Reviews - page 160

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.

So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?

Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.

But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.

Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.

Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.

(Via Merlin Mann.)

There aren’t many games on the iPhone platform that can match games on the big 64-bit boxes for production value — but Electronic Arts Mobile‘s Madden NFL 10 can, and does, fantastically. Unfortunately, it also has one gaping hole.

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the test of time, or is it a phonebooth’d Clark Kent.

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 Pastebot, 007: Top Agent, Jackson Pollock, Rhythm Racer, Judgement Day War, and TweakyBeat.

Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

Forgive me for banging on about Notational Velocity – but it’s such an awesome app that it deserves a place on your Mac. And this week it just got a little awesomer.

The latest version of NV includes native support for syncing with Simplenote, the iPhone app and web notes service.

As I noted the other week in a post about rival (and NV-inspired) notes app Nottingham, the great thing about Simplenote is that you get access to what I call an “ecosystem”. Your notes are safe – there’s copies of them in the cloud and inside your NV database. But because Simplenote encourages third-party apps, you’ll always have plenty of choice about how you access those notes from your computer.

NV has also undergone a few visual tweaks to smarten up its appearance, not least of them smart and funny new icon by Colin Cody. There are some more technical details about the new update on this blog post if you’re interested.

Having all my Notational Velocity notes automatically and wirelessly synced with my phone is just wonderful. If you need a similarly simple synced notes service, I encourage you to download Notational Velocity and sign up for a Simplenote account. You won’t regret it.

And now for something completely different.

I’ll admit, the first alarming thought that shot through my head when I stumbled across this vidclip on YouTube of Cult jefe Leander Kahney, was that he’d created it as fun-yet-terror-inducing way of emphasizing the “dead” part of the word “deadline” to Cult staff.

Turns out it was actually created by app developer Toga Pit — btw, cute marketing there, guys — to promote their new, maniacal-laughter-inducing iTouchMyFriends app, which turns images of your friends into manipulatable puppets. Just the evilness of the name ran shivers of anticipatory pleasure down my spine as I secured a copy to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.

What it is: Skimble is a fitness-tracking iPhone app that stands out from the crowd by keeping track of rock climbing, swimming, and even yoga.

Why it’s cool: Maria Ly created Skimble because she found no good tools for tracking the sports she had become passionate about in recent years. Basically, she’s become a very good rock climber in a very short time, and didn’t have a way to really track that progress and get a clear picture of how far she had come. She also does a lot of yoga, and, unsurprisingly, Nike+ doesn’t work so well for quantifying the impact of your Downward Dogs and Sun Salutations.

Fortunately, Maria’s a talented software engineer, so she was actually able to do something about it. And, as a rock climber (though one not quite so good as Ly), I can say that Skimble is just about perfect for tracking your climbing and bouldering efforts. I put into action at my local climbing emporium Mission Cliffs yesterday, and I was easily able to click a button to select the difficulty of the climb, the fashion in which I finished it, and a note (typically the name of the route). And as a result, I have a record of where I succeeded, where I failed, and where I maybe over-did it (that would be the late 5.12a I threw in).

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 Bebot, Buster Red, What’s On Reading, Amazon Mobile and Numeric Paranoia.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

Moodagent is one of those apps that seems like, at first glance, it’ll cure world hunger, or abruptly manifest all those single socks you’ve lost over the past seven years — a holy-crap,-I-just-gotta-have-this-app, app.

Sometimes I wake up from a dream where I’ve fashioned a majestic rock symphony. I’ll fumble around for my trusty digital recorder, groggily hum a few throaty bars and fall back asleep; then in the morning I find myself listening to something that sounds like a drowning donkey (or more frequently, I find I’ve forgotten to flip the “hold” switch).

Well, hell with that — for $3, I bought VoiceBand by WaveMachineLabs and turned my iPhone into a recording studio. What’s really cool is that all I have to do is vocalize into the mic and the app transforms my voice into a remarkably credible imitation of a musical instrument.