Siri is already about as simple as it gets, but that hasn’t stopped freelance journalist and TV host Marc Saltzman from creating Siri For Dummies. The 192-page book “shows you all the cool things Siri can do for you, so you can get the most from your iPhone’s voice-activated personal assistant.”

Say hello to John Tambunan. This five-year-old resident of Indonesia published his first book on the iBookstore a few days ago – a cute tale about catching fish.

Are you curious about what it’s like to work for Apple? Here’s a chance for you to find out. Career advice site CareerBliss recently complied a list of the “Happiest Companies For Young Professionals” – a top ten list for which Apple didn’t make the cut. Even though Apple didn’t make that list, CareerBliss does offer a lot of insight into what life is like for Apple employees.

CareerBliss allows people to rank and describe their experiences in their current or past workplaces. Users researching potential jobs and companies can then see overall rankings (based on a one to five ranking scale) and browse through the individual reports. For Apple fans, that means a treasure trove of data about what it’s like to actually work for the company.

We here at Cult of Mac just can’t get enough of Instagram. It’s really hard to not love the little photo sharing app, even after it got bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

Have you ever wondered why images upload so quickly in Instagram? The whole app feels super snappy, and images can seem to upload instantly after you take a picture and apply a filter. What kind of magic is going on in the background?

As it turns out, the app’s design tricks you into believing its working faster than it really is.

Notifications on the iPhone are annoying. There, I said it. They drop at the most inopportune times, and I always end up activating them, while the iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There is, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.

Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising announcement, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to a deal that resolved their ongoing patent dispute, spun off the bookstore’s Nook business as a subsidiary into which Microsoft invested $300 million, and ensured that a Nook app will be available for Windows 8 when it launches later this year.

Although rumors have been floating around for months that Barnes & Noble was planning to spin of the Nook as a separate company or subsidiary, Microsoft’s involvement came as a surprise – one that raises interesting questions about what the two companies have in mind for their new joint business.

Cult of Mac Deals is wrapping up another stellar app bundle lined up for our readers — with a total savings of over $400 on 9 great Mac apps! All of these apps would normally retail for $453 on their own. But thanks to Cult of Mac Deals you can get all of them for only $49 for a limited time. That’s an 89% savings!

But time’s running out to get your hands on The Mac SuperBundle…because it ends in just a few hours!

The projected May release of Cognovant’s health record management app, PocketHealth, looks to become a reality thanks to a recent $500,000 seed round closing. The announcement was made today by Cognovant, the Kansas City, Mo.-based startup that specializes in personal health record technology for mobile devices.

“This seed round of funding enabled development of PocketHealth and its forthcoming introduction into the Android and iOS markets,” Ketcherside said in the release

The Gary Fong Puffer ($22) has one function: diffuse your popup flash’s harsh light, making it softer, more eye-pleasing, and eminently more usable. It mostly delivers on that promise, but will it cure my distain for actually using popup flash? Doubtful.

Last week, Eugene Kaspersky — the eponymous founder of the industry leading Kaspersky security company — made some waves by claiming that OS X was “at least 10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security.”

Since Kaspersky’s eyebrow-arching claim, there’s been a lot of bickering about whether what he said was true, or whether his comments were self-serving. Maybe Kaspersky’s right, though, and Apple should follow in Microsoft’s footsteps and outsource OS X security to the anti-virus industry?

Instant is a five-dollar retro photo filter app for OS X, replicating the look and feel of a Polaroid camera, and it does the job with style.

At BlackBerry World this week, RIM began giving prototype BlackBerry 10 phones to developers. The prototype, known as BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha is an effort by RIM to drive developer interest in its upcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system with the hopes of building an app catalog for the platform before it launches the first BlackBerry 10 phones later this year.

While that’s a laudable and important idea, the handsets RIM delivered are lacking critical features like the ability to make calls or connect to wireless networks. RIM even pointed out that the actual user interface for BlackBerry 10 isn’t even running on the Dev Alpha devices because the company hasn’t finalized what that interface will look like.

SloPro is an app that magically makes the iPhone’s video camera shoot at 60 frames per second. And while the developers are being coy and refusing to reveal the mechanics behind it, the product does indeed let you double the camera’s frame rate, and therefore let you shoot some excellent slow-motion footage.

Thanks to the good folks at Digiarty, we’ve been able to bring you some great video software that will rip your DVDs and stream video anywhere. Both the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition and the MacX Video Converter Pro have been free to all Cult of Mac readers over the last 7 days, but the window to grab these awesome freebie is closing tomorrow, May 2nd.

By using the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition package that includes Air Playit, and MacX Video Converter Pro, we’ve shown you how to rip your entire DVD collection to your Mac, stream video files to your iPhone or iPad, and convert any video file to play on your iOS devices. Unfortunately, after May 2nd the MacX DVD Ripper Pro Streamer Edition will go back to its full price. If you want some truly phenomenal and easy-to-use software that will change the way you use video on your iPad or iPhone you better hurry and get your free copy now before it’s too late.

Here’s how to get your copy right now:

Think that Apple is already making Macs as tiny and tightly-packed as they possibly can? Think again. Intel is showing off a new demo spec that could shrink down Thunderbolt-compatible, Sandy Bridge Mac minis to the size of the current Apple TV.

The iPhone and iPad are revolutionizing business as we know it, causing companies to throw out old playbooks that mandated strict control over every piece of technology in the workplace. That revolution is liberating workers everywhere to choose their own devices, pick the best apps, and enjoy using technology in the office for the first time since… well ever.

All this month, we’re going to spend time highlighting the businesses helping to power that revolution: companies that take iPhones and iPads into the office and let them drive and control all the enterprise systems in place in your workplace.

Do you carry a backup battery, a camera connection kit and a charger with you in your man-sack? Yeah, me too, and it’s really no big deal as even together they weight almost nothing. But if you’d rather combine these items into one easy-to-lose box, then the Cellink I is just the thing for you.

This is a rather beautiful concept for what the next-gen iPhone could look like, courtesy of French designer Antoine Brieux. . It’s fanciful stuff, of course, featuring a Liquid Metal casing, but what I find most interesting is this idea that the home button could be replaced with a “virtual home button” that displays on a larger 4.5-inch widescreen display.

Several musicians who are involved in a class action lawsuit with Universal Music Group are demanding to see sensitive documents from a previous case that involved Apple. The documents include trial exhibits, expert reports, and a deposition from Steve Jobs that reportedly caused one judge to order almost everyone out of the courtroom.

Apple sees the material as “highly confidential” and strongly objects to handing it over. But why is the company trying so hard to keep this mysterious document under wraps?

According to the latest report from the International Data Corporation, Samsung has ousted both Apple and Nokia to aquire the top spot in both smartphone and total mobile phone shipments for the first quarter of 2012. This marks the first time since the inception of IDC’s Mobile Phone Tracker that Nokia did not lead the global market in total mobile phone shipments. That’s quite a testament to Samsung’s tremendous growth over the past year, which according to the IDC, was nearly triple in the smartphone category.

I can’t be sure, as I was a brainless, sieve-memoried child at the time, but I’m pretty sure that our family’s first portable (B&W) TV had a screen that wasn’t much bigger than the screen of my iPad. Still, the crappy picture and bulbous, almost circular screen didn’t stop my brother and I laying belly-down on the end of our parent’s bed and watching Monkey roll up the screen in a fuzz of snow and bad reception.

Now I can relive those dark days by putting my iPad into the Handmade Natural Stained Wood Retro TV iPad Dock, an Etsy product whose name is as good as a description.

When asked about Microsoft’s attempt to converge its mobile and desktop platforms into a single Windows 8 release, Tim Cook responded with an analogy of trying to converge a toaster and a refrigerator. If interest in Microsoft’s Consumer Preview release of Windows 8 is any guide, it seems that the public might agree with him.

According to Net Applications, a web analytics company, only a very small fraction of devices connecting to the Internet were running the preview – just 0.11% (or 11 out of every 10,000).

Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that his girlfriend and Steve Jobs were the inspiration behind a new, “life-saving” Facebook feature that allows users to share that they’re an organ donor with their friends via their Timeline. The social networks hopes that the new feature will help spread awareness for organ donation, and encourage as many people as possible to donate.

Command-Shift-3 is so last year. Using Grab to, well, grab shots of your screen is blasé. If you’re really hip, you’ll use today’s tip to get your screenshots and thank us for it in the comments below.

Alfred, an incredible productivity tool for Mac OS X that was voted the best Mac application of 2011 by Cult of Mac readers, has just received a “huge” update that introduces two new color themes and large type support, plus a whole host of improvements.