Giles Turnbull - page 10

Hey China! Apple loves you. To prove it, there are a whole bunch of China-specific features built into OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

One of the big headline features in Apple’s new Mountain Lion OS is Gatekeeper, designed to keep malware and other nasties away from your computer. So is this another step towards App Store-only software on Macs?

The short answer is yes, it is. But it doesn’t have to be. Gatekeeper gives you the choice: do you want to stick to App Store-only apps, or be able to install anything from anywhere?

Realmac‘s Clear todo app is the talk of the Macosphere today, earning glowing reviews pretty much everywhere (including here at Cult of Mac). And rightly so: it’s totally different to everything that’s gone before, and cute and sexy and gorgeous too.

But there’s more to it than colorful todo lists. Oh yes. It makes a pretty neat colorful poetry writing thingummyjig too.

Makego is a cool new app that makes your kids’ real world creations come to life.

The two-dollar app comes with three virtual vehicles – a racing car, an ice cream truck, and a river boat. All you have to do is make one (out of Lego, paper, or anything else you can think of), plop your device inside, and run the app.

Hands up if you forget birthdays all the damn time. Hey, whoa, slow down. I can’t see all of you at the back. Waaaaay too many hands. Wait. No, OK, hands down. Let’s do this differently.

We’ll forget about the counting bit, and just assume that pretty much everyone forgets birthdays and ends up hating themselves just a tiny bit more each time. Especially when a few months later, the person whose birthday you forgot remembers yours, and sends a perfectly judged gift too. Dammit.

DoodleDesk ($5.99) turns your Mac’s desktop into a digital whiteboard you can write on and attach sticky notes to.

ImageXY is an image resizer for OS X, available for 10 dollars on the App Store.

Oh look: talks from smart ideas conference TED have arrived on iTunes U.

There are six themed courses covering things like Visual Arts, Climate Change, and Creative Problem Solving. Each one comprises a number of different TED talks that you can watch for free.

There are many grid cameras in the App Store, but Grid Lens by Bucket Labs caught my eye because it adds a little bit of fun, something you don’t see often in camera apps.

The latest update to Alfred adds a selection of smart new features, one of which is a new way of grabbing selected text from any Mac app and pushing it straight into one of your other Alfred actions – such as a web search, for example.

This is the timer-tastic Repeat Timer Pro, a two-dollar multitimer for iOS.

Meet Niko, star of a cute-character platformer for iOS that involves the usual amount of bouncing, running, hopping and collecting things.

If you do a lot of typing on your iPad, the ZAGGFolio keyboard case should be on your list of things to try. It’s a nice wireless keyboard and solid iPad case combined in one reasonably-priced unit. Let’s take a closer look.

Apple’s new iBooks Author application for Mac is an impressive piece of work, even more so when you consider that it costs nothing. Although easy to use compared to many other page layout apps, it’s still quite a lengthy and complicated process to produce a book with it. It’s also squarely aimed at the education market. It was designed for the creation of textbooks.

So what if you want to make a shorter, simpler ebook? What if your kids want to make one? iBooks Author, for all its benefits, would probably be overkill. Enter, stage right, Book Creator for iOS. This five-dollar app lets you create simple ebooks on your iPad with very little fuss.

Today’s Best Thing Ever has to be Stuck on Earth, an app for travellers who haven’t left home yet.

Pentax just announced a new interchangeable lens digital camera, the K-01. Like a lot of mirrorless cameras these days, the idea is to create something smaller than a DSLR, without sacrificing image quality or the flexibility to swap lenses when you need to.

If you’re the kind of geeky person who experienced a little thrill of joy when the hacking scene in Tron:Legacy included realistic use of a genuine command line interface, you (or perhaps your kids) might also enjoy playing with Hacker Typer.

Back in 1981, Bill Gates co-wrote a PC game called Donkey, commonly known (as some apps were back in those days) by its filename, DONKEY.BAS. If you’re old enough to remember those days and old enough to yearn for them, you might enjoy playing Donkey all over again on your iPhone.

There’s been a lot of ohhing and ahhing about Cobook in the last few days, but spend just a few minutes playing with it and you’re likely to be ohhing and ahhing too. I know I am.

Meet one-eyed Evi, a one-dollar alternative to Siri which works on older (non-4S) iPhones.

She’s had a bit of a rough introduction to life, thanks to a much-hyped launch followed by 24 hours or so of struggling to keep up with demand.

O2, once Apple’s exclusive cell phone company reseller of iPhones in the UK, has been caught exposing user phone numbers in the headers sent to websites its customers visit while using its 3G network.

New from Tap Tap Tap is Serenity, a relaxation app for iPhone or iPad.

Relaxation app? What’s one of those? It’s an app for relaxing by; in this case, a digital jukebox of all things peaceful, calm, tranquil, and imperturbable. It plays sounds and moving images to lull you to sleep, or at least to a less troubled state. It’s an anti-alarm clock. Without the clock.

Meanwhile, over in the Linuxverse, the next release of Ubuntu looks set to try something pretty radical – ditching the top-of-screen Menu bar in favour of a type-what-you-need HUD panel. Rather like Spotlight for menu items, mixed with some Alfred and some Siri.

Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.

It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.

There’s been a lot of fuss overnight about what exactly Apple is claiming ownership of in the Terms and Conditions associated with its new iBooks Author application for Mac. The fuss is understandable, because the wording of the license agreement gets a little bit muddy.