About a hundred years ago, while I was still a Windows user and thought that a Mac was what you covered in a cheese and slurped down for lunch, I whiled away way too much time playing a DOS-based artillery duel game called Scorched Earth. Dot Matrix Interactive Designs have created their own version in the extremely polished, multiplayer KIL.A.TON — and it’s even more of a blast to play.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Air Assault, Bad Apples, Fire Drop Free, Ghost Capture – Free, Heli Rescue, Internet Radio Box, Sunday Lawn, synthPond Lite, Tiki Totems, and Titanic Rescue.
There must be a special space reserved at the table in Valhalla for any designer able to make a fat brick look hot; if that’s true, then there’s a seat reserved right next to Jonny Ive’s for the Vers 1.5R’s designer (and yes, both design heaven and design hell are Scandinavian. Don’t believe me? Take a look at an IKEA catalog; now, go experience a 1980s-era Saab).
Drums are awesome; there’re few things as satisfying as making sounds by thumping something with a stick — even if that stick is virtual. Now, for a buck, the iPhone can be turned into a virtual museum of virtual drums, thanks to Vintage Drum by developer OutOfTheBit.
Awesome Note is a charming, flexible, free-form app that combines elements of both note-taking and todo apps. But like uncle Chuck at an all-you-can-eat Vegas-style buffet, trying to shoehorn too much good stuff into one thing can sometimes lead to messy results.
Just days after we reported on the launch of Alfred for OS X, along comes yet another keyboard-centric file and application launcher: Launchy.
Launchy has a long history as an open source Windows application, doing much the same on that platform that Quicksilver did on OS X. It too supports plugins that greatly boost its usefulness.
Right now, though, you can download a Mac beta and see what you think.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Angry Birds, Bloom, FallDown!, Icy Escort, RandomPlay, Sir Revs-a-Lot, SteamPunk Hockey, Vector Runner
Plainview is a web browser with a difference. It’s a full screen browser, lacking any bells and whistles at all except just the one: no chrome, if you’ll forgive the pun.
So all you get is web content from floor to ceiling. Everything else gets hidden away, including your Dock and your Menu Bar.
So, you might wonder, why on earth would I want that? Good question.
Folks, let me tell you a secret: I sing. I sing all the damn time. It’s a good job I work at home all by myself, because if I worked in an office I’d drive my colleagues crazy by singing at them all the time.
And since the birth of the App Store, I’ve been looking for a looper. A looper, for those who don’t know, is a musical effects pedal that grabs a short snippet of audio and, well, loops it. Over and over again. And lets you record another loop on top. Repeat, ad lib to fade.
It’s a quick and easy way to do clever things live on stage, and fun things when you’re trying to write new songs.
There’s been a load of apps that promised some kind of looping capability, and I’ve tried a bunch of them and never found anything that really nailed it. Looping needs to be ultra-simple, instantaneous and spontaneous. None of the apps I tried made that possible. None of them until Everyday Looper.
Alfred is a new keyboard launcher in the spirit of Quicksilver, Butler and LaunchBar.
A (free) beta was released last weekend by the UK-based team who’ve developed it.
If you’ve ever used any of those other keyboard launchers, Alfred will be instantly familiar. You invoke it using a global shortcut, then type whatever you want to find. Type an app name to launch it, or type “google” then your search term to search Google.
It has built-in shortcuts for searching Google, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Bing, Twitter and plenty of others. It can also hunt down specific files or folders on your hard disk.
Here’s a cute little Twitter client called Pocket.
Pocket lives at the top of your display, permanently attached to your Menu Bar. Personally, that’s what I dislike about it most, but that’s because I’m a focus kind of person and I don’t want Twitter in my face the whole time. But Pocket wasn’t made for me.
No, Pocket was made for people who love having Twitter in their face the whole time, and for that purpose it totally rocks. I love the cute colors, I love the clever way that all the functionality you need is crammed into such a tiny weeny space. I love the one-tweet-at-a-time way that it displays things, giving you the chance to reply or retweet stuff as it arrives. Which is great if you can afford to spend your whole day watching Twitter.
I won’t be using Pocket myself, but if you love watching your tweets and want something colorful and cute to do it with, I’d recommend Pocket.
I’m always on the lookout for photography tools that are easy-to-use and help me turn good photos into great ones.
Nik Software’s Sharpener Pro 3 ($199.95), a plug-in for Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop, does just that, which is probably why I find myself utilizing it pretty much any time I do a photo shoot.
With two sharpening modes, RAW and Output, NSP3 is built to handle all your photo sharpening needs. If you’d like to handle all your image sharpening from start to finish with NSP3, you can turn off your camera’s sharpening features and use NSP3’s RAW mode. Or, if you’re like me and your camera generally does a good job at handling sharpening tasks, NSP3’s Output mode works wonderfully to enhance photos that have already been pre-sharpened by a camera.
If you’re like me, the last fortnight has seen little activity other than watching Olympic skiing, skating, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled, Nordic Combined, curling, complaints about NBC, curling, aerials, and curling. With the Closing Ceremonies now a rapidly fading memory of Shatner songs and giant inflatable beavers, there’s never been a better time to start slowly weaning yourself off the XXIst Winter Olympiad. And there really isn’t a better option than the deceptively simple “Vancouver 2010,” the well-made official iPhone game of the recently departed Winter Games.
The iPhone 3GS is like a Formula One car: fast, sleek and a thrill to drive. And then, every hour or so, it has to hit the pits to refuel (only, unlike refueling an F1 car, it takes hours, not seconds). Now, imagine if every F1 car had button on the steering wheel that the driver could punch, and a fuel cell would drop from some kind of team drone-copter and refuel the car while it was rocketing around the track. Pretty cool, right? Well, that’s what using the TruePower iV Pro is like.
Nuance, the company behind Dragon Mobile for iPhone and the Naturally Speaking range of software products, has bought MacSpeech, makers of the jaw-droppingly amazing MacSpeech Dictate and its recent new sibling, MacSpeech Scribe.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Wivi Band Free, Thomson Reuters News Pro, Sjoelen, Lucky Day!, Lexulous, Pudge, Mr. Driller, Flick Kick Field Goal, Whac-a-Mole, geoFighter, SpringFling, and Fare City.
APP OF THE WEEK
Reuters: Fast, reliable news app. Not the prettiest/nicest, but probably the best all-rounder on the App Store. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/8qT8i
Wivi Band Free: Virtual trumpet, oddly controlled by mic and touchscreen piano keyboard. OK, but no Ocarina. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/8qRWs
Sjoelen: Mild-mannered flick-based take on Dutch shufflepuck variant. Always good for a quick game. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/8qZOe
Lucky Day!: Overpriced Magic 8-Ball variant starring a gormless panda. 1/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/906U0
Lexulous: Borderline competent and overpriced client for accessing the popular online Scrabble clone. 2/5 $3.99 https://is.gd/907ht
Pudge: Cute one-thumb iCopter-style game starring a Pixar-like cartoon fish. Best in class + has 2-player mode. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/907GK
Mr. Driller: Decent port of the jolly, fast-paced digging game, marred slightly by lack of D-pad precision. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/94JYD
Flick Kick Field Goal: Four flick-based kick challenges. Nice graphics & better than Paper Toss. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/94LOY
Whac-a-Mole: Whacky Valentines: Reasonable fairground whack-a-mole with amusing retro-style mini-games. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/94MoL
geoFighter: Yet another dual-thumb Robotron rip-off. Colourful, but unremarkable, bog-standard stuff. 2/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/94MQ3
SpringFling: Vertical platformer with drag controls to fling spring hero upwards. Let down by reliance on luck. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/94NiR
Fare City: Decent line-drawing take on Crazy Taxi. Two very different maps & nicely presented. Gets tough fast. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/94Pvo
A barrage of games this week, some of which are good fun, including Mr Driller, the one-thumb iCopter vs Finding Nemo that is Pudge, Crazy-Taxi-meets-Flight Control Fare City, and Flick Kick Field Goal, one of the more successful flick-based games for Apple handhelds.
However, the Reuters news app is app of the week. It’s not the prettiest or the nicest news app, but it’s fast and has a good range of coverage. Localisation options for the USA, UK, Canada and India are also a nice touch.
Follow iPhoneTiny on Twitter, or visit iPhoneTiny.com
With limited space on the home screen of my iPhone, only the best apps get any real estate. Well, Apple’s Camera app has had its spot officially usurped by Camera Genius ($1.99). And for good reason.
Published by CodeGoo, Camera Genius is full of extra camera features that leave you wondering, why didn’t Apple think of these? Notable favorites include digital zoom, six different line guides, a timed shutter, and most useful, a feature dubbed “Big Button” that turns your entire screen into a shutter button―super useful when you’re trying to take a self portrait with your friends or significant other. Other cool features include a burst mode, sound activated shutter, and anti-shake.
Ever wondered what your mouse pointer actually does all day? Ever wanted to have a way of tracking where it goes while you work, and exporting that information as a map of your daily mousings?
If you have, you need IOGraph.
It’s simple, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s brilliant: it watches your mouse movements for as long as you want it to, tracking the times when the pointer is moving rapidly and the times it spends standing still in one place.
It plots all this on a view of your computer’s desktop, showing the movements as fine lines and the stationary periods as enlarged blobs.
You can choose to have your map on a plain white background, or superimposed over a screenshot of your desktop. If you search Flickr for “iograph”, you’ll find a few people who’ve made some great images with it. Co-creator Anatoly Zenkov has some cool images made with IOGraph in his photostream.
(Via Styledeficit.)
Thoughts is a desktop notebook app for Mac OS X, designed to look and behave like a real world paper notebook or journal.
When you open the app you see a shelf where all your notebooks are stored. Notebooks open in a separate window and come complete with a turning-page visual effect.
The basic layout of every note page is the same; there are title and date fields at the top. The main note editing space has a nice-looking toolbar at the bottom where you can access all the formatting controls you’re likely to need.
Here in Arizona, the general rule is to keep our hands away from anything that sounds like it has even the remotest chance of being prickly or having fangs. Strange then, that my fingers seem magnetically drawn to the triadic snake emblem on the palmrest of Razer’s Orochi Bluetooth mouse. The little sleek black gadget is like crack for my hand.
The newly released Breathe Sleeve has been cleverly designed to let the heat produced by your laptop radiate through the ventilated walls of the sleeve. And heat, as we know, can be very detrimental to the life of our laptop battery.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Card Shark Solitaire Free, DigiDrummer Lite, Dog Piano Jr, easyBeats LE, Met Office, Revs!, Rudolph’s Kick n Fly, Spoke Groove Machine Free, Trace, and Twin Blades.
The Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer bag is designed specifically to get your MacBook through an airport security screening.
No more pulling out your MacBook and putting it in a plastic bin. With the Checkpoint Flyer, you can leave your MacBook inside the bag and breeze through the X-ray machine.
How? The Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer is a fold-out, “Checkpoint-Friendly” design, approved by the Transportation Security Administration.
The bag has three compartments designed to be folded flat on an X-ray scanner bed. Laid flat, the bag gives the X-ray operator a clear view of the MacBook and anything else inside the bag. There are no pockets or metal components to block the screener’s view. Pretty cool!
Note: It’s Bag Week on CultofMac.com. We’re checking out some of the latest and greatest bags on the market. Read all the bag reviews here.
So, you think you have the legs to take on Lance Armstrong. One way to go about it would be to race against his time in the latest ingenious use of Twitter, the Twitter Time Trial (and for the cycling-illiterate, a time trial is where riders leave the start gate one at a time, in an attempt to set the best time over the exact same course and distance).
But a better way would be to race Lance using TrailBlazer Challenge.
A few months ago we reviewed Osprey’s Flap Jack Courier laptop bag, and it scored a pristine five-turtleneck rating.
Well, turns out they actually come in two flavors, and we decided to put the Courier’s big brother — the Flap Jack Pack — through the Cult’s rigorous, uncompromising bag-testing procedures. The result was a demonstration of how applying the exact same design elements to a slightly different application can change things.
