Japan has seen its fair share of crazed destruction through a never ending slew of anime porn and giant robots, but just when you thought lolcats couldn’t get any crazier than tackling Godzilla in the nether regions, Happy Cat appoints a legion of ramen noodles and rice balls to tear down Tokyo alongside zombie children and teen pop-star superheroes. If an invisible issue of glamour girl chasing you down the street with a barrage of homing missiles isn’t enough to get the blood pumping, fist boxing an overly ripe squid while dodging phaser lasers from a secondhand R2-D2 might do the trick. Or everything will just blow up in smoke, as usual.
Meow Meow Happy Fight HD Review & Giveaway!
How To: Add Tasks To OmniFocus or Things Using Dropbox and PlainText
OmniFocus and Things come with beautiful and useful mobile applications for iPhone and iPad, but sometimes you just want to have more control over how tasks are added to their databases. Or maybe you can’t afford paying for multiple mobile versions of the same app and you just use the desktop application.
But you’re a great Dropbox fan, and we’ve shown you many creative uses of Dropbox in the past. You can use the service to sync bookmarks and passwords across devices and computers, store music libraries, even control your Mac using Applescript and Folder Actions. Today, thanks to the efforts of our good friend Gianni Rondini (@giannivt), we’re featuring an interesting way to add tasks (with optional notes) to Things and OmniFocus for Mac using Dropbox and HogBay Software’s PlainText, inspired by Elastic Thread’s method to control your Mac using Dropbox.
Check out the instructions and download links after the break. Read more
SweetFM 2.0 - Last.fm Mac Client
Chocomoko has released version 2.0 of their SweetFM Mac application. SweetFM is a Last.fm client and player for Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4.
Version 2.0 has a completely redesigned UI that is more user-friendly and uses native Mac OS technologies. It also comes with Safari and Chrome browser extensions for Last.fm station control and can open the iTunes store pages from the current track. Other features: supports Media Keys, has an EQ, tagging and social network sharing, device scrobbling, multiple user accounts, hot keys and playlist management. Read more
iPad As The New Flash→
iPad As The New Flash
Jeffrey Zeldman:
Too many designers and publishers see the iPad as an opportunity to do all the wrong things—things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.
Everything we’ve learned in the past decade about preferring open standards to proprietary platforms and user-focused interfaces to masturbatory ones is forgotten as designers and publishers once again scramble to create novelty interfaces no one but them cares about.
While some of this will lead to useful innovation, particularly in the area of gestural interfaces, that same innovation can just as readily be accomplished on websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and the advantage of creating websites instead of iPad apps is that websites work for everyone, on browsers and devices at all price points. That, after all, is the point of the web. It’s the point of web standards and progressive enhancement.
But the iPad supports open web standards. More than hoping in Apple’s tablet to save their magazines, I think publishers just want to make a shitload of money out of iPad apps. It’s that simple.
Amazon Germany Leaks iLife ‘11 October 20 Release Date
It appears that the engineers over at Amazon Germany let a very brief detail slip though the lines of code: if you head over iLife’s product page and check on the “All Offers” box in the sidebar, it’ll tell you that iLife will be available on October 20th. Ring a bell?
As 9to5mac also notices, the US version seems to be less expensive. Hopefully we’ll know more on Wednesday.
Review: FLAC Player for iPhone
If you care about your digital music library and you care about quality, I guess you know what the FLAC format is all about. The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an advanced (free and open source) audio compression codec that allows decompression into a perfect copy of the original audio data. Basically, it’s a high-quality compression method that generates state-of-the-art rips and (here’s the downside) huge data files. If you lose a CD you care about but have a FLAC digital copy, you have an exact duplicate.
To give you an example, a standard 13-tracks album can go up to 450MB in size. Now think about encoding that Beatles collection you have in FLAC and you get the idea.
FLAC is great, but isn’t as supported by hardware makers as other standards such as MP3 are. Luckily enough for iPhone owners, there’s an for that (sorry Apple, I know it’s a trademark now). FLAC Player for iPhone (and iPad, it’s a universal app) is a simple way to import your lossless albums and songs on your iDevice and listen to them. Read more
N.O.V.A. 2 Coming This Fall, More Footage Surfaces
N.O.V.A. is one of my favorite games for iPhone and iPad. I don’t usually talk about games here on MacStories, but N.O.V.A. 2 is a thing I’m excited about: a sequel to one of the most successful and critically acclaimed games in the App Store, which Gameloft has confirmed through its official podcast will be available “this fall on Apple devices worldwide”.
It’s likely that N.O.V.A.2 will come out before the holiday season in both iPhone / iPod Touch and iPad editions. Check out the screenshots and footage from the Gameloft podcast below. Read more
No, FaceTime In The Middle East Doesn’t Work On iPod Touch Either
Two days ago iRamadah reported (Google Translation) that FaceTime in the Middle East was working fine using an iPod Touch 4th gen. It turns out that the units they used carried MC544FD, MC540FD and MC547FD model numbers, which are the ones Apple sell in Switzerland, SaudiMac reports. Read more
More MacBook Air Speculation: Boxier Design, Upgradeable SSD, Mockup
Following last week’s rumors about a new MacBook Air set to be announced by Apple at its “Back to the Mac” media event on Wednesday, Cult of Mac has now posted a mockup of what they think will be the final design of the new model.
