Jony Ive takes extra pains to keep his personal life private, but Leander’s book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products shines a light in corners of Jony’s life and at Apple HQ that few have ever seen, especially when it comes to Apple’s design processes.

The book garnered praise from readers during its release last Fall, but we were super-giddy this afternoon to see that the world’s leading Apple analyst, Horace Dediu, just plowed through all 320 pages and says it’s the best book about Apple so far.

Jony Ive by Leander Kahney @lkahney The best book about Apple so far.

— Horace Dediu (@asymco) March 3, 2014

Over the last few years we’ve devoured Dediu’s insightful and intriguing Apple analysis on his site Asymco, but here’s what he had to say about the book:

Ridiculous Fishing had a good 2013. The breakout game from the Dutch developers at Vlambeer was Apple’s best iOS game of the year. It also won a coveted Apple Design Award. We called it “stellar” and “addictive” in our roundup of the best iOS games of the year, and it spawned countless clones in the App Store.

Now the same two-man studio is at it again with a new game that’s coming out on March 18th, Luftrausers.

 Peter Oppenheimer doesn’t get a lot of the spotlight at Apple – unless you’re tuning into a quarterly earnings report – but the Apple CFO plays a huge role in Apple’s profitability and now he’ll be lending his talents to Wall Street by joining Goldman Sachs Board of Directors. If you’d like to know more about his career and impact at Apple, check out this article.

Goldman Sachs announced this morning that Oppenheimer will join the board immediately as an independent director of the firm:

We use our devices everyday tapping and swiping to perform the actions we need to. Effortlessly doing these things time after time, it’s only natural for us to become quite good at doing them. In the new fast-paced app Teggle you can put your gesture skills to the test. Do you think you have what it takes to get a high score?

Take a look at Teggle and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application Teggle brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

Thanks to this Cult of Mac Deals offer, the days of lugging around a clunky wallet are over.

That’s a good thing. Clunky wallets are unorganized, unnecessary, and can even mess up your back. Anyone familiar with Kickstarter knows how prominent minimal wallets are, and that’s because there is a need. Meet the HuMn Wallet 2, the most successful minimal wallet on Kickstarter to date. This is the ultimate minimalist wallet that is built to last a lifetime. And Cult of Mac Deals has this exceptional wallet for just $49.99 for a limited time.

You’ve probably seen the do-it-yourself, social media comics called Bitstrips in your Facebook feed at one time or another, and maybe you want to see more, or you’d like to find some that might actually be funny.

Best Strips for Bitstrips might help; it’s an app that only posts strips that pass muster with the moderators. You can rate what’s there and even submit your own for consideration if you’re feeling confident and/or brave.

Or you can just keep taking your chances with the ones in your feed, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Source:Best Strips for Bitstrips – Free | Echo Bay Apps

Monkeys are cute.

They’re fuzzy, they make little noises, and they act like tiny people if you train them well enough. And they’re mostly cool to hang out with once you factor out bad seeds like that one in Raiders of the Lost Ark that was a Nazi. And the ones who attack humans. And those other ones who attack other monkeys and steal their food for no reason.

Actually, you know what? Monkeys are awful. Here’s Monkey Boots, a fun game about getting one killed repeatedly.

Volvo today confirmed that it will be one of the first to support Apple’s new CarPlay platform in its upcoming XC90 SUV, and it has released a new video that demonstrates how the technology will be used on the road to send messages, view maps, and control apps like Spotify.

Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for creative projects, hit a major milestone today, when it officially racked up $1 billion in pledges.

According to the company’s statistics page, its $1 billion in total funds represents $859 million backing successful projects — with the $1 billion total referring to all projects, including those that are still in progress, or else which failed to reach their funding goal.

To date, there have been 57,121 successful Kickstarter projects — earning the company just under $43 million in the 5% cut that it takes of all successful projects.

Apple is taking on “hundreds” of new engineers and supply-chain managers in China and Taiwan in an effort to speed up product development and offer a greater range of devices, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Cupertino company has reportedly poached staff from HTC and other rival firms to create new teams in Shanghai and Taipei.

In the quiet foothills of Kentucky, a massive supercomputer is churning through data. It is hunting for new drugs to fight cancer.

Every week, the DataseamGrid processes 300 man-years worth of calculations. Yeah, that’s 300 years of calculations every week. Drug discovery usually takes 10 to 15 years, but the DataseamGrid blazes through that work in a fraction of the usual time. It is one of the largest pipelines of potential new cancer drugs in the country. Researchers here are about to start human trials this year of a new drug discovered by the supercomputer, which, if successful, may lead to an entirely new class of cancer drugs.

Is your iPhone app, awesome iPad case, or other Apple-related service so insanely great you know it’ll be the next big thing? Show it off to thousands of potential customers, journalists and investors at Macworld/iWorld by winning a spot in SF New Tech’s awesome “6 About to Break” event.

Cult of Mac is chuffed to be a media partner for the contest — we’ll be helping judge the best new apps, accessories, software and utilities tied to the Cupertino company, in the eternal quest for the next big thing.

Get a move on, though: The deadline for submissions is 5 p.m. PST on Monday, March 3.

It’s free to enter and qualified entries include any newly released software, iOS applications, iPhone or iPad accessories, or Apple utilities launched in the past year. Winners will be announced Wednesday, March 12.

The six-pack stars of startup goodness get to showcase their wares at Macworld/iWorld 2014 with a 5-minute live demo plus a 5-minute Q&A in front of a live audience. Winners also receive a free kiosk at Macworld, free hosting from Rackspace and Kendo UI and Icenium full product licenses plus support from Telerik.

Bring it on!

6 About To Break contest by SF New Tech

Samsung may have flashed a bit of cash to get Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres to appear on-stage with a Galaxy Note, but it seems that DeGeneres ditched the device backstage, as she was spotted tweeting out selfies using an iPhone.

@parislemon she’s using an iPhone backstage. pic.twitter.com/eRZlAVwq3S

— Sammy (@sbanawan) March 3, 2014

Yukari Kane’s new book about Apple post-Steve Jobs, Haunted Empire, is still a few weeks away, but it’s already beginning to pick up press coverage.

A recent video interview with Kane for the Wall Street Journal sheds a bit of light on her research methods as she describes her efforts to find out more about Tim Cook.

Referring to Apple’s CEO as “still an enigma to me,” Kane describes visiting Cook’s hometown and speaking with friends and former teachers to try and find out more about Apple’s soft-spoken CEO.

Last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, a curious, unexpected thing happened: I used an Eye-Fi Mobi card to shoot and share photos from my camera to my iPhone and it worked – almost flawlessly.

As regular readers will know, I have tried Eye-Fi’s cards over and over, both here and when I wrote for Wired’s Gadget Lab, and I could never get on with them. The problems ran from annoyances to plain bad design and broken functionality.

This time, though, the card came through. In fact, I couldn’t have covered the show so well without it. Read on to see how we covered the show.

Yesterday marked Dr. Seuss’s birthday and — in honor of him and Read Across America Day — developers Oceanhouse Media have launched a massive sale on more than 60 of its Dr. Seuss apps.

As expected, Apple today announced that it is finally ready to launch its “iOS in the Car” iPhone integration setup for car infotainment systems.

Called CarPlay, Apple claims that it is “designed from the ground up to provide drivers with an incredible experience using their iPhone in the car.”

CarPlay is built primarily around Siri interactions, with voice commands and prompts giving users an “eyes-free” means of responding to incoming calls, dictating text messages, and accessing their music library. Apple’s Maps service is also an integral part of the system.

Tim Cook lashed out at shortsighted, bottom line-driven investors during Friday’s annual shareholders meeting — telling them to “get out of [Apple] stock.”

The exchange concerned the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, which was pushing Apple to disclose the cost of its sustainability programs, and the impact this had on the company’s earning power.

Cook was asked about Apple’s plans to have 100 percent of its power come from green sources — and whether this was the case only because of government subsidies on green energy.

Asked to commit point-blank to only pursuing moves immediately profitable to Apple, Cook responded with anger — noting that Apple does many things because they are right and just, and not simply about making a return on investment (ROI).

Castello Davarg’s latest hot leather case is the Heming for iPad, an upgraded, redesigned version of its excellent iPhone case. It comes in iPad mini and iPad Air flavors, and is surprisingly full-featured for what looks at fist glance like a plain folio sleeve.

If you have a nerd in your life, and you need to get him/her a gift anytime soon, then your search is over. Go buy them the new Lomo Konstruktor Super Kit, the “directors cut” of the original build-it-yourself plastic film camera kit that now contains not one, not two but three lenses, plus a proper viewfinder.

Did you ever try to write a blog post on your iPad? It’s easy, right? But did you ever try to add an image to that post? It’s a major pain in the ass. Plink is here to fix that. It’s an iOS app that will upload a photo to its own storage cloud, and generate a URL that is automatically copied to your clipboard. All you need to do is switch back to your writing app and paste it in.

And of course this isn’t just for bloggers. Anywhere you need to link an image – forum posts for example – you can use Plink.

I saw the Oaxis InkCase at the Mobile World Congress last week, and it looks pretty neat. The v2 “case” is actually an e-ink panel that connects to the iPhone (or other device) via Bluetooth and can show anything on its e-ink screen. The new version is modular, so you can slip in into any case for any device, and even mount it, say, on the handlebars of a bike for a sunlight-friendly readout.

A dark cloud hangs over the future of mobile communication: the spectre of Facebook controlling it all.

It’s not likely, actually. But Facebook’s intention to purchase WhatsApp for $16 billion or $19 billion dollars (depending on whether you factor in the stock-based bonuses for WhatsApp employees) involved some scary-big numbers.

The biggest of these numbers happens when you add Facebook’s current user count plus WhatsApp’s projected user count (how many users Facebook believes the service will have if current growth rates continue). The number is: 2.3 billion users.

Of course, the number is pure B.S.

WhatsApp’s current growth probably won’t continue. Facebook’s current numbers are padded with duplicate users, fake users and non-active users. And there’s always going to be big overlap between WhatsApp and Facebook users — a dude who uses both is still just one dude.

Still, when I ponder the number of people likely to be using Facebook-owned services (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) for messaging compared to those using Google-owned Hangouts, I find myself astonished and confused. How did this happen? And what can be done about it?

Who doesn’t love jammin’ out in the shower?

Well, The Bluetooth Shower Speaker syncs up with your iPhone, Android device, iPad, or home computer – and can be played up to 10 meters away from your device. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $39!

The Telegraph newspaper brought to light this week an apparently widespread practice in China in which broken old iPhones are stripped for parts, and functioning iPhones are built with those parts.

The newspaper called it a “scam,” because the sellers of such phones often lie and say they’re new. And in fact that is a scam.

Our own Buster Heine calls them “Frankenstein iPhones,” and that’s a monstrously good name for it.

But I call the general idea of a large-scale refurb effort one of the best ways to improve the environmental impact of a dangerously irresponsible industry.