Rob LeFebvre - page 88

iOS contact aggregation app, Brewster, updated today and added a feature that might make you wonder why it wasn’t there in the first place: the contacts on your iPhone itself. While Brewster already pulled contact info from your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn profile, Gmail account, and Foursquare contacts, this is the first time its connected directly to the native iPhone contacts you carry around with you every day.

I’m guessing you take a lot of photos with your iPhone or iPad, right? I know I do. After taking them all, or saving them from web pages or text messages, they tend to add up. But how do you know how much space they’re taking up, specifically, on your iOS device?

Here’s the short and simple way to figure that out, plus an extra tip to boot.

Here’s a fun little extra for those of you that use the Reminders app on OS X.

Sometimes you just like to feel a bit more accomplished, a bit more successful at your day. One of the cool things about keeping a list of things you need to remember to do is actually checking them off as you do so. Heck, on a particularly frustrating day, you might want to know how many things you’ve actually completed, right?

Using the Reminders app, this is fairly simple to do.

As we reported a couple of days ago, the iOS game from the National Rifle Association (NRA), NRA: Practice Range, has been coming under fire from various media outlets and political organizations for being a shooting game that is rated for anyone four years of age and up.

Apparently, Apple heard some of the outcry, and revised the rating in the App Store, which now says the shooting game is “Rated 12+ for the following: Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence.”

So, here’s an interesting new idea. Take a little bit of Instagram, with it’s ability to snap quick pictures and apply fun visual filters, and combine that with a push-to-record feature that lets you add audio commentary, music, whatever you like, to the picture itself. Digisocial aims to be the next big social thing, obviously, with a well-designed, free app that’s easy and fun to use.

The problem is, of course, a matter of scale.

CNN Money polled 67 separate analysts, 39 pros and 28 indies, on their thoughts about Apple’s upcoming financial report, due on January 23rd. The consensus among them all is that Apple is most likely going to report the best quarter it has ever had. Ever.

I frequently “shop” for books using my iPhone, snapping pictures of books I want to read as I move through the store, and keeping them in my Camera Roll. This is a quick an easy way to keep track of stuff I want to check out later, but there’s really no organization to it. What would be cool is an app that I can keep track of the books, movies, and music I want to read, watch, and listen to that keeps track of stuff while organizing it.

Enter Done Not Done, a sweet little wishlist app that does just that, and more, adding recommendations from Facebook and Twitter friends to boot.

The OS X Finder keeps getting cooler and cooler, with animated window minimizing and live media previews. When you’re in icon view, the Finder updates all the image and video thumbnail previews in real time, making stuff easier to identify. This does take a toll on performance, however, which is important if you’re rocking an older Mac, like many of us.

One solution to help the Finder feel snappier is to turn off the image and video preview feature, and here’s how to do just that.

You may not know Spicy Horse, but you’re sure to have heard of American McGee, its CEO, from his long association with critically acclaimed video games stretching back to Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and (of course) American McGee’s Alice. He subsequently built a game studio in Shanghai called Spicy Horse, which has just been given the greenlight on Steam for its new game, Akaneiro: Demon Hunters.

The folks behind this already-fully funded Kickstarter project for the ultra-thin AL13 iPhone 5 bumper case want you to help them reach and then spend their stretch goal money. They’re looking for you to hop onto their project page and leave a comment with your vote for your favorite color from the choices of Purple, Fuschia, Blue, White, and Gunmetal. The winning color will go into production if the project reaches $75,000, while the top two favorite colors will go into production if the project reaches a stretch goal of $100,000.

Since the original $20,000 goal has already been more than doubled, these are pretty realistic goals, especially since there’s still 28 days to go in the project timeline.

One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.

However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.

Here’s how.

If you use Bluetooth as much as I do, you’ll know that there are times when it works flawlessly and times when it does not. Many of the issues around sound quality of a Bluetooth speaker or the performance of a Bluetooth keyboard have to do with the strength of the signal going between your Mac and the Bluetooth gadget.

Here’s a simple way to check the signal strength of each device you’re using.

So, it’s Sunday evening, and you realize you have an email from your boss from Friday that you really need to follow up on. You launch your Mail app on your iPhone and go to the Inbox, only to find that the message you saw on Friday afternoon is no longer in the Inbox because you archived it all on your computer before you want home.

Instead of freaking out, you can find that archived email, right there on your iPhone, and move it back to the Inbox where it belongs, so you can follow up on it before your boss comes in on Monday.

Over the years, my contacts list has become kind of crufty. Which is no surprise, really, as I’ve essentially used the same list since I owned a Palm Tungsten C back in 2003. I keep backing it up, moving it to newer, better devices and systems, but over time, there are serious issues in that database.

Like duplicated contacts, for example, each with a different subset of addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. It’s a pain to go through them, one by one, and copy over information from each duplicate contact to a final, master contact for each person in my list. The OS X Contacts app, though, has a couple of helpful features to make this a bit easier.

We told you about FTL back when it came out back in September of 2012, added it to Day 9 of our Awesome 2012 Advent Calendar, and put it in uur Editor’s Picks For 2012’s Best iOS And Mac Games article. Can you tell we love this game?

That it’s a full 50% off again on Steam is icing on the cake, so we wanted to let you know where to spend that spare $4.99 you might be sitting on.

If you’re as much a Twitter and Facebook junkie as we are, you’ll have both websites up continuously, or you’ll run a third party app that you’ll need to switch to obsessively to keep track of your Twitter stream and Facebook status updates from all your FB friends, right?

If you want even more instantaneous access to your social feeds, however, you might want to try Tap Social, a Mac app that puts a stock-ticker style window at the bottom of your screen and streams the latest from your Twitter and Facebook accounts in an always on, real-time perspective on your social networks.

Here’s a neat idea that will make you wonder why you hadn’t thought of this already. I know that’s what I thought as soon as I saw it.

Even though we have stuff like Find my iPhone and Find my Mac available, what about that honest person who finds your iPad or iPhone on a bus or in a restaurant and wants to return it to you? If you haven’t engraved your contact information onto the iPad (and who does that, really?), and you’ve set a passcode to get past the lock screen, that kind individual will be out of luck in trying to find you to get your iPad or iPhone back to you.

What’s a helpful iOS device owner to do, then, to help a good samaritan return a lost item?

When I worked in an office, I shared several playlists from my Mac’s iTunes Library, including a Holiday music playlist and a couple of artist-specific playlists. I didn’t want everyone to be able to log in and share my tunes, however, as a few of the playlists contained songs with Explicit lyrics. I would have loved to have been able to protect these playlists from certain co-workers while allowing others to listen to the tunes I had set up.

Here’s how to do just that.

Move over, Mojang! The Blockheads, inspired by such open-world exploration games as Mojang’s certified hit, Minecraft, is the best implementation of the genre yet, out Minecrafting even the official Minecraft game released for iOS some time ago.

You start the game as either a single or 2 player experience. The two player game promises online multiplayer with voice chat via Game Center, while the single player is what I’ve spent my afternoon messing with on both my iPhone and iPad mini. It’s seriously sticky, with all the kinds of things that made me sink hundreds of hours into the Mac version of Minecraft a couple of years ago. There’s crafting and mining, day and night cycles, sleep, a huge open world to explore, and more.

I ran across an issue yesterday in trying to support a Macbook Pro at work. We wanted to reformat the Macbook to a clean system install, but we had no system disk for the computer (it was lost in the move to our new offices), and we didn’t know the admin password for the Mac. I thought we were out of luck, until I ran across a solution in Apple’s discussion forums that showed me how to reset the admin password without a system disk. I figured I’d share this process here, hoping it helps some of you out.

Apple announced on its developer site today that it will be locking down the images submitted along with apps once they are approved for the App Store, locking scammers out of one more tactic used to scam naive app buyers into purchasing apps that may look just like popular games (like Pokemon or Minecraft). The tactic involved submitting apps with basic images for approval to Apple, then switching them out to infringing images that look just like the popular apps.

Apple’s new policy should help cut down on scammer app sellers from deploying the bait and switch maneuver in the future, helping keep app buyers a bit safer than before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlZfco05AZM

There’s a new game in town, coming to the Mac early this year, according to Haemimont Games, developer of Tropico. Omerta: City of Gangsters has you work your way up the criminal scene of 1920’s Atlantic City. Start running small jobs, recruit new gang members, and take down other mobsters, grabbing their territory as you take them out. Eventually, you’ll set up your own city-wide crime syndicate and rule Atlantic City’s seedy underground.

Lucky Frame, developer behind indie hit iOS games Bad Hotel and Pugs Luv Beats, announced today that its anticipated follow-up game, Wave Trip, will release on January 22, 2012. So, in just two short weeks, you’ll be able to control a mysterious geometric astronaut, helping her travel through worlds of beauty as well as danger, saving her friends via music and beat-based gameplay.

I haven’t really paid much attention to Mountain Lion’s new Power Nap feature, until I learned that it will keep my Mac safer, as Power Nap allows Find My Mac to run while it’s sleeping. A stolen Macbook can be run on battery power, so if you want to make it so that it’s more likely to continue running Power Nap, even when the Mac is unplugged, you have to enable it.

Power Nap also lets Time Machine back up hourly while asleep and runs Software Updates once per day. It will also keep all the iCloud stuff we all use synced up and ready to go, including email, calendars, notes, contacts, and reminders.

In case you don’t have this little gem running on your Mac, here’s how to check if it is, and enable it if it isn’t.

Apple has released yet another seed for OS X 10.8.3 today, Build 12D50, to developers in the Mac Dev Center. This is the fourth seed since the original 10.8.3 beta back in November.