A few months after Apple birthed Live Photos into existence with the release of the iPhone 6s, Facebook is catching on to the idea. The social network is building the feature right into its iOS app so iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners can start uploading their animated photos and viewing others. But it’s not all good news, since there are two issues with Facebook’s implementation.

reTXT is a radical new messaging app that wants to fix everything wrong with online communication as it exists now. It landed back in April and includes a number of unique features — like being able to edit a message you already sent — all of which are currently patent pending. The app just updated today for iOS and Android with support for voice calling with end-to-end encryption as well.

Sticking out from the crowd of third-party messaging apps, I decided to take a closer look.

Good news: the official Twitter app for Mac finally got some attention today for the first time in almost a year. It now supports direct messages without the 140-character limit. Bad news: that’s the only feature added in the update, rendering it so totally insignificant you’re probably considering donating a new coffee machine to the Twitter for Mac team.

Computer engineer Hunter Scott wrote a Python script to enter virtually every Twitter contest started over the span of nine months. The bot ended up entering him in about 165,000 different “RT to win” contests and more importantly, he won close to 1,000. On average, he won four contests per day every day.

“I’m leaving” is a message I probably send way too often, but not as often as “I’m here.” It’s just become routine whenever I’m making plans or picking someone up. It’s not necessarily a burden, but it’d be a nice luxury to be able to quickly send friends these repeat messages automatically to save a little bit of time. You’re smart so I bet you know where I’m going with this.

Yes, Written is a new app for iPhone that lets you write out five of your most commonly used phrases and save them for easy access in Notification Center. Then when you pull down the Today view from the top, you see the Written widget with your five messages. Tap one to send it along to your favorite contacts. It works with the Messages app and even WhatsApp.

Outside of reading Cult of Mac (which you’re already doing!) Medium is one of the best go-to destinations of quality writing on the Internet. A blog publishing platform co-founded by ex-Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Medium is an effortlessly easy-to-use social journalism network that puts content — not ads — first. It’s like WordPress meets Instagram.

Medium already has a wonderful iPhone app, but sadly, universal support was missing at launch. But that’s all changed, and you can now surf Medium on your iPad as well.

Now that winter has hit the country, cycling has moved indoors for much of the U.S. That means straddling a stationary bike or throwing your trusty road or mountain bike up on a stand (or if you’re really brave, rollers).

That’s where the Xspin comes in. it’s a small box filled with sensors and a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio that attaches to a crank arm and sends speed, distance and cadence data to an accompanying app — either one of two developed by its parent company, Pafers, or a handful of popular third-party cycling apps, like Strava or MapMyRide. It’ll also work with ellipticals (though it obviously attaches differently, since ellipticals don’t have cranks).

This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine

Thanks to Apple’s tireless vetting of App Store apps, it’s tricky for an app to flat-out snoop on you. Then again, the behavior of some apps could be thought of as snooping if you squint and look at them the wrong way.

Foursquare is all about location, but that’s because it knows exactly where you are. And Facebook is… Well, Facebook likes to know things about you.

But you can keep earning Mayorships and tweeting your pictures without telling everyone where you live, or letting them post your location to Facebook. Just follow our handy guide to the privacy settings of various famous apps.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time deleting spam messages from my inbox — despite using a junk mail filter. But the issue is about to get a whole lot worse, with Google gearing up to deliver adverts to our Gmail inboxes. The messages will appear under the new Promotions tab that was recently introduced in a Gmail update, and Google is testing them on a small number of users now.

UpTo might be the best social calendar app ever made. I’ve never really seen anything like it; so if it isn’t the best (or really the only) social calendar app around, whatever else is out there must be perfect — because UpTo is pretty damn fantastic.

The whole point of UpTo is to create a social experience around calendars, in a way that’s at once instantly recognizable and ridiculously simple to use.