If you haven’t been using If This, Then That (IFTTT) on your iPhone or iPad, you really ought to be.

It’s a really amazing way to connect up all the things you do on your devices, putting them together in new ways for new uses.

Want to send all your iOS photos to OneNote or Evernote? There’s a recipe for that. How about making your Phillips Hue lightbulbs flash a specific color when you pull up into your driveway? There’s an IFTTT recipe for that, too.

Chances are, if you can think of it, you can make it happen, connecting different services and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your iOS Photos app, location services, and the like in fantastically useful new ways.

There’s a new update for the iOS app, and it’s got some pretty spectacular new stuff to check out.

The iPad is four years old today and my mom hates it. Maybe not hate. Dislikes. Loathes. I don’t know the right word but for two weeks it sat in Apple’s pristine white box, unwrapped, unlocked, setup and then discarded; snuggling in its brown leather SmartCover completely untouched.

After dismissing it as “just a big iPhone” it’s grown on her in four months, just like it’s grown on us since 2010. Now it’s the only place she watches YouTube, looks at pictures, reads websites, FaceTimes and gets down on Solitaire like Kim Jong-un at a nuclear buffet.

It’s the best damn thing to ever happen for children with tech-illiterate parents.

Quick, think of two classic game franchises that make perfect sense as a mash-up! Give up? How about Street Fighter II and Flappy Bird? Not convinced of the brilliance of this idea? Well too bad — someone’s done it anyway.

Joining the plethora of Flappy Bird clones to arrive in the App Store since Dong Nguyen’s hit original, Street Flapper lets you take your favorite Street Fighter characters and guide them through an “endurance training” setup composed of the stretchy arms and legs of character Dhalsim.

The year might only be three months old but there’s already a contender for ‘most visually striking iOS game of 2014.’

Launched today, Monument Valley looks to combine the gameplay of hit indie game Fez with the brain-twisting art of M.C. Escher.

As can be seen from the above trailer it looks stunningly beautiful, and with developers Ustwo (the team responsible for Whale Trail and Blip Blup) behind it, hopefully the gameplay will be every bit as great. The trailer depicts Princess Ida climbing through landscapes of shifting geometric shapes, optical illusions, and hidden paths — all the while avoiding and outsmarting the enigmatic Crow People.

When Pebble’s last iOS update essentially bricked the smart watch, leaving it capable of only (shock horror) telling the time, we knew that something needed to be done in a hurry.

Fortunately Pebble realized that too, since the company has rushed out a new update for its official iOS app — fixing the bug users had complained about which stopped the Pebble from connecting to an iPhone via Bluetooth.

The jailbreak tweak called Auxo did card-based app switching in iOS 6, and then Apple came along and fully implemented the idea in iOS 7. Auxo, which started as a concept that went viral online, was suddenly obsolete.

A successor to Auxo has been in the works for quite some time, and now it’s available for jailbreakers to install in Cydia. Auxo 2 doesn’t reinvent iOS 7 multitasking, but the tweak builds upon it by adding more controls and customization.

With a seriously rugged style, the Intrepid Journeyman messenger bag is nothing to be trifled with. The soft brown leather exterior enfolds the utterly solid yet flexible abilities of this cross-shoulder travel bag, which will become an asset in almost any travel situation.

Unless, of course, you need to carry a whole lot of things with you. In that case, the minimalist design of the Journeyman may not perfectly suit. What it contains, however, it contains well, and it meets an even more important criterion: how it carries.

A cross-shoulder messenger bag must be able to sit high up on your back without crushing your chest or killing your shoulders. You should be able to carry the thing all day long without starting to feel that mid-shoulder ache that a poorly fitting shoulder bag tends to invite.

The Journeyman was designed with this sort of wrapping fit in mind.

After a disastrous Windows 8 launch that saw Microsoft embrace a new tiled user interface, the company announced today that it’s backpedaling and resurrecting popular Windows 7 features like the Start Menu.

Twitter was abuzz with the news of Start Menus with the majority of tweets cheering the return, but after closer inspection of the Franken-hyrbid interface we think they should have left it to rot in a tomb.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a network diagnostic tool, some laundry guidance, and a reminder that Reno 911! was a thing.

Here you go:

If your Internet connection is dragging, and you have no idea why, NetHero can offer some helpful tips to get you back up to speed. You just register, and it will check out all the devices on your home network to give you a general idea of whether or not they’re working properly. You can also download the app to your individual devices like your laptop to run speed checks and get alerts and advice that will hopefully get your devices running better and save you some aggrivation.

NetHero – Free | Pie Digital

When it comes to doing laundry, I’m a “just throw it all in, cold wash, walk away” kind of person. And that’s equal parts no time, ignorance, laziness, and the fact that my washer and dryer have coin slots in them. But here’s an app that lays the entire laundry process out for you if you care enough to do it right.

Complete Laundry Care takes you through the entire process starting with sorting and ending with folding, and it offers an abundance of helpful tips along the way. Most of these involve reading the care label, but it also taught me what the hell all those symbols on the label mean. The more you know.

Complete Laundry Care – Free | Renowne, LLC

If you have a cool story or a handy travel tip you’d like to share, Grawler will let you. It’s a new app that wikis up the world by having its community add photos, waypoints, and descriptions of their favorite destinations. And if you happen to live in a less-than-popular travel destination *cough*Lincoln*cough*, it comes preloaded with articles from Wikipedia.

And since I’m pretty sure nobody else in the community has this kind of insider information, I think I’ll go ahead and create my definitive guide to private places to sneak naps on the University of Nebraska campus. Worldly travelers need to know that.

Grawler: The Local Wiki – Free | Cosmix

If you’re on the go and missed last night’s episode of The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s new official app can hook you up. It offers a wide selection of programming, including talk shows, series, and standalone shorts. All the new stuff is right there for the viewing, but you’ll have to go through a cable-company login to check out everything else.

Just be aware of your surroundings. You don’t want to be another crazy person laughing on the bus.

Comedy Central – Free | Comedy Central

Maybe you’re walking down the street, and you see a squirrel fighting a feral cat over half of a hot dog. That’s awesome, and you must capture it.

But what if a construction crew is ripping up the sidewalk 50 feet away, and you don’t need that messing up this amazing moment? That’s what Hush does: It captures video without sound. It even preformats your video in an Instagram-friendly square format so that your friends can cheer on that plucky undersquirrel as soon as possible.

Plus, it’ll save them the embarrassment of having the noise of a thousand shrieking metal demons blasting out of their phone in public. They’ll owe you one.

Hush – Free | Zhukovskiy

From lakes to oceans, people everywhere can be found fishing. With busy workdays and full weekends, it can be hard to find the time to go out and cast your reel. The new app Ace Fishing: Wild Catch brings the thrill of fishing to all iPhones and iPads for free. Explore the world and catch over hundreds of different types of fish right away. Do you think you can catch even the most rare fish?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Ace Fishing: Wild Catch – Com2uS USA, Inc., brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.