iWork for iCloud is technically still in its beta phase, but Apple pubilished an updated to its suite of productivity apps this afternoon that will certainly make it more appealing for those looking for a Google Docs alternative.

The new iWork for iCloud update includes a number of features that focus on giving users more tools to collaborate with each other – many of which we heard about at Apple’s iPad keynote. The update includes new features for both Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes that come with some of the same features including the ability to see cursors and selections for everyone in a spreadsheet, as well as an option to view a list of collaborators working on a spreadsheet.

Users can access the new features for free over at iCloud.com and will also find a new option to print docs directly from the Tools menu and the ability to organize documents in folders.

Here’s a full list of what’s new:

Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.

In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.

I’m a big fan of Iron Man. I’ll play virtually any game with Iron Man in it, on it, or around it, so naturally I took a swing at Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 tie-in game earlier this year. And it was a bland infinite runner to sit alongside all the other bland infinite runners released for popular film franchises. I wept.

So when I saw that Thor: The Dark World was not an infinite runner, I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, Thor: The Dark World is a top-down dungeon crawler hybrid that allows you to summon Einherjar, or heroes, to help fight alongside you. So you’ll charge through levels tapping every shiny thing and enemy in your path and can strategically call more fighters to the battle to deal with bosses and ranged attacks.

To ease the minds of millions of Americans worried about their health insurance, Obama held a press conference today and admitted that his administration fumbled the launch of Healthcare.gov. Continuing his speech with optimism, Obama then turned to his favorite tech company – Apple – as an example, saying everybody needs to chillax and that buying health insurance won’t ever be as easy as purchasing a song from iTunes.

The Obama Administration has been under heavy fire the last few months thanks to the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and has pulled a couple Apple metaphors out of his hat to cope with the mess.

Obama’s not the only one in Washington looking to Apple for inspiration with the Healtcare.gov mess though. The GOP released a series of attack ads that spoof Apple’s famous “Mac vs. PC” campaign. Take a look:

Hot on the heels of the iBooks de-Forstallization for iOS 7, Apple has released iOS 7.0.4 with “bug fixes and improvements.” The update also addresses “an issue that causes FaceTime calls to fail for some users,” according to the release notes. You can download 7.0.4 as a 37.6 MB update.

iOS 6.1.5 has also been released with the same FaceTime fix for the fourth-gen iPod touch, a device that can’t run iOS 7.

Apple released iOS 7.0.3 with iCloud Keychain, improvements for iMessage, and other bug fixes last month.

Source: Apple

On A Day Like This — Reference — $0.99

On A Day Like This is a brand-new app that fills you in on significant events for any day you choose. You just swipe in the date you want, and you can flip through events, births, deaths, and holidays and observances. It’s a simple, clean, easy-to-use app that contains a lot of interesting and potentially useful information. For example, did you know that November 14 is the day that scientists discovered 90377 Sedna, an object that is orbits the sun at three times the distance of Neptune? Slip that into conversation at work, and see what happens.

On A Day Like This

Continuing its slow purge of felts, leathers and woodgrains the UI of iOS 7, Apple released an iBooks for iOS update today that finally dismantles the woodgrain shelves championed by former iOS Cheif Scott Forstall, and tosses them in the woodchipper.

The update features the same minimalist UI that Apple has embraced throughout iOS 7 and its other apps, though it doesn’t look like Apple actually added any major new features. Apple also released an update for iTunes U today with an all-new look and feel. Both app updates are available for free in iTunes now.

Source: iTunes

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

If you’re looking to gain an insightful perspective as to how Apple has become the most valuable brand in the world you’ll get that and so much more with these two genius titles written by Leander Khaney.

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The official Google Music app for iOS, which will allow Google Play Music All Access subscribers to enjoy the music streaming service on iPhone and iPad, is now “imminent,” a reliable source reports.

Once I started iSpying in the crowded, bustling streets of Hong Kong, it was hard to stop. (Also, the IP lawyers must be seriously busy in these parts.)

These are some of my favorite finds of Apple-esque products and signs — minus the pics that didn’t turn out because my travel companions were trying to stop me from lagging behind or getting run over.

We’ll have more reporting from Hong Kong soon; a special thanks goes out to Truman Au for showing me around.

It’s great to be able to keep track of addresses for friends and places around town in your Contacts app. Having all the address info in a ready Contact makes it super simple to launch Maps in Mavericks from the Contacts app when you want directions to a party in town somewhere.

And, while you can easily send directions from Maps app to your iPhone, it’s also helpful to just say to Siri, “Directions to Jill’s house,” or “Get me to the movie theater,” and have your iPhone just pull up maps based on that name in the Contacts app.

Mavericks makes it incredibly simple to put addresses for all the places you might want to go right into your Contacts app so you can do just that.

The holiday shopping season will be starting a little earlier this year for Apple, as sources are now claiming that Apple will keep several of its U.S. Apple Stores open on Thanksgiving Day.

What store sells the most iPhones every year? If you named, oh, the 5th Avenue Cube, or the Grand Central location, you’d be wrong, asserts ABC News. Instead, they identify an obscure Apple Store in a shopping mall in Delaware as being the likely contender for selling the most iPhones every year. What wizardry is this?

Those frustrated that Nintendo still stubbornly refuses to release an official Legend of Zelda game for iOS should pluck-up, because the next best thing is here. Heavily inspired by one of the best Zelda games, The Wind Waker, a console-quality Zelda like has just hit the Apple Store called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. And this is a game you want to get.

If you want an iPad mini with Retina Display today, there’s only one way to get one: reserve it for in-store pick-up. That’s how I got my 128GB iPad mini with Retina Display on day one of availability while my colleagues Charlie Sorrel and Killian Bell were sitting at home, waiting five to ten days for delivery like a couple of suckers.

If you’d like to make the hunt for an iPad mini in your area easier, a new web-based tracking tool has been released that makes the process less tedious. But act now, because Apple has shown itself to be willing to kill these trackers before, although it’s possible this one will escape unscathed.

I ordered a Retina iPad mini (128GB, LTE, silver if you’re asking) barely 30 minutes after I noticed Killian had posted about it. And yes, I have to wait 5–10 days, but so does everyone else. Even those hippies on the West Coast who sleep in ’til noon every day before making their mango smoothies.

Which is to say that I agree with Ed Dale’s smart take on Apple’s weirdly quiet launch of the Retina mini: that it was designed to keep folks happy.

Jawbone has announced the UP24, a tweaked version of its troubled UP activity-tracking wristband. It’s mostly the same, with a cool futuristic look and $150 price tag. The difference is that it now uses “Bluetooth Smart,” which lets it communicate with your iPhone in real time to send alerts and notifications.

But what’s really interesting is that it now has a rather useful IFTTT channel.

Coffitivity is an app that turns your too-quiet (and frankly pretty creepy) home office into a buzzing coffee shop, only without the jerk who’s hogging the single power outlet all frikkin’ morning after buying one measly coffee. And not even a real coffee. It’s one of those lame-o frappa-latte-chinos or something.

Anyhow, Coffitivity adds a backing track to your office, via a Mac or iOS app.

Everpix’s servers are probably going to hate this, but users will love it. Picturelife (my favorite of the Everpix alternatives I tested, has made an Everpix-to-Picturelife importer. If you received a link to your Everpix archive, you can just plug it in to the importer and walk away.

Best of all, the entire archive won’t count towards your storage quota. And the Picturelife team managed to put this all together in less than 24 hours.

Day One, the beautiful journaling app for Mac and iOS, has just gotten even more beautiful on iOS 7, and added features to boot. I roll my own nerd journal, but if I used a journaling app it’d be Day One. Especially now it has M7 support.

Richard Haberkern’s new GPS Cookie looks like a great little data logger for photographers, and a nice tracker for bikers, hikers and vacationers. It’s a tiny little puck which does nothing but detect GPS satellites and record it’s location periodically, so you can just switch it on an forget it.

Facebook has released a major redesign of its Messenger iPhone app in the App Store. The update is a significant departure from the previous version, and Facebook has designed it with iOS 7 in mind. Profile pictures are circular like they are for contacts in iOS 7, and Facebook is using a brighter color scheme that comes close to mimicking the look of Apple’s Messages app.

Badges now appear over friends’ pictures when they are on Messenger. Facebook has done a good job of stripping pretty much all of its normal branding out of the redesign, so Messenger looks like a typical chat app now.

A key addition is Messenger’s new integration with phone numbers. If someone has their phone number listed on Facebook or in your iPhone’s contacts, you can enter their number in the app to find them on Messenger. You can also message people through the app by using phone numbers in your contacts list.

Source: App Store

There are tons of wireless keyboards on the market these days for all sorts of prices. Those for portable devcies like the iPad are even more numerous, and of wildly divergent quality. I’ve long been a fan of the Logitech series of bluetooth keyboards, as it lights up and can connect to any device, Mac or otherwise, with a quick tap.

The MiniSuit BlueBoard is a nicely designed keyboard that connects via Bluetooth to any computing device, but it is primarily designed as an iPad (or other tablet) stand. It’s solidly constructed from aluminum and the keys are responsive and accurate. The price to be paid, here, though, for a full-sized keyboard, is one of size and bulkiness: I wouldn’t want to have to carry this around as a permanent bit of kit.

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