Those hoping for a little more rock and roll at SXSW will be amped to hear Apple just added Soundgarden to the lineup of bands schedule to perform at iTunes Festival during SXSW this year.

You know how it is; as a brimming young tech-savvy hipster, you need to carry a lot of gear with you as you cycle from the coffee house to the park bench, writing your magnum opus and staying in touch with your iPad, Macbook Air, and iPhone.

The thing is, that gear usually comes with a ton of support gear, with all sorts of plugs, wires, battery packs, extra mice, point-and-shoot camera and the like. You’ll be awash with the detritus of your modern monadic life in no time without some sort of organizational system that you can strap to your back while on the go.

Kastel thinks it has the answer with a Kickstarter project to fund a new line of functional, good looking bags for your gear, soon to be available in three savvy material choices, including leather and blue and grey linen.

Balance Book is a simple, easy, clean way to track your income and expenses on a daily or monthly level. You set up categories and assign colors to keep them straight, and then you just make entries based on how much money you bring in or spend. It automatically calculates your net values to give you an idea of where you are on any given day.

Now I know that I’m probably spending way too much money on sour bears. But in my defense, they are delicious.

Source:Balance Book – Free | Tree Planet

Developer Pangea Software’s well-regarded Enigmo series of puzzle games has been around for a while, and they’ve turned over development of the latest installment, Enigmo: Explore to a new team, but the idea is the same: See that liquid dripping from a pipe over here? Get it into that jar over there.

The game gives you a suite of tools to accomplish this, including trampoline-like items that the drops bounce off of and little cannons that can send them even farther. It’s up to you to decide which items in which combinations to use to complete levels, which offers you a decent amount of freedom when you’re playing it.

But a couple other features work just as hard against you, and it’s kind of a shame.

Tired of turning your iMac or Apple Cinema Display just to share things with co-workers or to get a better vantage point when you’re working? This Cult of Mac Deals offer has got your solution.

The Rain Design i360 turntable provides an elegant and dynamic way to turn the iMac, Apple Cinema Display, and Apple Thunderbolt (24“–27”). At the push of a finger, you can share the screen during group discussion and access the back ports easily. And you can get the i360 for only $39.99 courtesy of this special offer from Cult of Mac Deals.

Oscar-nominated director David Fincher is in talks to direct Sony’s upcoming biopic about Steve Jobs, according to Variety. If Fincher did direct, it would team him up yet again with writer Aaron Sorkin. The last time the two worked together was on The Social Network.

Fincher is currently finishing up post-production on his latest movie, Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck. He directed the first two episodes of House of Cards and is an executive producer for the show. The last project he directed for Sony was 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Aaron Sorkin finished his script for the Jobs biopic earlier this year. He has said in the past that the story will be divided into three distinct acts, and each act will take place backstage at an Apple keynote. No rumors on casting yet.

Source: Variety

The tale of Flappy Bird is almost unbelievable. A frustratingly simple iPhone game from an indie game dev in Vietnam with no prior notoriety becomes an overnight success. It dominates the App Store charts and starts making $50,000 per day in ad revenue. Then, out of the blue, the dev decides to pull it from the App Store at the height of its popularity.

It was a story too good to be true. Except that it was true.

In the wake of Flappy Birds’s removal, countless knockoffs have tried to fill the gap. “Flappy Bird being taken off the App Store has created this vacuum,” says Jeremy Olson, founder of the award-winning app studio Tapity. In an effort to make a worthy successor to Flappy Bird, Olson and his small team have created Buffalo Wings.

Instead of a bird, you guide a flying buffalo over and under walls by tapping the iPhone’s screen. Hit a wall at any point and you have to start over. The gameplay mechanics may be the same, but Tapity is hoping that Buffalo Wings has what it takes to capture lightning in a bottle twice.

In the ephemeral world of Internet memes, gamers have already moved on from Flappy Bird and on to the next thing. But that doesn’t mean that developer Dong Nguyen was wrong when he claimed that the game was proving “addictive” to players.

In a new YouTube Sci Show episode, host Hank Green explains why a game that even its staunchest defenders would admit is pretty stupid proved so crazily addictive.

Popular numerical puzzle game Threes! has received its first ever update, adding several player-requested features.

For those who haven’t played Threes!, it’s a game which challengers players to come up with multiples of 3 by sliding and matching pairs of cards. The object is to gain the highest score possible by combining numbers to first make 3s, then 6s, then putting those together to get 12s, and so on.

It’s surprisingly fun and addictive, and has been met with a number of positive reviews since its release earlier this month.

Apple has filed an appeal related to last year’s verdict stating that the company violated U.S. antitrust laws by conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices.

The appeal — which was filed Tuesday with the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York — calls U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote’s ruling “a radical departure from modern antitrust law and policy,” and argues that it will “stifle innovation, chill competition, and harm consumers” if it is followed.

The company behind Candy Crush Saga has withdrawn its controversial trademark application for the word “Candy” in the United States, according to documents filed with the U.S. Trademark Office early on Monday morning.

With the tech world still buzzing over Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition, business insurance provider Simply Business has put together a fascinating infographic.

Showing 15 years of acquisitions by Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, the chart lays out in visual terms when tech giants were at their purchasing busiest, as well as how much they typically spend on deals — with the size of individual dots representing the price paid for each startup.

This year we’re covering the Barcelona Mobile World Congress a little differently. Each day there will be one liveblog post here on Cult of Mac and one on Cult of Android.

Instead of gathering up press releases and writing them up in the press office at the show, and then hitting the parties, we’ll be posting quick photos and snippets of info from the show floor itself.

Think of it as a kind of Instagram/Twitter hybrid, only right here on the site. Currently the newest posts are at the top, reverse-chronological style. Killian has given up and gone home already, so maybe I’ll get a chance to actually check out some gadgets today (Killian is a terrible influence).

If you want me to check something out, Tweet me @mistercharlie.

Now, let’s get on with Day three, the final proper day (Thursday is for the suits and the cleaners).

We’ve seen a few great Flappy Bird machines before, but nothing as incredible as this robot that flawlessly plays Flappy Bird using a web cam, a robotic arm made from an old hard drive, and the tip of a stylus.

It was created by two Chinese developers, Liu Yang and Shi Xuekun, who live in China’s Shaanxi province. According to the duo, it took four days to create the robot, which is probably 3.99 days more than Dong Nguyen originally spent programming the game himself.

Now can it beat Flapthulhu?

Apple was responsible for 15% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and as much as 56% of all the profit. Sony, on the other hand, accounted for only 3.8% of the world’s smartphone shipments in 2013, and is barely ekeing out a profit company-wide.

Despite all of this, Sony mobile chief and European president Pierre Perron told The Inquirer that Apple is “missing out” by only releasing yearly iPhone freshes, instead of flooding the market with incremental updates every few months.

Despite the fact that this year, as every year, Apple failed to show up at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the iPad Air still managed to win the award of 2014’s Best Mobile Tablet in the 19th Annual Global Mobile Awards.

I know we’ve talked about Flappy Bird a lot over the past month… but forget that stupid bird. You have a new god now. Meet Flapthulhu.

We know making your dog talk with your own voice is entertaining and will get everyone laughing hysterically. With CrazyTalk 7 Pro you can take pets, sketch drawings, baby photos or inanimate objects to create fun and interesting videos in minutes.

And Cult of Mac Deals has CrazyTalk7 Pro available for only $79.95 during this limited time offer – a savings of 46%!

Have you ever wanted to learn how to play the guitar? If so, then Cult of Mac Deals has got you covered.

If you’re an aspiring guitar player or just want to improve your skills, look no further because for only $39, you’re definitely going to get your money’s worth with The Complete Guitar Lessons Course.

Up to this point, the term “iBeacon” has been used to describe just about any location-aware transmitter that can send data to a device over Bluetooth. But now it’s going to get harder for companies to market their products as iBeacons.

Apple is clamping down on its iBeacon trademark by adding specifications for the technology to its ‘Made for iPhone’ (MFi) program.

Including iBeacon in MFi gives Apple complete quality control over where the iBeacon name can be used. When a Bluetooth speaker maker wants to be approved by Apple, it has to go through the MFi program. And now the same process will be required for iBeacon.

Apple just finished patching the nasty goto fail bug in iOS 7 and OS X, but a report shows another vulnerability in iOS has been discovered that gives attackers access to every single touch you make, including your keystrokes.

Apple has added a dedicated channel to the Apple TV for TV4 Play, the country’s largest commercial broadcasting network.

Live broadcasts and original programming are available for free. Full episodes of TV4 Group shows are available for playback up to seven days after their release. Premium TV4 subscribers get access to additional content, and the window of availability for TV shows is longer.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.

Many apps these days are location aware and are able to refresh themselves in the background. It’s how apps like Facebook can refresh that little red icon badge on your home screen without you having to launch the app.

All that background activity, though, can take its toll on your battery life. Luckily, Apple has included a way to turn this off for specific apps, or altogether.

Anyone who’s done their time babysitting knows the pain of kids wanting to watch the same Disney movie over, and over, and over, all in one day. To make Little Mermaid marathons that much easier/bearable, Disney’s got a new iOS app that lets you watch all your Disney, Pixar and Marvel movies from anywhere without using iTunes.