Cult of Mac

Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.

Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.

Cocktail is a popular OS X utility that has been around for years. It’s a simplistic app that lets you clean up and optimize your Mac’s system. The developer behind Cocktail, Maintain, has finally released a version that is fully compatible with Mountain Lion. A Mavericks edition is also in the works.

Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Justice proposed serious remedies for Apple to abide by now that the company has been found guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices. When the ruling was issued last month that Apple was guilty, the outcome of the suit was unknown. How would the government punish Apple (for something that Apple has always adamantly denied)? Now we know.

Not only does the DoJ want Apple to stop selling e-books through the iBookstore entirely, but allow rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to sell e-books in their iOS apps. In a scathing response to the DoJ’s proposal, Apple has called the proposed remedies “draconian” and “punitive.”

I play a lot of iOS games on iPhone and iPad. There are so many games out there, so much content, that it can be extremely difficult to find something you’ll like without having to download a ton of apps, try them out, and then discard them as they don’t quite scratch the itch you’re needing, well, scratched.

Free apps or paid apps, both cost something to download in time, cash, or both. So, I figured, why not start doing some of the heavy lifting here, and help you find fantastic games to play, without all the work?

That said, I found a gem of a game this week, and it’s only $0.99, with no further in-app purchases (IAP) to sully the experience. Blitz Block Robo is a fantastic little game that hits all the right notes.

It’s fine to listen to one podcast at a time, one episode at a time. Of course it is. You’re more than welcome to just download and tap your way through your podcasts on a one by one basis. I’m not judging.

Sometimes, though, it’s great to queue up a whole bunch of sweet podcasting content, especially when the content is a bit shorter, or you’re on a super long drive and don’t want to have to fiddle with your iPhone or iPad when on the go. That’s where playlists come in.

Here’s how to easily set one up in Apple’s Podcast App, which calls playlists “stations.”

I have used a variety of Eye-Fi cards in the past, both top-end, RAW-compatible Eye-Fi branded cards, and SanDisk’s licensed versions. And all of them have sucked. But the folks at Photojojo insisted I try out the new 8GB Eye-Fi mobi, a card designed to pair with an iDevice and let you seamlessly transfer pictures from any camera to your iPhone or iPad.

And — to my huge surprise — it’s fantastic.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front, ok? Scattered Entertainment’s The Drowning is a drop-dead gorgeous free-to-play game with a well-designed control scheme that (almost) makes playing a first-person shooter (FPS) worthwhile on a touchscreen. This is, in fact, an important release for those three facts alone.

Ultimately, though, the game suffers as a direct result, I think, of these very same features. I went into the game expecting to find at least some console-level depth in storyline, level design, and the like. What I found, however, was much less interesting.

We’ve seen our fair share of cool MacBook decals and engravings over the years, but holy crap this one might take the cake. as the most trippy MacBook engraving ever.

Your retinas can get lost for days swimming through this weird Illuminati vortex. The redditor who created it said he designed it using Illustrator and then used a laser at his school. It’s a lot more permanent than a decal, but at least the warranty is still intact.

Source: Reddit

Motorola has finally revealed all most of the details of the Moto X after months of leaks, and while the handset looks great and is customizable to a fault, what we really want to know is how its specs stack up against the best smartphones out there.

Specs aren’t everything, but it is important to keep in mind whether the Moto X will still be able to run the best apps after 12-24 months. Here’s a chart that GigaOm cooked up that compares the Moto X’s specs to the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S 4.

Minigore 2: Zombies, the wonderful dual-stick shooter from Mountain Sheep, is now free for a limited time to celebrate Minigore’s fourth anniversary. It’s arguably one of Mountain Sheep’s most enjoyable titles on iOS, and that’s saying a lot when you consider the same studio is also responsible for Bike Baron and Ice Rage.

The big upgrades you can add to your devices aren’t always going to be the ones that can make the biggest difference in how much you get out of them. It’s often the little innovations that can really change the way you use them. One example would be the much-talked about Tile, which goes beyond the iDevices we have and will serve to help us keep tabs on a slew of our personal belongings.

When focusing on little innovations for iDevices, Cablekeeps are a great example of an add-on you can use with your iPhone iPod, or iPad that does something small that can mean a lot more – like getting cable clutter out of your way. Cablekeeps allow you to wrap up the excess cord onto your Apple power adapter so that the unsightly extra length of cord gets wrapped up quickly and neatly for those moments when you want to grab and go everything you’ll need to charge those iDevices of yours. As a frequent traveler, this little innovation can be a big help in keeping the cable clutter down and ensuring you’ve got everything you need to keep powered when you take your iPhone on the road. If you want to get one of these – available in orange, light blue, or green – Cult of Mac Deals has them going for only $12.99 right now.

One of the finer console ports to date, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been raising expectations of mobile gamers since its release last month. It’s almost the exact same game as its Mac, PC, and console versions, bringing deep strategic gameplay and a brilliantly conceived science fictional world to the iOS platform.

Today, though, XCOM: Enemy Unknown got an update, and a bit of a price drop. It’s now $14.99, down from $19.99, and has a whole new way to play: Second Wave.

The ongoing iBooks antitrust case between Apple and the United States Department of Justice took a very interesting twist this morning when the DoJ and 33 state Attorneys General laid out plans to remedy Apple’s wrongdoings and restore competition to the market.

The DoJ wants Apple to terminate all of its deals with book publishers, and refrain from entering into any new ones for at least five years. It also wants the company to start selling e-books from rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Apple has begun giving away free content today via the App Store app for iPhone. Its first giveaway is for Color Zen, “a new and addictive kind of puzzle game” for iOS which is available free for a limited time “exclusively for Apple Store app users.”

On my Macbook Air running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, when I click on the Time Machine backup menubar item, I see the option to browse other backup disks. That’s a pretty cool option, if I need to switch between different disks to backup my Mac; maybe to make a secondary backup for redundancy.

In Mavericks, the Time Machine menu bar icon doesn’t have this option any more, instead only showing Stop This Backup when backing up (or Back Up Now when it isn’t), Enter Time Machine, and Open Time Machine Preferences. If you’re wondering where the option to browse other backup disks has gone, you’re not alone.

Samsung has admitted that a Korean PR agency did offer money to app developers to promote a competition on the popular developer question and answer website Stack Overflow. The electronics giant insists that this is “clearly against” its cooperate policy, and says that it cancelled the plan as soon as it was made aware of the situation.

Yesterday, the makers of the upcoming Ashton Kutcher vehicle and Steve Jobs biopic Jobs released a featurette that went behind the scenes of the upcoming film.

Today, we get a new promotional clip, in which Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak try to figure out the name of their new computer company? Whatever could it end up being?

For iOS users, the Pebble Smartwatch has largely existed as an exercise in frustration. While Android users can tie the Pebble Smartwatch into their smartphone’s central nervous system in all kinds of ways, the feature set of the e-ink proto-iWatch has been comparatively worse.

Case in point? Pebble Smartwatch owners who have an iPhone in their pocket couldn’t even get email notifications on the face of their watch. That’s a big deal: getting notified of new emails is seemingly one of the big things you’d want a second screen on your wrist to do. Luckily, that’s being rectified.

Already explored all of Rapture on your Mac? Gear up, soldier. It’s time to soar up to the air city Columbia in Irrational Games’s incredible, award-winning sequel to the Bioshock series, Bioshock Infinite. It’s coming to the Mac App Store at the end of the month.

Two years ago, Apple overtook Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. It was a heck of a feat for a Silicon Valley company: for the first time, the world seemed to value silicon computer chips more than the bubbling, black goo of long dead dinosaurs. The future seemed rosy, and in the following months, Apple’s share price eventually rose to over $700 a share… before cratering thanks to bizarre Wall Street pessimism.

Somehow, though, even though analysts are bleaker about Apple’s futures than they have ever been, Cupertino has once more managed to claw the title of world’s most valuable company from Exxon. How?

I know, I know. This is technically the third post I’ve written about the Panasonic GX7. But it’s also the first post since it has existed as anything except a Schrödinger’s Rumor.

The GX7 is Panasonic’s best-looking Micro Four Thirds camera to date, in terms of both styling (it’s retro-hot) and design choices. It’s also priced to go up against cameras like Fuji’s X-series, at $1,000 for the body alone, and $1,100 for camera and 14–42mm (28–84mm equivalent) kit lens.

Quip is an odd new app that looks like it could be incredibly useful. It’s billed as a word processor, but it combines text editing with instant messaging, change tracking and sharing — plus it has a very cool interface.

Oh, and it works on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac (in the browser).

Poor Canon. When it comes to compact cameras, its heart is in the right place, but the market is shriveling so fast that sometimes it’s hard to see the point. Today’s example is the Vixia Mini camcorder, a video version of its quirky Powershot N. The Vixia Mini is a square box with a flip-out screen and a fisheye lens. And as a nod to smartphone users, it has Wi-Fi built in. But do we care?

A rear panel believed to be for the upcoming second-generation iPad mini appears to have been leaked from Apple’s supply chain. The panel is largely the same as the existing one — suggesting the new model will look identical to the original — but it has a new Apple logo on its back.

Photowerks is a Smart Album app for the iPhone and iPad that you will actually use. Unlike previously-written-about SmartAlbums, Photowerks uses easy spinning dials to set criteria for your saved searches, and it is also quick and very nicely designed.