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Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

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Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

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The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset [...]

In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

Reviews

Full category list for displayed posts: Reviews, Software, Vintage Tech

Review: Lynxlet Is An Easy Internet Nostalgiafest

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So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?

Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.

But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.

Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.

Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.

(Via Merlin Mann.)

Review: EA’s Madden NFL 10 On Sale For The Superbowl

There aren’t many games on the iPhone platform that can match games on the big 64-bit boxes for production value — but Electronic Arts Mobile’s Madden NFL 10 can, and does, fantastically. Unfortunately, it also has one gaping hole.

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In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

Google's Nexus One smartphone. CC-licensed picture by ekai.

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the test of time, or is it a phonebooth’d Clark Kent.

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iPhone Weekly Digest: Clipboard Management, Retro Drumming, and Galcon in Tanks

Left: clipboard manager Pastebot. Right: odd retro drum machine TweakyBeat


It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Pastebot, 007: Top Agent, Jackson Pollock, Rhythm Racer, Judgement Day War, and TweakyBeat.

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Review: InfiniteScope, Another Fun Free Photography Toy For iPhone

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Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

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Notational Velocity Adds Simplenote Syncing, Gorgeous New Icon

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Forgive me for banging on about Notational Velocity – but it’s such an awesome app that it deserves a place on your Mac. And this week it just got a little awesomer.

The latest version of NV includes native support for syncing with Simplenote, the iPhone app and web notes service.

As I noted the other week in a post about rival (and NV-inspired) notes app Nottingham, the great thing about Simplenote is that you get access to what I call an “ecosystem”. Your notes are safe – there’s copies of them in the cloud and inside your NV database. But because Simplenote encourages third-party apps, you’ll always have plenty of choice about how you access those notes from your computer.

NV has also undergone a few visual tweaks to smarten up its appearance, not least of them smart and funny new icon by Colin Cody. There are some more technical details about the new update on this blog post if you’re interested.

Having all my Notational Velocity notes automatically and wirelessly synced with my phone is just wonderful. If you need a similarly simple synced notes service, I encourage you to download Notational Velocity and sign up for a Simplenote account. You won’t regret it.

Review: Deliciously Evil App Grants Endless Possibilities To Piss People Off

And now for something completely different.

I’ll admit, the first alarming thought that shot through my head when I stumbled across this vidclip on YouTube of Cult jefe Leander Kahney, was that he’d created it as fun-yet-terror-inducing way of emphasizing the “dead” part of the word “deadline” to Cult staff.

Turns out it was actually created by app developer Toga Pit — btw, cute marketing there, guys — to promote their new, maniacal-laughter-inducing iTouchMyFriends app, which turns images of your friends into manipulatable puppets. Just the evilness of the name ran shivers of anticipatory pleasure down my spine as I secured a copy to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.

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Cult of Mac Favorite: Skimble Tracks ALL of Your Active Life

What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.

Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.

Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).

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iPhone Weekly Digest: Robot Meets Synth, Online Shopping, Games and More

Left: Amazon Mobile. Right: Bebot.


It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Bebot, Buster Red, What’s On Reading, Amazon Mobile and Numeric Paranoia.

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Review: Grand Theft Auto on iPhone a Near-Perfect Match

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

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App Freebie: Genius-y Moodagent As Confused As A Chameleon On A Pile Of Skittles

Moodagent is one of those apps that seems like, at first glance, it’ll cure world hunger, or abruptly manifest all those single socks you’ve lost over the past seven years — a holy-crap,-I-just-gotta-have-this-app, app.

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Review: VoiceBand App Ushers In The Age Of The Three-Dollar Rock Star

Sometimes I wake up from a dream where I’ve fashioned a majestic rock symphony. I’ll fumble around for my trusty digital recorder, groggily hum a few throaty bars and fall back asleep; then in the morning I find myself listening to something that sounds like a drowning donkey (or more frequently, I find I’ve forgotten to flip the “hold” switch).

Well, hell with that — for $3, I bought VoiceBand by WaveMachineLabs and turned my iPhone into a recording studio. What’s really cool is that all I have to do is vocalize into the mic and the app transforms my voice into a remarkably credible imitation of a musical instrument.

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iPhone Weekly Digest: A Brain-Bending Puzzler and a Decent Vertical Shooter

Left: MetaSquares. Right: Sky Force.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review MetaSquares, Piyo Blocks Lite, Space Dock, Sky Force, PuzzlingsXXX.

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Review: Phototropedelic Brightens Up Almost Any Photo

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The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

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App Hed2Hed: Shazam Encore v. SoundHound

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?

After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.

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iPhone Weekly Digest: A Fab Blitz Clone, Bejeweled Blitz, and, uh, a Blitz of Other Games! No, Really!

Left: GOALS! Pro. Right: Jungle Crash Land

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review ToyPlanes, GOALS! Pro, Bejeweled 2, Jungle Crash Land and Boulder Dash Vol 1.

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Google Chrome Adds Bookmark Manager

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The dev channel version of Google Chrome for Mac has been updated with a long-awaited new feature: a bookmark manager.

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Review: Sleep Cycle Watches You Sleep, Wakes You Up Gently

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Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

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Cult Favorite: MemoryMiner 2.0 Realizes Potential of Your iLife

We take pictures to remember our own lives better and tell stories about the people who matter most to us. In older days, we had photo albums. These days, we have gigantic digital libraries on our computers, and a lot of the time it’s pretty disorganized. Sure, the most important photos are grouped into albums and what-not, but little else is. The meaning behind the pictures isn’t obvious.

Apple has taken steps to address this in iPhoto 09, adding in face detection and the ability to take people in pictures for searching by participant and searching by geography via GPS data, but these elements aren’t well-intertwined — and it does a bad job of considering the long view. That’s where MemoryMiner, a very nice piece of shareware from GroupSmarts, steps in.

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Spot The Difference: Nottingham Clones Notational Velocity

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Left: Notational Velocity, right: Nottingham

Tyler Hall, the developer behind Nottingham is quite clear: he loved Notational Velocity so much, he wanted to make a version of his own.

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