You know the drill: You’re up against an endless stream of foes moving toward you, and all you can do is move back and forth and shoot. They may be space invaders or enemy fighters or weird … animal things or something, but it’s always up to you and your single dimension of movement to stop them.

And then TriBlaster shows up and is all, “Pssssh, let’s double that.” So the developers added in a jump button, and suddenly things get completely different.

That’s right, people. Two dimensions. Welcome to the future.

Following a change to VAT (value added tax) legislation in the United Kingdom, there have been a lot of reports suggesting that Apple customers in the U.K. may soon have to pay more when buying from iTunes and the App Store.

As it turns out, those reports are likely incorrect.

You see, Apple has been charging Brits 23% VAT on digital content until now — but the U.K. VAT rate is only 20%.

This Cult of Mac Deals promotion is going to do its part to bring your speakers back to life.

The Griffin Twenty is a system that takes your existing speakers and allows you to do something new with them. You don’t need an iPhone speaker dock, or Bluetooth speakers, or cables. Connect your favorite speakers to Twenty, and it acts as your stereo receiver for pure digital sound. And right now you can get The Griffin Twenty for 30% off – just $69.99.

Tim Cook might have claimed that iPhone 5c demand “turned out to be different than we thought” on Apple’s recent quarterly earnings conference call, but there’s one company that doesn’t seem too upset about the 5c’s performance: Apple supplier Pegatron.

This week, our intrepid Games Editor Rob LeFebvre brings readers of Cult of Mac Magazine all the news from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

There were dueling VR 3D headsets, discussions about sexism in the games industry, contests, awards and plenty of action on the show floor.

But the million-dollar question this year was: How do I make the next Flappy Bird?

Essentially the Garage Band of coding, smart iPad coding editor Codea has received a major update.

Adding a new iOS 7 interface and full 64-bit support for the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display, Codea 2.0 also includes “a brand new unified asset system that supports sounds, music, images, and more,” according to developer Two Lives Left.

Apple is set to start producing all its iPhone batteries on automated production lines starting later this year, according to a report from DigiTimes.

The decision is reportedly related to minimum wages rising in China — combined with labor shortages and high turnovers of staff, who have to be trained to use the manufacturing machinery.

What if Apple’s iWatch is’t an iWatch at all? What if it’s a spec, like CarPlay, that lets folks like Casio and Rolex put an Apple chip inside their watches to make them talk to your iPhone?

Problems solved:

• Apple doesn’t have to get into the fashion watch game, or make “ladies” and “gents” watches.
• The watch industry gets a shot in the arm (pun intended) as watches get useful again.
• You don’t need a power-sucking display. The iPhone is the display.

The little BOLT Charger Battery is as clever as it is good looking. The USB wall-charger packs a backup battery into its tiny body, as body that leads its maker to call it the “The World’s Smallest Wall Charger + Battery Backup.”

I’m not sure how true that it, but who cares? It fits in your pocket and it’ll juice your iPhone twice, even without a wall to shove it into.

The already-great GeoTagr app has been updated to v4.4. This doesn’t sound like much, but there’s one huge new feature in this update: support for geotagging photos stored in your iPhone or iPad’s local photo library.

Have UK Apple users seen the end of 69p app downloads?

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has closed a tax loophole, which may result in iTunes and App Store prices in the UK rising by as much as 20% from 2015. The loophole meant that international companies including Apple were able to sell digital content in Britain through Luxemburg, where tax is as low as 3% — compared to the 20% it is charged at in the UK.

The Tactivo Mini case for the iPad mini lets you lock down apps so they can only be used when you insert a smart-card into a slot on the back. The idea is that businesses and government agencies can secure software on mobile devices, which sounds like a neat idea.

RoomScan is a crazy app that seems like it should never work. It lets you use your iPhone to measure the rooms in your home and turn them into floor plans, and all you have to do is walk around and tap the iPhone on the walls.

Apple has continued rolling out its 3D Flyover support to Maps users — adding Perth (Australia), Saint-Tropez (France) and Cordova (Spain) to its list of available cities.

Apple and Comcast are in the early stages of negotiating a streaming TV service, according to The Wall Street Journal. The service “would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web.”

Rumors have been saying that Apple is working on a TV streaming product for years, and this latest report suggests that Apple is concerned about its customers have enough bandwidth to make the experience worthwhile at home.

Animation and modeling are very tough to learn on your own, so this Cult of Mac Deals offer aims to make the process that much easier.

With The 3DS Max Tutorial, animation and modeling have neever been easier. Designed for the beginner, you do not have to have any prior experience using 3DS Max to get the most out of these video animation or modeling tutorials. You will learn about materials and mapping, lighting, and how to operate cameras within 3DS Max. Finally, you will learn to animate, render and add special F/X to your models. And you’ll get the whole course for just $39 – a savings of 60%!

The announcement of Android Wear, and smartwatches from LG and Motorola, was greeted by the public as: “Oh, look — a new kind of gadget!”

But the wearable revolution in general and Google’s Android Wear initiative in particular, is barely even about gadgets.

The smartwatch revolution is about three things: devices, smartphone apps and cloud services.

You’ll note, however, that these are listed in order from least to most important. Here’s why Google’s total dominance of the third aspect of the smartwatch revolution will make them unbeatable.

We’re big fans of the Philips Hue line of smart lightbulbs controllable with a slick, full-featured iOS app, but there’s no doubt it’s a pricey proposition for most people, with a single Hue bulb costing as much as $60.

If you want smart lighting in your home for about half the price, then, pay attention to what LG is doing. They have just announced their own smart bulb system called the LG Smart Lighting system, and each bulb will cost just $32.

It looks like paying for burgers using your iPhone is the next big trend in fast food.

Following Burger King’s announcement last week that it would be releasing a dedicate mobile app, Wendy’s has followed suit, unveiling their own iPhone-based payment app that will allow you to pay for Big Bacon Classics at any of Wendy’s 5,800 locations.

Do you have a lot of reliability issues with your iPhone or iPad? You might want to make haste to upgrade to iOS 7.1. According to a prominent app monitoring firm, iOS 7.1 is the least crash prone and most stable version of iOS yet.

Last week, Alex Kibkalo, a former Microsoft employee living in Lebanon, was arrested on charges that he had sold the Windows 8 source code in retaliation for a bad performance review. What was most shocking about the arrest was the means by which Microsoft gathered evidence pinning the crime on Kibkalo: they went into his personal Hotmail account and read his email to figure out it was him, without a court order to do so.

Apple would never do something like that by reading iCloud email without a court order, right? It’s not that simple, actually. Like Hotmail, Yahoo, and other webmail providers, iCloud’s terms of service specify that Apple reserves the right to read your email at any time.

All those cheap, five dollar replacement headphones you’ve picked up after you lost or broke your last pair add up – and they don’t sound all that great, either. It’s time to stop wasting your money and save money through Cult of Mac Deals instead.

AViiQ’s In-Ear Headphones will put a stop to your reckless spending and constantly growing headphone graveyard because Cult of Mac Deals has these high-quality headphones for only $19.99 during this limited time promotional offer.

Want to supercharge your stock music player? If you’re on a jailbroken iPhone, check out Aria. It’s a new Cydia tweak that adds a number of new improvements to the stock Music.app in iOS 7.1, including the ability to see albums in a grid view, a new ‘Now Playing’ interface (like in Apple’s Remote app), an ‘Endless Playing’ feature that will start a shuffled play after an album ends, improved lyrics views, and a number of UI improvements, including gestural support.

From a tectonic perspective, any time Apple releases a new version of iOS, it’s like an Earthquake hit the internet. But you might be surprised by how high on the Richter Scale an Apple iOS release is.

This chart by network management services provider Deepfield shows just how big of a seismic event the release of iOS 71 was. From almost zero traffic, iOS 7.1 caused traffic to spike to over 1 terrabyte of data per second… and that’s just a partial view of the effect iOS 7.1 had on the world’s networks. Imagine what this chart will look like when iOS 8 comes around?

Via: GigaOm

Blackberry — which recently celebrated the notable achievement of a zero percent marketshare in the smartphone space — has turned into a patent troll now. In suing Ryan Seacrest’s Typo iPhone Keyboard case (which gives the iPhone a physical QWERTY style keyboard which can be slide onto the screen when necessary) now claims that it is a “deliberate” copy of Blackberry that violates three patents.