For those of us who have been running OS X Mavericks since it was announced at WWDC in June, it’s been obvious for a while that OS X Mavericks is a complete miracle when it comes to battery life. Installing Mavericks on any MacBook is enough to eke an hour or so more battery life out of it, but especially when running on MacBooks boasting Intel’s power-sipping Haswell processors, it’s a game-changer.

What kind of battery life increases are you looking at on, say, a 2013 MacBook Air? Up to 30% improvements, according to legendary Apple OS reviewer John Siracusa.

For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.

In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.

Blackberry’s in trouble. Ever since the iPhone’s debut in 2007 blindsided them, the once-dominant smatphone company has been struggling to recover its mojo. Who can save the floundering Canadian company from ruin? Former Apple CEO John Sculley to the rescue!

If you’re hoping to get your hands on the new iPad mini with Retina display next month, then you’ll want to be one of the first in line at the Apple store when it goes on sale. According to one tablet industry expert, supply of the new device will be “ridiculously tight” at launch, likely leading to long delays for those who aren’t lucky enough to bag one on day one.

BlackBerry has today updated its new BBM app for iPhone, addressing an issue that caused it to crash under Apple’s latest iOS 7.0.3 firmware. The update also brings a number of new features, including contact categories and list sorting and filtering in BBM Groups.

Written by Greg Keonig, product designer and publisher of Atomic Delights.

As a product designer, one of my favorite parts about any new Apple product launch is the inevitable “How it’s made” video. The Mac Pro incarnation did not disappoint.

What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things – even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.

ForeverMap 2’s brand-new update is ostensibly an iOS 7 makeover. But if you’re a regular user, one look at v3.3 will tell you that it has been improved almost everywhere.

Tublme is possibly the stupidest name for a thing, ever. But it’s also a fantastic name if you think about anagrams, lost vowels, Tumblr and .me domain suffixes. It’s got em all.

Tublme is also an OS X Tumblr app, and it’s pretty gorgeous.

Here’s a neat tip for OS X Mavericks users. It lets you choose how long a Notification Center alert goes away for when you snooze it.

It happens to all of us at some point: you get a little tipsy, you open up your computer and you’re trying out some fancy new contacts app; or you’re just not really paying attention to what’s happening in your browser. And then BOOM, you’ve signed up for a LinkedIn account. Good luck. You have now ruined your e-mail forever.

We all hate the seemingly unstoppable spam that LinkedIn loves to spray all over our inboxes almost daily, but now the company has gone one better, able to inject its insidiousness right inside the native mail app of your iPhone, using a kind of “plug in.” How is this sorcery done?

Hazel users who have already installed OS X Mavericks have reason to be cheerful today: An update to the app brings support for Mavericks Finder tags, letting you do all kinds of neat things with your files, automatically based on how you tag them.

Mac gamers rejoice, as Mac game port superstar Aspyr just announced the fantastic news that the latest hilariously bloody Borderlands 2 downloadable content (DLC), “TK Baha’s Bloody Harvest,” is available for Mac on the very same day it is available for PC gamers, bringing us all closer together in our need to blast each other away in 2K Games’ brilliant first person shooter game.

T-Mobile is bringing its “Uncarrier” strategy to tablets with the upcoming launch of Apple’s new iPads. Yesterday we reported that T-Mobile will offer 200 MB of free (yes, totally free) data to iPad Air and mini owners.  But that’s not all.

Yesterday Apple announced that all of its consumer software, including OS X Mavericks, is now free. Customers who buy Apple’s hardware will have full access to the completely new versions of iLife and iWork at no additional cost. It’s a bold move that The New York Times called a direct attack on Microsoft Office.

The decision to make iWork free wasn’t Apple’s only jab at Microsoft during yesterday’s keynote, and now the Redmond giant has gone on the defensive.

The BAFTA-nominated games studio behind award-winning Great Big War Game, Rubicon Development, just released its latest mobile game: Combat Monsters. It’s available now on Google Play, the App Store, Windows, and will be coming soon to the Mac.

Star Wars® fans…you’re going to be excited about this one.

Cult of Mac Deals doesn’t usually offer iOS games, but today is a different story — especially when we get to showcase one of the most popular iPad games on the market at 50% off. That’s right. You can now own one of the greatest role-playing games of all time – Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic™ – to play on your iPad. And you can own it for only $4.99.

Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.

Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.

Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.

During yesterday’s iPad keynote, Apple showed several new videos to the audience. Now four of those videos have been uploaded to Apple’s official YouTube channel.

Fans of Games Magazine will know the puzzles in developer Casual Labs’ Paint It Back as “Paint by Numbers.” Owners of the Nintendo DS portable system might recognize them as Picross, and giant puzzle nerds might know them as Nonograms for Non Ishida, the Japanese graphics editor who invented them.

The point is that Paint It Black is not doing anything new; this puzzle type, in which solvers use logic to determine which squares in a grid to fill in to make a picture, is readily available a lot of places. But that’s not to say that this app is a boring rehash.

In fact, whether you’re a fan of Nonograms or picking them up for the first time, Paint It Black has a lot to offer.

Apple unveiled the new iPad mini with Retina display yesterday along side the iPad Air, and while we were expecting a bump up in resolution, we also got some nice internal hardware upgrades in the form of the A7 processor, M7 co-processor, improved cameras and faster WiFi.

We still think the iPad mini is the best 7-inch tablet on the market but the number of competitive Android tablets keeps growing every year, each with their own set of compelling features and ecosystems. To sort out whether the iPad mini really is the best purchase for you, check out the chart above that breaks down the iPad mini’s specs compared the Kindle Fire lineup, Nexus 7 II and the Galaxy Tab 3.

Source: BI

We’ve been trumpeting the tale of a fantastic game in development from the all-star team at Industrial Toys for a while now. Titled Morning Star, it had some serious pedigree and promise.

A sci-fi themed first-person shooter from Alex Seropian, the dude that co-created Bungie (Marathon, Halo) is huge news in the first place. A game that includes author John Scalzi and artist Mike Choi among many other hugely talented folks that will launch exclusively on mobile? That’s ginormous news.

Color us fascinated when President Tim Harris penned a blog post on gaming site Gamasutra about why the team had to rename the game, and how they went about it. It’s a super interesting behind-the-scenes look at the very real business side of game development, and it’s worth a look.

Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free

Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.

Calming Breath

Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.

The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.

If you’ve ever wanted to take your life to the next level in a whole slew of areas, then this Cult of Mac Deals offer is for you. We’re offering lifetime to access to 7 courses that consist of over 55 hours of actionable material that will improve your daily life.

And we’re offering it to you in the form of The 7 Course Life Hack E-Learning Bundle for just $59 – a savings of $419!

After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.