Apple App Reviews

Filed under: Gaming The good folks at Joystiq got to sit down and talk with John Cook, the director of Steam at Valve , and he says there’s probably no comparison to the news about Steam coming to the Mac — it is “the biggest event in Steam’s history.” He says that not only is it big news for the company and its services, but that one of the goals of the service will be to “prove” to other game developers that coming to this platform is important. Like PC gaming in general, Mac gaming isn’t dead, “it just needs to be attacked from more directions than retail.” Too true — while PC gaming is suffering on the retail shelves, Mac games are having those same issues many times over. And with Apple taking a larger share of the desktop pie than ever, putting Steam games on the Mac platform is a huge benefit both for game companies and their customers. Cook says he hopes that “many, if not all” of the game companies with games on Steam will eventually bring their titles over to the Mac. Good news for us. He does knock down, however, the suggestion that Valve is coming to the Mac on the way to the iPhone — Cook says the company is focused on the Mac right now. That doesn’t rule out a move to the iPhone or the iPad, but for now, Steam on the Mac is a story that’s plenty big. We can’t wait to see the client running in April. TUAW Valve: Coming to the Mac is “biggest event in Steam’s history” originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read ?|? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

FingersTune is a virtual musical instrument. It is designed as an Ocarina . It has four buttons. When you click on different buttons in different combinations, You get different tones. Plus it can sound not only as Ocarina voice, but as any instrument from a large voices library. As Piano, Saxophone, Accordion, Violin, Piccolo, Guitar, or even as a Woman Scream . Also FingersTune has an embedded Editor . You can use it to compose a melody. And use the composed melody to learn learn it in Traning Mode. The Lite Saxophone version do not have Editor, and is able to voice only as a Saxophone.

Filed under: Gaming , Software , Developer , iPhone , App Store , iPad Steph Thirion’s first iPhone game was Eliss , a touchscreen-based arcade game that had you combining and maneuvering planets around one another, and trying to size-match them up with black holes to earn points. As he told us (stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the indie developer), it was pretty hard — even more so than he actually intended it to be. So, for his second iPhone game, Faraway , he’s gone much simpler. Inspired by the iPhone game Canabalt , Thirion has created a one-button game in which the goal is nothing less than to explore the universe. He has it running on a Mac at the show (so he can project the video onto a bigger screen), and we got to have some hands-on time with the new game. You control a comet that flies around an inky black void speckled with dots and circles; the pixelated space aesthetic from Eliss is back. This time, however, there’s only one control, and it’s a tap anywhere on the screen. Doing so will cause your comet to gravitate towards the nearest static dot, which will then slingshot you around the star until you let go, and the comet flings off in a new direction

Filed under: iPod Family , iPhone , iPad Ever since the iPad ’s introduction a month and a half ago, the internet has been awash in criticism of the as-yet-unreleased device. “It’s just a big iPod touch,” many have said. “No Flash, no multitasking, no sale,” others bemoaned. And a few have gone so far as to say, “It doesn’t do a lot of things that a netbook that costs half as much will do.” For these reasons and many more, many of the pundits and forum dwellers have but one prediction: the iPad is going to crash and burn. Don’t you believe it, because the critics have been wrong before. Several times, actually, according to The Week , which provides a list of five Apple products the critics thought would fail. Out of those five, only one, the Newton, failed to find mainstream success. The other four were industry-defining products which went on to sell millions of units each

Filed under: Gaming , Multimedia , Rumors Scans from the April 2010 issue of Gameinformer have confirmed that Portal 2 , the sequel to Valve’s wildly popular and critically acclaimed game Portal , will be released in fall of 2010 for the Xbox 360, PC, and Mac (as reported on MacRumors ). No, your eyes do not deceive you: Portal 2 is coming to the Mac this fall. More on the Valve front: TUAW reader Jason let us know that Gameinformer’s April 2010 issue also confirms a May launch of Steam for the Mac. This was rumored several weeks ago based on some WebKit & Mac-specific content in the Steam beta, and pretty well locked in by Valve’s viral leaks of Mac-themed ‘reimagined’ advertisements last week. ( The final one is a bit of a give-away … read the copy.) “There is an article on page 22, News, ‘Mac Gets Its Steam On’ – Valve preps May launch on Apple platform,” Jason tells us. He also says the article itself states, “Valve will start a beta program this spring, with a full launch targeted for May If you already have a Steam account but want to use it on your brand-new Macbook, for instance, your Steam keys will still work.” That last part is pretty huge; from the sounds of it, if you already bought PC versions of games on Steam, you won’t have to pay again to download Mac versions of the same games. That should be a huge relief to Mac gamers who’ve been booting into Windows to get some gaming done. We haven’t been able to confirm this reader tip, so if any of you have access to the same issue of Gameinformer and can confirm what Jason’s told us, let us know in the comments. TUAW Gameinformer: Portal 2 confirmed for Mac, Steam on the way for May originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST

Filed under: Humor , Odds and ends , MacBook It’s Sunday, a time for reflection, reading the Sunday comics, and looking at pictures of cute kittehs! TUAW Reader Brian sent us a link to one of his favorite sites, The Daily Kitten . On March 6th, the kitten of the day was a little sweetheart named Lyra, who has learned at a young age that Apple is the brand to reach out to. Lyra’s not quite as famous as my 15 year-old Tortoiseshell cat Ruby, who has joined me on TUAW TV Live , but she’s certainly a lot cuter (sorry, Ruby!). Enjoy these photos of Lyra! One, two, three… awwwwwwwwwwww! http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemorris/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 TUAW Take your cute pills: Apple kitteh is a furry little Mac fan originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read ?|? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

Aside from access to SDKs, Apple developers get access to new OSs for Apple’s portables and computers before the public. Now, buying your way in to the Mac Developer Program costs about the same as MobileMe. Formerly a $500 to $3500 proposition, Apple has combined development memberships on all their platforms into one $100/year offer. For developers, that means developing for OS X is really no more expensive than developing for the iPhone. For fanboys, that means you can download the next beta OS without the need of a torrent. [ Apple via 9to5Mac and Macworld ]

Filed under: Apple After a many-hours outage, the Apple developer site is back — and the changes are profound, at least on the Mac end of things. On the iPhone side, users are required to update their profiles, take a rather obnoxious survey and agree to new terms [Developer credentials required for link]. Unfortunately, Apple needs to improve the default survey formatting. iPhone developer John Fricker points out, “If you go to My Profile you can take the iPhone developer ’survey’ with better formatting.” But it’s on the Mac side where the big news is. Apple has replaced the select and premiere memberships with a single-tiered, low-priced Mac Developer program. They write: We recently introduced a new Mac Developer Program that replaces ADC Premier, Select, and Student Memberships. If you are a current ADC member, you can continue to access your resources and benefits through the end of your membership year

Filed under: Gaming , Software When Telltale Games kicked off their Mac revolution at Macworld a few weeks ago, they also set up a poll on their website where players could vote on the next franchise in their company to get a full release on the Mac . The vote is now over, and the Sam and Max franchise was chosen as the next group of games to see a full Mac release. The original characters were created by Steve Purcell a few decades ago, but since then, the franchise has created a storied gaming history, starting at LucasArts and moving on to Telltale’s classic titles. The series of point-and-click adventures is known for its stories and humor, and it’s definitely a worthwhile choice by fans. Rumor has it that there’s a brand new Sam and Max season (the games are released in “seasons” of smaller episodes) around the corner — we’re hoping to see Telltale at GDC 2010 next week, so we’ll let you know if we get to see anything new from them there. TUAW Sam and Max voted as next Telltale franchise on the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read ?|? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

Filed under: Humor , Cult of Mac , Odds and ends , Apple Happy weekend! Google may have won some hearts with its Super Bowl ad a little while back, but we all know that Apple is the king of advertising when it comes to technology, so YouTuber allenmonroeiii decided to make a little parody of the Google ad and promote the Mac instead. Strangely, it actually works — while the audio is straight from the Google ad (which tells the story of a guy who finds love in Paris by searching on Google), the music serves just as well to tell the story of someone frustrated by a Windows PC purchase. No, this probably won’t sell any computers (it’s for us Mac heads to laugh at, considering that it was made in about an hour), but go ahead and enjoy it for what it is, and enjoy your weekend. TUAW Found Footage: Google’s ad, Mac style originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read ?|? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Comments