The IMDb app is one of my favorites on the iPad, so I was pleased to see that it received a pretty big update today with a lot of new features. Version 3.0 brings a new user interface that focuses on showcasing movies and TV shows in a visually appealing way. There’s a full-featured Watchlist and recommendations that are tailored to each user.

The general experience of browsing photos and lists has been greatly improved and goes hand in hand with the revamped interface. The iPhone version of IMDb has received a little love too.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

Day 20 is upon us as the end of the world draws near, and today we’re recognizing a handy menubar app for the Mac called Bartender.

Lekh Diagram is a clever and potentially useful diagramming app for iPad, “free” on the App Store, but not if you want to make serious use of it.

Have an idea for a mobile app? Getting it developed and into the App Store is not as hard as you think – and this Cult of Mac Deals offer will help you take all of the steps you’ll need to go from idea to app.

This guide will teach you how to identify key features, how to find development and marketing talent, how to make sure your developers meet timelines and budgets, and all of the other essential requirements for getting your app published on the Apple App Store. And for a limited time it’ll do that for just $29.

Over at his blog, Don Melton — the guy behind Safari and WebKit — has a fascinating post up about the many possible names Apple CEO Steve Jobs tested on friends and colleagues for the company’s web browser before settling on “Safari.”

They were all terrible. “Freedom” was one strong candidate, among other terrible options like “Alexander” and “iBrowse.”

If you pop into your local Microsoft store and ask for a demonstration of Windows 8, there’s a chance the store assistant will disappear and send over an 11-year-old child to help you. That’s what the company is doing in Portugal in an effort to prove its new operating system is so intuitive, even a child can use it. Either that or it’s taking advantage of cheap child labor.

Apple’s App Store is widely considered the king of mobile marketplaces — even Android fanatics will admit that it offers a greater selection of high-quality apps and games. But it’s Google Play that’s currently seeing the most growth, according to the latest data from app analytics firm Distimo, while the App Store enjoys more than four times as much revenue.

ZeptoLab, the creators of the hugely popular Cut the Rope, just released their latest iOS game. It’s called Pudding Monsters, and it promises to be a deliciously addictive puzzle adventure filled with whacky characters and “innovative stick-’em-together game-play.” Check out the launch trailer below.

The excellent Autostitch Panorama app is now available for the iPad, and it is as fantastic as ever. Unlike Apple’s own implementation of iOS panoramas on the iPhone 5, the Autostitch app does things the old-fashioned way, quilting together a patchwork of separate images.

This has some advantages.

iTunes 11 came with several changes, many of which we detailed in our iTunes 11 Tips feature a couple of weeks ago.

One of the changes made was the loss of a “find all duplicates” feature that was really handy for finding and deleting duplicate files in our rather voluminous iTunes libraries. Luckily, Apple re-included the feature in the latest version of iTunes 11, version 11.0.1