Reviews - page 152

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

Birdhouse: Notepad for Twitter. Drafts can be rated, backed-up, published/’unpublished’. Fantastic UI. 5/5 $3.99 https://is.gd/2A56C

Shoot-Em-Up: Competent but easy, unexciting vertical shooter with annoying ship inertia. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wmWJ

Bloons Lite: 12-level dart-throw action puzzler. Iffy controls, poor graphics. Mildly compulsive but annoying. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wn5L

Spaceballs: Mediocre Puzz Loop clone. Dull graphics and slowdown take edge off fun core gameplay of original. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2wnoq

Minigore: Characterful Robotron-style shooter. Fun, but lacks depth & environment doesn’t affect protagonist. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2xWGi

PapiJump+: Cute vertical platformer with varied modes, but bettered in every way by Doodle Jump. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2C0uN

Mevo: Rhythm action game. OK graphics, but dullish gameplay and problematic response lag & slowdown. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Eeys

In amongst lots of iffy games, a fun vertical platformer (PapiJump+) and Chillingo’s bloody (and furry) dual-thumb shooter (Minigore), Birdhouse appealed this week. Birdhouse is a good example of how a really odd idea can be great. The app is a drafting app for Twitter. You might wonder why you need to draft 140-character tweets, but if you’re serious about the service, it often pays to think about things and mull them over. Birdhouse is like a sounding board for your thoughts, and the interface is absolutely fantastic. The ability to rate drafts and back them up to email is also welcome.

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Have you heard of Posterous yet? It’s a free hosted blogging service, where the aim is to making the act of posting content as simple as possible.

Which means that posting-by-email is the primary interface. Send Posterous anything in a mail message – text, pictures, video, other files – and it tries to do The Right Thing with whatever it is, to make it work as a post.

And on the whole it works very well. I’ve been playing around with it recently and I’m impressed. I like the simplicity and the immediacy of it.

That might explain why I was excited to see today’s announcement of a Posterous iPhone app.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

Pinball Fantasies: First-rate update of 4-table Amiga pinball. More intricate than Dreams, but a bit less fun. 4/5 $5.99 https://is.gd/2rNSH

KRYZER: Stylish, great-looking, great-sounding, but terminally dull basic shooter with Head On overtones. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2kYfK

Solitaire (Fat Head Apps): Bare-bones Solitaire. Iffy graphics & feature-light. Sol Free much better. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mIKj

Mixed: Anagram game with ongoing/timed modes. Has problems with mixes that have multiple solutions. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mITf

Tase-A-Hippie: One-joke app, which lacks a joke. Just prod to ‘tase’ a static cartoon beatnik. 1/5 Free https://is.gd/2mJ1U

Ask Happy Buddha: Rub fat guy’s tummy, ask ?, shake, get answer, wonder why didn’t get free Magic 8-Ball app. 1/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mJaz

Eurosport: Sports news app. Lots of content, mostly looks good, and works well, but a bit crashy. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/2oonU

Ten Pin Championship Bowling: Good-looking, fun bowling. Let down by ball sometimes having a mind of its own. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2qha6

Lots of junk and mediocre stuff this week—one-‘joke’ apps in particular are really wearing thin—but three apps stand out from the crowd. Eurosport offers a pretty good means to get at regularly updated European sports news and standings; Ten Pin Championship Bowling, while having a ball that sometimes seems to do its own thing, is a fun game and made by industry legend David Crane (Pitfall!, Little Computer People); and Pinball Fantasies proves that you don’t need gloss to create a great game. A loving and careful update of the 1992 Amiga classic, Pinball Fantasies eschews modern cartoon-like or 3D pinball for tables instead packed with features and missions. It might not look terribly modern, but it plays brilliantly, and its four tables offer plenty do to. If I’m honest, I prefer the simpler tables from prequel Pinball Dreams, but Fantasies is still a must-have iPod game for pinball aficionados, and I await Pinball Illusions with bated breath.

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Another screencast for your information and entertainment. If you want to know more, you can grab a copy of Radio Gaga from here.

And that station playing French pop from the 50s and 60s is Radio Oh-la-la, and if you couldn’t listen to it for free on the web, it’d almost be worth buying Radio Gaga for that alone. Maybe.

Much has been said about the super-handy Flip digital video cameras. These well-designed, inexpensive cams have gotten plenty of favorable reviews.

But the question is whether they’re worth having when the iPod gets video capability.

The Flip model we tested is ripe for iPod comparison: the 8G UltraHD records two hours of video and is slightly cheaper than an 8G iPod Touch, with a price tag of $199. It shoots 720p (1,280×720) high-definition video.

So, should you wait to see what’s behind door no. 2 or stick with the Flip HD?

Full review after the jump.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

QuadCamera: Top serial-shots ‘toy’ camera with vivid effects and various layouts. Would like higher output res. 5/5 $1.99 http://is.gd/2bzLs

iPolygon: Top-notch twist-based Breakout, played from within a polygonal shape. Three different modes. 5/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2afgK

Whoiser: Efficient client for accessing whois info. Spindly font, but good landscape view & mail ability. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2atfA

OldCamera: Mono camera effects. Great results, but prefs a bit awkward & you can’t use pics from Photos app. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2bAet

ToyCamera: Like OldCamera but with vintage/saturation colour effects. Randomiser a nice touch. 3/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2bAFr

Critter Crunch: Action puzzler, resembling a souped-up single-player Magical Drop. Fun & plenty of depth. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2fk82

DrawRace: Top-down racer. Draw racing lines before races start. Good concept/multiplayer; frustrates quickly. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2gGGE

Although some people still stamp their angry little feet while moaning that Apple handhelds aren’t ‘proper’ games consoles, developers don’t care. Most complaints seem to stem from the lack of tactile controls, but this week’s batch of games shows how a decent developer can get around such perceived shortcomings.

iPolygon is essentially Breakout, but played from inside polygonal shapes, and the twist-based mechanic is more fun and makes for more frantic gaming than the typical approach seen in most clones and evolutions of Atari’s ancient coin-op. Similarly, DrawRace takes Super Sprint and makes you draw your route before the race starts and then watch the outcome. I found it pretty frustrating in terms of difficulty, but there’s no getting away from the innovative nature of the app.

However, my favourite apps of the week instead deal with another iPhone shortcoming: the rubbish camera. I’m stuck with a 3G for now, and the camera isn’t great. But with some apps installed, it becomes an interesting ‘toy’ camera, along the lines of a Lomo. Of this week’s trio of apps, all from Takayuki Fukatsu, QuadCamera is my pick. The app takes four to eight shots in quick succession, applying user-defined effects while it does so, and although output resolution is lower than I’d like, there’s no denying how much fun the app is. (Long-time Cult of Mac readers will know that Giles agrees.)

I suspect that even when I get my mitts on a 3GS with its video capabilities, I’ll still be drawn to the low-tech charm of QuadCamera.

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Gizmodo’s Brian Lam talked to a high level source who claims to have seen and handled prototypes of Apple’s upcoming tablet.

* The tablet is real (we already knew this though — CoM’s sources have also confirmed it).

* 10-inch screen.

* Looks like a giant iPhone with the same Home button and a shiny black plastic back.

* Two editions: One with a webcam and one for education.

* Will sit between iPod/iPhone and a MacBook, costing $700 to $900.

* Will also function as a secondary screen and/or a touchpad for iMacs and MacBooks, like this 7-inch external USB monitor form MiMo.

* It’s been under development in one form or another for six years, but the first prototype was built at end of 2008. Time to market is 6-9 months, pegging the device’s release date this holiday season.

But just as Lam — who is a great reporter and a straight-shooter – was was about to get to the juicy bit — what OS the tablet will run — his iPhone dropped the call. Classic!

Writes Lam: “My call dropped on some windy road off Skyline Drive. Fucking AT&T.”

UPDATE: I contacted Lam, who said his source didn’t know the tablet’s OS. It’s the biggest secret surrounding the device, he says. Entrepreneur and ugly dog-lover Jason Calacanis just tweeted it runs a modified version of the iPhone OS, citing a developer. Maybe. Here at CoM, we like the idea it’ll run Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

There are two things that really piss me off about iPhone… Actually, that’s a huge lie. There are loads of things that piss me off about iPhone, but two things in particular make me want to HULK SMASH. The first is that you can’t back-up individual app data. Delete Peggle from your iPhone, reinstall and you have to start from scratch. Clearly, whoever decided on that gem went to ‘cheapskate DS games without battery back-up’ school.

The other issue is that it’s a major pain in the arse (or ass, if you’re American) to rearrange apps on your device’s home screens. The current ‘drag everything about’ system was clearly designed for hardware where it wasn’t possible to download fifty billion apps. And although Spotlight in OS X iPhone 3.0 enables you to find apps within the mess, you shouldn’t be using text-based searching to find apps on such a tactile, touch-based system.

What we’d like to see is this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfv0OJ1oMQ

If you can’t be bothered to watch that, it shows an iTunes interface for dragging and dropping apps about, the organisation of which would then sync with the device itself. Rumours suggest this functionality might appear in iTunes 9, but I remember similar things being promised before.

A press release I received this morning about ShareAppScreen made me hope that someone had somehow managed this, outside of Cupertino. I was hoping for magic beans: someone to have figured out how to rearrange iPhone screens using a widget. What I got was baked beans—a widget that’s awkward to use and that doesn’t realise that different iPhones actually have different apps pre-installed. And when you’re done, it can share your screens with your friends, but not with your device, sadly.

Overall, it’s better than using something like Photoshop for testing app arrangements, but other than that, it’s a case of ‘roll on iTunes 9’.

Because we’re all geeks these days and need bags for our laptops, the market for fashionable computer bags has mercifully grown. Gone are the days when the only laptop bag you could buy was black and rectangular.

A particularly stylish entry onto the fashion laptote market is Ibint, a company that sells a range of good-looking laptop bags called Loopbag. The Loopbags have distinctive zippers that loop around the front and back of the bags — hence the name.

We’ve been testing a pair of Loopbags in New York for the last couple of weeks, and they’ve held up exceptionally well, especially because this summer has been exceptionally wet.

Hit the jump for the rest of the review.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

CrunchFu: Effective and surprisingly fun fitness aid. Kind of like Nike+ for crunches. 4/5 $2.99 https://tr.im/vUFR

Doodle Jump: Infectious (if somewhat irritating) and simple tile-based ‘jump survival’ game. Updated often. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/20Dko

Flyloop: Sweet and surprisingly frantic high-score game. Draw lines & loops to ‘snare’/combine butterflies. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/22g9j

CameraBag: Trendy camera effects (Lomo, Holga, 1970s, 1960s, etc.) and 1200px per edge output. Good quality. 4/5 $1.99 https://tr.im/vCb5

Electrogravitron: Excellent multitouch/accelerometer game where you shepherd blue dots into defined zones. 4/5 $0.99 https://tr.im/vLsv

Lots of decent apps this week, including the infuriatingly addictive Doodle Jump, the hippyesque Flyloop (catch those butterflies, man), Electrogravitron—only second to Eliss in multitouch gaming terms—and CameraBag, which remains one of my favorite iPhone image-manipulation apps.

App of the week is CrunchFu, though, for providing a means for cheapskate iPhone owners to get fit and have some fun at the same time. It takes the same basic principle as Nike+, turning exercise into an online videogame. League tables and online battles ensure you stay engrossed rather than giving up. And if you’re no fan of crunches, GymFu offers similar apps for squats, pull-ups and push-ups.

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Ready to head-butt your Mac from the onslaught of everyday annoyances?

Use it for something better: emWave is a handy stress reducer just released in a Mac version that charts your heart rate and trains you to relax.

It’s the brainchild of Doc Childre, who founded a company called HeartMath in 1991 to create medi-gadgets for people seeking relief from stress and looking for greater mental clarity.

What is it?
Billed as a “Stress Relief System,” it promises big but comes in a small package.  You get an ear sensor for your heart rate that plugs into a USB key and a software program that monitors your heart rhythms and breathing, plus a CD training guide.  Initially unimpressed, after taking emWave through its paces for 10 days, I’m convinced nirvana may be something other than a band.

Details and full review after the jump.

(Blurry pics taken by Pete himself)

What it is: Nike+iPod-iPod. Basically, an inexpensive watch that doubles as a run tracker with the help of a transmitter in your shoe. Not an Apple thing, per se, although they did design the chip that goes in your shoe.

Why it’s cool: The Nike+ system originally developed for the iPod nano is a pretty remarkable little invention that allows you to keep track of your running statistics and inspire yourself to greater heights.. Unfortunately, it’s only recently been available across Apple’s mobile devices. If you own anything but a nano, a second-gen iPod touch or an iPhone 3GS, you can’t use Nike+ with your iPod. And, bizarrely, the Nike+iPod set-up actually behaves in obnoxious ways if you’re an urban runner. For example, if you get caught at a long stop light and pause your run clock, the iPod stops its music, too, making the wait that much more interminable. The NikePlus Sportband acknowledges the value of run tracking and music without making them interdependent. You can pause your workout and keep listening. And it obviously works with older iPods and iPhones, or even your shuffle.

And the new model, out as of a few weeks ago (available in gray/neon yellow or white/hot pink), is brilliant and fixes some significant flaws with the previous generation. The original black and orange Sportband had poor sealing, which led to a lot of people ending up with unreadable watches as moisture left smears on the inside. Nike recalled the product and now offers one-for-one swaps if you help onto your original Sportband. Besides fixing the moisture problem, the new display goes for a pleasing black numbers on white background instead of the former’s extremely dim white letters on black. It’s very stylish, and the functionality is better than ever. Additionally, because the face clips off and syncs vis USB (see below)

The watch sets itself and can even charge its (already long-lasting) battery, which means it won’t die the way normal watches do. It’s fuss-free, and the nicest $59 watch you’ll ever find, whether or not you’re a runner.

Where to get it: Finer local running specialty shops or the Nike Store. If you’re making a swap, bring it into the original place of purchase, with or without a receipt. At any NikeTown location, they’ll even give you cash, including tax, if they don’t have enough in stock.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

TonePad: Fantastic grid-based musical toy, somewhat based on a simplified Tenori-On. Includes save/edit options. 5/5 Free https://is.gd/1OKub

Radial 50 Lite: Three-level circular Breakout. Great graphics and sound, but awkward, frustrating controls. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/1NPLb

Xpandaballs: Expanding-ball placement game. Fun & addictive, but annoying ‘automated movement’ aim mechanism. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1NPQf

Death Ball: Simplistic avoid-the-bombs game, saved by online scores but marred by jerky visuals and awful audio. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/1QrUI

Railroad Madness: Flight Control with trains. Doesn’t really work, due to limited movements & awkward switches. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1Qsy7

XE Currency: Straightforward, clear and highly usable exchange-rates app. Works offline with recent data. 5/5 Free https://is.gd/1U9Xo

This week proved the old development truth: if someone comes up with a great idea, someone else will copy it—often not terribly well. This is definitely the case with Railroad Madness, which takes Flight Control and tries to apply the ‘direct them home’ mechanic to trains. Thing is, trains aren’t quite as free moving, and so where Firemint’s game is exciting and flexible in how you can move your planes, Railroad Madness is merely frustrating, clunky and maddening with its trains.

Xpandaballs also appears to have a slight case of copycatitis, being very similar to Gravulous. That said, the newcomer looks and mostly plays better than its older rival—both games task you with shooting expanding balls into space, using subsequent collisions to remove them from the board. Xpandaballs would have scored higher if it wasn’t for the aiming mechanism automatically moving back and forth—direct aiming would be a lot more fun.

App of the week this time round isn’t a game, though—it’s a fantastic musical toy. With TonePad, you tap lights on a grid on and off, and a loop of music is played back. It’s simple, but surprisingly engaging, and the ability to flip the grid and save compositions ensures it rises above ‘throwaway’ and becomes welded to your device’s home screen.

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It’s Friday and it’s time for our new weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

Parachute Panic: Fun rescue game, akin to swipe-based G&W Parachute – drawn with a biro. Infectious music. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1F76A

Grunts: Simplified Cannon Fodder. Retains good humour & graphic design, but controls poor & tactics lacking. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1F7jF

Air Sharing Pro: Turns device into wireless disk. Good UI. Feature-rich. Good view support. Dire email feature. 4/5 $9.99 https://is.gd/1GffO

iHandy Carpenter: Set of virtual tools. Great UI/calibration and good level tools, but naff, awkward ruler. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/1Hxzs

Poppi: Akin to Electroplankton mixed with pool. Nice idea/sound/graphics, but very harsh difficulty spikes. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1IMlf

Frogger: Barely adequate update of an arcade classic, lacking the charm, music & nice graphics of the original. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/1KqHl

Not the best of weeks for retro games. A buck for iPhone Frogger is a buck more than it’s worth (is it really too much to ask, Atari, for the original, superior graphics and the old music?), and Grunts looked like it’d be Cannon Fodder for iPhone, but ended up making me want to take a machine gun to my Apple device, due to shoddy controls.

Things were better on the app front, notably the genuinely useful Air Sharing Pro, which turns your iPhone into a wireless drive, although using a third-party server for the email function is a dreadful idea.

App of the week, though, has to be Parachute Panic. A little like Nintendo’s Parachute Game & Watch crossed with Flight Control, the aim is to get parachutists into waiting boats, without getting them killed. The original release of the game was awful, due to some stupidly unfair gameplay components, but this release is a million times better. The title tune is great as well, and I’m happy to admit I nipped into the game’s package to get that track into iTunes. Put it as a download on your website, Parachute Panic guys!

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All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.

Another little screencast for you, this time about PersonalBrain, a mind-mapping tool. I recently spent some time exploring this app and found it an odd mix of the infuriating and the fascinating.

The screencast I refer to, about the guy with 100,000 items in his PersonalBrain, is here.

Like I say in the video, PersonalBrain doesn’t really appeal to me; but if you use it, I’d be interested to hear what for, and why you like using it.

What it is: Yet another puzzle game. This time, you drop numbered discs into a grid. If the number matches the amount of discs in its row or column, the disc vanishes. If it’s next to gray blocks, it smashes them. Clear chains for bonuses.

Why it’s good: The evil people behind Drop7 describe it as “Tetris meets Sudoku”, which is kind of right. However, we’d prefer to describe it as “hardcore drugs meets videogaming”, since Drop7 just won’t let go. We find ourselves sneaking quick goes on ‘hardcore’ mode, because they only take a few minutes each, but then an hour flies by and deadlines are standing in front of us, with a concerned, slightly angry expression.

We fully believe that Area/Code actually plans to get everyone hooked on Drop7, shortly before taking over the world and going “mwahahahahahaha!” a lot. Put it this way: we’re now playing this more than Flight Control.

Where to get it: Drop7’s available via the App Store, and there’s more information at the Drop7 website. At the time of writing, the game cost three bucks. Don’t leave home without it—or you’ll get the shakes.

Here’s a neat little iPhone app for all you typography nerds: Typography Manual is a pocket reference book for everything you could wish to remember about fonts and typefaces.

Better still, it’s more than a reference book. It’s a toolbox as well, with a font size calculator, em calculator, conversion tables for switching inches and millimetres into points and picas, and a list of HTML character codes. If none of those things mean a thing to you, don’t buy Typography Manual. But if they do, you might find it hard to resist. It’s only five bucks.

My favorite review is the last one on the testimonials page: “One of only a handful of programs I’ve seen on the iPhone that hyphenate properly.” (And yes, I know I’m using straight quote marks there. I know, I know.)

Ocado is one of the UK’s classier supermarkets. It’s online-only (although closely linked to meatspace retailer Waitrose) and most people would probably say it appeals to the better-off kind of shopper.

It’s also, as of this week, a pioneer of iPhone shopping. The free Ocado app does a few clever things that the other big retailers might want to keep a close eye on when they finally get round to building apps of their own.

What it is: Pix Remix is a new iPhone app from Bay Area-based Jump Associates and Originate Labs that lets you turn photos – taken with or stored on your iPhone – into slideshows, collages, and interesting pan & zoom presentations — and makes it incredibly easy and intuitive to share them in email or post them to Twitter and Facebook from right within the app.

Why it’s cool: Impressive for an initial release, Pix Remix is loaded with effective tools for personalizing your photo shows, with built-in transitions including fade/dissolve, push, drop and spin out; and the collage function makes it easy to drag, resize and bring photos to the front or back. The pan and zoom function lets you become an instant documentarian, guiding your viewers’ eyes from one spot to another on individual pictures, zooming in to a special detail area. Text can be added to give photos captions or tell a story about your show.

Once you’ve got your photo show together, Pix Remix makes it easy to share in email or to post to your Twitter page or your Facebook profile. Email recipients have the option of viewing your work on a web page or within the Pix Remix app on their iPhone; updates to your Twitter status automatically append a bit.ly url that sends viewers to the Pix Remix web page for your show; shows can be posted directly to your Facebook profile, where your contacts can view your creations right within Facebook, without ever having to leave the site.

Pix Remix is so intuitive and easy to use, I made my first collage and sent it to myself in email while I sat on the porcelain throne in my office during my morning constitutional today!

Where to get it: Pix Remix is available now on the iTunes App Store; it sells for $2.99.

Important Disclosure: Cult of Mac contributor Pete Mortensen is the communications lead at Jump Associates and works in the firm’s growth strategy consulting business. He was involved in the original brainstorming sessions that led to the development of Pix Remix but was in no way affiliated with the writing of this product review, nor did his association with Cult of Mac influence the author’s use of the application or his conclusions regarding its quality or value.

XMenu from the Devonthink people is one of those freeware apps that I recommend to every Mac user I meet. The latest update, version 1.9, is newly released and boasts visual refinements and a helpful new feature.

For the uninitiated, XMenu is a Menu Bar widget for getting to stuff quickly without leaving the app you’re in. What I like most about it is its flexibility. You can have six different shortcuts in your Menu Bar if you like, or just one if you prefer to keep things simple.

That’s what I do. I use the user-defined widget and throw aliases for useful files and folders into ~/Library/Application Support/XMenu – that way, I keep my Menu Bar uncluttered but XMenu still gives me quick click access to stuff like my todo.txt, my income and expenses records, and a handful of use-them-every-day folders.

If your Dock is overcrowded with folders or stacks that you don’t use because, well, because it’s overcrowded, then you should have a look at XMenu. This latest update adds a text snippets manager that works just the same as the user-defined widgets. Put some plain or rich text files in the right place, and XMenu will let you insert them into any app with two clicks.

In the unlikely event that you’ve been yearning for more browsers on your Mac, and in the even less likely event that you wish you could splash out money for one; well, sunshine, your prayers have been answered.

For iCab, the last Mac browser that still costs money, is still being updated and has just reached version 4.6.1. And it can be all yours for 20 bucks. (I’m wracking my brains, and I can’t think of any other browsers that cost money these days – not since OmniWeb went free. Shout if you know of another.)

What it is: Lala is a newish (about a year old) web-based music marketplace, but to brand it as simply that does an extreme disservice to an interesting, innovative Internet destination that, given enough publicity, strong management and bit of good fortune could become the first online music store to give iTunes a real run for its money as a music distributor.

Why it’s cool: When I was a kid growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I spent uncounted hours in the music listening rooms at the back of Pop Tunes on Summer Avenue, where I discovered the heritage of the city they call the Home of the Blues, and learned about the ground-breaking artists who gave birth to the Blues’ baby, Rock & Roll.

Pop Tunes was a great spot to get in out of the hot summer sun or the cold winter rain, where I could browse the racks, amassing a stack of LPs and 45s, both old and new, and head for one of the four or five sound-proof listening rooms at the back of the store, where I’d listen to my heart’s content before deciding which of the albums or singles my meager allowance or paper route money would buy me any given week.

By the time I left home for college in another of the great music cities in the US – New Orleans – I had a music collection numbering over 1000 lp records and another few hundred 45rpm singles.

What does my ancient music-buying experience have to do with Lala and this review?