Cult of Mac

Apple revolutionized your iPhone’s camera with the introduction of the 5S, but you can unlock its full potential with this deal from Cult of Mac Deals.

The Ultimate iPhone Lens Kit arms you with six different lenses so you can take virtually any kind of photo in any imaginable situation – from microscopic organisms to full-blown landscapes. And Cult of Mac Deals has this incredible iPhone 5S accessory for 65% off the regular price for a limited time. That’s right. You can get The Ultimate iPhone Lens Kit for just $69 through this offer!

If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.

It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.

Nevermind; just use it for intervals.

Source:Practice Time – Free | Mal Function

If you like Threes but wish it was less numbery and more Tetris-like, SideSwype might be for you.

It’s a puzzler in which you, you know, swipe. To the side. And when you do that, you move every block on the board as far as it can go in that direction. So you might want to plan ahead a little.

Your goal is to line up three or more blocks of the same color to clear them, and it throws in some complications and special pieces too because otherwise it would be boring. But luckily, it has those things, and it is not boring.

The Hitman series has always alternated between vicious and silly, with a stern protagonist who will wear any kind of ridiculous costume, from ice-cream man to Mardi Gras costume, in order to murder his target. Hitman GO, a new turn-based puzzle game from Square Enix, doesn’t give you extensive dress-up options, but it is a refreshingly smart take on the series.

Hitman GO sanitizes the series’ violence by turning it into a simulated board game, with a satisfying number of missions and challenge. Presented as a collection of boxed sets with very little background audio, it’s a dramatic departure from the console games’ over-the-shoulder view and stealthy gameplay. You don’t creep in Go, but instead slide your Hitman game piece along grooves in the board, toppling other pieces when their backs are turned.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a digital collectible card game in the vein of Magic: The Gathering, only set in the high-fantasy World of Warcraft universe. The Mac and PC version came out last month after an extended open beta period.

What may not be apparent from the above is that Hearthstone is hands down the best card battler I’ve ever played. Putting it on iPad makes it that much more habit-forming. The game is full of awesome and bad Scottish accents, which makes it all the better. (“UUUUUUUUUther versus Jaaaaaaynuh.”)

It’s really not fair — I was just starting to leave the iPad at home in favor of only the Macbook Pro in my bag. Now I need to take the tablet with me once again.

One of Apple’s most famous patents is slide-to-unlock, a method of waking up a touchscreen smartphone that has proven to be one of the most valuable in Apple’s arsenal. Now, Apple is trying to patent a similar system that would use gestures to unlock an iPhone. And if that sounds familiar, it should, because Android already does it.

It’s looking like it might be a dreary quarter for Apple. Not only has iPhone growth pretty much leveled off, but most Wall Street analysts believe that when Apple announces its quarterly numbers, iPad sales will have actually declined year over year. Is Wall Street wrong?

It’s not often that a company announces that they’ve figured out a way to make people stop paying for a piece of hardware by purposely making it obsolete, but that’s just what Sonos has done.

Sonos has just announced that thanks to clever programming, they have figured out a way to make their $50 Sonos Bridge device — a gadget that plugs into your router to allows you to stream music in perfect sync to the Sonos speakers throughout your house — completely obsolete.

As a guy running upwards of seven miles a day to get in shape for his imminent nuptials, Runkeeper is my favorite exercise tracking app, but you have to consciously remember to use it. But Runkeeper now has a new trick up its sleeve: Breeze, an activity tracker that taps into your iPhone 5s’s M7 motion processor to subtly guide you into living a more active life.

Well-known Dutch designer and concept artist Martin Hajek has created a new iPhone 6 rendering, which might just be the most accurate one to date.

Hajek had previously teamed up with Nowherelse to create a stunning mock-up based on the recently leaked schematics discovered by Macotakara apparently showing the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch variants of the iPhone 6.

With the recent case leak, Hajek revised his designs to show everything we currently know (or think we know) about Apple’s next iPhone.

Move over FarmVille, Candy Crush and all those other freemium games whose developers (presumably) sleep on top of a pile of money with beautiful ladies in it — we may have a new contender for app overlord of 2014.

Blizzard’s turn-based iPad game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was released Thursday, but already it’s the No. 1 most downloaded game in 36 countries, and the most downloaded app overall in 34 countries.

Apple isn’t being valued as a creative leap company so much as it is a predictable cash machine, says former CEO John Sculley.

Speaking with India’s Economic Times about the launch of his latest venture, pCell — a technology that allows huge amounts of data to travel on spectrum-crunched wireless networks, while offering faster speeds and fewer call drops to customers — Sculley gave his opinion of Apple’s current situation:

“Google and Apple are like ATMs, they just keep generating cash. Google takes more risk than Apple. Apple tends to stay the course, and this year is a very big year for Apple in terms of products. It’s not clear that they’re going to demonstrate a creative leap this year despite the products, like they did when Steve Jobs was leader. I think it’s probably unfair to expect them to have a creative leap every five years.”

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One of the cool things about the era of over-the-air updates is that developers can add tweaks and features specific to certain times of the year, without having to build them in from the start.

That’s what EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game has done for Easter, adding in features specific to this time of year as a way of giving a seasonal nod to Simpsons’ fans. In the same way that the game was overrun with snakes for Whacking Day, so too for Easter has Springfield been overtaken by bloodthirsty bunnies, which players must stun into submission.

Remember that old slang phrase from the 90s: “Talk to the hand, because the face ain’t listening?”

Apple seems to be taking a similar tack — except that you can substitute “talk to the hand” to “upgrade to iOS 7,” and “because the face ain’t listening” to “because FaceTime is no longer working on iOS 6.”

First spotted in a thread on the Apple Support Communities mini-site, a number of users running iOS 6-powered devices have reported an inability to either make or receive FaceTime calls. According to them, this problem dates back to April 16.

Like its predecessor, the new prototype Linkase Pro LTE iPhone case supposedly boosts your iPhone’s ability to connect to the Internet. But where the previous version was claimed to strengthen the iPhone’s wifi radio, this new LTE version is supposed to boost, you guessed it, your iPhone’s LTE data radio. Absolute Technology, the company behind the case, also claims it will add 20 percent to your battery life due to less power wasted while trying to send and receive data.

Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new albums, books and movies to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Albums

The Afghan Whigs – Do To The Beast

The Afghan Whigs haven’t released an album in over 16 years, but that streak finally dies with the release of Do to the Beast. Rather than picking up right where they left off, the Whigs have shunned 90s nostalgia and leaned on influences in R&B, soul and funk, for an album that’s rich, dark, and raw even if it misses the mark as a true rock album. 

iTunes – $9.99

August Alsina – Testimony

August Alsina first broke big when his single “I Luv This S**t” became a viral hit in 2013, and although some fans are worried he might be coming on too hot, he’s ready to mine his hip-hop connections for gold in his debut album, Testimony, that features appearances by Young Jeezy, Pusha T, Rick Ross, B.o.B., Chris Brown, and Yo Gotti. But August is never overshadowed by his rap overlords, thanks to his sweet evocative vocals that are something of a mashup between Usher and Omarion.

iTunes – $13.99

Chet Faker – Built on Glass

Melbourne-based Chet Faker established himself as one of the most alluring voices in electro-soul thanks to his cover of “No Diggity” in 2012 and the series of sultry singles that followed. Built on Glass, his first full-length album, is a swirl of blues-inflected ruminations on love, loss, desire and emotional desolation. Combined with spare beats, hypnotic samples and yearning melodies, Built On Glass is an imaginative, soulful delight.

iTunes – $9.99

Books

Creativity Inc.
by Ed Catmull

Thousands of books have tried to formulate the secrets of creativity, but as one of the co-founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull is uniquely positioned to dispense advice on creativity in business. In Creativity Inc., he explores the lessons learned while creating some of the most beloved animated films of the last 20 years and the ideals and techniques that made Pixar so widely admired – and so profitable.

iTunes – $11.99

Can’t and Won’t
by Lydia Davis

Rick Moody once called Lydia David “the best prose stylist in America,” but you can make that judgement for yourself as her fifth collection of stories Can’t and Won’t hits iTunes this week, demonstrating all the power of her sly humor and finely honed prose, as her stories seek to untangle the predictable patterns of daily life.

iTunes – $12.99

WAR! What Is It Good For?
by Ian Morris

Ian Morris’s new book makes our list for its excellent title alone (seriously, no one else thought to name a book after the popular song?), but there’s more to WAR! than just its catchy title as Morris explores one of history’s greatest paradoxes to see how war has changed our society for the better. With all of those unmarked tanks edging towards chaos in Ukraine, it’s a timely read.

iTunes – $12.99

Movies

The Unknown Known

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the most powerful men behind the scenes in Washington for over three decades. In this shocking documentary about the use and abuse of American power, Academy Award winner Errol Morris sits down with the former United States Secretary of Defense to discuss his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

iTunes – $6.99

Joe

Nicholas Cage is the probably the most hit-or-miss Academy winner of all time, which makes recommending any movie he’s in tricky. This one, however, is a safe bet:  Cage has his best role in years with a film about a hard-living ex-con who inexplicably becomes a role model  to a 15-year old homeless boy as he teeters between redemption and ruin.

iTunes – $6.99

Beneath the Harvest Sky

Fans of Game of Thrones will enjoy seeing Aiden Gillen (who plays sinister Little Finger in the HBO series) put his devilish charm to good use in Beneath the Harvest Sky. Here  he plays an outlaw character teaches his struggling teen son the business of smuggling drugs in an indie film that was all the hype at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

iTunes – $4.99

RadioShack has one of those deals coming tomorrow that’s just too good to pass up. Starting April 18th, the 16GB iPhone 5s will be sold in RadioShack stores for only $99 with a two-year contract on AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. That’s a 50% discount off the retail $199 value.

And that’s not all; iPhone 4s owners get an even sweeter deal. If you’re upgrading from eligible an iPhone 4s, you get a $100 trade-in credit on top of the $99 5s price. So you could effectively get a 5s for free.

No word on how long the promotion will last, so head to your local RadioShack tomorrow if you’re interested.

Source: RadioShack

Flickr’s redesigned mobile apps, which are out today, look very much Instagram. And I think it’s safe to say that the design decision was intentional. The question now is whether Flickr can set itself apart with its pro-friendly features and more free cloud storage than most know what to do with.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include _____, _____, and _____.

Here you go:

This new self-improvement app from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance has a simple premise: Trying to do everything is hard, but doing one thing isn’t.

Sounds obvious, but what you do here is select a few habits you’d like to form; pre-loaded examples include drinking more water, inviting friends over, and going to bed early. You can also devise your own if you want to do something that isn’t on the list. The app sets goals, and you check them off when you do them. Eventually, you can “commit” to doing a thing without prompting and start on something else.

Do One Thing by SCCA – Free | 2Morrow Mobile

I know that your iPhone already has a calculator in it, but here’s a specialty app for people who suffer from the curse of Man Thumbs.

SwipyCalc is a basic calculator that gives all the screen space to the numbers. Only the numbers. You enter your basic functions — adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing — with swipes in one of four directions. It’s fast and easy, especially once you realize that the comma in the lower left corner is what you use for a decimal point.

Unless you’re in one of the 60+ countries that uses the decimal comma. That won’t slow you down at all.

SwipyCalc – Free | Domenico Scalambrino

Spring is here, and–holy crap, do you see that bird? No, the other bird. It’s over by the tree. No, the tree by the shrub. Yeah. That bird there. Do we have those here, or is it some kind of bird-stranger?

Local Birds will help keep inane, interminable thought processes like that one from happening. You tell it your location, and it shows you birds in order of commonality to your region. So when I told people the other day that I saw a Western Scrub Jay, and they were like, “Nuh-uh,” and I was all, “Uh-huh”?

I can totally prove that that was possible now.

Local Birds – Free | Thomas Benner

This isn’t the most practical app for everyone, but it’s certainly interesting to look at.

Re(play) features six clips of athletes being all athletic and stuff. High-speed cameras captured the footage at 236 frames per second, and you can either watch the maneuvers play out or scrub back and forth to study the movements in detail. That could be nice for people studying movement for art or animation.

But even if you don’t have any professional or artistic need for Re(play), it’s really just kind of hypnotic to watch.

Re(play) – Free | JC Pinheiro

I don’t know if I’m just ridiculously clumsy or what, but I’ve had times where I saw something happening that I wanted to record, and by the time I got my camera app up and switched over to video, that thing had stopped happening. And regret is a powerful thing.

So Blink (or [Blink], if you’re super fancy) is a new app that starts recording the instant you open it; it also lets you take still photos while capturing with a single button press. And that’s slightly faster than opening your iPhone’s camera and then fumbling my stupid, giant thumb around trying to switch to video.

I feel like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial when that happens.

[BLINK] – Free | James Munro

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old rocker: you people just have no idea how good you have it.

The ease with which you can put together a fairly amazing-sounding song with that iPad and a few peripherals is darn near insulting, considering the kind of stuff we used to have to do, back in the day.

When I was in a band in Los Angeles in the 1990s (no applause, really, please), we recorded a little demo on a friend’s recording set up. This was a full-on audio workstation that used, joy of joys, Alesis Digital Audio Tape, (ADAT) a thrilling new technology that let you record up to eight tracks at once. My buddy linked up two of these bad boys for a full 16-track mini studio, and we spent weeks in that smelly room playing the same 10 songs, over and over to get them right. If we screwed up a part, we’d have to back up to the beginning again, a laborious process that certainly extended our timeline exponentially, newbie recording musicians that we were.

Soon after that epic effort, I wanted to do some of my own recording, but I really didn’t have the money to buy the kind of crazy-expensive equipment that we had used on our demo tape (remember tape?), so I turned to my Mac, a Performa 638CD that the salesman at Circuit City had sold me without mentioning that PowerMacs were just about to come out. Jerk.

Anyway, I lost a few brain cells learning some arcane audio recording software enough to just scrape by. I’m not sure I remember which software it was (brain cell loss, remember?) it might have been Cubase, Logic, or ProTools, but to say these were overkill (and darn pricey) is an understatement. They were hard to learn, and you needed a ton of weird equipment to connect MIDI keyboards or drum machines to the thing, so I didn’t even bother.

Macs continued to play a role in my music, but not to any huge extent. I’d rather be a musician than a recording engineer — and that was what you’d need to be to make older equipment and software sound halfway decent.

Flash forward to 2004. Steve Jobs announced Garageband, with a little help from John Mayer. Here, finally, was multi-track recording software for the rest of us. A little program that would let me record live music, use pre-recorded loops like the most expensive software at the time, and mix it all down to something that I could then burn to a CD and play in my car? All for the cost of, well, next to nothing? Sign me up, right now.

The next few iterations of the Garageband software added amazing technological advances, like recording more and more tracks at once, pitch correction and automated pan tracking (moving the audio from one side of a stereo signal to the other). The ability to easily create and edit Podcasts led to my short stint as a podcaster, in fact.

Now you’ve got this ridiculously advanced audio recording software on an iPad. A tablet that you can slip into a backpack and just go. It’s a glorious time to be a musician with this kind of ability within your reach. Just be sure and know you’re totally spoiled.

Apple has begun selling refurbished models of the iPad mini with Retina display for about 15% off in its online store. Only WiFi models are being offered right now in 32GB and 64GB variants.

A 32GB Retina iPad mini refurb runs $419, which is $80 cheaper than retail price. Not many third-party retailers can match that kind of discount.

While the Apple Store is the last place to normally shop for discounts, it does have one thing going for it: refurbished products. When you buy a refurb from Apple, you’re buying hardware that Apple has replaced with even newer parts than stock items in most cases. Refurbs also come with a full, one-year warranty.

Source: Apple Store

Your desk needs to be clean and organized so you function as efficiently as possible, right? Don’t you get tired of wasting time untangling, tripping and spilling due to that pesky abundance of cords.

CableHub isn’t just any other cable management system. Those only store one or two cables at once, but you need something that exceeds that. Some people need to charge a tablet, phone, headset, laptop, and any other everyday necessity to keep your day running smooth, and CableHub will help make that happen. And Cult of Mac Deals has The CableHub 2 Pack for only $24.99 during this limited time offer.

Dropbox has been very busy lately. After announcing big updates to Mailbox and the all-new Carousel photo app, a new service is joining its repertoire. Loom, a popular photo and video storage service, announced today that it has been bought by Dropbox.

The news isn’t a complete surprise given the recent launch of Carousel. While it’s sad to see Loom go, the acquisition is very smart on Dropbox’s part.

Sometimes in life you just want to experience the excitement portrayed in every action-packed book, movie and television show you see. While your regular day-job may not consist of being a hitman on the run, in the newly released app Hitman GO this is your sole occupation. Strategically swipe your hitman across squared grids helping him reach his targets in this addicting new puzzler. Do you think you have what it takes to take out all of your targets?

Take a look at the video and see what you think.

Facebook announced this morning that it’s adding a new Nearby Friends feature to its mobile app for iOS and Android that lets you stay more connected than ever with your buddies by letting you stalk every step they take.