An overwhelming sense of eagerness overtook me after Apple showed off OS X Yosemite at WWDC. The redesigned interface and accompanying features, like a spruced-up Spotlight and the ability to take phone calls on your Mac, made downloading the beta version too intriguing to pass up.

Little did I know that moments after finalizing the installation, I would encounter a massive problem that would send me on an emotional ride.

The latest ad for Beats headphones prominently displays Apple products, which probably has something to do with the fact that Apple is spending $3 billion to buy Beats.

Clocking in at just over five minutes, you won’t see the ad on TV. It’s tailored for the upcoming World Cup, and Beats is not an official sponsor. Nevertheless, the ad is compelling and filled with celebrity cameos. Could this be the direction Apple is heading with its in-house advertising?

The 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is honoring U2’s Bono with the first Cannes LionHeart Award for his achievements in the war on AIDS through (RED), a charity he created that has partnered with Apple for years.

Jony Ive will join Bono at Cannes Lions for a special interview moderated by Shane Smith, the CEO of VICE Media. The discussion with Bono and Ive will center around “the success of (RED) and it’s unique collaboration with global partners,” namely Apple.

Congress has dropped the ball on surveillance reform, according to Tim Cook and a host of other top tech CEOs throughout the country.

In a full-page ad printed in today’s Washington Times, the tech companies tell the Senate it’s been a year since revelations on the NSA’s over reach were made known to citizens, but Congress has failed to pass a version of the  USA Freedom Act that would restore the confidence of internet users.

Here’s the full ad:

As a huge fan of Vertigo Comics’ Hellblazer, about hard-bitten wise-cracking paranormal detective John Constantine, I’m warily excited about the upcoming TV series on NBC. Wary because of the totally off-base movie of the same name. Excited because, well, it looks like they got a bunch of things about the character and universe in which he lives “right.”

“I think as with the source material,” says series lead Matt Ryan in an interview with IGN, “there’s so much to draw from in terms of the character and the balance of humor and wit and dark and gritty. It’s great, because John has this kind of real sarcastic, ironic British wit. It’s funny, but at the same time it’s serious and dark and gritty. It’s got it all, I think.”

At first glance, the trailer (below) looks like the show creators understand more of the character than the 2005 movie starring Keanu Reeves ever did, including emo angels, a world-weary John Constantine and his famous trench coat.

SAN FRANCISCO — At Apple’s WWDC developer conference, there are talks about interface design, writing code and fixing bugs.

Across the street at indie spinoff AltConf, the talks are concerned with spying on users and making choices between good and evil.

“We have had a hand in creating one of the most dystopian and undesirable societies imaginable,” said Andrew Stone, a veteran programmer who once worked with Steve Jobs, during a talk entitled “What Have We Built Here?”

It’s not the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear at a developer’s conference, but in an age of widespread government spying and cynicism about corporate slogans like “Don’t be evil,” AltConf highlights that programmers are often presented with moral choices. There’s a growing awareness in the coding community that although the activity of programming is benign, what’s created can be used for evil. Take Maciej Cegłowski’s talk last month in Germany, which has been widely discussed on the Web. Cegłowski argues — convincingly — that the utopian ideals of the early internet have been thoroughly corrupted, and the entire industry is “rotten.”

We’re shining a spotlight on a couple of deals here at Cult of Mac Deals – one that will help you wrap your head around creating animations on your Mac and another that will help you move from the analog to the digital world.

The CrazyTalk Animator 2 Bundle offers award-winning, professional 2D animation software and a ton of video tutorials to get you up to speed with using the software. If you’ve ever wanted to create top-notch animation, then this bundle is going to be for you. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $49 during this limited time offer.

How many times have you allowed a friend to use your iPhone and then experienced that sudden sinking feeling when you realize they might stumble across “personal” snaps in the Photos app? Well, with iOS 8, that’s something you won’t need to worry about quite so much.

Apple has added a new feature to the built-in Photos app that allows you to hide images you don’t want others to see — but hidden photos aren’t exactly hard to find.

I just switched from Kindle to Kobo. Why? Amazon. It’s currently extorting publishing house Hachette by delaying orders and refusing to allow pre-orders for certain titles. The exact machinations are secret, but many people agree that Amazon is demanding discounts on ebooks.

I don’t want to see authors forced to get a second job to survive, so I switched. No more Kindle ebooks. I switched to Kobo, which has a great e-ink reader, a deep book catalog, and – most importantly – breakable DRM.

The results are mixed, with ups and downs for both the service and the hardware.

When we’re looking for comics in our local nerd den, we’re often overwhelmed by the quantity of new titles each week. That’s not even counting the back issues and collected series in trade paperback format.

So we asked some of the most alpha nerds we know: the folks at Industrial Toys, a game development team (Midnight Star) with a who’s-who pedigree in geek. There’s CEO Alex Seropian, the co-founder of Bungie games (Marathon, Halo), Tim Harris, part owner of Alley Cat Comics in Chicago, John Scalzi, best-selling science fiction author, and Mike Choi, a veteran comic book artist in his own right.

Harris and Seropian, along with art director Aaron Marroquin and senior graphic designer Sarah Chiappetta, chimed in to our request with the comic books that they think are the best in the bin.

If you’ve already heard enough about Swift, and are looking for another language to sink your learning-teeth into, how about taking up Dothraki?

The fictitious Game of Thrones language — as spoken by the late badass Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen — is the basis of a forthcoming iOS app, and accompanying book, CD, and online learning course, set to arrive later this year. Costing $3.99, the app is described as “your Dothraki learning experience to go” and features 15 thematic flashcard decks with more than 200 Dothraki vocabulary words, a conversational dialogue, a pronunciation guide, a simplified grammar summary, and interactive games testing your vocabulary knowledge.

Apple’s new programming language Swift might be a hit with coders, but bringing it to developers wasn’t quite as speedy a process as its name implies.

Chris Lattner, director of Apple’s Developer Tools department, has updated his personal website with information relating to Swift — including some details of its development. According to Lattner, work on the language began back in July 2010. Lattner implemented much of the basic language structure himself, with only a few other people at Apple knowing of its existence. It was only when several other individuals began contributing to the project in 2011 that it started to gain momentum, leading to it becoming a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013.

You can now use your Pebble to control music volume on your smartphone and tablet, thanks to a new Pebble app update that’s available now on iOS (and coming soon to Android). It’s accompanied by a version 2.2 firmware update for Pebble watches, which also adds the ability to reorganize the Launcher Menu.

One of the first things Steve Jobs did after returning to Apple in the late 90s was to bring back TBWA\Chiat\Day, the ad agency which had previously produced the memorable “1984” Macintosh commercial. The result was the famous “Think Different” campaign, which helped set Apple off on its present course. Now it seems that Apple is moving away from TBWA\Chiat\Day, toward producing more of its television ads in-house.

At WWDC, Apple debuted its new Family Sharing feature, which allows up to six members of a household to share calendars and even iTunes purchases when using the same credit card — meaning the end of multiple iTunes accounts for different family members.

While Family Sharing allows users to set up their family as a unit able to share photos, calendars, locations, etc. more significant to developers is that it lets users share songs, books, movies, apps, and other purchases.

One year on from the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, a group backed by tech companies including Google and Apple, called Reform Government Surveillance, is publishing a letter demanding that the Senate strengthen its NSA reform bill as recently passed through the House.

In addition to Google and Apple, CEOs who signed the letter include the heads of AOL, Dropbox, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and LinkedIn. The letter, which will be published tomorrow, notes that the upper chamber of Congress has the “opportunity to demonstrate leadership and pass a version of the USA Freedom Act that would help restore the confidence of Internet users.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTjejvnBJfU

In a new TV ad for the iPhone 5s, Apple shines a spotlight on some popular fitness trackers. Called “Strength,” the minute-long spot features the old song “Chicken Fat” from President Kennedy’s Physical Fitness Program for schools in the 1960s.

Trackers like the Withings Health Mate, Misfit Shine, and Adidas miCoach Smart Ball are shown in use. Apple just announced its new HealthKit framework for iOS 8 at WWDC, so developers will be able to start feeding Apple’s new Health app data from the kinds of wearables shown in the commercial.

Today a report said that Apple is starting to move its TV ad making in-house. The latest iPad ads featuring the voices of Robin Williams and Bryan Cranston were made internally by Apple, while iPhone spots like the one above are still being made by the ad agency TWBA\Chiat\Day.

If you’ve been holding out for a Retina iMac, the wait may be almost over.

First spotted in the latest Mountain Lion developer beta, code has now been uncovered in OS X Yosemite that references new resolutions for what would be a Retina display-equipped iMac.

Rumors of an Amazon smartphone have been circulating for a long time, but now it looks like the device will finally be shown to the world this month.

Amazon has announced a launch event for a “new device” on June 18th, and it’s probably a phone. Some kind of fancy 3D technology is rumored to be its main selling point, and Amazon has a teaser video that strongly suggest that will be the case.

Apple and Google aren’t the good friends they used to be thanks to the rise of Android as the iPhone’s main competitor. Ever since Apple axed Google Maps in iOS 6, it has been clear that Google’s days in Apple’s software are numbered.

The hardest Google service for Apple to replace is undoubtedly search. Siri is slowly becoming its own search engine of sorts that draws from multiple services like Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia, but Google has remained the standard for traditional web search.

In iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Google is still set as Safari’s default search engine. But with the introduction of more search partners in Apple’s new software, it’s hard to believe that Google search will enjoy its prominence for much longer.

Apple’s WWDC keynote just days ago brought us many new iOS 8 features to look forward to downloading this Fall. Thanks to an immediate downloadable beta version open for developers, many have found even more useful features and changes not mentioned on Apple’s big stage. In today’s video your host Joshua Smith introduces eight of his top hidden iOS 8 features.

Take a look at the video to see what you think.

On the back of the most eventful WWDC keynote in recent memory, and Eddy Cue claiming that Apple has its most exciting product pipeline in 25 years, there have been few better times to invest in AAPL shares. With that in mind, Apple has just given an overhaul to its Investor Relations minisite, giving it a long overdue spit shine.

The website features sections advising on Apple stock prices, financial information, SEC filings, and leadership and governance, alongside relevant press releases and financial news related. Notably the website’s graphical overhaul brings its into line with Apple’s current design preferences, with an abundance of thin fonts and white space.

When the walls and pottery starts shaking in spooky ways, newlyweds Donna Johnson and Carol-Anne decide to call the Paranormal Investigation Team, or P.I.T. This ragtag team of ghost busters, led by Connor, the lovelorn managing director, must prove themselves as professionals to keep the gig, and save the day.

This new web series, part of geek-favorite Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry media collective, is surprisingly well written and acted, and is as well-produced as any new TV show, even though it’s only on the web.

The first episode (embedded below) shows a lot of promise and anyone with an interest in geeky television shows about ghosts and goofy nerds should take a look.

Modern day meetings around the conference table may be a rare occurrence in our often-mobile and telecommuting world, but when they happen, the incoming mass of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks need a lot of electricity.

Instead of making all your employees figure out where the outlets are (under the table? behind them on the wall?), why not provide a big fat power center in the middle of the action? The Belkin Meeting Room Power Center aims to do just that, with a huge, round UFO-looking power hub that sports four actual plugs and a generous eight USB ports.

That’s a lot of power.

Apple is finally going to open OS X Yosemite betas to the public, but when it comes to iOS 8, Apple fanboys desperate for a sneak peek at Cupertino’s upcoming software have been left out in the cold.

Luckily, if you’re willing to give a little info and some cash to certain “developers” you too can become an official iOS 8 beta testers and reap all the new benefits and bugs of iOS 8 as Apple puts the finishing touches on the biggest iOS release ever.

Here’s how to do it: