Rob LeFebvre - page 87

Artizens is raising money on Kickstarter right now, and to judge by the funding activity, it looks like the Kickstarter community is as excited about the potential of this upcoming game as I am, as the project has already gathered over half of its $30,000 goal with 23 days to go.

The game looks like a side-scrolling platform gam, with shades of Shadow of the Colossus, with giant creatures to overcome by co-operative teams of players, each of whom will be able to create their own characters and gear. The gear creation here is unique, with materials for the armor and weapons gathered from the defeated monsters, and the look and feel of the objects created by…drawing them.

While we’ve been looking at various new ways to interact with sheet music on the iPad at the 2013 NAMM show this week, here’s an app that takes sheet music and brings an entire orchestra along for the ride.

You can take this free iPad app out for a spin and it will turn the page for you as well as let you play along with Piano, Cello, Violin, Viola, Guitar, Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Recorder, Clarinet, Trumpet, Saxophone, Horn, or Voice. Calling this “augmented sheet music,” the app brings the same service from the Weezic website to your iPad in a native app.

Weather apps are fairly thick on the ground in the App Store, and iOS even comes with its own Weather app, and has done so since day one. If that’s good enough for you, then keep on enjoying it; there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, if you’re a big fan of apps like Clear, where the interface is simple, minimalist, and just gets out of the way, you’ll love WeatherCube for iPad. It’s a universal app, and chances are you’ll dig it’s clean, functional lines enough to use it often on your iPad 3, 4, or Mini.

Check it out.

We showed you a handful of fantastic, instant keyboard shortcuts to shut down, reboot, or sleep your Mac, but an even safer way is to bring up the Power button dialog box that happens when you hit the, well, Power button on your Mac. That’s the one in the upper right corner of the keyboard on most modern Macs, while some older Macs have it as a separate button integrated into the body of the Mac itself.

Either way, hit that Power button and then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to activate the different options in the dialog.

Apple has just released its annual Supplier Responsibility Report, a document that sheds light on the Cupertino-based tech company’s findings about its suppliers’ business practices in 2012. It takes into account excessive work hours, underage labor, and environmental impacts of the manufacturing process, including things like conflict-free minerals.

In the report, the company notes that it is the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association (FLA), and had the group audit Apple’s biggest supplier, Foxconn, finding that the Chinese manufacturing company is on track to meet the recommendations of the FLA this year.

Not all in the report is positive, however.

Sometimes, it takes a bit for an email to come through on your iPhone via the Mail app. That might be due to the way your iPhone checks mail servers. Here’s a quick way to find out what type of email access your iPhone is doing, and then what kind of fix might be in order.

We all should back our stuff up frequently and often. With the advent of iCloud and Time Machine, keeping your Mac and the important things on it backed up has gotten easier, but there’s always a good reason to back stuff up when you can.

Reminders often have a lot of important data about us, our schedules, and things we really need to do. Keeping these backed up separately, in addition to the system wide backups we all should do, is probably a good idea as well. Here’s how to back them up, and to restore them when you need to get them back.

Those of us over a certain age (ahem) remember the days, after the LP and the 8-track, but before the CD, when cassette tapes were all the rage. I belonged to a couple of different tape clubs back in the day, and still have quite a few of these bad boys in a case under my house, somewhere.

The Cave is a brand new adventure game from legendary developer, Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion) and award-winning Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts, Brütal Legend). Choose a team of three from an available seven differently-equipped and skilled adventurers to descend into the dark, mysterious, and promisingly twisted depths of The Cave, now out on Steam for Mac and PC for a gloriously affordable $14.99.

Ever try to create a picture-in-picture video? It’s kind of a pain, what with the two video streams, the two audio streams, and the like. You can use iMovie on your Mac or iOS device, of course, but it requires some heavy lifting in the video editing department.

Enter Eye Report, a sweet little video app that lets you take video with your rear iPhone or iPad camera and then film yourself with the front camera, putting it all together into one smooth picture in picture video, without any editing needed.

A while back, we wrote up a tip on reindexing the hard drive on your Mac using Terminal. Recently, a Cult of Mac reader emailed us to let us know it wasn’t quite working on his end.

Rob,
I read your post on using terminal to reindex the hard drive on a mac. Any idea why when the command is executed the terminal displays “Indexing disabled.”?

Thanks,
Mike S

Here’s what he had to do to get it working again.

Mobile ecosystems analyst firm, VisionMobile, today released its fourth Developer Economics report. The 2013 report, sponsored by AT&T, Mozilla, and Nokia, looked at developer opinions, charting out which platforms have the highest mindshare among developers as well as which platforms make their devs the most money.

Regularly $0.99, Screen-Recorder is available now for free on the Mac App Store, letting you capture video of your Mac’s screen for no money at all.

Version 3 came out in January of last year, while the original app was released in May of 2011. The latest update brings some minor bug fixes to the table, along with the price drop to free.

Apple’s iPhone continues to beat out Android as the best selling smartphone platform in the US, showing 51.2% of the market for a twelve month period which ended December 23 of 2012. According to the data released by market-analyst Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android has remained stable in market share since the same period of time in the previous year, at 44.8%, while Windows phone brings up third place at 2.6 percent of smartphone sales sold in that time period.

Shared calendars keep things running smoothly around my home, letting various folks in my life what’s going on with me and my family so that everyone is up to date on the latest information about our whereabouts. It used to be that I had to hop onto the calendar on my computer or via a web browser to share them with specific people, but no longer.

Here’s how to share an iCloud calendar with others, right from the comfort of your iOS device.

One of the trickier things about creating a playlist for any party is making sure you have the right music for the people you’ve invited. Sometimes, though, you might want to give this nerve wracking process a miss, and let the guests at your house choose the music.

Here’s how to do just that, using nothing more than your Mac and the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver.

Lucky Frame today announced the immediate availability of Wave Trip for iPhone and iPad. This is a music-focused, arcade-style game for iPhone and iPad in which players control a geometric astronaut, helping her travel through worlds of gorgeous artwork and dangerous enemies. She’s got to save her friends, and she needs you to help.

I still have a Message Pad 110 at my house. It’s the greenish-grey of the standard retail version of the Apple proto-PDA, and it still rocks. However, were I to have a spare $1350 to purchase this clear, limited production prototype Newton that was originally given out to some folks at Apple’s 1994 developer conference, I would jump at the chance. Seriously, they only made about 400 of these bad boys.

The auction on eBay ends on January 26, so if you’re hankering for this sweet bit of Apple history, now might be the time to jump in.

Today, Imangi Studios announced that Temple Run 2–sequel to runaway hit mobile game, Temple Run–recorded an outrageous 20 million downloads in its first week on the iTunes App Store. The game shot up to the number one free app in only eight hours, and is now the number 2 top grossing app on the App Store charts. Pretty amazing for a free to download game, right?

We’ve shown you how to get to an email draft on your iPhone before by tapping and holding on the Send button to bring up your most recent draft. At the time, though, that only brought up a single email, typically the last draft you had written.

These days, however, there’s a new thing happening, with a list of more than one draft appearing (if you have more than one). Here’s how to make that happen.

The latest version of Safari for OS X has an iOS-like behavior if you’re using an Apple Trackpad, Magic Mouse, or Magic Trackpad to browse the web. If you double tap on the trackpad or mouse, the view within the Safari window will zoom in, just like a double tap on your iPhone or iPad version of Safari zooms in to help you read the web page on the smaller screen.

If this annoys you, here’s how to disable it.

Looks good, right? Today, Eugen Systems announced the Mac version of popular real-time strategy (RTS) game, Wargame European Escalation, with the trailer above.

In even better news, if you own the PC version of the game and own a Mac, you can download the new Mac version for free. How’s that for Mac-friendly?

Tired of welcoming our Google overlords? Have a free Gmail account, and just lose your contact sync via Exchange? Well, why not put your contacts over on iCloud for easy synchronization across all your Apple products? Makes sense to me.

Here’s how to do it.

I’ve been a Mac user since the Performa 638 CD I purchased in 1994, and I had no idea these shortcuts existed. While I wouldn’t recommend them to every Mac user, if you’re comfortable with the potential issues of immediately shutting down your Mac, you’ll want to learn these post-haste.

According to Google engineer, Frank Petterson, on his own Google+ profile page, the search giant’s social network iOS apps just got a little more international, as the app just became available in 48 new countries and territories.