Rob LeFebvre - page 85

The Mac Game Store knows your love for Mac games. So much so, that it’s putting a ton of them up for sale this weekend, all in the name of Valentine’s Day. While we’re not above taking a crack or two at the commercialism of V-Day, we’re not about to look this gift (horse) in the mouth, either.

It looks like there are over 150 games on sale in the Mac Game Store app, the portal for MGS that’s also available on the Mac Game Store website. Most of the games seem to be going for 30 to 50 percent off, which isn’t a bad discount, really.

Some of the standout titles include Amnesia: The Dark Descent for half off at $10, the same price and discount as Assassin’s Creed 2. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood can be had for $15, while the deluxe edition with all the DLC trimmings will run you a tidy $20, half off the regular price. Batman Arkham Asylum is similarly $15, and Call of Duty: Black Ops is now going for a wallet-friendly $25. Driver: San Francisco is a healthy 67% off at ten bucks, and Duke Nukem Forever has the honor of being the full 75% off, coming in at $5.

All in all, with so many Mac games to choose from, you’re bound to find something you like, or something you’re willing to toss a few bucks at. The sale lasts through Sunday, so head on over to the Mac Game Store and scroll through them all.

11Bit Studios has released a couple of fantastic iOS games, Anomaly Warzone Earth and the follow up Anomaly Korea. Now, however, they’re setting their sights on the desktop gaming scene with a new secret game that they won’t even tell you about. Oh, and they’ll let you pre-order it, without even knowing what it is or what it’s about, for $7.49, which is half off the expected $14.99 they’ll release the game for on Steam sometime between March and June.

Intrigued? The developers hope you are, as they’ll only make this offer until February 28th, when they actually announce the game. If you pick it up now for $7.49, you’ll get a Steam code for the game when it comes out sometime in Q2 of this year, as well as a code for the multiplayer beta sometime near the end of March.

Guys, gals, ladies, gentlemen! In order to keep that special someone in your life, you’ve got to work on your relationship. I know! It’s Scary! However, there are many iPhone apps out there to point you in the right direction. So, while cooking the perfect meal, dressing well, and bathing regularly are important, if you’re a selfish jerk on the inside, it won’t matter.

With that in mind, check out the following three apps that will help you connect and communicate to become a better person and partner in your own right. Still, bathe regularly, ok?

Tired of right-clicking (control-click or two-finger click on trackpads) on a file and seeing a ton of duplicates in the Open With… contextual menu pop up? Not only is it aesthetically annoying, it takes up valuable real estate on smaller screens, and makes you move your mouse cursor more than you should, which could lead to repetitive-stress injuries. Or, you know, a tired finger or three.

Anyway, if you want to get rid of those duplicates, try the following.

The Hunger Games Adventures, first on Facebook and now on iOS as well, has been rebuilt from the ground up to better work on the iPhone and the iPad, adding in iPhone and Retina support, new content from the 2nd novel and film, Catching Fire, and over 100 new quests to discover with Katniss, Peeta, and the other heroes of Panem.

Looking for more Borderlands 2 goodness to play through? Looks like you’ll get your wish on the Mac, as the Borderlands 2 DLC, Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt, is now ready for your downloading pleasure for a mere $9.99. You’ll need Borderlands 2 to play, of course, but you’ve already got that, right?

Anyone knows that the key to anyone’s heart is their stomach, gender stereotypes be damned. If you can make that special someone the perfect meal, you’re way closer to being a better lover than someone who has to continually order out. Making a meal for another human being is a delight for both the cook and the recipient, feeding both mind and soul, if done well. What better way to show you care than with a meal you make yourself?

The problem is, how? First off is confidence. As Julia Child said, “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” Equally important for us cooking newbs, however, is a good cooking app or three.

Check these out for your Valentine’s Day dinner, or any time you want to make your significant other feel just a bit more significant.

The excellent Mac app 1Password is a cross-platform password management app which makes it easy to have unique strong passwords for every site you visit, as well as keeping all your private bits of data secure and available to only you. While you’d think a single app that holds all your sensitive data would be a point of weakness, AgileBits has proven its app to be super secure, even against hackers with malicious intent.

When you use the app to create or store passwords, though, you might want to be sure that you don’t reuse a password you’ve already used on a different site: it’s more secure if you don’t. You also want to make sure that all of your passwords are strong ones. How can you know that, though, with a long list of them? It’s simple, really: just sort by password strength.

Ever since we reviewed this sweet menu bar internet radio app for the Mac, we’ve used it to tune into thousands upon thousands of stations just ripe for the listening. It was one of our 15 top apps of 2010, and one of the essential apps in the Freelance Mac App Bundle that came out back in June of 2011.

Now Radium is back with a new icon and a new version, ready to take on a whole new set of fans with its easy to use, small footprint, and just plain full-of-audio awesomeness that we’ve all come to expect from the Mac app. Plus? It’s half off right now in the App Store.

If you’ve got a hankering for a Missile-Command-styled arcade action game on your iPhone or iPad without engaging any emulation or lame vector graphics, Ballpit Monster’s Frog Orbs might be the game for you. Plus, if you’re in the mood for some holiday-themed fun, you can grab a special Valentine’s heart hat for your frog, along with a staff shaped like, you guessed it, a heart.

Fashion! It’s something we all either dread or avoid, right? Ok, maybe not all of us. But what of those among you who have no clue how to dress up for a fancy date or dinner or night out? How will you ever find out?

iPhone apps, of course! Whether you’re gearing up for a fancy night on the town for Valentine’s Day or beginning a more thorough process of bringing your wardrobe up to date, here are three apps that will help you increase your sartorial intelligence just a bit more, making you even more desirable to those you want to impress

CultofMac reader, Ashwin, asks,
“I wanted to know if there is way to use an USB stick as a password for my Mac. One of my friends has it for his Windows (machine). So, is there a way to do it for a Mac?”

The concept here is fairly simple: you install a program on your Mac, and then use it to take any USB stick you have and turn it into a secure password device for your Mac.

Germany-based game studio, Fishlabs, today announced the development of Galaxy On Fire – Alliances, a continuation of the Galaxy On Fire brand, to be released in the third quarter of this year, 2013. The new game is meant as a spin-off from the premium Galaxy on Fire, Galaxy On Fire 2 and their expansion packs, and will use a free-to-play model that includes massively multiplayer capabilities like alliances, player-vs-player combat, and alliances.

Greenlight Capital is suing Apple in an effort to get Apple to send back more of its $137 billion cash reserves in the form of shareholder dividends. Apple took this fairly seriously, and issued a press release explaining where they were at on the issue, including the fact that the Cupertino-based company has already given shareholders $10 billion of a planned $45 billion in cash.

Today, however, a judge in the US Court for the Southern District of New York approved a request by both parties in the suit to move the timetable for a response, with Apple planning to file by the end of the day this coming Wednesday, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Look, folks, it’s Valentine’s day coming up this week, and you know what that means. Either you’re a full-on V-Day fan and you’re out to get the best gift and/or date for your significant other, or you’re one of those haters who sees this as nothing more than a crass attempt to pry even more money out of your pocket in the service of an outdated social ideal.

Either way, though, you can better yourself. Here are several apps that will make you a better person to attract that special someone through your attention to personal grooming.

If you were used to inverting the colors on your Mac with a Control-Command-Option-8, you might have noticed that this has changed in OS X Mountain Lion. The older keyboard shortcut doesn’t work any more, and has been replaced with the less simple Command-Option-F5 shortcut to bring up an Accessibility Options dialog box. You have to then manually click the checkbox next to Invert Display Colors.

Here’s how to get the old shortcut back, for a quick invert.

Terminal app can be daunting at first, but it’s really the best way to hack into your Mac’s configurations and preferences to customize things to work for you rather than against you. With the right Terminal commands, you can tweak the Finder, mess with the user interface, build a more private and secure Mac, and even enable features that aren’t officially supported on older Macs.

Here are a few of the better ones.

Speech to text dictation is getting better by leaps and bounds, and Apple’s Siri on iOS is one of the best implementations of the technology. While you may have known that you could punctuate your dictation by just speaking it aloud (comma) you may not know that there are some more commands that you can use to further refine your dictation performance, allowing you to write stuff just by speaking it, and no one will know the difference.

Here are some of the better ones.

So far this week, we’ve spent time hacking our Macs via the Terminal, the best darn behind-the-scenes app you can find in Mac OS X. We’ve talked about tweaking the Finder, the user interface, security and privacy, and the Dashboard.

Today, let’s look at a few of the newer features of the OS X world, and how to make them work on older, unsupported Macs using some Terminal magic.

According to a source that posted on a Chinese microblogging site, the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 have been spotted at Apple suppliers in China. Both models could release in 2013, said the source, named Old Yao on the site.

The source also notes that the iPhone 5S looks a lot like the iPhone 5, while the five-inch iPhone 6 is even lighter and thinner than that.

It’s good to take all rumors with a big grain of salt or two, of course, but this one is both exciting and plausible, even without any photos.

Source: Sina Tech

I’ve used iPad notepad app, Penultimate, since I’ve owned an iPad, and I bought an iPad 1 on day, well, one. I love the idea of keeping several Moleskine-type notebooks on my iPad to carry around with me.

That’s when I have my iPad. Sometimes, I don’t. Or I have my iPad mini. Or my iPhone. Or just my Mac (I’m spoiled, I know). That’s when I use Evernote, so I can take notes on any of these devices and have them accessible on any of the others.

When I found out that Penultimate is now both free and syncs with Evernote, I knew I had to share with you how to get it all set up so you could have the joy that is synced Evernote Penultimate notes!

We’ve passed along information on using Terminal, the most useful app on your Mac, to tweak the Finder, change up some User Interface features you may not want or like, and to keep your Mac more secure and your data more private.

Today, let’s look at the Dashboard, with its widgets and things, and see what we can do to hack it a bit.

Fandango is pretty cool. You can buy tickets right on your iPhone with the Fandango iOS app, send them to Passbook, and then just waltz right into the theater without stopping at the box office. Of course, you’ll still need to stop at the concessions stand, unless you’re smuggling in a bunch of wrapped candy in your coat pockets. Just sayin’.

Using Fandango is fairly easy, but Siri can make it easier still in iOS 6.1. Here’s how.

Well, so far this week, we’ve shown you how to tweak the Finder and change up some user interface types of things, all using the power of Mac OS X’s Terminal app, a window into the back end of your Mac. Today, we’re going to spend a little time with the Terminal commands to make your Mac just a bit more secure and private.

Apple may lose its right to use the iPhone name in Brazil, according to a report on Reuters today. The trademark has been given to Gradiente Eletronica SA, a Brazilian electronics maker who registered the name in 1998, well before Apple had an iPhone to even trademark. The decision is set to be made public on the 13th of this month.

Apple can still challenge the ruling in Brazilian courts once the announcement is made.