The Shivah starts with a joke:

“A goy came up to Rabbi Moishe to ask, ‘Why do rabbis always answer with a question?’

To which Rabbi Moise replied, ‘Why not?'”

First released in 2006, The Shivah is a noirish, murder-mystery adventure game centered around a money-deficient New York synagogue. Its hero, Russell Stone, is not a hardbitten private investigator or a disgraced former police officer like the genre typically demands. He’s a cynical rabbi with a heavy conscience who stumbles into the investigation completely by accident. It sounds odd, and it is, but it also totally works.

Now, developer Wadjet Eye Games has released The Shivah: Kosher Edition, an updated iOS and PC version of the original game with all-new graphics and music. If you’ve never played the original and you’re a fan of adventure games and (well-meaning) Jewish humor, it’s a great take on the well-trod genre.

Given that it’s one of the biggest and most successful third-party messaging platforms available on mobile, you might be wondering why WhatsApp still hasn’t been updated for iOS 7 — more than two months after the software’s public release, and over five months after it was first made available to developers. (I certainly am.)

But the update — complete with a fancy redesign — is on its way, and you can get an early glimpse at it in the hands-on video below.

The HBO Go apps for Android and iOS have today been updated with support for Google’s Chromecast. The feature works on Android smartphones and tablets running Android 2.3 Gingerbread and above, and on iPhones and iPads running iOS 6 and above.

Magic Mouse gestures let you use swipes and taps on the mouse itself to do things like go back a page when browsing in Safari.

Unfortunately, some folks who have upgraded to Mavericks may have noticed that their Magic Mouse gestures no longer work.

Luckily, there’s a quick way to re-enable this feature, if you miss it.

With less than a day to wait for the new Xbox One, Microsoft has announced that its new console will have an official YouTube app, after all. What’s more, you’ll be able to send videos to it from your Android and iOS devices.

Smartphone crime is a huge problem. In fact, New York City’s crime rate went up for the first time in twenty years because people are mugged violently so often for their iPhones.

In response to iPhone crime, Apple has made some important improvements to iOS, including requiring users to enter their iCloud password to turn ‘Find my iPhone’ off, and the new ‘Activation Lock’ feature in iOS 7which allows users to disable stolen or lost iPhones remotely.

Apple’s got the right solution, but you know who hates it? The carriers. In fact, as other manufacturers have tried to insert similar cellphone kill switches in their smartphones to Apple’s, the carriers are standing defiant against them. Why? Because they are afraid that it will affect their bottom lines.

Trent Reznor might have a head like a hole, but not a heart like one. During a recent show in Las Vegas, the Nine Inch Nails frontman pulled out his iPhone 5s mid-concert to FaceTime a dying fan and friend on stage.

With the new Mac Pro, Apple has once against shifted manufacturing of one of its products to the United States. Could other products follow? Even, say, the iPhone?

Foxconn chairman and president Terry Gou has hinted yes, saying that the company is actively looking into the possibility of setting up factories for high-end smartphone and tablet production in America. But how likely is it?

If there are two main areas where Microsoft massively lags behind both Android and Apple it is market share and app availability.

Well, Microsoft has copped to its role as a “distant third” in the former capacity (Windows Phones represent less than a 5 percent share of the overall market), but is the latter something more immediately addressable?

Yes, according to a tweet posted by Windows Phone VP Joe Belfiore — the man responsible for the design and software product definition of Microsoft’s smartphones — who enthusiastically claims that the end of 2014 is going to mark the end of the “app-gap” between Windows Phones, and those available for Android and iOS platforms.

Due to a combination of laziness and… actually just laziness, I often use my iPhone to take product shots for the reviews you see here on Cult of Mac. And while my Snapseed usually lets me turn my snaps into usable photos, I could sometimes do with a little help trying to find a spot on my desk that isn’t covered in junk to use as a backdrop.

Yes, I could clean up, but as I mentioned above, I’m terminally lazy. So I might instead adopt Andrew Park’s Foldio, a tiny light tent for iPhone product shots and the like.

A few weeks ago it was iPads banned from the UK’s No. 10 Downing Street due to spying fears, and now Apple products will start disappearing from the German parliament too.

It almost doesn’t matter what the Urbanears Humlan headphones sound like, because however bad they are, they’ll still sound better than the pair of headphones you put through the wash cycle and killed. Why? Because the Humlans are washing-machine friendly, just like my old iPod Nano.

Finally, the perfect gift for the myopic or sight-impaired person in your life! It’s called the U See Tablet Magnifier, and it’s a stand that turns your iPad into a giant, zoomable, battery-powered magnifying glass for short-sighted folks like me.

In latest news from the Samsung vs. Apple patent case, Samsung on Wednesday filed an emergency motion with presiding Judge Lucy Koh to halt Apple’s damages retrial.

Why the halt? Because according to court documents, the US Patent and Trademark Office has suggested that Apple’s “pinch to zoom” patent (which much of the patent trial revolves around) might not actually be valid.

I like Fetchnotes 3, a new and deceptively simple update to the iOS/web app which lets you take, organize and share notes. At first, it looks a lot like Simplenote, with a very plain and simple UI, plus tags and easy sharing. But it’s actually a lot more powerful than that.

Remember back when a button was a button, and not a skeuomorphic touch-screen fake complete with drop shadows and gradients? Me too. Back in the 1980s and beyond, kids had tougher fingers thanks to all the button-pushing that went on, not like the kids of today with their weak twiglets which threaten to snap if they squeeze their in–0line remote’s play/pause “button” too hard.

Which is my way of saying that you can keep your pathetic modern-day children from playing any music by simply loading your iPhone into this retro-tastic iRecorder.

Flickr takes another step towards “being awesome again” with a new book printing service, built right in to Flickr itself. And it’s so simple that you can have even a pretty long book put together in minutes.

Tumblr has redesigned its iOS app with a fresh look for iOS 7. The Dashboard, post compose screen, and post chooser have all been redone, and the finished product is an app with plenty of character that feels very at home in Apple’s latest mobile OS.

The official Tumblr app has never felt aesthetically clunky or old, but this most recent update is a huge step forward in terms of modernizing the interface and animations. On the feature side, tags can now be autocompleted, and faster reblogging for users with multiple accounts. There are plenty of other changes in the app to discover, like an improved photo uploader and trending tags design in the Explore tab.

Tumblr is a free universal download in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Just over a year after Drift Innovations dropped its impressively specced Ghost HD action cam, the company has upped the ante in the action-cam tech race by launching the improved Ghost-S, with big boosts in performance — notably low-light performance and a doubled frame rate — and a slew of trick new features.

Now that winter has hit the country, cycling has moved indoors for much of the U.S. That means straddling a stationary bike or throwing your trusty road or mountain bike up on a stand (or if you’re really brave, rollers).

That’s where the Xspin comes in. it’s a small box filled with sensors and a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio that attaches to a crank arm and sends speed, distance and cadence data to an accompanying app — either one of two developed by its parent company, Pafers, or a handful of popular third-party cycling apps, like Strava or MapMyRide. It’ll also work with ellipticals (though it obviously attaches differently, since ellipticals don’t have cranks).

Today Tapbots released a big update for Tweetbot for Mac that brings smoother scrolling and the ability to quickly reply to mentions and DMs via Notification Center in OS X Mavericks. The update also brings a number of bug fixes and performance improvements for Apple’s latest desktop OS.

Here’s the full change log:

It’s fantastic to be able to swipe up from the bottom of the screen in any app or the home screen to turn Wi-Fi on or off, enable or disable Bluetooth, and the like. Control Center in iOS 7 has really solved some of my biggest issues with iOS in general.

However, there are times when I’m playing a game or using a certain app that I don’t really want the Control Center to pop up when i use the bottom of the screen.

Thankfully, Apple’s given us a way to disable it.

iOS users that long for something other than Safari will be delighted to know that Google has released a free update for Chrome for iOS.

The new updated includes an Autofill feature that lets users complete forms with just a few clicks, similar to the autofill feature Apple introduced in iOS 7 with iCloud Keychain. Along with some stability enhancements and bug fixes, Google has also improved image searches by adding the ability to long press on an image to search for related images.

Here are the release notes:

Upcycling — Entertainment — Free

Green-lifestyle blog Eve of Reduction saw your landfill at Whole Foods the other day and thinks it looks tired and kinda flabby. It wants to help, so it has a thing you might want to check out.

Upcycling is a free app full of instructions and suggestions for repurposing and repairing out-of-use items. It’ll show you how to reupholster a chair, what you can do with used paint cans, and show you cool things other people have done with their would-be junk. It’s all arranged and indexed conveniently within the app, and even if you don’t do anything in there, it’s still interesting to browse through.

Upcycling

I mentioned high-concept games with evocative titles earlier this week when I reviewed Tilt to Live 2, and here’s another one.

Don’t Shoot Yourself! is a quick, often frustrating little game in which the name says it all. You control a little ship (I guess) trapped inside of a series of shapes. Your main goal is to keep moving for until a number on the right side of the screen counts down to zero, and all the while your little guy is firing bullets all hither and thither. Your secondary goal is not to fly into any of those bullets.

If it sounds daunting, that’s because it is. But it’s still a game worth trying if only to see if you’re up to the challenge.