This week: We’ll tell you why the 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference may be one of the most mundane on record. Plus, Apple pretty much confirms Apple TV will be your home’s digital hub; Facebook’s an impenetrable fortress with too much power; and the tale of a Bay Area woman who unknowingly junked her $200,000 Apple-1 computer … whoopsie!

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Show notes ahead, compadre.

This is your last chance to save serious cash on a lifetime of privacy protection from Blur, a protective case that charges your iPhone 6 and more, offered now at Cult of Mac Deals.

I saw my six pack for the first time at the age of 40. Prior to that, my abs had been hidden behind a thick layer of fat that I’d built up over years of living a sedentary geek lifestyle. The only exercise I got was racing to be first in line at the Apple Store for a product launch.

Then one day, a doctor told me I had cancer and my whole world changed. There’s nothing like a brush with death to make you take your health more seriously. Suddenly, I wanted to get fit, but true to my geek heritage, I would do it using my iPhone. Abs? There must be an app for that.

Download the latest Cult of Mac Magazine to find out what we’re all expecting from next week’s WWDC 2015, why we’re waiting for HomeKit’s killer app, what Kahney’s Korner has to say about the big Jony Ive promotion, a bit on our epic journey from hacked Facebook page to recovery, and check out an ‘Apple Watch Song’ fanboy anthem for the ages.

All that, plus product reviews, helpful tips, and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Tumblr has come up with its own version of Reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview series.

The new feature, called Answer Time, will let users ask anything they want of musicians, actors, activists, and other celebrities, with the replies appearing on the subject’s Tumblr page.

Pebble Watch fans have been absolutely freaking out on Twitter the last few days due to a delay with the Pebble Time app for iOS getting delayed in the App Store approval process.

After sitting in ‘pending approval’ since May 22nd, Pebble fans rallied around the #FreeOurPebbleTime hashtag to get their voices heard by Apple, but everyone can stop their whining, because the Pebble Time app for iPhone is finally available for download.

Starting today, Skype users in the U.S. and U.K. can start making calls directly from their browsers.

The Skype for Web beta makes the chat program available without having to download and install the program’s dedicated app.

To fly a drone, it can’t be too windy. But a windmill looks its best when wind is spinning its sails.

So the filmmakers at Voormedia in the Netherlands had to be patient for a perfect, cooperative wind — and they were rewarded on a recent sunny afternoon, filming the beautiful windmills near the Zaanse schans from the DJI Inspire drone.

Apple and Google boasted that they paid over $17 billion to app developers over the last year. What they left out is that they also made a tidy $7.3 billion off those sales, thanks to the 30/70 split pioneered by Steve Jobs with the launch of iTunes in 2003.

That split could coming to an end soon, though, according to a new report claiming Apple plans to make a departure from its old pricing formula in an effort to make Cupertino’s devices more appealing to media companies.

If you’re one of those word game fiends that has a list of Words With Friends games as long as your arm, you now can actually use that long arm to wear your games on your wrist.

Zynga just updated its hugely popular Words With Friends app to include Apple Watch features, so you never have to go another second without knowing when it’s your turn to spell “ZA” or “MUZJIKS” for the win.

When you’re choosing between Android and iOS, you also have to choose between the App Store and Google Play; apps are so important to us these days that they must come into consideration when we’re buying new mobile devices.

Android has caught up with and even overtaken the App Store in sheer number of apps, but Apple’s marketplace continues to rake in lots more revenue. But which offers better titles, a greater user experience, and more features?

In this week’s Friday Night Fight with Cult of Android versus Cult of Mac, we pit the App Store against Google Play to find out which is the best mobile marketplace.

Apple makes it easy for iPhone users to share their data with their Mac, but it’s not quite as simple for those of us with an Android. Thankfully, there’s now a handy third-party Mac hack called HoRNDIS that makes it incredibly easy to share your Android’s data connection over USB.

An upcoming improvement to Google’s web browser will empower it to “intelligently pause content” that isn’t crucial to the page, therefore saving your laptop battery a whole lot of grief.

You don’t need a formal photography education to make a pretty good snap. But sometimes, it would be nice to have a simple fix for a technical challenge without requiring a textbook or expensive software.

Take noise. In non-scientific terms, it’s the appearance that your pictures were taken in a sandstorm. It generally happens when you are shooting in low light. Lots of microscopic bits of colorful grain across your images.

The team at Macphun has created new software for Mac users with a series of simple sliders that let you take noise out of your photos. The aptly named Noiseless can have photos looking better with just a couple of intuitive steps.

During his January conference call with investors, Tim Cook said that 2015 would be ‘the year of Apple Pay’, and while Apple’s mobile wallet has already leapfrogged rivals like Google Wallet, a new survey of the top 100 retailers in the country found that Apple Pay still faces a long uphill battle.

Can’t Apple’s design guru catch a break? After Jony Ive received a well-deserved promotion to become Apple’s chief design officer, some pundits misinterpreted the happy news as a bad omen.

Our own Leander Kahney reads the tea leaves completely differently: Ive’s promotion is nothing but good news for Apple.

Here at Cult of Mac Deals, we rely on VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for ensuring that our online activity stays private, browsing securely even on public Wi-Fi, and accessing any app or video no matter where we are in the world. To that end, we’ve put together a collection of deals on some of our favorite ones. Keep reading to see which ones get our stamp of approval, and save up to 77%.

We’re just three days away from Tim Cook and the gang taking over San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Preparations for the big event have been underway all week, but crews are starting to wrap up pre-production — and the final WWDC 2015 banners are being unfurled.

Take a look:

The NBA Finals started last night, with LeBron James taking to the court in search of yet another championship ring. His team is taking on the Silicon Valley Golden State Warriors and, while Apple Senior VP Eddy Cue was all too happy to cheer on LeBron during the last two NBA championships, this year he’s defected to the home team — and giving King James hell.

If you need a solid gold smartphone to go with your Apple Watch Edition, look no further than HTC’s limited edition One M9.

Made out of 24-karat gold, the one-of-a-kind handset has been made to celebrate this weekend’s UEFA Champions League final — and it was photographed with an iPhone.

Apple is planning to use WWDC to spotlight the new streaming music service its been working on for year. It could be Apple’s biggest play in the music industry since the launch of iTunes, but according to a new report, Apple is still struggling to ink its deal with record labels.

Looking to buy a new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus from Apple on AT&T but don’t want to sign up for the carrier’s Next plan? Too damn bad.

Just days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega promised subsidized phones are going away, the company has completely removed subsidized options for the iPhone from the Apple Store as well.

Already bored of the band that came with your Apple Watch? Now’s the time to get a new one, because almost every band available from the Apple Online Store is now shipping in just one business day.

You’ve probably heard — repeatedly, from us — that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is happening in San Francisco next week. But that’s not the only show in town. The Alternative Developer Conference, aka AltConf, is running at the same time, right around the corner from the Moscone Center at the AMC Metreon.

It’s a more open and accessible convention than Apple’s, and that’s not just because it’s free.

“Alt has great information, but it has a lot more community feel where it’s not getting talked down to from the lectern and Apple, you’re getting talked to by your peers,” Jeff Kelley, iOS developer for Detroit Labs and author of Developing for Apple Watch, told Cult of Mac. “And everybody there is kind of on the same foot. Especially because it’s free. You can pay to get a reserved ticket this year, but you don’t have to pay to get in. Everybody is there because they love this stuff.”