| Cult of Mac

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past provides fun mutant action for story purists

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Days of Future Past

Maybe you’ve just seen the latest X-Men film. A lot of people have, so odds are pretty good. And if it left you wanting to know more about the original Days of Future Past storyline, but tracking down the trade paperback and then, like, reading it sounds like a lot of work, here’s a game you’ll want to check out.

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past by GlitchSoft
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Price: $2.99

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past is out now for your favorite iOS device, and it aims to faithfully re-create the source material the way it originally appeared. This means that it’s the assassination of Senator Kelley that brings forth the robopocalypse (that character died in the first film, so he wasn’t available to die in the new one), and it’s Kitty Pryde, not Wolverine, who goes back in time to set things right.

Sure, you can play the whole game as Wolverine if you want, but if you’re a purist, you have a chance to do it “right.”

Lumena beats you senseless with rhythm

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Lumena

Once again, I’m here to tell you about a little minimalist game that has completely kicked my ass.

Lumena by Elevate Entertainment
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Price: $1.99 (promotional price, reg. $2.99)

It’s called Lumena, and it doesn’t look like much until you play it and fail in like two seconds. And then you try again, and again you fail because the game is, in fact, so minimal that it doesn’t even bother to tell you how to play it. But after a while, you figure it out (it’s not really that complicated), and with newly found confidence, you give it another shot. And you lose in five seconds.

But stick with it because it’s way better than I’m making it sound.

Top iOS Apps Of The Week

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Traveler's Badges

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a timer inside of another timer, something to keep track of where you’ve been, and some fancy new fonts for your iWork.

Here you go:

It’s nice having some record of the places you’ve visited, but FourSquare is a little granular for my liking.

Traveler’s Badges keeps it simple and broad. You just let it detect your location, and it generates a unique badge for your current city that you can collect and add to your collection. It even logs the date and time you were there, in case anyone asks.

If you want to get all global with it, you can even display all of your badges on a map. It’s not the most practical app, but it is pretty cute (and free). And it’ll kill like five seconds of a layover. Every bit helps.

Traveler’s Badges – Free | Yangfan Qi

Practice Time

If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.

It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.

Nevermind; just use it for intervals.

Practice Time – Free | Mal Function

Spell Checker

Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.

Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.

You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.

Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic

Install New Fonts

Your iPhone and iPad already have some fonts on board, but what if you want to make something that looks like it was stenciled or written in cursive? Or maybe you just like knowing that you have like 800 typefaces to choose from, just in case? Install New Fonts has you covered with enough options to keep you out of trouble for a while.

It’s free to download, but most of it is locked behind a $2.99 in-app purchase. But everything’s licensed for commercial use, so think of it as an investment.

Install New Fonts – Free | Denis Tokarev

Keep Calm and Breathe On

Every once in a while, I find an app that shows me just how much I need it. This time, it’s Keep Calm and Breathe On, which offers you seven guided breathing exercises (based on cycles per minute). The goal is to relax you and “calm your heart activity,” and when I tried it out for this write-up, I realized that I’m apparently really bad at breathing.

It has two sounds to accompany your oxygenation: Wind and River. I preferred the wind. It just made more sense because if I’m in a river, breathing might be a problem. And that’s less than calming.

Keep Calm & Breathe On – $0.99 | Commit GmbH

‘Install New Fonts’ And Make Your iWork All Fancy-Like

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Install New Fonts

Your iPhone and iPad already have some fonts on board, but what if you want to make something that looks like it was stenciled or written in cursive? Or maybe you just like knowing that you have like 800 typefaces to choose from, just in case? Install New Fonts has you covered with enough options to keep you out of trouble for a while.

It’s free to download, but most of it is locked behind a $2.99 in-app purchase. But everything’s licensed for commercial use, so think of it as an investment.

Source:Install New Fonts – Free | Denis Tokarev

Wholesome App’s New Update Lets You Assess Your Risk Of Scurvy

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Wholesome

A premium update to nutrition app Wholesome lets you do more than just see what’s in your food. The base app — with all its nutritional information — is still free, but for $2.99, you can unlock the “My Nutrition” and “Food Diary” features.

These give you tools to track your intake of hundreds of nutrients like vitamins, minerals and isoflavonoids. I had to look up what isoflavonoids are, but I definitely haven’t eaten any today (they’re in peas).

Shatter Alley Hates Bricks And You Equally [Review]

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Shatter Alley

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.

Shatter Alley by Dojotron
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

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.

Top iOS Apps Of The Week

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Whether

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration.

This time, our picks include a donut locator, a good-looking scheduler and a quick house-hunting app.

Here you go:

I’m kind of obsessed with monitoring and comparing numbers like blog views and podcast downloads. It’s probably a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I made up my own word for it: “metriculous.”

Whether is an app that satisfies that part of your brain, if you have it. It lets you compare today’s temperature, precipitation, wind, and humidity to the same day last year. The temperature panel is free, but you can unlock the rest — and any future ones — for $2.99.

So it’s basically a cool-looking weather app with an extra layer of trivia on top of it for crazy people inquisitive, metriculous types.

Whether App – Free | Sturmware

Candooit

It can be stressful when you have way too much stuff to do and it’s hard to keep track of everything.

Candooit is a new app that lets you add your obligations with a few simple gestures and then presents it all in an attractive, easy-to-read infographic. Once you select the type of activity (the app includes eight color-coded categories with numerous sub-items), you drag left and right to set the start time and up and down to set the duration. You can make notes, view by week or month, and even sync with your Google calendar.

And the busier you are, the cooler it looks. So that might actually be kinda dangerous.

CandooIt – Free | Panurge

Doughbot

Not everything in the App Store has to be a Swiss Army knife. Sometimes, you find an app that does one thing and does the heck out of it.

Doughbot is one such app. It tells you where you can buy donuts.

You can also get directions, read Yelp reviews, and look at pictures from Instagram, but that’s just overkill. I can count on one finger the number of bad donuts I’ve had in my life. Just point me toward the nearest besprinkled blip on the map so that I can start pointing at lumps of fried dough I’d like to cram into my face.

Doughbot – $0.99 | Timothy Tolbert

Doorsteps Swipe

House hunting can be stressful and annoying, especially if you’ve never done it before. But the Doorsteps Swipe app wants to help you out by letting you quickly look through a bunch of listings in your desired location, then reject or save them with a single swipe. It also compiles data (average price, number of beds and baths, etc.) on the ones you’ve liked so you can get some idea what you’re looking for.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any cloud houses or big shells yet. But I haven’t gotten all the way through the list yet.

Doorsteps Swipe – Free | Move, Inc.

This App Reminds You ‘Whether’ You Were Hot Or Cold A Year Ago

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Whether

I’m kind of obsessed with monitoring and comparing numbers like blog views and podcast downloads. It’s probably a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I made up my own word for it: “metriculous.”

Whether is an app that satisfies that part of your brain, if you have it. It lets you compare today’s temperature, precipitation, wind, and humidity to the same day last year. The temperature panel is free, but you can unlock the rest — and any future ones — for $2.99.

So it’s basically a cool-looking weather app with an extra layer of trivia on top of it for crazy people inquisitive, metriculous types.

Source:Whether App – Free | Sturmware

Dead Room: The Dark One Copies Slender (But Does It Well) [Review]

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Dead Room 01

Developer Parsec Productions’ PC horror title Slender: The Eight Pages was one of my favorite games of 2012. It packs an impressive amount of horror and suspense into a very simple idea — being lost in the woods while an unbeatable enemy relentlessly pursues you — and it was one of the few games I’ve ever played that really and truly terrified me.

Dead Room: The Dark One by Donovan Crewe
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

It makes sense that others would want to get in on that action, and while you have plenty of Slender Man games to choose from in the App Store, Dead Room: The Dark One takes the same basic concept and puts its own creepy spin on it.

And as fairly overt copies go, it’s pretty good.

Glorkian Warrior Is For The Marshmallow-Cereal-Swilling Youngster In Everyone [Review]

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Trials of Glork

I have fond memories of waking up Saturday morning, pouring myself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys (because Count Chocula was out of season), and plunking down on the couch to watch my favorite cartoons. And then, when the cereal was gone and the show was over, I opened my laptop and cranked out that review of Demolition Crush that went up Monday.

Glorkian Warrior: Trials of Glork by Pixeljam
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

I am not an adult, is what I’m getting at here.

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork is a collaboration between developer Pixeljam and comic-book artist James Kochalka. It feels like a mashup between classic arcade shooter Galaga and Adventure Time, which means that it hits all the right notes for people whose favorite breakfasts still end in bowls full of chocolate milk.