Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.

You might as well delete all the layer-blending apps on your iPhone or iPad right now, becasue Union is better than all of them. It comes from Pixite apps, the developer behind Unbound, LoryStrips, Flickring, Tangent and more, and it lets you stack images, then blend and manipulate them to stunning effect. How stunning? Take a look:

I don’t know if I’m just ridiculously clumsy or what, but I’ve had times where I saw something happening that I wanted to record, and by the time I got my camera app up and switched over to video, that thing had stopped happening. And regret is a powerful thing.

So Blink (or [Blink], if you’re super fancy) is a new app that starts recording the instant you open it; it also lets you take still photos while capturing with a single button press. And that’s slightly faster than opening your iPhone’s camera and then fumbling my stupid, giant thumb around trying to switch to video.

I feel like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial when that happens.

Source:[BLINK] – Free | James Munro

Video games have always had some weird vendetta against bricks. That paddle in Breakout, Mario, Simon Belmont in Castlevania … they all busted up blocks like they caught them stealing their lunches.

To be fair, Simon Belmont often found entire hams and stuff hidden in the walls of Dracula’s castle, so maybe some food thievery had happened. I don’t know; you tell me how those hams got there.

Regardless, Shatter Alley wants to bring the blockpocalypse back, and it does so in frantic, retro fashion.

Knights of Pen & Paper +1 Edition combines two fantastic things: a brilliantly funny de-construction of a pen and paper role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons and a mobile game that uses those very same mechanics to create a habit-forming experience.

Best of all? It’s going free on Wednesday at 8 am Pacific, so you should go get yourself a copy of it. Like, right now.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

In Apple’s drive toward simplicity, one of the things which fell into the category of “things we can do without” were physical paper manuals.

While the Cupertino company does offer a 140-page online User Guide — which provides a passable intro to using your iPad (and currently has the advantage of being one of the few iOS 7.1 guides around) — Apple’s refusal to create manuals has fostered a cottage industry with rival products.

Apple’s continued Chinese expansion saw App Store revenue in China increase by 70% last quarter. That’s according to figures from a new Q1 2014 report from app analytics firm App Annie.

Key to this increase is the China Mobile deal which was announced at the end of last year, opening up Apple’s potential customer base to the 763 million users currently on the country’s biggest mobile network.

Ever since Office for iPad launched a few weeks ago, folks have been claiming that it costs $100 just to use it. This isn’t true at all. And as of now, with Microsoft’s new Office 365 Personal plan for $7 per month (or $70 per year), it’s even less true.

Edovia makes the most polished VNC client for iOS, but its Mac app has been needing some attention for quite some time, especially in the design department. Screens 3 for Mac was released today, and it has been rebuilt from the group up for Mountain Lion. It also looks much cleaner and promises to be faster.

Apple has been releasing its weekly top games charts as of late, and they make interesting reading.

The latest list — published Tuesday afternoon — shows the cumulative iOS game downloads for the week running April 7 to April 13.