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This week, Cult of Mac Magazine is all about the Olympics.

Whether you’re a cord cutter or just like to slack off at work, our ever-resourceful reviews editor Charlie Sorrel has compiled all the tips you need to watch without a traditional TV – from streaming services to apps and, like any good British expat, he’s also given a thought to beverages – so you can get more Sochi action across all your Apple devices.

The 2014 Winter Olympics may also be the first quantified games in history. Sure, coaches have been standing by with stopwatches and clipboards since, well, some dude sprinted down dusty roads in sandals, probably. But now, there’s an app for that. To find out more about what the teams are using (and how you can improve your form on the slopes) we talked to the people behind some those performance apps.

We’re also featuring the winners of our epic Selfie Olympics contest. But just so you know: you’re all winners in our book!

Cult of Mac Magazine

With rumors of a new Apple-made “fitness app” coming to iOS 8, secret meetings with the FDA, and murmurs of more sleep and fitness experts joining the Apple ranks, the iWatch rumors are heating up on this week’s CultCast! Plus, a classic Nintendo game makes its way to iOS; Microsoft says goodbye to the one and only Steve Ballmer; and new job openings in Cupertino could mean big upgrades in battery life for future MacBooks…

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Softly giggle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin.

Until Apple finally comes out with its eagerly anticipated iWatch, Nike — at least in terms of style — is perhaps the closest thing to Apple in the wearable computing space (Tim Cook does, after all, sit on its board). I resisted picking up the original 2012 Fuelband but, motivated by a desire to get fit for the new year, bought its sequel, the Fuelband SE, earlier this year. Having had a bit of time to try it out, here’s what I make of it. (Thoughts registered between exercise-related wheezes.)

With teens and young adults leaving Facebook in droves, it’s up to social networks like We Heart It to pick up the slack.

The new image-centric app is gaining a ton of traction with this highly-coveted target demographic, breaking the 25 million user mark and pulling in over a million new users monthly.

CEO Ranah Edelin spoke with Cult of Mac on the phone, and attributes this incredible growth to one thing: We Heart It is a safe space.

“Social networks mimic what happens in the real world,” he said. “There is a ton of bullying on them and they mimic popularity contests. Our users tell us they love We heart It because they can express themselves authentically without having to brag or worry about getting bullied.”

Did you watch that? It’s total crap.

The security expert quoted in the piece, Kyle Wilhoit, has just written a blog post that calls out the report, essentially saying that the hacks shown in the video can happen anywhere, and require some risky user behavior to even happen.

That’s a long way from “if [tourists] fire up their phones at baggage claim, it’s probably too late to save the integrity of their electronics,” as Brian Williams claims in the clip above.

Talk about fear-mongering.

Mark Smith’s Spell Quest: Grimm’s Journey is this week’s iOS Game of the Week, and it’s a fun one.

You’ll need to spell words to move Grimm from left to right, with longer words causing more damage to the baddies you encounter. You’ll pull letter tiles from a grid below, and some tiles will give you power ups, others will poison you. It’s a fun mix.

Check out our video below for some gameplay footage.

No one but actual, honest-to-God bicycle messengers had the authority to wield a Timbuk2 messenger bag. If you were an iron-assed hard case living life on a bike, you’d probably earned the right; though you might still have found yourself the target of diluted messenger disgust.

That was the pervading vibe 15 years ago when I bought my first Timbuk2 bag, a Bolo (back then, each size had a name; the Bolo was the large version). Make no mistake, these were Messenger Bags: simple, voluminous, virtually indestructible black holes, able to swallow an inordinate amount of awkwardly dimensioned deliverables, specially stabilized for use on the bike exclusively. The only grudging nods to civility were a couple of pockets sown onto the outside of the bag and an optional padded shoulder strap.

And apart from a few minor changes, it’s stayed that way. Like the coelacanth, the Classic Messenger has remained a living fossil, unchanged, while other Timbuk2 species have evolved and developed around it. Until now.

Getting Apple to dish on secrets is practically impossible, but if you’re looking for an inside line to one of the most powerful CEOs in tech, the house next door to Tim Cook just went on the market.

That’s right, even you could become Tim Cook’s neighbor, as long as you got a cool $2.8 million in the bank to drop on a condo.

The capabilities of today’s are so incredible, a few weeks ago we came across a 20-year old RadioShack ad and everything you could buy  has already been made obsolete by the iPhone. Still, the iPhone’s powers are so much greater than those products it doesn’t do justice to compare it to a $29.99 speed dial phone, so Bret Swanson at Tech Policy Daily decided to find out how much an iPhone would really cost in 1991.

Swanson’s back-of-the-envelope math estimates it would have cost Apple over $3 million to make a machine with comparable powers to the iPhone back in 1991, and that’s only counting some of the hardware.

Even though it feels like the iPhone 5s just came out, the rumor mill is already churning out little bits on the iPhone 6: a supercharged camera, a bigger display and a ton of sapphire crystal glass.

A number of designers have presented both wacky and plausible mockups for what the iPhone 6 might look like, but our concept designer friend Federico Ciccarese just sent us his rendition of what the iPhone 6 might look like. While it doesn’t have any wild design changes, it still has my pockets lusting after a 4.7-inch iPhone 6.

Check it out:

Popular wine tasting app Wine Spectator WineRatings+ has received a notable upgrade, adding updated content, a new design interface, and a version designed specifically for iPad.

While the mandatory iOS 7 design improves readability and ease of use, the real improvements include an updated Top 100 Wines list for 2013, containing editors’ latest list of the world’s “most exciting” wine.

A recent report suggested that Apple was restarting manufacture of the iPhone 4 to target India, Indonesia and Brazil as developing markets. In fact, sources say that Apple never stopped making the phone.

A news story for BGR India claims that — while the volumes might not have been so high as that of the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, or even the iPhone 4s — Apple continued manufacturing the iPhone 4 ever since its introduction, since the phone serves as a key component of Apple’s sales strategy in countries outside of the U.S. and Western Europe.

Popular MMO (that’s Massively Multiplayer Online) game, Line of Defense, has arrived on iOS via a new combat strategy game called Line of Defense Tactics.

Giving gamers the opportunity to take control of a team of four Galactic Command Marines (GALCOMs) as they embark on a range of missions across space stations, starships, and planetary battlefields, Line of Defense Tactics lets you train your squad, upgrade their stats, weapons, inventory and abilities en route to becoming the ultimate fighting force.

The money side of Apple is nothing out of the ordinary for anyone who follows investor news and views. The idea, however, that Apple products — specifically the iPhone — may be considered a form of hard currency in themselves is something a little bit different.

That’s the premise of a recent post by Bloomberg News reporter Vernon Silver, however, who claims that in recent months he’s been using unlocked iPhones to pay his bills.

Reporter is a crazy iPhone app that tracks… well, everything. It pops up an alert at random intervals throughout the day and conducts a mini survey, then puts all this data together to be mined at your leisure.

Today sees the App Store launch of retro-styled hack n’ slash iOS actioner, Only One.

Borrowing its one-man-fights-off-millions-of-enemies-on-top-of-a-giant-tower premise from the Jet Li-starring cult movie The One, the game is the fighting equivalent of a never-ending platformer — only with waves of enemies (70 in all, plus 7 bosses) taking the place of constant leaps and obstacles.

Beep is a weird little device that could be either just the thing you’re looking for, or the stupidest accessory ever. It’s a Wi-Fi volume knob that hooks up to your speakers, and streams music either direct from Pandora, or from your iDevice via its own companion app. No AirPlay, no Rdio or Spotify. I told you it was weird.

Meet the Miggo, a camera strap that wraps around your camera to make a protective case. If that gets you as excited as it makes me, then keep reading.

Tim Cook has acknowledged that Apple has bought back $14 billion of its own shares over the past two weeks — reacting to an 8 percent decline in shares following the recent financial quarter results.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Cook admitted that he was “surprised” by Wall Street’s reaction to Apple’s last quarter, in which the company broke records by selling 77 million iOS devices over the holiday season.

Apple’s recent share repurchase is the largest of its kind for a company of Apple’s size over a similar timespan. During the past 12 months, Apple has bought back $40 billion of its own shares — part of a plan to repurchase a total of $60 billion. In the past two weeks Cook says that Apple bought $12 billion of its shares through an “accelerated” repurchase program, and a further $2 billion on the open market. Apple plans to disclose updates to its buyback program either next month or in April.

With Phraseology 2.0, developer Greg Pierce has made a definitive case for URL schemes, the trick that he invented with his Drafts app to let iOS apps talk to and send data to each other. While Phraseology 2 can work as a text editor, it is in fact a “word processor” for iOS. And I don’t mean that in the crappy, MS Word bloatware sense, either. I mean that it’s a machine to process text, from any other app.

If you got a kid to draw a picture of a camera, that picture would look just like the new Nikon P340, a device that can be accurately described as “boxy, with knobs.” And it’s gorgeous, kind of like then Lenovo Thinkpad of cameras, and despite its diminutive form it has everything an enthusiast would need – except a viewfinder.

Under its previous owner, Instapaper was a good-but-limited iOS app with a barely functional website component. Under its new ownership at Betaworks, the app has slowly become part of a great ecosystem, with the latest addition being a Safari extension.

Remember the report from yesterday that said that Sochi Olympics sponsor Samsung was asking athletes to cover up their iPhone logos? Not something athletes need to worry about, according to the International Olympic Committee. But that doesn’t mean Samsung didn’t ask.

Foul-mouthed YouTube Senor Pacman teaches you how to beat the $50,000 a day App Store sensation, Flappy Bird. Or, at the very least, he teaches you how Flappy Bird will ultimately beat you.

Source: YouTube
Via: TUAW

We’ve all likely done it: you’re sending a text message — only to find out after hitting the “send” button that your carefully crafted comments have fallen victim to some embarrassing autocorrect abomination.

Clearly someone at Apple has had the same experience, since a new Apple patent suggests that future iPhones may include an option for correcting messages after the user has instructed the device to send, but before the transmittal of the message has taken place.