Feel like smashing some glass? How about throwing pinballs to do it?
Well, you can do both in this week’s pick: Smash Hit by Mediocre Games, a free-to-play glass-shattering endless run through some of the prettiest yet most fragile obstacle courses we’ve ever seen.
Here’s a quick video of our play through, along with our thoughts on the game.
So you get a seriously racy iMessage from someone incredibly inappropriate, and you want to send it along to one of your close confidants. What do you do?
It used to be that you’d tap the Edit button in Messages to be able to forward them.
In iOS 7, there is no Edit button. Nor can you swipe to the left, as that just brings up the timestamps.
Have you ever wanted to create a quick video of yourself doing something interesting on your Mac? Need to show someone in another department how you manage your files, or the tagging system you employ using Mavericks?
You can create a screencast with many third-party tools, some of them quite robust and expensive, but there’s a new one that’s both free and easy to use.
It’s called Recordit, and the developers sent along a version for us to try out here at Cult of Mac Tips HQ, and we’re pretty impressed. Recordit allows anyone to create a quick recording (up to five minutes) of any portion of their screen and share it via a URL.
Mac game publisher Aspyr Media announced Thursday the release of the latest update of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the iOS port of the classic role-playing game set in the Star Wars universe.
The update is free and includes much-asked for support for Made-For-iPhone (MFi) controllers like the Steel Series Stratus, Moga Ace Power Controller, or the Logitech PowerShell. In addition, the team has added iCloud saves and new supported languages including English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
One of the lesser known functions of the Keychain on OS X is its ability to add Secure Notes, notes that require you to enter your Keychain login password to view them.
There are a ton of third-party apps out there that allow you to password protect your notes, but Keychain is built right in to Mac OS X, and has been for a while; it’s a pretty nifty thing to have when you need it.
Better yet? The current version of Keychain will let you put images and video into your notes, making it a snap to secure your media files to your password.
Mines of Mars is a fantastic mining and crafting game with a mysterious story, developed by WickeyWare and published by Crescent Moon Games. It’s along the lines of Super Motherload or SteamWorld Dig, in that you must manage your fuel and cargo space while you dig deep into the crust of the Martian planet to find ores, gems, and other secrets.
You’ll come up to the surface to fuel up, exchange ores for ingots, play some fun mini-games based on arcade classics like Berzerk.
It’s a game full of mystery and atmosphere, mostly due to the creepy storyline and amazingly atmospheric soundtrack by composer Evan Gipson. Check out the trailer below to see what it looks like.
I’ve had my eye on Celsius Game Studios since I first heard about their in-development space simulator game, Drifter, back in 2012. Since then, developer Colin Walsh has continued to pour on the awesomesauce to create a game that–while still in active beta–impresses on every level.
Drifter takes place in a procedurally-generated galaxy that contains 100,000 light years worth of star systems to explore (that’s a lot of star systems–tens of thousands). The soundtrack is by indie-darling composer Danny Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, The Blinding of Isaac) and it will thrill you in all the right places. Take a look at the trailer below to get a sense of how it looks and sounds.
Sometimes, you might have a certain someone who gets a little, shall we say, overzealous in trying to message you. Since your iPhone and Mac can both receive iMessages, you might get interrupted by the flurry of messages from this certain contact.
While you can block iMessage senders on your iPhone or iPad, it hasn’t been possible in Mac OS X Mavericks until the latest update to 10.9.2, available through the Software Update panel of the Mac App Store.
Now, though, you can block and unblock any contact in your Contacts app with aplomb, right from your Mac.
This post first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine’s “No Fail iPhone Photography” Issue.
Let’s just first say that you all are awesome. We had over 300 entries in last week’s Cult of Mac Magazine photo contest, in which we asked for photos taken with an iPhone that exemplified the topic word, “silver.”
Y’all filled up our Twitter and Instagram feed in spades. Well done!
We don’t have space to print all gajillion photos here in Cult of Mac Magazine, though, so we narrowed things down to our favorite ten submitted photos, with the top three there at the end of our list.
Here’s the top seven, in no particular order:
The men and women who ensure the safety of Apple employees will stand against the Cupertino company to demand better pay. With some of them forced to rely on public assistance and for housing and food due to the low quality jobs provided by companies like Security Industry Specialists (SIS), they want Apple to secure a better contract for them.
As another in a long line of rallies and protests, it may be difficult to get the attention of the Cupertino-based company’s shareholders, but the security officers and their community supporters hope to make enough noise to point out that while they work for the most profitable tech company in the world, the security officers are usually hired on part-time as on-call employees.
The folks behind the brilliant and sticky Tiny Death Star and Pocket Trains are back at it again, this time with another free-to-play title, Disco Zoo. This time, however, NimbleBit has the added talent of rock-star developer Owen Goss, a Canadian dude with a pedigree in gaming that reaches back to pre-iOS days (gasp).
Disco Zoo has the same Nimblebit retro bitizen look and feel, and the fun mechanics from Pocket Trains and Tiny Tower are out in force. You’ll take over running of the titular Zoo, adding animals and building habitats while earning in-game soft currency on a timed basis, as well as randomly on the zoo map screen.
The main part of the game involves rescuing animals from a variety of habitats–each requires the purchase of more and more expensive aircraft–and adding them to your zoo. The zoo animals will sleep after a time, which encourages you to keep checking back into the app to wake them up.
Quick Look is a fantastic bit of tech, letting you view any file up close and personal with a quick tap on the Spacebar. It works in the Finder, in Open and Save dialogs, and across a ton of other apps like iPhoto.
It’s basically the best new thing ever.
There are times, though, that I forget I’m previewing a file with Quick Look and I head up to the text in a document to copy and paste it elsewhere, only to be rebuffed. You just can’t do this.
Unless, of course, you enable this feature using Terminal.
You know how it is–you never seem to have enough battery power for your iPhone or iPad when you really need it. When I travel, I tend to use my iPhone 5 for everything possible, looking up nearby restaurants and attractions, finding directions to the nearest coffee place, and keeping in touch with friends and co-workers both near and far.
All that usage takes its toll on a mobile device, but you want to stay mobile. There are plenty of extrenal battery solutions out there, from the popular Mophie iPhone cases to less-attached solutions like the ones you can find at Brookstone for about $100.
The Naztech power bank is a surprisingly small external power pack that lets you charge up to five devices at once, including iPhones, iPads, and any other USB-charging devices. It’s a decent size for something with such flexibility, and it has a 10400mAh Lithium-ion battery in it that seemed to hold and deliver plenty of power to my iPad 3, iPad mini, and iPhone 5 while I took a trip to Las Vegas this past weekend.
You know how it is; as a brimming young tech-savvy hipster, you need to carry a lot of gear with you as you cycle from the coffee house to the park bench, writing your magnum opus and staying in touch with your iPad, Macbook Air, and iPhone.
The thing is, that gear usually comes with a ton of support gear, with all sorts of plugs, wires, battery packs, extra mice, point-and-shoot camera and the like. You’ll be awash with the detritus of your modern monadic life in no time without some sort of organizational system that you can strap to your back while on the go.
Kastel thinks it has the answer with a Kickstarter project to fund a new line of functional, good looking bags for your gear, soon to be available in three savvy material choices, including leather and blue and grey linen.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.
Many apps these days are location aware and are able to refresh themselves in the background. It’s how apps like Facebook can refresh that little red icon badge on your home screen without you having to launch the app.
All that background activity, though, can take its toll on your battery life. Luckily, Apple has included a way to turn this off for specific apps, or altogether.
When you’re running a Macbook Air or Pro with an SSD in it, you’re probably concerned about space on your drive. You can easily sort files in the Finder by size to see what you might want to delete or at least put on an external drive, but sometimes it’s nicer to visualize your data in a different way.
That’s where apps like GrandPerspective come in. This one is simple to use, works well, and is entirely free. It helps you see your data as an image, and then you can decide what to do with your files from there.
Let’s say you’re at a conference, and you meet someone you’d like to share your contact information with. You could both download one of many apps in the App Store for this express purpose, you can hand them a business card, or you can just use the simplest solution: send them an email or text message with your contact info.
It’s super easy to do, and takes way less time than downloading an app. It’s also more efficient than a business card, since you know no one actually keeps those, right?
Are you tired of running from zombies, but looking for another way to distract yourself from boring yet obviously beneficial exercise?
The Walk–developed jointly by the UK’s National Health Service and Department of Health–has you walking the length of the UK while listening to an original story in which you’ll need to figure out why a bomb exploded in the tube station, evade hostile agents and the police, and discover how a mysterious package you’re given might save the world.
Creating your own Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to keep your productivity high. To make a shortcut for a menu item that doesn’t already have one, you simply drop into System Preferences > Keyboard, hit the Shortcuts button at the top, and then add your shortcuts (more below). You have to add the full menu path for the shortcut to work, though, and there’s the rub.
Some apps have menu items that are named the same thing. For example, in Pages, there are two submenus named Use Default: one in the Baseline submenu, and one in the Ligature submenu. How can you tell your Mac which menu you want to activate with your new shortcut?
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine – No Fail iPhone Photography, the best tips, tricks, and practical advice on using that amazing camera you carry around in your pocket.
We’re celebrating Apple’s astonishingly great iPhone camera with a whole issue dedicated to all things iPhoneography. Cult of Mac’s own photography guru, Charlie Sorrel, weighs in with some choice technical advice on photography that applies across all cameras, iPhone or not, while Buster Heine gives you the lowdown on all the greatest peripherals you’ll want to gear up with before the big shoot.
Olloclip’s Michele Baker drops some wisdom on how to best capture “silver” with your iPhone, in honor of the winners of this week’s Photography contest, and our very own Nicole Martinelli interviews one of the best street iPhonographers around.
We’ll take some time out to showcase the top ten entries in our #CoMSilver photo contest, with the top three winners and some fantastic runner ups.
Of course, we’ll start off with the usual Best Apps, Books, Movies and Music from the past week and then end with our famous “Ask A Genius” column, so be sure to subscribe and download the issue.
We’ve been excited about Tengami ever since we saw it at a gaming conference a couple of years back. The long development time has paid off for developer Nyamyam, as Tengami is by far one of the best games of its type we’ve seen on any platform.
It came out for iOS just this week, and we’ve lost ourselves (and our sense of time) playing through the lushly illustrated pop-up book. The story is told without dialogue, tasking us with moving from one beautiful environment to the next, solving puzzles along the way to keep the journey going.
Here’s a video of some of our play through of the game.
I remember when the Apple Quicktake was a revolutionary new product. It was an odd, squarish thing that you held up to your eyes like a strange pair of binoculars and it took photos at a then-astonishing 640 by 480 pixels. It was bulky, though, and quickly replaced.
No one took pictures with their phones.
As soon as June of 2007 rolled around, the iPhone debuted with a 2 megapixel camera. It wasn’t as good as the point and shoot I still favored, so it stayed in my pocket (at first). More and more, though, the iPhone was with me when I wanted to take a picture, and my Minolta was not.
Each successive iPhone model increased not only the megapixel count, but the iPhone camera itself, from the lenses to the internal sensors, received update after update, until–honestly, who carries around a point-and-shoot anymore?
This week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine celebrates that fact with an entire volume dedicated to tips and tricks befitting the one camera we all have in our pockets at all times, giving you practical, technical tricks on all things iPhoneography. Cult of Mac’s own photography guru, Charlie Sorrel, weighs in with some choice technical advice on photography that applies across all cameras, iPhone or not, while Olloclip’s Michele Baker and Camera+’s Lisa Bettany drops some wisdom on how she got her best iPhone pictures.
Of course, we’ll have the usual Genius column and Best Apps and Media from the past week to share with you to, so head on in and enjoy the issue.
If you’ve used iTunes for a while now, you know how to set the Equalizer to a variety of pre-set and custom settings to make your music sound the way you want it, right? You simply head up to the Window menu, and choose Equalizer, or hit Option-Command-Two. The Equalizer window will show up, and you can click on the pop up menu at the top there to pick a setting you’re happy with.
But what if you want to set your Equalizer differently for different tracks? It’s pretty easy to do, but you’ll probably have to hop into the View options in the list view to make this work.
Here at Cult of Mac, we take quite a few screenshots. Our current favorite for taking and annotating them is Share Bucket, and of course you can always use Preview or Grab to take your screenshots, but what about the basics? Not everyone needs fancy screenshot capabilities. Aren’t the built-in tools in OS X good enough for most of us?
They sure are, and while we’ve covered a couple of them before, we haven’t just put them all in one tip to rule them all. Or something like that.