DJs have one more tool to add to their set thanks to Pioneer and its Rekordbox app for Android and iOS. Just like the desktop software, Recordbox for mobile allows users to manage music files, which can be played back on a Pioneer DJ Player. Many professional DJs have turned to Rekordbox for their music management needs and the mobile app extends this functionality by allowing users to:
Retro heaven: Vectrex is on its way to the iPhone and iPad.
Vectrex, the sent-from-the-future vector-based games console from 1982, is soon to come to iOS. The Vectrex Regeneration emulator, complete with the entire original game catalog, will launch soon as a Universal app, and will use optional expansion packs to enable extra features.
The WWE is ready to bring the pain, with its up close and personal WWE app for Android and iOS. Get in the ring with your favorite WWE Superstars, with instant access to profiles, biographies, social media feeds and more. Relive thousands of face smacking matches thanks to a video library consisting of thousands of clips. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or just looking for a little nostalgia, the WWE app has it all.
I have no idea how many apps there are in the iTunes store that let you add filters to your photos. But I do know how many there are to remove those filters, and turn your picture into something that you can look back on in ten years’ time without cringing: One. It’s called Normalize, and it comes from Joe Macirowski.
Look! Skype managed to make a non-hideous version of its app.
Say what you like about Windows 8, but Microsoft seems to have knocked developers into line when it comes to interface design. Exhibit a: Skype for Not-Metro, which not only matches the minimal tile design of the OS, but manages to make the iOS version look positively baroque.
Question: Do you have any idea what the following terms mean?
Multiply, Screen, Layover, Soft Light, Hard Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Addition, Difference, Darken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.
Answer (if you didn’t answer “yes” yourself): They’re blending modes. And a new iOS called Layover lets you use them to combine layered images. Still confused? Read on…
If you can’t make it through the day without some D&D (I’m not talking Dungeons & Dragons you nerds) then this next bit of news is for you. Dunkin’ Donuts wants to keep you running with their new app for Android and iOS. Released today, the Dunkin’ Donuts app allows customers to easily locate the nearest D&D, make payments, gift DD, and more. The app is supposed to make your Dunkin’ run easier, but the payment system seems a bit awkward to me.
Round 3 of the Android Humble Bundle has landed and we couldn’t be happier. Not only do you get to pay-what-you-want, but you also get to support charity and the great devs who have donated their games. All game included in the Humble Bundle are multi-platform, DRM-free, and independently developed games. There are currently four games listed along with a fifth “bonus” game for those who pay more than the average (which is $6.03 at the time of this post).
You lucky thing. The summer’s over, or nearly over, and you’re already planning on heading back to school. Just like last year, you will begin this year fresh and full of energy and enthusiasm, only to be ground down by the man. Luckily, we’re here to help with advice on the best apps and gear to get you through the year and into next year’s summer vacation with the least effort possible.
So sit back, relax and take a look at the Cult of Mac back to school/college superguide.
For years, Growl was the good old, third-party standby when it came to OS X notifications, but with Mountan Lion, Apple’s ported Notification Center to OS X, giving everyone a built-in drawer for keeping up with all the little messages their apps send burbling up for attention. Unfortunately, while a lot of apps still use Growl for notifications, these don’t show up in Notification Center.
Growl will eventually be updated with Notification Center support, solving the problem, but in the meantime, here’s another great way to do the same thing: Mountain Growl. Not only will it push all your Growl notifications to Notification Center, but you keep full Growl support, allowing you to continue using remote notifications or Prowl, as well as a lot of granularity of control over the notifications you see.
If you’ve been having a hard time waiting for Growl to get proper Mountain Lion support, this is a good app to try.
By huge coincidence, I downloaded the brand new Withings app moments after its launch, almost by accident. The new app, which is iPhone-only (or pixel-doubled on the iPad) until a future update arrives), does a much nicer job than the old one of tying together the data from Withings’ various health devices, and remains completely free.
Forget old-timey fake film effects -- Meta is as modern as it gets.
Meta is yet another photo filter app for the iPhone, but if you have any interest in this kind of thing, you should just go and buy it right now (it’s just one lousy buck).
Meta gives you a bunch of live filters through which you can snap pictures, and lets you share and upload to the usual places. The difference here is that the filters are genuinely new, and that you’re going to love them.
Launchpad tries to bring an iOS-style app interace to OS X. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay. Introduced in OS X Lion, Launchpad arranges the apps you have installed on your Mac in a grid array, much like the apps are arranged on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Of course, your Mac has a much bigger screen than these iOS devices (hopefully), so there’s even more of a need to filter out the apps you don’t want so that you can find the apps you do want to find.
In iOS, as you get more and more apps installed on your device, you’re gonna end up swiping to the right of the home screen at some point and typing the name of an app into the Search field there. Prior to Mountain Lion, there was no way to do this in OS X. Now, however, there is, and I sincerely hope they bring this concept back to enrich iOS itself.
This is pretty much all you need to write and publish to the web.
I do all my work these days on an iPad. From organizing reviews through gathering story ideas to actually writing posts and features, and even photographing and editing gadgets for those reviews, it’s all — every last bit — done on Apple’s tablet. I just spent two weeks away from home using the iPad’s 3G connection to work, only opening up my MacBook to sync my FitBit.
And they still say the iPad is just for consumption.
One of the biggest problems with the iPad has been writing blog posts. You really did need a Mac to take care of the multiple browser windows and — most of all — the image uploading. Now, though, while there isn’t quite a wealth of options, there are certainly several credible methods to do this all from the iPad. So make a coffee, sit back and enjoy this how-to:
The quickest way to see which Mac apps are ready for the Retina display.
If you’re the proud owner of a Retina MacBook Pro and you’re on the lookout for great apps that showcase its high-resolution display, don’t spend your spare time wading through the Mac App Store searching the hard way. Check out RetinaMacApps.com — a simple site that brings together all the Mac apps that are now Retina-ready.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new Twitter client called Slices, which claims to be the world’s first Twitter app that allows you to break your timeline into individual streams, follow live events, browse Twitter by category, and more. We also have a “magical” app called Cardiio that accurately monitors your heart rate simply by looking at your face; the best blogging app for iPad yet called Pages; and more.
Downcast, my favorite podcatching app, has added a rather handy new feature with its latest update. Now it can automatically check for new podcasts when you arrive in a certain location. This clever use of iOS’ geofencing tech was first used by Instagram to grab unread articles, but now works for podcasts, too.
My experience of recording music is limited to bouncing down bedroom guitar recordings to free up tracks on a cassette-based Tascam Portastudio, way back in the 1980s. So anything that records 24 tracks simultaneously onto a tiny iPad seems astounding to me. That is costs just $40 makes it even crazier. We’re talking about the new musicians’ iFriend, Auria.
Like we said, Passbook in iOS 6 is going to steal a few tricks from flight apps like Mobiata’s $5 FlightTrack (and $10 FlightTrack Pro), making the apps seem somewhat less valuable.
Whether or not Passbook replaces these types of apps remains to be seen; in any case, Mobiata isn’t going down without a fight, and has just released an all-new, free version of their FlightTrack app for both iOS — and Android.
Teasing mobile gamers with trailers and screenshots is nothing new for the mobile gaming giant Gameloft, however, what is new, is a trailer for their first game built off of the Unreal Engine. Gamers first caught a glimpse of the new game (that we now know is entitled Wild Blood) thanks to a sole screenshot depicting a gigantic bloody blade towering over a corpse filled battlefield. Gameloft has now followed that up with a short teaser video and a Facebook page for gamers to unravel clues about the game’s story.
Allan Odgaard’s TextMate has been a beloved text editor since 2004 and one of Cult of Mac’s favorite apps for about just as long, but since 2009, development on the app has slowed to a crawl: three years ago, Odgaard said TextMate 2 was about 90% complete, but a public alpha didn’t hit the web until December 2011, and as of writing, a final version still hasn’t been released.
However, in a surprise (and very awesome move), its source code has: TextMate 2 is going open source.
There are lots of apps out there that let you manage your data usage, but My Data Manager amazes. It works on both the iPhone and iPad, and has a feature set that’d make it a great deal even at $5 — let alone at the $0 it actually costs.
Yesterday, if I had suffered a grievous accident involving some kind of heavy farm machinery, and my fingers were mangled to leave only a single, stubby nubbin where previously I had sported ten beautifully slender digits, I’d still have been able to count the entirety of half-decent iPad blogging apps on one hand.
Today, though, I’d have to start counting on my toes, as Black Pixel software, the company behind Apple award-winning app Versions, had launched Posts, and you might like to call it the Reeder of blog publishing.
Brett Terpstra's scripts will write your journal for you.
With an update last week, iOS and Mac diary app Day One went from a tool for angst-mongering teens to full-fledged journal, adding support for photos (the original was pretty much text-only) and locations, and the ability to automatically pull in weather info.
But for serial hacker and tweaker Brett Terpstra, maker of the amazing Markdown preview app Marked, among many, many other things, this still wasn’t enough. So Brett wrote a tool called Slogger, which pulls in posts from your existing social networks and adds them to your Day One journal, rendering any text in Markdown, naturally.
Apple’s wireless accessories are great at conserving battery life… so great, in fact, that when they suddenly run out of juice, it can be a shock to the system, since you never knew they were hard up for electricity to begin with.
On a Mac, it’s fairly complicated to see battery life on your connected devices through System Preferences, but wouldn’t it be great if you could check them out in your menu bar, just like your Mac’s remaining battery life? Thanks to Battery Status, you can.