Cult of Mac

The iPhone has become a vehicle for not just texting and calling but also for social media and taking tons of pictures. And you certainly don’t need a Hollywood budget to make Hollywood-quality movies anymore. There are plenty of us out there who strive to take the best pictures (and make the best videos) possible and with the Phocus 3 Plus Lens Kit, that is what you’re going to get.

These three Phocus lenses and specially designed housing unit will get you there, and give you the ability to shoot photos and videos from your iPhone that will amaze even you. And Cult of Mac Deals has this package for just $99.95.

Every once in a while, you might want to password protect a PDF file with encryption. While there are several nice third-party apps that will do the trick, the simplest way to do this is with the built-in image and PDF viewer, Preview.

The Blast Furnace, the development studio responsible for Call of Duty: Strike Team, is being closed by Activision. The studio was originally expected to handle all future Call of Duty mobile games, but its 47 staff are now facing redundancy.

It’s become a begrudgingly accepted part of the App Store that the moment a popular game appears, the clones roll in with miniscule differences.

While most of us laughed at some of the ridiculous variations that emerged for a popular game like Flappy Bird (Flappy Beard Hipster Quest anyone?), it’s not quite so funny if you’re the developer of the original game in question.

With that in mind, the creators of hit puzzle game Threes recently took to their blog to complain about the growing number of ripoffs that have emerged in the App Store as of late:

Fancy yourself an MC in the making?

AutoRap by Smule, a popular app which transforms regular speech into legit rap, has just been updated to version 2.0 with several significant improvements.

Apple TV may have scored sales of $1 billion in 2013, but that hasn’t stopped Roku CEO and founder Anthony Wood from branding the device a “a money loser” and questioning why Apple would want to keep selling it.

The comments were made at the inaugural Code/Media event on Thursday, hosted by technology site Re/code. They arrive at a time when Apple is reportedly preparing a new version of the Apple TV that will integrate with Comcast’s network to provide users with a streaming TV.

Ahead of its April 4 U.S. theatrical release, Gameloft’s movie tie-in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – The Official Game has arrived in the App Store.

An original adventure co-scripted by Marvel, the game lets you play as Captain America as you lead a S.H.I.E.L.D. Strike Team to take down enemies. The game promises intense combat with plenty of tactical elements, RPG features which let you learn new fighting techniques and upgrade weapons, and an asynchronous multiplayer mode.

Citing people close to the situation, a new report by the WSJ claims that Amazon is planning to introduce an advertising-supported streaming television and music-video service.

This free service would represent a break from Amazon’s policy of linking video to its $99-a-year Prime subscription service. According to the rumor, Amazon would feature both original series and licensed content — and has discussed the effort with the creators of “Betas,” a show about a Silicon Valley startup produced for Prime last year.

Major League Baseball mobile companion app MLB.com At the Ballpark has just received a significant update.

While one new feature is the expected iOS 7 redesign, the most exciting update relates to Apple’s iBeacon technology. As Cult of Mac wrote back in September, MLB has installed iBeacons at 20 ballparks around the U.S. to offer iOS-using spectators point-of-interest mapping and other relevant contextual information during the 2014 MLB season. With MLB.com At The Ballpark version 3.0 support for iBeacons is included.

Along with the new Office Suite that launched on the iPad yesterday, Microsoft has updated its OneNote app to look like a proper iOS 7 app. OneNote is Microsoft’s Evernote competitor, and now it looks better than ever,

Quick – guess what the “Multiple Attachments” App does. Correctamundo! It lets you add multiple attachments to an email on iOS.

Transporter just took another step towards being a viable alternative to Dropbox for mobile users. Now the private cloud has become a “platform.” Don’t worry though – this just means that app makers are now free to add Transporter support to their apps, letting you sync and save your data from your iPad and iPhone.

Urban Outfitters, everyone’s favorite copyright-infringing chain store, is at it again with the Happy Plugs, earbuds from a “Swedish fashion and lifestyle brand that brings color to the world.”

Can you imagine a pair of Apple’s old Earbuds, only in color? Congratulations, because you just imagined the Happy Plugs, in a uncannily accurate piece of mind theater.

At last, a portable Thunderbolt drive that leeches its power from the Thunderbolt connector itself, just like a USB drive. And you can’t even lose the cable for WD’s new My Passport Pro – it’s built into the unit itself.

BusyCal from BusyMac, the app that saved busy people by being a way better calendar than the junk Apple ships with the Mac, now makes BusyContacts. Or has at least announced BusyContacts. Like BusyCal before it, BusyContacts takes your local address book and syncs it with any online contacts lists you may be using. The public beta should launch this summer.

Facebook Messenger, the iOS messaging app for the ubiquitous social network, has just updated with a couple of new cool features that will help cement the app’s place on your iPhone home screen.

While it already updated just a little while ago, there are some new additions that will make you sit up and take notice.

Like the (now-defunct) Monster-Beats partnership, V-Moda has been a key player in convincing the casual music afficionado that walking around with goofy-looking cans on your ears was actually a fashion win rather than a faux pas. Naturally, this would have been practically impossible had V-Moda not actually spent what seems like considerable effort crafting a dynamic, sharp look for their headphones.

V-Moda’s newest set, the XS, could probably be considered the successor to their portable, supra-aural M-80s — but with folding cups that V-Moda says dramatically increase portability, and in an effort to improve comfort and aesthetics, design refinements to the headband that attempt to completely eliminate the gap between the band and the user’s head.

The hit bird slinging game Angry Birds has found its way on devices everywhere. While the Angry Birds series has brought developing company Rovio so much popularity, their branch company Rovio Stars aims to share the spotlight. The newest application from Rovio Stars is Word Monsters, a game that combines competitive head-to-head gameplay with word puzzles and monsters. Do you think you can beat all your friends and top the high score charts?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the iOS application Word Monsters – Rovio Stars Ltd., brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

The stunningly gorgeous Yahoo! Weather app that inspired Apple’s own new iOS 7 app for iPhone and iPad has just gotten another update, adding some great features that only enhance the usability and beauty of the app.

Look, Legos are for everyone, ok? With the huge success of the latest Lego Movie, it’s clear that playing with the building bricks isn’t just for kids anymore, if it ever was.

If you’ve been in a comic, toy, or hobby shop lately, chances are you’ve seen the little random minifigure bags that you can buy, not knowing exactly which minifigure is contained within, like a mini treasure hunt.

Funcom is banking on this craze with its upcoming release of Lego Minifigures Online for iPad, Android tablets, and PC, hoping to trade on the fact that one of the coolest features of the modern Lego experience is the little people that seem to come with every construction model set sold.

Sadly, there’s no Mac version planned as yet, but the iPad game will play the same as the PC and Android versions, on the same servers.

Cult of Mac saw a preview of Pirate World for Lego Minifigures Online last week at GDC, and we’re finally allowed to post it below.

The day has finally come. During a keynote today in San Francisco, Microsoft unveiled the Office suite for iPad. Rumors have said that Word would be unveiled for Apple’s tablet this month, but that’s not all; Microsoft has also released versions of PowerPoint and Excel.

Sure, you can ask Siri to call one of your contacts; it’s one of the ways I make calls handsfree in the car. Simply say, “Call Kim” (or the name of the contact you’d like to call–you may not know Kim), and Siri will place a voice call to that Contact.

Did you know, however, that Siri can handle even more complexity? Yes, yes it can.

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:

Idea Maker Flashcards is a new app that hopes to get your creativity going by showing you different ways to think about and approach your work. It also includes video examples of each of them for you visual learners out there.

It’s intended mostly for marketers and public-relations folks, but even people outside of those industries might be interested in some of the projects. Like the story of the Dortmund Concert Hall, which raised its attendance and membership by selling milk from cows that had listened to the upcoming symphonic program.

No, really.

Idea Maker Flashcards – Free | Hoboglobal Intergalaktik

Picking the right word can be challenging. Or maybe you’re just trying to make yourself sound smart by using something that would be a formidable figure on a Scrabble board. Either way, Thesaurasize can get you those synonyms but quick. All you do is type in the boring word you’re starting with, and it spits out a list of other candidates.

Just make sure you read the definitions Thesaurasize provides so that you know what the synonyms mean, though. You don’t want come off sounding fatuitous.

Thesaurasize – Free | Next Wave Services Inc.

I’ve always been interested in origami, but it’s been hard to find directions that consistently make sense. It’s all dashed lines and dotted lines and arrows pointing in vague directions, and it’s supposed to be relaxing, damn it. But Origami Club is here to help you out with video tutorials in which a pair of helping hands walk you through the entire process, even pausing occasionally to point out details on potentially complicated steps.

The videos are also surprisingly calming just to watch even if you don’t end up with a little mouse or whatever. But I think you want to end up with a little mouse.

Origami Club – Free | Alexey Liger

Your days of endlessly hitting “Refresh” to see if a price has come down may be over (unless you like that sort of thing). Punchr is a new app that will monitor any part of a web page for updates and then let you know when it happens. You just navigate to the site and then select the part of it you want to look out for, and it’ll send you a push notification if something changes.

So now you can spend less time refreshing Twitter when it’s down and more time taking pictures of your lunch to post on Twitter when it returns.

Punchr Page Monitor – Free | BitMelter Ltd

I don’t have a lot of time to read, so it’s always nice to find an app to help me out there. SprintReader employs <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentation”rapid serial visual presentation to let you read one of a selection of classic (i.e. public-domain) works with haste.

You get a box, and the words appear one at a time. They always appear in the same place, so you just plunk your eyes there and let the text come to you. The selections are a bit limited right now, but if you’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now might be a good time.

SprintReader – Free | Robert McBride

If your Internet connection is dragging, and you have no idea why, NetHero can offer some helpful tips to get you back up to speed. You just register, and it will check out all the devices on your home network to give you a general idea of whether or not they’re working properly. You can also download the app to your individual devices like your laptop to run speed checks and get alerts and advice that will hopefully get your devices running better and save you some aggrivation.

Source:NetHero – Free | Pie Digital

I like Scrabble and poker, and I’ve often wished that there were some way to combine them. We could call it “Scroker.” Or “Pabble.”

I haven’t, actually, because who would think of doing that? Plus, those awesome names are copyright me. Don’t steal them.

Anyway, Ayopa Games did think of it, and now we have Words and Cards, a catchy and fun social mobile game that will have you spelling and trying to remember if a flush is better than a straight. Spoiler alert: It is.