Last night I tweeted Nintendo games meeting iOS’ multi-touch capabilities would be my personal geek dream come true. Ok, that’s never going to happen (well, at least not “officially”) but we can dream, right? We’re dreamers, geeks, old Nintendo and Apple fanboys. Call us what you want, but Nintendo games are the best thing that ever happened to us in the late ’80s and ’90s. Read more
Gorillaz Will Release Their iPad Album For Free On Christmas
Remember when Damon Albarn announced the upcoming Gorillaz album had been entirely recorded and produced on his iPad? Well, he wasn’t joking. Not at all. The Blur & “The Good, the Bad & the Queen” frontman, cartoon band Gorillaz all-star and, you guessed it, producer and songwriter told the Courier Mail that the album is real, it’s coming out for free on Christmas, and a music video will be released on Christmas Eve.
Seems like Gorillaz fans are going to have a great time come Christmas this year: Albarn wanted to make sure that people knew the album was entirely recorded on the tablet, with no studio equipment being used to realize it. We do wonder, though, how mixing and mastering was done on the iPad.
I wanted to make sure that it came out at the end of the tour because I don’t want anyone to think I’d tampered with it.
We believe you, Damon. We’ll be waiting for the album to show up on our MacBooks under the Christmas tree. And if the results will be poor and not as great as Plastic Beach, hey – you still have a Country House to spend your retirement days hiding from the angry fans. [via]
Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift Now Available - Free and Universal
Even if we don’t talk games much, we have our favorite gems from the App Store. Cut the Rope, addictive puzzle game by ZeptoLab, is surely one of them: available both on the iPhone and iPad featuring beautiful and colorful graphics, in CtR you’ll have to literally “cut ropes” to let a tiny frog reach candies. Something like that. Still, it’s addictive, and that should be enough.
ZeptoLab today released a Christmas-themed version of the app, which features new levels and a “new stocking feature”. Most of all, the app is available for free in the App Store and it’s universal. It’s a great deal offered by publisher Chillingo you sure can’t miss, so head over the App Store and download it now.
With all the games released this week (Infinity Blade, anyone?), Cut the Rope is another little masterpiece to add to your weekend game list.
Dropkick: Simple To-Do List App With Cloud Sync
You know we love OmniFocus here at MacStories, and we just can’t get enough of the possibilities offered by OmniGroup’s powerful GTD software. I understand, however, that GTD is not for everyone. Some people are looking forward to having a simple system on their mobile devices and computers, an app to enter tasks in a list and that’s it. Sounds like a solid and affordable plan, right? With only one major problem,though: sync.
People looking for such a simple system would also like to be able to effortlessly sync their tasks in the cloud. As far as I know, there’s no good and simple app that lets you enter tasks on the iPhone, have them backed up online, and find them again in another simple and minimal app on the desktop. If there’s one, please let me know in the comments.
Still, Dropkick is here to solve this problem: it’s a minimal and elegant application that lets you a) enter tasks and b) sync them to all your devices. That’s really it. Read more
Real Racing 2: Coming On December 16th At $9.99, We Can’t Wait
A few minutes ago Firemint announced the full details behind Real Racing 2, the sequel to the popular racing game that came out on the iPhone and iPad earlier this year. The game is coming next Thursday, on December 16th, and it will be available for $9.99 in the App Store.
Real Racing 2 will feature 30 officially licensed cars with a new career mode that will grant you over 10 hours of gameplay, a 16 player online gaming (no other iOS game did this before, I think), 5 game modes and 15 different locations. There will be Game Center integration and you will be able to see vehicle damage in real time (finally), 5 different camera angles and several control modes.
Real Racing 2 basically looks like a huge sequel, and a must-have for iOS users. The online multiplayer sounds fantastic, and the screenshots posted by Firemint are simply delicious.
Check out a trailer below. Read more
Apple Engineer Re-Builds 2,000 Year Old Computer With Lego
If you’re looking for the perfect way to begin your geek weekend, look no further than the video below. If the screenshot we posted above doesn’t tell you much about what you’re going to see, here’s the gist: an Apple engineer, Andrew Carol, has recreated a 2,000 year old Greek mechanism – widely regarded as the world’s first “computer” – using his 1,500 Lego Technic blocks.
The computer goes by the name of Antikythera Mechanism, and it’s an ancient computer made of mechanical parts Greeks used to calculate “with unprecedented accuracy” astronomical positions and celestial events. Now the Antikythera Mechanism is working again, only in Lego pieces.
If you want the full details on how the mechanism works arithmetically, or you simply want to geek out over the Lego heaven Carol has built, the video is embedded right after the break.
Google Docs Desktop Editing Comes To The iPad
Great news for Google Docs users and iPad owners this evening: Google has announced that they have extended compatibility of the Docs desktop editor to include support for iPad. If you’re running an iPad, you can now switch from the mobile version to the desktop one with just a tap.
The desktop editor is the Google Docs you know and love, allowing you to modify fonts and alignments, paragraphs and font styles. It’s the usual Google Docs, running on a tablet.
As simple as it sounds, Google just made a great move towards ensuring millions of iPad users out there a desktop-class Docs experience without the need of a dedicated mobile client. Google announced a Docs Viewer in June, and released a mobile version for iOS and Android users with editing enabled a few weeks ago.
Once again, Mobile Safari wins.
Helping Developers, For Free→
Helping Developers, For Free
Robert Scoble on how he helped the Flipboard developers in the early stages of the app:
Why do I do it for free? Because I love this stuff and want the best possible apps to use myself. Flipboard without Twitter list support would have been totally worthless for me. It isn’t obvious that Twitter list support is important. After all, how many people use Twitter lists. But for Flipboard it was a must have.
I’m passionate about seeing things early and work hard at adding value back to entrepreneurs for that honor.
See, it’s not about the “cool factor” of having access to stuff other people don’t know about. Maybe it’s that, too. I don’t want to call this a “mission” but, really – for some it’s just about helping people build better, innovative products.
No In-App Purchases and Game Center In The Mac App Store
Looks like the Mac App Store is going to be quite different from the iOS model we’ve gotten used to in these past two years. Yesterday we broke the news that developers won’t be able to generate promo codes for Mac apps sold though the new Store (even if they’ve gone international for all users), today 9to5mac reports that in-app purchases and Game Center won’t find their way to Jobs’ latest reinvention of the Mac software environment, either.
Mark Gurman notes:
Apple has informed App Store developers that two major iOS app store features will not make their way ‘back to the mac.’
Note: In app purchases are not available for Mac OS X apps.
Note: Game Center is not available for Mac OS X apps.
As we wrote yesterday, Apple is clearly aiming at a simple purchase experience similar to the iOS App Store, but with less features than the mobile counterpart. Perhaps they don’t want Mac users to feel overwhelmed with new functionalities such as in-app purchases? Maybe they didn’t have time to implement them by the 2011 opening?
Still, we think Game Center on the desktop would be great. And terrible for our productivity.