Tweetbot just dropped on the Mac App Store today, and perhaps the most surprising thing about it is the price. At $20, it’s significantly more expensive than most social networking clients. The thing is, it’s important not to see the number and instantly start making comparisons. You need to look at the price and ask: does this app provide 20 dollars worth of value? Judge it by that standard, and it doesn’t seem so expensive after all.
This man wants to drive over your spleen. Repeatedly.
This is Carmageddon: the driving game that got banned in several countries. The driving game that’s less about driving, and more about killing. Hit the gas and aim for the gizzards.
Newly released for iOS, this is a 12+ rated no-holds-barred killing fest. It’s non-stop gory driving violence with plenty of offensive language thrown in for good measure. In some working environments, both the game and some of the screenshots that follow may be considered NSFW.
I have a problem keeping track of suggestions from friends and loved ones. Someone will recommend me an artist or TV show to check out, and I’ll forget to actually check it out shortly after. Apple’s wish list feature in iTunes is nice on the desktop, but you can’t manage or view it in iOS. I use an app called TodoMovies to track films I want to watch on the iPhone, but I’ve been longing for something more robust.
When I heard about Recall, I was intrigued. “Never forget a great recommendation again.” Ok. Sign me up. After giving it a test run, I was pleasantly surprised.
The Crumpler Nhill Heist is a laptop backpack that “allows you to step off your bike and into work, without looking like you’ve just stepped off your bike.” Built from water resistant 900D/300D rip-stop nylon, with reinforced stitching on all stress points, it aims to outlast its lifetime guarantee by being super tough.
Drive is a tool for drivers who want to get basic tasks done on their phones with just a tap or a swipe, controlling your phone just as you’d control the other dashboard gadgets in your car.
I’m a borderline weather geek. I don’t just like to know the temperature — both inside and out — I even keep a hydrometer in my home so I can keep tabs on the humidity, cause you know, that’s important.
So naturally, when I found out about the Netatmo Weather Station ($179), I was a little excited. With its indoor and outdoor weather modules, the Netatmo tracks a lot more than just the current temperature. Plus, unlike my crappy $5 hydrometer, it relays all its readings in a unified way, presented beautifully in an iOS app optimized for both my iPhone and iPad.
As a great man once sang, there’s 57 channels and nothing on). But that was before iOS and apps came along. Now you don’t need channels. You need something like Vodio.
There are games, and there are brands, and there are games that become brands. Angry Birds is one of those, and Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes is the latest iOS Angry product to emerge from studio Rovio. It’s not a game. It’s a cookbook for iPad. Not an ordinary cookbook: this one’s just about eggs.
Another day, another todo app. There’s a bewildering variety of choice in this category, and newer phones all come with Apple’s own Reminders app, which is capable although not to everyone’s taste.
This one, oddly named DOOO, is nicer than most. For two bucks, it combines a thoughtful approach to feature design with stylish looks and a minimal, simple layout.
The Jabra Freeway ($100) is Jabra’s flagship bluetooth car speakerphone. The Freeway has loads of top-rung features like hands-free voice commands, caller announcements and FM music-streaming, wrapped around three loud, powerful speakers accompanied by noise-cancelling dual microphones — making it a very attractive option for drivers who want to add a hands-free speakerphone to their cars.
The Patagonia MiniMass commuter bag ($69) is my first taste of Patagonia’s gear, and I’ve always wondered if their stuff was worth the hype. The company has a bit of a reputation — perhaps fair, perhas not — as the outdoor industry’s bourgeois player, probably due to generally higher prices than the competition, an innovative design ethic and the use of green materials throughout their line.
But Patagonia has also spawned a fanatical following. I once worked with someone who literally camped outside the company’s Southern California headquarters (it sits literally right aross the road from the beach) in the hopes she’d be hired. She wasn’t, but toting around my tablet in the the fantastic little MiniMass let me grasp why she tried.
The MiniMass is the smallest sibling in Patagonia’s family of courier bags (all of which end in “Mass” — a nod to the Critical Mass bicycle movement). This makes the MiniMass a perfect tablet carrier. And even though it isn’t explicitly to ferry tablets, it excels in the task.
Going down a storm on the App Store this week is the brand new version of Crazy Taxi from Sega. Yes, it’s just like Crazy Taxi you used to play a decade ago. And that’s a good thing.
There’s been a lot of hoopla today about Rockmelt, a free new iPad app for browsing the web. Everyone keeps calling Rockmelt a browser, but I disagree. This is not what I call a browser. It’s a feed reader.
The Don’t Panic case is like a pair of comfy slippers for your iPad. As the name suggests, just using it is relaxing, the iPad-acessory equivalent of a valium or a well-mixed Old Fashioned at the end of a long day.
The floppy felt and leather sleeve is also a little like your embarrassing uncle. He has some horrible habits, and annoys you to death some times, but you can’t help loving him despite his foibles.
This is Dolphin. It’s a neat web browser for iPhone. You could easily be forgiven for saying: “What’s the point of having an extra browser? Mobile Safari does everything I need.”
Which is true. Safari does everything you need. But try Dolphin for just a few minutes, and you’ll discover a browser that does everything you need but in a totally different way. A way that’s much better suited to using on your phone while you’re moving around.
I’ve been messing about with this new app, called Listen, on my iPhone 5 for a little while, after the developer hit me up on Twitter about it. Now, I’m not able to jump on on every app, Mac or iOS, that someone asks me to look at, but I gave this one a look-see. Turns out, it’s a pretty neat little app, which does exactly what its name says it does.
Multi-touch? Pah, that’s so last year. Gestures are where it’s at. Only yesterday, we reported on a prototype wrist-mounted motion detector; today, we’re trying out Flutter, a free OS X app that we first mentioned back in March when it was still a demo.
Now it’s available in the Mac App Store. It claims to put gesture controls at your, um, fingertips, using your Mac’s built-in webcam.
The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues. If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.
But you know how it is; using something for several months offers a lot more perspective than merely reviewing it for one or two weeks. So I decided to give the Think Tank Retrospective 5 another look, and with six months of use under my belt, I’m ready to tell you how it’s really performed.
The end results are lovely, but the UI needs phixing
MonoPhix is a two-dollar black-and-white photography app for iPhone, with a separate companion MonoPhix HD version for iPad. Although it produces good results, MonoPhix suffers from some odd design choices that make it a disappointing and frustrating experience.
Headquake is a music sound enhancement app for iOS. It claims to “flat narrow sounds to an enormous yet perfectly balanced 3D Sound experience surrounding your head.” But hearing, like music, is a very individual thing, and Headquake’s efforts aren’t always much of an enhancement.
We don’t often praise Microsoft here at Cult of Mac, but with this game they’ve got almost everything right. It’s a cool action-adventure romp with great visuals and a sense of humor. The only thing that leaves me boggling is the ridiculous name: “Tentacles: Enter the Dolphin.” I beg your pardon?
As a gadget reviewer, I go through a lot of shipped packages. Which means I have to deal with a logistical nightmare second only to the Allied supply lines following the D-Day landings (except my packages tend to be, for the most part, somewhat less liable to explode or cause diarrhea). But that’s OK — I have a secret weapon to help keep everything straight.
Junecloud‘s Deliveries Status ($5) tracks shipments in a wonderfully simple, easy-to-read, straightforward manner; and like many of Apple’s own products, it just works.
