Cult of Mac

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!

Best Albums

Broken Bells – After the Disco

For their second album as dynamic duo Broken Bells, Danger Mouse and James Mercer of Shins fame combine their arching melodies and sweet vintage synths with groovy bass-lines for a sound that’s a fusion of futuristic disco and rock. The final product, After the Disco, is a kaleidoscope of pop mixed with imagination, in what is surely the duo’s best album to date.

iTunes – $10.99

CEO – Wonderland

CEO’s second LP drifts somewhere between dreams and nightmares. It’s energetic and bouncy. It’s great to work to. In fact, I wrote this whole article while grooving to Wonderland’s other-worldly sounds. That alone deserves a nod in this week’s picks.

iTunes – $9.99

Bombay Bicycle Club – So Long, See You Tomorrow

Bombay Bicycle Club has decided to reinvent itself with each of the albums its released, and while some of the previous efforts were charming, nothing has felt satisfactory. Rather than releasing their fourth album a year after A Different Kind of Fix, it seems like the group benefited from their time off with most the songs being written during Jack Steadman’s travels to Turkey, India, and Netherlands. Beat and loops get more of an emphasis on So Long, See You Tomorrow making it the groups most vibrant disc yet.

iTunes – $9.99

Best Books

All Joy And No Fun – The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
by Jennifer Senior

I don’t have any kids, and a recent trip to Disneyland kind put me off on the idea of having them for a while, but when I do this will be my reading list. Rather than taking a look on the effects of parenting on children, All Joy and No Fun examines the effects of children on their parents and how changes over the last 50 years have dramatically altered the roles of mothers and fathers, making them more complex than ever.

iTunes – $13.99

The UnAmericans: Stories
by Molly Antopol

One of the most promising collection of short stories lands this week from the young Molly Antopol, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Antopol’s stories combine for a stunning exploration of characters shaped by history and the nature of disillusionment as failed dreams crack.

iTunes – $11.99

Extreme Medicine – How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century
by Kevin Fong

All the blank unexplored places on our maps have been filled in over the last 200 years, but as man has pushed the boundaries of his physical limits, we’ve also been pushing the medical boundaries as well. In his book Extreme Medicine, Dr. Kevin Fong explores how medicine has been shape by mankind’s thirst for exploration. Like how the challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors pioneering techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and much more.

iTunes – $14.99

Best Movies

Thor: The Dark World

I wasn’t a huge fan of the first Thor film, but Chris Hemsworth managed to win me over in Thor: The Dark World. There’s less cheesy love drama on Earth this time around, for starters. This time there are higher stakes – all of the Nine Realms are up for grabs. And Loki and Thor team up to take down an enemy even Odin couldn’t destory.

iTunes – $19.99

12 O’Clock Boys

The Wire offered one of the most stunning portraits of life in Baltimore (or any city), but did you know that there is a gang of dirt bike riders who perform death-defying stunts on the street while evading the police? It sounds out of place in the urban landscape of Charm City, but the documentary 12 O’Clock Boys follows Pug, a precocious youngster who will stop at nothing to join the gang.

iTunes – 12.99

Grand Piano

Grand Piano hasn’t even hit theaters stateside yet, but iTunes offers the thriller featuring Elijah Wood as a brilliant concert pianist suffering from stage fright. During a concert the pianist learns a sniper in the audience will shoot him if he plays a wrong note, in one of the most unique action movies this year. Want the complete opposite of an Elijah Wood and John Cusack pairing? Try Escape Plan.

iTunes – $12.99

Have the spectacular goings-on at Sochi got you inspired to get off the couch and pick up your snowboard? Just remember to take your iPhone with you: there are a ton of game-changing apps to get more out of your runs.

Back in the day, slo-mo video analysis and gait analytics were only for the pros, now weekenders can have it, too, along with speed and other stats that can definitely up your game.  Cult of Mac polled some app makers for advice on how to get more out of this winter sports season.

Extreme Sports? Step It Up Before You Go

“One of the frustrating things about extreme sports is that you just can’t do them all the time. As a snowboarder living in Israel, all I get is one week of snowboarding a year, at best,” Benny Shaviv, CEO Clear Sky Apps, maker of fitness apps ranging from 10K forever to Pushups Extreme. Before the winter season, Shaviv runs two t0 three times a week and does strength training. A month before the longed-for vacation he steps it up and says the “impact on my snowboarding has been tremendous.”

Find Focus Before You Hit The Slopes

“Although meditation can have a spiritual or philosophical aspect to it, I focus on the neurological changes in the attentional system,” says Portenga, a sports and performance psychologist and founder of iPerformancePsychology.  “I use meditation to help train the attentional system without getting into the philosophical aspects. Breathing is similar. This is a crucial skill to manage energy and recovery. It’s surprising how many people don’t breathe efficiently or have breathing patterns that waste energy and can lead to anxious feelings. To handle pressure, a performer must have mastery over their attention and energy.”

That said, Yoda-like mental mastery still can’t make you graceful or expert if you’re a world-class klutz.

“At the most basic level, sport is 100% physical,” Portenga, who has worked with athletes in both the summer and winter Olympics, notes. “If you can’t ski, you can’t ski and no amount of ‘mental toughness’ will cover for that. It’s why you’re not going to see any PhDs in sport psychology at the Olympics. That being said, the brain controls the body, so it’s responsible for how efficiently we develop and how much of what we’ve developed we get out during a performance. You have to develop the physical skills first.”

Try A Virtual Coach

Ubersense, a free app for video and analysis in sports training, has been working with the USA Bobsled and Skeleton teams before they hit Sochi. Choke is a dirty word in sports, and it tends to happen when experts morph back into newbies when they suddenly become conscious of every move they make. And what about newbies who are already hyper-aware of how exactly how dumb they look?  It all depends on when you decide to shoot, apparently.

Listen To Your Body, Not the Tech

Let’s say you’ve been faithful to wearing a heart rate monitor and an app, to track your progress all fall. Fitness by the numbers can be problematic, though.

“The biggest pitfall of training with tech is relying on it too much,” says Kate Billerbeck of NuMetrex, which makes futuristic heart rate monitor clothes and gear. “People tend to look at the stats in isolation – they think something like ‘oh, well I’ve had really steady results the past couple of days, so I can push myself to the limit today.’ ”

The opposite happens when weekend athletes let the numbers get them down. Billerbeck says that it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re not seeing the progress you expected.

“It’s important to remember why you started self-monitoring in the first place – to get to know your body better.  Sometimes it can be beneficial to take a step back and get some perspective – take a day off if you’re feeling tired or think about how much better you feel about yourself when you get a good workout in – regardless of whether or not your progress shows up on the screen.”

Digifit apps.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

One final word to the quantified fitness aficionados: keep an eye on your goals and your gadgets if you want to go long.

“(People forget) they need to reassess their fitness level and workout plan as their fitness level improves to maximize workout efforts.” says Dean Hovey, CEO of fitness app purveyor Digifit.  Hovey advises users to reassess their fitness level and cardiovascular strength every few months. “This will help avoid plateaus, promote safer workouts and ultimately help the user reach their goal faster.”

Other speed bumps on the road to maximum fitness include too much data from too many disparate sources, Hovey says.

“With so many fitness, health, weight management and calorie counting tech tools these days, many people become overwhelmed and may have personal data for different goals stored in multiple accounts or on multiple devices,” he says.

“To fix this problem, link accounts to gather data in one place or find a wearable tech tool that gathers data across multiple areas.”

One final note of caution: if you’ve gone digital with your training, don’t drain your willpower because of the batteries.

“Get in the habit of charging your devices on the way to the gym in your car, keep extra chargers in your gym bag and take a long a portable device for those unexpected low battery alerts,” Hovey notes.

Remember the report from yesterday that said that Sochi Olympics sponsor Samsung was asking athletes to cover up their iPhone logos? Not something athletes need to worry about, according to the International Olympic Committee. But that doesn’t mean Samsung didn’t ask.

Foul-mouthed YouTube Senor Pacman teaches you how to beat the $50,000 a day App Store sensation, Flappy Bird. Or, at the very least, he teaches you how Flappy Bird will ultimately beat you.

Source: YouTube
Via: TUAW

Love Star Trek but cringe every time William Shatner opens his mouth? Google’s new method for customizing video could allow you to mute Captain Kirk’s melodramatic monologues, skip scenes in which the character appears, or even change the channel every time Shatner’s face graces the screen.

These novel ways of slicing and dicing video on the fly are outlined in a patent application entitled “Customized Video,” published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and assigned to Google. The system would use facial recognition to identify actors, cartoon character, etc. — and give viewers a way to find (or avoid) other videos featuring the same people.

While I’m a huge fan of the new Control Center on iOS, I can see where it might not be the best thing to have enabled on the lock screen. We’ve all left our iPhone or iPad out in places where folks might be able to get a hold of it, and you might not want those folks messing about with your settings.

Once you take Control Center out of your Lock Screen, you’ll have to enter your password (or use Touch ID) to authenticate to your phone before you can use Control Center, which is a pain, but so will anyone else, making your device just that much more secure.

This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple Store Genius who answers all your questions about working at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.

This week our Genius talks about the oldest and youngest employees at the Apple Store. Then he dishes on Windows 8 as well as whether Apple will ever come out with an iPhone with a bigger screen.

Got a question you want the inside scoop on? Send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.

Q: What’s the youngest Apple Store employee you’ve seen? The oldest?

The ages of Apple Store employees varies a lot. Before I worked at Apple, I would be shocked to see older people working at this high-tech company, but now I think it’s great because we have a wide variety of ages, gender, race and backgrounds to give customers a lot of options to connect with a Specialist.

The youngest Apple Store employees are 18, as for the oldest, I have a female co-worker in her late 60s – I’ve never dared ask her exact age. She retired as an airline stewardess and now works at the Apple Store part time, mostly in the iPod and iPad sections, but she’s phenomenal. If you can put up with pushy airline passengers, the Apple Store is a cake walk.

Q: Are you required to use Macs? What do you think of Windows 8?

At the Apple Store we’re required to use Macs because the tools we use to diagnose and fix problems with Macs, iPods, iPhones, etc. only works on OS X, so using a Windows machine isn’t an option. As far as personal life though, Apple has no say. A few friends at the Apple Store game on PCs but most of them use Boot Camp on Mac.

Windows 8 is interesting. It was a gutsy move to introduce a UI that’s so radically different, but it sounds like its not paying off for Microsoft. I haven’t played with it a ton myself, but when I have, the tile interface has turned me off. I actually like Windows 7. It feels solid and in some ways I like it better than OS X 10.9, but Windows 8 feels like a mistake. I hate that Microsoft is trying to get us away from the keyboard and mouse for a touchscreen desktop. It doesn’t work as well as on a tablet you hold with your hands.

Q: Will Apple ever make an iPhone a bigger screen?

Probably ;)

Apple has already showed that it’s willing to make a bigger iPhone screen with the iPhone 5. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but rumors say they’re moving to a bigger screen this year.

Fragmentation is always a concern, but Apple has changed the resolution on the iPhone every two years since the iPhone 4 and developers have adjusted just fine. Maybe it’ll happen again this year. I wouldn’t mind if they do.

Despite Apple’s incredible success with the iPhone, company co-founder Steve Wozniak believes it should make a new Android-powered smartphone and “play in two arenas at the same time.” Woz believes such a device could compete very well in the Android market against rival manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola.

Numerus — Reference — Free

Numerus is one of those weird apps that shouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But once you spend a little time clicking around it, you will feel the random knowledge dropping into your head.

Did you know that in 1950, the Canadian postal system processed 1,362,310,155 items? I don’t know why you would, but you do now. Also, the human body has 248 organs, there were 129 episodes of the CBS sitcom Becker, and China contains 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. I can’t stop.

Alright, maybe one more.

Is that a Bill and Ted reference in there? This app is amazing.

Numerus: Fun Facts About Numbers – Clover Studio Ltd.

Here’s the thing about touch controls: You’re controlling the game with the same thing you’re using to see what you’re doing. This creates a problem when your dumb, clumsy fingers start blocking your view and lead to cheap and preventable deaths.

Some games prevent this by putting the control areas off to the side or in an otherwise unused place on the screen, leaving the view clear. Lego Star Wars: Microfighters, the latest in the synergetic juggernaut of a series, is not one of those titles.

It’s surprising that developers and publishers as experienced as Warner Bros. and Traveller’s Tales would allow such a clumsy and stupid thing to happen, but here it is.

Preview is a fantastic image viewer with some basic image and PDF annotation tools.

If you’re viewing a high resolution image and want to magnify a small portion of the image, without zooming the whole thing in, you’ll want to use the magnification tool, also known as a loupe.

It’s time to take your diet from digital to delightfully simple.

ReFleX NutriCrystal is a Bluetooh enabled, glass-top kitchen scale to help you track calorie intake and reach your healthy eating goals. And Cult of Mac Deals has it right now during this limited time offer for 27% off – just $79.99.

Your unbridled addition to Flappy Bird, the latest craze in smartphone gaming that has recently rocketed to the top of the App Store and Google Play charts, is earning its creator an incredible $50,000 per day in advertising revenue.

The title has been downloaded over 50 million times since its debut, and it has amassed almost 350,000 ratings across both platforms.

We’ve all likely done it: you’re sending a text message — only to find out after hitting the “send” button that your carefully crafted comments have fallen victim to some embarrassing autocorrect abomination.

Clearly someone at Apple has had the same experience, since a new Apple patent suggests that future iPhones may include an option for correcting messages after the user has instructed the device to send, but before the transmittal of the message has taken place.

From quadrocopter deliveries to rumors of a 3D Kindle smartphone coming in 2014, Amazon has been on the cutting edge of tech for quite some time now. The company’s latest update for its iOS app, however, might be among the most fun new developments we’ve seen.

Along with the ubiquitous bug fixes seen in practically every iOS app update, version 3.2.1 of Amazon’s retail app includes a feature called “Flow” which lets users quickly and easily search for products using their iOS camera.

We said it wouldn’t be too long until a jailbreak was available for iOS 7.0.5, and thankfully the good folks at Evad3rs haven’t let us down — since Evasi0n has just released its untethered iOS 7.0.5 jailbreak.

U.S. iPhone users won’t get a whole lot from the iOS 7.0.5 update, since its changes mainly deal with minor bug fixes to network errors on Chinese carriers — but for those looking for assurance that their unlocked iPhone can be used internationally without problem, it may be worth a download.

What do Steve Jobs, Tony Hawk, Elvis Presley, and Marlon Brando have in common? All of them qualify as “cool.”

That’s the verdict of the curators of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery — opening Friday — which explores the concept of “American Cool” through some of its most iconic figures.

Apple’s dislike of bitcoin has been on display for quite some while now, but the cyber-currency has been hit yet again as Apple removed Blockchain — the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet — from its App Store late Wednesday.

Apple had previously removed fellow wallets BitPak and Coinbase — while Blockchain had previously found itself excised, only to later be re-accepted.

After what seems like a lifetime of anticipation, Final Fantasy VI for iOS has finally touched down in the App Store.

Representing the FF series at its 2D peak, the game (which originally hit consoles back in 1994) takes place in an eye-popping Industrial Revolution-inspired world, as characters Terra and Locke battle to escape the clutches of an evil Empire.

The 2014 Winter Olympics may be the first quantified games in history. Sure, coaches have been standing by with stopwatches and clipboards since, well, some dude sprinted down dusty roads in sandals, probably. But now, there’s an app for that.

Elite athletes are using apps to keep them on top of their game – physically and mentally. We talked to Steve Portenga, who has worked with winter and summer Olympians, and created iPerformancePsychology to help give the rest of us the winning mindset. He admits there’s less to be done about your hopeless snowplow on the bunny slope, but more on that in the story.

I’m excited about these apps, and that’s saying a lot. There are only two times you’ll find me interested in sports: the Olympics and the World Cup. Even then, it’s usually not so much the sport that captivates me — though the winter games have the edge when it comes to mesmerizing sequins — it’s the epic international battles played out in the name of gymnastics or soccer.

When the question of who lands on the podium speaks to age-old predilections rather than strictly by GDP, things get interesting. Norway, for example, is a nation of just five million souls but is expected to make mammoth countries like the U.S. eat ice dust in Sochi. Jamaica’s bobsled team, which qualified for the first time since 2002, is coming to Russia courtesy an international crowdfunding campaign. I plan to re-arrange my schedule to view all of their matches. And what about host country Russia? Can pumping millions into sports bring back the glory days, especially after the embarrassing showing in Vancouver? The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat take on a larger meaning when countries go for for the gold.

Once again, I’ll be watching exclusively on my MacBook Pro, iPhone or iPad. (When I moved back to San Francisco from Milan with exactly four boxes, buying a set never became a priority.) Watching sports this way brings interesting aspects to viewing not limited to the tiny screen and intermittent buffering. For instance, I ended up watching the last World Cup entirely in Spanish, which definitely has an edge over the more buttoned-down English-language commentary. Note to U.S. broadcasters: you really need to hire a guy to give rat-a-tat-tat play-by-play climaxing in “GOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!” People would watch soccer, then.

Fortunately, this time around our own Charlie Sorrel has chimed in with all the tips you need to watch without a traditional TV. And we’re off, for 18 days of sport!

When I was young, maybe between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I used to make very basic games with a friend of mine called James Brzezicki. They were almost always the simplest things imaginable: a single sprite jumping over other sprites, or a ball bouncing back and forth between two paddles. This wasn’t because we had worked out how to strip gaming down to its most base elements, but rather because it was all we could work out how to program.

Samsung is an official sponsor of the Sochi 2014 Olympics, and the Korean company has been giving athletes Galaxy Note 3 phones to use during the games. In exchange for the gifts, Samsung has reportedly asked the athletes to specifically cover the Apple logos on their personal iPhones.

What happens if athletes don’t respect the rule remains unclear. Logos were also asked to be covered by Samsung when it was a sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics, so this isn’t a new tactic. However, it does illustrate Samsung’s corporate contempt for Apple.

We’ve shown you how to enable the hidden Smart Mailboxes in iOS 7, which is a great way to manage your email in Apple’s own built-in Mail app.

If you’re like many of us, though, you’ll have a few folders for organizing your mail as it comes in. I use Mailbox on my iPhone, but Mail app on my iPad, and I want to be able to access the Mailbox “Follow Up” folder on my iPad without having to tap through a ton of different folder hierarchies.

It’s relatively easy to set your Mail app up to add any folders you have in any of your email accounts.

If you’re into gaming, then having a versatile experience at your disposal is ideal. This Cult of Mac Deals offer gives you just that — and at a price that is tough to beat.

That’s right. The Mac/PC/XBOX 360/PS3 Gamer Hardware Bundle gives you a universal controller and headset that lets you game with top-notch quality and on multiple platforms. And you’ll get this bundle at a 20% savings — just $48!

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 some interactive art, a quick way to exchange contact information, and a really rude personal trainer.

Here you go:

Slip — Utilities — Free

Slip knows that exchanging business cards can be annoying. You have to find your cards and then take theirs and then maybe jam it into the back of the thing where you keep your cards, and hopefully it fits. And then later, you find their card and can’t remember why you’d met in the first place.

So instead of that, Slip uses Bluetooth to exchange contact information wirelessly. You go in and toggle which bits of information you want to share and just flip it over to another user with a single swipe. You can also text or e-mail it to people without Slip, but that’s not as much fun.

Slip – Yodel Code

CARROT Fit — Health & Fitness — $1.99

It isn’t hard to find a fitness app that offers enthusiastic and positive encouragement to keep you motivated and working toward your goals. CARROT Fit is not one of those apps.

Following its predecessors, CARROT To-Do and CARROT Alarm, Fit brings the you-deprecating artificial intelligence program to bear on your weight-loss plan. You set your goal, and “she” gives you points and virtual medals for doing well and mocks you if you don’t. It’s basically like if GLaDOS, the comical, murderous A.I. from developer Valve’s Portal series, were sent to whip you into shape.

By which I mean that CARROT Fit is kind of amazing.

CARROT Fit – Talking Weight Tracker

Phone Price — Reference — Free

If you’re due for an upgrade to your iPhone, you might be wondering what to do with your current one. You could go to a bunch of different websites and search for buyback values or try to just sell it yourself, but that sounds like a lot of work, and living in the future like we do means things should be easy.

Phone Price is an app that aggregates phone trade-in values from a variety of sources so that you can get the most for your old device. So you’re basically making the phone a party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.

Phone Price – K Mobile Solutions

iHud — Utilities — Free

You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.

iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.

I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.

iHud – Anders Sperling

Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free

Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.

The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

Contact Alias — Utilities — Free

People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?

Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.

Contact Alias – Ryan Siegel