Ever faced with one of those situations where you need to give out your phone number, but you feel a bit iffy about doing it? RingShuffle is a free app that’s ideal to have on your iPhone for exactly those occasions.
Smule’s been racking up the hits with apps like Ocarina and I Am T-Pain. Their latest is called MadPad, and like the others, it’s well-polished, cooler than an arctic popsicle and impossible to put down. And today, it’s free.
One of my first favorite portable video games was a boxing game on — of all platforms — a Casio calculator (that’s right — you think your life’s tough, try living in a world where the most entertaining handheld a kid can play with is a calculator). The third-person perspective of Manny Pacquiao: Pound for Pound, a new iOS title that’s expected to be released soon (pending approval by Apple), reminds me of that game. But with features like swiping for attacks, customizable outfits and being able to level attributes, it’s bound to be, well, a knockout.
When Apple announced iCloud, it also announced the end of MobileMe web hosting.
If you’re among the small community of iWeb/MobileMe users who’ve been wondering what to do when MobileMe finally gets switched off next June, I suggest you take a look at Sandvox as one possible replacement.
If you’ve been using a Mac for any real length of time, you probably know Retrospect. They’ve been releasing great backup tools to Mac users since the Metazoic age of MacOS 6, and despite coming under the thrall of various corporate overlords from time to time, Retrospect’s still hard at work making great software… and Retrospect 9 for Mac might be their best backup client yet.
What’s new? Growl notifications and AES-256 encryption, for one, making Prospect 9 a corporate level backup solution. Task workflows and WebDAV support are now in the mix, as well as a network backup option supporting all flavors of machines, including Mac, Linux and Windows, and the whole software package has gotten a shot in the arm to run even faster and prettier than ever before.
How much? $129 for five users, or $479 for a single-server, 20 seat license. Pay $1699 and use it on as many servers and as many users as you want. Or just download the free trial.
A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.
Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.
Planetary isn’t the most practical iPad app, but it’s absolutely one of the prettiest. The app reads your iTunes collection, then forms a gorgeous miniature galaxy — complete with elegantly animated solar flares — on your iPad, where the suns, orbiting planets and moons all represent artists, albums and songs respectively.
Wizardry has to be one of the longest lived franchises in gaming history — and is especially beloved by us, because the dungeon RPG’s first-ever appearance was on an Apple II. Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls will be the newest title in the 30-odd-year lineage when it debuts on November 3 for the iPhone.
We reported yesterday that our favorite Photoshop-on-a-budget app, Pixelmator, was hitting the big two point oh today, and so it has.
It’s available now on the Mac App Store as a free upgrade to previous users, or a $29.99 purchase new.
The biggest additions to Pixelmator 2.0 are content-aware fill, vector drawing and editing tools, wrinkle, blemish and damage repair tools for photos, new retouching tools such as smudge, sponge, burn, and more. In addition, Pixelmator 2.0 gets full OS X Lion support, a new interface and some impressive speed and stability improvements.
For 90% of us, Pixelmator was already a better and cheaper replacement for the industry standard, Adobe PhotoShop. With 2.0, closes the gap another few percent, and becomes even more of a no-brainer to recommend to just about everybody.
Let’s face it: Chess is pretty geeky. Then again, so is the iPad (c’mon, it is). Blend the two though, and you’ve got…well, let’s just say that playing chess on an iPad at your local coffee hangout is a Wookie’s fingernail-width less geeky than insert-hyperbolic-geek-stereotype-here.
Who cares though; with its portability, large screen and potential to reach all 600 million chess players around the world, the iPad is the ultimate gadget for playing electronic chess, and the free Social Chess app is the way to play.
Cult of Mac Deals is back with an all new deal for you. Ever thought about getting a scanner, but held back because of size and cost? Do you have a Mac and a digital camera?
Then good news! Prizmo for Mac offers a great solution to accomplish your scanning needs without the extra hardware.
So, what can Prizmo do for you?
Well for starters, it performs excellent OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning on your books, magazines, receipts, invoices or any other document turning them into data-rich spotlight scannable files. Beyond OCR scanning, Prizmo can also completely alter the perspective of any photograph.
Everyone wants to be an amazing photographer now days. That’s the reason why Apple updated the iPhone’s camera right? Unfortunately, taking breathtaking photos isn’t as easy as buying the new iPhone 4S and taking random pictures of the sun behind trees changing colors with the season. Don’t worry though, Cult of Mac is here to help you take your photography skills to the next level.
Whether you’re wanting to make a serious dent in the photography universe, or just trying to impress your friends on Instagram and Facebook, we got three amazing apps that will pour life into your photos. Best of all, the Mac Photo Effects FamilyPack Bundle gives you five licenses of FX Photo Studio Pro and five copies of ColorSplash Studio so you can spread the joy and give a couple copies to your friends so their pictures can look great too.
So what all is in this bundle worth $215 that you can get for $35?
If you’ve got a bicycle and an iPhone/iPt, here’s a pretty interesting development: iBike, who earlier this year introduced a $200-plus kit that turned the iPhone into a sensor-linked cycling computer, has just released a $70 iPhone cycling package for riders who aren’t Gu-fueled cycling nuts; and it includes what looks like a stellar — and free — cycling app.
So, you’re the next Ansel Adams, eh? Well, dear reader, then we have a beauty of a deal for you this week. Say hello to the Mac Photo Effects Mini-Bundle!
This bundle is a pretty special one, so we’ll break this down easy for you. You get three cutting-edge Mac Photography Apps for less than the price of just one:
The newest app to grace the Deals.CultofMac.com hub is a nifty little tool called Disk Drill Pro. This is a sort of app that you hope you never have to use, but is a lifesaver when it’s called to the line of duty. In almost any situation Disk Drill Pro can assist in recovering lost data on your Mac. It has patented technology to deep-scan your hard drive and find files you thought were gone forever. Currently, the app is on sale at deals.cultofmac.com for $30 (that’s 66% off its usual $89 price-tag).
Today we’re holding a giveaway for 2 app codes of Disk Drill Pro. You have to actually play to win the giveaway though, so here are the rules for the contest:
This is it, folks, we’re here: the future. Remember Dave talking to HAL back in Kubrick’s lethargic masterpiece? It’s real.
Sometimes you just want to write something down. Some people would call this process “journaling,” or even “keeping a diary.” In reality, the whole concept of keeping a journal or diary is about recording memories and thoughts. It’s therapeutic. It’s comforting.
Day One by Bloom Built is a beautiful and simple app for journaling on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The app balances features with simplicity to bring you an excellent environment for writing on a daily basis.
Ever since Apple released Lion as a download from the Mac App Store, boxed software has been on the endangered species list. Now, the Cupertino, Calif. company tells educators only two titles will be available as boxed software.
Over a year ago, when Skype’s iOS app was finally upgraded with the ability to work as a backgrounded app, it was a big step in the direction of untethering voice communications from the telcoms. Today marks the next big step in that direction, as both Skype’s iPhone and iPad app add Bluetooth support.
Yes WordPress, you’ve finally given the WP iOS app a bionic injection — an upgrade that’ll make it an order of magnitude more useful (certainly for bloggers like me, anyway). Finally, I have a whole row of commands to easily insert links, quote marks and the like. But why did it take so long?
Most of us work, right? Because Apple makes great stuff, but most of it isn’t free. Which means you need money, and that means you’ll need to get paid for your time. That’s where HoursTracker Lite, and its iPad equivalent, HoursTracker HD Lite, come in handy.
I was seriously shocked when I saw this: Snapseed, probably the most elegant iOS photo editing app at the App Store, has been knocked down from $5 — to zero. It’s free.
Earlier today Microsoft released updates for the Mac versions of Office 2008 and 2011 that address some issues with security, stability, and reliability. Users of these versions of Microsoft Office should immediately update their software.
I tend to travel a fair bit, and when I’m not flopping down on friends’ couches (which happens more than I should probably admit — thanks guys), I often turn to Bill Shatner’s pugnacious figure and punch it, firing up the Priceline app to find a killer deal. And now that it’s a universal app, it’s even better on the iPad.
I’ve worked at a few desks that used Cisco VoIP phones (one in the Wired.com offices among them); but something like the new Invoxia NVX 610 iPhone-controlled conference phone may eventually turn conventional handsets — even VoIP ones — into relics.