SAN FRANCISCO — Even in a town populated by ninjas, gurus and rockstars, Mario Estrada may have the coolest job around.

He’s the Director of Fun for digital photo app Hipstamatic and hopes you won’t hate him for it.

“Most people don’t believe that’s my job, but a lot of thought went into the title,” he says, enjoying the sun from the rooftop lounge of the startup’s SOMA headquarters. “Someone asked once why I wasn’t the VP of fun, but that implies there’s someone more fun than I am. And you can’t be the president of fun, because, actually, being president is never fun.”

Despite all efforts to the contrary, email is still the default way to shift files, photos and – yes – mail around the internet. Even when you share a file using Dropbox, the link goes via old-fashioned email. And yet email clients are still awful. They’ve gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, on both iOS and the Mac, but we’re still stuck without a proper task manager that integrates with the native iOS/OS X Calendar and Reminders.

What’s going on?

When photojournalist Scott Strazzante planned a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., with his daughter Betsy in 2011, he was intent on leaving his cameras at home.

They were visiting colleges and he wanted it to be a “daddy-daughter” weekend. But the prolific, award-winning photographer gets anxious when he is not creating, so there was a point in the trip when he commandeered her iPhone, downloaded Hipstamatic and started making pictures.

As soon as he returned home, he purchased his own iPhone and it wasn’t long before the news photographer began making pictures for the first time that were truly about him.

His Instagram feed, a body of street photography images that grows larger by the day, has more than 19,000 followers. He loves how Instagram allows him to send pictures directly to people waiting and wanting to see them.

For many users, the quality and accessibility of the iPhone camera means that it is the only camera we need on a regular basis. It may be about to get a whole lot better, too, according to a patent application published by Apple on Thursday — describing a new “super-resolution” mode.

What makes the patent interesting (apart from that it promises higher quality images) is that it suggests that picture resolution could be ramped up without needing more megapixels.

Adobe has launched an intriguing new iPad app called Adobe Voice. Designed to help users “create stunning animated videos in minutes,” the app lets you record an audio message, and then quickly and easily turn it into a slick animation. All you have to do is match your words with a library of 25,000 images, and then Adobe Voice does the rest by adding in transition animations and a backing track.

Ever since the Edward Snowden revelations, the question of how companies like Apple respond to law enforcement and government requests for user information has taken on a new level of importance.

In a new document added to its website, called Legal Process Guidelines U.S. Law Enforcement, Apple provides an overview of how it deals with such requests in North America.

After the retirement of Katie Cotton, the PR who helped craft Apple’s air of mystique, Apple has announced another departure: that of Zane Rowe, who served as the head of North America sales.

The reason for the departure isn’t yet known, but it comes weeks after former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts took over as the new head of retail and online stores. Rowe joined Apple in 2012 from United Continental, where he had been the chief financial officer.

He will be replaced by Doug Beck, who has been key in growing oversees sales in Japan and Korea.

Apple has regained its crown as J.D. Power’s top tablet maker in the world, according to the company’s latest U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.

Samsung knocked the iPad off the top post last year, but after surveying 2,513 tablet owners Apple came out on top in 2014 with a score of 830, dominating in every category except cheapness.

Upcoming.org – the artsy-fartsy, Apple-loving community Yahoo tried to kill – has pulled itself out of the cold clutches of death with its own Kickstarter project.

And it only took 90 minutes.

As more and more smartphones are released with all new features, it’s not difficult for the average iPhone user to become slightly envious. In today’s how-to, learn how to use one of the iPhone’s coolest features that isn’t so commonly known. Click the home button, turn your volume up and down, and so much more by simply following these steps and moving your head.

Take a look at the video to see what you need to do.

Don’t Starve is a brilliant yet brutal video game that will not hold your hand as it leads you inexorably toward a messy, starving death.

Until now, it’s been a single-player affair, which just reinforces the theme of loneliness present in every ticking second of each of the in-game days and nights.

Klei Entertainment, at the frantic urging of its fan base, is finally bringing a final feature to the game that we all wanted: a shared experience.

This summer, we can huddle together with other players, avoiding the rampaging hounds of doom and giant tree monsters bent on our destruction in ecstatic togetherness.

Getting your MIDI keyboard connected to your iPad or Mac can be a frustrating experience. You’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right wires that connect to your output device of choice, and then you’ve got to make sure you never ever lose them.

Hopping onstage for a gig at the local brewpub can be a frightening experience if you’ve lost that one special cord that goes from your keys to your Ableton Live setup on your Mac, and missing out on a recording session because you can’t find that special 30-pin adaptor for your iPad is just a pain in the butt.

The folks behind the excellent JamStick, Zivix, have your answer, then, with a cool-looking little round gadget called a PUC that connects any MIDI keyboard or other capable device to your iPad, your Mac, your iPhone, your PC — you name it, if it’s got Wi-Fi and can run a MIDI app, you can use the PUC to send your MIDI performance to it.

Katie Cotton, the woman in charge of Apple’s worldwide corporate communications is undocking from the mothership after nearly two decades of service at Apple, according to a report from Re/code.

Cotton has been one of Apple’s top ranking female VPs since joining the company 18 years ago and has been crucial in shaping the media narrative around pretty much every product from the iPod to the iPad.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling had the following to say about Cotton’s departure:

Cult of Mac Deals has a ton of stellar promotions to offer, and this time around we’re highlighting a bundle that features 10 top apps that will make your Mac happy.

We’re pumped to bring you another The Happy Mac Bundle, one that’s stacked with 10 apps that bring performance, privacy and productivity to your Mac. And we’ve got it for just $39.99 – 86% off the regular price!

Thanks to its gorgeous aluminum construction and Gorilla Glass display, the iPhone 5s is one of the strongest, most robust flagship smartphones money can buy. If you drop it from a reasonable height, there’s a good chance it will remain in one piece — even if it’s not wearing a case.

But Jony Ive’s aluminum is no match for the crushing machine in the video below, which uses 40,000 pounds of force to make a sturdy iPhone 5s crumble like cookies.

Cigar is a new aggregation app that pulls in new content from crowd-funding site Kickstarter, Netflix, TED Talks, and the App Store and presents it to you in a giant pile for your consideration. You run through them one at a time, swiping up to dismiss ones you don’t like and double-tapping to save some for later.

It can be a little daunting when it throws like 300 things on your stack. But Cigar also e-mails you a digest of things you liked, so you don’t have to go back to the app and sort through your “Liked” list again.

Which is nice.

Source:Cigar – Free | FiveIron Software, LLC

I’ve been playing video games for almost 30 years. I like to think that I’ve developed a certain level of hand-eye coordination and an ability to recognize patterns and learn rules reasonably quickly.

But Spirit Run: Fire vs. Ice, a new endless runner from developer Lunagames, made me question all of that. Suddenly, I was transforming when I wanted to jump, and jumping when I wanted to slide, and just falling the hell off of things that I normally wouldn’t.

That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game; it’s actually quite good. But be prepared to feel like a monkey trying to do algebra. You know, if that’s a thing that one might call upon monkeys to do.

Hollywood loves Apple almost as much as it loves itself.

The passionate affair burned for decades before Samsung came snapping celebrity selfies with Ellen at the Oscars and dishing out enough paid endorsements to finance the next Star Wars trilogy.

Apple plans to fight back with its own buzz marketer in New York to keep its products in the hands of the elite and glamorous. But Cupertino has never had a problem getting its products on the big screen and into the coolest TV shows — even though Apple swears it doesn’t pay a dime for product placements. Here are 18 of the most iconic Apple cameos to hit the screen.

Do you work in tech? Then why are you wasting your time on a blog rather than doing what you should be doing: coming up with “fresh” new ways to parody Apple.

To prove it is one of the boys, San Francisco ride-sharing service Lyft just dropped its latest commercial, featuring a “me too” impression of Jony Ive.

When the iPhone 5s was announced as featuring Touch ID, you could have been forgiven for assuming that the iPad Air and iPad mini would naturally follow suit. Like original thinking from Samsung, however, it never quite materialized — and to this date Apple’s flagship iPhone is the only Apple device to incorporate the technology.

That may be set to change with the arrival of the next generation iPad Air and iPad mini, though.

Every year at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, a million and one business cards get handed out. Most end up in a desk drawer or, worse, the circular file. But last year one card stood out.

This glass business card is made from an actual iPhone screen, sourced from Foxconn’s factories in China. The lettering is laser-etched into the hardened Gorilla Glass — a very complex process.

The card belongs to an Apple engineer, who hung it on a lanyard around his neck. Everywhere he went, people pawed at it.

“Everyone was grabbing it asking him, ‘How the heck did you do that?'” said the card’s creator, who made a batch of 10 for the engineer.

The first question we had when we got our hands on one was, where do we put in our order? Unfortunately, that ain’t gonna happen.

Less than four months after relaunching the iPhone 4 in India, Apple has decided to ditch the strategy and take the phone off the market again.

The January move had made the iPhone 4 one of the cheapest unsubsidized iPhones in the world, with the aim of growing market share by appealing to a percentage of the population who would not usually be able to afford iPhones.

If you’re a fan of strategy simulation games, you’ll probably already know the Anno series, which arrived on PC back in the heady days of 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise since then.

Developers Ubisoft recently announced that they will be bringing an original entry to the series to iPad, later this year. Called Anno: Build an Empire, you’ll begin by colonizing an uninhabited island, which you then harvest for resources, eventually building your way up to fully-fledged civilization — with various colonized islands under your control, which you can trade between.

Leo’s Fortune is one of those games that just makes you feel good. 

It definitely gave Apple the warm fuzzies: they chose the game, which looks like a mashup between a Pixar movie and a classic platformer from the Super Mario World era, as their first “game of the month” for iPhone.

Still reeling from the breakout success of the $4.99 game, designer Anders Hejdenberg spoke about the origins of Leo’s Fortune, why passion projects are best, how market research ruins creativity, and the reason the best teams are small ones. He also gave us exclusive access to pictures showing the game’s journey from page to iOS screen.

Want to find out more? In true platformer style, there’s more after the jump…

Pegatron has reportedly received orders from Apple to start production on the iPhone 6. According to Taiwan’s Industrial and Commercial Times, the supplier will be producing around 15% of Apple’s upcoming 4.7-inch handsets, ahead of their launch in September.