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Agree or disagree with us on any of our picks? If there’s a concept, product, or feature you’d like to see Apple take another crack at, let us know in the comments below.

Graphic designer Susan Kare is iconic — literally. The mastermind behind the friendly 32 x 32 and 16 x 16 icons used in the original Mac operating system, Kare’s work has reached more people than almost any other graphic designer on Earth.

Yet the way she stumbled into designing the icons for the Mac operating system was pretty much a lark, and in a recent presentation at the EG conference in California, Kare spoke a little bit about how she stumbled into the job.

It’s a fascinating talk, not just for the details she shares about early Mac operating system development, but also because Kare finally reveals why Apple switched from the Apple symbol to the Command key.

Apple sure is looking friendlier these days.

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference was geekier, more welcoming and less locked-down than any in recent history. Apple also bid farewell to Katie Cotton — the much-feared queen of PR, whose frosty relations with journalists made her only slightly less terrifying than an angry Steve Jobs — with a call for a “friendlier, more approachable” public relations face to warm up the company’s relationship with the press.

“For the past few years it’s felt like Apple’s only goal was to put us in our place,” Panic’s Cabel Sasser recently tweeted. “Now it feels like they might want to be friends.”

These recent moves represent a major change in the way Apple does business, even as the company sits atop a $150 billion war chest amassed thanks to innovative products, ruthless leadership and heavy-handed policies that fostered a culture of secrecy and utter domination. But in a world where it’s drummed into our heads that nice guys finish last, does Apple’s approach risk killing the company with kindness?

CEO Tim Cook certainly doesn’t seem to think so.

SAN FRANCISCO — James Armstrong might be one of the few iOS engineers who loses weight while on a coding bender.

Armstrong is lead developer at The Orange Chef Co., the company behind a smart kitchen scale called Prep Pad. It weighs your food and, based on the nutritional profile you set, gives you a more accurate idea of how much you should eat. While working on a companion iPad app called Countertop, Armstrong beta tested his meals and realized how super-sized they were. So he cut the portions and shed 30 pounds.

“I had to buy new clothes twice,” he says.”I bought a bunch of clothes, then I had to buy ’em again — it’s made that much difference.”

While some reports are claiming that Apple is still finalizing the specifications for its first generation iWatch ahead of the supposed October launch, another set of reports — supposedly backed up by insider sources — put forward another theory.

And it makes a lot of sense.

Apple is set to unleash multiple versions of its long-awaited iWatch this fall, according to a new report from the the Wall Street Journal.

Coming in multiple screen sizes, and boasting more than 10 sensors to track health and fitness data, Apple seems set to go way beyond the current smartphone accessory functionality seen in present generation smartwatches.

Apple has the best App Store on the planet. Thousands of developers.  Millions of apps. Billions of sales. But no one can find a damn thing.

Since 2008, iOS users have downloaded more than 75 billion apps. How we locate a winner from among the App Store’s 1.2 million apps hasn’t changed much, but Andy Baio thinks Apple could revolutionize the way we discover and consume apps. And he’s got a brilliant concept Apple should borrow.

I was all set to pull the trigger on Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, which gives subscribers access to Lightroom and Photoshop as well as Lightroom Mobile for the iPad and iPhone.

After all, it’s just $10 per month, right? (or €12.29/$16.71 in the EU). That’s about what I spend on Rdio, or Dropbox, and I get Lightroom on my frickin’ camera.

But I decided to hold off and see if one huge doozy of a design problem is fixed before my 30-day trial of the service finishes up. This will also give me time to check out the amazing new Adobe Photoshop Mix, which is what Photoshop for iPad should have been all along.

And the little problem that could be a deal-breaker? You’re gonna love it…

Amazon’s new Fire Phone boasts plenty of unique features; flashy stuff like 3-D effects, the intriguing scan-to-buy app Firefly, and 24/7 tech support via Mayday. But should the Fire Phone be your next smartphone?

Here are five possibly fatal flaws you need to be aware of before you place an order for Amazon’s first smartphone.

Apple didn’t tell anyone during WWDC, but it wants iOS 8 to be the ultimate city tour guide.

Cupertino is adding a new Flyover City Tours feature to its Maps app. And even though the code has been hidden, developer Pierre Blazquez managed to unearth it from the latest iOS 8 beta release to give us a preview of the new feature that’s still in development.

Flyover tours are currently only available for Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris and a few other cities, but in a video posted by Mac4Ever, we’ve been given our first glimpse of the tours in action.

Based on the massive number of hires they’ve made in the field as of late, it’s no mystery that Apple is interested in biometrics and biosensors. However three new patent applications published Thursday shed a bit more light on what Apple has up its sleeve, and make us feel even more excited about the possibility of an iWatch (and future iPhones) later this year.

With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple is finally showing us its idea of how we’ll compute in the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, this pristine vision of our computing destiny — unveiled after years of secret, patient and painstaking development — aligns perfectly with how we currently use our computers and mobile devices.

The keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month not only showed off a new way to think about computing, based on data not devices, but also silenced pretty much every criticism leveled at the company over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at Apple’s new way of doing things, which fulfills Steve Jobs’ post-PC plan by minimizing the importance of the Mac.

Amazon introduced its first smartphone to the world this morning and while the jury is still out on whether its incredible Dynamic Perspective feature is a UI revolution or just another 3-D gimmick, Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team have pumped Fire Phone full of features that could make it more than just the world’s best buying machine.

From Firefly’s compulsive-purchasing features to Mayday’s instant tech-support tether, Fire Phone has a few tricks up its sleeve that we weren’t expecting. But will that be enough to convince consumers to buy one of the AT&T-exclusive phones?

Check out these six things your iPhone and Android can’t do, but Fire Phone can:

Years of speculation are finally over: Amazon is taking on the iPhone with a handset of its own that offers advanced features and a tight integration with Amazon Prime.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos triumphantly pulled the new Fire Phone from his pocket this morning in front of a Seattle crowd of 300 reporters and Prime fanatics, revealing a new handset that looks like an iPhone but houses tons of Amazon special features to set it apart from Apple’s and Samsung’s top wares.

To do battle with the iPhone and Apple’s enormous ecosystem, Bezos says Amazon chose a 4.7-inch screen for the device after testing models between 4.3 inches and 5.5 inches. Like the iPhone 5s, the Fire Phone uses Gorilla Glass 3 for the front display, but Amazon has wrapped the enclosure in an injection-molded rubber frame.

Ben Heine is a magician.

Like David Blaine and Criss Angel before him, he has a special talent for blurring the line between reality and fiction. But instead of utilizing sleight of hand or his indomitable will to delight his audience, Heine keeps it simple by using just a pencil and camera to create his illusions.

Heine’s incredible art series Pencil vs Camera combines gorgeous landscapes and city scenes with hand-sketched drawings. The otherworldly images that result are both whimsical and intriguing, with a bit of mind-bending magic thrown in for perspective.

“I always try to express what I’m feeling,” Heine told Cult of Mac, noting that most of his inspiration for drawings come “mainly from people around me — friends, family, even strangers — and from every experience I live.”

As a gamer, I want a controller with buttons. I lust after this new product category like I do any new gadget that I think will improve my gaming experience. I think that if you play games with any frequency, you’ll want them too.

Unfortunately, I also think the majority of mobile gamers are making do just fine with touch interfaces, thank you very much, and that these lust-worthy devices will soon find their way to the dustbin for most who buy them. Not because the controllers, including one that straps to the sides of your iPad mini like the loving embrace of an alien face-hugger, aren’t any good. On the contrary, these are solid, high-quality gaming peripherals that will make certain types of console-like games (platformers, open-world sandbox games, first-person shooters) much easier to play.

Cult of Mac readers came through again: after our nominees, here are your semi-serious and sometimes outrageous picks for who should be coming up with the next big ideas at Apple.

One small footnote: Apple tweaked the job title on us. Now they are looking for a “business intelligence thought leader” rather than just a plain old “thought leader,” but the party game is still a fun one.

The online Apple Store is back up and, as many suspected, there’s a new low-end 21.5-inch iMac for sale.

Featuring a 1.4Ghz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB memory, a 500GB hard drive, and integrated Intel HD Graphics 5000, the iMac is available for shipping within 24 hours at $1,099. The specs were leaked earlier today when French Apple website Macplus posted the below image of a box for the new iMac.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sometimes even a great idea falls flat at first. Take Pump-Hub, a self-inflating bike tire gizmo. It was rolling along at trade shows and getting lots of good press before the financial crisis of 2008 sidelined the project.

Now its creator, engineer Kevin Manning, is getting back on track with a new team behind him and plans to expand his original idea — an automatic, adjustable, tire-inflation system housed in the hub of a bike wheel.

For cyclists, the Pump-Hub means no remembering to check the tire pressure or pack a pump, no fiddling around with the valve and then racing to put the cap back on before the air wheezes out and your aching arms have to start all over again. It inflates the tires to the proper pressure while you ride, making a gentle clickety-clack sound reminiscent of spoke cards from childhood days. When the tire hits the designated pressure, the fluttering sounds stop. If you get a flat, just upend your bike and spin the wheel until pressure is restored.

“It’s like how using a Macintosh is easier than using a command-line interface,” Manning says, turning his Gunnar bike upside down on the Embarcadero to show me how the Pump-Hub works. If you really boil down all the technology behind his invention, he adds, the main advantage basically ends up being “it’s easier.”

One week ago, the Taiwanese actor and racing car driver Jimmy Lin posted pictures of what looked to be a legit 4.7-inch iPhone 6. Today, he’s followed up by sharing a picture on his Weibo account depicting Lin sitting next to what appears to be the 5.5-inch iPhone 6.

While this could possibly be a dummy unit, Lin has a history of teasing images of future iPhone models — starting with last year’s image of him with an iPhone 5c. A recent report seemed to confirm that last week’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6 was, in fact, a beta unit that had been sent out for testing purposes.

Apple’s new beta for iOS 8 is stuffed full of bug fixes after most of the new features were unveiled at WWDC two weeks ago, but Cupertino still managed to surprise us today with a number of neat tweaks to iOS 8 beta 2 that make some of apps better than what was revealed at the Moscone Center.

We’re still combing through the beta for new features, but additions like QuickType for iPad, iBooks displayed as series and improvements to Photos are welcome additions before iOS 8 lands this fall.

Take a look at all the tweaks Apple added to the iOS 8 beta today:

Jose Torres, CEO of Boogio, wants you to track your fitness with the most obvious part of your body: your feet.

“We’ve got 60,000 layers of sensitivity in the Boogio,” he told Cult of Mac at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, “so we can track gravitational force, inner balance, and three different acceleration forces of your feet.”

We’re still crawling through the myriad of new features Apple added to the first beta of iOS 8, but now we’re about to dive back in. Apple just released iOS 8 beta 2 to developers this morning a mere 15 days after dropping the new OS on devs at WWDC.

According to the iOS 8 beta 2 release notes Apple’s mostly filled it with a ton of bug fixes, but we’ll update you on all the new features, big and small, once we’ve got it on our test devices.

Developers can pick up the new beta as an OTA update, from the iOS Dev Center or from the direct download links below: