Giles Turnbull - page 19

Everybody’s favorite jumping-as-high-as-possible iOS game, Doodle Jump, has just been updated with something cool: two player mode.

You can now challenge other Doodle Jumpers via Game Center, using your iDevice’s wifi connection. In two-player mode there’s a finish line, first player to reach it is the winner.

To spice things up, power-ups are shared between the two players. He who jumps higher, faster, gets to use them first.

“What a shame there’s no Doodle Jump for iPad,” you might whisper sadly. Whisper not: makers Lima Sky say Doodle Jump for iPad is on its way to us right now.

It’s true: sometimes Macs do crash. More often than not, though, crashes will be limited to a single application, rather than the entire system.

You’ll know an app has crashed because it simply stops doing anything. Clicking on controls has no effect, scrolling gets you nowhere; the app simply doesn’t respond to your usual commands. So what do you do next?

First, don’t panic. OS X is designed to keep crashes under control. Even if an application has crashed, in most cases you’ll still be able to carry on just fine with work you’re doing in other applications. All you have to worry about is the one that’s crashed, and any unsaved work you had inside it.

This is ace. This is precisely what the iPad 2 is all about.

For those of you who don’t know them, Dan and Dan are a mysteriously identical comedy duo from the UK. If you like this style of weird Brit humor, there’s lots more of it on their YouTube channel.

MarsEdit is the best blogging tool for OS X, bar none. If you do blogging for money or just for the love of it, MarsEdit is a dream come true for you. It will save you lots of hassle and hours of time.

OK, so imagine you’re in one of those Android marketing meetings. Big Boss needs ideas for the new advertising campaign.

“Apple’s just so far ahead,” says Big Boss. “We need something radical to pull in customers.”

Radical, huh? you say.

“Yeah. We need color, action. Bad language. We need everything you never see in an Apple advert. And none of that plinky-plonky background music.”

You think for a minute.

OK boss, you say. How about something like… this?

Joey Chun had an idea, and the idea was this: a cute iPhone stand with a sturdy fold-out arm, so you can use it as a viewing stand, or to keep your device still while recording video and taking photos.

Got an iPad? Got an Apple TV? Wish you could flick web videos from one to the other? Well now you can.

This is gorgeous. Everyday is a $2 app that reminds you, once a day, to take a photo of yourself. Then it combines all the photos you’ve taken into a timelapse movie of your changing features.

Over at Etsy, Jositajosi is selling a selection of lovely hand-sewn cases for MacBook Air and iPad, using authentic Scottish tartans.

This is great. Japanese games giant Capcom has slashed the price of Street Fighter IV for iOS to just one dollar (59p in the UK) until March 22nd. Sega is doing something similar for Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2.

Every penny from those sales will be donated to relief funds for the victims of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake. Street Fighter has already knocked Tiny Wings off the top of the UK Top 25 list as a result.

Capcom says: “We can never thank you enough for all the support each one of you are giving to us. People from all over the world, please unite with us to help people in the disaster-struck area.”

You heard ’em, kids. Grab your bargains now, and send a dollar to help people who need it.

Now you might think that the world already has enough plain text editors, but those of us who spend all day writing will always disagree.

Writer is a new text editor on the Mac App Store. It’s similar in some respects to applications you’ve seen before, yet it’s also distinctly and subtly different.

Rarely consumed with a desperate rush to issue any new music of their own, electropop pioneers Kraftwerk have come up with a better idea: get the fans to do the work for them.

So the Kraftwerk app lets you inside the Kling Klang Studio, in a manner of speaking, giving you access to some cheerfully bleep-tastic musical buttons in exchange for nine of your fine American dollars.

Given that the App Store is awash with sequencers, loopers, samplers and other electronic music apps, many of which offer quite a lot more in terms of functionality, this one might be left to the fans only. But for those who value the looking-cool as much as the making-sounds, perhaps it’ll be nine bucks well spent.

OK, this is a little WTF, and I haven’t yet been able to verify it myself (because reception’s pretty good where I live), but: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zante over the The Next Web says he’s discovered a trick to improve iPhone 4 reception: stick it in a glass.

Here’s an astonishing post from Kevin Rose, publishing an (anoymized) email from a friend of his who works for Apple in Japan.

In the System Preferences application, you’ll see an icon called “Language and Text”. If you open this, and select the Text tab, you’ll see a list titled “Symbol and Text Substitution”, which provides some useful text shortcuts. You can use these to auto-correct common typos as you make them, or to replace short text mnemonics with longer words or phrases.

If you’ve ever used and loved the “Archive” function in Gmail or MobileMe, then found yourself missing it while using Apple’s own Mail application, this simple free plugin is a dream come true.

It’s an Archive button for Mail, and you can guess what it does. Instead of having to mess around with filing messages into folders, a single click will throw them into the archive. It even comes with its own ready-made keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+S), to make archiving even faster and easier.

When you need to find something specific, use Mail’s own search, which is quite up to the task of hunting through enormous archives (I’ve used Mail in this way, as a backup for my Gmail account, for years now).

If you need Mail to be a little more flexible, try Mail Act-On, which we mentioned back in number 8 in this series.

(You’re reading the 33rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

Feast your eyes on this gorgeous combination of old and new, as photographed and (at least in part) brought bang up-to-date by Pedro Moura Pinheiro.

It’s an original Power Mac G4 Cube, circa 2000, but with a few modifications to its insides. The original 450MHz G4 processor and 256MB of RAM have been replaced with dual G4 chips and 1.5GB of RAM. Those changes were made by its original owner, but Pedro wanted to take things a step further when he bought the machine. It’s now zippy enough to run Photoshop CS4 without any trouble.

Pedro says: “The only thing I did was get an Intel 40GB SSD, place it in an external Firewire 400 enclosure, and install Leopard on it – basically, Firewire 400 is much faster than the internal IDE interface, so the speed benefit is greater than trying to install an IDE SSD inside the Cube.”

He knows what he’s talking about. Check out this stop-motion video of him dismantling, then re-assembling, a G4 iMac. Great stuff.

Applejack is a command-line application for rescuing your computer when disaster strikes, or threatens to strike.

Don’t let the “command-line” bit frighten you off. Applejack is probably the easiest-to-use command-line application I’ve ever seen. It was built for ordinary people to use, and won’t bamboozle you with geekspeak.

Patrick Robertson got in touch with Cult of Mac to tell us how keyboard launcher Quicksilver is getting on.

Yes, the very same Quicksilver that a few weeks ago I said had faded from the limelight. Not so.

According to Patrick, Quicksilver is alive and well and enjoying a new lease of life and a new website.

If you’ve been looking for a Stickies-like application with just a tiny bit more oomph, you might like to try SpiralBound.

Good news for RSS users: NetNewsWire Lite is now in the Mac App Store.

This free news reader remains one of the nicest around, and this new update looks particularly smart, with new toolbar icons and a complete re-write of all the code behind the scenes.

Note that “Lite” means “lite”. This is a deliberately lightweight, stripped-down cousin of the much meatier NetNewsWire application (which will be on the App Store at a later date). That means that some features some people insist on – like syncing with Google Reader – are not included.

But if, like me, you just want to keep an eye on some feeds and do it quickly, NNW is an excellent choice of news reader. Recommended.

When friends or family come to stay, they might want to borrow your computer for a while. That’s fine, but sometimes you want to keep your stuff private, and you want your personal settings to stay as they are.

That’s when it’s a good idea to make use of the built-in Guest Account, which you’ll find inside the Accounts pane of System Preferences, as long as you’re running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.

Mac fan Sam found this cool Apple Logo lamp on eBay, and it certainly looks smart on the minimalist desk in her System Attic lair.

The lamp costs £25 (UK pounds) from ss-design-shop on eBay, and it’s available in several different colors, although I think plain white looks best, don’t you?

This chunky silvery thing is an iKn2, a sturdy and secure case for iPad, built for those times when you might want to use one as a public kiosk device.

Here’s an iPhone photography app that’s rather different to all the others.

It’s called nofinder, and its name is a clue.