Rob LeFebvre - page 58

Here at Cult of Mac, we’re just starting our coverage of iOS and Mac games, as our fearless leader Leander told you in the publisher’s letter for the inaugural edition of our Newsstand magazine.

Since we’re just starting up, it’s pretty easy to get our attention when it comes to promotional emails and review requests. While we can’t review all the games we’re sent, we do read all the promotional emails that you’re sending our way.

Even still, we’d be lucky to review even a minuscule percentage of games we get requests for, so there are a few things that you can do to guarantee that we’ll take a closer look. There are a few more than you can do to make sure we don’t look much closer, too.

Here’s a list of both extremes, to help guide you on your way to getting coverage on Cult of Mac.

With this latest Halloween-flavored update, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is bringing vampires and werewolves to its acclaimed tower defense gameplay in a new update, entitled Shadowmoon.

You’ll get three brand spankin’ new levels to defend your base against nine new enemy types, including scary vampires and vicious werewolves (oh my!). The update will go live on All Hallow’s Eve itself, so get ready for some Halloween fun after you fill your pillow cases full of loot from your local neighborhood.

Here’s the brand new trailer to whet your appetite.

You know all those menubar items in the upper right hand corner of your Mac’s screen? The ones that–from the right–probably show the Notification Center, Spotlight, your user name, the date and time, your battery level, and so on?

Did you know you could move those things around (most of them, anyway)? Did you know you could even take some of them off of the menubar altogether? Here’s how.

I just love tower defense games. I also love Steampunk. Chillingo has just published a game, developed by DreamGate, that combines both great tastes into one great game.

In contrast to a traditional tower defense game, where you typically place towers along a fixed path to keep the bad guys from getting to your base, Steampunk Tower gets you to build up your tower’s defenses with turrets like machine guns and cannons. The creeps come at you from both sides, and it’s up to you to cleverly manage your monetary and weaponry resources to keep them from destroying your beautiful, beautiful tower.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s Halloween-themed Costume Quest from Double Fine Productions. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.

There are a ton of apps out there, both free and paid, that may or may not be worth your time and money.

Why waste either one? With over 600,000 apps to choose from, finding the most interesting and worthwhile apps is, at best, a tricky activity and, at worst, a fool’s errand.

Might as well let us find the cool ones for you.

Here are a few of the favorites to come across our home screens this week —  including a running app, PumaTrac, photography apps Spark Camera and Perfect Shot and more.

Check ’em out:

PumaTrac – Health & Fitness – Free

For a change of pace from bloated running apps, try PumaTrac. It’s made just for runners, and it will track distance, pace, and calories burned over time. It also keeps a log of outside conditions like weather, day of the week, and location as well as music choices and social media activity to help you figure out how these things affect your running performance. Share your routes with your running buddies, as well, or just find routes other locals are using to keep your routine fresh. Oh, and it supports the Pebble watch, too.

PumaTrac


Spark Camera – Photo & Video – $1.99

If you’ve played with Vine, you’ll get Spark Camera right away. Here you get a 30-second limit for your mini video masterpiece. Adding a soundtrack via  your iTunes library  is also super easy and so is sharing with your friends across social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as via email and SMS. Just press and hold anywhere to record 720 p HD video then release to stop recording. Flip through a variety of live filter effects and then tap the note symbol to choose music.

Spark Camera


Listastic – Productivity – free

Listastic is a great little collaborative to-do list app with an intuitive interface that’s easy on the eyes. It’s simple to use, too, so you can share a grocery list with a roommate or life partner, a gift list with friends and family, or plan a project at work with a group of co-workers. You can become a Listastic premium member for a small fee, which lets you share any list with other Listastic members, free or paid. Free members can use Listastic on their own device, or join and edit shared lists from premium members. New users get a free two-week trial of Premium service, as well.

Listastic


WherezMyStuff – Utilities – $0.99

Aside from the unfortunate spelling of the name, WherezMyStuff is pretty handy. I have a habit of putting things away safely only to discover, many months later, that my perfect hiding place is unknown to even me.  WherezMyStuff is a mini-inventory to prevent this common mind melt. You simply name the item, type in (or record via the mic) where you’re putting it, and snap a picture. When you want to find your stuff again, tap the name or search and voila’ your treasures are found.

WherezMyStuff 


Perfect Shot – Photo & Video – $0.99

Ever taken a picture of a large group of people? It’s a huge a pain to get them all to smile at the same time, let alone refrain from blinking. Perfect Shot aims to make sure everyone in your group photo is smiling and their eyes are open with its face-detection technology. Aim your iPhone at the happy group and Perfect Shot will detect every face in the group choose the right moment and take the perfect picture–you don’t even have to press a button. Automagical, indeed.

Perfect Shot

When we share our innermost thoughts on a blog, send pictures of loved ones through Facebook, or even divulge the unhealthy foods we ate for dinner from our iPhone, we trust the companies that run those services with our data. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Companies like Dropbox, AT&T, Foursquare, and Linked In.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), initially funded by three big donors in 1990 including Apple’s own Steve Wozniak, published its third yearly report on the best and worst of these companies.

The results may surprise you: Apple has one of the worst scores on the chart.

The Cupertino company gets only one star – on par with internet behemoth Yahoo and telcom giant AT&T – and that was awarded for fighting for privacy rights in congress. (It’s worth noting that Yahoo’s one star gets an extra sparkly patina due to the company’s “silent battle for user privacy” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

The report examined the public policies of major internet companies, including service providers, cloud storage companies, blogging platforms, social networking sites, and the like, to figure out whether they were committed to backing us up when our own government wants access to our data. The point of the report is to motivate companies to be more transparent, and do better.

EFF’s scorecard was released in the spring, before NSA and PRISM were in the spotlight, but the criteria were prescient.

Companies were rated by whether they:

• Require a warrant for content of communications.
• Tell users about government data requests.
• Publish transparency reports.
• Publish law enforcement guidelines.
• Fight for users’ privacy rights in courts.
• Fight for users’ privacy in Congress.

Apple earned its lone star for joining the Digital Due Process Coalition. However it does not require a warrant, tell users about government data requests, publish transparent reports or law enforcement guidelines, nor does it fight for users’ privacy rights in court.

Compare this to a company like Twitter, which does all of these things. The microblogging service scores favorably across all the EFF categories, as does internet provider Sonic.net.

Google rates a five out of six, falling short a star for not telling users about government access requests; Dropbox ranks the same, demoted a star for not fighting for users’ privacy rights in court.

Overall, it’s great to know how private our communications are. (Or not, as the case may be.) Reports like this one are a step towards transparency and understanding of our own ability to interact privately, at least within the realm of the law. If a company we trust is cavalier about our own data, perhaps we should contact them and ask them why they aren’t scoring so well. Maybe the companies will make some changes in policy, or maybe they’ll lose some customers when they don’t.

Either way, if privacy is important to you, you can see above exactly how important it isn’t, and the companies it isn’t important to.

You can download the full PDF report here.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

The new mobile Safari app built in to iOS 7 has a whole new multi-windowed interface, which allows for a near limitless number of windows that you can open at once. Simply hit the icon in the far right-hand bottom corner to bring up the “tabs” interface, and then tap the big central Plus button to add a new page to the list.

But what about closing those windows? They’ve got an X icon in the upper left of each tab/window, but the X is super tiny, and not always easy to tap. Sometimes I end up activating a window instead of closing it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Let’s talk about getting around the web quickly. Most likely, you’re using Safari or Chrome on the Mac to surf the information superhighway, and these modern browsers use tabs to open more than one window onto the world wide web at the same time, right?

You probably also have a series of oft-accessed bookmarks that you keep in the toolbar just above the web page and just below the address or URL bar.

Popping back and forth between tabs, or opening up new bookmarks is fairly easy with the mouse, for sure, but here’s a faster way that lets you keep your hands on the keyboard.

Apple just released a new firmware update for mid-2012 MacBook Air owners. The release notes say that Apple recently discovered that a small percentage of flash storage drives in these models may have an issue that could cause data loss.

The update, available here, tests your drive and should, if there’s a problem, install new firmware to prevent the issue from happening to you.

If your drive can’t be updated, Apple will replace it free of charge. That’s big news.

The only reason I picked up Disco Bees to play today was the name. I’m really rather tired of the match-three dynamic, but I figured cute bees and disco music was a good combo to try, regardless.

What I found was a compelling match-three game that does indeed have the same mechanics as many other free-to-play matching games, like Candy Crush or Dragon Academy. In addition, however, it’s got amazingly adorable dancing bees and a killer soundtrack that does fantastic justice to the disco genre without using licensed music.

Did I mention cute dancing bees? You really need more? Fine.

Wondering what Spacetime Games is up to these days? After a successful launch of free-to-play Battle Dragons this past August, the team has turned its attention to a new combat strategy game with the same branding: Battle Command!

In this new game, you’ll take command of a small group of soldiers and try and shape them into a crack team of military force. You’ll collect resources, construct bases, recruit troops, form alliances, and fight on the battlefield (obviously). Battle Command! will have a bunch of single player missions to help hone your skills, and then some serious global multiplayer, something Spacetime has been getting right for years.

iOS 7 brings a ton of visual and interface changes to our favorite smart phone, not all of them easily intuited from general use.

One of these is the new fullscreen mobile Safari. The web browser’s address bar and toolbar (at the bottom) disappears when you’re browsing, and you might have figured out how to bring it back by accident, but not in a systematic way.

Nothing sucks the joy out of using a smartphone than not really being sure how to do something, so here are three ways to re-appear that sucker on your iPhone.

When an app gets stuck on my Mac, I typically force quit it by hitting Command-Option-Escape, and then clicking on the app that’s frozen, then hitting the OK button. Then, I hit the “are you sure” dialog button that invariably pops up. It’s a several step process, but I figured that was the price for having multi-tasking that no longer takes down my whole machine.

Turns out, there’s a quicker way to do that right from the Apple Menu. Here’s how.

If there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s Angry Birds, am I right? No?

Well, either way, it doesn’t matter: you’re getting more of them. Rovio just announced the pending release of Angry Birds: Go!, a kart racing iOS game set to go live on the App Store December 11, 2013, which is–not too coincidentally–the Finnish studio’s fourth birthday birdday.

Gaming headsets are quite the rage lately, with products from Turtle Beach, Logitech, and Sony gracing any decent gaming aisle at your favorite retailer.

SteelSeries has a long history of providing high quality gaming peripherals, like mice, keyboards, and controllers, for the high-end PC gaming market. They’ve recently made some fantastic forays into iOS gaming peripherals, as well, like the SteelSeries Free controller for iPad and iPhone.

These Siberia Elites, then, have a fantastic pedigree at a fairly competitive price, and I’ve fallen in love with their sound, build quality, and fancy extras.

Love Dropbox, but hate the mobile app on your iPhone? Join the club; while having access to my Dropbox folder on all of my iOS devices is a fantastic productivity booster, the user experience of the default app is pretty bare bones.

What’s a Dropbox loving tech writer to do, then, to enjoy his Dropbox experience even more? Boxie thinks it has the answer, with a brand new Dropbox client app. Boxie connects to Dropbox, lets you access and use all the files in there, and promises to be much prettier and intuitive than the official app.

Sounds good, right?

In case you’re not from around here, you should know that I’m a huge fan of Scottish game developer Lucky Frame, what with their weird, wonderful visual and musical sensibilities that result in games like Pugs Luv Beats and Gentlemen!, a Victorian-themed Joust-like game.

They’ve just announced that one of their most award-winning games, Bad Hotel, is coming to the Mac and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.

Dan Whisenhunt was visibly moved when speaking of his former employer Steve Jobs in front of the Cupertino City Council.

“A little more than two years ago, Steve shared his excitement about this project,” said Whisenhunt, Apple’s director of real estate and facilities, his voice breaking slightly. “It’s a campus to inspire innovation and collaboration between some of the finest engineers in the world.”

Just 10 days after the anniversary of the co-founder’s death, the giant “spaceship” campus is closer to landing in the city of Cupertino, which has a population of just over 60,000.

Whisenhunt’s speech enlivened a meeting that dragged on over four-and-a-half-hours–much longer than usual, Mayor Orrin Mahoney said–where locals fretted over the minutia of every intersection that might tangle the already clogged Silicon Valley commute. In the end, the council unanimously voted to OK the project. It still has one more hurdle to clear before Apple can break ground.

I remember back in the olden, pre-OS X days, when you’d need to use a utility like Stuffit to compress a bunch of files together into one archive, shedding excess data and making it easier to get those files to your recipient due to much smaller bandwidth back then.

That’s not to say it’s not a valuable strategy, even with today’s cloud infrastructure. Getting a bunch of files into one archive makes the logistics of sending someone a ton of files a lot easier, even if there’s less of a need to compress them for bandwidth reasons.

Here’s how to do just that, using the tools already built into your OS X Mac.

Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

LitBound has made the jump from Android, and is now available on iOS. If you’re a fan of books, or just a library geek at heart, this game offers you hours of trivia fun, testing your knowledge of best sellers, great works of literature, children’s books, and genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. Oh, yes, and movies.

When you open up a new Finder window, at least in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, you’ll see a snapshot of all the files on your Mac. Apple calls this view, “All My Files,” and it’s a good way to just see what you have on your Mac.

It’s also an annoying view if you’re looking for stuff on your Desktop or Documents. If you want to change the default view for any new Finder windows, here’s how.

Ok, I’ll admit it; I occasionally use Siri in the car. It’s not a perfectly hands-free system, but it is great to be able to send a quick text to let someone know I’m running late without touching the phone too much.

The other day, though, I was sitting in the car at my son’s school, waiting for the final bell to go in and get him from class. I had my iPhone set up in the car, and was sending a text to a friend. I realized that somehow, in the transition to iOS 7, I no longer had access to the Emoji keyboard.

As the iPhone was propped in it’s in-car holder (a Breffo spiderpodium), I just activated Siri, out of habit.

The now 14-year-old app developer we introduced to you last year, Nicholas G, has just released a second app, putting all of us adults to shame yet again.

This year, Nicholas has put together a rather impressive looking tip calculator that makes it super easy to figure out an accurate tip without all that pesky math.

Called Quick Tips!! (yes, the exclamation marks are part of the charm), Nicholas’ latest app uses all the visual style of iOS 7 and it looks to be pretty as well as functional.