Cult of Mac

Billy: The Bill Samurai — Utilities — Free

So you go out to dinner with a bunch of your friends, and when the bill arrives, you decide to save time and just pay the whole thing yourself. But you’re a little obsessive-compulsive, so you insist that your friends pay you back exactly what they owe. But how do you figure it out? That’s a lot of math to fit into one head.

This app has you covered. You just enter in the menu price of every item, tell it who ordered what, and enter in the tip and tax percentages, and it gives you the exact amount each person needs to pay you back, to the cent. And nothing screams “friendship” quite like making change.

Billy: The Bill Samurai

That headline isn’t hyperbole. I’ve started this review three times, but I kept thinking of things I should “check out” in the game so that I could make sure I was writing the thing properly. But mainly, I just wanted to keep playing the new Adventure Time version of Ski Safari.

If you haven’t played the original, it’s a twist on the endless runner genre: The endless skier. The hapless hero has to give it all he has to outrun an avalanche that is barreling down the hill behind him. He can do backflips for points and can hitch rides on the local wildlife for speed boosts, and all the while, he’s collecting as many coins as he can.

Ski Safari: Adventure Time is the same thing only with 100 percent fewer skis and way more characters from Pendleton Ward’s awesome cartoon series. So basically, it’s better in every way.

If you’re a budding artist who wants to take on the digital world in a big way, then the latest offer from Cult of Mac Deals is for you.

The Astounding Artist Bundle consists of five killer apps that you can add to your artist’s toolkit that will help you take your digitial creations to a whole new level. And the price is astoundingly inexpensive – just $69! That’s right. You’ll save 75% on this complete beginner’s toolset through this limited time offer.

Nightmare: Malaria is the story of a little girl with malaria. In her dreams, she is thrust into a horrible nightmare world where she is trying to save her teddy bears from a horrible world infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes and vats of bubbling disease. Your goal is to guide her through the world and hide in screened tents to ward off the infected bugs.

You can download the game for free, but between each level you’ll see a prompt for a microtransaction. This won’t unlock features in the game, and you don’t need to contribute money to win, but the $3 purchase is actually a donation toward providing mosquito nets to people at risk for contracting malaria. You can donate as often as you want, and the whole game is designed to educate players on the dangers of the disease. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Against Malaria Foundation work tirelessly to help eradicate malaria, but your small contribution can provide preventative measures to people who can’t help themselves.

Back in the day, Apple popularized the point and click interface so well that Microsoft decided it would use the same system, thereby paving the way for decades of mouse pointers and menu systems.

Still, one of the great things about Mac OS X is the way it caters to the power user with keyboard shortcuts, both built in and customizable. Heck, in Mavericks, you can even sync these custom tricks with iCloud.

It comes as an obvious surprise, then, when you realize that you can even navigate that most mouse-centric of innovations, the menu bar.

Apple’s latest Mac Pro, the high-end desktop built in the U.S. that you’ve been anticipating for years, will finally go on sale tomorrow. Announced at WWDC back in June, the new machine sports a brand new design and cutting-edge hardware throughout, and it will start at $2,999.

iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks have made passwords easier to deal with than ever thanks to iCloud Keychain, which saves your passwords and logins and syncs them across your devices, but it comes with a downside: you have to use Safari on all of your devices.

That cuts Chrome users like me right out, but luckily, there’s great apps like AgileBits’ 1Password, which does everything iCloud Keychain does and much, much more. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s the best password manager out there, full stop. So here’s good news: AgileBits has dropped the usually steep price of 1Password by 30%, allowing you to buy the award-winning, ultra-secure password locker for just $34.99.

1Password is an expensive upfront purchase, but once you make it, it’s worth it: free solutions like LastPass just have none of 1Password’s polish.

You can buy 1Password on the Mac App Store here.

When Apple first unveiled iOS 7, one of the features that made law-enforcement officials breathe a collective sigh of relief was Activation Lock, which allows users to locate, lock and wipe their iPhones remotely if they are stolen.

Activation Lock is a great system which prevents thieves from simply hard resetting an iPhone once they’ve stolen it, and considering what a big problem iPhone crime is, it’s a big step forward by Apple that helps make owning an iPhone safer all around. And it looks like it’s starting to make a difference, with a new report suggesting that almost 4 out of 5 iPhone users has it turned on.

Although reports have surfaced that Apple may be building a top secret $10 billion chip fab, right now, the vast majority of Apple’s A-series chips are made by Samsung. This is obviously not an ideal situation, as it gives Apple’s arch smartphone rival the advantage of knowing what the iPhone-maker is planning on doing next, at least from a silicon perspective.

It looks like Apple may soon be able to rely less on its nemesis when it comes to building chips, though. A new report says that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will largely take over for Samsung in making iPhone and iPad chips in the future. And they’ll be pretty crazy advanced chips, too, at least if the rumors can be believed.

Once the king of mobile gaming, over the past few years, Nintendo has found itself caught flatfooted by the rise of smartphones. Although the company’s 3DS portable game console can’t be said to be a total flop, it’s certainly not selling in gangbuster units compared to previous consoles, like the DS or Gameboy. The reason why is simple: most people have a perfectly good gaming device in their pockets all the time now in the form of their smartphone, and don’t want to have to carry around (let alone buy) an entirely separate device dedicated to gaming.

Many critics have suggested that it’s time for Nintendo to give up and just start releasing games based on its prize characters such as Mario or Link as iOS apps. Such advice is short-sighted, but that doesn’t mean Nintendo can’t be better leveraging Apple’s iOS platform… which is exactly what the Big N seems to have in mind.

Earlier this year, Cult of Mac cited a study from Distimo stating that developers with a hope of cracking the Top 10 paid apps needed to be making in the region of $47,000 per day.

Well, after a strong year for mobile, that number has been revised slightly.

According to Distimo’s 2013 Year in Review report, global revenue for the 200 highest grossing apps in the App Store stand at more than $18 million — a figure which breaks down to around $90,000 average for the top apps.

Would Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs have created the Apple I as a Kickstarter project had they been born in, say, 1985 and 1990 rather than 1950 and 1955?

Certainly Apple co-founder Wozniak has clearly always seen a bit of himself in other would-be homebrew engineers — which is why he has supported the creators of kit computer Kano.

These PopSockets are pretty neat. They’re flat circular buttons that pop out, accordion-style, to make little rubbery cones on the back of your iPhone, iPad or other handheld device. They aid grip, work as basic kickstands and offer a place for fiddlers and fidgiters to work off their annoying energies.

It’s another day, another optimistic projection for Apple’s success over the Christmas season.

This time the report is from Piper Jaffray’s analyst Gene Munster, who analyzed 25,000 tweets featuring the hashtags @Santa and #wishlist — and found iPhone to be the “most mentioned item”.

Like the Lomo Konstuktor (which I have actually konstrukted and found to be pretty cool), the Last Camera comes as a kit so you can build your own camera.

Unlike the Lomo, though, the Last Camera comes with two interchangeable lenses, and you can buy extra kits to customize it in the future, and it even ships with a special “light leak” back that lets stray photons in through the back door.

As Crocodile Dundee would no doubt say, “That’s not a warranty, this is a warranty.”

Consumer rights watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), has accused Apple of misleading Australian consumers about their rights to refunds, replacements, and repairs.

It used to be OK to ask a stranger in a bar “do you have a Nokia charger?” and borrow said charger for a while to juice your phone. These days, though, you’ll mark yourself out as a Low-Charge Loser, the kind of person who goes to bed without plugging in his iPhone. Worse, you’re probably carrying more than just a phone. Are you really going to ask a stranger for adapters to charge your iPad and Kindle too?

You are not. What you need is a beefy backup battery. And at this time of year, it should be waterproof, too.

Imagine that one of your photos was printed onto a sheet of card, and that this piece of card was carefully sliced and cut to chop it into a series of concentric rings, or concentric squares, or just a geometric pattern of tiles.

The imagine moving these sections with your finger to make a fragmented version of your picture, only because you’re using the Fragment app instead of real scissors and paper, there are never any gaps between the pieces. Sound like fun right?

Apple has announced that developers must ensure that all app submissions are optimized for iOS 7 by February 1, 2014, according to a new posting on its developer portal.

This includes both new apps and updates to existing ones. In order to optimize apps for the new OS, they must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 — which includes 64-bit support, and access to features such as backgrounding APIs.

Is nothing sacred in the Samsung vs. Apple clash, we ask you?

It might have recently been ordered to pay Apple $930 million in damages (with a possible side order of Apple legal fees), but Samsung still scored a personal victory this month by hiring away Apple’s senior store designer, Tim Grudgel.

Photos+ is a new iPhone app from Justin Williams aka Second Gear software aka the developer of iOS text editor Elements. Photos+ is in the “one thing well” school of apps: it lets you look at the photos you have on your iPhone, and it does a better job that the built in app. In most ways at least.

MIDI Guitar for GarageBand is a Mac app (remember those?) that turns your guitar into a MIDI controller for, well, for any instrument you like. Thus you can thrash away on your axe like the heavy metal rock god you are, and have the sound emerging from the speakers be a plinking, ringing triangle.

After 22 years at the Wall Street Journal reviewing technology, columnist Walt Mossberg is moving on. In his final column, Mossberg picks the 12 devices that had the most impact over the years.

“I chose these 12 because each changed the course of digital history by influencing the products and services that followed, or by changing the way people lived and worked,” Mossberg writes.

One company completely dominates the list. Guess which one it is (and what devices he chose)?

Beyoncé rocked the internet last weekend when she released her self-titled album in the iTunes Store as a total surprise. In exchange for launch exclusivity, Apple gave her the red carpet treatment in iTunes and iTunes Radio. The move was a smart one, as Beyoncé is the fastest selling album in iTunes history, moving an insane 828,773 units within the first three days of availability.

Target, another big music retailer that prides itself on exclusive deals with artists, isn’t too happy about Beyoncé’s decision to go the iTunes route.

Apple has added the ability to gift iBooks through its iTunes Store. Until now, the iBookstore was the only section of iTunes that did not support gifting. Here’s how it works.