Cult of Mac Deals has partnered with 6 of the world’s finest indie gamer developers to bring you The Name Your Own Price Indie Gamer Bundle!

You pay what you want for three cross-platform, DRM-free games that will keep you gaming for hours on end including: The Journey Down, Aztaka, and iBomber Defense, and if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Spades of Time, SpaceChem, and Cubemen.

Your purchase will also do some good. We’ve chosen three charities, Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of three charities of your choice: Child’s Play Charity, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons. You get to help choose which charity raises the most!

Apple has been getting pounded by the Chinese press lately for its warranty policies service and not talking to the press whenever they want a statement (welcome to Apple news my friends). Hoping to end the onslaught from the government-supported press, Apple issued an apology letter to Chinese customers signed by Tim Cook.

The letter, which was written in Chinese and posted to Apple’s website, said that Tim Cook and the rest of the company have been reflecting on the feedback regarding its warranty policies and apologizes the poor communication that has made customers so angry.

Using map apps on the iPhone can be a pain when you’re trying to zoom in to check out some specific detail of where you’re going.

Usually you have to use one hand to hold your iPhone and the other to pinch and zoom, but Google just made an awesome new zooming gesture that only requires one hand and one finger. 

Apple has a strict “no porn allowed” policy on the App Store, but what if your softcore porn magazine is also known for its thoughtful writing, its incredible reviews and it’s award-winning journalism?

Simple. You launch your magazine in the App Store without any nudity at all. And that’s just what Playboy is doing.

The biggest Apple expo in the world is moving to a new date for 2014 in order to avoid the Super Bowl and CES. Macworld/iWorld 2014 has been rescheduled for March 27th through March 29th.

Last year’s Macworld/iWorld expo was held from January 31st to February 2nd, which coincided with the Super Bowl and is only a few weeks removed from CES and holiday travel.

Speck is the Trojan of iPhone cases: you might not want to wear one, but they’re everywhere, and it’s better than going bareback. Speck’s colorful, buttony cases are pretty much ubiquitous, and one of the most easily recognizable iPhone case brands out there.

In fact, Speck is so recognizable that there are aapparently counterfeit Speck cases on the market… and Speck is so honked off about it that they are suing the maker of these fake Speck cases for mllions.

Late last year, Cult of Mac reported that New York City’s crime rate had increased for the first time in twenty years, not due to the resurgence of criminal gangs like the Warriors and the Baseball Furies, but because the iPhone was just such a popular thing to steal.

Why are criminals so interested in ripping off iPhones, though, and not, say, Samsung Galaxy S III’s? What it all comes down to is two things. One, the predictability of the resale market: you can predict what you can pawn an iPhone for, but other gadgets are harder. Two: an iPhone or iPad is easy to identify at a glance, where as other lucrative gadgets are harder to spot.

Apple and Foxconn’s jumper problem might not be a thing of the past after all, as reports over the weekend broke that two workers have jumped from the roof of Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory on Friday in reaction to job cuts, lowered wages and the end of free amenities at the world’s largest gadget manufacturer.

The iPad mini is one of Apple’s biggest successes to date, but that doesn’t matter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has turned down Apple’s request for a trademark on the iPad mini because it is “merely descriptive.”

Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!

Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.

iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.

Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.

Facebook invited the media to “Come See Our New Home On Android” on April 4.

The most likely prediction for Facebook’s project, code-named “Buffy,” is that it’s a modified, Facebook-centric version of Android on an HTC handset with a promise of other handsets — some insiders call it an “application layer.”

The dark horse contender is a Facebook-branded phone.

That’s great, right? Facebook has now friended Google and will join the growing family of Android-loving companies. Uh, right?

Wrong. Facebook is joining the club of Google’s enemies who are using Android to take business away from Google.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to Apple has now happened: The company has run afoul of the authoritarian government of China. 

Gatekeepers of the world’s largest and one of the fastest growing markets for every product Apple makes, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government has decided to stop and reverse Apple’s growth in the country.

Here’s what’s going on.

I have done a lot writing in my day, and there are times when I want to just let the words fly freely faster than I can possibly type them. When I’ve worked on my talks for seminars or wanted to work out some thoughts on a major piece of writing, I have given the reins to Dragon Dictate.

This Cult of Mac Deals offer has a huge savings on Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac – which has been an indispensable tool for me as a writer. You can get it for only $100 – that’s 50% off the regular price!

iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection

Look, every once in a while a Mac app comes along that’s so incredibly useful, it becomes one of those rare staple apps no Mac should go without. On this week’s CultCast, we’ll introduce you to the incredibly talented Alfred, and reveal all the time-saving totally amazing feats this little bit of code can perform for you.

Plus! Word on the streets is T-Mobile’s getting the iPhone and their new plans could give the industry a shake down. We’ll tell you the pros and cons of big T’s contract free “uncarrier” plans and explain what makes them different from the pack.

All that and more on this episode of the CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes to download our new episodes or just hit play below.

Major League Baseball is getting ready for the 2013 season by updating its official apps on both Google Play and the App Store. Today MLB.com At Bat was updated with live audio access for At Bat 13 subscribers and other features for various devices.

Twitter has a released an update to its video sharing service Vine that adds a couple of new features. You can now quickly share videos taken by other people in your feed on Twitter and Facebook. Just tap the ellipsis on the bottom right of a video and then “Share this post.”

Another addition is the ability to embed Vine videos on the web like tweets. Anything in your Vine feed can be embedded with the new option. Getting the actual embed code is a little clunky in the app right now. Tapping “Embed” in the iOS app creates an email with instructions to use the code on the web. You can choose from the “Simple” and “Postcard” frames along with the width of the actual video.

Today’s update also includes some bug fixes, so be sure to grab it for free in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.

Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in 2013, and now a new report says the company is “pushing hard” for a launch this summer.

iOS is the most popular gaming platform in existence, and Apple has managed to create an incredible ecosystem of titles with only iOS devices. The company sells no actual controllers or joypads; everything is touch-based.

So does it make sense for Apple to make a physical game controller that somehow connects to your iPhone and iPad? According to a new report, the answer is yes.

LEGOs are one of the greatest toys ever invented. You can build pretty much anything you can dream of with them. Even a car. They’re amazing.

We’ve seen tons of Apple-inspired LEGO projects over the last couple of years, from LEGO Apple Store replicas, to a working LEGO Mac Pro. There is no limit to the creativity you can achieve with LEGOs, but these best LEGO projects we’ve ever seen:

One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.

However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.

Here’s how.

Artist Maico Akiba takes everyday gadgets and then imagines them as they would look if dug up from a landfill a hundred years from now. This is what Akiba thinks the iPhone 3G will look like in 2107.

Got to say, I’m skeptical the screen will hold up that well. There’s more art by Akiba at the link below.

Source: Maico Akiba
Via: iSmashiPhone

If you think that last week’s huge security hole that allowed anyone with your Apple ID email address and birth date to reset your password was just a fluke, this damning report by Tim Carmody over at The Verge might just change your mind.

It’s a compelling argument that says that Apple is being extremely negligent and sloppy when it comes to your iCloud data’s security.

There have been rumors for over a year that Facebook is trying to make its own smartphone to compete with the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S3, but we haven’t had much reason to believe in them until now.

Facebook sent out invitations last night to an event on April 4th at its headquarters, where the company will allegedly unveil its own smartphone that was built in partnership with HTC.