice on photography that applies across all cameras, iPhone or not, while Olloclip’s Michele Baker and Camera+’s Lisa Bettany drops some wisdom on how she got her best iPhone pictures.
Of course, we’ll have the usual Genius column and Best Apps and Media from the past week to share with you to, so head on in and enjoy the issue.
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 sleeping aid for nerds, a clever alarm, and a way to avoid looking at other people’s lunches.
Here you go:
Developer Fixdit sees no reason why your nerd love should have to stop just because you’re unconscious. So now we have Hypersleep, a space-themed sleep aid that includes white-noise-ified versions of the engine noises of various science-fiction vehicles. You can nod off to the engine idle of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D or the background hum of the 10th Doctor’s TARDIS. Or some other equally dweeby drones.
And that’s where the Nerd Tax comes in: The default noise is free, but additional (read: recognizable) sounds cost $0.99 each. But I’m pretty sure that if the sound of Serenity’s engine will help you nod off, you’re willing to pay that dollar.
My Smart Alarm wants you to be on time, but it also knows that you can’t just walk out the door looking like that. So it lets you build up a list of things you need to do to get ready (showering, shaving, impromptu Nerf-gun battles) as well as travel time. You tell the app when your event/appointment is and check off your pre-game tasks, and it will alert you when you need to start getting ready.
It won’t tell you if that outfit looks dumb, though; you’re on your own there.
An official Metacritic app exists, but it’s pretty basic; it only shows you new movies. Metascore is also basic, but in a completely different way. It allows you to look up the Metacritic aggregate number for anything on the site, including movies, video games, TV shows, and music. You just type in what you’re looking for, and it gives you the number.
And when I say it gives you the number, I mean that it only gives you the number. You’ll have to go somewhere else if you want to read the reviews, but this is still a handy app if you’re just looking for a general rating.
Photo-sharing social apps like Instagram are fine and all, but most of them have one flaw: You can’t tell them not to show you pictures of people’s lunch if you don’t want to see them. Enter Just…, a quick-and-easy place to post and look at photos that asks you upfront what you want to look at. So far, it includes 11 categories including Automobiles, Cats, Dogs, and, yes, Food, if you’re into that.
It’s easy to put up your own work and like and share others’, and the feeds already have some beautiful pictures for your enjoyment.
(Apologies to Mr. Albano for the crop job up there.)
We’ve already covered multimedia platform Narr8’s transition from iPad to iPhone, but this week, the company released a standalone app just for biographical comics about some of history’s great thinkers and doers. Biographics offers 13 “episodes” that offer tons of information about some fascinating figures. The first two episodes, which cover Nikola Tesla and Sigmund Freud, are free, and the rest are available for $0.99 each. Subjects include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vlad Dracula, and Martin Luther King.
Like many of us, Travis Jensen spends his lunch hour taking iPhone pics.
Unlike most of us, however, his moody urban landscapes and punchy black-and-white portraits have been the object of two photo books, shot with fellow street photography veteran Brad Evans, Tenderloin U.S.A. and the #iSnapSF Field Journal.
Believe it or not, there's an iPad mini in there somewhere.
You know those amazing photos you see taken by the pros using only an iPhone? The stories pop up from time to time, and they all have two things in common: the iPhone, and the incredible shots. Why don’t your iPhone photos look so good?
Part of it it is the knack: These pros have an eye that knows what looks good, and the practice to know what looks bad. But the other part of it is that they know how to use their gear. This article will take us through all the facts about iPhoneography: from how the camera actually works, to extra gear you might like to try, to apps that let you shoot and share. It’s not a top-ten list, but more of a tips-n-tricks article to get you going.
Camera Theory
Don’t worry, I’ll make this interesting. Camera theory is important, because it lets you know what your camera is doing and why. And if you know that, then you can push the boundaries or fix problems. It’s universal, too, whether you’re using an iPhone, a DSLR or a pinhole film camera.
Aperture/Shutter/ISO
This is the triumvirate of camera control. Aperture and shutter speed control the amount of light that gets into the camera and hits the sensor or the film, and ISO is a measure of the sensitivity of the sensor or the film. The trick is, they are all interchangeable, and they are all the same whatever camera you use. ƒ2.8 is ƒ2.8 on your iPhone lens or your giant sports telephoto lens. They literally let in the same amount of light at that setting. And 1/500 sec is one five hundredth of a second wherever you are (relativity notwithstanding).
Exposure is measured in “stops,” thanks to the click stops on lenses and shutter-speed dials. One click will add one stop more or one stop less of light. Here’re the terms:
Aperture is the hole in the lens. Opening it up lets in more light. Closing it cuts light out. Each hole lets in double the light of the hole before (or half, depending on which direction you’re going in). That last part is important.
Shutter speed is a measure of the time the shutter stays open. A shutter can be a metal curtain or an electronic screen that flicks from black to clear and back, but the time it is open for is the “shutter speed.” Each stop lets in double (or half) the light of the previous one on the dial. 1/2 sec is open for double the time of 1/4 sec, for instance, and lets in double the light.
ISO Also known as “film speed,” ISO is a measure of the sensitivity of film. The numbers run thusly – 100, 200, 400, 800 and so on, doubling each time. And guess what? Yes, the amount of light needed to get the same image on the film/sensor halves with each step. That is, sensitivity doubles with each stop.
And here’s the trick: You can click the shutter speed up one stop and the aperture down (more open) one stop, and the exact same amount of light will hit the sensor. This used to be easier with manual film cameras fro two reasons. One is that the ISO was effectively fixed once you loaded a film into the camera – to change it you had to change the film for a more sensitive one. And second is that the cameras only changed their settings in full-stop clicks, so you could literally dial a stop on the shutter speed dial and the aperture ring (usually around the lens).
Special Effects
To recap, we now know that setting, say, an aperture of ƒ8 and a shutter speed of 1/500 sec gives the exact same exposure as ƒ11 at 1/250 sec. One click up and one click down. The numbers – especially the ƒ-numbers used for aperture – are confusing but worth taking a short while to study.
This knowledge lets us use the secondary effects of aperture and shutter speed to change the look of our photos, all without affecting the amount of light that hits the sensor. Aperture also affects the “depth-of-field”, or the slice of a picture that’s in focus in your frame. You know those portraits with pin-sharp faces but distraction-free blurred backgrounds? These have a shallow depth-of-field (DOF), achieved by setting the aperture wide open to a low number like ƒ1.8 or ƒ2.
And those neat pictures with the light trails caused by car taillights moving across the frame at night? Long exposure, caused by slow shutter speed. Open up the shutter for a half or a whole second and anything that moves during that second will register as a blur.
“Differential focus” uses depth-of-field for effect.
Conversely, a fast shutter speed (e.g. 1/2000 sec) freezes action, letting you see individual water droplets in the spray from a canoeist’s paddle or oar or whatever it’s called, and a small aperture (e.g. ƒ16) will give you a photo that’s in focus from front to back, handy for landscapes.
And you can make this choice independent of exposure, thanks to the fact that you can twist both controls in the opposite directions. And with digital you can add ISO into the mix, letting you up the sensitivity in low light to let you keep a fast shutter speed to avoid blur.
Camera Shake Vs Out Of Focus
Speaking of blur, there are two kinds. One is caused by the lens not being in focus, and can be used for good or evil. Evil is when your subjects are are not sharp. Good is when you focus perfectly on those eyes, and leave the background out of focus (see depth-of-field above).
Even blur can be used for the powers of good.
The second kind is when the camera or the subject moves during exposure, and it’s made worse the longer the shutter is open (slower shutter speeds). If the camera is rock steady (on a tripod, say) then only the things that actually move will be blurred, even if you leave the shutter open for many seconds. This knowledge can be used to get those photos where a rushing river turns to ethereal mist around sharp, rain-slicked rocks.
If the camera moves, you get “camera-shake,” where the entire picture is blurred. This is almost always a disaster, and is the reason cameras have flashes on them – to add in enough light that the shutter speed can be kept short enough to avoid blur.
However, even this can be used to your advantage. If you move the camera so the subject stays at the same spot in the frame, swinging your body around to follow a passing cyclist, say, and set a shutter speed of around a half or quarter second, then the subject will stay sharp and the background will blur. This technique is called “panning” and, if you’ll forgive the pun, the results can be gold.
Focal Length
Focal length is – for practical purposes – the measure of how wideangle or telephoto your lens is. Higher numbers mean more magnification (200mm is a telephotos lens) and lower numbers mean less magnification and a wider field-of-view (anything below 35mm is considered wideangle). And for every camera format (aka film size or sensor size) there is also a “normal” focal length, which is neither telephoto or wide, and gives a perspective similar to that of the naked eye (only chopped off at the edges becasue it’s a camera).
For 35mm photography (known as full-frame in digital), the normal length is 50mm. The iPhone 5’s focal length is 4.1mm. Which in terms of 35mm cameras (sorry for all the millimeters here) is the equivalent to 31mm, or a mild wideangle (the 5S is slightly wider at equivalent 29.7mm).
Gear
Lenses Or Lens Case
Lenses will do two things. They’ll let you get closer to or further from your subject, and they’ll change your point of view. A telephoto means you won’t have to walk over to that spectacular monument to fill the frame with it, but it also squashes the perspective in your picture, making it seem flatter, and making objects look closer together than they really are (in the z-axis anyway).
These Olloclip macro lenses will let your iPhone see new worlds.
A wideangle will let you fit more into your picture without stepping back, and it also lends an immediacy, giving the viewer the feel of being in the middle of the action. Perspective is dramatized and exaggerated, and people’s noses look huge if you get in close.
The extreme version of a wide angle lens is the fisheye, which distorts the picture so much that the circle of the lens’s view is actually smaller than the frame of your photo, and any straight line that’s not dead-center is bent. One neat trick is to use the fisheye to reverse the crop the iPhone makes when shooting video. Because the iPhone’s video mode crops a section out of the center of the 8MP frame (presumably to let it perform image stabilization), things can get a little cramped when shooting indoors. A fisheye will still add a little distortion, but as the camera is zooming into the center of the frame, it’s less noticeable, and you get back a nice wideangle shot.
There are a few ways to add lenses to your iPhone. You can stick a lens directly over the existing camera lens, for one. I favor the Olloclip for this as it puts several lenses into one clip-on mount that is self-centering over the lens, and the optics are of good quality.
The other way is to use a special case which actually puts a ground-glass screen in front of the iPhone’s lens, and then uses a lens from, say, a 35mm camera to project an image onto that screen. If you ever used an SLR, you’ve seen this in action: the viewfinder is actually showing you the image from the lens projected onto a matte ground-glass screen.
The advantage of this method is that the “sensor size” of your photo can be a lot bigger (as big as the ground-glass screen), which gives you the sweet shallow depth-of-field of a big full-frame camera. Thus you can throw the background way out of focus in your portraits.
The disadvantage is that these kits are big and expensive, so why not just use a bigger camera?
Tripod/Stand
A stand isn’t just for holding the camera while you shoot selfies, and a stand doesn’t have to be a tripod, although a tripod has the advantage of being steady on any surface, and it also allows almost infinite adjustment of the camera’s angle.
A floor can be a good support, and help you get a more interesting angle.
The main reason for using a tripod is to avoid camera-shake, letting you take either long-exposure shots, or to stop things from getting blurred when things get darker, and the iPhone camera starts to choose slow shutter speeds to gather enough light.
There are lots of stands out there, though I really never use one for my iPhone unless I’m taking selfies. But I steady my camera in other ways.
If you’re Instagramming your lunch, say, then you can get steady by holding the iPhone in both hands, and resting your elbows on the table. Breathe out (this helps to steady your body) and gently squeeze the shutter button. Don’t stab it, and don’t use the on-screen button either.
In fact, consider shooting all photos with the built-in camera app, especially in low-light. Not all third-party apps use the iPhone 5/S’s high-ISO mode, which boosts the ISO and tries to iron out the extra image noise this causes. A higher ISO means that you can up the shutter speed, too (a stop for a stop, remember?), making the difference between a blurred photo and a sharp but slightly noisier photo. Also, the built-in app lets you use the volume switch as a shutter release, letting you keep both hands firmly on the iPhone for steadier shooting.
If you’re not sitting at a table, look around for something else to steady the camera. Push it up against a lamppost, or prop it on a wall. Failing that, you should gently grip the iPhone in both hands (not too tight or you’ll start shaking), pull your elbows into your body, stand with your feet slightly apart and relax. Breathe out, squeeze. You just became a human tripod (or bipod, I guess).
Lighting
The other thing that’ll make a huge difference to your photos is lighting. Step one, never ever use the built-in flash. Well, maybe in sunlight. What? Yes, sunlight. If your subject’s face is in shadow, and you’re fairly close to them (because the iPhone flash is pretty weak, especially in noonday sun), then you can use the flash to fill-in the shadows, getting a nice even balance of exposure between the bright background and their face.
Once the sun goes down, though, that flash should be switched off. It’ll cause redeye and – worse – white face. If you want your subject to look like a junkie then go ahead. Otherwise ask them not to move too much, and follow the camera-steadying tips above.
Off-camera lighting is tricky with the iPhone as it won’t trigger a flash. But you can artfully arrange table lamps, or drape sheets over windows to make huge soft-boxes that wrap beautiful light around your subject, or even buy LED video lamps and use those. You’ll need to put in some practice to get good results (start with the Strobist’s excellent Lighting 101 series), but you’ll be rewarded with some spectacular shots.
The key is to remember that photography is about light, and the quality is as important as the quantity. I take all the product shots for my reviews using my iPhone, and I manage it not with post-processing, but with careful composition and attention to lighting. North-facing windows are your friend, as even on a sunny day the sky becomes one giant (albeit blue-tinted) softbox. Muslin drapes are amazing light modifiers, and white walls can reflect back enough light to fill shadows and make it look like you added a second light source.
Conclusion
You may have noticed that only a few of these tips were iPhone-specific. That’s because the iPhone camera is just another camera. And it’s easily as good as the best cameras of a few years ago.
Some tricks are unique to the iPhone, like glitching in panorama mode.
The one trick you need to remember is that the camera doesn’t matter. The pro photographer can take a good picture with any gear, because s/he pays attention to things like exposure, and framing, and lighting. Without those things, even a Leica or a Nikon D4 will turn out crappy pictures. But with them, the results from your iPhone can embarrass those from the expensive DSLR from the gear dork standing next to you, with the added bonus that you don’t have to carry a ten kilo bag of crap around to get the job done.
A few years ago at a MacWorld party, I spotted a guy I knew and barged in while he was talking to someone else. “Have you got a story for me?” I asked. He came back with a few suggestions, each less newsworthy than the last. His former conversation partner stood by in silence. Then Mr. no-news said, “Wait a minute: this guy runs the largest Mac supercomputer in the world!”
That guy was Brian Gupton, one of the brains behind the DataseamGrid in Kentucky featured in this week’s magazine. We talked for a couple of hours, lost in conversation in the middle of a party. I liked him immediately on a personal level: here’s a guy from a blue-collar background who is hugely passionate about education. And it turned out he had built this gigantic supercomputer that was trawling through massive amounts of data in the search for a cancer cure.
There were so many strands to the story.
At the time we met, there were two promising cancer drugs in the works. One of them appeared to be almost 100 percent effective at eradicating stage IV carcinomas. I remember being completely flabbergasted: “Are you sure no one has written about this?” His answer was even more astonishing: only local press had picked up the story.
I was amazed that he’d managed to build a world-class research tool in a place that was being decimated by the declining coal industry. It was a public/private partnership, and an early example of utility computing – this was before cloud computing had taken off. Another fascinating detail: some of the drugs they were exploring were being grown in genetically modified tobacco plants.
Gupton and his partners built the supercomputer with Apple’s Xgrid, a software package for distributed computing which, at the time, came built into OS X. This meant that anybody could build their own supercomputer. And it meant that universities, schools, research centers could potentially become these powerful grids, following in Dataseam’s footsteps. (Apple has since removed Xgrid from Snow Leopard, making that less possible.) Many school districts buy iPads for kids now, favoring one-on-one computing without desktops. Yet Gupton is as passionate as ever and the researchers are still bullish, saying it’s the largest cancer drug pipeline in the country.
Today, the Grid hums as researchers look for chemicals to disrupt or inhibit the growth of cancer. Based on the modeling techniques that won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry they’ve built a simulator that takes a 3D model of a cancer protein and matches it against a molecular model of a chemical, working with a library of 20 million chemicals.
This supercomputer on a shoestring is still going strong.
There are lots of apps and open source efforts that put your unused Mac processing power to good use, but now that we’re shifting away from desktops and onto iPads and iPhones we wanted to know if all that tapping on a touchscreen can change the world.
The countless hours you’ve invested into Flappy Bird won’t get you much more than a shiny platinum medal, but here are five iOS apps that are fun to play and help you do some good in the world in the process.
Play To Cure: Genes In Space
Computer processing power is providing tons of heavy lifting for cancer research, but there are still some tasks computers don’t perform as well as humans, like recognizing visual patterns.
As part of the search for a cure to cancer, scientists across the planet are painstakingly analyzing thousands of cancer samples for genetic faults, but in a clever move to help speed up the work, Cancer Research UK has developed a game that lets gamers help.
In Play to Cure: Genes in Space players pilot a spaceship through the galaxy to harvest Dubbed Element Alpha, a newly discovered substance refined for use in medicine, engineering, construction and everything else. The thrill of blasting asteroids while scrambling through hoops at speeds faster than the speed of light provide players with hours of entertainment, but groups of gamers provide scientists with quick analysis of a cancer data set that would otherwise take hours with only one set of eyes.
Plotting points of density on the data set to steer your spaceship towards Element Alpha gives scientists more accurate results, which could be crucial in moving us toward the day all cancers are cured.
Quingo combines trivia with aspects of bingo in a free-to-play game where are portion of the money raised from in-app purchases goes to benefit charities of your choice. The game spits out trivia questions with multiple answers on the board. The combination of quizzing and bingo is where it gets its awkward name, but the gameplay is actually pretty cool and challenging.
In a slightly meta move, developer Global Gaming Initiative’s Sidekick Cycle, a downhill-racing bicycle title, is using the money it raises to give children in Africa the opportunity to hurtle dangerously down steep hills on bikes of their own.
Alright, they probably prefer that the kids don’t do that, but it is certainly an option available to them.
The charity is dedicating half of its sales to the project, and it costs about $134 to build and deliver a single bike. This means that at its current price, the app generates one bicycle per 209 downloads.
We all make silly 5 buck bets with friends that they will/or won’t be able to do something, but rather than cycling your petty change through you and your friends’ pockets, Budge lets you put those bets to good use.
The app links to your Facebook friends so you can make bets of $10, $5, or $1 where the loser donates to their charity of choice. You can also make make bets public so others can compete in your challenge.
OMG bikini season is almost here, which means if you’re anything like me you’re pounding out 10 to 15 miles a week to get toned and in shape for that perfect summer bod. Well, maybe it won’t be the perfect bod, but you can put all your movement to good use too.
Charity Miles allows you to earn money for the charity of your choice by walking or biking out miles. On a short 30- minute walk with my dog I raked in $0.43, but you can also bike and earn 10 cents a mile, otherwise you get 25 cents when walking or running.
They just came out with an update that added teams so you can join forces with your friends to bike-away autism. If you’d like to join our team, just type in @cultofmac in the My Teams section.
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple 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 answers why the iPhone screen can be repaired in stores while the iPad has to be shipped away from special care. We also discuss whether working at the Apple Store can be turned into a solid career, plus the top 5 most annoying things customers do at the Apple Store.
Got a question you want the 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.
Q: On average, how many customers come in to ask for or buy the new Mac Pro?
You’d be surprised how often people ask about it. It’s a brand new product so a lot of people that come into the store are curious what it looks like, want to know the new features and ogle the new design the same way the iPhone and iPad tables are crushed after a launch.
On the other hand, it’s a professional machine with a price tag that would intimidate Bigfoot himself, so I personally haven’t met anyone who has bought one in the store, but we never have any in stock — orders are backed up until April!
Q: Would you leave your job at Apple for a higher-paying job?
Hell yes. Let’s be real, working at the Apple Store is fun but it’s not my dream job. I get to be surrounded by cool tech and great people who are uncontrollably excited about everything Apple. The pay is decent, Apple treats us pretty well, and you could make a career out of it if you want to, but at the end of the day it’s still a retail position.
A few friends that have left Apple told management they got a better offers from another company but management rarely tries to match an outside offer. Once that higher-paying job comes along, a lot of people leave.
The monotony of the job wears you down and it’s not like you’re actually working for Apple corporate, so it doesn’t feel quite as magical or special as I imagine working at HQ in Cupertino would. In the end, it really is just a job and lots of people come and go after finding greener pastures elsewhere.
Q: Is it true you are not allowed to go on rumor sites like Cult of Mac and MacRumors?
You’re not supposed to read them while you’re at Apple, but a lot of us read the rumor sites in our free time. We get just as excited about new iPhones, iPads and the possibility of an iWatch as all the other Apple fanboys, but we’re in the dark as much as regular customers about future products.
We’re not allowed to speculate about future products with customers. If a customer asks whether I’ve heard about X post on Y Apple blog about Z unannounced product, I’m supposed to act clueless, say I’ve never heard of it nor do I know anything about Apple’s plans, but really I’ll be chowing down on the latest iPhone rumors during my lunch break.
Los Angeles-based three-piece the Glitch Mob drift even further from their name on their second album Love Death Immortality, an album that suggests they be renamed the EDM Mob, the Big Room Mob, the Bass Drop Mob, or maybe even the Totally Accessible Yet Utterly Awesome Mob. Whatever they choose, fans will drink up this meaty and chaotic album.
Following up on last year’s well-received LP Major Arcana, Speedy Ortiz is kicking off the year by releasing four new songs on their Real Hair EP. You’ll find the same introspective exuberance and deep lyrics that highlighted the last album, in a more snackable size.
Despite having released six albums as an outfit already, some music critics are calling Benji Sun Kil Moon’s best album to date thanks to Mark Kozelek’s raw, heartbreaking lyrics. Each song focuses around a central character or theme combined with tightly woven narratives and sparse musical arrangements to form a masterpiece of reflection.
For his literary debut Joshua Max Feldman chose to reimagine the biblical tale of Jonah in a modern setting. As a young Manhattan lawyer, Jonah Jacobstein is a lucky, healthy, and handsome man with two beautiful women ready to spend the rest of their lives with him, but just as he’s celebrating a deal that will make him partner, a bizarre biblical vision at a party changes everything in this funny novel that moves from New York to Amsterdam to Vegas.
The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway
by Doug Most
Before the convenience of modern mass transportation, the cities of Boston and NYC were suffering from congestion problems at the turn of the 19th century, so two brothers from one of the nation’s great families—Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York— set off on a race to dig America’s first subway. Doug Most’s new book, The Race Underground, relives the competition between Boston and New York played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, life-changing innovations, class warfare, bitter political tensions, and the question of America’s place in the world
Sci-fi doesn’t get featured as prominently in our picks, but Andy Weir is here to bust through with his excellent debut novel about a mission to Mars that goes wrong as a dust storm leaves astronaut Mark Watney stranded. Injured, carrying limited supplies and presumed dead, Watney has to use his intelligence and grit to work to stay alive.
Gravity was without a doubt the most visually spectacular movie to watch in 2013. Now that its available to view on your TV screen the enormity of space might not feel quite as vast as in the theater, but Sandra Bullock’s plight from the space shuttle back to Earth is no less captivating. And don’t forget about George Clooney ready to smother you with charm.
On August 1st 2008, 18 mountain climbers reached the summit of K2. Just 48 hours later, all but 7 were dead. The Summit documents the deadliest day on the world’s second tallest mountain, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Expect some incredible mountain cinematography and jaw dropping reenactments based on testimonies from those that survived the horrific climb.
The Counselor didn’t blow up the box office quite as expected last year, despite boasting a cast that includes Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, but now can judge it for yourself as Fassbender plays a savvy lawyer who gets entangled in a treacherous drug.
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 us for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, we 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 fancy number trivia app, an bed-bug checker, a photo editing and filter app for the obsessive in all of us, a new update to iDraw that brings some Photoshop-style features to the already-fantastic iPad app, and a fashion blogger app for heaps of style.
Check them all out:
Numerus is one of those weird apps that shouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But once you spend a little time clicking around, you will feel the random knowledge dropping into your head.
Did you know that in 1950, the Canadian postal system processed 1,362,310,155 items? I don’t know why you would, but you do now. Also, the human body has 248 organs, there were 129 episodes of the CBS sitcom Becker, and China contains 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. I can’t stop.
Alright, maybe one more.
Is that a Bill and Ted reference in there? This app is amazing.
America is seeing a resurgence in bed-bug infestations, and here’s an app to help you screen a room and identify the little biters before they introduce themselves.
To be perfectly clear, Bed Bug Proof is an app created in part to sell an anti-bed-bug spray. But the practical information and tools it provides like the inspection guide, comparison photographs, and a magnifier/light to let you use your phone to search for eggs and poop, are useful enough to let it stand on its own.
Although it will make you itchy just looking at it. Seriously.
Photo editing for the obsessive compulsive in all of us.
Sure, the Camera app that came with your iPhone has a few filters, but we all know they’re pretty lame.
Instagram (and before that, Hipstamatic) made the quick filter process a no-brainer and popular to boot.
Jelly Bus’ Rookie, though, has all of them beat, with a veritable boat load of filters, effects, and all the settings you can possibly handle. If that’s not enough, there’s a bunch of stickers and text effects you can add to your photos to make even the most ordinary snapshot into a work of art.
Once you tweak and tap your way to photo-nirvana with Rookie, you can save your photo to pretty much every other photo sharing service out there, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.
Get a whole photo shop on your iPad for a tiny amount of cash.
Image editing app iDraw has been around for quite some time, but the new 2.0 version (released this past week) really kicked things into high gear.
If you’re looking for a solid Photoshop-style image editing program for only a little bit of scratch, iDraw 2.0 has it in spades. The app now imports and exports PSD photoshop files with full vector path and effect support, as well as shape layers and layer effects. You can also export your designs as layered PSD files.
The app has been redesigned for iOS 7 as well, and it now takes advantage of the new 64-bit A7 processors on the new iPad Air.
Seriously, there is so much jam-packed into this release as to consider it an entirely new app, which is why we wanted to share it with you now.
Whether you’re a fashionista looking for new sources of inspiration or a tone-deaf jeans and t-shirt kind of dresser, new app Flink will help you connect to the world of fashion blogging.
Flink allows you to see hot new “looks” from the top fashion bloggers around the web, including Garance Doré, La revue de Kenza, Adenorah, Absolutely Glamourous, Mercredie, le blog de Lilou, Modasic, and Blondie Baby. You can also save these looks for later, visit the original blog posts, and “heart” the looks you love.
When you first launch the app, you’ll tap to follow as many of the included bloggers, and then tap your way through each of the photos included in each screen. You can tap through to see what clothes and accessories make up each look, or you can just swipe through and see various images of the different parts.
All in all, if you’re looking to kick up your fashion knowledge, or just find some new looks to recreate in your own life, Flink just might be the free app you’re looking for.
The best winter athletes across the world are descending on Sochi for eternal glory, but while snowboarders have been preparing their Double McTwist 1260s a different kind of competition erupted on social media early this year – competitive selfie taking.
Yes, the Selfie Olympics were a real thing and took social media by storm with entrants posting their pics with the hashtag #SelfieOlympics. What started off with simple mirror selfies quickly evolved into a competition to see who could cram the most random objects in front of their bathroom mirror.
The results of the Selfie Olympics were so hilarious we asked Cult of Mac readers to submit their best selfies for our own smaller contest, but before we reveal our winners, here are the best selfies from the main event.
Tons of competitors used their door for a prop, but this dude nearly snapped his neck trying to capture this ridiculous selfie.
Taking a selfie with your selfie is so meta we love it, even if he is using an Samsung phone.
Weird contortions on the door only lasted so long before competitors started bringing props into play. This little guy’s Flava Flav mock up is great, but the added foot in the sink brings in a whole other element of incredible.
Eventually the competition graduated from simple selfies and props, to a contest to see who could make the most elaborate backdrop in front of the bathroom mirror.
These guys created an entire Footlocker in their bathroom. And I must say those Kobe 8 “Year or the Snake” shoes are a nice choice.
Even indigenous jungle tribes were getting in on the selfie action.
Flying knives. Fireballs. More seasoning than any cook should have to deal with. The number of things that could have gone wrong in this Habachi selfie are too numerous to count.
King Tut made a late entry into the games, but his treasure trove didn’t disappoint.
The hands down winner for the best Apple-themed selfie. It’s like a selfie, in a selfie, in a selfie, in a selfie. I think we may have been incepted.
Why is a this guy riding a bike through his shower while playing the guitar? Who is he going to blast behind the Christmas tree? Doesn’t he know you’re not supposed to put your Xbox, iron, TV or any other electrical device so close to the shower? Who cares, this guy just won the Selfie Olympics.
The Cult of Mac Selfie Olympic Winners
Incorporating old camera tech into a modern game of photographic narcissism, Javier Cobas snuck in to grab the Bronze
Silver
This selfie from Namuks comes to us all the way from Kenya. The gorilla pod on top of the head really stands out in contrast to the woman’s niqab.
Gold
I’m 99.7% sure the helicopter in Scott Katz’s photo is fake, but there were no rules against augmenting reality, so for his ingenuity, and the fast that he snapped this at the site where the Legion of Boom just dominated the Super Bowl, he’s this year’s winner of the Cult of Mac Selfie Olympics.
All our winners left the virtual podium with Photoshop Touch for iOS. Thanks for playing!
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!
Best Albums
Broken Bells – After the Disco
For their second album as dynamic duo Broken Bells, Danger Mouse and James Mercer of Shins fame combine their arching melodies and sweet vintage synths with groovy bass-lines for a sound that’s a fusion of futuristic disco and rock. The final product, After the Disco, is a kaleidoscope of pop mixed with imagination, in what is surely the duo’s best album to date.
CEO’s second LP drifts somewhere between dreams and nightmares. It’s energetic and bouncy. It’s great to work to. In fact, I wrote this whole article while grooving to Wonderland’s other-worldly sounds. That alone deserves a nod in this week’s picks.
Bombay Bicycle Club has decided to reinvent itself with each of the albums its released, and while some of the previous efforts were charming, nothing has felt satisfactory. Rather than releasing their fourth album a year after A Different Kind of Fix, it seems like the group benefited from their time off with most the songs being written during Jack Steadman’s travels to Turkey, India, and Netherlands. Beat and loops get more of an emphasis on So Long, See You Tomorrow making it the groups most vibrant disc yet.
All Joy And No Fun – The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
by Jennifer Senior
I don’t have any kids, and a recent trip to Disneyland kind put me off on the idea of having them for a while, but when I do this will be my reading list. Rather than taking a look on the effects of parenting on children, All Joy and No Fun examines the effects of children on their parents and how changes over the last 50 years have dramatically altered the roles of mothers and fathers, making them more complex than ever.
One of the most promising collection of short stories lands this week from the young Molly Antopol, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Antopol’s stories combine for a stunning exploration of characters shaped by history and the nature of disillusionment as failed dreams crack.
Extreme Medicine – How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century
by Kevin Fong
All the blank unexplored places on our maps have been filled in over the last 200 years, but as man has pushed the boundaries of his physical limits, we’ve also been pushing the medical boundaries as well. In his book Extreme Medicine, Dr. Kevin Fong explores how medicine has been shape by mankind’s thirst for exploration. Like how the challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors pioneering techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and much more.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the first Thor film, but Chris Hemsworth managed to win me over in Thor: The Dark World. There’s less cheesy love drama on Earth this time around, for starters. This time there are higher stakes – all of the Nine Realms are up for grabs. And Loki and Thor team up to take down an enemy even Odin couldn’t destory.
The Wire offered one of the most stunning portraits of life in Baltimore (or any city), but did you know that there is a gang of dirt bike riders who perform death-defying stunts on the street while evading the police? It sounds out of place in the urban landscape of Charm City, but the documentary 12 O’Clock Boys follows Pug, a precocious youngster who will stop at nothing to join the gang.
Grand Piano hasn’t even hit theaters stateside yet, but iTunes offers the thriller featuring Elijah Wood as a brilliant concert pianist suffering from stage fright. During a concert the pianist learns a sniper in the audience will shoot him if he plays a wrong note, in one of the most unique action movies this year. Want the complete opposite of an Elijah Wood and John Cusack pairing? Try Escape Plan.
Have the spectacular goings-on at Sochi got you inspired to get off the couch and pick up your snowboard? Just remember to take your iPhone with you: there are a ton of game-changing apps to get more out of your runs.
Back in the day, slo-mo video analysis and gait analytics were only for the pros, now weekenders can have it, too, along with speed and other stats that can definitely up your game. Cult of Mac polled some app makers for advice on how to get more out of this winter sports season.
Clear Sky’s 10K app.
Extreme Sports? Step It Up Before You Go
“One of the frustrating things about extreme sports is that you just can’t do them all the time. As a snowboarder living in Israel, all I get is one week of snowboarding a year, at best,” Benny Shaviv, CEO Clear Sky Apps, maker of fitness apps ranging from 10K forever to Pushups Extreme. Before the winter season, Shaviv runs two t0 three times a week and does strength training. A month before the longed-for vacation he steps it up and says the “impact on my snowboarding has been tremendous.”
Find Focus Before You Hit The Slopes
“Although meditation can have a spiritual or philosophical aspect to it, I focus on the neurological changes in the attentional system,” says Portenga, a sports and performance psychologist and founder of iPerformancePsychology. “I use meditation to help train the attentional system without getting into the philosophical aspects. Breathing is similar. This is a crucial skill to manage energy and recovery. It’s surprising how many people don’t breathe efficiently or have breathing patterns that waste energy and can lead to anxious feelings. To handle pressure, a performer must have mastery over their attention and energy.”
That said, Yoda-like mental mastery still can’t make you graceful or expert if you’re a world-class klutz.
“At the most basic level, sport is 100% physical,” Portenga, who has worked with athletes in both the summer and winter Olympics, notes. “If you can’t ski, you can’t ski and no amount of ‘mental toughness’ will cover for that. It’s why you’re not going to see any PhDs in sport psychology at the Olympics. That being said, the brain controls the body, so it’s responsible for how efficiently we develop and how much of what we’ve developed we get out during a performance. You have to develop the physical skills first.”
Video app Ubersense
Try A Virtual Coach
Ubersense, a free app for video and analysis in sports training, has been working with the USA Bobsled and Skeleton teams before they hit Sochi. Choke is a dirty word in sports, and it tends to happen when experts morph back into newbies when they suddenly become conscious of every move they make. And what about newbies who are already hyper-aware of how exactly how dumb they look? It all depends on when you decide to shoot, apparently.
“We’ve heard from some people that they do not look to record or analyze footage during a game or round of golf as gets them thinking too much and they prefer to record and analyze during practice instead,” says Alex Pedicini, Ubersense community manager. “While some people may be a little embarrassed about the way they look on film, we’ve found that people who are serious about improving their performance and technique want the visual feedback.”
The app can record and analyze over 30 sports, compare your efforts to the pros and devise coaching plans. (The fearless can even share their videos — over various social media channels).
Pedicini says there is a ton to learn from watching and analyzing yourself on video, if you can get past the cringe factor.
“Slow-motion and video analysis in general was expensive and only available to elite level coaches and athletes. Now, with the rise of mobile devices and the increasingly high quality of the cameras it’s possible to do pretty much all the analysis you need from your phone or tablet,” he says.
If You Don’t Want To End Up On The Couch, Watch Your Weekend
Apps are great for motivation and charting progress, but there are some pitfalls to working with them. “People who don’t run regularly commonly try to go too hard too soon,” says Shaviv of Clear Sky Apps. “This means that someone who has not run for years might go out there and try to do a 20-minute straight run (and will feel pretty bad doing it). Then, in an effort to accelerate and get in shape fast – they might take a shot at running almost every day… which will only make it worse.”
The lesson? Weekend warriors will end up on the sidelines.
“Your body needs natural progression and time to heal. Using a pre-set program that slowly progresses is the way to go. We advise everyone to start slow, and make sure to mind the rest days. They are just as important as the running days – its during that time that your muscles build up and improve,” Shaviv notes.
Listen To Your Body, Not the Tech
Let’s say you’ve been faithful to wearing a heart rate monitor and an app, to track your progress all fall. Fitness by the numbers can be problematic, though.
“The biggest pitfall of training with tech is relying on it too much,” says Kate Billerbeck of NuMetrex, which makes futuristic heart rate monitor clothes and gear. “People tend to look at the stats in isolation – they think something like ‘oh, well I’ve had really steady results the past couple of days, so I can push myself to the limit today.’ ”
The opposite happens when weekend athletes let the numbers get them down. Billerbeck says that it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re not seeing the progress you expected.
“It’s important to remember why you started self-monitoring in the first place – to get to know your body better. Sometimes it can be beneficial to take a step back and get some perspective – take a day off if you’re feeling tired or think about how much better you feel about yourself when you get a good workout in – regardless of whether or not your progress shows up on the screen.”
Digifit apps.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
One final word to the quantified fitness aficionados: keep an eye on your goals and your gadgets if you want to go long.
“(People forget) they need to reassess their fitness level and workout plan as their fitness level improves to maximize workout efforts.” says Dean Hovey, CEO of fitness app purveyor Digifit. Hovey advises users to reassess their fitness level and cardiovascular strength every few months. “This will help avoid plateaus, promote safer workouts and ultimately help the user reach their goal faster.”
Other speed bumps on the road to maximum fitness include too much data from too many disparate sources, Hovey says.
“With so many fitness, health, weight management and calorie counting tech tools these days, many people become overwhelmed and may have personal data for different goals stored in multiple accounts or on multiple devices,” he says.
“To fix this problem, link accounts to gather data in one place or find a wearable tech tool that gathers data across multiple areas.”
One final note of caution: if you’ve gone digital with your training, don’t drain your willpower because of the batteries.
“Get in the habit of charging your devices on the way to the gym in your car, keep extra chargers in your gym bag and take a long a portable device for those unexpected low battery alerts,” Hovey notes.
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple 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 talks about the oldest and youngest employees at the Apple Store. Then he dishes on Windows 8 as well as whether Apple will ever come out with an iPhone with a bigger screen.
Got a question you want the 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.
Q: What’s the youngest Apple Store employee you’ve seen? The oldest?
The ages of Apple Store employees varies a lot. Before I worked at Apple, I would be shocked to see older people working at this high-tech company, but now I think it’s great because we have a wide variety of ages, gender, race and backgrounds to give customers a lot of options to connect with a Specialist.
The youngest Apple Store employees are 18, as for the oldest, I have a female co-worker in her late 60s – I’ve never dared ask her exact age. She retired as an airline stewardess and now works at the Apple Store part time, mostly in the iPod and iPad sections, but she’s phenomenal. If you can put up with pushy airline passengers, the Apple Store is a cake walk.
Q: Are you required to use Macs? What do you think of Windows 8?
At the Apple Store we’re required to use Macs because the tools we use to diagnose and fix problems with Macs, iPods, iPhones, etc. only works on OS X, so using a Windows machine isn’t an option. As far as personal life though, Apple has no say. A few friends at the Apple Store game on PCs but most of them use Boot Camp on Mac.
Windows 8 is interesting. It was a gutsy move to introduce a UI that’s so radically different, but it sounds like its not paying off for Microsoft. I haven’t played with it a ton myself, but when I have, the tile interface has turned me off. I actually like Windows 7. It feels solid and in some ways I like it better than OS X 10.9, but Windows 8 feels like a mistake. I hate that Microsoft is trying to get us away from the keyboard and mouse for a touchscreen desktop. It doesn’t work as well as on a tablet you hold with your hands.
Q: Will Apple ever make an iPhone a bigger screen?
Probably ;)
Apple has already showed that it’s willing to make a bigger iPhone screen with the iPhone 5. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but rumors say they’re moving to a bigger screen this year.
Fragmentation is always a concern, but Apple has changed the resolution on the iPhone every two years since the iPhone 4 and developers have adjusted just fine. Maybe it’ll happen again this year. I wouldn’t mind if they do.
The 2014 Winter Olympics may be the first quantified games in history. Sure, coaches have been standing by with stopwatches and clipboards since, well, some dude sprinted down dusty roads in sandals, probably. But now, there’s an app for that.
Elite athletes are using apps to keep them on top of their game – physically and mentally. We talked to Steve Portenga, who has worked with winter and summer Olympians, and created iPerformancePsychology to help give the rest of us the winning mindset. He admits there’s less to be done about your hopeless snowplow on the bunny slope, but more on that in the story.
I’m excited about these apps, and that’s saying a lot. There are only two times you’ll find me interested in sports: the Olympics and the World Cup. Even then, it’s usually not so much the sport that captivates me — though the winter games have the edge when it comes to mesmerizing sequins — it’s the epic international battles played out in the name of gymnastics or soccer.
When the question of who lands on the podium speaks to age-old predilections rather than strictly by GDP, things get interesting. Norway, for example, is a nation of just five million souls but is expected to make mammoth countries like the U.S. eat ice dust in Sochi. Jamaica’s bobsled team, which qualified for the first time since 2002, is coming to Russia courtesy an international crowdfunding campaign. I plan to re-arrange my schedule to view all of their matches. And what about host country Russia? Can pumping millions into sports bring back the glory days, especially after the embarrassing showing in Vancouver? The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat take on a larger meaning when countries go for for the gold.
Once again, I’ll be watching exclusively on my MacBook Pro, iPhone or iPad. (When I moved back to San Francisco from Milan with exactly four boxes, buying a set never became a priority.) Watching sports this way brings interesting aspects to viewing not limited to the tiny screen and intermittent buffering. For instance, I ended up watching the last World Cup entirely in Spanish, which definitely has an edge over the more buttoned-down English-language commentary. Note to U.S. broadcasters: you really need to hire a guy to give rat-a-tat-tat play-by-play climaxing in “GOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!” People would watch soccer, then.
Fortunately, this time around our own Charlie Sorrel has chimed in with all the tips you need to watch without a traditional TV. And we’re off, for 18 days of sport!
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 some interactive art, a quick way to exchange contact information, and a really rude personal trainer.
Here you go:
Slip — Utilities — Free
Slip knows that exchanging business cards can be annoying. You have to find your cards and then take theirs and then maybe jam it into the back of the thing where you keep your cards, and hopefully it fits. And then later, you find their card and can’t remember why you’d met in the first place.
So instead of that, Slip uses Bluetooth to exchange contact information wirelessly. You go in and toggle which bits of information you want to share and just flip it over to another user with a single swipe. You can also text or e-mail it to people without Slip, but that’s not as much fun.
It isn’t hard to find a fitness app that offers enthusiastic and positive encouragement to keep you motivated and working toward your goals. CARROT Fit is not one of those apps.
Following its predecessors, CARROT To-Do and CARROT Alarm, Fit brings the you-deprecating artificial intelligence program to bear on your weight-loss plan. You set your goal, and “she” gives you points and virtual medals for doing well and mocks you if you don’t. It’s basically like if GLaDOS, the comical, murderous A.I. from developer Valve’s Portal series, were sent to whip you into shape.
By which I mean that CARROT Fit is kind of amazing.
If you’re due for an upgrade to your iPhone, you might be wondering what to do with your current one. You could go to a bunch of different websites and search for buyback values or try to just sell it yourself, but that sounds like a lot of work, and living in the future like we do means things should be easy.
Phone Price is an app that aggregates phone trade-in values from a variety of sources so that you can get the most for your old device. So you’re basically making the phone a party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.
You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.
iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.
I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.
Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.
The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution in real time.
People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?
Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple 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 answers why the iPhone screen can be repaired in stores while the iPad has to be shipped away from special care. We also discuss whether working at the Apple Store can be turned into a solid career, plus the top 5 most annoying things customers do at the Apple Store.
Got a question you want the 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.
Q: How do you move from retail to corporate?
Moving from retail to corporate is really hard. In fact, during the hiring event I went to with Apple one of the managers got up and told all the applicants that if they were looking for an easy way to get into Apple Corporate and work at Cupertino, this wasn’t it.
It’s not unheard of for someone to make that move, but it’s pretty hard. Some people dream of going to Cupertino for Genius training only to have an Apple bigwig recognize their skills and be offer them a job to work at HQ, but that’s not reality. Only managers and regional managers really have a shot at making the transition, and in those cases it’s just to manage retail efforts from corporate. However, if you’re in high school or college and want to go into software or hardware design, it wouldn’t hurt your resume ten years down the line to have some Apple Store experience when applying for a corporate job.
Q: Ever want to punch someone?
All the time! Ha ha, not really. I’m not the fist-fighting type. I’m more into cruel and unusual punishments – like plastering your MacBook with My Little Pony wallpaper if you’re a grumpy jerktard.
I’ve never come to blows with a customer, but there are times I’ve been particularly upset with management or other Apple Specialists. Occasionally a customer will freak out at you, but there are plenty of managers around to help diffuse a situation, and we’re trained to help you find the silver lining in life at the Apple Store.
Q: Do you jailbreak? Do any of your coworkers?
I’ve been an Apple fan long before I actually worked at the Apple Store, so when the first couple iPhones came out I was very into the jailbreaking scene. Nowadays, I’m not really feeling jailbreaking. Jailbreaking iOS 7 took a couple months and good hacks are just starting to come out, so there’s been little incentive to void your warranty until recently. I’m pretty happy with iOS 7 so I don’t see myself jailbreaking anytime soon.
I have a couple of coworkers who have played around with jailbreaking, but it’s usually on extra devices. A lot of jailbreak tweaks can cause problems with other system apps on the iPhone, so its pretty rare to see an Apple Genius jailbreak their main device that they’re going to be using at the store, plus it’s like totally forbidden by Apple. So why push the line when you get every app in the App Store free?
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!
Albums
Dum Dum Girls – Too True
At 31 minutes in length, half of the 10 tracks on Dum Dum Girls’ third album, Too True, barely make it past the three-minute mark, which is great in that the songs take you somewhere fast but Dee Dee’s commanding, playful voice leaves you wanting to stay a little longer.
While Darren J. Cunningham announced that Ghettoville, his fourth album as Actress, would be the project’s final album, Ghettoville is supposed to be the sonic sequel to Actress’ first LP that came out five years ago. The sound is dark, tense complex and very obscure. Great for listening at home in the dark to unwind.
Before combining forces to form Supreme Cuts, Mike Perry and Austin Kjeultes tried to make it as solo rap producers, so naturally their second album relies heavily on a lot of guest vocal performances to tie the productions together. The end result are 14 tracks you could imagine some of hip-hop’s biggest names rapping on.
Counter-cultural writer and artist William Burroughs one of the most influential characters in the Beat era and definitely the strangest cat in the bunch. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photos, wrote novels but also had an obsession with Scientology, UFO abductions, took tons of drugs, and had weird theories that giant intergalactic insects that control everything, making Barry Miles biography one of the most interesting reads of the month.
Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West
by Bryce Andrews
Taking off and living on the western edge of civilization is kind of one of my fantasies. Bryce Andrews has actually done it, ditching life as a city kid to becoming a ranch hand in the windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana. His memoir describes what it’s like to live in one of the few places where the West still feels wild, building fences, riding, roping, and just plain old getting your hands dirty.
The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently
by Sunni Brown
If you’ve ever been busted by a teacher for doodling in school, rest assured that your great mind is kin to Einstein, John F. Kennedy, and Henry Ford, all of whom were doodle-crazy. Sunni Brown’s new book Doodle Revolution busts the myths of doodling and reveals how the silly little drawings lining the edges of your notebook is really deep thinking in disguise. So take that with you to detention, kids.
The Seabirds and Ponies are set to clash in the Big Game this week, but the stakes of the Lombardi Trophy are nothing compared to the consequences facing Ender and his team of elite young soldiers if they don’t successfully defend earth from a terrifying alien species.
iTunes – $19,99
Schooled: The Price of College Sports
Pro football players will be all over your TV this weekend, but don’t forget about the other professional athletes that will be invading the living room this spring. No not the NBA, or NHL, we’re talking about the huge business of college sports. Sam Rockwell narrates Schooled, which gives a comprehensive look at how money has influenced collegiate basketball and football, and how the rights of student-athletes have been compromised in the process.
While phenomenally talented college athletes take the stage in Schooled, Off the Rez follows Shoni Schimmel, a high school basketball star living on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. The documentary reveals the changes in Shoni’s life after her mom takes a job as a Portland high-school coach. Leaving the rez, provides a host of new challenges for Shoni who’s out to prove Native American woman can be champions off the rez too.
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 some collectors of videos and interesting articles, an app to help you get better sleep, and another that might give you something to do while you’re doing that.
Here you go:
Spender: Expenses Only — Finance — Free $0.99 [thanks, commenters]
If I want to be reductionist here, money management has two general components: maximizing income and minimizing expenses. For many people, the second part is more difficult because sometimes you really, absolutely need to own that box set of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
Spender: Expenses Only is a quick and easy way to itemize and organize your bills, and it even tells you how much you’re spending on average daily. And once you look at your costs in that vacuum and see just how much you’re blowing on Pez and action figures without seeing the income to offset it, you might want to change some things.
If you have a few minutes to stare at your phone, and you don’t really feel like watching a video, you might want to look into Inlight. It’s a really good-looking app that collects articles from the Internet in one place and lets you browse by categories like “Me Time” and “Nourish.”
So that’s a little weird, but I found a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example, now I know, as a man, which 21 compliments I crave. And that’s just news I can use.
Everyone likes funny and/or interesting videos from the Internet, but who has time to go look for them? Especially when you just have a few minutes to kill while you take care of business in your “second office?” StumbleUpon is here to help with 5by.
The video aggregating app has been out for a little while, but it just got a shiny, updated look that makes it look all current and fabulous. You can find videos based on what you’re doing and how long you have, and it’ll just stream them along to you. So don’t worry; you don’t have to just sit there staring at your shoes anymore.
The 2014 Winter Olympics are coming up fast, and if you feel like a bad American for not having any idea who is competing on our various national teams, The U.S. Olympic Committee has an app for you.
Here in one simple interface, you can find athlete bios, news, team rosters, and more handy information to prepare you to watch people in ridiculous shape do incredible things while you sit on your couch and create new and elaborate curses for various judges.
Alright, so “sleep hygiene” is kind of a weird way of describing one’s sleeping habits, but this is a pretty useful app, regardless.
It starts out with a questionnaire that asks about your pre-bed routine, including how much TV you watch, alcohol consumption, and when you ate your last full meal, and then it ranks your results and offers suggestions for how you might make your sleepytime more effective.
My results put me in the bottom 25 percent of respondents, which is probably why I spend all day lapsing in and out of consciousnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn–huh? I’m up. What are we doing?
While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.
Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.
Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.
You never go anywhere without your iPhone. But instead of having it with you (always!) in the car, what if it ran your car?
That future may only be a few months away, when the iOS in the car is expected to go come out of the gate with the release of iOS 7.1. iPhone aficionados have been expecting it since at least last summer, when the first screens were leaked. There are a few ways Apple’s entry into the market will disrupt the industry — leading to a pile-up of failed ventures.
The car industry has increasingly relied on tech to sell vehicles in a saturated market. However, the folks who brought us ABS brakes and the four-wheel drive aren’t always the best people to engineer what drivers want (or need!) when it comes to computers on board. Many of these systems are complicated and distract drivers more than help.
Not one of these systems has become industry standard. Most drivers fiddle a bit with the parking system, then use their phones or maybe a GPS system like Garmin as add-ons. It’s rumored that Apple has made agreements with major car makers to get its system into vehicles — if so a whole segment of the proudly “I’m a PC” market will find itself de facto “Macs.” This will inevitably stall sales of smartphones by Samsung and Google, who will be basically locked out of the place most Americans spend a significant portion of their day.
What about app makers? Here the future is even less clear. There are thousands of apps in iTunes — and thousands of indie developers and startups behind them — targeted to the auto market. Apps to help you find parking, then find your car in parking lots, avoid speed traps and run diagnostics on fuel usage, etc. Apple’s in-car system will make all those apps suddenly last year’s model. For 30 years, Apple’s has focused appeal on early adopters; people with older phones and older cars will feel sorely left behind as app makers scramble to update and integrate with the new system.
The last industry Apple will leave in the dust are GPS products like Garmin and TomTom, though these have already been largely left in the dust by our smartphones. Suburban navigators see no need to spend $200 on map updates when they can easily get from Point A to Point B using smartphones with apps like MapQuest that also update them on traffic conditions and provide peer-to-peer instant updates.
Apple’s entry into the car market will be welcomed by most — drivers, I mean. A clean, simple interface that is easy to use might be one way to curb the deadly distraction that plagues our highways as people try to text, talk or answer emails while stuck in traffic. Reading a manual on the road isn’t conducive to safety, which is what some of the more clunky systems seem to require in their present incarnation.
With Apple at the wheel, we can imagine a time when finding an alternate route in a Friday afternoon snarl is as easy as saying: “Siri, get me outta here!”
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 another cool timer, a money-saving challenge, and a thing to help you unwind.
Here you go:
52 Weeks Money Challenge — Finance — Free
If you haven’t heard of the 52 Weeks Money Challenge, you probably don’t have a Facebook account. And I envy you for that.
Anyway, the challenge is a way to help you build up a nest egg through regimented saving. You put away one dollar the first week, two dollars the second, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks, you’ve set aside a total of $1,378. This app tracks your progress and grand total, and it will even send you weekly reminders in case you’re the forgetful type.
People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.
Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …
Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”
Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.
Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.
The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.
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!
Movies:
Captain Phillips
Captain Phillips was one of the best movies to hit theaters in 2013, but you can finally cuddle up to it on your iPad. It’s up for like 50 Oscars, including a best supporting actor nod for Barkhad Adbi who had never even acted before taking over Tom Hanks’ ship.
On the surface About Time seems like it’d be just another romantic comedy starring Rachel McAdams of The Vow, The Notebook and Wedding Crashers fame, but romance takes a back seat in this moving story about the relationship between Tim, played by Domhall Gleeson, and his father, both of whom have the ability to travel through time.
Sepideh: Reaching for the Stars premiered at this year’s Sundance, and for the first time ever, Apple’s made the film available on iTunes while it’s on at the indie film festival. The documentary follows a young Iranian woman, Sepideh, who teams up with the first female space tourist to follow her dreams of becoming an astronaut.
Fans of Imagine Dragons, AWOL Nation and the like are destined to enjoy the new EP from Bad Suns. I’m allowing them a spot on this week’s list even though they’ve desecrated my the Zia Symbol. Groovy bass lines and great guitar are followed with some impressive vocals in the four-track EP full of earwormy tunes.
Warpaint has been around for almost 10 years, yet they’ve only managed to drop two LPs in that decade. Despite the wait, their second album, Warpaint, oozes with slow-flowing pop moodier than your teenage sister ever was, making it one of my favorite albums of the month.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – F*** Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything
The title for Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s seventh album is a bit ridiculous, but what else would you expect from the motley group of Montreal rockers? Lead guitarist Efrim Menuck and violinist Jessica Moss recently became parents, so the album fittingly intros with their son Ezra before the group jumps in declaring, “We live on the island called Montreal, and we make a lot of noise… because we love each other!” before unleashing a new wave of orchestro-punk mayhem.
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by McKenzie Funk
Most of us look at global warming as an ominous threat, but in McKenzie Funk’s new book Windfall we learn that some people view Earth’s looming disaster as a ticket to the One Percent. Funk spent six years traveling the planet to study climate change and dives into three major categories of global warming – the melt, the drought, and the deluge – that have nations and major corporations lining up to cash in on the global meltdown.
The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
by Steve Sheinkin
We enjoyed a great MLK day this week and if you’re looking for more background on civil rights stories, check out Sheinkin’s book which covers the events of a massive explosion that rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago in 1944. More than 300 sailors were killed in the blast and when 244 men refused to go back to work because of unsafe conditions 50 were charged with mutiny, facing decades in jail and even execution.
Armistead Mauphin’s Tales of the City series is finally coming to an end. The ninth and final novel features Anna Madrigal, a wry 92-year-old transgendered landlady who has found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco, and culminates with the group attending Burning Man in this memorable and captivating capstone to the series.
At Cult of Mac, we pride ourselves on our obsessive love for everything Apple, which is why we’re crashing through the walls with excitement to have Apple pioneer, Susan Kare – the person responsible for creating most of the original Mac icons – designing this week’s cover.
Since 1983, the San Francisco-based designer has crafted thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Designed on a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their functions immediately and memorably.
Kare was working as a fine arts curator when she was recruited in the early 1980s by Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend, to design the look and feel of the first Mac, the first commercial computer with a GUI – which happens to celebrate its 30th birthday this week.
Influenced by road signs, her whimsical, easy-to-understand icons defined the visual language of computers for decades —such as the Trash Can, the Bomb, the Paint Can, to name a few
Kare later designed the Mac’s fonts, and then went to work for Steve Jobs at NeXT. She also designed icons for Microsoft’s Windows 3.0. More recently, she created a line of virtual gifts for Facebook, stickers for Path, self-published an art book, as well as a ton of wonderful prints she makes available on her site when she’s not out surfing.
Kare is widely recognized as the groundbreaking designer of graphical user interfaces, mostly because the meaning of her symbols were instantly apparent.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York praised Kare’s designs for being able to “communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”
Did she have any idea she was making history at the time?
“You can set out to make a painting, but you can’t set out to make a great painting,” Kare said in an interview. “If you look at that blank canvas and say, ‘Now I’m going to create a masterpiece’ — that’s just foolhardy. You just have to make the best painting you can, and if you’re lucky, people will get the message.”
