Game Center, now on OS X as well as iOS, is Apple’s online leader board and game matching system. It lets you challenge your friends for both real-time as well as asynchronous multiplayer gaming, as well as give you bragging rights each time you beat out your frenemy’s high score on a Mac game you both play.

Did you know, however, that Game Center also lets you challenge your buddies on iOS, as well? With Two Towers, you can issue your challenge from your Mac, and your friend will be able to accept that challenge on their iPhone or iPad. You can then both play together, cross-platform. Cool, right? Here’s how to make it work.

Choosing what to buy when you’re trying to be an ethical consumer is tricky. In a world where hippie holdout Ben and Jerry’s is now a corporate sellout owned by Unilever, how can we know who owns what, and which products we should boycott?

Luckily (and you knew this was coming), There’s An App For That™. It’s called Buycott, and by just scanning a barcode, you can find out which scheming ne’erdowells are behind the brand.

There are probably more slick-looking weahter apps in the app stoire than there are gimmicky to-do list managers, but if you want a meteorological powerhouse in your pocket then there’s only one option: WeatherPro. In it’s paid form it will give forecasts for up to two weeks, along with all the radar and satellite animations you could need, plus detailed yet easily-read weather info.

Now, if you own a backyard weather station from Netatmo, you can view its data right there in the familiar WeatherPro interface.

I used to mock Apple years ago because they advertised Apple as the fun alternative to stodgy, boring Windows.

The idea that Apple was fun and Microsoft was not was a misdirection at best. Windows was the biggest games platform and Xbox was the best console game (in my opinion). Apple had no games to speak of.

Five years ago, all that changed: Apple launched the iOS App Store, and it quickly became the biggest games platform ever, now making twice the money as portable game consoles. Apple’s App Store hit right when the casual and mobile games market was ready to take off in a big way.

The Android market is no slouch in the gaming arena, either, and will soon overtake the portable game console market as well.

But the mobile gaming market is still in its infancy. The Android gaming scene is about yesterday’s games — isolated, causal time-killing games, for the most part. So to take it to the next level, Google this week announced Google Play Games Services.

There are two gigantic opportunities that are potentially unique to Google: multi-device gaming and gaming as a mainstream spectator sport.

 Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid-state drive in it, like my MacBook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get tricky and a bit advanced. If you’re using a MacBook Pro M1, optimizing storage is even more crucial to ensure you get the best performance from your device.

Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.

Like an odd cross between Sudoku and a collectible card game, Star Trek Rivals, from Elephant Mouse Games, is out for iOS on the App Store to capture your attention today, on the release date of Star Trek: Into Darkness (have you gotten your tickets, yet?).

The game is free, has all your Star Trek reboot characters in it, and is pretty simple to learn, but hard to master. It plays asynchronously, and you can play a bunch of games at once. Did I mention it’s made out of Star Trek? What’s not to like?

Every year Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. It’s the only time out of the year that third-party App Store developers can meet with Apple engineers face-to-face. For the indie dev making apps out of his home office, WWDC is Mecca. Besides the knowledge that can be gained, the conference holds tremendous networking value for many who make their livings from selling apps on the iPhone and Mac.

WWDC 2013 sold out in under two minutes this year, and about 5,000 developers will be descending upon the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the week-long conference in June. Some new information shows how WWDC attracts quite the international audience.

When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, he left behind a wife and four children. His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, has stayed hidden from the public sphere for years, but now she is starting to receive more recognition as an influential philanthropist.

She is passionate about a host of social issues, including education and immigration policy. As the world’s ninth richest woman, her platform to effect society has only grown larger in the wake of Jobs’s death.

This week on The CultCast: Google Maps gets prettier, smarter, and faster; Hangouts is a new chat app with some innovative features; Google Music is too late to party; Erfon eats H’orderves on a space jet with Tim Cook and Richard Branson; and Leander dons his powdered wig to judge an all new Faves ‘N Raves.

All that and more on this week’s CultCast! Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Show notes up next.

If you’ve tried to use Siri to call or text someone, you know it’s pretty simple. Just say, for example, “Call Joe Smith,” and Siri will call the person named Joe Smith in your Contacts App.

But did you know that Siri can also identify people via their relationship to you? You can say, “Call my brother,” or “Text my daughter,” and Siri will call or text that person, provided you’ve done a little set-up in the Contacts app.

You can also use Siri to define these relationships, so you don’t even have to open Contacts. Here’s how.