Reviews - page 157

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.

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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.

The Brenthaven MacBook Messenger bag allows you, the customer, to design your own messenger bag. You can choose from more than ten designs to personalize the front flap.

Wait, it gets better.

You get two different designs, one for each side of the flap. Allowing you to change sides depending on your outfit! It’s almost like getting two bags for the price of one ($129.95). The bags fit the 13-inch MacBook Pro and 15-inch MacBook Pro.

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.

I’ve been a long-time user of messenger bags, ever since I was a bike courier here in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. I’ve been though a few of them, including an original Zo bag, but one of the best I’ve used is the Large Messenger Bag from Incase.

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.

I took the LA Besace bag with me to Macworld and boy am I glad I did!

This bag is an absolute pleasure to use. Its semicircular front opening is a superb design that makes everything highly visable and accessible. No more wasted time digging around for stuff in bags!

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.

I love the latest Horseman laptop bag from Crumpler.

The best thing about Crumpler’s Horseman Bag is its size, which I think is optimum for a messenger/laptop bag. I have owned messenger bags that are too big, really just a huge cavernous void for your stuff to rattle and roll around in.

The other end of the spectrum are bags that are too small, which I personally think look a little on the feminine side on a fully-grown man. Not The Horseman though.

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.

For the ultimate wow factor, bring the Knomo Bristol laptop bag to your next meeting or job interview. This well-made leather laptop bag is the ultimate accessory for white-collar workers.

The Bristol looks professional and so will you. Sold at Apple’s retail stores, this $150.00 bag is from Knomo, a posh new company from the West End of London.

Founded in 2004,  Knomo’s mission is to make accesories that are as stylish as they are functional. With the Bristol bag they’ve outdone themselves.

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.

The AR.Drone feels like the future of video games. A combination of a flying, hovering, and downright smart helicopter with four rotors and lots of sensors, and an iPhone augmented reality app, the Drone allows gamers to see the world through cameras on the chopper, to augmentedly dogfight with friends, and even to attack robots that only they can see. Basically, it was the hit of CES, and it shows an entire class of games that the iPhone makes possible.

On Friday, the AR.Drone from Parrot took the stage at the venerable TED Conference in Long Beach alongside everyone from Bill Gates and complexity theory genius Benoit Mandelbrot to Andrew Bird and Sarah Silverman. But before then, the little helicopter from the future hit northern California, making a cameo at MacWorld and, in a stroke of luck, briefly landing in my control on Thursday. And I came away more impressed by the actual device than I had been by video and demos of it.

Mango Tango’s Flavour laptop bag helps you to throw the smart, hot and professional look together in seconds. The bag is perfect for looking serious while also looking hot. With its generous dimensions of 15-1/4″ Wide, 11-1/4″ tall and 3″ deep, you will find almost any sized laptop will fit inside here but its lightweight construction won’t weigh you down.

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.

I must admit I love the BBP Hybrid Hampton bag, possibly my favorite of the year, in terms of style at least.

BBP’S Hybrid Hampton is the company’s flagship laptop bag featuring the Bak2Pak system that converts from a backback to a messenger bag in no time at all.

I’ve been on the lookout for a bag that is cool enough to be hip ‘with the kids’ while grown-up enough to take to business meetings without feeling like mutton dressed as lamb. And this bag is what I’ve been waiting for.

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.

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 Showtimes, Space Deadbeef, UFO Kidnapped, Ramp Champ, IMDB, Air Hockey, Valet Hero, RunKeeper Free and RunKeeper Pro.

Mobile Safari is a lovely browser but lacks a few features, and one of those is Find-in-page. If you want to find a specific piece of text on a very long web page, you have to resort to third-party fixes.

There are a variety of bookmarklets, alternative browsers and add-ons around, but this latest one is a bit different. Although it’s basically just a bookmarklet, it’s being distributed as an app on the App Store, for a fee of 99 cents.

It’s called Find in Page, and just from the title you know what it does. Here’s a simple demo video:

What separates this from other bookmarklets is the extra interface controls that appear above Safari’s built-in navigation controls when you’re using it. They let you flick between instances of your search term, or start a new search, without having to start all over again.

The app itself simply adds the bookmarklet to Mobile Safari’s bookmarks folder; in theory, you need only run it once to do this, then you can delete it from your device. But you might want to keep it around in case your bookmarks get edited or lost and you need to add it again.