The new year is well underway, and we’ve got a bundle lined up for you here at Cult of Mac Deals that will help you make the most of your Mac over the months to come. And the best part is that you’ll get all 8 of these time-savings apps for free as part of The Mac Freebie Bundle.
So you got a new Mac over the holidays. (Or your old Mac makes you wish that you did.)
Well, this Cult of Mac Deals offer will keep that newly-minted Mac running like the day it was unboxed and get your old Mac running like new again. With this exclusive promotion you’ll get the CleanMyMac Double Pack which will keep two of your Macs clean and free of clutter – for life – and for only $25!
This post is brought to you by SquidMelon, creator of Live Wallpaper.
Live Wallpaper is the quickest, easiest way to liven up your desktop. With twenty-three official themes and an ever-expanding assortment of custom themes, Live Wallpaper offers an array of high-res images and animations to liven up your Mac screen, or across multiple screens if you use more than one monitor.
So you got a new Mac over the holidays. (Or your old Mac makes you wish that you did.)
Well today’s Cult of Mac Deals offer will keep that newly-minted Mac running like the day it was unboxed and get your old Mac running like new again. With this exclusive promotion you’ll get the CleanMyMac Double Pack which will keep two of your Macs clean and free of clutter – for life – and for only $25!
Games! They’re awesome. There are a ton of them released every year, making best of lists like this one fairly difficult. In the interest of our space and your time, we’ve narrowed the field down to ten, with what we feel are the best of the best games out there for Mac as well as for iOS. All of these games were released this year, and while all of them may not be blockbusters you’ve seen on other end of year roundups (this is on purpose), they’re all of them worth your time and money.
So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the following top ten games for iOS and Mac.
Back in the 90s, I was in a modern rock band. Yeah, I know, who wasn’t? Anyway, one of the thing we did, as most rock bands do, was to create our own demo tapes and recorded music. We used a variety of hardware to get our music onto tape, and then when I got my first Mac, I started using it to record multitrack demos right in my living room.
The thing about home recordings is that they sound like they’ve been recorded in your home. We wanted a more highly polished, stuiod sound. That’s when we found out about T-rackS, a Mac application that worked like a mini mastering studio, letting us apply various audio processing sets to our mixed down songs, without having to pay someone a lot of money to do the same thing. It made our music sound a LOT more professional.
I lost track of T-rackS software, and I assumed that it had gone the way of System 8, honestly. Then IK Multimedia came up with a revamped T-RackS, ready to purchase and use right now, and I knew I had to try it out.
The critically acclaimed RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is now available on the Mac App Store. The development team promises that your choices really do matter, and will determine the fate of the people and kingdoms in the game. You’ll fight blood-thirsty monsters as protagonist Geralt of Rivia, as well as navigate politics, lies, and gorgeous environments.
Calling GODUS “a delightful reinvention of the god game from 22cans and Peter Molyneux,” the game’s Kickstarter page has some new details on the project, the second from Curiosity’s 22cans games studio. With nine days left to go and about half of its funding goal met, Project GODUS just may be worth a look. Originally set to release on iOS, Android, and PC, the game will also be available on the Mac platform: welcome news indeed for those of us firmly in the Mac camp of gaming.
There’s a good chance you can think of someone who plans on giving an Apple product this holiday season. Apple has rolled out its own Holiday Gift Guide and has its own gifting information page, which details the basics about gifting Apple products. If you’re looking for a little more assistance when shopping for Apple products then this guide is for you. Here we offer some simple tips to help the average holiday shopper save time and money when gifting Apple products.
Siri, Apple’s voice-based virtual assistant is a mixed bag of good things and bad. And Siri faces an increasing competition in the market, especially from Google.
I believe Siri is probably the single most important feature Apple offers for three future Apple devices. In fact, I think Apple is betting the entire company on Siri. However, many users often wonder why is Siri so bad compared to its competitors, raising concerns about its limitations.
And that’s why they’ve got to fix it.
Apple’s current “hobby” — also known as Apple TV — doesn’t tell us much about Apple’s future plans for the living room.
It’s a good product under the right circumstances. But five years from now, living rooms are going to be transformed by all-encompassing systems that turn TVs into video phones, gaming systems, home automation control centers and artificial intelligence assistants.
Does Apple have what it takes to compete in the living room?
Apple is all about the latest and greatest, inventing (and selling) the future. The computer marketplace as a whole evolves with ever accelerating speed – that two year old iPhone or laptop, so passé. Sometimes its helpful to take a step back and appreciate the long view of computing.
David Greelish is a computer historian who has been studying vintage computing for many years, as a writer, collector, podcaster and now vintage computing festival sponsor. His journey has included playing Star Trek text adventures on teletype machines, rescuing orphaned Lisas and Commodore 64s from unloved futures, and lobbying Apple to create a visitor’s gallery of company history in their new corporate HQ. He’s still getting flak for that last one.
Cult of Mac contacted David to hear his story.
If you’re reading this website on a new iPad or MacBook Pro with a Retina display, you may have noticed how crisp the logo is. Go on; take a good look. Zoom in with your fingers. Also check out the navigation bar, and the graphics for Reviews, Tips and How-Tos. See how clear and crisp they are?
That’s because we’ve upgraded the site to Retina — Apple’s marketing term for screens that are so dense with pixels, they’re practically invisible.
We think it looks really sharp. And next week, we’ll be giving the mobile site a complete overhaul to make it pretty for the iPhone 5.
Here’s what the site looks like on Retina and non-Retina devices.
Hit the jump for some of the geeky details:
Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?
It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.
Let me explain.
Most software released for Macs and iOS devices is designed for the general public – programs, utilities, games and Apple’s own website. But an important and growing industry exists behind the scenes to keep all that shiny Apple gear working.
GsxWarranty is a small utility for Macs, Windows PCs and iPhones which allows a technician to quickly check warranty status on Apple products. By entering the serial number GsxWarranty displays detailed information concerning AppleCare, service parts and configuration details.
PowerPC-based Macs have long been considered dead and buried by Apple, but the company just put a few more nails in the coffin to prevent any corpse risings. With the release of iTunes 10.7 this week the ubiquitous media control center becomes Intel-only, requiring at least a Core Solo processor and Mac OS X 10.6.8.
In a related one-two punch, Apple has also stopped providing online Software Updates for Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.3, as well as Mac OS 9. These items are now available only by direct download from Apple’s support website.
Word is spreading of a new independent film, Project Genesis, involving a world populated only by old Apple computers. Italian director and filmmaker Alessio Fava has posted an enigmatic teaser of Macs shuffling around in a drab soulless environment, with hints of better existence:
We computers have always looked at our world from a single point of view: with resignation, limiting ourselves to survive. We were wrong! From this moment on, everything changes: new unexpected ways open up in front of us, the world we knew now becomes more accessible, simple, within everyone’s range.
When people think computer gaming, they may not think Macintosh right away. However, there are a host of games both new and old, expensive and cheap, indie and triple-A for the Macintosh platform. The following list, then, is of the best strategy games the Mac platform has to offer; all of these received an over 80 score on Metacritic, a gaming review aggregation site. Most of them are playable on modern Macs, with a few exceptions as noted.
An interesting crop circle was reported at Cheesefoot Head, near Winchester in Hampshire, southern England, last week. An infinite loop, the formation has no beginning nor end. It has been likened to the Tibetan Buddha, symbolizing peace and motion simultaneously. It also reminds us of the command key symbol, an emblem of Mac keyboards over the last thirty years.
Did you know Microsoft Excel was release on the Mac before it was released on Windows? Pretty cool when you think about it—Microsoft launched its first attack on Lotus 1–2–3 through the Mac. Well that was in the late 80s-early 90s and 25 years have passed and Excel has only gotten more sophisticated and powerful. Most people who use Excel know the basics of formulas and spreadsheets, but like most apps the real power and treasures lie just below the surface.
Now’s the time to learn the secrets of Excel with today’s deal—Microsoft Excel 2011 Course – Cult of Mac Deals. Step up and become a master of Excel in just a few hours and for only $24!
SkimClip is a very clever, and very handy little Mac app. What it does it this: With one keystroke, you can make a screen grab of any part of your Mac’s desktop and SkimClip saves it and performs OCR.
Thus, any image containing text is instantly cataloged for searching. Sure, you could also roll your own PDF workflow to do the same thing, but as SkimClip also organizes the results into an iTunes-like interface with search, subcategories and quick-look, and only costs $5 on the Mac App Store, then why bother?
Plus, this is yet another way to convert DRM-encumbered e-books into plain old go-anywhere text.
SkimClip v1.0 is available now in the Mac App Store.
Source: Dom Loves Kim Software
Yeah it’s the set of apps we love to hate—Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. I know, it’s all be downhill since Word 6.0, but still MS Office is the standard for sending and receiving files. Myself, I’ve always liked Excel and I taught myself how to use Pivot Tables, but it wasn’t fun or easy. When I told other people “Oh, just use a Pivot Table and you can do all of that…” their response was “That’s too hard to learn, I’ll do it the way I’ve been doing it…”
Wow.
So how would you like to tap into all the features of MS Office 2011? Really learn it inside and out? Now you can with today’s deal—Microsoft Office for Mac Video Training Bundle for only $79! That’s almost a 60% discount off the usual $196!
Think Retina display Macs are a gimmick? Think again: Mac developer Gus Mueller is almost ready to pop out an update to the Acorn image editing app which will use the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro to spectacular (and rather useful) effect.
Who doesn’t love the Drobo? People who like to lose their data, that’s who. For the rest of us, today brings good news: New Thunderbolt-equipped Drobos, one for the desktop and one for taking on the road.