Cult of Mac

Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.

Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.

Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.

During yesterday’s iPad keynote, Apple showed several new videos to the audience. Now four of those videos have been uploaded to Apple’s official YouTube channel.

Fans of Games Magazine will know the puzzles in developer Casual Labs’ Paint It Back as “Paint by Numbers.” Owners of the Nintendo DS portable system might recognize them as Picross, and giant puzzle nerds might know them as Nonograms for Non Ishida, the Japanese graphics editor who invented them.

The point is that Paint It Black is not doing anything new; this puzzle type, in which solvers use logic to determine which squares in a grid to fill in to make a picture, is readily available a lot of places. But that’s not to say that this app is a boring rehash.

In fact, whether you’re a fan of Nonograms or picking them up for the first time, Paint It Black has a lot to offer.

Apple unveiled the new iPad mini with Retina display yesterday along side the iPad Air, and while we were expecting a bump up in resolution, we also got some nice internal hardware upgrades in the form of the A7 processor, M7 co-processor, improved cameras and faster WiFi.

We still think the iPad mini is the best 7-inch tablet on the market but the number of competitive Android tablets keeps growing every year, each with their own set of compelling features and ecosystems. To sort out whether the iPad mini really is the best purchase for you, check out the chart above that breaks down the iPad mini’s specs compared the Kindle Fire lineup, Nexus 7 II and the Galaxy Tab 3.

Source: BI

We’ve been trumpeting the tale of a fantastic game in development from the all-star team at Industrial Toys for a while now. Titled Morning Star, it had some serious pedigree and promise.

A sci-fi themed first-person shooter from Alex Seropian, the dude that co-created Bungie (Marathon, Halo) is huge news in the first place. A game that includes author John Scalzi and artist Mike Choi among many other hugely talented folks that will launch exclusively on mobile? That’s ginormous news.

Color us fascinated when President Tim Harris penned a blog post on gaming site Gamasutra about why the team had to rename the game, and how they went about it. It’s a super interesting behind-the-scenes look at the very real business side of game development, and it’s worth a look.

Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free

Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.

Calming Breath

Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.

The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.

If you’ve ever wanted to take your life to the next level in a whole slew of areas, then this Cult of Mac Deals offer is for you. We’re offering lifetime to access to 7 courses that consist of over 55 hours of actionable material that will improve your daily life.

And we’re offering it to you in the form of The 7 Course Life Hack E-Learning Bundle for just $59 – a savings of $419!

After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.

Pixelmator, arguably the best image processing tool for Mac (and a steal at just $30) has today received its “most advanced” update yet. The version 3.0 “FX” release delivers lots of new features and improvements, including support for Apple’s latest OS X Mavericks upgrade and the new features that brings.

Following the release of OS X Mavericks on Tuesday, Apple has updated iBooks Author for Mac to introduce compatibility with the desktop iBooks app. So, books created in iBooks Author can now be previewed and read in iBooks for Mac.

Ember, the awesome scrapbooking tool for Mac from Realmac Software, has been updated to support Apple’s new OS X Mavericks update. It also comes with “two huge new features,” including the ability to search for colors, and the option to store your Ember library in iCloud.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s not interested in Apple’s new iPads because the neither model meets his needs. Woz didn’t get a chance to watch the keynote live because he was on a plane, but he caught up with the news when he landed and then emailed his wife to say, “nope, I don’t want one of those.”

This post is brought to you by Digiarty, creator of MacX DVD Ripper Pro.

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Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.

Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:

With Apple disrupting the entire desktop operating system business by releasing OS X Mavericks for free, there is still at least one Mac operating system that Apple is still selling. Even more curiously, it’s a variant on OS X Mavericks… OS X Server for Mavericks.

With every new release of the iOS operating system, there’s a chance that Apple will close security holes that the Dev Team needs to make an untethered jailbreak possible. Luckily, it appears that Apple’s new iOS 7.0.3 update is safe, allowing motion sick potential jailbreakers to update with impugnity

If you keep a diary, you probably know about Day One, Bloom Built’s indispensible Mac journaling app. With the release of OS X Mavericks, Day One has received a major new update. The big feature? Integration with Mavericks’ Maps app.

One of the most common criticisms you hear of Apple’s iPad line is that they are expensive compared to the competition. When the iPad mini first came out, for example, it was widely criticized for its entry-level price of $329, with many saying it couldn’t succeed unless it was under $249.

Obviously, such predictions were laughably wrong. But Apple is now selling a $249 iPad mini: a refurbished one!

In all the hubbub yesterday, it’s possible you missed the most exciting iPad news of all: Apple has given the iPad Air and iPad mini an incredible new wallpaper!

We kid, of course, but featuring a lovely blue gradient, the new wallpapers are rather nice. With the iPad Air and iPad mini not shipping until November, though, you can only see it in Apple’s new iPad ads… or download it from us!

BlackBerry finally brought BBM to Android and iOS earlier this week, but in an effort to prevent the server problems that halted its initial debut, the Canadian company decided to implement a waiting list that allows it to control how many users gain access.

But if you were late to the party and you’re stuck at the back of the line, you’ll be pleased to know there’s a quick and easy way to bypass that waiting list. Just follow the simple steps below.

We last caught up with Pics.io back in the summer, when it was just starting out in beta form. Now the service has gone live, and you can convert and edit your RAW photos right there in the browser. Yes, the future really has arrived.

In a fit of either obliviousness or hubris, Evernote yesterday released an update to its iOS app in the middle of some other clearly less-important news. The update is actually pretty solid, although not nearly as radical as the last one which revamped the entire interface for the second time in less than a year.

Lost your keys? Sure you have, you absent-minded fellow you. And you iPhone? No frickin; way, right? What you clearly need is a way to replace your keys with your iPhone. That’s already been done for the home, and now you can toss the keys for your bike lock.

Not interested in a case for you new Retina iPad mini, or the gorgeous iPad Air? Nope, me neither – I want to show that thing off to passersby and pickpockets alike. But what I don’t want to do is carry it in my hand all the time, so I’ll be needing yet another bag for my man-sack collection. [1]

And that bag is the Outback Solo from WaterField Designs.