iOS devices might be ruining your child’s ability to play with building blocks, according to a recent report.

Members of the UK’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers claim that addiction to iPad and iPhones mean that children aged between 3 and 4 have no problem swiping a screen, but have difficulty understanding real space, and possess “little or no” dexterity in their fingers.

“I have spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks or the like, or the pupils who cannot socialize with other pupils but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone,” says teacher Colin Kinner.

Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.

Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.

You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.

Source:Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic

If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m a sucker for a good word game, and here’s a new multiplayer offering with an interesting idea behind it.

Catena is all about you and your opponent making a chain of words. One player starts, and then the other has to come up with another word that uses one or more of the last letters of the previous entry. For example, if I played “wholesome,” my opponent could play “somewhat” or “metric” or anything else that continues the chain.

It has a few hiccups along the way, but it’s mostly a good time.

Apple has turned even the most modest weekend strummer into a guitar hero.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, our games editor and disco band frontman (!) Rob LeFebvre takes you on a magical mystery tour of Garageband’s latest and greatest features. He’ll walk you through a shiny new piece of kit called Drummer, plus get you ringtone making and learning from the pros in the Lessons store.

Rob has also kept his ear to the ground for all the other great gear you need to make your homegrown music making hit the right notes and, well, sound better. And definitely louder. Whether you’re rocking at home or taking your iPad with you on stage.

So. The beat goes on with Charlie Sorrel sifting through MacBook stands to single out the best, plus his picks for the best Apple-related gear and Buster Hein’s top choices from iTunes for music, books and movies you’ll be grooving to all week.

Cult of Mac Magazine

Every aspect of Facebook’s entire business is essentially designed to target ads. Is anyone surprised, then, that the social networking giant intends on launching its own mobile ad network, similar to Apple’s iAds?

To be or not to be? That’s the question posed by Sometimes You Die, a game powered by existential angst that’s tearing up the charts.

The game — which is based on the question of how much of the gaming experience you can strip away and still have the end result be fun — has become the surprise hit of 2014, despite (or perhaps because of) its unusual take on life, death and the meaning of video games.

Now Philipp Stollenmayer, a 22-year-old developer who lives in the Netherlands, has opened his sketchbooks to show Cult of Mac how Sometimes You Die came to life.

Nike is dismantling the hardware team behind its FuelBand fitness tracker, according to a new report from CNET.

The sportswear company, which features Tim Cook on its board of executives, reportedly fired between 70 and 80% of the 70-person hardware team on Thursday.

Despite being Cult of Mac’s resident comic book fan, I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.

They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.

Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week. What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.

It has been nearly three months since Facebook launched Paper for iPhone, a cutting-edge experiment in what it means to use Facebook. Today Paper received its first big update in the App Store, and a few of the elements that were stripped out of Facebook in the original release have been added back.