The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has today approved Apple’s application for a registered trademark for “iAd,” 21 months after the Cupertino company first applied for it.

What if Siri tried to kill you? That’s the plot of a new Dutch horror film called App that features a malevolent Siri clone called IRIS (get it?) that starts killing people. And as a cool twist, App allows you to download a free app to use while you watch the film.

Amazon hasn’t been able to beat the iPad in terms of features, apps or build quality, but the ace up the online retail giant’s sleeve was always the price: at just $199 for the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, getting Amazon’s tablet is at least $130 cheaper than Apple’s cheapest iPad mini.

Undercutting Apple on price, then, is the major way Amazon is competing ith Apple in the tablet space, and a new report suggests they are about to take that even further with the release of a $99 Kindle Fire.

Square Enix has been working hard to port its classic Final Fantasy titles over to iOS, and the next in the series, Final Fantasy V, is expected to hit the App Store by the end of the month. Like previous Final Fantasy ports, the game will bring updated visuals, and new controls optimized for touch-based devices.

Ron Gilbert is the weirdo behind some of the best and funniest games of tjhe last thirty years. Maniac Mansion. Secret of Monkey Island. Heck, just last year he designed The Cave, a game about evil psychic twins, a hillbilly and a time traveler going spelunking. It’s available for Mac if you haven’t given it a try.

Gilbert’s next game, however, is coming to iOS, and the title is so deliciously weird and unwieldy you just can’t help but get excited. Are you ready? It’s called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage To Discover The Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG. Let’s see him fit that under the app icon.

Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”

Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company to become Vice President of Technology at Apple, but Tim Cook may have to keep a close eye on him around the iPhones. Back in 2009, Lynch smashed up a whole bunch of them in a bid to get them to run Flash Player. See his destructive side for yourself in the video below.

It’s taken well over a year, but the Jawbone UP finally has an official companion app in Google Play. The device has only been compatible with iOS devices since it launched in November 2011, but now you can track your sleep and physical activity on Android-powered smartphones, too.

Furthermore, starting today, UP will be available in Apple stores across Europe.

If you’ve ever had a party with people in various rooms of your house, maybe even outside, Bem’s Wireless Speaker Trio was made just for you.

The Trio is a neat idea: connect your music source (iPhone, iPad, iPod) via Bluetooth to its base station, then move any of its three rechargeable satellite speakers anywhere in your home, up to 120 feet from the base, and they’ll fill that room with music from your iDevice or Mac.

But while Bem’s Wireless Trio is a great idea and was awesome when it worked, my tests brought to light some problems I just couldn’t ignore.

Call Bliss is an app with its own, industrial-strength take on the iPhone’s newish Do Not Disturb feature. It takes Apple’s basic concept — blocking calls with the flick of a switch, or only letting through calls from selected contacts — and infuses it with management features and more powerful options. And now the app adds two more tricks.

Hotline Miami, a retro, top-down, hyper-violent shoot-em up is finally on the Mac, via Steam and Gamer’s Gate.

Don’t be alarmed: the game is full of bizarre, hipster characters, animal masks, brutal weapons, and truly immense amounts of 16-bit blood and gore. Making it through the punishing difficulty of the game is a point of pride. Sounds like a good time, right?

We’ve been fascinated the stuff emerging from motorcycle-wizards-turned-iDevice-accessory-crafter Rokform ever since we took their machined alloy Rokbed iPhone case for a spin a few years back. Today the company revealed the Rokshield v3, basically a smaller, iPad Mini version of their Roklock case and mounting system.

QuikIO has been a great solution for getting your files from your Mac to your iOS device for a while now, with AppleTV support added this past January.

Today, however, the app has added yet another great feature: the ability to send your files from iPhone to iPhone with the new QuikBeam feature, letting you send photo, video, and other files between iPhones at higher speeds than otherwise available. The developers claim that the feature will send ten full-resolution photos in as little as one second, using a proprietary network intelligence system that finds the fastest path between two iPhones running the QuikIO app.

Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, may be looking to switch from Adobe over to Apple. According to a tweet from CNBC, the high level Adobe Exec is leaving the company to join Apple.

Adobe submitted an SEC filing on Wednesday, March 18th, that confirms Lynch left the company “to pursue other opportunities.” Per item 5.02.b in that SEC filing:

On March 18, 2013, Kevin Lynch resigned from his position as Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, of Adobe Systems Incorporated, effective March 22, 2013, to pursue other opportunities.

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Say hello to CubeSensors, sensitive little cubes that detect pretty much everything and tattle to your iPhone about it. The cubes are internet-connected, so you can get their information anywhere, any time.

Tired of scrolling through endless songs from burned CDs from years ago and having no idea what each one is because the tracks didn’t quite register with iTunes? Wish you could have more cover art in your collection? Is your iTunes Library teeming with duplicate tracks? This Cult of Mac Deals offer will magically eliminate what ails your iTunes because TuneUp transforms your music collection. Automagically™.

With over 12 million downloads, TuneUp is the best iTunes companion app in the industry, and in a just a few clicks your entire music collection will be fresh and clean. And for a limited time, Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $30!

Holding an iPad, especially the larger-sized iPad one through four, can be an exercise in finger strength, especially when typing with your thumbs in landscape mode and holding the iPad with both hands. Luckily, back in iOS 5, Apple gave us all the ability to split the iPad keyboard and move it closer to the middle of the screen. This also comes in handy with the new iPad mini when in landscape mode.

Here’s how to make it happen.

For years Apple has been playing a game of cat and mouse with jailbreakers. Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, a new jailbreak comes out utilizing those hard-earned exploits, and Apple fixes the security holes in a new iOS version. The cycle has been happening for years.

A team of hackers called the Evad3rs were responsible for the recent iOS 6 Evasi0n jailbreak, and Apple just released iOS 6.1.3 to patch the related security holes. Of the 6 exploits that were fixed, Apple has publicly credited 4 to the Evad3rs, all of which are chained together to give hackers root access to iOS.

ABC, NBC, and CBS all have their own iPad and iPhone apps that will finally let you watch some of their shows for free. The catch with all of those apps is that you can’t watch a new show until 24 hours after it’s aired.

To take TV network apps to the next level, ABC is reportedly working on a new app that will let cable subscribers stream live network TV to their iPhone or iPad.

File under the ever-growing list of “things Android does better than iOS.” Today it’s Gmail, which now lets you reply to, archive or delete your messages right there in the notification. Meanwhile, us schmucks with iPhones and iPads are stuck digging into preferences just to toggle Bluetooth on and off, and waving a freshly-slaughtered chicken over our heads as we try to make Photo Stream work again.

One of the biggest complaints about Android, is that Google will announce a new version of Android, but then it takes over six months for that software to actually get on your phone. What gives?

The guys over at Gizmodo decided to talk to both manufacturers and wireless carriers to find out what’s the hold up. It seems like a software update would be a pretty straightforward process, but what they found was a myriad of problems that can take months to answer before your Android phone gets an update.

If you’re a Hulu Plus subscriber that prefers to consume your favorite shows on Apple’s diminutive set-top box, great news: Hulu has just announced a new Hulu Plus experience that they say they have completely redesigned from the ground up.

Warren East, who has spent the last 12 years as CEO of ARM, has announced that he will retire on July 1. During his time in charge, East has overseen ARM’s processor design powerhouse through some of its most explosive growth, thanks to lucrative deals with companies like Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm.

There are a handful of apps that I have to have on every Mac I use, or things quickly start to get annoying. Launchbar is one. Dropbox is another, and TextExpander is one more. TextExpander is sold as a way to expand a short string of text into a longer string of text, so I can just type, say, “aadd” and my address magically appears. I use it all day long on both Mac and iOS for adding Markdown and HTML code to my Cult of Mac posts, and even to the the name Cult of Mac (shortcut: ccom).

But there’s a lot more in there, as this example will show. BEcause TextExpander can run scripts, it can query all kinds of neat stuff — including finding out about your Mac.

Evernote Food, the iOS app for foodies that lets you keep a record of all the recipes and restaurants you want to remember, has received a major new update adding a number of neat new features. In addition to OpenTable reservations, users can now share recipes with their friends, enjoy better search results, and more.