One December years ago, in London’s Piccadilly Circus, a Santa Claus sat in a pavement cafe eating lunch with an elf. Santa had a pint of beer in from of him. I raised my old film SLR, which was prefocused and had the exposure already dialed in, and took a couple of shots.

I hoped they’d turn out well.

“Who are those pictures for?” said a guy, shouting as he jogged toward me. He’d come from somewhere nearby because it was too cold for just a shirt on a December afternoon in London, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. I ignored him — there are a lot of nutters in Piccadilly any time of the year.

“Are you taking pictures of me?” he said.

Despite Apple’s claims that email attachments are safely locked away with data encryption in iOS 7, a new report has found that all your email attachments have been vulnerable and unencrypted for months.

Isn’t it time to replace your bulky old wallet with something that really does make a difference? Sure it is – and Cult of Mac Deals can help you out with that!

EZGO is a new kind of wallet that brings ingenuity and many new useful features. A modern, buoyant, slim and lightweight wallet designed with no moving parts, for easy access to cards, cash, digital media and more. And Cult of Mac Deals has the EZGO Wallet for 42% off the regular price – just $19.99 – during this limited time offer!

What Amazon taketh away, Amazon also giveth.

One week after enraging comic nerds everywhere by removing the option to purchase titles within its ComiXology iOS app, Amazon has made it easier than ever purchase products thanks to a snazzy new Twitter feature.

From this point on  — provided you live in either the U.S. or UK — whenever a customer discovers a tweet from their favorite artist, brand, friend, etc. featuring an Amazon product link, they can simply add “#AmazonCart” to their reply and that product is added to their Amazon.com Shopping Cart. (UK customers must add #AmazonBasket instead.)

A lot of apps hope to inspire you to improve yourself and focus by offering you words of wisdom from people whose names you recognize. Like that rather stern one up there, which comes courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Maybe you’ll get something out of this app, which gives you a new quotation every day to make you work harder and feel better. But I’m going to use it to reply back to coworkers who have silly inspirational quotes in their e-mail signatures. It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive office way of saying, “Leave me alone, and get back to work.”

I’m sure my boss will love that.

Source:Daily Productivity Quotes – Free | Michael Paddock

Here’s yet another artsy, minimalist puzzle game you’ll want to check out.

Bicolor gives you some colored blocks with numbers on them, and your job is to swipe them around to make the entire screen a single color. It sounds easy — and it typically is, if I’m honest — but it has moments of beauty and elegance that make you forget that it isn’t challenging you. And it’s fun enough without the head-scratching because, like all minimalist puzzle games, it’s about calm, man.

And as long as you keep that in mind, the two of you will get along just fine.

This week we check out the best iPhone cases for using underwater. And seeing as the only reason to take an iPhone underwater is to snap pictures, we’re looking specifically at the camera capabilities.

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

Every week, we serve up the best of the website as a magazine so you can download an read it at your leisure on your iPhone or iPad.

This week Buster Hein foraged for the best in movies, books and music in the iTunes store, his picks include an album of flamenco-rockin goodness, plus a haunting Southern drama and a riveting nonfiction book how the modern office got “cubed.” We also review the best in apps as well as take a look at the best minimalist iPhone cases and the most awesome Apple-related gadgets we found this week.

Cult of Mac Magazine May 5 Edition

When I worked on my college paper a million years ago, my buddy Bruno had Leicas. This made him the coolest person in the whole wide world.

The cameras were tiny and had the smoothest-operating lenses I had ever touched. They were a feat of German engineering. For me, it was love at first sight. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop lusting for one of those tiny black boxes.

I immediately started my quest to get one. I had to have a Leica. And because this was the mid-’80s, I definitely wanted an M6, which was introduced in 1984. Hell, it was advanced. It had a meter. The first real meter in a Leica, if you disregard the much-maligned M5.

Having sold its handset business to Microsoft, Nokia has plenty of time on its hands to devote to other projects (probably). The Finnish firm has already announced that it will invest $100 million in car connectivity, and according to a new job listing on LinkedIn, it also has plans to bring back Here Maps for Android and iOS.

Want a wacky stat to start your Monday? According to a new poll by YouGov, iPhone owners are the most likely smartphone users to send “sexts.”

Apparently, more than 30% of iPhone users have sent explicit messages at some point, compared to 21% of Blackberry users, and 17% of people with a Samsung device.

Apple has donated $500K to the anti-poverty initiative SF Gives, according to people close to the matter.

Launched in March this year, SF Gives is the joint venture of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Daniel Lurie, CEO of the nonprofit Tipping Point. Their goal is to get 20 businesses to contribute $500,000 each to fund local charitable programs.

Of course, when you’ve got more money in the bank than the gross domestic product of the whole of Luxembourg, giving $500K to charity isn’t exactly breaking the bank. But it’s interesting because it shows a public commitment to charity in line with Tim Cook’s vision for Apple as a philanthropic “force for good” in the world.

Have you ever dreamed of swiping up instead of across on your smartphone to unlock it — a whole new way of doing things that is totally unlike the iPhone standard?

No, this isn’t a leaked memo from Samsung’s R&D department, but rather a new tweak available to jailbreakers free of charge in the Cydia Store, optimized for iOS 7 and ARM64-devices.

Called SlideUP2Unlock, the tweak more or less does what it says on the tin: getting rid of the Lock screen camera shortcut in favor of allowing you to use upwards swipe gestures to unlock your iPhone.

Most people these days have a spare, old and unused iPhone or iPod touch gathering dust somewhere in a drawer, but it’s time to breathe new life into your retro Apple device by updating it to iOS 7 … almost.

Cult of Mac’s Ste Smith shows you how to install Whited00r onto your Apple device to bring it back to the future so you can use your iPhone 2G or 3GS as a spare, or an old iPod touch as your main MP3 Player.

Make sure to subscribe to the Cult of Mac YouTube channel for all the new videos coming seven days a week.

I think it’s safe to say that no one was clamoring for a Metal Slug tower defense game. Don’t get me wrong: I love Metal Slug and have since the Neo Geo days. But despite the number of entries in the series now being firmly in the double digits, I don’t think anyone was calling for a shake-up of the formula. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

May 4th only comes around once per year, and Star Wars fans know it as Star Wars Day.

We love puns as much as we love savings here at Cult of Mac Deals, so we’ve assembled The “May The Fourth Be With You” Star Wars Gamer Bundle to help every Cult of Mac reader celebrate Star Wars Day for a fraction of the regular price – just $16.50!

May the fourth be with you on Star Wars Day this year.

The droid-loving folks over at SMS audio (a company majority-owned by rapper 50 Cent) have put out a set of surprisingly good on-ear headphones based on the company’s entry-level Street by 50 on ear wired headphones.

Each set boasts a Star Wars-themed logo on the ear cups (see below) with associated fan service pack-ins like stickers and a poster.

Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.

They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.

Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week, and they’re all about food (mostly desserts, oddly enough). What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.

This time on The CultCast: rumored new EarPods take your pulse and more; updated Macbook Airs get faster and cheaper; a leaked “iPhone 6” case indicates an iPod-inspired design; Google takes on Office with new iOS apps for Drive; we ponder the state of the iPod; and we pitch our favorite tech and apps then vote on which is best… it’s an all new Faves N Raves!

Have a few chuckles while we catch you up on 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!

And thanks to Lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.

Click on for the show notes.

Cult of Mac Deals is starting off the weekend right with a couple of offers that aim to make your life easier – both at home and on the go!

We’ve lined up a great price for Typinator, the productivity-boosting text expansion app, offering it for 42% off the regular price. And for those of you who want to stay charged while on the go, we’ve got The Apple Approved Lightning Cable and Car Charger available for only $26.99!

The jury is done deliberating. The results are in. And Samsung is guilty. Again.

Weeks of legal sparring between Apple and Samsung has finally culminated this week in San Jose, as a federal jury just ruled that Samsung did indeed infringe on at least one of Apple’s patents while it only partially infringed on others.

If you’re looking to get away from it all, you might want to check out this game. …and then it rained is an arcade game full of sound, rain, and colors, and it’s the perfect game for a quiet few minutes away from the hectic pace of your life.

With true zen-like minimalism, there are just a few simple mechanics at work here, but it may just be the best game you play all week.

Check out the video below to see how it plays.

What if you had a Mophie-like battery pack for your MacBook? Available for preorder now, the BatteryBox is exactly that.

The box itself is about the length of a credit card and packs a whopping 12,000mAh battery. That equates to about 12 hours of extra juice for the MacBook Air and 6 hours for the Pro. The BatteryBox can charge any device over USB, and it has its own MagSafe2 connector.

The complications behind creating a small screen for something like an iWatch are immense, but Apple has bought the company it may need to make it all possible.

TechCrunch reports that Apple has acquired LuxVue Technology, a small California-based company that specializes in “microLED-based displays for consumer electronics applications.” It turns out that microLEDs could work very well with wearables.

Celebrities like Samsung phones, but they love marketing paychecks even more.

The wave of Samsung-sponsored selfies that started with massive retweets at the Oscars, has become one of the most popular viral campaigns in the history of the Internet as everyone from Ellen to Big Papi have been spotted snapping Samsung-selfies in exchange for a fat paycheck.

And Apple is totally jealous.