The Notepad Calculator for Mac, iPad, and iPhone — Biggest Update in 7 Years
Myke, Federico and Stephen celebrate Valentine’s Day by taking some heat about baseball and talking about smelly iBooks, Myke’s Pebble and Flappy Bird.
I really enjoyed Myke’s report on his Pebble Steel and the subsequent discussion on wearables, which fits well with The Prompt #34. Get the episode here.
Following the unfortunate demise of Flappy Bird, hundreds of developers are rushing to release clones of the game on the App Store. Over at the Pythonista forums, however, user “bashedcrab” has created a working clone of Flappy Bird called “Jumpy Octopus”, made entirely with Pythonista (pictured above).
This started out as a Flappy Bird clone (can be done in under 100 lines of Pythonista), but I let my son do a bit of a redesign. He decided an underwater setting involving an Octopus was much more enjoyable.
The game play and physics are tuned to replicate the original Flappy Bird as closely as possible, so it is hard! If you want to make it a bit more fun for young kids, make the gap larger (Default is 360. 450 is much easier but still a challenge for young kids).
The game is available as a Python script here, which can be copied in a new file in Pythonista and run to play the game. Jumpy Octopus has sounds, keeps tracks of high scores, and uses iOS emojis as characters for the underwater setting. Of all the Flappy Bird clones that are coming out, this is an impressive open-source implementation based on Pythonista’s game creation features.
Dan Moren of Macworld, faced with a failing SSD in his MacBook Air, took up his screwdriver and fixed his own laptop without need of the Genius Bar. Better yet, he saved some cash and got comfortable doing repairs in the process. The article has lots of good links to tools and guides you’ll need to get the job done. Really, working on the innards of your Mac or PC isn’t all that scary, and while Apple’s guts are largely proprietary, removing the rear case is to get to components is a lot simpler than it used to be.
I’ve had my fair share of drives die, and I can vouch for SuperDuper being one of the most invaluable pieces of software on my Mac. While you’re waiting for your new SSD for your MacBook Air to come in, you can just boot up off an external drive and keep working like nothing happened — provided your SuperDuper backup is up-to-date of course.
Alyssa Bereznak of Yahoo Tech writes has a report on Jason Belmonte, a professional bowler who recorded himself bowling a perfect game during competition using Google Glass. He’s an advocate of the technology, and has been using it to showcase his skills and give fans a new perspective.
Though Google’s PR team has been promoting “stories” that tout Glass’ technical capabilities for firefighters and DJs alike, the typical Explorer’s experience tends to be less mind-blowing than you might think. As Belmonte is neither a developer nor a darling of the Glass PR team, his capabilities in the bowling alley are essentially limited to recording his firsthand experience. Even live-streaming on TV, which is something he’s hoping to start doing during competitions, isn’t at the HD resolution he’d prefer.
Instead, he’s begun uploading his post-game footage for networks to splice in with recaps of the game. On a recent bowling program, ESPN cut straight to Belmonte’s Google Glass perspective — something he’s nicknamed Belmo Vision — during a game.
Cactus speeds up web development by creating a project folder on your Mac, where you can create websites locally without having to install a local development environment like XAMPP. With Cactus, you can get a head start on your blog or portfolio page by selecting from a variety of templates, which establishes some basic site structure for what you want to accomplish. Cactus supports languages like Markdown, SCSS and SASS, and CoffeeScript, and lets you add functionality to your site with simple python scripts (or plugins). With your site developed, Cactus sets up your domain and deploys to Amazon S3. Alternatively, you can export your finished project if you’re hosting the website yourself.
Cactus is $29.99 on the Mac App Store, and a demo is available to download.
StorageStatus keeps you informed of when your internal and external drives spin up and spin down, when devices have been connected and disconnected, and how long drives have been active or sleeping. It’s designed to be a modern replacement for Apple’s SpindownHD utility, making it useful for monitoring power consumption when mobile, or diagnosing why hard drives might start up when they’re not supposed to. The app is $0.99 through February on the Mac App Store.
Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s Dead Air Space:
PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.
It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.
In some ways, PolyFauna reminds me of Proteus. The app is free to download in the App Store.
[Hat tip: Macgasm]
If you’ve been trying to get high scores in Threes, you’ll want to check out Eric Pramono’s tips and explanation of the point system.
The game score is determined by the numbers and types of tiles you have at the end of the game. Each white tile is worth three times the score of its previous number, for example the 768 tile is worth 19,683 points whereas the 384 tile is only worth 6,561 points.
Fair warning: this may require an even larger investment of your time to play Threes, which is a great game.
Calzy, one of my favorite iOS calculators, has been updated to version 2.0, which brings several new features and design changes over the old version. I reviewed Calzy in May 2013, shortly after the app had been released on the App Store, and I appreciated its clean design and gesture-driven interactions:
I use Calzy because it blends powerful features with delightful gestures and animations. For instance, the app comes with full undo/redo support: to activate this, you can swipe right or left, respectively. If you want to clear an entire expression quickly, you can tap & hold the backspace button. And – my favorite feature – if you need to edit, not just view, single items in the current expression, you can tap & hold on the display to bring up the expression editor (with another sweet animated transition). From the editor, you can swipe to delete numbers or use a button in the top left to achieve the same functionality.
Calzy 2.0 is a free update that brings a new design for iOS 7, which isn’t dramatically different as it makes numbers thinner, brings some lightweight blurring in certain parts of the UI, and introduces themes – which I like (especially the Dark + Gold setting, pictured above). The expression editor has been revamped so you can easily reorder values in the expression, and the app has currency rounding available by tapping a button below the number pad. My favorite addition, though, is the ability to bookmark calculations with a note: tap & hold the equal sign, type a note, and a bookmark will be added (with a nice animation) and saved. Bookmarks have their own section in the History view, and I find this particularly handy to save how much I’ve spent while grocery shopping and access previous notes at any time.
Calzy 2.0 is a nice update that adds new functionality without compromising the app’s simple approach. Calzy is $0.99 on the App Store.
