Mac App Store - page 7

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

So what’s behind the door on Friday the 7th? Tweetbot for Mac, the best (and most expensive) Twitter client on the Mac App Store!

Pocket brought us a terrific Mac app back in October, and just over a month on, it’s already back with a new update. This one introduces a nice stack of new features, including native Twitter and Facebook support for those running OS X Mountain Lion, new keyboard shortcuts, better Evernote sharing, and more.

Twitter may have given up on its official Mac client, which hasn’t seen an update in well over 18 months, but one third-party developer hasn’t. Deniz Mert Edincik, an iOS developer from Turkey, has taken it upon himself to patch the application to provide support for Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pros.

I have always believed that if Apple designed a Photoshop competitor, it would be something like Pixelmator: clean, powerful, and intuitive. While Photoshop will set you back hundreds of dollars, Pixelmator can normally be purchased for only $30 in the Mac App Store.

Not only is price a huge factor, but Pixelmator is also updated more aggressively than Photoshop. For example, Pixelmator looks great on the new MacBook Pro’s amazing Retina display, but Adobe still hasn’t Retina-ized most of its Creative Suite.

The folks who make Pixelmator have announced a special holiday discount. For a limited time, the image editor is being sold for 50% off!

If you haven’t played Rochard, yet, you might want to check this out. The gravity-bending, scifi adventuring, sarcastic-remark making space mechanic with a gravity gun is on the Mac for a mere $6.99. The latest update features iCloud support as well as some new language localizations, like Russian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech and Turkish.

You can play Rochard with the keyboard and mouse, hook up a bluetooth PS3 controller, or grab a wired Xbox 360 controller to get your puzzle-solving, Metroid-Castlevania groove on.

We’ve been talking about it for several weeks, and today, Evernote 5 makes its public debut on the Mac — exactly a week after touching down on iOS. This mammoth update brings over 100 new features, in addition to a swanky new user interface. The whole thing has been “re-imagined” to make it more accessible and more useful than ever before.

AirDrop is a pretty slick app that was first available in OS X Lion. It basically allows any Mac see any other Mac with the protocol enabled on the network, with no configuration or knowledge of file sharing needed. You just drop a file onto any available AirDrop icon, and your file heads over to that user’s Mac. No muss, no fuss, just simple.

At least, that’s the concept. In reality, I’ve not seen AirDrop ever work that easily. Luckily, there’s an alternative that’s even simpler: Any Send, a free Mac app that lets you send files to any other Mac using WiFi.

Some of the biggest and best games available via the Mac App Store have seen some big reductions today, with BioShock 2 down to just $12, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic, Galaxy on Fire 2, and Tomb Raider: Underworld down to less than $10.

Aspyr Media has issued an update to Call of Duty: Black Ops for the Mac, which hit the Mac App Store back in October, that introduces the Annihilation & Escalation DLC bundle. It’s available to download now via an in-app purchase, which is priced at $24.99.

Apple has released a software update that’s recommended for all MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros released in June 2012 — including the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. In addition to graphics performance and reliability enhancements, the update promises to improve compatibility with some USB devices.

The year was 1983. Arcades were the primary way I played video games, unless you count the Magnavox Odyssey pong clone sitting on our TV at home. I didn’t.

I remember stepping into the local arcade, a pocket full of quarters, and seeing this…amazing game. It was like a animated movie! The characters moved fluidly! I stepped forward.

Dragon’s Lair had my entire pocket of quarters within 30 minutes.

Now we can all relive the glory without the quarters via the Mac, as Dragon’s Lair comes out for the Mac platform tomorrow, November 8, 2012 for $9.99.

Ever wanted a quick-and-easy way to slap a watermark on a digital photo, so that no pesky bloggers can claim it as their own without permission? Ever wanted to slap a watermark on dozens of photos at a time? Image Agent might help.

Realmac Software has today announced Clear for Mac, a desktop version of its wonderful to-do app. It’s coming on November 8 alongside a big update to the iPhone app, which will add iCloud syncing between both platforms, and more.

Echofon has announced that it will be “phasing out” its desktop applications for Mac, Windows, and Firefox this fall to focus on its mobile apps for iOS and other platforms. Desktop apps will continue to function normally in the “immediate future,” Echofon says, but it’s not planning any further updates for the popular Twitter client.

OS X developers are reportedly becoming frustrated with the lengthy delay they must endure to have their applications approved for the Mac App Store. Average wait times have increased to 27 days over the past month, whereas approval for the iOS App Store takes just 7 days on average. Some are blaming the influx of iOS updates for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, but claim that Apple should be over the worst of it by now.

Double Fine is putting several fantastic games on sale today, from Stacking and Brutal Legend on consoles to Iron Brigade on Steam.

But the best news of all is that the company has also dropped the price of one of the best games of all time, Psychonauts, to a mere five dollars. Well, $4.99 to be exact. How can this be?

Let’s face it: the Mac App Store, and the iTunes App Store that it’s modeled on, just isn’t made for comparing apps. Let’s say you want to find the best note taking app for your Mac. You can launch the Mac App Store, search for note taking apps, and see one at a time. If you want to look at more than one, you end up clicking the back button endlessly.

Sometimes it’s just better to be able to flip through a bunch of apps at once. If only the App Stores had tabbed browsing. Luckily, you can browse more than one app at once with a bit of a workaround and your web browser.

The Mac App store provides a nice, simple, graphical way to keep your Mac updated with the latest software, letting you know when system updates as well as Apple and third-party apps have a new update to be downloaded and installed.

If you don’t want to use the Mac App store, though, you can use the Terminal app along with some Terminal commands to do the same thing. When would you use this? Well, maybe when the Mac App store gets wonky, or if you’re not at the current Mac, and want to securely and remotely administer the Mac in question, that’s when.

It’s fairly simple. Here’s how.

After updating iPhoto for iOS on Wednesday to add iOS 6 support and a whole host of new features, Apple has shown a little love to iPhoto for Mac. Version 9.4 is available to download from the Mac App Store now, and it comes with support for the Shared Photo Streams introduced in iOS 6, Facebook comments, and more.

After unveiling its latest Kindle lineup last week, Amazon has updated its Kindle app for Mac OS X to introduce support for new books that employ the Kindle 8 format. It also adds OS X Lion gestures and a number of improvements.

Notefile, a popular note-taking app for iOS, developed by Junecloud, has made the leap to Mac. Priced at $4.99 in the Mac App Store, the app offers cross-platform sync between your Mac and iOS devices, high-resolution artwork for the Retina MacBook, and all the features you’ve been enjoying on iOS.

Apple has seeded a new OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 build (12C35) to participants in its AppleSeed program, continuing its testing of Facebook integration. Though it states that there are no known issues with this update, the Cupertino company is also asking users to focus on Messages, Game Center, Safari, and Reminders.

Sunside Games announced that their well-received iOS game, Crow, is coming to the Mac platform this Thursday, August 30, 2012. Crow for the Mac will have Game Center support, including leaderboards and achievements, as well as high rez graphics and a remastered soundtrack.

“Crow has had an incredibly successful run so far on the App Store. It’s a really unique immersive experience and it demonstrates that there is a desire for something fun and different. We’re really excited to bring this experience to the Mac,” said Richard Cowgill, CEO of Sunside, Inc.

Display Menu is a simple yet incredibly handy little app that just hit the Mac App Store. It allows you to quickly switch display resolutions and change display settings from your Mac’s menu bar — negating the need to navigate the System Preferences options — for free.

I listen to music from a number of places while I’m working. Most of the time it comes from Spotify, but I’ll also call on albums or songs I’ve purchased from iTunes, or check out songs Spotify doesn’t have on YouTube. It’s kind of a pain switching between the three, but there’s never been a better solution.

Until now. Meet CloudPlay, a fantastic little app that sits in your Mac’s menu bar and pulls music from all kinds of sources, including iTunes, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Internet radio stations.