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10 surprising things we learned about Tim Cook today

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Photo: Apple.
Fortune names Tim Cook the "world's greatest leader." Here's why. Photo: Apple

Tim Cook had enormous shoes to fill when he took over as Apple CEO. After Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, doubters questioned whether the Southern engineer could keep Apple relevant. But Cook has led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company — he might be even better at running the company than Jobs ever was.

Now Fortune has named Cook the “world’s greatest leader” and published a profile full of exclusive details about Cook’s journey as Apple CEO. In the interview, Cook reveals how he developed thick skin, why he’s giving all his money to charity, and the real reasons he opened up about his sexuality.

The massive profile is well worth a read, but we’ve picked out the most interesting bits for you below.

An actual wheel iPad gamers can get behind

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The KOLOS gaming wheel is for iPad gamers who want a more realistic and comfortable experience with driving games. Photo: KOLOS
The KOLOS gaming wheel is for iPad gamers who want a more realistic and comfortable experience with driving games. Photo: KOLOS

A game like Real Racing has sophisticated graphics that, combined with the motion sensors of an iPad, give you the sensation of being behind the wheel.

The only thing missing is the actual wheel.

Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev wants iPad users to have a more comfortable drive when they play anyone of the more than 450 tilt games.

The CEO of KOLOS, slavic for colossus, has developed a gaming wheel for the iPad that launches on Kickstarter today.

Energize your brain with REBUS, a stylish but absurd logic game

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New iOS game REBUS will get your brain firing on all cylinders. Photo: Jutiful
New iOS game REBUS will get your brain firing on all cylinders. Photo: Jutiful

This post is brought to you by Jutiful, creator of REBUS.

You know what a rebus is — a graphic puzzle representing a word or phrase. An example would be a letter “M” sitting atop the word “day”: “M” on “day” equals “Monday.”

REBUS, a new “absurd logic game” from Jutiful, is an app containing more than 100 rebuses (with more on the way). Solve these stylish word puzzles to collect achievements you can share with friends.

Twitter takes on Meerkat with live video app Periscope

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I asked my colleague Killian Bell to come up with an image to show the battle between Twitter and Meerkat. This is what he came up with. The monster. Photo: Cult of Mac
Twitter is hunting Meerkats. Well, sort of. Photo: Cult of Mac

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of Meerkat: the live-streaming social media phenomenon. Well, Twitter has too, because today it launched its own would-be Meerkat killer: a standalone live-streaming video app called Periscope.

Currently available only for iOS devices, the app was acquired by Twitter back in January for a reported $100 million. Unlike Meerkat, which works on the same disappearing media idea as Snapchat, Periscope allows users to save live streams and then replay them later.

Save big on extra storage for you Mac with the Nifty MiniDrive & more top accessories [Deals]

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CoM_Nifty

Your Mac computer is a precision device. Take care of it with quality made products designed to complement your Mac’s features, providing you with a more robust computing experience.

Take advantage of low prices and free US shipping for the Nifty MacBook MiniDrive, the ChugPlug Portable MacBook Power Pack, the Quirky ‘Space Bar’ Monitor Stand, and the Quirky Apple Accessory Bundle available now at Cult of Mac Deals.

Calling Aaron Muderick a putty magnet is not a stretch

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Crazy Aaron's Thinking Magnetic Putty smothers all it is attracted to. Photo: Ian Parks/YouTube
Crazy Aaron's Thinking Magnetic Putty smothers all it is attracted to. Photo: Ian Parks/YouTube

Aaron Muderick is grateful to the anonymous pioneering office worker who thought to populate his or her desk with toys.

Muderick was a software engineer when his go-to desk toy, Silly Putty, gave him a whole new career when the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s and the company that employed him went under.

The story behind the unique beginnings of “Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty” is even crazier than the chemistry that creates the luminescent and magnetic properties of his product.

Game Boy camera pictures look primitive — and that’s refreshing

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Towards the end of the life of the Game Boy player, Nintendo added a camera attachment. Photo: Solopress
Toward the end of the Game Boy's life, Nintendo added a camera attachment. Photo: Solopress

We turned up our noses at the first digital pictures because they didn’t look as good as film. The camera added to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1998 certainly didn’t make the case for a digital future.

The bulbous attachment recorded a fuzzy, postage-stamp-size, black-and-white image. That’s black and white with no gray shades in between.

If you wanted to share your photo, you could purchase a separate printing device that plugged into the Game Boy and spit out a tiny print. The printer took a little roll of paper and looked like one of those small credit-card-processing machines that spit out a receipt.

Today, several megapixels later, the look of the Game Boy camera is refreshingly vintage.

Want to make your own Toy Story?

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Toy Story
The software that made this happen is now free. Photo: Pixar
Photo: Pixar

Steve Jobs was, of course, formative to developing the software for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, but he was also formative to the development of another company and its software: Pixar, the computer animation studio behind Toy Story, Ratatouille, Up and more.

Now Pixar has released RenderMan, the company’s in-house rendering software, to the public for free. It’s the tool that gave the world Toy Story and countless other modern day classics, and it is now totally free to download for non-commercial use on the Mac, as well as Windows and Linux.

Apple acquires big data company to help improve iCloud

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Hacker who tried to extort Apple for $100k is spared prison
Apple is trying to improve its iCloud services. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Rightly or wrongly, iCloud is one of Apple’s most regularly criticized products (speaking personally, I’ve never had any major problems with it, but I use Google’s rival service far more.) It seems that Apple is more than aware of the negative feedback, however, because it’s in the process of improving the back-end infrastructure needed to support its cloud-based services.

Firstly, the company bought FoundationDB, a Virginia-based startup, which specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. Now a separate report claims that Apple acquired U.K.-based big data analytics firm Acunu sometime in late 2013, with the likely effort of using its database technology for providing analytics related to iCloud services.

French photographer whimsically augments reality with his iPhone

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By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth! Photo: François Dourlen
By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth! Photo: François Dourlen

Ever wondered what your favorite movies and shows would be like if the characters had iPhones?

The work of French photographer François Dourlen sort of touches on that subject, but with a subversive, whimsical twist that sees characters like Die Hard’s John McClane crawling out of microwave ovens, or the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies topping an industrial tower.

You be the judge with music competition game Chosen

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David Hyman demos his latest dream project: Chosen. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
David Hyman demos his latest dream project: Chosen. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Note: Chosen is available for free right now but the ability to sing and judge is invite-only for now. As a special treat for Cult of Mac readers, however, the first 500 folks that enter the code 313 into the app after downloading it will be able to get in and participate.

David Hyman is no stranger to the music business, having sold MOG to Beats when the headphone company wanted a music subscription service. He was the CEO at Gracenote before that, and the director of ad sales at music blog Addicted to Noise before that. Hyman even served as interim CEO at Neil Young’s PonoPlayer.

At the Game Developers Conference this March, Hyman sat down with Cult of Mac to show off his latest music project: Chosen, a new game that marries the idea of fan-made YouTube music videos with the American Idol-style competition television, all on your iPhone.

We sat down with Hyman at the chic Hotel Zetta at the beginning of March in San Francisco, where he demoed Chosen, Hyman’s latest foray into making music accessible to all of us.

Joggers don’t need an iPhone to track runs with Apple Watch, says Christy Turlington

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You can leave your iPhone behind on Apple Watch runs. Photo: Apple
You can leave your iPhone behind on Apple Watch runs. Photo: Apple

The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.

It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.

The problem with Becoming Steve Jobs? Too much Steve Jobs

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Becoming Steve Jobs
The world needs fresh insight into how Apple works, but you won't find much of that in Becoming Steve Jobs. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.

Apple teams with Foxconn to launch iPhone trade-in program in China

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People queue for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus all across China. Photo: People's Daily/Weibo
People queue for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus all across China. Photo: People's Daily/Weibo

Apple’s doing everything it can to push its brand in China, which Tim Cook is convinced will soon take over from the U.S. as the company’s primary market.

Having recently taken the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, and also beaten out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand, Apple is now teaming with manufacturer Foxconn to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones — letting customers exchange their older iPhone handsets for credit against other Apple products.

The program is set to go into action next week, on March 31.

Apple may release three different iPhones this September

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Is the 4-inch iPhone coming or not?
The projected sizes of Apple's next generation of iPhones. Photo: ModMyI
Photo: ModMyI

Whispers about three new iPhones set to arrive this September are emanating from Apple’s Chinese supply chain — suggesting that we may be set to receive the expected iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, alongside a 4-inch iPhone referred to currently as the iPhone 6c.

Check out details about internal components, possible pricing and projected sales below.

Trent Reznor is rebuilding Apple’s Spotify killer from ground up

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Apple has big ambitions for its new music streaming service.
Beats redesign is coming to WWDC 2015. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Apple is planning to unveil a hot new redesign of Beats Music at WWDC. The new streaming service is aimed at killing rival’s like Spotify and Pandora, but rather than relying on an Apple software veteran to redesign Beats Music, Nine Inch Nail’s frontman has been tapped to lead the redesign.

Nearly a year after acquiring Beats for $3 billion, Apple plans to overhaul its music strategy behind the Beats Music redesign, reports the New York Times. Reznor, who was the chief creative officer for Beats, has been made the point main for overhauling the iOS music service to include the streaming service.

The two personality traits that made Steve Jobs great

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post-316999-image-8d267c37138394b1f0d5aa08666e4cb6-jpg
Steve Jobs was a total narcissist. And that's a good thing. Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, rests on the premise that Jobs’ wilderness years outside Apple somehow helped turn a once-reckless co-founder into a seasoned leader.

Just how accurate the book’s kinder, gentler portrayal of Steve actually is, is something that will be discussed over the coming days and weeks — but a new study from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management backs up the idea that brash, narcissistic qualities can be a “net positive” for CEOs, so long as they are counterbalanced by an added dose of humility.

The study’s illustration of the perfect mixture of these qualities? None other than Jobs himself.

Raising a daughter is even tougher when she’s a zombie

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Real men cry, especially when they may have to kill their zombie daughters. Photo: Lionsgate Films
Real men cry, especially when they may have to kill their zombie daughters. Photo: Lionsgate Films

What happens when your daughter is infected by the zombie virus? You love her, and you want to save her.

Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to kill her.

Action-hero and California governor Schwarzenegger stars in the upcoming Maggie, a gritty, realistic, and very human portrait of the possible zombie apocalypse.

Becoming Steve Jobs searches for answers in Jobs’ wilderness years

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Becoming Steve Jobs explores Steve Jobs' exile from Apple. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo:

New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?

It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.

In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.

CNN lands on Apple TV, but you still need cable

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Apple's forthcoming service would unify top TV networks into one package. Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac
Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac

CNN came to the Apple TV today in the form of “CNNgo,” an app that lets you view live broadcasts, shows, and popular news clips.

Unfortunately, the bulk of CNNgo is still shackled to cable, meaning you won’t be able to view anything except some short video highlights without first entering TV subscription information.

How to get all the awesome extra sounds for GarageBand 10

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All you need to make some sick beats. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
All you need to make some sick beats. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

If you dig creating fresh beats and smooth grooves on your Mac, you’ll likely love GarageBand. It’s a fantastic bit of musical creation kit for anyone, regardless of native ability or experience. You can use loops to make new songs, play your own music with MIDI keyboards–even make your own ringtones for your iPhone. It’s quite versatile.

When you download GarageBand from the Mac App Store, you’ll immediately get 50 sounds, 500 loops, 1 drummer, and 2 basic lessons for guitar and piano. Likely, though, you want the full package, which is available as a free download that expands the content to 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 basic lessons for guitar and piano.

Here’s how to get it.

Apple doubles down on emojis in latest iOS 8.3 beta

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Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

Apple continues to tweak its emoji keyboard in the latest iOS 8.3 beta, the fourth iOS beta so far to make its way to developers to test and try out new features.

The new options organize the skin tone modifiers — which debuted in beta 2 of iOS 8.3 — into tap and hold menus, making things just a bit easier to utilize while streamlining the process as well.

In addition, all the yellow-colored Emoji people that previously had brown hair now have yellow hair, as you can see in the image below.

Apple Watch Edition buyers get double the hands-on time in stores

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Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Starting April 10th you’ll finally be able to go into an Apple Store and try on Jony Ive’s first wearable, as long as you have an appointment. Those shopping for the regular Apple Watch and Sport models will get up-to 15 minutes of hands-on time at the Apple Store, but if you’re looking at the Apple Watch Edition, you’ll get to play with it twice as long.