Here’s a reason to download Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts app if you haven’t already: the latest gift — freely downloadable using the app — is Martin Scorsese’s critically-acclaimed 2011 film Hugo.

The movie, based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times best-seller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station, who meets a down-on-his-luck toymaker, who turns out to be silent movie special effects maestro Georges Méliès (the guy that famously made this iconic short, entitled A Trip to the Moon).

Mountain is a very useful little widget that sits in your Mac’s menubar and tells you all about the disks you have mounted. It also lets you eject them right from its drop-down menu, and do a whole lot more besides.

The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.

What?

If you write anything longer than a paragraph, then Gabe Weatherhead’s new Bookmarker Macros for Editorial are going to get you pretty excited. They let you highlight any section of a text document and save it as a bookmark.

Apple’s flagship Apple Retail Store in Brisbane, Australia may be less than two weeks away from opening.

Following a period of construction — including a delay — barricade signage has appeared outside the location: usually a surefire indication that launch is imminent.

StorySkeleton is an amazing app that’s been around for a little while, but a recent update to add iPad support has made it even better. At heart, it’s a kind of index-card-based note and outlining app for writers (screen, fiction and non-fiction) to help structure and plan stories. But the design is fantastic, making it easier to use than most other alternatives.

Oh, and it exports directly to native Scrivener files.

No, don’t worry: it’s not another terrible mouse design from Apple. This is the Tempo from UK-based Blue Maestro, and it’s a smart Bluetooth thermometer disguised as a pebble.

Google and Audi plan to announce a partnership to build in-car dashboard systems based on Android, according to a new report.

The deal will be rolled out Jan. 7 at the big International CES trade show in Las Vegas, says The Wall Street Journal, with the companies also set to reveal others involved in the collaboration, including Nvidia.

In iOS 6, the dock was a glass shelf. In iOS 7, it’s far more abstract: a blurry transparent layer over your wallpaper.

Some people love it, some people hate it. If you’re one of the latter, and you have already jailbroken your iOS 7 device, you’re in for a treat: a new jailbreak tweak lets you adjust the transparency and blurriness of the iOS 7 dock to your heart’s content.

Google+ was not the immediate Facebook-killer that Google wanted it to be, perhaps, but slowly and surely the search giant has been making its social networking service more and more useful to average folk.

That trend continues with the release of Google+ Auto Backup, a new app that will automatically upload images from your computer to Google+, thus storing them in the cloud.

We’re still at least six months away from the debut of iOS 8, but designer Sam Beckett has come along already with a very enticing look at one hot feature that could be in store for all of us: interactive notifications. And boy, do they look rad.

Tweetbot is probably our favorite Twitter client for iOS, especially after Tweetbot 3 gave the app a major makeover for iOS 7.

It’s also one of our favorite Mac Twitter clients, but it tends to hover a bit behind Tweetbot for iPhone when it comes to features. A new update, however, narrows the gap a little bit, introducing a number of useful bug fixes. Don’t expect a major aesthetic overhaul, though.

Have you ever thought about building your own website without spending thousands of dollars or thought about starting a freelance web development gig? What if it was all possible without knowing how to code? Well, it’s true.

WordPress is a full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. It’s a system that makes it easy for anyone to get a professional website up and running without knowing how to code, and now WPMU DEV has created an amazing membership service that will give you all the essential tools you need to get a WordPress website up and running…and all for just $89.

In the Mac space, Dutch designer Martin Hajek is the crown prince of concepts, having done some of the most realistic and jawdropping renders we’ve ever seen for the iWatch, Mac Pro, iPhone 6 and more.

One product concept we thought Hajek bit the pooch on a little, though, was his idea of what an Apple HDTV would look like. His concept was black, chamfered and gorgeous… but also looked like Martin Hajek had never used a television in his life. But here comes Hajek’s Apple HDTV, Mach II… and this is an Apple television set I would buy.

When the iOS 7 jailbreak from Team Evad3rs was first released, it was buggy as all get-out, largely because it had been released without giving the larger jailbreak community any heads-up. Even Saurik, the keeper of the Cydia app store, wasn’t given warning… which means that when the iOS 7 jailbreak went live, MobileSubstrate — the mechanism through which jailbreak tweaks are installed — wasn’t updated for the 64-bit A7 chip, leaving many tweaks broken.

Team Evad3rs quickly updated their jailbreak to fix some bugs and give Saurik the hooks he needed to get MobileSubstrate working, but what if you already jailbroke? Well, you’re in luck: instead of restoring your device and jailbreaking it all over again, you can just download the Evasi0n 7.x untether package version 0.2 off Cydia.

If you’ve been clocking into Cult of Mac over your Christmas holidays, you’re probably already aware that the iOS 7 jailbreak is out thanks to the tireless work of Team Evad3rs. The jailbreak is compatible with iOS versions 7.0 through 7.0.4.

But what if you hate iOS 7? What if you love Scott Forstall and skeuomorphism? What if you’re still rocking iOS 6.1.3 or iOS 6.1.4, the last stable versions of iOS 6, on an A5+ device?

Well, good news: a jailbreak is imminent for the last versions of iOS before Jony Ive rebooted it.

There’s good news and bad news for Apple. The good news is that the Cupertino-based company sells more tablets in America than anyone. The bad news is that Apple is selling less iPads proportionate to the total share of tablet sales than a year ago… and Mac sales are also going down.

There are still a ton of us who game on our Macs. If you’re one of those folks, you’ll know how great a platform the Mac can be. While there may not be as overwhelming an amount of games on Apple’s fantastic computer platform, the ones that are there are of high quality.

And? There are a ton more these days than ever before. 2013 was a great year to be a Mac gamer, with ports of a ton of the big titles of the year, including games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sim City, and Bioshock Infinite.

A bunch of iOS games came to the bigger screens of the Mac, too, with fantastic, hit titles like tower offense, Anomaly 2 and Solstice Arena, a speed massively online battle arena (MOBA) game from Zynga that has some legs, and some smaller indie gems like Gentlemen! from Lucky Frame.

Whether you like the big blockbuster games or the more cerebral indie ones, the Mac platform has a plethora of gaming experiences to choose from. Here are the best ones we’ve seen.

There was a time when one of the few parts of your Mac that you could upgrade was the CPU, but recently, Apple has phased out CPU upgradeability in favor of slimmer form factors with soldered-in silicon chips.

One surprising exception to Apple’s stance against user upgradeability, however, is the 2013 Mac Pro, which is now confirmed to have a processor that can be upgraded by the user.

There are more than a few people who would claim that not much happened with Apple in 2013. After all, they spent the first six months of the year without releasing a single product, didn’t they?

Maybe that’s true, but in actuality, 2013 was one of the most exciting years in the Apple space in recent memory.

Don’t believe us? First of all, check out our round-up of the biggest stories in 2013, and then, take a detailed look at this incredible infographic by Kevin Choi, beautifully showing the most important milestones in Apple’s fiscal 2013, from the introduction of the 128GB iPad to the App Store’s 50th Billionth App Download, and beyond.

We can only show a small snatch of the infographic, due to its hugeness, but you can see the whole thing here on Google Drive.

Jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich is one of the most esteemed in the community, having created the excellent Grabby, Liveclock, and Display Recorder tweaks.

Now, Petrich’s first iOS 7 tweak is here, and it’s an incredible one. Called FlipControlCenter, Petrich’s brand new jailbreak tweak lets you rearrange and customize the layout of iOS 7 Control Center, with all new buttons.

There’s a lot of different metrics out there for gauging the success of personal electronics, some more suspect than others. Many companies, for example, favor units shipped to retailers, where as Apple favors the more realistic metric of units sold.

Perhaps the best metric of all, though, isn’t what is shipped or sold, but what people want Santa to bring them for Christmas. And by this metric, the iPad is king.

Apple is increasingly shipping hardware products with specific features that are crazy overkill — far more power than is necessary or even usable.

Here’s why I think that when it comes to some technology features, too much is just right.

Ho! Ho! Ho! It’s Christmas CultCast time! This episode: a new deal in China hands Apple 770 million potential new customers; we cover some of the wackiest rumors of 2013; the Mac Pro delivers surprising results in performance tests; some of App Store’s best apps just went on sale; and we recall some of the best and worst gifts we’ve given or received!

Have a few laughs whilst getting caught up on each week’s finest Apple stories! Download new and past episodes of The CultCast on iTunes or hit play below and let the audio enjoyment commence.

Thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode. Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

This week, Cult of Mac Magazine looks back on 2013 with our Year in Review issue.

Apple has once again overturned a few carts and made mincemeat of our best predictions for where the Cupertino company is heading next.

In addition to a rollicking review of the best — and weirdest — news, apps, games, rumors and the like, Cult of Mac’s resident gadfly Mike Elgan opines on what Apple will bring us in 2014.

Elgan also weighs in on whether those iWatches or other gadgets (iGlasses? Yeah or Nay?) will be anything we actually want. Reporter Alex Heath takes a look at Apple’s bumper crop of acquisitions, a record this year, as a signpost of what the new year may bring.

As always, we bring you the best in apps, games, movies and books out of all the stuff our staffers have watched, played with and read this year — but only the stuff that doesn’t suck.

Cult of Mac Magazine: Year in Review.