Crescent Moon Games and Dead Mage have created a great action platformer here with Shadow Blade, available now in the App Store for an affordable $1.99.

It comes with Game Center Achievements and iOS 7 controller support, and a touch screen capable control scheme that works fairly well. You can read our review of the game after you watch the video below.

You can hit Command-F to find anything on your Mac, or you can hit Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, which took over for Sherlock as the built-in searching system many moons ago. In Windows 8, you can use the Search “charm.”

On the iPhone and iPad, however, some might be a little confused. There’s no keyboard commands in iOS, and Apple has even moved the Search functionality in iOS 7 from the furthermost left icon page.

What’s an iPhone owner to do when she wants to search for that specific app that she’s buried in a folder somewhere on her device, or needs the phone number of her best friend, because she’s always just used Siri to call her and has no idea what her number actually is?

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 answers why the iPhone screen can be repaired in stores while the iPad has to be shipped away from special care. We also discuss whether working at the Apple Store can be turned into a solid career, plus the top 5 most annoying things customers do at the Apple Store.

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: Do you buy lunch or bring in your own?

I  bring in my lunch. Whenever we have leftovers at home from an amazing meal I usually pack some up after for the next day. On the days where I don’t pack something I like to get away from the store for a bit and “reset” as Apple likes to call it. Most the stores are in shopping areas so we have plenty of choices for grub. We either get a half hour or an hour for lunch depending on the length of our shifts. Living on retail wages, I find I do much better financially when I take the time to plan my meals and bring them. Some days you just need a big burger to comfort you from the first world problems of a Genius though.

Q: What’s the most common lie you hear at the Genius Bar?

Geniuses and Family Room Specialists alike have to come up with a fair amount of excuses to explain to customers what’s wrong with their device. The worst excuse and the most commonly told lie at the Genius Bar is for known issues to be called “rare.”

I can’t stand it when a Genius tells a customer that a sleep/wake button failing on an iPhone is rare or that a battery needing service before being completely consumed is uncommon. I don’t know any statistics on failure rates, but I know I handle a fair number of these “rare” issues enough to say that they aren’t rare.

It’s a sort of white lie that reassures customers that the problem was a fluke and that they can trust in Apple’s products in the future. I think it’s better to explain common issues as known issues and just to provide the solution rather than lie about it. The lie gets harder to tell to a customer should the replacement product or repaired device have the same issue down the road.

Q: Why do you think Apple doesn’t release the hardware tests you use to the general public? It would help people out, make your jobs easier and make for shorter lines at the GB.

I would argue that Apple has a lot of tools for consumers to use to troubleshoot their products should they encounter issues. There are many articles and discussions in the support section of Apple’s site which help users find solutions to issues on their own. Should software troubleshooting point to a hardware issue, you can always run Apple Hardware Test on your Mac. Many of the tools we use might not be released because they are only to be used by authorized technicians. Apple only wants authorized technicians to touch most of their stuff anyway. My second opinion on the matter is that in the end, Apple wants you to come into the store. The Genius Bar is another way to get you to buy another product or upgrade you current setup. We have to keep some kind of edge to keep the stores alive and well.

Relaxatron — Entertainment — Free

People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.

Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …

That was two hours ago.

Relaxatron

1981’s Qix is one of those games that just won’t die. It’s come out in its original form no fewer than four times, most recently in the Nintendo 3DS handheld’s retro-game marketplace Virtual Console in 2011 (in Japan, anyway). I’ve also seen versions of it as minigames in titles like Bully. It’s a long-lived game with a lot of versions.

And here’s another one.

Line Knight Fortix is a new variation on the old territory-capturing game with a medieval skin including dragons, ogres, and castles. The same basic idea of carving out and capturing territory before enemies cross your path and kill you remains, but you can also unlock weapons and generally just run around being all knightly and cool.

It has a couple playability issues, but it’s mostly decent.

For the musician on the go, in the studio, or on the stage, this Cult of Mac Deals offer is designed to meet all your mobile sound needs.

iLoud is the first portable Bluetooth speaker designed with musicians and audiophiles in mind. It allows you to reproduce your music – in every possible mobile situation – as accurately as you would in the comfort of your studio. Plus, it offers a ¼” microphone/guitar input for use with iOS music creation apps, so you can record, edit, and perform all on-the-go. And Cult of Mac Deals has the iLoud for just $239 during this limited time offer.

BlackBerry and Windows Phone might be having a hard time trying to break up the monopoly on mobile software held by Android and iOS, but that hasn’t stopped the Chinese government from having a go with a platform of its own.

Built by a company called Shanghai Liantong in conjunction with ISCAS (Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences), COS — which stands for China Operating System — aims to take on Android and iOS by providing better localization for things like language input and cloud services.

Finger prick testing could soon be a thing of the past for people with diabetes, thanks to new smart contact lenses being developed by Google that measure glucose levels in your tears. The lenses have tiny chips and LEDs embedded within them, which light up to notify the wearer that their glucose levels have crossed certain thresholds.

I use TextEdit all the time to jot down notes, phone numbers, and any time I need to just get some info down super quick.

I forget, sometimes, that it’s a fairly robust text editor (hence the name, I suppose), and there are a lot of great features to be had.

If you need to make a quick outline, TextEdit can be pretty helpful. Though it’s not as extensive as an outlining feature in something, say, like Word or Pages, it can be useful. It’s also extremely easy to use.

Steven Sande and Erica Sadun have been working on the third-edition of the book Talking To Siri (Amazon), and posted this great example of Siri’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor over on TUAW. Siri might not tell you one, but she’s certainly good at dissecting a lightbulb joke.

Source: TUAW

DoubleTwist, the company that has long been helping Android-powered devices work harmoniously with iTunes, today released a new Android app that lets users rip songs from iTunes Radio. Called AirPlay Recorder, the app essentially turns your Android device into an AirPlay receiver, then records all the audio that you play through it.

But is it legal?

If you have a 2011 MacBook Pro that is wonking out like it was haunted by a Japanese ghost, you’re not the only one. It appears that a massive number of early-2011 MacBook Pro owners with AMD graphics are having issues with system crashes and hardware problems, with failure rates reaching a critical mass in recent weeks.

Are you ready to access your Mac Chromotely? No, doubtlessly not. None the less, you will soon have the option to do just that from your iOS device, if an online document from Google is to be believed.

The arbitrary 140 character limit of tweets can oftentimes seem as maddeningly arbitrary as it is maddeningly short. It’s not arbitrary, actually: Twitter was originally designed to work over dumbphones as an SMS service, and 140 characters is the maximum size of a single SMS (longer SMSes are actually sent as multiple messages and pieced together by your phone). In turn, the reason SMSes are 140 characters is that’s the maximum amount of information that fits into the small pocket of bandwidth that is left over with all the cellular voice calls whizzing through the air.

Interesting, huh? And, of course, Twitter’s cultural tersity has its benefits. Still, sometimes you just want to send a longer tweet, only to be thwarted by Twitter’s hardline stance. For just those moments, a new jailbreak tweak called Infinite Tweet 2 has come to make things easier for you.

Creepypasta meme Slender Man is back again — this time in an official sequel to 2012’s Slender Rising called, imaginatively enough, Slender Rising 2.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it pits you against the so-called Slender Man in four different horror movie-style locations, including the fan-favorite Mansion and Ghost Town. Your task is to rescue lost souls and pick up signs along the while, all while defending yourself with a shogun.

Following yesterday’s report that the official iOS Starbucks app was storing users’ credentials, passwords and GPS location in plain text — a big security no-no — the Seattle coffee maker has quickly pushed an update that seemingly resolves the issue. Or does it?

A new Apple Store has opened in Brisbane, Australia — representing the fourth to open in Queensland, and the largest in Australia’s Sunshine State.

Around 500 fans queued up for the grand opening ahead of time, with some camping out all night. The second person in line was Apple Store aficionado Gary Allen, who had traveled from California for the opening — which represents his 38th store opening.

Most musicians I know are struggling to buy a new set of guitar strings, let alone a new iPad Air. But if you are a music-making, iPad-toting, live-gig-playing musician, then you might be interested in IK Multimedia’s new iKlip 2, and the accompanying iPad Adapter.

News Republic — the iOS app which describes itself as the “definitive news app” — has received an upgrade, including several significant improvements.

Imagine that your devices could send you a push notification asking if they could switch themselves off. That you could switch appliances on and off remotely to stop them drawing power in standby mode. That would be neat, right? Well, that’s exactly what the energy-saving Parce plug will do.

Last week we saw Command-C, a super-useful app that uses Wi-Fi, iOS 7 multitasking and push notifications to easily send your clipboard between devices. Now, there’s Scribe, which goes one better by ditching the Wi-Fi sending the clipboard between devices using low energy Bluetooth.

Apple has been accused of censorship in the past when it has been a little heavy-handed (to say the least) about banning content in the App Store.

With that being said, few were upset to hear that Plastic Surgery for Barbie — a game which asks players of 9 years+ to perform liposuction on Barbie-styled characters to make them “slim and beautiful” — has been pulled from the App Store. Google has similarly pulled the app from its own Google Play store.

Today is turning out to be photo-journal app Friday, with the latest entry in the list from iOS developer Manton Reece. It’s called Sunlit, and it’s a way to put together a journal of your daily meanderings with photos, text and check-ins. And here’s the twist: the free app uses App.net as it’s storage backend, so you can finally get some use for that account you signed up for but never use,

While Touch ID saves you the pain of writing in a passcode to unlock your iPhone, until now Mac users haven’t been afforded the same ease of use.

A new jailbreak feature is looking to change that, however, since it gives users the opportunity of using their iPhone 5s’ Touch ID feature to unlock their Mac computer.

Just the other day I asked my Twitter followers to recommend me a good app for making animated GIFs out of my photos. The response was stunning in its silence – not a single reply. But I don’t care. I now have PicGIF, a Mac app that does one thing: Turn Pics into GIFs.