This week on The CultCast: With Apple Watch apps now hitting the store, we discuss some of the most popular ones. And if you want an Apple Watch you absolutely need to preorder — we’ll tell you why and how. Plus: Periscope! Learn all about it and why it’s way better than Meerkat. All that and so. Much. More…

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Full show notes ahead!

Don’t ever let a good deal pass you by.

There are several offers at Cult of Mac Deals that are ending soon, including the versatile and invaluable BatteryBox MacBook & Mobile Device Charger. It’s the perfect addition to any Apple workspace but, if you don’t act on it now, you might just miss out.

With Apple Watch about to become a reality, recent reports have questioned the benefits of fitness trackers, highlighting their inaccuracy and even claiming they make you fat.

So can wearables like Apple Watch really help you get fit? From my experience, what’s in your heart is more important than what’s on your wrist — but gadgets still have a role to play.

Apple Watch preorders don’t go on sale until April 10th at 12:01 AM, but you can get a virtual walkthrough of how to use one right now.

Apple has posted new guided tours online detailing specific features of the Watch in detail.

New details for the Apple Watch are beginning to surface ahead of its release this month, including the precise time you’ll be able to start preordering Apple’s first wearable.

This week, Buster looks to the future with the nine features we want most in the upcoming iPhone 6s, while Luke gazes into the past with a piece on how a Californian architect influenced Apple. Luke turns his sight to the future again with a possibly waterproof iPhone, as well as the present with Tim Cook’s slam of discriminatory laws. John then shows us all how to create a thoroughly modern paperless office. All this and much, much more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Come and take a look.

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Horological Machine No. 6 looks like something you’d see strapped to the wrist of an interstellar raider. Maybe that’s why Swiss watchmaker MB&F dubbed its lunatic $230,000 watch the “Space Pirate.”

The watch, which its maker says “has been designed to operate in the hostile environment of … the space on your wrist,” is one of just two timepieces to be awarded Red Dot design awards in the competition’s current round.

The other winner of the Red Dot Award for Product Design? Apple Watch, which seems like a modest piece of jewelry next to the MN6’s alien design. Just wait till you see the spinning turbines that make the Space Pirate watch tick.

Cheaters in school these days have it too easy. In my day, we had to program cheat sheets of formulas into our giant graphing calculators. Now that the Apple Watch is coming out, the cat and mouse game between students and teachers is about to change.

Mobixee’s educational suite of Apple Watch apps are giving students a faster/subtler way than ever to find “that formula” when you’re doing tests homework.

By bringing iMathematics, iPhysics, and iChemistry to Apple Watch, you won’t have to pull out your iPhone to search for formulas again. Just whisper a word to Siri like “derivative” and a list of formulas related to the topic will pop up.

Check it out:

Following the “Bendgate” rumors which dogged the iPhone 6 Plus last year, it was inevitable that Samsung’s next flagship phone was going to come under scrutiny the moment it landed in the hands of customers.

Samsung all but invited the comparison; putting out ads which boldly claimed its handsets could survive even the biggest butts. Well, the long-awaited Galaxy S6 Edge is finally out, and there’s good news and bad news for fans.

The good news? The phone’s as easy (or as difficult) to bend as the iPhone 6 Plus. The bad news? Its glass display is far more likely to crack under pressure.

Check out the video comparison below.

Apple told us last month it would make AppleCare+ available for anybody who just knows they’re going to break Apple Watch’s display. Apple still hasn’t officially revealed pricing, but a leaked internal screenshot may have just revealed the extra cost of insuring your timepiece.

You can pack pretty much anything into a survival kit: food, warm clothes, and water. What you can’t pack, however, is enough electrical power to give life to your iPhone or iPad – until now, that is.

Introducing the nifty ZeroLemon SolarJuice 10,000mAh Battery, an external power pack that uses the sun’s rays to charge all of your devices. It’s marked down by 47% right now and with free US shipping at Cult of Mac Deals.

In her latest blog post on Apple’s website, supermodel and Apple Watch spokeswoman Christy Turlington reveals a few more interesting tidbits about the Apple wearable — such as the fact that you can use the device’s Force Touch tech to change the color of animated emoji.

Mastering a few crucial Mac keyboard shortcuts will make using your Apple computer easier and much more efficient. Cutting your reliance on your mouse will help you work more quickly, and you’ll undoubtedly impress your family, friends and co-workers to no end. You might even end up becoming the go-to Mac person in your office, and we all know how wonderful that will be.

Here are the top 10 Mac keyboard shortcut tricks you really need to memorize right now, whether you’re a Mac newbie or a veteran user who still uses the mouse for everything out of habit.

Today marks five years since the iPad first went on sale and, to celebrate, the superb app Art Authority (which also celebrates its fifth anniversary) is slashing its price from $9.99 to zero for one day only.

For those unfamiliar with it, Art Authority is a fantastic resource for any art-lover, with 75,000 high-resolution classic artworks stored in one place. These include paintings and sculptures by more than 1,000 major western artists, with an easy-to-use interface that divides the works up into different periods — so you’ll have no problem sorting your Byzantine paintings from your Baroque, or your Romantics from your Renaissance.

Up until now we’ve seen Game Boy emulators and accessories created for the iPhone, but this is something else entirely: a Nintendo Game Boy-compatible case for the iPhone 6 Plus, which actually runs real Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges.

Sound too good to be true? Well it is, sort of. Originally, the concept — called the Smart Boy — was an April Fools’ joke created by Hyperkin product developer, Chris Gallizzi. However, the idea of a turning your iPhone into a fully-functioning Game Boy proved too irresistible, and Hyperkin has now announced plans to really create and sell the product.

Provided Nintendo’s legal team don’t stop them first, that is.

The battle over who will manufacture the A9 chip for Apple’s next-gen iPhone has reportedly come to a close, with Apple giving the nod to long-time frenemy Samsung instead of current A8 chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

Okay, so all eyes are currently trained on the Apple Watch, which arrives later this month. But April also represents another important benchmark for Apple: five years ago today the iPad went on sale for the very first time.

To celebrate, we’ve scraped the dark recesses of the Cult of Mac archives to bring you a whistle-stop tour of the glorious 60 months we’ve spent in the company of Apple’s breakthrough tablet.

Whether you’re after a zero-gravity Garage Band symphony or a reminder of the time the Queen of England bought an iPad 2, keep reading for a trip down memory lane.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is the hottest ticket in town when June rolls around. Before a lottery system was introduced for distributing passes last year, the week-long event sold out in a little over a minute.

For those who aren’t lucky enough to get into Apple’s main event, there is AltConf. Created by developers for developers, the indie conference will run alongside WWDC again this year — and it’s expected to be bigger than ever.

Drexel University won our hearts two years ago with its invention of a MacBook vending machine for students. Now the school is taking its tech to the next level with a vending machine that spits out iPads.

The vending machine isn’t just for students, either. Residents of Philadelphia’s Mantua and Powelton Village can use their Free Library of Philadelphia cards to sign in and check out an iPad.

Here’s what the machine looks like:

Ah, Pong, the first video game I ever played! If you’re like me and feeling nostalgic for the retro-goodness of Pong, Pac-Man, or even Space Invaders, boy are you in luck.

Pacapong is a new free game that mashes up all three of these fantastic classic video games into one lovely multiplayer package that you can play on your Mac (or PC/Linux box) right now. How they all fit together is a mystery even the developer isn’t aware of.

“I’m actually not sure why,” developer Dick Poelen tells Cult of Mac, “but it started with adding Pac-Man and the maze to Pong. That seemed to make sense.”

Airbnb has revolutionized the way we travel by allowing people to rent rooms on the fly in 190 countries around the world. Now that President Barack Obama is finally opening U.S. relations with Cuba, Airbnb is taking over Havana and other cities in the communist island nation.

The DIY rental service says it already has more than 1,000 listings available in Cuba. You have to be a U.S. citizen to stay at the Airbnb rooms, but you could score an awesome retro-chic rental for super-cheap.

Cast your eyes on a few of the glorious places you can rent.

A zombie survival game called Apocalypse Rising doesn’t sound like a story that should have a happy ending. For game developers Ethan Witt and Gus Dubetz, this doomsday is not about plagues, oceans of blood or even the walking dead.

This apocalypse pays for college.

Aside from better battery life, a waterproof iPhone has to be one of the most-requested upgrades Apple could make to its smartphones — a feature that H20-defying rivals like the Xperia Z1 haven’t wasted a moment bragging about possessing.

But a new patent application published today suggests a waterproofed iPhone could finally be on the way, thanks to a method for sealing buttons specifically designed for iOS devices.