project

Welcome to another week of great new deals at the Cult of Mac Store. This time around we’ve got awesome noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones, and an app for staying on top of any project. There’s also a powerful VPN for safe and anonymous browsing, and an award-winning tool for protecting and repairing your computer’s drive. Everything is discounted by well over half, read on for more details:

Like the content they create, today’s digital creative takes many forms. Whether designing a website or a game, whether editing photos or lines of code, there are some things we all have in common. This bundle of Mac apps offers tools for converting media files of all kind, a powerful file transfer protocol for moving data from place to place, a game-changing productivity tool for completing complex projects, and a digital assistant for studying better and taking rich notes.

No matter what you do at the screen, these Mac apps can help you do it better. And they’re all going for half off or even more. Read on for more details:

Customers visiting one of Apple’s popular stores in New York City got treated to a horrific sight on Valentine’s Day: a giant image of a pregnant Donald Trump standing naked in the loving embrace of Vladimir Putin.

Let’s face it. Deep in our hearts, we all know some colored M&M’s taste better than others. For me, it’s the red and green ones; for my wife, it’s the brown and orange ones. And Van Halen famously stipulated in all its contracts that the band should never be served any brown M&M’s, requiring some lowly stagehand to pick them all out by hand from a bowl before every show.

These days, things would be easier. Case in point: This simple machine, which was custom-rigged out of just an iPhone and an Arduino to individually sort M&M’s by color, no human intervention required.

Evernote has today rolled out a new Reminders service to its clients on the Mac, iOS, and the web. The new service rolls three of Evernote’s most-requested features into one, delivering in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your note list.

There’s a belief that Apple makes new engineers work on fake products until they can be trusted. According one of the company’s former employees, Adam Lashinsky, who published the book Inside Apple last January, the Cupertino company hires people into so-called “dummy positions” until it’s confident that they can be a part of upcoming products without leaking information.

But how accurate are those claims? We know Apple takes secrecy very seriously, but would it really waste time and money on giving people fake projects just to ensure they won’t squeal?

Almost certainly not.

We love Readdle’s productivity apps here at Cult of Mac, especially when they’re going cheap. The company is currently holding a Back to School campaign that sees a number of iOS apps that “are indispensable for studying” reduced. Those included are ReaddleDocs for iPhone, ReaddleDocs for iPad, and Remarks.

With millions of dollars pledged to all kinds of projects every week, it’s no wonder that Kickstarter has become one of the most popular funding sources for getting a new product off the ground. The process is simple: Start a project, spread the word, then — if your idea is a good one — watch the pledges roll in.

If you’re a budding entrepreneur with a great idea for a Mac or iOS accessory, or even an app or game, then Kickstarter could be the fastest and most effective route to success. Not only is it a great source of funding, but it also helps you establish just how popular your product will be.

Here at Cult of Mac we’ve stumbled across a handful of really outstanding devices that wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for Kickstarter. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. While creating your project may be pretty straightforward, ensuring it succeeds is hard work.

To help you out, we’ve spoken to a couple of companies who recently used Kickstarter to launch their latest products, and they’ve given us some feedback and a few tips on how to ensure your Kickstarter project is a success.

Here’s a quick video of Project magazine’s panoramic cover for its latest issue.

The iPad-only magazine uses the iPad 2′s gyroscope to create a cover that moves through 360-degrees as you sweep the iPad around the room. It is available now from the App Store for $2.99.

More about the magazine here.

Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.