Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.

Enjoy!

Movies:

 Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips was one of the best movies to hit theaters in 2013, but you can finally cuddle up to it on your iPad. It’s up for like 50 Oscars, including a best supporting actor nod for Barkhad Adbi who had never even acted before taking over Tom Hanks’ ship.

iTunes – $17.99

About Time

On the surface About Time seems like it’d be just another romantic comedy starring Rachel McAdams of The Vow, The Notebook and Wedding Crashers fame, but romance takes a back seat in this moving story about the relationship between Tim, played by Domhall Gleeson, and his father, both of whom have the ability to travel through time.

iTunes –  $12.99

Sepideh

Sepideh: Reaching for the Stars premiered at this year’s Sundance, and for the first time ever, Apple’s made the film available on iTunes while it’s on at the indie film festival.  The documentary follows a young Iranian woman, Sepideh, who teams up with the first female space tourist to follow her dreams of becoming an astronaut.

iTunes – $7.99

Albums

Bad Suns – Transpose

Fans of Imagine Dragons, AWOL Nation and the like are destined to enjoy the new EP from Bad Suns. I’m allowing them a spot on this week’s list even though they’ve desecrated my the Zia Symbol. Groovy bass lines and great guitar are followed with some impressive vocals in the four-track EP full of earwormy tunes.

iTunes – $3.99

Warpaint – Warpaint

Warpaint has been around for almost 10 years, yet they’ve only managed to drop two LPs in that decade. Despite the wait, their second album, Warpaint, oozes with slow-flowing pop moodier than your teenage sister ever was, making it one of my favorite albums of the month.

iTunes – $9.99

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra – F*** Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything

The title for Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s seventh album is a bit ridiculous, but what else would you expect from the motley group of Montreal rockers? Lead guitarist Efrim Menuck and violinist Jessica Moss recently became parents, so the album fittingly intros with their son Ezra before the group jumps in declaring, “We live on the island called Montreal, and we make a lot of noise… because we love each other!” before unleashing a new wave of orchestro-punk mayhem.

iTunes – $9.99

Books

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by McKenzie Funk

Most of us look at global warming as an ominous threat, but in McKenzie Funk’s new book Windfall we learn that some people view Earth’s looming disaster as a ticket to the One Percent. Funk spent six years traveling the planet to study climate change and dives into three major categories of global warming – the melt, the drought, and the deluge – that have nations and major corporations lining up to cash in on the global meltdown.

iTunes – $14.99

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
by Steve Sheinkin

We enjoyed a great MLK day this week and if you’re looking for more background on civil rights stories, check out Sheinkin’s book which covers the events of a massive explosion that rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago in 1944. More than 300 sailors were killed in the blast and when 244 men refused to go back to work because of unsafe conditions 50 were charged with mutiny, facing decades in jail and even execution.

iTunes – $9.99

The Days of Anna Madrigal
by Armistead Maupin

Armistead Mauphin’s Tales of the City series is finally coming to an end. The ninth and final novel features Anna Madrigal, a wry 92-year-old transgendered landlady who has found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco, and culminates with the group attending Burning Man in this memorable and captivating capstone to the series.

iTunes – $14.99

At Cult of Mac, we pride ourselves on our obsessive love for everything Apple, which is why we’re crashing through the walls with excitement to have Apple pioneer, Susan Kare – the person responsible for creating most of the original Mac icons – designing this week’s cover.

Since 1983, the San Francisco-based designer has crafted thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Designed on a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their functions immediately and memorably.

Kare was working as a fine arts curator when she was recruited in the early 1980s by Andy Hertzfeld, a high school friend, to design the look and feel of the first Mac, the first commercial computer with a GUI – which happens to celebrate its 30th birthday this week.

Influenced by road signs, her whimsical, easy-to-understand icons defined the visual language of computers for decades —such as the Trash Can, the Bomb, the Paint Can, to name a few

Kare later designed the Mac’s fonts, and then went to work for Steve Jobs at NeXT. She also designed icons for Microsoft’s Windows 3.0. More recently, she created a line of virtual gifts for Facebook, stickers for Path, self-published an art book, as well as a ton of wonderful prints she makes available on her site when she’s not out surfing.

Kare is widely recognized as the groundbreaking designer of graphical user interfaces, mostly because the meaning of her symbols were instantly apparent.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York praised Kare’s designs for being able to “communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”

Did she have any idea she was making history at the time?

“You can set out to make a painting, but you can’t set out to make a great painting,” Kare said in an interview. “If you look at that blank canvas and say, ‘Now I’m going to create a masterpiece’ — that’s just foolhardy. You just have to make the best painting you can, and if you’re lucky, people will get the message.”

We’ve featured her work heavily on the site, and oogled at the incredible prints available on her online store, but its truly an honor to have her work her craft on the Cult of Mac Magazine.

We have no shortage of cute games about adorable characters who need your help to get home or something comparable, but here’s something a little different.

Kid Aviator is about a young carnival daredevil fired from a cannon who is trying to fly as high as he can to spite gravity. He has a cape. He has goggles. He is awesome.

The only problem is that the sky is full of all kinds of random crap that wants to ruin his affront to physics and Nature, and that’s where you come in.

Update: A SteelSeries representative sent us the following in an email asking why the price had been reduced so soon after the initial release.

“The response of this product coming out of CES was incredibly positive, [but] the largest concern was with the price set at $99.99 MSRP. Our goal with the Stratus goes beyond just selling a controller; it’s really about helping to define a new platform. We want to see that succeed and took initiative immediately after CES to find ways where we could improve the odds of that success by lower[ing] the price. The outcome is that our team was able to work with our partners to bring the cost for the consumer down to $79.99.”

Original Post: Well, it looks like the price wars have begun in earnest. SteelSeries’ Stratus is now $79.99, instead of the $99.99 it launched for at CES. If you pre-ordered this at the older price, you’re in luck: SteelSeries will honor the new, lower cost for all pre-orders.

Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.

I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.

But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.

What’s in an app name? That’s the question an developer had to ask himself after accidentally naming his app that was sexually suggestive enough that no one actually wanted to use it.

One month after its launch in the App Store, Codeacademy: Hour of Code has gone universal — being optimized for iPad and iPad mini, as well as iPhone and iPod touch.

Google has lost its battle against a patent troll after a Texas court found Android guilty of infringing a push notification patent. SimpleAir — which has also targeted Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and other technology giants — is now seeking $125 million in damages.

Sony Pictures Television has a new iOS game available in the App Store and, unlike previous titles, this one’s based on an original property.

Called Suits and Swords, the game is a cross between a blackjack card game and an RPG, set in four different fantasy realms.

If you have a modern Mac, there’s almost no reason not to use FileVault, the all-disk encryption that’s built in to OS X. It doesn’t slow the computer down, it keeps your data safe and – if the machine is switched off – then even if a baddie pulls your drive he’s stuck with a useless chunk of silicon.

And now Apple has added one more convenience for the cautious user: authenticated reboots.