Get ready to splatter some grays, slice up some sectopods, and run screaming from some Chryssalids. Firaxis and 2K Games have today released XCOM: Enemy Unknown for the Mac, the official OS X port of last year’s best strategy game.
Another advantage of the Mac App Store, besides pausing downloads, safe uninstalls, and easy re-downloads of Mac OS X apps, is the safety of knowing that anything in the Mac App Store has been vetted by Apple.
One way your Mac makes sure you’re (relatively safe) from rogue apps is what’s called Gatekeeper. By default, this bit of software only allows you to install verified apps from the Mac App Store on your Mac. What if, however, you want to download software from a Mac developer who doesn’t distribute their software on the Mac App Store? You’ll need to bypass Gatekeeper in order to do so.
Here’s how to do that safely.
Using the Mac App Store is helpful in many ways, what with the ability to re-download apps, pause them during download, and the like.
There’s even an easy way to delete apps you’ve purchased from the Mac App Store these days, aside from the tried and true “drag app icon to trash” method we’ve all grown to know and love since OS X debuted oh so many years ago.
The Mac App Store is a great way to download apps to your Mac, as it takes care of the download, the install, and the post-install clean up for you. Sometimes, however, things can get a bit wonky, whether by accident or design, and you’ll want to go and download an app you think you’ve deleted.
Sometimes the Mac App Store will think the app you’ve deleted is still on your Mac. Or, you’ll want to re-download an app that’s behaving weirdly. When that happens, there will be a “Downloaded,” or “Installed” button there that won’t let you do anything.
While not all Mac App Store apps will work the same way, here are a few things to try out.
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is one of my favorite Sega games on iOS, and it’s making its way to the Mac thanks to Feral Interactive. The game will be available to download from the Mac App Store tomorrow, April 4, with support for Game Center and iCloud game syncing.
We’ve provided a couple of tips to help you prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you don’t want to, from a time-based app called Sleep No More to some Terminal magic that can do something similar. Unfortunately, both solutions are based on time. What if you want to keep your Mac from sleeping while it’s running a specific app, no matter how long it takes?
Free Mac app, Wimoweh, may be your answer. Check it out.
Going paperless is a goal of mine. I’d love to be able to keep all my important documents, like banking paperwork and medical records, all safely and cleanly tucked away into the digital ether. And, while productivity apps are fairly common in the Mac App store, when Apple made document-organizing app, doo, an Editor’s Choice app this week, well, it certainly piqued my interest.
As email continues to be fairly ubiquitous, especially in business settings, there’s a ton of information floating around in your Mail app that may or may not be useful to you to save and archive. Mail hides a lot of the complexity of email, and as such, it can be less than intuitive to grab all the info you might need from a given email, like headers, message text, the subject, sender, and recipients’ information, and so on.
If you want to save the info from your emails, Mail Clips just might be the answer for you, especially if you use Apple’s built-in Mail app in OS X, as it integrates right there.
One of the coolest things about the current version of iOS, and one I show every new iOS user, is the way you can double click the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar. This shows a horizontal list of all the recently closed apps on your iPhone, making switching between their saved states super easy.
If you want something similar on your Mac, then you have to try AppsBar, a $1.99 app in the Mac App Store that does the same thing, only at the top of your screen.
[polldaddy poll=6894415]
One of the more intriguing and, in our minds, controversial comments Tim Cook made during his interview at Goldman Sach’s conference:
“The innovation has moved away from PC development to the tablets and smartphones. Who is making PC apps now? No one, except the usual suspects.”
That’s a bold thing to say. When Cook refers to “PC development” the context of this question makes it clear the’s also referring to Mac development. That’s a strange comment to make when one of the legs on Apple’s stool of businesses is the Mac App Store, which is a lucrative business in its own right for Apple.
But is Tim Cook right? Have Mac and PC developers stopped innovating? Are all the innovators working on iPhone and iPad apps now? Take part in our poll, then please feel free to give us your thoughts in the comments.
EA’s Origin platform has today made its public debut on the Mac, proving gamers with a Steam alternative that currently boasts 48 downloadable titles from EA and third-party developers like Sega and Warner Brothers. Its initial catalog includes Batman: Arkham City, Star Wars, The Sims 3, LEGO Harry Potter, Dragon Age 2 and many more — plus any expansion packs.
Fantastical and 1Password, two essential applications for any Mac OS X user, have both had their price tags slashed by 50% for a limited time. Fantastical is now down from $19.99 to $9.99, while 1Password is down from $49.99 to $24.99. They’re both available to purchase from the Mac App Store now.
If you run a Mac server, check your Mac App Store updates: OS X Server 2.2.1 has arrived, bringing a panoply of new features and bug fixes.
Headlining is a new feature called Caching Server, which Apple claims will speed up Mac App Store downloads. Although the exact mechanism isn’t stated, it’s easy to imagine that what will happen is if one Mac connected to the server downloads an update, it’ll be cached locally for other Macs to download instantly.
There’s also a monitoring service for Time Machine, telling admins which Macs have backed themselves up and when. Wiki Server support for Retina MacBook Pros and a new Centralized Certificate Management interface are also new.
You can download OS X Server for any Mac running Mountain Lion at the link below.
Source: iTunes
Apple has introduced new short URLs for the App Store, making links to iOS apps and games much simpler to remember, and easier to read. Like its short URLs for the iTunes Store, you can now tell which app you have been linked to before you’ve even clicked on it. The new system has already been put to good use, making its debut during a Super Bowl commercial for the Star Trek app.
Wunderlist for Mac has today been updated to introduce a number of new features including the ability to email and print your to-do lists. It also adds contextual menus, makes performance and stability improvements, and adds additional languages.
We all know dealing with PDF files can be a pain. We’ve all had a PDF file that we’ve wanted to modify in some form or another and found ourselves only to be left with no real way to do it. But thanks to iPhone Hacks and PDFPen, those days are over.
PDFpen is your simple solution to making all of your PDF dreams come true. It offers a powerful editing capability – one that is unmatched at this price! With this Cult of Mac Deals offer, you can get PDFpen for only $30 (50% off) you can get this stellar piece of software that will become an integral part of your document workflow.
Things, one of the most popular task management applications for Mac, has had its price tag slashed in half until the end of January. It’s the first time Things has been reduced since it hit the Mac App Store in July 2011, but you can now pick it up for just $24.99. If you already use Things on iOS, it’s a must-have.
Regularly $0.99, Screen-Recorder is available now for free on the Mac App Store, letting you capture video of your Mac’s screen for no money at all.
Version 3 came out in January of last year, while the original app was released in May of 2011. The latest update brings some minor bug fixes to the table, along with the price drop to free.
Amazon has today announced that its in-app purchasing service, which is already available on the company’s Kindle Fire tablet and other Android devices, is coming to Mac, PC, and web games. This will allow developers to take advantage of Amazon’s service on those platforms to provide their customers with a new way to purchase additional content using their credit card or virtual Amazon currency.
While Amazon isn’t the first company to offer an in-app purchasing system, its service does come with some advantages that developers may not get from its rivals. One of those advantages is that their content will be available via Amazon.com.
Twitter has updated one its Mac applications today, but no, it’s not the Twitter app. It’s TweetDeck, which now offers a number of new features, and more than 90 fixes for previous issues. The update brings the native TweetDeck client in line with TweetDeck for Google Chrome.
Alfred is a beloved and widely-used keyboard shortcut utility for the Mac. It can do everything from launch an app in three keystrokes to quickly eject an attached disk.
Fans will be happy hear that Alfred 2.0 is in the works, and soon a completely new version of the app will be released with loads of shiny features. Private betas will be sent out in early 2013, and the folks at Alfred have already started teasing version 2.0.
Just as they did yesterday with the iOS App Store0, Apple today has launched their Best of 2012 awards for the Mac App Store… and this time, the clear winners are actually clear winners instead of head-scratching WTFs.
The critically acclaimed RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is now available on the Mac App Store. The development team promises that your choices really do matter, and will determine the fate of the people and kingdoms in the game. You’ll fight blood-thirsty monsters as protagonist Geralt of Rivia, as well as navigate politics, lies, and gorgeous environments.
Tweetbot is our favorite Twitter client for Mac. We love it so much, we’ve even included it in our Cult of Mac Advent Calendar. Even though the app is a bit costly at $19.99, it’s worth every penny because of the love and dedication poured into the app from the Tapbots team.
The latest version of Tweetbot for Mac was just released on the Mac App Store and it’s full of new features. The update includes some new global hot keys, better notifications, along with numerous other features and bug fixes.
Here are the full release notes on everything that’s new in Tweetbot for Mac 1.1:
Say you’re out and about and you find a link that you want to remember to download onto your desktop once you get home. You could copy the URL to Notepad, email it to yourself, or add the page to Pocket, but you’re probably going to forget to do it later or lose the info.
A new utility called Transloader, created by Matthias Gansrigler, makes such situations easier to manage by allowing iPhone and iPad users to remotely download URLs to their Mac when they’re away from the house.
