Giles Turnbull - page 7

Twitter feed of the week – possibly the year – has got to be Text-Only Instagram, which gently pokes fun at Instagram and the kind of photos you often see there.

“Latte with foam shaped like a heart,” it reports. And later, simply: “Feet.”

It’s satire, yes, but the problem is that it really works. Read those tweets and you instantly conjure up an image in your head that fits the description.

Don’t let the satire make you mad, Instagrammers! It’s just a bit of fun. And you can subvert it by making your Instagrams increasingly weirder. Someone might even start by, say, taking Instagrams of the the Text-Only Instagram Twitter feed. Oh wait, that’s started already.

Here’s Barack Obama taking control of a Sphero during a visit to Boulder, Colorado yesterday.

Google Drive was announced yesterday, and we’ve spent some time putting the OS X client software to the test. How does it stand up against the list of rivals (which seems to be growing by the day)?

This is Fragile Earth, an interactive photo gallery designed to teach you a little about ecology, conservation and the natural environment.

An email arrived at Cult of Mac headquarters the other day: “Can you please let me know if it possible to make a review of our game on cultfomac site?”

It was from Andrey Uchaev, one of the team at Russian developers Manera Software, letting us know about a free iOS game called Tochki Online. We don’t often do reviews of free, ad-supported games, even less often about ones like this that we’ve never heard of and that have no user reviews in the App Store. So why are we reviewing this one? Because it’s fun.

Camtasia, the video and screencast editor for OS X, has been updated with two useful new features: remove color, and adjust clip speed.

Popular OS X photo editing app Color Splash Studio has been updated with a handful of new features, but the most interesting one is the offer of a free 8×10 inch canvas print.

Minecraft fans, rejoice. Minecraft Pocket Edition just got updated to 0.3.0, and the new release finally adds the feature you’ve all been waiting for: crafting. Oh, and cows and chickens too.

Microsoft’s online file storage service SkyDrive, got a boost today with the announcement of some new features, including a native Mac client app for OS X Lion. While SkyDrive might lack some of Dropbox’s more advanced features on OS X, it does offer something only a giant like Microsoft can afford: 7 GB of free space for everyone, and up to 25 GB if you already have a Windows Live ID and sign up fast enough.

Another day, another cool thing you can do with Alfred. This time it’s updating a text file of your choice, without having to leave Alfred’s friendly text input window.

It’s a big day for Adobe, with the announcement of two new products: Creative Suite 6, and a new subscription service called Creative Cloud, which it describes as “a hub for making, sharing, and delivering creative work, and a radical new way of providing tools and services that will change the game for creatives worldwide.”

Awesome Calendar is a Google Calendar client for iOS, priced at three dollars on the iOS App Store (although a free Lite version is also available). Is it as awesome as its name implies? I wouldn’t say so.

Alfred users, the time to customize your digital assistant has finally come, with the launch of the web-based Alfred Theme Builder.

The guys at FontShop have released a beta plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS5 and 5.5, giving designers access to live font previews within their existing artwork.

You’re either going to love Opuss, or you’re going to really hate it. It’s a social network for word lovers. It’s Instagram for poetry. It’s Twitter for wannabe comedians. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully designed, but, still in its early days, isn’t as compelling as it could be.

This is Readdle‘s PDF Expert 4 for iPad, and a more full-featured PDF reading and editing app you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

If, like many people, you find Mondays just too much to cope with, you might want to avoid today’s app. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to make your Monday feel any better, and in some cases it will just fry your brain until next Monday. Which would be a shame, because you’d miss out on a whole weekend.

Be forewarned, then: The Fourth Dimension is an app which will mess with your head. Deliberately. Even though the aim is education and expansion of knowledge, it will still mess with your head. You will emerge from the experience only fractionally the wiser, and quite a lot more confused than you were at the beginning. Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal.

Ideas is an iOS app for managing, organising and sorting your ideas and thoughts. It stands out from the crowd thanks to a refreshingly different interface that does the job very well. It usually costs two bucks, but right now it’s on sale for one dollar.

Yesterday we highlighted the release of TextWrangler 4, the wonderful free text editor from Bare Bones Software. Here’s a closer look at the new stuff you’ll find in this update.

Picle, the photo/audio hybrid app launched a month ago at SxSW (and reviewed by us here), just got updated with some cool new features, the best of which is converting Picles to movies.

Rebus Show is an iOS Rebus puzzle game with visual style and flair.

Apple has changed its mind about DragonDrop, the file moving utility that we reviewed here a few weeks ago, and granted the app a place in the Mac App Store after initially saying it would never back down.

Remember the Microsoft Courier? It was a concept tablet device from Microsoft, with two side-by-side digital touchscreens that could fold together like a book. Well, Taposé is a new iPad app inspired by that concept. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to it.

Voice Dication, or Voice Dictation – Voice To SMS, Email, Facebook, Twitter And Other Apps to give it its full name, is a voice control app from Europe, designed to offer something vaguely Siri-like to those of us still stuck in the Dark Ages on our pre-4S iPhones.

Does it work? Well yes, actually it does. Better than expected.

Barefoot Books World Atlas ($8) is a kind of digital globe for children, giving them easy access to a simplified cartoon overview of the whole world.

From the orbital view (for want of a better word), you see the globe peppered with hundreds of colorful icons. Spin the globe and zoom in. The little icons grow and become tappable controls. Each one reveals a snippet of information in text and audio form (read aloud by the UK’s favorite TV geographer (yes, we have those), Nick Crane). There’s also a photo to look at for each fact, which is often much more informative than the icon was to start with.