Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free

Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.

Calming Breath

Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.

The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.

After finally getting BBM on your iPhone this week, you may have upgraded to iOS 7.0.3 to find it no longer works properly. One of the fonts BlackBerry uses in its app is no longer supported by Apple, causing the app to crash when you open existing chats. But there is a way around it.

Ember, the awesome scrapbooking tool for Mac from Realmac Software, has been updated to support Apple’s new OS X Mavericks update. It also comes with “two huge new features,” including the ability to search for colors, and the option to store your Ember library in iCloud.

This post is brought to you by Digiarty, creator of MacX DVD Ripper Pro.

Gonna watch some scary movies this Halloween? This week, leading multimedia software designer Digiarty is giving away for free its ultimate DVD ripper for Mac, MacX DVD Ripper Pro. You can rip all your horror DVDs to just about any file format for OS X and play your video nasties on any mobile device such as iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, Apple TV, or Android. And the MacX DVD Ripper Pro can rip all the latest encrypted and copy-protected DVDs as easily as a ghost can walk through a wall! This great offer lasts till November 4 — read on for details….

With Apple disrupting the entire desktop operating system business by releasing OS X Mavericks for free, there is still at least one Mac operating system that Apple is still selling. Even more curiously, it’s a variant on OS X Mavericks… OS X Server for Mavericks.

One of the most common criticisms you hear of Apple’s iPad line is that they are expensive compared to the competition. When the iPad mini first came out, for example, it was widely criticized for its entry-level price of $329, with many saying it couldn’t succeed unless it was under $249.

Obviously, such predictions were laughably wrong. But Apple is now selling a $249 iPad mini: a refurbished one!

In a fit of either obliviousness or hubris, Evernote yesterday released an update to its iOS app in the middle of some other clearly less-important news. The update is actually pretty solid, although not nearly as radical as the last one which revamped the entire interface for the second time in less than a year.

Just as night follows day, death follows taxes and blissful sleep follows energetic coitus, so a new iPad is always followed by a new case. And for me that case might just be Grove’s gorgeous new Wood Smart Case for the mini and the new iPad Air.

Apple’s pro apps aren’t being left out of the update-a-thon surrounding the launch of new iPads and Macs. Aperture has just gotten bumped to v3.5, and gets some nice new features, including full Photo Stream support and integrated Apple Maps.