Cult of Mac

Sir Jonathan Ive is extremely self-effacing. The only time he says “I” is when he’s talking about the iPhone or iPad. Talking about his work, he replaces “I” with “we.” It’s always about his team, his collaborators, and Apple, the company he works for. For Jony, it’s all about the work.

As senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, the world’s most valuable company, he’s been the world’s leading technology innovator for more than two decades. He’s led the design of a string of iconic products: the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, plus a score of other innovations in between. He’s won every design award under the sun. He’s even been knighted.

In 2011, Sir Jonathan Ive was promoted to Apple’s overall design guru, in charge of both hardware and software. It was a position formerly held by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Jony provides direction and leadership for industrial design, the group primarily responsible for hardware, as well as the human interface software teams. Hardware and software have traditionally been run as separate divisions at Apple. Only one man straddled both groups — Steve Jobs. Jony has stepped into the role that Jobs left with his passing. Tim Cook is CEO, but Jony is Apple’s creative driving force. He’s Apple’s MVP.

You wouldn’t know it if you met him. Born in Chingford, Essex, the 43-year-old Brit is quiet, even shy. He’s super friendly and soft spoken. He is extremely private. Even Apple says it doesn’t know his precise date of birth. He dresses in jeans and T-shirts and always seems to be carrying something in a plastic bag. He speaks softly but he doesn’t look like a wallflower: he’s big and muscular, a legacy of a lifetime working out. He has close-cropped hair, which might make him look menacing if he wasn’t so obviously a nice guy.

Jony is the most celebrated designer of his generation. In 2002, he was named the first Designer of the Year by the Design Museum, which he won again in 2003. That year he was inducted as a member of the Royal Designers for Industry (extremely prestigious). The following year he was given the Royal Society of the Art’s Benjamin Franklin Medal and the BBC named him the “Most Influential Person on British Culture,” beating out JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais.

In 2005, Jony was presented with three Silver Pencils from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD) association, some of the most prestigious awards in the industry. In 2006, he got a fourth, the most Silver Pencils ever awarded to an individual. One Silver Pencil is a career maker; four the mark of an off-the-charts genius. He subsequently got six Black Pencils, more than anyone else, ever. Jony has a record number of D&AD awards; and he got them in a stretch of just 10 years. In 2006, he was made a Commander of the British Empire; and in 2010 he was knighted by Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace. By March 2013, he was named in more than 600 design and utility patents.

In 2011, D&AD bestowed another giant award on Jony: it named Apple’s design team the best design studio of the last 50 years. It was one of the first public recognitions for the group as a whole, and Apple felt the award was important enough to fly the normally reclusive, ultra secretive group en masse to London to receive it — the first time ever.

While racking up awards, he’s helped push Apple’s sales off the charts. In the nearly two decades that Jony has been at Apple, the company has pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies. In 1992, the year he joined Apple as a designer, the company made $530 million profit selling beige computers. In 2012, Apple’s made $41.7 billion profit on $156.5 billion revenue. Yeah, billion!

The company makes gorgeous products that compel customers to camp out overnight and sometimes even riot. AAPL, as it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, currently has a market cap of about $475 billion, making it the biggest company on the planet after the oil giant Exxon.

A lot of this had to do with Steve Jobs of course, the genius who toiled for three decades to bring personal computers to the masses. Jobs always had an eye for talent, launching Apple in 1977 with the hardware genius Steve Wozniak. For the last dozen years, his chief creative partner at Apple was Jony Ive. Jony is a genuinely original thinker. His products are not just the same old things repackaged to look new; they are new. They are products no one could have imagined a few years ago.

We all need a break every once in a while. And nothing can take some of the edge off than a good video game – especially a shooter.

Cult of Mac Deals has assembled a bundle of games that will keep your trigger finger going for hours with The iShooter Gamer Bundle. And it’s at a price that’s tough to beat – just $4.99 – a savings of 81%!

Nothing can touch the Fallout series of role-playing games for post-apocalyptic immersion; the ’50s, atomic-era nostalgia and post-nuclear holocaust loneliness and horror that the games simulate have gained the series a huge and devoted following. But none of it would have been possible without a breakout 1988 computer RPG called Wasteland.

Houseplan — Productivity — Free

In the past, whenever I’ve wanted to change the furniture layout in a room, I’ve broken out the graph paper and made a tiny scale mockup of the space and everything in it. HousePlan is a new app that is designed specifically to keep things like that from happening. First, you place the walls, windows, and doors, and then you can figure out where the furniture goes before you actually have to lift anything. It’s quick and easy to use, and the best part is that you don’t have to wonder if that piece of paper you just threw away is a scrap or your chifferobe.

Houseplan

Its title may sound like a Star Wars-based mockbuster by The Asylum (the studio that brought us Sharknado and Atlantic Rim), but Stellar Wars, a new iOS title out now from developer Liv Games, is actually the followup to 2011’s megapopular Legendary Wars. Only this one takes place in space and stars a bunch of cute robots.

So it’s off to a promising start from that alone.

Once you get over the cute overload from those little guys, though, Stellar Wars reveals itself to be a complex, surprisingly deep melange of a bunch of different game styles that shouldn’t work together, but then they totally do.

Just expect to have to work for it.

Edifier is a lesser-known company with roots in China, and a design lab in Vancouver, British Columbia. While Edifier speakers have seen table time in Apple stores in the past, they seem to be making a bigger push here in the States within the last year or two.

Their latest set is the e25 Luna Eclipse, Bluetooth-equipped speakers stuffed with some trick tech and 74 watts of power per channel — at the upper end for a set of desktop media speakers.

An official Google Play Music app is finally available on iOS, bringing Google’s All Access music streaming service to your iPhone. Users can listen to millions of tracks on demand and enjoy custom radio with no limits, as well as access to the music they’ve uploaded to Google’s cloud-based storage service.

It’s important to keep track of your power consumption on a Macbook Air or Pro, since that will determine how long you can use the thing before you have to plug it in again. Mavericks makes it easy to see the top app or two that uses the most energy on your Mac with a quick Option-Click on the battery menubar icon, letting you know which apps are consuming the most energy.

If you want to know about all the apps running on your Mac, though, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper, using Activity Monitor.

Want to make your Apple TV look like an SNES, Gamecube, NES, or even a big waffle? These decals have you covered.

Remember Apple Tracker, the web app that checked Apple’s inventory in order to help you find new iPhones and iPads in your area? Apple killed it off ahead of the iPad mini Retina launch , but now it’s back… just not on the original site.

Do you remember how last week, the iPad mini with Retina Display was said to have been delayed to November because of LCD burn-in issues with Sharp’s IGZO display panels? It appears the rumor was true, because the iPad mini does have image retention issues.

Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS, there’s a good chance they have broken existing jailbreak techniques with it. If a public jailbreak has already been released, it means your jailbreak has gone away; if a public jailbreak hasn’t yet been released, an update can kill an exploit that will delay a public jailbreak by months.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7.0.4, but did they break the possibility of an iOS 7 jailbreak? Are you safe to update?

Runtime stands out above other run-tracking iPhone apps thanks to its great design: it’s not – like most other apps – fugly as hell. It also use the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro to track you even when you’re walking.

While it isn’t strictly Apple news, I thought I’d let you know about Amazon’s cool new feature for Kindle covers anyway. After all, plenty of us have Kindles to read when we leave out nerd caves and head out into the sunlight, right?

So what has Amazon done that’s worth writing about? Exactly what Apple should do: Covers personalized with your own photos.

It’s hard to describe Curator for iPad as anything other than a digital scrapbook… In a good way. It lets you pull in snippets and content from pretty much anywhere, presenting them in a clean grid layout. If you ever used Evernote to collect a stuff together on one place for a project, you might consider Curator instead.

HopTo is a great version of Microsoft Word for the iPad. And that’s because it is MS Word, up in the cloud, driving a native iPad app. And you know what? If Microsoft just made the exact same app only with the Word part running locally on the iPad, I’d be happy. It really is nice enough to let you forget you’re using Word.

What if you could condense all of the credit, debit, membership, and gift cards in your wallet down to a single card? Companies like Apple and Google have tried to give us digital wallets, but nothing has really caught on. People still feel tied to their physical wallets.

Coin is a new product that became available for preorder today. It looks like a normal credit card at first glance, but Coin is much smarter than your average piece of plastic. A small display and a fancy magnetic strip let you choose from a range of your cards and memberships before paying.

iWork for iCloud is technically still in its beta phase, but Apple pubilished an updated to its suite of productivity apps this afternoon that will certainly make it more appealing for those looking for a Google Docs alternative.

The new iWork for iCloud update includes a number of features that focus on giving users more tools to collaborate with each other – many of which we heard about at Apple’s iPad keynote. The update includes new features for both Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes that come with some of the same features including the ability to see cursors and selections for everyone in a spreadsheet, as well as an option to view a list of collaborators working on a spreadsheet.

Users can access the new features for free over at iCloud.com and will also find a new option to print docs directly from the Tools menu and the ability to organize documents in folders.

Here’s a full list of what’s new:

Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.

In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.

I’m a big fan of Iron Man. I’ll play virtually any game with Iron Man in it, on it, or around it, so naturally I took a swing at Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 tie-in game earlier this year. And it was a bland infinite runner to sit alongside all the other bland infinite runners released for popular film franchises. I wept.

So when I saw that Thor: The Dark World was not an infinite runner, I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, Thor: The Dark World is a top-down dungeon crawler hybrid that allows you to summon Einherjar, or heroes, to help fight alongside you. So you’ll charge through levels tapping every shiny thing and enemy in your path and can strategically call more fighters to the battle to deal with bosses and ranged attacks.

To ease the minds of millions of Americans worried about their health insurance, Obama held a press conference today and admitted that his administration fumbled the launch of Healthcare.gov. Continuing his speech with optimism, Obama then turned to his favorite tech company – Apple – as an example, saying everybody needs to chillax and that buying health insurance won’t ever be as easy as purchasing a song from iTunes.

The Obama Administration has been under heavy fire the last few months thanks to the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and has pulled a couple Apple metaphors out of his hat to cope with the mess.

Obama’s not the only one in Washington looking to Apple for inspiration with the Healtcare.gov mess though. The GOP released a series of attack ads that spoof Apple’s famous “Mac vs. PC” campaign. Take a look:

Hot on the heels of the iBooks de-Forstallization for iOS 7, Apple has released iOS 7.0.4 with “bug fixes and improvements.” The update also addresses “an issue that causes FaceTime calls to fail for some users,” according to the release notes. You can download 7.0.4 as a 37.6 MB update.

iOS 6.1.5 has also been released with the same FaceTime fix for the fourth-gen iPod touch, a device that can’t run iOS 7.

Apple released iOS 7.0.3 with iCloud Keychain, improvements for iMessage, and other bug fixes last month.

Source: Apple

On A Day Like This — Reference — $0.99

On A Day Like This is a brand-new app that fills you in on significant events for any day you choose. You just swipe in the date you want, and you can flip through events, births, deaths, and holidays and observances. It’s a simple, clean, easy-to-use app that contains a lot of interesting and potentially useful information. For example, did you know that November 14 is the day that scientists discovered 90377 Sedna, an object that is orbits the sun at three times the distance of Neptune? Slip that into conversation at work, and see what happens.

On A Day Like This

Continuing its slow purge of felts, leathers and woodgrains the UI of iOS 7, Apple released an iBooks for iOS update today that finally dismantles the woodgrain shelves championed by former iOS Cheif Scott Forstall, and tosses them in the woodchipper.

The update features the same minimalist UI that Apple has embraced throughout iOS 7 and its other apps, though it doesn’t look like Apple actually added any major new features. Apple also released an update for iTunes U today with an all-new look and feel. Both app updates are available for free in iTunes now.

Source: iTunes

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.