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We’re all carrying sketchpads now, thanks to the great touchscreens on our iPads and iPhones. If toting an iPhone us all into potential artists, it turned a venerable pop artist into the world’s best-known iPad artist pretty much by accident.

David Hockney’s iPad made it into his artistic toolkit in 2010 because it happened to fit into the specially made pocket he has sewn into all his jackets – for sketchbooks.

The venerable pop artist has been using Apple devices to send daily sketches to friends since 2009. Some of those sketches are now living large in paper format at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in the aptly titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” until January 2014.

Sumit Vishwakarma is an iPad art advocate whose use been creating works of art on the iPad with a variety of different apps and styluses. His work has been featured at the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angeles, the Apple flagship store in San Francisco and the Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium.

After teaching various workshops on how to embrace iPad art, Vishwakarma decided to open his own art academy in San Francisco with a goal to educate people of all ages on how to create simple digital techniques based on the traditional painting techniques artists have fine tuned for centuries.

We talked to Vishwakarma about how the digital art world is maturing, what it takes to become a successful iPad artist, as well as how he’s giving kids a serious introduction to art through their favorite toy, the iPad.

Cult of Mac: What apps do you use the most to create and teach art?

Sumit Vishwakarma: Apart from ArtRage, Procreate and SketchBook Pro, I am also using “Paper” and, for animation, I use “Doink” and “iStopMotion.” Our education director Caroline Mustard is an expert in Paper.

Sumit Vishwakarma: Success is subjective. I feel, if you can create an iPad painting and you like it, it’s the first “pass.” When others like it – it’s a success!  Some of us don’t even know if we are artistic. I often hear: “I am not good at art,” however, this assessment is often made in relation to producing work that is judged in terms of accuracy of representation. With iPads or smartphones you can draw whenever inspiration hits.

Good art is good art, whether done on an iPad, wall or canvas. So we concentrate on empowering students to use their painting apps efficiently so they can produce what they want to create.

SV: Our academy offers three ways of teaching iPad Art:

Workshops: We are invited by schools, libraries, city parks and recreations and local art institutes where we conduct day-long workshops. Here we walk them through various art apps and techniques. The goal is to get them started with iPad art.

Classes: Our classes are mostly electives and after school classes. Students are given a wide variety of projects to encourage and inspire their imaginations, including traditional drawing techniques, plein air sketching, animation and even abstract art depending on the student’s individual creative choices. At the end, each student walks away with a  portfolio of digital art which they can display and share digitally or in printed format.

Online Classes: Many people who are interested in creating art on tablets are too busy to attend physical classes or they live too far away. Because our medium is digital, we offer our iPad art online class which consists of 10-HD video lessons covering the major art apps and techniques. These are starting to get popular because they can be taken anytime, anywhere — via laptop, tablet or smart phone! There’s a class preview here: https://www.mobileartacademy.com/classes.html

SV: Most schools where we are invited to teach have some kind of iPad pilot program where students have access to an iPad for a pre-defined time. In our elective classes and after school most students bring their own iPads. For workshops, we ask students to bring their own iPads.

CoM: Who are you teaching mostly?

SV: Our goal is to empower users from toddlers to seniors, artists to scientists and everyone in between. But our most popular iPad classes are those for middle-school aged children who have an immediate grasp of the technology and start creating fast. We have even taught kindergarten kids to use Paper 53 and they do great.

We even have a class of moms who bring their iPads and learn what they can do with them. And we have elderly students, including those who are retired and want to learn to paint. The best part about iPad Art is anyone who has some interest in art can create. Different apps have different uses and thus different sets of users. Some just want to draw while some wants to create professional paintings and illustrations.

SV: Yes, as you know parents want to limit “screen time” for their kids. They are using the iPad everywhere: in homes, schools, restaurants to watch videos, play games and for social media. All these represent consumption of the iPad, but I feel  it can be used innovatively to explore creativity.  Once parents see the value of learning to create with the iPad instead of just play video games they get behind the concept fast.

With our demo and workshop we show parents that the iPad can enable students to create and share digital content and media focusing on art and cross-curricular learning. Students can explore drawing and painting, digital photography, digital storytelling, animation and graphic design. When using iPads, mistakes can be erased and experiments are easily undertaken. This boosts their confidence and enhances creativity!

SV: Mobile art is becoming increasingly common. From one art app in 2010 to now about 100+ art apps in the Appstore tells us there is incredible growth in this segment. Growth of FaceBook and Flickr groups of iPad/mobile artists has more than quadrupled as compared to last year. A giant exhibit of David Hockney’s at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum highlights the influential artist’s foray into iPhone and iPad art.

SV: Apart from teaching iPad art, the Mobile Art Academy also conducts Mobile art exhibitions. We recently did our first Mobile Digital Art Exhibition at the Pacific Art League displaying top 50 selected artworks from all over the world. We used two types of print media: metal (aluminium) prints and acid-free paper prints – the results are outstanding!

There are misapprehensions that iPad- created artwork does not have high resolution. But there are apps and tools that can bump up the resolution and you can produce high-quality large professional prints. If you see what has been done with David Hockney’s iPad art your fears are quickly handled – his paintings are produced on 10-foot canvases!

SV: Well, during our exhibition we sold quite good number of iPad paintings. Most of our students create work for their own use. Some of our students have even published story books using their own iPad artwork (they write and illustrate their own books under our guidance). There are a huge number of growing iPad artists around the world and some of them are selling their work professionally.

SV: Technology is advancing at an incredible pace. Kids have more technology in their classrooms (and in many cases, in their backpacks) than existed in the workplaces of their parents 20 years ago. Teachers can help students become 21st-century problem solvers by introducing them to a broad range of thinking and creative tools – the iPad is one of them.

The iPad can enhance confidence in creating art as students have the freedom to change every aspect of their art elements without fear – anything can be replaced, modified or manipulated. This increase in confidence and willingness to try new things makes them better contributors in today’s competitive global society.

Funny story: In one of our Kindergarten intro classes, when we asked, “Can you draw on your iPad?” one kid literally showed us by drawing on the iPad screen using his crayon.

You can check out Vishwakarma’s work on his Flickr page, or at the Mobile Art Academy.

So you have your iPad and your apps, and you even arranged a bowl of fruit/nude model (delete as applicable). But what about hardware? After all, only stupid babies fingerpaint, right?

If you’re doing a lot of iPad painting, you should pick some kind or drawing tool. But what kind? Styluses can be had as dumb pencils, as brushes or even in Bluetooth pressure-sensitive versions.

And then there are the other accessories that’ll make painting a little easier.

Wacom ICS

Wacom makes the best graphics tablets for Mac and PC and now it wants to do the same for the iPad. The Bamboo stylus is already my favorite iPad stylus, but the ICS, or Intuos Creative Stylus goes one better with pressure sensitivity.

The iPad’s screen is binary in terms of touches: It might detect multiple fingers, but they’re either touching or not. So the pen itself has to measure how hard you’re pressing and send that info to the iPad. In the case of the ICS, this is done via a low-power Bluetooth 4 connection, with the pen communicating 2048 levels of pressure. This wireless connection also means you can use the button on the side to control various functions: undo/redo for example, or to pop up a color picker.

The ICS uses a single AAA battery, has a replaceable nib, and comes in a natty box which carries extra batteries and nibs.

This, as they say, is the Rolls Royce of styluses.

Wacom
Price $100

Jot Tote Case

You have your pens and pencil, but what about somewhere to keep them? A pencil case is traditional, and the Wacom comes with one. But Adonit’s Jot Tote case is made to hold your iPad and also let you clip on a stylus. And while it’s designed for Adonit’s own Jot, you can use it with pretty much any pen-shaped object.

The case is a rear shell with a grippy finish, and on the back is a steel strip which slides out of the side and grabs onto the pen, holding it both safe and handy until you need it. This might not be strictly necessary, but for serial pen-losers it’ll be sure to save you some cash.

Adonit
Price: $50

Nomad Brushes

While a pen is nice and all, nothing quite beats the feel of a good hogs-hair brush when you’re smearing on the oils. When I first saw a Nomad capacitive brush years ago, I thought it was just a gimmick. Then I tried one, and I loved it. You can’t really scrub and stipple the paint of course – the iPad sees the brush as just another pink digit – but that doesn’t mean that the action of stippling, scrubbing or stabbing isn’t more pleasing to the brain. It really does feel like you’re painting on canvas. Well, not canvas, as canvas has a stretch and give that the glass screen lacks, but it is like painting on wood or card.

Now nomad has a range of brushes, but my advice would be to go for a set of whole brushes. The kits with the single handle and screw-on tip look good in theory, but these things take up so little space it’s nicer to have the convenience of quickly grabbing the brush you want without dicking around changing the tips.

Nomad
Price: From $20

Your iPhone

One thing that was essential to me when I painted in oils was a palette. I went the traditional route with a thin plywood board in the familiar shape, which is easy to hold in one hand, but I know people who just mixed their paint on tabletops or any nearby flat surface (including one of my own paintings).

Remote Palette is an app which lets you use your iPhone as a palette to mix paints. You can swoosh your colors around until you have the exact hue you need and the color will be automatically loaded into your brush in the iPad app. It works via Bluetooth so you can use it anywhere.

The only downside is that you have to paint using the Remote Palette app on the iPad, which is pretty limited. It’s not MS Paint, but neither does it come anywhere close to something like Procreate. Still, it’s cheap and fun.

Remote Palette
Price: $1

NeoLucida

The NeoLucida isn’t really an iPad accessory, but it can certainly be used as one. It’s a modern version of the camera lucida, an optical device used by artists throughout history (well, since the mid–1800s anyway) to make their drawings more accurate.

The principle is simple: the unit has a prism on the end of a flexible arm, and this lets you see both your paper and your subject at the same time. This allows you to “trace” the image from real life as if it were projected onto your paper.

And of course when I say “paper” I also mean “iPad.”

The NeoLucida was made by university art professors Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin because antique versions are too expensive for working artists and students to afford. Their Kickstarter was super successful, raising almost half a million on a target of just $15,000, and they’ll be back in 2014 with a retail version. Until then you might want to speak to your bank manager before hitting Ebay.

NeoLucida
Price: Around $40

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

It may be a cliche, but if the Internet has proven great at one thing, it’s connecting people. It’s allowed a million communities to bloom, big and small.

These days, the iPhone is having a similar bonding effect, but offline.

We trust our iPhones to reach out to people – sure, mainly friends and family – but also to contact complete strangers in the quest for a ride, a love match or a new job.

One effect is that we’re all becoming micro-entrepreneurs, according to Rachel Botsman, author of 2010’s “What’s Mine is Yours: The rise of Collaborative Consumption.” Peer-to-peer rentals alone are an estimated $26 billion market sector, she writes.

And it’s not just a bad economy that leads us to share our car, our leftovers or get a loan outside traditional channels, Botsman notes. That may have given it momentum, but increasingly it was the iPhone itself.

“People today are starved for community,” says Anthony Centore, a licensed counselor and founder of Thriveworks. “We’ll take some risks to connect.”

And that connection — tenuous at first — may be that you and I both have iPhones.

“I’d suggest there’s an element of trust there (with iPhones). Of ‘Well, we’re all in the same boat, they’re just like me, let’s help each other out’,” says Adrienne Andrew, a UX researcher for lifelogging app Saga. “I wouldn’t go so far to say that it’s as if we’re all vetted by Apple, but there is an element of self-selection.”

Smartphones may seem ubiquitous, but there are certain demographics that use them more and an even smaller subset that use these apps, adding to a feeling of safety when using them.

“We are more comfortable swapping houses, meeting people, and sharing rides with “strangers” because the same digital technologies that support these smartphone-facilitated encounters discourages anonymity and, with it, antisocial behavior,” says Dana Klisanin, psychologist, founder and CEO of think-tank Evolutionary Guidance Media R&D, Inc.

Personal Boundaries And Sliding Doors

There seem to be two basic strategies that people take with sharing their lives with their smartphones: open book or peek-a-boo.

Centore, the counselor, decided long ago that he’s personally for the open book strategy. “Everything online is going to be who I am – everything I present needs to be public,” he says, though he has tweaked some privacy settings on Facebook but isn’t obsessive about who sees what.

His social media roster includes Vine, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and Google Places. The 33-year-old, Boston-based therapist, who dated online when he was single, hasn’t tried Lyft but had a good holiday experience at a stranger’s beach house found on Airbnb.

Andrew, who holds degrees in computer science and learning design technology from MIT and Stanford, is more for the second strategy. She uses Saga’s lifelogging tool to track her bike commute to work, for example, but keeps her settings public or private depending on where the followers are based.

The app uses your iPhone’s Location Services to log where you are, connecting with apps including RunKeeper, Instagram, FitBit, Facebook, FourSquare and more. There’s a Twitter-like follow-follower model and users can decide who sees what as the stream of locations and activities is logged.

Andrew says she’s noticed her own tendencies as a “control freak” to tweak the default settings and now says she realizes she breaks down followers into three basic groups: “People I know and trust, and I don’t mind if they see most of what I’m doing, then there are people who maybe I know a little bit about them but they’re in the greater Seattle area – but I don’t know well or at all – and I don’t want them to see basically anything and then there are random people in Ireland or Florida, whom I’ll probably never meet and I don’t worry about how they’ll judge me.”

What takes most of the anguish out of sharing and participating in many of these formerly off-bounds activities is the fact that the device itself creates some accountability.

“Participants are trackable via their digital footprint and GPS technologies and in many cases, once an individual has participated in such a swap, etc., community feedback will be available to inform others,” Klisanin says.

“Providing such feedback is a form of digital altruism, an action that takes a little time, but supports individuals and their communities. While it is always important to be cautious, “strangers” who have signed up with “ride-sharing” sites are not the same as the completely anonymous hitchhikers our mother’s warned us about.”

What limits are there to sharing?

But are there limits to what you can do with an app? Some niche ideas – like exchanging breast milk – will get a lot of press but won’t necessarily take off — the target market is probably too small. However, the cost of developing an app to try out an idea is very low.

“As the cost of developing these apps goes down, it’s not that hard to throw your hat in the ring to create something,” Centore says. “Some will be wacky and some will fail, others may only appeal to a very small niche of people.”

Some services, he says, are ripe for disruptive tech. Once more of us can get our heads around the idea. For example, even though many clients use Google to find a therapist, Centore says they prefer face-to-face counseling.

When clients call one of the six Thriveworks centers, they are always offered the online counseling option but most say no. “The conversion rate is minuscule,” he says, adding that the resistance is likely because even though people are comfortable using Skype, if they’re going to therapy they want someone present with them.

“I won’t say there are no limits to what you can do with apps,” Andrew says. But when I ask about the flop of our trial with the Leftover Swap app as the outer limits to smartphone-enabled sharing, she tells me about a mom’s email list in Seattle that she belongs to where people frequently offer swaps of gluten-free flour or diapers in a heavily populated area of the city, often leaving items on their front porches for pick-up.

What’s the difference between swapping seconds on an email list and through an app?

“It’s kind of semi-curated thing and there’s a barrier to getting into it,” she notes. “That barrier is what convinces people that it’s safe. It gets back to ride sharing: finding common ground where you can say, ‘These people are like me,’ seems to be the key.”

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

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

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

Did the scroll speed change on OS X Mavericks? How can I change it?

Mavericks is designed to make your Mac run faster and more efficiently with better RAM and CPU management. Depending on the hardware and contents on your Mac, these changes may cause scrolling to either speed up or slow down with the upgrade.

The day after Mavericks was released, a customer came to me with this same question. Apple hasn’t officially stated that the scrolling speed has changed and I haven’t noticed it on my own machine, but a quick search revealed a number of people were experiencing either faster or slower scrolling speeds than previously.

There is a simple fix. Go to the System Preferences app >> Accessibility >> Mouse and Trackpad >> Trackpad options or Mouse options, then adjust the speed with the slider there.

Smooth scrolling!

Why is it that every time I go to the Genius Bar I walk away believing that I’m smarter than they are?

Maybe you believe that Apple Geniuses know everything there is to know about every apple product and service and while many of us come pretty close to that standard, for most people this is just not the case. We see a wide variety of issues at the bar and everything is near impossible.

We get a lot of training, but Apple’s product lines are so vast and have been around for so long that it’s impossible for a new hire to pick it all up in just a few short months. If you encounter an issue that your technician is unfamiliar with, there are some basic troubleshooting steps they will perform to isolate and find the cause of your issue so it can be fixed. They may need to reach out to other resources. Be patient: they are working to help you.

Another thing to keep in mind is how much the average customer knows about their product.

I am amazed at the number of people who don’t even know how to backup their device, let alone what a backup is, so we gear our service towards those people. Sometimes we sound dumb when really we are just covering our bases to make sure we don’t get “hung by our lanyards” later for assuming that a customer knows what we’re talking about.

Why do iOS device home buttons fail so easily? Has Touch ID improved its durability?

The home button can become unresponsive for a number of reasons. You may be running low on application memory causing overall unresponsiveness. A reboot will clear the memory, but if it’s still a no-go then a restore might be needed.

Dirt and other debris (like remnants from today’s Cheetos) can also cause home button problems. Try cleaning the button with an alcohol wipe and keep your hands clean while handling your device. Seriously. The home button can take a hefty beating but some do fail. The cable that connects your home button may have failed, which can be replaced by a Genius, though sometimes we have to replace the whole display on newer iPhones to remedy home button issues.

The original home button function on Touch ID devices has improved, but many have reported issues using the sensor. A couple of rules to keep in mind with Touch ID: keep your fingers clean and make sure to scan all parts of your finger that press the button. Touch ID is brand new but Apple is supposedly improving the software for the button as it is used.

A few years ago, developers pushed a lot of boundaries in the iTunes store. Either that, or the minions who OK’d them in a Cupertino basement needed more coffee, better judgement and probably a raise.

As you’ve seen from our gallery of banned apps, the world really doesn’t need to play Baby Shaker with an iPhone. A lot of these apps made a peek-a-boo in the app store and were never more.

But as the virtual store becomes more like a bazaar for its wide range of offerings, you can find just about anything there – including apps about controversial figures like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.

In 2010, Italian developer Luigi Marino made a media splash with an app about dictator Benito Mussolini. The iPhone app of Mussolini’s speeches was the second-highest paid app in the Italian iTunes store a week after launching despite criticism for giving voice to Il Duce’s diehard fans. The app, available in the US store but published in Italian, costs $0.99 with additional in-app purchases for maps and videos.

It seems there is a kind of double standard for quote apps of controversial figures. For example, the US iTunes store features a bunch Dalai Lama teachings and quotes apps, but these were all removed from China’s iTunes store leading to cries of censorship. And if Il Duce doesn’t do it for you, there are still apps available on Che Guevara and Franco, too.

After Mussolini made a hasty exit for copyright violations, it was reinstated soon after and has been available ever since. Marino kept on developing apps, adding iStalin, Hitler and iGandhi to the store.

He told told Cult of Mac that there were some hiccups getting the Hitler app into iTunes. In fact, it remains unpublished in the Italian store after Jewish groups protested but it is on sale in Germany, where Mein Kampf has been banned since 1945. It’s the grim jaw of Mussolini, however, that Marino says attracts the most buyers.

“I still get emails every day about iMussolini,” Marino, who lives in Naples, Italy, said. “There is a lot of engagement – in my opinion it increases in times when there are more political problems.”

A $1.99 iPad app version released in March allows users to upload pics of fascist memorabilia to a gallery and share info from the app on Twitter, Facebook or via email.

Marino, now CEO at mobile development agency Creact, says he has about 20-25,000 users registered for push notifications for iMussolini.

When you buy an iPhone, you agree to live peacefully within the beautiful walled garden that Apple’s engineers have created. All the important decisions have been made for you, from the font size in iMessage, to wallpaper options, even the way you align app icons on a page and name folders.

Having Apple’s team do all the work is nice, but it also means you can’t install any app you want. However, some daring developers have managed to sneak their way through the App Store approval process long enough to completely shock us before being quickly ejected from paradise. Wander into darker corners of the App Store with us as we take a look at 10 of the most extreme apps Apple has banned.

Girls Around Me

We caused quite a stir last year when we broke the story about Girls Around Me — an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that allowed users to stalk women in their neighborhood without those women’s knowledge, right down to their most personal details.

Foursquare was quick to respond within hours, cutting off the API access that the app relied upon to function. Facebook also reached out quickly with a reminder on how to keep your photos private, and then Apple dealt the final deathblow with official banishment from the App Store, but the app still served as a punch-in-the-face reminder that you never know who’s accessing your data and what they’re using it for.

I Am Rich

I Am Rich’s sealed its spot as a legend in the history of banned iOS apps, not because it gave users some controversial function, but because it charged users $999.99 to do absolutely nothing. Never again will you get to spend a grand for an utterly useless program that just displays a red gem to flaunt your wealth to passersby after Apple banned the app in 2008.

WikiLeaks

Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard. Then Julian Assange got a ballsy idea to create an iOS app so users could get all his leaked docs on the go. Apple wasn’t keen on the idea and banned the Wikileaks app for failing to meet the personal attacks part of the user agreement, and said it could be a potential threat to iOS users.

Baby Shaker

Baby Shaker only lasted a few hours before outrage over this game – where you silenced the kid by shaking the iPhone until their eyes get X’d out — got it whisked out of the iTunes store. Apple eventually admitted that approving the app was a mistake.

Prohibition 2: Dope Wars

Ever dream of being a dope dealer, slinging dope with the best of ’em just like those guys on the The Wire? Prohibition 2: Dope Wars allowed users to pretend to be drug dealers in New York City, trying to make fat stacks of mad cheddar in 30-days by selling PCP, ecstasy, cocaine, acid, and all manner of other illegal substances. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs didn’t have similar dreams of being the next Heisenberg, and the app was quickly banned.

Super Monster Bros By Adventure Time Pocket Free Games

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

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

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This week, we have something to keep you from getting lost, something to let you combine your photos, and another thing to help you breathe again after your traumatic shopping experience.

Here you go:

InstaPhotoBlend – Photo & Video – $1.99

If you’ve ever looked at two of your photos and wished that you could somehow transmogrify them into one Frankenphoto, you might want to check out InstaPhotoBlend. It’s image-editing software for your iOS device that uses a simple interface to let you combine and blend two photos together.

You start by selecting two pictures — one top layer and one bottom layer — and then fiddle around with the controls to control opacity and adjust color until you’ve created the perfect thing that used to be two things. After that, you can post your masterpiece to social media, email or text it, or just hang onto it until the time is right. It’s a fun little app to play with, and it’s not hard to create some interesting effects.

InstaPhotoBlend

Backstep – Travel – Free

If you’ve ever traveled to an unfamiliar city, found a new café, or parked at a SuperTarget, you know the value of being able to get back to where you were. Backstep wants to help. It’s a new app by developer D Leak that lets you drop a waypoint at your current location with a single tap on your screen. You name the waypoint, then call up your various pins individually, and Backstep will show where you are in relation to it and update as you head back to your starting point. It’s a simple app with the cleanest of interfaces, and it might save you a few fights over which arbitrarily named row your car is in.

Backstep

Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free

Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty.

Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person.

If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.

Calming Breath

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

Enjoy!

Best New Albums

Ryan Hemsworth – Guilt Trips

 Canadian DJ and producer Ryan Hemsworth has made a name for himself by producing a mountain of spacey instrumentals for rappers like Deniro Farrar,  Shady Blaze, and Berkley’s 100s while also creating some hot remixes from artists such as Kanye West, Frank Ocean and Cat Power, but Guilt Trips marks Hemsworth first solo record, and what a joy it is.

Hemsworth’s sound teeters along the edge of hip-hop and dance music without fully crossing over into either for a truly unique and grounded sound that’s sprinkled with enough R&B to keep it away from being “too experimental” for casual listeners without drowning in pop.

After releasing his Still Awake EP in May, Hemsworth’s Guilt Trip focuses on adding clarity to his sound by reining in his wandering instrumentals and giving vocals a stronger emphasis. You won’t find any superstar guest appearances on the album, but featured verses from spitters like Haleek Maul and Kitty prove that Hemsworth can produce hit pop tracks like the best of them.

iTunes – $9.99

Poliça – Shulamith

If Shulamith proves anything, it’s that the Minneapolis group’s sudden success is no fluke. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon once famously said that POLIÇA was the best band he ever heard, and he sings along to the mysterious lyrics of “Tiff.”

The ambling percussion of “I Need $” shares the brio and aesthetic of hip-hop as Channy Leaneagh glides and freestyles over the song’s icy plains. Her haunting processed vocals meld with the echoing effect of two drum kits, a super-funky bass guitar, and the trip-hoppy exhalations of an alien synthesizer. I wall makes a potent statement: to be a modern creature is to reside in the surreal space between the digital and the organic.

iTunes – $9.99

Katy Perry – PRISM

A lot’s changed since Katy Perry catapulted into superstardom with her breakaway hit “I Kissed A Girl” in 2008. Marriage, divorce and an ocean of fame have led to some of Katy’s bluntest lyrics to-date on her third album.

PRISM is chock full of the bouncy pop tunes Perry’s become famous for while also covering some rocky ground in the singer’s personal life. As the lead songwriter of the album’s opening track, “Roar,” Perry kicks off her third studio endeavor with stadium-sized guitars, a stomping beat and an epic sing-along hook. Perry’s assertive return is underscored by other early tastes from the album, including “Dark Horse,” which features a menacing bass line, crackling beat, and a sharply styled guest verse from Juicy J of Three 6 Mafia fame. PRISM’s parade of singles continues with the banging house-influenced groove and whistling hook of Perry’s euphoric, party-all-night anthem “Walking on Air” while tracks like “By the Grace of God” divulge into the heartbreak of Perry’s failed marriage to Russell Brand.

iTunes – $11.99

Best New Books

The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

“The Goldfinch” starts off with a bang – literally – as a 13-year-old New Yorker named Theo and his mother are rocked by an explosion at a New York museum. Theo survives the blast, but his mother doesn’t, leading to 800-pages detailing the aftermath of his experience over the course of a decade and a half.

Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him and tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small 17th-century painting that he jacked from the museum during the chaos of the explosion.

The book moves us through the life of Theo as an adult, as he drifts between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of antiques in his shop. He is alienated and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle as the novel unfolds with a healthy serving of suspense.

iTunes – $10.99

Allegiant

by Veronica Roth

Teens who have been sucked into Veronica Roth’s Divergent series will be ready to lock themselves away to finish Roth’s final book in the Divergent trilogy – “Allegiant.”

The story picks up with Tris Prior who’s witnessed the downfall of the faction-based society she’s believed in her whole life. So when offered a chance to explore the world past the limits she’s known, Tris is ready. Perhaps  she and Tobias will find a simple new life together, free from complicated lies, tangled loyalties, and painful memories.

But Tris’s new reality is worse than the one she left behind. Old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless. Explosive new truths change the hearts of those she loves. And once again, Tris must battle to comprehend the complexities of human nature—and of herself—while facing impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice, and love.

If you liked “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” and are looking for a new teen series to dive into, try this. But get started now if you want to finish before the Hollywood adaptation hits theaters in March 2014.

iTunes – $6.99

Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

“Provence, 1970” is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping today’s tastes and culture, the way we eat now.

The conversations among this group were chronicled by M.F.K. Fisher in journals and letters—some of which were later discovered by Luke Barr, her great-nephew. In “Provence, 1970” he captures this seminal season, set against a stunning backdrop in cinematic scope—complete with gossip, drama, and contemporary relevance.

Best New Movies

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Extended Cut)

Just in time to prepare fans for the wide-release of the “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” Apple has released an exclusive extended cut of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” this week that contains tons of new Extras that almost double the length of the original film.

Set in Middle Earth 60 years before the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, the movie follows the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, who is conned swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom from the fearsome dragon Smaug.

Hardcore LotR fans might take offense that the plot of the movie doesn’t exactly follow the details of the book, but casual fans will be enthralled with Bilbo’s journey after he’s approached by the wizard Gandalf to join a company of dwarves set on retaking their homeland. What follows is steady medley of action and suspense as Bilbo and the dwarves find themselves caught in a series of goblin tunnels on their march East. Oh yeah, and Gollum and his Precious make a brief appearance too, so you finally find out where Bilbo got the all-powerful One Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

iTunes – $19.99

The Conjuring 

Halloween is fastly approaching, which means its time to gather your friends and load up the scary movies at night to scare the living shit out of each other. Classic horror movies are always a great choice, but if you’re looking for something freaky and new, try “The Conjuring.”

The film details the horrifying “true story” of world renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorrain Warren who are called out to help a family terrorized by a dark presence on their secluded farm. After waking up with a mysterious bruise and finding their dog, Sadie, dead, mom Carolyn calls the paranormal investigators for help. As you can imagine, all hell breaks lose once Ed and Lorrain arrive at the house, making for a truly terrifying movie experience.

iTunes – $14.99

Turbo

Over the last decade Hollywood has given us animated movies about rats, Kung-Fu pandas, dragons, ants, and clown-fish, so why not give a nitrous oxide-charged snail a shot at the big screen?

Voiced by Ryan Reynolds, “Turbo” is a tale about a misfit snail with a need for speed as he strives to earn a slot in the Indy 500. While Turbo craves speed all of his fellow snails — including his brother Chet (voiced by Paul Giamatti) — seem to savor the slow life. At one point, Turbo gets sucked into the intake valve of a speeding muscle car. After getting spit through the volatile nitrous oxide that fuels the car, Turbo is imbued with new masterful speed powers that allow him to travel at speeds up to 200 miles per hour.

Armed with his speedy new powers, Turbo’s journey is far from over as he realizes his dreams are finally within reach, but runs into a number of obstacles on his way to the Indy 500. Other actors appearing in family-friendly movie include Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Peña, Bill Hader, Luis Guzman and even Snoop Dogg

iTunes – $14.99

In the early 90s, I drove across the States in a clapped-out Mustang, from the East Coast to California. It was a leisurely drive. I was in my mid-20s and drifting.

I stayed for a stretch in a seedy motel on the Las Vegas strip, at one point sleeping one week for free in exchange for building a wall by the front entrance. I don’t know why the motel owner agreed to this. My roommate – a hitchhiker I’d picked up — and I had never built a wall before. We stretched the work out for a week. But as it grew higher, it became more unstable and we were evicted when it fell over in a shower of bricks.

The night before I’d met a French guy. He claimed to be ex-Foreign Legion. Short but muscular, he radiated fitness and strength. He told me about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Most of the injuries, he said, occurred in the week before the actual running of the bulls. People gather in the streets to drink all night and brave young men climb the lampposts to jump off, trusting the crowd will catch them. Sometimes they plunge right through the upstretched arms.

My roommate and I split up and I drove with the French guy to Death Valley. He claimed to know a remote cabin in the mountains above the Valley floor. It was a three-hour, 13-mile hike, he told me, but the cabin was full of food and we could stay as long as we liked.

Although it sounded a little fantastical, I parked the car off the highway. He advised me to hide it as best as possible – we didn’t want anyone breaking in.

As we hiked across the valley floor toward the distant mountains, he told me how he’d nearly been executed in South America. He was travelling alone in the jungle and was sleeping in the trees to stay safe from jaguars. One morning he woke to find himself covered in blood. There was sticky blood all over his body, from head to toe. At first he suspected that something had been killed in the tree above him, but then he realized it was his own blood. He had been attacked by vampire bats in the middle of the night and they’d drooled his own blood onto his skin.

Afraid of a rabies infection, he headed for the nearest settlement. But he crossed the border into a neighboring country and was locked up by the army, which was battling local rebels. In the cell, he started to exhibit the first symptoms of rabies. But he had more pressing troubles. The army accused him of being a rebel spy and threatened to execute him. They didn’t believe his cockamamie story of solo jungle hikes and vampire bats. It took days of beatings and interrogations – plus his advancing rabies — to convince them of his innocence.

We crossed the Valley floor and started to climb upwards, following a rocky dry river bed full of huge boulders. I was getting more and more nervous. The French guy was crazy! There was no cabin here. Free food and board? In Death Valley? What was I thinking? He was luring me off the road to kill me. He’d take my Mustang keys and disappear. No one knew where I was. Not a soul. The name of the place began to gnaw at me, ringing in my head like a crazy mantra: Death Valley, Death Valley, Death Valley!

When I was a kid, my friends and I hitchhiked everywhere. We hitchhiked to school most days. We hitchhiked all across the country for camping holidays. We’d just take sleeping bags – no tent – and bed down in open fields. This was Britain in the 1980s, which didn’t seem particularly dangerous. But like the US, the UK is high up on UNICEF’s ranking of countries for child abuse.

I have my own kids now, and the thought of them hitchhiking wherever they please seems crazy. I’d never allow it. But they take buses all over San Francisco, and I have no problem with them hailing a car using Uber or Lyft. Because they are using an app, they’re not getting into a car with a stranger.

Likewise, we’ve swapped our house with strangers several times (AirBnB – read on for my wife Traci’s account) and I regularly buy used goods from Craigslist and eBay.

These apps affirm my deeply held belief that most people are fundamentally decent.

I digress: back to Death Valley. I kept trying to get behind the French guy so that I could pick up a boulder and smash his skull in. But he took my falling back as a sign of tiredness and he’d wait up to help me.

I was getting desperate. Death Valley! Death Valley! And then there was the cabin. Sitting on flat near the river bed, just shy of the lip of the mountain. An old miner’s cabin built around the turn of the century. It had four cots and, as promised, it was full of dry and canned food left by previous visitors. Over the years, it had accumulated into quite a hoard. We stayed for a few days, exploring the abandoned mine and mountaintop, which had unbelievable views across Death Valley in one direction, and across the Nevada desert in another.

When we hiked back down to the car, it was just as we left it, except someone had used their finger to write a message in the dust on the back windshield: “Clean Me.”

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook bought four properties surrounding his house in Palo Alto, California. He reportedly spent a cool $30 million buying four properties surrounding his house, and is leasing them back to their former owners. Irony of ironies, he did it to protect his privacy.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, except Zuckerberg presides over the greatest intentional invasion of our privacy ever devised.

Actually, maybe that’s the NSA, but nonetheless, Facebook is built on the idea that our digital lives should be public. Facebook’s default mode is to expose as much information about you as possible. All your pictures, vacation plans, school graduation ceremonies and what products and services you “like,” which are mined by commercial interests to sell products and services back to you.

I discovered the dangers of unfettered social sharing while researching my upcoming book on Jonathan Ive and Apple’s industrial design department. Digging around in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I found a LOT of personal information about Apple’s designers. Stuff they no doubt want to keep on the down low. These are people who are intensely private. They have very low public profiles. They intentionally keep their identities and jobs out of the public eye.

This is partly because of Apple’s draconian secrecy policies and partly to shield them from headhunters. But there’s also a large measure of just keeping their lives private. Apple’s twenty or so industrial designers are somewhat public figures, thanks to their amazing success as Apple’s primary innovators and the growing international fame of their boss. They don’t want their lives examined by a nosey snoop like me.

Some keep their Instagram feeds private, but a surprising number don’t. Some of the designers have registered Facebook and Instagram accounts under nicknames or pseudonyms. They weren’t too hard to find with a bit old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting.

Looking through their pictures — cyberstalking them — you can see their vacations, their houses, their cars and kids and spouses. You see weddings and nights out at clubs. Skiing adventures by helicopter and surfing excursions. Trips to London or Italy’s Amalfi coast. It’s all very enviable. In fact, the pictures look just like the staged photos Apple uses on the computers at the Apple Stores. They are the real version of the picture-perfect California life.

I won’t reveal the pictures or the Instagram feeds. Although their pictures and feeds are very much out there in public, the designers are entitled to their privacy. They’ve made attempts to keep them private — or semiprivate — and I won’t violate that. There’s no reason they should be forced to hide their feeds. There’s little harm in exposing your pictures to the public. It’s easy for friends and family — or the public even — to get a glimpse of your life and activities. There’s nothing very serious that’s exposed. I could figure out exactly where they live, I suppose, but there are probably easier ways.

But it shows that we should all be aware of what we’re exposing online. My kids are quite savvy about privacy. They are careful about what they post to Facebook and tend to keep pictures with their faces offline.

In 2011, even Zuckerberg’s puppy got into the act. Beast, a white mop of a sheepdog, has his own page on Facebook. He can be seen waiting patiently for steak bits, blending in with a shaggy rug and rushing about the yard. His “mom”  (Zuck’s wife Priscilla) is often incidentally pictured – maybe over a morning cuddle or carrying him down the stairs. Since August, though, the four-legged wonder has not posted a single status update. And can you blame him? Even a dog with 1.6 million likes needs a little privacy once in awhile.

There are a ton of apps out there, both free and paid, that may or may not be worth your time and money.

Why waste either one? With over 600,000 apps to choose from, finding the most interesting and worthwhile apps is, at best, a tricky activity and, at worst, a fool’s errand.

Might as well let us find the cool ones for you.

Here are a few of the favorites to come across our home screens this week —  including a running app, PumaTrac, photography apps Spark Camera and Perfect Shot and more.

Check ’em out:

PumaTrac – Health & Fitness – Free

For a change of pace from bloated running apps, try PumaTrac. It’s made just for runners, and it will track distance, pace, and calories burned over time. It also keeps a log of outside conditions like weather, day of the week, and location as well as music choices and social media activity to help you figure out how these things affect your running performance. Share your routes with your running buddies, as well, or just find routes other locals are using to keep your routine fresh. Oh, and it supports the Pebble watch, too.

PumaTrac


Spark Camera – Photo & Video – $1.99

If you’ve played with Vine, you’ll get Spark Camera right away. Here you get a 30-second limit for your mini video masterpiece. Adding a soundtrack via  your iTunes library  is also super easy and so is sharing with your friends across social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as via email and SMS. Just press and hold anywhere to record 720 p HD video then release to stop recording. Flip through a variety of live filter effects and then tap the note symbol to choose music.

Spark Camera


Listastic – Productivity – free

Listastic is a great little collaborative to-do list app with an intuitive interface that’s easy on the eyes. It’s simple to use, too, so you can share a grocery list with a roommate or life partner, a gift list with friends and family, or plan a project at work with a group of co-workers. You can become a Listastic premium member for a small fee, which lets you share any list with other Listastic members, free or paid. Free members can use Listastic on their own device, or join and edit shared lists from premium members. New users get a free two-week trial of Premium service, as well.

Listastic


WherezMyStuff – Utilities – $0.99

Aside from the unfortunate spelling of the name, WherezMyStuff is pretty handy. I have a habit of putting things away safely only to discover, many months later, that my perfect hiding place is unknown to even me.  WherezMyStuff is a mini-inventory to prevent this common mind melt. You simply name the item, type in (or record via the mic) where you’re putting it, and snap a picture. When you want to find your stuff again, tap the name or search and voila’ your treasures are found.

WherezMyStuff 


Perfect Shot – Photo & Video – $0.99

Ever taken a picture of a large group of people? It’s a huge a pain to get them all to smile at the same time, let alone refrain from blinking. Perfect Shot aims to make sure everyone in your group photo is smiling and their eyes are open with its face-detection technology. Aim your iPhone at the happy group and Perfect Shot will detect every face in the group choose the right moment and take the perfect picture–you don’t even have to press a button. Automagical, indeed.

Perfect Shot

When we share our innermost thoughts on a blog, send pictures of loved ones through Facebook, or even divulge the unhealthy foods we ate for dinner from our iPhone, we trust the companies that run those services with our data. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Companies like Dropbox, AT&T, Foursquare, and Linked In.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), initially funded by three big donors in 1990 including Apple’s own Steve Wozniak, published its third yearly report on the best and worst of these companies.

The results may surprise you: Apple has one of the worst scores on the chart.

The Cupertino company gets only one star – on par with internet behemoth Yahoo and telcom giant AT&T – and that was awarded for fighting for privacy rights in congress. (It’s worth noting that Yahoo’s one star gets an extra sparkly patina due to the company’s “silent battle for user privacy” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

The report examined the public policies of major internet companies, including service providers, cloud storage companies, blogging platforms, social networking sites, and the like, to figure out whether they were committed to backing us up when our own government wants access to our data. The point of the report is to motivate companies to be more transparent, and do better.

EFF’s scorecard was released in the spring, before NSA and PRISM were in the spotlight, but the criteria were prescient.

Companies were rated by whether they:

• Require a warrant for content of communications.
• Tell users about government data requests.
• Publish transparency reports.
• Publish law enforcement guidelines.
• Fight for users’ privacy rights in courts.
• Fight for users’ privacy in Congress.

Apple earned its lone star for joining the Digital Due Process Coalition. However it does not require a warrant, tell users about government data requests, publish transparent reports or law enforcement guidelines, nor does it fight for users’ privacy rights in court.

Compare this to a company like Twitter, which does all of these things. The microblogging service scores favorably across all the EFF categories, as does internet provider Sonic.net.

Google rates a five out of six, falling short a star for not telling users about government access requests; Dropbox ranks the same, demoted a star for not fighting for users’ privacy rights in court.

Overall, it’s great to know how private our communications are. (Or not, as the case may be.) Reports like this one are a step towards transparency and understanding of our own ability to interact privately, at least within the realm of the law. If a company we trust is cavalier about our own data, perhaps we should contact them and ask them why they aren’t scoring so well. Maybe the companies will make some changes in policy, or maybe they’ll lose some customers when they don’t.

Either way, if privacy is important to you, you can see above exactly how important it isn’t, and the companies it isn’t important to.

You can download the full PDF report here.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

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

Enjoy!

Best New Albums

Cults – Static

A lot has changed with Cults since the New York-based boyfriend-girlfriend duo released their highly-acclaimed debut album in 2011. For one thing, they decided to break-up after dating for four years and as a result their new album centers around their sadly dissolved relationship.

Produced with Shane Stoneback and Ben Allen the subject matter of Static is a bummer, but Cults has been able to effectively recreate the alluring low-fi retro sounds that made the their first record so enjoyable. Bottomline: it’s a solid breakup album that sounds surprisingly happy.

iTunes – $9.99

Pusha T – My Name Is My Name 

Pusha’s album really came out a week ago so this isn’t a new new album, but My Name Is My Name is one of the best albums I’ve heard in months.

Pusha T may not be a household name, but you’ve probably heard him rapping on tracks for Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, 2Chainz and more. This  is Pusha T’s debut solo album after splitting from No Malice as the rapping duo Clipse. Push’s unique storytelling weaves with some of the best modern production and features tons of guest appearances from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Big Sean, Chris Brown, Rick Ross and Kelly Rowland.

If you’re looking for a great new rap album that’s not by a dude named Drake, try My Name Is My Name.

iTunes $9.99

Pearl Jam – Lightning Bolt

Pearl Jam is here to let you know that they’re still kicking out the jams like it’s 1992. Lightning Bolt is the 10th studio album from the Seattle rockers and its pretty much everything you’ve come to expect form the band with heavy doses of reverb, ballards, distortion and thrashing.

iTunes – $11.99

Best New Books

The Circle

by Dave Eggers

“The Circle” is the latest from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of “A Hologram for the King,” a finalist for the National Book Award.

The plot involves Mae Holland, who is hired to work for  the world’s most powerful internet company called the Circle. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the company links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s whirlwind of activity. There are parties til dawn, famous musicians playing on the lawn, athletic activities and clubs and brunches and even an aquarium of rare fish. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

iTunes – $11.99

I Am Malala

by Malala Yousafzai Christina Lamb

“I Am Malala” is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.

Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

 

iTunes – $10.99

The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

 Don Tillman is a brilliant yet socially challenged genetics professor , who has decided it’s time to marry. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.

Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love, it finds you.

Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion’s distinctive debut will resonate with anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of great challenges. The Rosie Project is a rare find: a book that restores our optimism in the power of human connection.

iTunes – $11.99

Best New Movies

The Way Way Back

This comedy comes to you from the studio that brought you Little Miss Sunshine and Juno! While 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) is being dragged on a family trip with his mom (Toni Collette) and her overbearing boyfriend (Steve Carell), he befriends the gregarious manager (Sam Rockwell) of a local water park. The two form a powerful bond, resulting in a vacation Duncan will never forget.

iTunes – $14.99

Monsters University

Disney•Pixar presents the hilarious story of two mismatched monsters who became lifelong friends. Ever since college-bound Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) was a little monster, he’s dreamed of becoming a Scarer—and he knows better than anyone that the best Scarers come from Monsters University (MU). But during his first semester at MU, Mike’s plans are derailed when he crosses paths with hotshot James P. Sullivan, “Sulley” (John Goodman), a natural-born Scarer. The pair’s out-of-control competitive spirit gets them both kicked out of the University’s elite Scare Program. With their dreams temporarily dashed, they realize they will have to work together, along with an odd bunch of misfit monsters, if they ever hope to make things right.

iTunes – $19.99

This Is The End

While attending a party at James Franco’s house, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and many other celebrities are faced with the apocalypse. Hilarity ensues.

iTunes – $12.99

For a whole year, Johannes P. Osterhoff broadcast what came across his iPhone screen to an open internet page.

Anyone who stumbled onto his iPhone Live website could spy on how much beer he was drinking, who called him, what games he was playing, his email inbox, how long his showers took, see what gigs he had lined up, his Twitter exchanges and what his moods were. As you can imagine, there were some interesting consequences for his friends and a few worried conversations with his mom.

Osterhoff is something of a techno-provocateur. Based in Berlin, he has pwned Apple ads with porn in a subway station, built himself a wearable OSX home and aimed high with a William Tell iPhone project.

Calling himself an interface artist, this project was less playful than some of his previous efforts. It grew from being “concerned about the growing amount of personal data that was stored on smartphones and that users lose control over it,” he told Cult of Mac.

With the stranger-than-science fiction story of the National Security Agency coming to light at the tail end of his iPhone Live year, the experiment has added resonance. While Americans disapprove of surveillance programs – about 53% were against spying in a Gallup poll taken after the Edward Snowden story broke – our participation in social media and the traces we leave publicly has skyrocketed. In 2008, just 12 million of us were “heavy” social media users – now that figure is 71 million, or about six times as many people, according to Edison research. That’s a lot of status updates.

The Peek-A-Boo Challenge

In a way, Osterhoff is simply going bigger with what we all do, every day. You may laugh at lifecasters, but that’s what you do with every tweet, Facebook update, FourSquare check-in and Flickr snap. We don’t do it for money, though — and maybe we should stop sneering at those who do. At least they get paid for it. We do it to stay in touch. To prove we matter.

Osterhoff’s unease – and impetus – for the project came with the realization that “interaction with our smartphones serves the companies who provide platforms and apps more than it serves us, the actual users and the originators of information and data.” He wanted to share his information but keep control over what he was providing. This proved his biggest challenge.

When the project captured media attention, there were a flurry of visitors peering into his daily life on the web. Osterhoff tried to shield his friends and acquaintances from making unwanted cameos. He rigged up his jailbroken phone so that every time he hit the “home” button it would take a screen shot and upload it online. This gave him the flexibility to avoid capturing anything that might be better left private.

“Luckily apps provided me with more freedom than I had expected,” he said. “If I did not want to show the content of an email for example, I usually navigated back and showed the folder structure of my inbox instead. On the other hand, I wanted to entertain my visitors, so I used Camera+, Instagram, Google Maps more frequently to tell stories about my life. I would not have done this without an audience.”

When Your Peeps Want More Privacy

Osterhoff’s wife, Mi Sun, gladly participated in the project. The pair even enjoyed documenting their trip to Korea, “staging” the more interesting and photogenic parts of the journey to keep friends and family in the loop, he said. His mom, who voiced concern initially about the project, checked up on him after she thought he’d logged too many beers the night before — but she did like being able to stay abreast of his everyday doings any time she wanted. For his friends, it was different.

“I received less text messages then I did before the performance,” Osterhoff remarked. “My friends preferred to call me directly. The topic then would not be tracked and the call would only be listed in the call history.”

Life After the Truman Show

He logged in 13.575 screenshots of his home screen during the project, where anyone could participate by using his phone number at the top of the site or sending him an email. Osterhoff took the performance live, too, participating in events like Berlin’s Transmediale Festival where his iPhone screen was projected behind him as people live tweeted or emailed him comments and questions.

The apps taking up most of the limelight were Instagram, Mail, Phone and Safari, with a few guest spots from players like Pizza.de, Shazam, Cut The Rope, Angry Birds and Ikea. After an initial burst of energy, Osterhoff’s postings fell off about two-thirds of the way through the show. A broken dock connector (lint turned out to be the culprit) meant he had to cool his heels and wait for a replacement part to finish the experiment.

So, what happens after you’ve bared all for a year?

“Currently, using my iPhone feels pretty boring,” Osterhoff told us a few weeks after the end of the experiment. “I realized that I did a lot of stuff only due to the performance — tracking my showers, beers and mood for example. I have already stopped doing that, since it is pointless without an audience.” He’s back to heavy usage of the basics, namely: calls, Mobile Safari and Google Maps.

Osterhoff hasn’t walked out on lifecasting altogether, though. His latest project, called “Dear Jeff Bezos,” also centers around privacy by documenting what he’s reading on an Amazon Kindle. He jailbroke the device so that it every time he sets a bookmark, it sends an email to the Amazon CEO.

“Not so long ago it was very simple to read a book in private, Osterhoff said. “Companies like Amazon are interested in exclusive ownership of data, because with this exclusivity comes value. As a user of such services, one loses not only control but also authorship of the data one generated. To make the data I generate public is to devalue it. This is why I prefer to share data in an open format.”

The iPhone Live project also exposed his own ignorance – when a friend asked him over Twitter about spy operation PRISM, Osterhoff mistakenly replied on screen about the puzzle game of the same name. Perhaps too engrossed in tracking his own doings – using apps like iBeer, Mr.Mood and ShowerTimer – he hadn’t paid that much attention to the news.

Still, broadcasting our own data may be the way to go. “Screenshots contain a lot of information for humans, but it is still difficult to extract machine-readable data from them,” he said. “So actually, iPhone live also shows how we could share information with friends only and make it difficult for others, such as the NSA, to extract meaningful data.”

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

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

This week we cover which Apple products are too old to get fixed by the Genius, how to skirt around the need of a credit card to buy OS X updates and whether Geniuses ever imbibe on the job. 

What are the oldest Macs you guys get for repairs?

It’s pretty rare for someone to bring in an old Macintosh Classic and expect us to fix it. Apple has an official cutoff and the oldest Macs we perform hardware repairs for in the store are around five years old. Once its been five years since a product has been discontinued, Apple slaps a on it and no longer offers service for it.

To check if a product you have is vintage or obsolete, check Apple’s guidelines here to see if it’s still serviceable before coming to the store. If your Mac is running OS X then we can still provide software support. That’s good news for those of you still running Cheetah out there!

How do I update my system to the newest versions of OS X without a credit card to download it?

Apple doesn’t sell physical copies of OS X at Apple Store any more, but there are still ways around that if you just want to pay cash. You can always purchase an iTunes or App Store gift card at the Apple Store or many other retailers with cash. Once purchased, redeem the gift card on your account in the iTunes or App Store app. You can then purchase your OS X upgrade or and any apps with the credit added to your account. Make sure to update your payment information for card type to “none” by signing into your account in the iTunes Store or App Store.

Have you ever worked drunk?

The job can be pretty stressful sometimes. Occasionally, I’ll have a drink before work or on a lunch break. It’s not a bad way to relax and most of the managers at the store don’t care unless you’re always coming in sloppy drunk.

There are always a few situations throughout the day where it’d be great to take a short drink break after helping out a particularly horrible customer, but I don’t make it a habit. Fixing people’s iPhones really isn’t any easier after a few drinks so there are few benefits to being hammered on the job. As for what happens after work, it isn’t uncommon for employees and managers to meet up and toss back a few.

Never in the history of the human race have we been able to effortlessly capture and broadcast the most mundane and personal details of our lives to friends and strangers across the globe as we can now.

It’s a double-edged sword: you entrust a lot more of your personal info to your iPhone and Mac — and it’s easier than ever for a significant other to snoop around and find all your dirt. A single wayward text or neglected setting in iOS can subject you to some serious drama — just ask Anthony Weiner.

Fortunately, you don’t have to watch your career and personal life go up in flames, as long as you follow these tips on how to keep all your private business right where you want it: private.

How To Keep Your Porn Hidden

Still having problems keeping your porn hidden? Dude, it’s 2013. Armies of developers have dedicated their careers to building internet browsers for the sole purpose of finding and watching porn anonymously, making it easier than ever to not get caught.

Apple added a Private mode to the Safari back in 2005 that lets you browse the Internet with the calm assurance that once you’re done with your session all the cookies, cache and browsing history will be expunged. To switch to private mode in Safari, click the menu bar and go to “Private Browsing.” The same option is also available in Safari for iOS.

If you’re using Chrome go to File >> New Incognito Window. If you make the colossal error of searching for smut via the Google Search bar so that “Big Fat [Secondary Sex Characteristic]” pops up in your list of suggested searches, there’s a way to clear that out, too. Head to Google.com/history and from your Web History page click the gear  > Settings. Click “Delete All,” confirm your choice and, poof, your searches are gone.

And if you like to save a couple of files for leisurely offline viewing? Try the free Mac app Cryptor to encrypt and password protect any files or folders you don’t want anyone opening. To lock a folder, you just drag and drop it into the Cryptor screen, click the lock, create a password, and now your top secret files can only be accessed by you.

Caution: you can’t leave your porn stash lying around on your desktop, so make sure to hide your folder inside another folder and then make it hidden. You can hide folders right from Terminal with this simple command line:

chflags hidden /path/to/file-or-folderP

To unhide it, simply change hidden to nohidden:

chflags nohidden /path/to/file-or-folderP

If you don’t know what the path to your file or folder, type the first part of the command and then just drag your folder into Terminal and press enter. Now no one will come across your stash of nudie vids.

How To Catch A Computer Snooper

Is anything more annoying than a roommate who sneakily uses your stuff without letting you know about it?

Sure, you could always change your password and lock them out for good, but if you just want to keep tabs on them and find out what the hell they’re using your Mac for, you can use Console access your system logs to find out when someone used your computer.

To start, open Console by going to Applications >> Utilities >> Console. Now to access your system logs click on the “Show Log List” button on the sidebar and expand /private/var/log.

To find all the timestamps for when your MacBook was turned on, type the following in the search bar “Wake reason: EC.LidOpen” A list of all the times your MacBook was powered on will be on full display, which can then be used as incriminating evidence when you confront your roommate about using your MacBook as his pornography machine.

It’s not the most elegant solution, because you have to remember when you were using your computer, but you don’t have to have anti-theft software installed beforehand to uncover snoopers.

Want a more advanced option? The third-party OS X Prey can be used to track the location of your Mac when you’re away like Find My iPhone, but you can also use it to remotely access your FaceTime camera and capture screenshots every time your roommate has an unauthorized session for an extra dose of embarrassment.

If you hate giving your phone number to strangers when selling stuff on Craigslist or just want an added layer of privacy when meeting new people, you don’t need to a second cellphone like Walter White thanks to a handy disposable phone number app called Burner.

Burner generates a disposable number that you can use to call or text people from for a limited time. Numbers can be set to last for only 20 minutes of voice time, 60 text messages, or 7 days. You can toss the number any time you want and get a new one, or even generate multiple numbers and add labels to them so you can keep track of all your anonymous lines. Packages for the various amounts range from $1.99 to $11.99.

Need an app-free alternative? For crank calls, you can always just turn off sending your caller ID info by going to Settings >> Phone >> Show My Caller ID >> OFF. Now when you call people your number will show up as “Unknown.”

How To Bust A Significant Other Sneak-Reading Your Texts

Rather than using an third-party app to do your dirty work for you, there’s a pretty simple method to detect if your nosey significant other is reading your texts while you’re in the shower. First, close all of your apps by double-clicking the homebutton and then swipe up on all of your app cards.

Now, leave your iPhone out where your sneaky partner can find it and give them ample time for snooping. When you get back to your iPhone all you have to do is double click the home button to see which apps have been opened since the last time you killed them all. If iMessage, Email, Facebook and other communication apps have been opened while you were away, you know you’re entangled with a suspicious mind.

How To Keep Information Off Your Lockscreen

All of the extra precautions you’re now taking to keep info private will do wonders for safeguarding your porn, sexts, fake calls, credit card numbers and more, but it will all be for naught if you don’t keep information off your Lock screen.

To begin your Lock screen purge head to Settings >> Notification Center >> Access On Lock Screen and then toggle off both Notifications View and Today View.

You’ll be giving up the conveniences of being able to pulldown Notification Center to view alerts of new comments, Tinder matches, and Burner calls anymore, but neither will strangers, or your snooping spouse.

From the Notifications Center settings in iOS 7 you can also customize how alerts are displayed for each app so that you either see a banner at the top of your screen, a full alert window, or nothing at all. Users can also turn off the Badge App Icons for each app so your girlfriend isn’t alerted that you’ve been going hard on Tinder all night and have a slew of new matches.

How To Prevent Your Boss From Seeing Embarrassing Facebook Pics

How To Protect Your Personal Data From Advertisers

How To Use A Disposable Credit Card Number For Online Shopping

Buying stuff online from a shady site you’ve never heard of can be a bit worrisome. What if the guy on the other end grabs your credit card info and goes on a Nordstrom shopping spree?

To add an extra layer of protection against identity thieves during your online shopping sessions, use a disposable credit card number. A disposable credit card works the same way as your regular credit card, but it comes with a spending limit and shortened expiration date so that if a thief steals it they’re not gaining access to your entire account.

Bank of America, Citibank, and Discover are the three major US banks that offer disposable credit card numbers. Customers set the dollar amount, expiration date and can even make it useable at only one merchant. It’s a bit of a hassle to create a temporary a card number each time you buy something online, and you never get a physical credit card to use in brick-and-mortar stores, but it’s better than leaving your entire bank account open for the taking during the holiday season.

How To Torrent Movies Without Getting Caught By Your ISP

A new study suggests that people typically resort to torrenting a movie because it is unavailable for streaming, download, or digital rental. Who can blame you for wanting to watch Pacific Rim now, rather than waiting months for it come out?

Well, the MPAA for one, who might press hard for your internet service provider to shut off service when they catch you. Rather than risking a shutoff, there are a few simple precautions you can take to add extra layers of privacy to your torrenting.

First, start by using a VPN so that all of your traffic is routed through someone elses’ servers and your IP address remains hidden from public. Some VPNs cost a couple bucks a month which is a small price to pay for some extra privacy. Anomos, Itshidden and StrongVPN are popular among BitTorrent users.

Another option for obscuring your torrenting is to use a proxy, which work similar to a VPN so that your traffic is anonymous. If you’re not comfortable creating your own SSH proxy, you can pay for access from companies like Private Internet Access and BTGuard. The only problem with using a VPN is you might see a speed drop. But if you’re downloading huge files over the course of a few hours, a VPN might be the best choice for covering your pirating behind.

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

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

 This week we cover the perks of being an Apple Store Genius – as far as discounts are concerned – as well what to do if you have a jailbroken device that needs repair and the most facepalm-worthy moments from behind the bar.

1. What was your greatest facepalm moment with a customer?

I hear some pretty interesting stories from people about what happened to their broken product. Recently, someone told me their iPad got thrown from a hotel roof in Las Vegas. I would have liked to hear the rest of that story. He took responsibility for the damage and I let him know his options. The stories that make me facepalm are the ones people make up about their damaged device. While it’s pretty obvious when someone is lying, I can’t just call them out on it.

I had a customer who came in recently irate because his iPhone would not power on. His story was that he woke up one morning and the screen was black and wouldn’t power on. After trying to connect the iPhone to power, I noticed a rice grain in the lightning port (urban legend has it that this household staple can “dry” your waterlogged device) and then saw the liquid contact indicator was tripped. I asked if the iPhone had been damaged by liquid and he insisted nothing happened. Opening the device, it was clear it had been submerged in liquid and I was able to show photos of the corrosion. He insisted it was our fault and we should replace it under the warranty. *facepalm* (We didn’t replace it.)

2. Do you check to see if a phone is jailbroken before you give warranty services — even if it is something as simple as replacing broken headphones? How do you check?

We really aren’t seeing too many jailbroken iPhones these days. If I determine a device is jailbroken, it voids the warranty. However, with some issues there really isn’t a way to tell if a device is jailbroken. If the device won’t power on for whatever reason or users restore it with iTunes and then bring it in for service there’s really no way to tell.

3. What kind of discounts do you get? 

I get a personal discount on Apple products and a smaller discount for family and friends with some limitations. We receive varied discounts on third-party products. Every three years we can also buy a Mac for $500 off or an iPhone (device only) or iPad for $250 off including our personal discount. There are also the perks of Apple’s software and many third-party software discounts or freebies. 50 Gigabytes of free iCloud space makes it a little easier to say yes to backing up my iOS devices on iCloud. I wish I used the discounts more often, but when I do I save big.

Apple recently rose above Coca-Cola to become the most valuable brand in the world according to Interbrand, a corporate identity and brand consulting company that ranks companies on criteria including financial performance.

One of the things that stands out about the Cupertino company is its resistance to gamification. Gamification is turning work into play – any activity where you collect points, get a ranking and get something in return. And most of us are all too happy to play along, turning our daily lives into an epic quest for popularity or to get something more (anything!) than what we actually pay for.

You might start your day out putting a latte on your Starbucks Rewards Card, so that in addition to getting caffeinated you’re also on the way to free refills or food. While you’re waiting for the barista, you check your Twitter feed. How many new followers you have you got? Has your Klout score – whatever that really is – gone up? You stop to get gas for the commute to work – the first screen at the pump asks whether you’re a Safeway Club member. Are you? Then your full tank might earn discounts on that ciabatta you buy on the way home. At work, you book your conference tickets with the airlines you have the tallied the most frequent flier miles on, compare “likes” on your Facebook posts and get lunch with a Groupon.

It comes as a relief – to me, at least – that Apple doesn’t do loyalty programs, points schemes or offer fire sales.

Apple wants to sell you insanely great devices, that’s it. They sell on the strength of the product, not something else they throw in for good measure to make it seem more appealing or a better deal. They run very few contests  – like the iTunes $10,000 blowout for the 10 billionth download – and have never offered rewards cards. Apple has long offered discounts to schools, but that’s about it. The MacBooks, iPods, iPhones do not ever go “on sale,” in the way that other companies slash prices when products head down the inevitable road to obsolescence.

Compare this to Coke, which topped the brand list for 13 years in a row before falling flat to Apple. Coke has a website, intended to make its product go down better with worried parents, called “My Coke Rewards School Donations” program. If you participate, the Atlanta-based corporation will “donate points to your school, so it can get rewards like art supplies and sports equipment, and support all the ways kids play.” Sounds good right?

But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out astutely in “Antifragile,”  you only need marketing for things that no one wants or needs. Coke (or Pepsi, he adds) are in the “business of selling you sugary water…causing diabetes and making diabetes vendors rich thanks to their compensatory drugs.” So they must “dress up their companies with a huge marketing apparatus with images that fool the drinker.”

I would add that gamification is only necessary for stuff that no one really wants or needs, too. In the case of the Coke rewards program, for example, you are buying Coke to earn points so that the fizzy drinks company donates sports equipment to your child’s school. It would certainly be easier to buy sports equipment for your school directly than stocking up on Coke, collecting and turning in the points then waiting for the corporation to buy the equipment for you. The “money for nothing” aspect of gamification that we now accept everywhere makes it more difficult to see what we’re actually getting in return for purchases.

Fortunately, Apple doesn’t bother. And it’s probably for our own good. A few years back, an April fool’s joke proposed an Apple loyalty scheme that involved getting a company tattoo in exchange for a lifetime 25% discount.  Given the fierce loyalty that the company inspires, they might go bankrupt if they tried to honor it.

I came home from work to find my sons and their friends killing a prostitute with a baseball bat.

I was horrified. They were laughing their heads off.

But they were right and I was wrong. It was funny. They were just having some taboo fun. Their reaction was super healthy, and I’m not at all worried about what they were doing.

They weren’t supposed to get hold of my copy of Grand Theft Auto. I’d hidden it away; but not very well. They’re in their early teens, and too young, I felt, for the adult pleasures of the GTA franchise.

Not only are there prostitutes in the game. You can kill them. And killing them, for a kid, is a source of amazed amusement that you can do such things. It’s like finding dad’s Playboy’s under the bed, only worse. It’s naughty. Transgressive. I still kinda regret that they played it, but I am relieved by their reaction to it.

The fact that they were squealing with delight and laughing their heads off at the ability to do something so outrageous was a very clear and gratifying affirmation of their emerging humanity. I’d have been worried if they had been silently and grimly killing off the other characters.

Oddly, it’s the non-violent games that turn them into little monsters. They got Rock Band for Christmas, and they were soon attacking each other with the plastic instruments. One of my boys smashed his brother over the head with a guitar in frustration. Wii tennis has resulted in several controllers thrown against the wall. Candy Crush induces epic rages fits. My wife and I concluded that it’s true what say: video games make kids violent.

But it’s not the content of the games that morphs them into little rage monsters. It’s the mechanics of the game. They get frustrated when a sibling screws up a song, or they are killed before the end of a level.

It’s not blasting zombies’ heads off that makes them violent. It’s frustration with the game itself, the inability to complete a task or challenge.

They encounter these same frustrations in every aspect of their lives: with homework and classmates, playing soccer or being told to brush their teeth. Frustration and rage are a normal part of our makeup. I’m consumed by it whenever I drive to Safeway.

I believe that games are an important learning environment. Better that my kids try to deal with their rage while mashing buttons now than behind the wheel of a car in a few years.

As Rob Lefebvre reports in this week’s issue, there’s a new generation of games called “empathy games” designed to help us understand other people better and hopefully make us nicer to be around.

In a roundabout way, I think GTA has a similar effect. GTA’s not Shakespeare, but it incorporates elements of good literature and cinema – complex story-lines, character development, moral choices, atmosphere, and sometimes jaw-dropping beauty.

The moral choices are gleefully the wrong moral choices, but choices they are. My daughter, the eldest of the lot, is a great example of this. When she plays GTA, she drives within the lines and stops for red lights. She gets pleasure from following the rules, not breaking them.

GTA has much more to contribute than the gleeful killing of streetwalkers. It’s a sly and fascinating satire of America, courtesy of its Scottish developers, who are obviously both amused and appalled by this country. My kids are fans of Colbert and Breaking Bad, too. They get it.

This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.

Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.

We had the sense that in some ways, we’re talking even more about Steve Jobs than we ever did. Then again, we’re called Cult of Mac and our vision of things has a certain, shall we say, focus.

So we checked out a database called Newsbank to see if our hunch was right. After searching nearly 70,000 U.S. publications from 1999 to 2013 (just up to October 4, mind you) to see how many articles featured Steve Jobs in the headline, we feel pretty vindicated.

Back in 1999, the year Jobs introduced the new Power Mac G3 and the color iMacs and “starred” in TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, the Apple co-founder headlined about 1,000 articles.

The number remained steady with about a thousand articles a year until 2005, when it bumped up to around 2,500. That was the year when iTunes expanded to include TV shows and music videos and Steve unveiled the new fifth-generation iPod that plays music, photos and video.

The number of news articles dedicated to Jobs nearly tripled by 2007, with the advent of the iPhone. In 2011 with his passing, it peaked to over 15,000 articles. That number hasn’t dipped to under 5,000 articles since. And we have a feeling it won’t for some time to come.

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

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

Gold iPhone 5s units have been in low supply, but our Genius dishes tips on how to swap a space gray 5s for gold one, along with what it’s like to work at the Apple Store and how to get iLife for iOS free, even if you haven’t bought a new iDevice in years. 

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Although he was a billionaire and a legendary jerk, Steve Jobs could be surprisingly accessible and even friendly.

He might take your family photo, dress up like Frankenstein for a haunted house or tell a group of interns that he spends his free time bonking his wife.

Here are some of my favorite stories and anecdotes about everyday encounters with Jobs.

After leaving my job at Apple, I dropped in for lunch one day. I was exiting the main building, Infinite Loop One, and just ahead of me was Steve Jobs, walking with the usual spring in his step that never seemed to go away even as he started looking more frail. Bumping into Steve was a surprisingly common occurrence for such a large company as Apple. Steve was heading towards a car parked next to the curb with its door open, waiting for him. If you want to see where Steve Jobs’s tombstone rests, take a look at this piece on steve jobs tombstone.

A family was standing near the Apple sign outside the building, a common site for people to take photos on their pilgrimages to Apple. The father turned to Steve as he passed close by and asked, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind taking our photo?”

Steve paused for a moment as an iPhone was extended to him, realizing that they didn’t seem to know who he was. With a hint of enthusiasm, he said “Sure!” as he took the iPhone into his hands.

Steve took a great deal of care composing the photo, backing up a few steps several times, tapping the iPhone screen to lock focus, then said “Smile!” as he snapped the photo, grinning a little bit himself to encourage the family to follow suit.

He handed back the iPhone and they said “Thank you, sir” as Steve stepped into his car, closed the door and was driven away. The family looked at the photo that Steve had taken and all agreed that it looked great. Then the iPhone was pocketed and they were on their way.

And that was the last time I saw Steve Jobs.

Chris Hynes, Oct 7, 2011

Before I met the wife I had a girlfriend named Rebecca. Rebecca had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was a rough time in her life and she was very depressed by it, even though chemotherapy was healing her over time.Rebecca was a big fan of Pixar films.[…]

I sent a letter to Steve Jobs telling him about Rebecca and her situation. I asked for an autograph for her, hoping that could be something positive for her and encourage some positivity. I never thought I would get a reply, but i thought it was worth a try.

A week later I receive a package in the mail. In this thick envelope was a letter from Steve Jobs speaking of his cancer fight and how he wished Rebecca a quick recovery.

Also in this envelope was six Pixar prints signed by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Mike Doctor, and Joe Ranft (a fellow cancer sufferer). Each of these men had written a letter to Rebecca wishing her well.

Jobs did not have to go to this kind of trouble, but he did anyway. Steve Jobs was not a man known for his public charity and many people think he was driven by selfishness and greed. But this act goes against that idea for me. This was most certainly a positive, selfless, and charitable act.

Kristopher Wright, Quora, Oct 6, 2011

One of my friends did an internship at Apple. Apparently Apple has a day where the interns get to meet Steve Jobs (this was obviously a few years back) and ask him questions.

Two questions that were asked stuck in her mind:

1.“What do you wish for the most?”Steve Jobs:“I wish people would stop asking me stupid questions.”

2.“What do you do in your free time?”

Steve Jobs:“I f*** my wife.”

Dan Zhang, Quora, Dec 29, 2011

Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. […] I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”

At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.

Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.

And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget: “You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”

Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.

Michell Smith, Quora, Oct 24, 2012

In 1988, I was self-employed as a recruiter and had referred a number of candidates to Steve at NeXT Computer, which he subsequently hired. I had also worked at Sun Microsystems as a contract recruiter. In September of that year, Steve invited me to his offices on Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto for an informal interview. He was 45 minutes late. As soon as Steve led me into his office and closed the door, he turned and said, “You recruited for Sun and Sun hires shitty people.”

“Well,” I retorted, “You hired the ones Sun didn’t want.”

At that point, Steve cracked a big smile and exclaimed, “Touche!”

After that, we had a nice chat for about twenty minutes. During this time, a crowd of NeXT employees gathered and paced outside. When Steve opened the door to escort me out, he was mobbed like a celebrity, while I was shoved aside.

As I was about to exit the lobby, I heard Steve call out my name. I turned and saw Steve bending down and waving to me, childlike. I walked away thinking to myself, “That guy can be a real jerk, but he sure is charming.”

Bill Lee, Quora, Dec 10, 2012

Growing up I was a huge Apple fan-boy (fine, still am.) The first NY Apple store in Soho opening was probably the coolest thing that happened to me between the ages 6 and 12. For a while I would spend almost every weekend there.

Every year for halloween I was a Mac, and I made a habit of shaving the Apple logo into my head to celebrate every OS launch.

My neighbor Brooke mentioned that Steve Jobs, busy as he is, always reads email sent to his public address.

I think I was around 10 or 12, and I sent a very enthusiastic and grammatically incorrect message including a picture of my shaved head [with an Apple logo in the back].

Apparently he forwarded it to the head of Public Relations, Katie [Cotton], and I got invited to the opening of the 5th Avenue Cube. I can never thank them enough. This was probably the high point of my childhood.

Allen Paltrow, Oct 6, 2011

[…] He almost ran me over. As I walked back from the campus fitness center, a silver Mercedes S-Class launched a wheel onto the sidewalk and nearly took me out. I whipped around and threw a dirty look at the driver. The door opened, and the driver spat an expletive at the curb as he exited.

I recognized the face immediately. It’s him, I thought. Oh God, he’s pissed. […] I kept walking. DO NOT ENGAGE, I thought. DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. But I couldn’t help myself. He kept walking briskly behind me, staring at the ground, visibly irritated about his car and whatever made him come into the office.

After I looked back for the third or fourth time, he cracked a smile that said, This kid doesn’t even have the balls to talk to me. It was a week before Macworld New York. I took a deep breath and spoke.”Ready for the show?”

He looked up and smiled for real. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of great stuff. It’s going to be fun.”

“Well, I grew up in New York. Say hi for me.”

Another smile. “OK.”

He walked past me and held the IL1 lobby door open. Steve Jobs. Holding the door for me. What?

That moment changed my life, and other former and current employees surely have moments like it. Whatever Steve was upset about that day was almost certainly more serious than anything I have faced in my career. Yet he still had the good sense to give me a smile and an act of courtesy. It taught me to never lose perspective and never forget who you’re dealing with, no matter what else is going on.

Matt Drance, Oct 7, 2011

I was an intern and one day the head of the intern program gathered the almost 100 interns into the Town Hall auditorium in Infinite Loop 4 for a “surprise guest speaker” that wasn’t really much of a surprise: Steve Jobs.

The meeting had no agenda but I had a hunch that when Steve (everyone who has ever worked at Apple just calls him “Steve”) ended his remarks there would be a Q&A session.

[…] Steve got to about his 4th question from the audience and by this point almost every single intern had their hand up. [Steve pointed to me] I was nervous. “Steve, many years ago you left Apple to start NeXT. But recently you returned to Apple. Why did you come back to Apple?” […]

“When I was trying to decide whether to come back to Apple or not I struggled. I talked to a lot of people and got a lot of opinions. And then there I was, late one night, struggling with this and I called up a friend of mine at 2 a.m. I said, ‘should I come back, should I not?’ and the friend replied, ‘Steve, look. I don’t give a fuck about Apple. Just make up your mind’ and hung up. And it was in that moment that I realized I truly cared about Apple.”

[The friend Steve called was Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO]

Jonathan Berger, Aug 25, 2011

As the conversation went: “I hear you’re not really one to give autographs, but I just gotta ask….will you sign my iPod? It’s fine if you don’t want to. I’m not normally one to even ask for autographs.”

Steve: *chuckling* “It’s quite alright. You heard that about me?? Well, I wouldn’t say that I don’t like giving autographs, I guess I was never comfortable with the idea solely taking credit for something, which is to me what an autograph might imply. To be honest, I think I’m the last person who should sign something. A writer signing a book I can understand, but I think if anybody within our company should sign something, it should be members from our R&D team and all the others responsible for product innovation. It’s unfortunate that they all can’t receive the same level recognition. But I suppose it’s easier this way though?… you would need a pretty big iPod to fit all those signatures”.

eBay listing, Dec 29, 2011

I wanted to share with you a memory of my friend Steve Jobs, a memory that in the days since his passing has come to represent how great of a guy he was, and how good he was to me.

I first met Steve in 2003, over the phone, when I cold-called him to tell him I was a devout fan of all things Apple and would love to be involved in whatever way I could with the company. I remember the call extremely well; me on my hotel room bed, fidgeting and doodling and circuitously explaining that all I could really explain was that I wanted to have a relationship. I got nervous at one point and started second guessing myself and my intentions for calling, to which Steve replied “don’t worry, I have a very good bullshit detector.” I found it very comfortable to be myself around him from that moment on.

The bullshit detector must have stayed silent because In the following months and years I was invited to help introduce products and software at several Macworld keynote addresses in San Francisco. I got to know him a bit in our time together on and off the stage. I remember Steve as being almost iridescent; one second he would be talking to you about “architecture” as it related to digital data flow, and then in a microsecond turn his head a different way and mention Bob Dylan or a killer sushi place and just be the biggest rock star on the planet.

in Spring of 2008, RIM (makers of the Blackberry) approached me about sponsoring my upcoming summer tour, and as I got closer to accepting the offer I knew I had to call Steve to give him the heads up. I explained to him that the money they offered would allow for a better stage design and an all around higher level of production. I also told him that the contract with Blackberry would mean using their products exclusively. He thanked me for calling him, praised the people at Blackberry and told me he would send me an iPhone to at least play with on the bus.

I accepted the offer with Blackberry, and in the months leading up to the July 29th release date, the iPhone became the most desired item on the planet. Everybody wanted one, and nobody had yet to see one in person. It was mythical. That day I was playing an ampitheatre in Indianapolis, and sometime in the afternoon the production office got a call over the radio that a sales associate from the local Apple Store was standing at the outermost gate of the venue with something addressed to me. A few minutes later someone knocked on my dressing room door and handed me an Apple Store bag. Inside was an iPhone, and taped to it was a card; it belonged to Steve Jobs, CEO, 1 Inifinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Handwritten on the backside of the card was one word: “Enjoy!”

Just the greatest thing.

I used to think that when you died, everything you ever learned and amassed along the way in your life just stopped existing, all of it returned into the universe and repurposed for something else completely. Steve’s passing made me realize that can’t be true, because every bit of energy and intellect he spent his life to collect is still here with us, as vital as it was when it was with him. I can’t think of a better way to measure a life well lived.

John Mayer’s Tumblr, Oct 20, 2011

I once forwarded an email from Steve Jobs to a friend, adding a snarky comment. Steve’s reply informed me that I’d replied, not forwarded. Steve was extremely cool about it. He said he’d been emailed FAR worse things accidentally. And many not so accidentally…

Pixar director Lee Unkrich, @leeunkrich, Twitter, Oct 11, 2011

Here in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs isn’t just an icon, he’s also the guy who lives down the street.

I first met Steve years ago at a backyard pool party. I was so flummoxed by the off chance I was breathing in his DNA, I could barely say a word. I am sure I made a winning first impression as I stumbled over my own name when we were introduced.

I watched as he swam in the pool with his son. He seemed like a regular guy, a good dad having fun with his kids.

The next time I met him was when our children attended school together. He sat in on back-to-school night listening to the teacher drone on about the value of education (wait, isn’t he one of those high-tech gods who didn’t even graduate from college?) while the rest of us sat around pretending having Steve Jobs in the room was totally normal.[…]

It was at Halloween not long after when I realized he actually knew my name (yes, my name!). He and his wife put on a darn scary haunted house […]. He was sitting on the walkway, dressed like Frankenstein. As I walked by with my son, Steve smiled and said, “Hi Lisen.” My son thought I was the coolest mom in town when he realized The Steve Jobs knew me. Thanks for the coolness points, Steve.

From then on, when I saw him holding his executive meetings in our neighborhood, I didn’t hesitate to smile and say hi. Steve always returned the favor, proving he may be a genius, but he is also a good neighbor.

In time, things changed. The walks were less frequent, the gait slower, the smile not so ready. Earlier this year when I saw Steve and his wife walking down our street holding hands, I knew something was different. Now, so does the rest of the world.

While Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and CNET continue to drone on about the impact of the Steve Jobs era, I won’t be pondering the MacBook Air I write on or the iPhone I talk on. I will think of the day I saw him at his son’s high school graduation. There Steve stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, his smile wide and proud, as his son received his diploma and walked on into his own bright future leaving behind a good man and a good father who can be sure of the rightness of this, perhaps his most important legacy of all.

Lisen Stromberg, Aug 29, 2011

I remember being at a talk he gave shortly after returning in 1997 as Interim CEO. A bunch of us employees (I was at ATG at the time) were in Town Hall in Building 4 at Infinite Loop to hear him, and he was fired up. Talked a lot about how Apple was going to completely turn things around and become great.

It was a tough time at Apple — we were trading below book value on the market — our enterprise value was actually less than our cash on hand. And the rumors were everywhere that we were going to be acquired by Sun. Someone in the audience asked him about Michael Dell’s suggestion in the press a few days previous that Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders, and as I recall, Steve’s response was: “Fuck Michael Dell.” Good god, what a message from a CEO!

He followed it up by admitting that the stock price was terrible (it was under $10, I think — pretty sure it was under $2 split-adjusted), and that what they were going to do was reissue everyone’s options on the low price, but with a new 3 year vest.

He said, explicitly: “If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.” I think it’s not an overstatement to say that just about everyone in the room loved him at that point, would have followed him off a cliff if that’s where he led.

John Lilly, Oct 9, 2011

I was at a Bjork concert at Shoreline back in 2007 when I met an engineer at Apple called Skip Haughay. We stayed in touch and I visited him a few weeks later at the Apple campus, the day before iPhone launched. There was an incredible buzz around Campus and we saw Jobs walking tall with his iPhone. Skip ushered me out to the parking lot, said “I could be fired for this” and showed me the iPhone the day before it launched.

That evening, Skip calls me to say that “My date has cancelled, do you want to join me at the iPhone launch party?” It still ranks as maybe the dumbest question anyone has asked me in my life… and this was only a few weeks after we met. I raced to get ready and joined him at the exploratorium in San Francisco.

The big surprise was that Apple was so secretive, that most employees hadn’t seen or touched an iPhone themselves (Skip was one of the few entrusted with one). Since I’d bought an iPhone earlier in the day, many of the employees wanted to touch and play with mine. So I spent much of the evening giving iPhone demonstrations to other Apple employees!

Then there was Steve Jobs on the stage. The only private speech I’ve ever seen him give. He thanked all the Apple employees and particularly the partners and families of all the people working at Apple. He was gracious to a fault… it sounded like he’d matured a great deal from when I’d read Insanely Great. He was mesmerizing and quite clearly he cared, not just about the product but also the people.
I saw Jony Ive and spoke with him briefly. Then I also saw Steve Jobs. Skip was hesitant to say hello, so I just went up to him myself. Steve responded with a “I’ll talk to you in a moment” and then shortly thereafter walked off. It might’ve been a casual brush off but honestly I wasn’t bothered at all. Skip just laughed at the whole thing. It was one of the most amazing evenings of my life.

I’ll never forget the passion, ingenuity and spirit of the group that evening. All of which was so wonderfully embodied in Skip. The two of us stayed friends for many years afterwards. Just recently, my girlfriend and I visited him in Morgan Hill on his farm. Skip said it was “The Farm that Jobs built.” He was in his element with nature and the farm animals. I was delighted to see him so happy.

Skip passed away himself only a month ago (https://www.mercurynews.com/crime…). So for it to be followed by Steve Jobs just compounded the tragedy. While Steve Jobs was an icon, I will most remember Skip as my friend.

Bruno Bowden, Quora, Oct 11, 2011

My wife and me were walking in downtown Palo Alto one afternoon when I notice a man walking towards us. I immediately recognized Jobs and nudged my wife. Nobody noticed him as we walked down the pavement The year must have been 2003 and I had just ordered a pair of Keen sandals off the Keen website. Back then Keen was not well known and you hardly saw anybody wearing Keens.

As Jobs got closer, there was moment when he looked at my feet and noticed the Keens I was wearing. He was wearing an identical pair. He looked up at me and gave me a smile and a nod. He then walked passed us and stopped to take a look at the Apple store from the other side of the street. A minute later he turned and continued on his way.

Not much of a story at all…..but something I will never forget.

Nikhil Sohoni, Quora, June 5, 2013

I had left a company called Taligent with a few other folks in the mid-90s and we had been cooped up in a small office in a strip mall in Los Altos working on the idea we thought was pretty cool.

The product was a browser with built-in multimedia/animation support so you could build the sort of full-screen animated experiences you had on CD-ROMs (except with markup) and transmit it across the web. This was in the days when HTML barely had support for gifs and way before Flash, so we thought it could open up a lot of new possibilities.

Once we had a decent running demo I started showing it around. At some point I had the notion that I’d like to get feedback from Jobs. I had been a big fan — one of my first applications in college was on an Apple IIe and my first consulting job ever was working on the C++ compiler at Apple in the 80’s.

He was at NeXT by this time. So I wrote him there and mentioned what we’d been working on and asked for advice. To my surprise I got a note back from his secretary saying Steve wanted to meet.

I showed up at the NeXT offices a week later and was shown to a meeting room down the hall from his office. I set up my demo and waited. And waited. He walked in 1/2 hour late, put his feet up on the table and asked me what I had. I introduced myself and mentioned that a couple of the engineers were ex-Apple people. Then I ran through the demo, stopped, and asked him what he thought.

For the next half an hour he went on to rant pretty much non-stop… about the arrogance of Apple (!!!), the quality of their products, and anything unsavory you could think of. There were a lot of ‘you Apple people’ in there. I tried to break in and mention that we weren’t really related to Apple (except the demo was running on a Mac Powerbook) but there was no stopping him.

“Boy, what a dick,” I remember thinking. It went on and on.

At some point a secretary stuck her head in and said he had a call. So I figured that was that. Instead he asked if I could stick around. I remember hesitating for a second, thinking if I really wanted to hear more of that abuse. But for some reason I said yes. He walked out and I sat there. And sat. And sat. For a good 30-45 minutes, I sat there and got more and more steamed about this predicament. Do I pack up and walk out or do I wait and hear more about how Apple sucks?

Then he comes back in. I was sitting down. He gets in front of the whiteboard and starts drawing notes. For the next I-don’t-know-how-long he mapped out precisely how the product could be rolled out, the strategy for taking it to market, how it should be positioned, what other parts would be needed to fill in the gaps, all the way down to the features that should be taken out or added. It was the most amazing, useful, spot-on, and entertaining display of product management erudition I’d ever seen. He completely understood the product, the space, and what it could be used for.

I remember asking him if he wanted a job :-)

We both laughed at that. I remember him saying some nice things about the idea and the product itself. There was no trace of the nasty anti-Apple bile left. I thanked him profusely and he asked me to stay in touch. I walked out with my head still buzzing in the clouds.

As it happened it turned out my ex-Apple cohorts weren’t too happy with my having gone over to see him either. There were choice words about Jobs, so the feelings seemed to be mutual.

A few months later word came that Apple was acquiring NeXT and the rest is history.

My cohorts went on to out-vote me and eventually the company got sold to Microsoft. The product was never released publicly and they all went to work up at Redmond.

I still remember that meeting with Jobs to this day.

A few years ago I was working on another software product that I thought could benefit from his advice. By then he had been back at Apple and the iPhone was a huge hit. I kept holding off until the product was a bit more solid before sending him a note. Then I read that he was sick and a little while later he passed away.

I really wished I could have shown him the new product. I imagine he would have made me wait around for a long while then taken me on a rant on how great Apple products are :-)

And then he would have no doubt gotten up and shown, once again, exactly how he would have done it.

Ramin Firoozye, Quora, July 17, 2013

Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. Larry Ellison had floated the idea of a hostile takeover of the company, but it seemed to some of us Apple watchers that then-CEO Gil Amelio’s turnaround plan might work.

I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”

At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.

Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.

And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget:

“You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”

Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.

Michell Smith, Quora, Oct 23, 2012

This was in June ’10 just a few days before Apple’s WWDC. I was working late out of a cafe and was testing one of my apps on the iPad. This was in India and at that time the iPad hadn’t been officially launched here, so was something that would definitely catch someone’s eye.

There was this girl sitting on the next table and was pretty curious about this new thing, moments later she stopped by and we had a nice chat about how cool the iPad is, and was pretty impressed that I could actually write an app that could run on it.

I went home and before going to bed wrote a short email to Steve about how an iPad got a girl interested in me and almost forgot about it until…. Days later, it was his WWDC keynote and I was following a few live blogs that night as I always do (I was GMT +5:30), then suddenly I saw something that was very familiar, it was my email that Steve displayed on the huge screen behind him. He said “It is magical, I know it because I got this email: I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in me!.” “So there’s proof.”

Chaitanya Pandit, Quora, Oct 27, 2012

About five years ago, one evening, just as I had sat down with my wife and daughter at Saravana Bhavan, a South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Sunnyvale, in walked Steve Jobs with his wife and son. They sat down on the table behind us. It was a busy school night and the place was packed with loud kids and hungry Indians vying for attention of the woefully inadequate staff. Like the clientele at this hangout – mostly Indian techies looking for cheap but authentic food – the staff is also authentic Indian: many speak limited English only and are not aware of the rich and famous of the Silicon Valley.

So, it was with great amusement, we watched Steve raise his hand several times to attract the attention of the waiter, who summarily ignored him. As the only white guy in the restaurant, we thought he would be instantly recognized and served with special attention. Instead, he had the worst table in the house. A bored waiter passed plastic menu cards at his family without giving a second glance. Eventually, he did get served with the mass efficiency of an overworked staff. And, no one bothered him during his dinner either.

My wife and I observed in awe as Steve and his family enjoyed a quiet meal in the riotous, inexpensive place in the heart of Silicon Valley. It dawned on us that no one in the restaurant had recognized Steve in his low-key attire and stubble. At the end, when no one came to his table to present the check, Steve rose up, dropped a few cash notes on the table and walked out, as the server wiped his table.

Just then, the manager walked by, and I asked him, “Did you know that was Steve Jobs?” He smiled and gave me the Indian head shake – a cross between yes and no. To this day, I don’t know what he meant.

Anurag Wadehra, Quora, Oct 27, 2012

I was an intern at Apple in 2004. I saw Steve Jobs in IL3, on the second level. He was just walking away from a couch. I said hello, folded my hands and told him how much I admired him. I then told him how much I learn at Apple, and how I would love to learn from him. I said to him – “Teach me, teach me.”

He fired me on the spot.

Anonymous, Quora, Oct. 25, 2012

At a recent Self-Realization Fellowship Sunday morning service, Brother Bhumananda, a Self Realization Fellowship minister, said that a few years back the phone rang up at Self Realization headquarters (in Los Angeles).

The caller said, “This is Steve Jobs.” The person answering initially thought it was a prank call, but it really was Steve Jobs calling personally to say, “I want to get permission to put ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ on iTunes. It’s my favorite book!”

Steve Jobs said that he had read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ over 30 times. It was the first audiobook to become available on iTunes.

Milton Drepaul, Quora, May 1, 2012

A bunch of us were in the old screening room in Point Richmond with Steve early the morning of the Pixar IPO. We were watching the financial news for that PIXR ticker to go by. So we witnessed the moment that Steve became a billionaire. Quite the payoff for $50 million and almost a decade of hanging in there.

He didn’t say anything. No fist pumps or whoops. But I’ve never seen him happier. That was one beaming smile.

Craig Good, Quora, Oct. 11, 2011

I met Steve Jobs randomly while working as an intern at Apple in the summer of 2010. I had stepped into an elevator on the main Apple campus when, just as the door was closing, Steve Jobs strolled in. He saw that I had an intern badge on, and asked me what I was working on over the summer.

When he asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I tell him what I was working on, and risk getting in trouble for disclosing what I was working on (as we had been instructed not to do during orientation), or should I just tell him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him?

I went with the latter, telling him, “Sorry, but I’m not supposed to tell you.” Steve flashed a smile, chuckled a little, and stepped out of the elevator.

Michael Chang, Quora, Oct. 16, 2012

This story was told to me by the not too bright guy who used to run the Palo Alto retail store at Helio (Helio wireless carrier), a now-extinct Korean smartphone company that combined a music player with a phone. This was in 2007, right when the first iPhone came out. Given that their store had opened directly across the street from the existing Palo Alto Apple Store on University Avenue, a lot of people were curious as to what Helio did and how their product compared to the iPhone. One day the manager noticed a guy wearing a black turtleneck, blue jeans, and glasses staring at the “Helio: don’t call it a phone” window display outside the store for quite some time. When the manager came out to ask if he could help him or give him a demo of the product inside, the guy in the black turtleneck stuck his head in and peered into the store, but deliberately did not set his foot inside. It took some time, but finally he responded to the manager by shaking his head and saying the words “You guys just don’t get it, do you…” and continued walking down the street. The manager had no idea who this guy was and thought nothing of it.

Two weeks later, the same manager was inside the store giving a demo of the amazing Helio smartphone to some prospective customers when he was interrupted by someone at the door. It was the same guy in the black turtleneck and blue jeans. “You guys STILL just don’t get it, do you???” the guy said in an elevated voice from the entrance of the store. Then before the manager could respond, the guy was gone again.

The manager was visibly annoyed and said to his customers “Who is this guy and who the hell does he think he is???”

“That’s the founder of Apple,” replied the customers.

Suffice to say, Helio moved out of the retail store only a year later, replaced by a much more popular Lululemon store.

Mark Young, Quora, Nov 1, 2012

It was hard not to run into Steve Jobs if you spent anytime in downtown Palo Alto. While I never had a conversation with him, my chance encounters reminded me just how human this innovator was.

Once, I drove up behind his car on the way to Whole Foods. (pretty easy to spot his car, especially with his “license plate.”) As I drove up behind him, I could see the gas cap dangling from the side of his car. I tried to grab my phone to snap a picture before deciding that stalking him as he went into Whole Foods would be bad. Chalked it up to a mad genius sometimes forgetting the small stuff.

A month later, driving by his house, glanced to see his car parked out front and the GAS CAP DANGLING AGAIN.

Loved it. Not because it had some profound effect on me, but just because it showed me we’re all human. Even the brightest of us all.

Mark Hull, Quora, Oct 23, 2012

About ’82 or ’83, I and 5 others, including Steve, had dinner together in NYC. The now legendary, late Jay Chiat, then CEO of Chiat-Day Advertising, invited his client Steve, and his other client, Pioneer Electronics CEO Jack Doyle and his wife Ann, Pioneer’s ad manger, and me, Pioneer Senior VP Marketing and Product Development, to dinner.

Never mind the fact that much older Jay and Jack had accomplished so much more at that point than had Steve, he dominated the conversation, brusquely brushing aside anything he didn’t agree with, which, as I recall, was most everything said by the rest of us.

Dinner was over and while we waited for desert, Ann lit up a cigarette (remember this was the early ’80’s in NYC), holding it away and blowing smoke away from the rest of us at the table. Steve, who was seated next to Ann, gave no indication that this bothered him. He simply went on talking animatedly as he had all dinner.

At one point Ann put her lit cigarette in an ashtray the opposite side of Steve. He never looked at it but must have seen her put it down because without so much as a glance toward her or the cigarette, without breaking from whatever topic he was currently holding forth on at that moment, he reached across her, picked the cigarette up from the ashtray, and dropped it in her half full water glass.

I can still see the stunned looks on everyone’s face except Steve who continued to educate the rest of us on . . . I have no idea.

No doubt Steve was a genius given all he and Apple, under his direction, later accomplished. However based on what I’ve heard about him personally, and witnessed that night, he’s not a person I would care to spend time with. One dinner was more than enough.

William Matthies, Quora, June 28, 2013

I bumped into Steve at the Palo Alto Whole Foods near both of our homes. He was in front of me in line paying for his groceries. It was the express checkout and he was wearing his traditional black turtle-neck. This was back in the early 2000s.

Here was a very wealthy, smart guy arguing with the cashier about what the correct change was for his purchase. He was demanding that he got another quarter ($0.25) for his change. This discussion went on for several minutes and held up the line so much that everyone behind him (including us) were getting annoyed.I guess Steve had to be right. The cashier gave him a quarter and he walked away.

Roy Pereira, Quora, Oct. 24, 2012

In the early 1980s, Steve used to eat lunch at “The Good Earth,” the now-defunct Cupertino restaurant where I waitressed when I was sixteen.

I remember this nerdy young guy who always ordered the Good Earth tostada, served in a whole-wheat tortilla and topped with sprouts. He smiled shyly at me when he asked for more Good Earth tea and drank gallons of the stuff.

Steve always sat alone, devouring books and manuals way beyond my limited teenage understanding along with his food. […]

I called my mom the moment I heard Steve Jobs had died. She was sitting in front of her iMac, from which she has a view of the Cupertino Valley, The Apple headquarters nestled in the middle like a brilliant white palace. She was crying.”There was a rainbow one day,” she sobbed, “that ended right on top of Apple.”

My mom snapped a photograph. “I wanted to send it to him!” she added. “I meant to send it to him. And now,” she stopped suddenly, struggling for control. “Now, he’s dead.”

Suzanne Rico, Oct. 7, 2011

I miss Steve Jobs. He made tech reporting a lot of fun. The world of technology is dull without him.

Larry Ellison skips his own conference to watch the America’s Cup? Boring! Steve Ballmer steps down from Microsoft without taking anyone with him? Yawn.

Life was never so dull when Jobs was around. He said crazy stuff. He was rude to people. He insulted competitors. He was unpredictable.

Jobs was always up to something. He was either trying to destroy historical landmarks (like his derelict Woodside mansion) or put them up (Apple’s spaceship campus). He could turn a kill-me-now planning meeting at Cupertino city council into something fascinating.

His public presentations were always interesting. I went to almost every one from the late 1990s onwards. I’d be lying if I said they were all great. Some were routine, although it was always amusing to see him get lathered up about small things, like sending email postcards from iPhoto. But they were often fascinating, and some felt important. His iPhone introduction in 2007 felt like history being made and I was thrilled to see it firsthand.

It’s been two years since he died and I miss the excitement he brought to tech. There was always a lot of drama around Jobs. Illegitimate children. Secret liver transplants. Coffeeshop dates with Google’s Eric Schmidt. Parking in handicapped spots.

People talked about him, and not always in a good way. He was constantly criticized. For most of his career, almost everything he did was doomed to failure by the press: the iMac, Apple retail stores, the iPod, the iPhone. Each was greeted with withering, dismissive criticism. It was only after the iPhone became a hit, around 2009, that the world woke up to his genius. He’s lionized now, of course, but for most of his life he was a loser (remember the NeXT years?) or a slick marketer who got lucky.

The last couple of years of his life, as Apple rode the iPhone and iPad explosion, Jobs tended to get all the credit. Now that he’s gone, Apple is doomed without him.

I’m not worried about the future of Apple. It’s still too early to tell, but by all outside measures the company is doing just fine. Nine million iPhones sold in a single weekend is not a sign of a company in trouble.

There’s been only one major executive departure –Scott Forstall, the man in charge of iOS– and few have mourned his passing. The iPhone’s Touch ID has the potential to be as revolutionary as iTunes or the App Store were when they launched. And there are signs of some very exciting products being cooked up in the design lab, especially a wearable iWatch that measures your biometrics. And I’d love to see an Apple TV that brought some smarts to the tube.

This past year I’ve been working on a book about Apple’s top designer, Sir Jonathan Ive. Ive is a genius and he’s responsible for a lot more of Apple’s success than he’s been given credit for. But the best stories belong to Jobs. He’s by turns fascinating, funny or horrifying. He was colorful. A huge character.

This issue of our Newsstand magazine collects a few stories about Jobs. As you’ll see, he wasn’t always a jerk. Some of these anecdotes show a rather kind and thoughtful man. Some portray a runaway monster. But none of them are boring.