Eastgate Systems has just announced Tinderbox 5, a major update to its venerable note-taking application.
“Note-taking” hardly covers it, though. Tinderbox is uniquely flexible and adaptable, in a league of its own when compared with all the other OS X notebooks.
UK supermarket giant Tesco has just announced tariffs for iPhone, which will go on sale from the company next Monday (December 14th).
The headline they’ll be using in adverts is that this iPhone is available for as little as £20 per month. Whether you go for a contract or decide to pay-as-you-go, this gets you £60 worth of calls and SMS messages (assuming PAYG customers top up at least £20 per month, which qualifies them for extras – and obviously encourages them to switch to a contract). Also consider that the free credit is applied once a month and only lasts for one month, then automatically expires.
Meet the iVictrola, the weirdest and possibly the coolest iPhone dock you’re likely to see this Christmastime.
Or should I say not likely to see, as it appears that the limited stock at Design Within Reach has already sold out. Oh well.
As Christmas approaches, you might be thinking of buying a pocket sized video recorder for your loved one. But which one should you get? A Flip? An iPod Nano?
How about none of the above? When I asked my Twitter followers the same question, they were unanimous: “Get a Kodak Zi8“, they said.
So what’s so good about it?
The festive season is so close you can almost taste it. The kids are pestering to put up Christmas decorations; so why not give them something fun to do this year?
SymmetriSketch is a great free vector drawing application (also available for Windows and Linux users) that lets you play around with symmetry across a 2D plane.
Quite new on the App Store is Launchball, a physics game that might look familiar to you if you’ve ever played the London Science Museum‘s online version.
The Museum has ported the web-based Flash game to the iPhone, with some help from Bright AI, and the result is lots of fun.
Today’s Best Thing Ever is Lo-mob, a gorgeous new photo effects app for iPhone.
The emphasis is on decidedly retro-looking shots. There are 28 (count ’em) different effects on offer, ranging from 35mm format film to a variety of instant camera prints.
Lo-mob will take photos from your Camera Roll or let you snap fresh ones. It then takes a few seconds to generate preview thumbnails of all the different effects, and shows you a list. Pick from the list to see a full-size version (you’ll need to wait a few more seconds to see it).
Lo-mob isn’t the fastest app around, and could do with some tweaks to make it easier and faster to use. (Such as: flick left and right to move from one effect to the next; a “save all” feature to save full-size versions of all the effects; and a favorites feature so you can remove the effects you don’t plan on using.)
But those are minor niggles. I really love this app and haven’t been able to stop playing with it. There are a lot of effects apps on the App Store, but none of them have yet managed to offer anything very different (CameraBag remains the best of the bunch). Lo-mob does offer something different, and deserves a place alongside CameraBag on your iPhone.
To give you an idea of what it can do, I’ve taken screenshots of all the different effects.
Here’s the original photo:
These are the “Classic Vintage” effects:
George Dearing‘s three-year-old son got his hands on dad’s iPhone and – oops – found himself staring at the App Store. While it was still logged in to dad’s iTunes account.
Ommwriter is different. It’s a text editor, perhaps better described as a “writing environment” because text editor makes it sound like something you could write code in. And I can’t see many people using it for that.
Ommwriter plays ambient music and soundscapes while you work. The splash screen encourages you to stick headphones on while you’re using it; the idea is to put you in that special writing space you need to be in to get your work done.
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite it hitting the shops a couple of months ago.
Russell Davies does lots of things that are interesting, including, um, Interesting and Newspaper Club and a bunch of other stuff, but the other week he did a talk at the Playful event in London, culminating in this fabulous mock-up of an augmented reality game using an iPhone.
The idea is genius: you start playing the game with one tap, and after that you don’t have to look at the device at all. You walk around with your earphones in, and it alerts you with sounds when there’s stuff to interact with. This video explains it better:
SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.
Good news! Two doses of it, in fact.
First: QuoteFix for Mac fixes the problem of top-quoting in Mail! Now you can use Mail and reply to email messages underneath the text of the message you’re replying to, as God intended things to be.
Second: I got this tip from Tim Gaden’s Hawkwings blog, which has had a fresh burst of energy over the last month or so, and is now buzzing with tips about using Mail (and other cool things to make your Mac using life easier). If Hawkwings isn’t in your RSS reader or on your list-of-sites-to-keep-an-eye-on, I urge you to add it there.
There’s an old internet joke that you’ve probably heard a thousand times:
A: Because people don’t like reading backwards
Q: Why is top-quoting a bad idea?
Email is a very personal thing. Most people don’t care how their replies are displayed in their email software, but for those of us who’ve been around long enough to remember when “email client” was the term used for “email software”, some things – like whether you quote at the top or the bottom – matter a lot.
Most modern email services top-quote. By which I mean when you hit reply, the original message is underneath and your reply is on top. Makes no logical sense, but people have got used to things being that way. It’s just How Email Works for millions.
Gmail made things a little better, by retaining top-quoting but keeping messages in context as threaded conversations. Combined with its “Show quoted text” feature, it makes top-quoting bearable.
Thing is, Mail top-quotes too, and those same people – you know the ones I mean – hate it for that. Now, at last, there’s something for them. QuoteFix sorts it all out and makes it work the way it should. There. That’s better isn’t it?
This presentation is the work of Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, and in it he makes a lot of very interesting points.
Screens of all shapes and sizes can end up cluttered with windows and palettes all over the place. On tiny little MacBook screens you get everything overlapping everything else; on ginormous 27″ iMac screens, everything’s so far apart you have to crane your neck to take it all in.
Step forward Zooom/2, a utility designed to make managing all those windows a little bit easier.
Popular Science has published its Best of What’s New 2009 list, with Apple a winner in the Computing category.
So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.
Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.
“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”
November 11th is internationally recognised as a day of Remembrance; in the US it’s Veterans Day, and here in the UK is known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.
When I saw this snap in the Cult of Mac Flickr pool, I wanted to find out more. Who is the owner of the little family of Macs old and new, and how did they end up on this desk?
Bare Bones released a Yojimbo update this afternoon, which adds a handful of nice new bits and pieces.
Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe bet), they’ll throw in a copy of Mariner Write as well.
Sweet deal? I reckon. All of these are great apps. What’s the catch?
This is a great idea, and bound to go down very well with your kids.
Balloons is simple: you launch a virtual balloon into the air from your phone. You add a photo and a text message to the label that dangles below the balloon, and send it off.
Anyone with the Balloons app can catch that balloon and add their own message. If you shell out for the paid version, you can track the balloons you’ve launched and see what other people have added to them.
To celebrate and set things off, we’ve created a Cult of Mac balloon for you to catch. It’s purple with green stripes, and has a photo of the Cult home page at the top. If you catch it, let us know what you think about Balloons.
This is a particularly friendly application. I can see school classes all over the world launching balloons to make contacts in other schools. And Shiny development have wisely kept the choice of balloons fairly limited to start with; I wouldn’t be surprised to see custom balloons appearing soon, as an in-app purchase.
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
TapeDeck is one of those apps that I don’t use very often; but when I need it, I’m glad it’s there.
