Mac Games and More The Blog

Just released. Yay for a gaming weekend! With Stone Loops of Jurassica, take a trip through the five colorful realms of Jurassica – from wild jungle, through endless glacier, to the edge of a blazing volcano. Own and upgrade 5 different houses and collect 24 trophies in this crazy, action-packed adventure. 75 handcrafted levels, three modes of play and a vast number of powerups make StoneLoops! an incredibly fun game for both fans of a strategic challenge and those who just want to let off some steam and smash some stuff.

Stone Loops will definitely appeal to the gamers who liked playing the old but super fun original Zuma and the more recent and awesome game called, Sparkle. Stone Loops is incredible and you will not be disappointed by it, I’m pretty sure of it. Download it for free below.

Got this week in a little bit early. I hope you enjoy them here: mac games. BTW, Happy Mother’s Day!!

The other new items that didn’t fit on the mac picks page are:

Times 1.0.2 – news reader for Leopard.

CopyPaste Pro 1.0 – Multiple clip utility.

Bezipped 1.0 – A file compression and archive utility freeware.

Moody 1.0.2 – Plays a mood instead of an album or a genre. Shuffles better in iTunes.

pngweasel 1.0 – Convertis an image to the PNG image format and makes parts of the image’s background transparent. Freeware. See also gifweasel.

m.o.t.e.s. 1.0 – a fun way to kill some time.

WeatherSnitch 1.2.2 – Displays weather information in your menubar. Freeware.

Macnification 1.0 – Enables scientists to organize, find, annotate, analyze, adjust, compare and publish microscopic images.

Viveza 1.0 – Control light and color in photographic images.

Lingo 1.0.1 – A word game where you have to use your vocabulary and deduction skills.

Leech 1.0 – Queue, pause and resume downloads, download from password-protected servers and store your passwords in your system-wide, secure keychain. And you won’t have to worry about downloads that were disrupted by a crashing browser ever again.

Saturn Fighter Wing – Red Zone 1.0 – “Red Zone” is the code name for the Saturn Test and Training Range (STTR). You are required to collect all green and red gems in the area avoiding missiles, bullets and mines.

Travel Tips for Globetrotting Geeks – Guide to mastering the art of high tech travel.

Read more about it here.

[via]

Yes, yes. I know I’ve written about Warblade already, but it got updated and is soooo soooo soooo fun. Did I mention it’s really fun? You can now save where you left off.

Download it now

More about Warblade

It’s out and it’s awesome. Some say it’s like Galaga, but it is so much more than that. Try it out to see for yourself.

Download it now

Check out a unique Apple friendly restaurant in France, Ma Pomme Tao here: Why travel to France

Charlie Rose (PBS TV journalist) loves his MacBook Air so much so, that when he took a fall, he decided to land on his face, to protect his Mac. Gotta love the guy.

[via]

4th Saturday of every odd month, except where holidays conflict.

Premier Event: Saturday, March 22, 2008.

Mac Day L.A.
CBS Studio Center — “Radford Studios”
4024 Radford Avenue, Studio City CA 91604
Website: Macdayla (for details and required RSVP)

The iPhone Dev Team has announced that it has fully unlocked the iPhone, patching its firmware to work with any carrier and allow the installation of any application, not just what Apple distributes through iTunes.

[From Wired]

Sort of like pointilism but instead of using dots to paint a picture, Steve is painted with Apple products.
Source

In a nutshell, both have more power:

MacBook Pro – The latest Intel processor, a bigger hard drive, plenty of memory, and even more new features all fit inside just one liberating inch. The new MacBook Pro has the performance, power, and connectivity of a desktop computer. Without the desk part.

MacBook – Faster is just the beginning. The new MacBook features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, larger hard drives, and up to 2GB of memory standard. Best of all, MacBook still starts at $1099. It’s the same does-everything-you-want notebook but better.

If you are looking for a great company that can host your server, I highly recommend Liquid Web. They are simply the best. Excellent and highly skilled customer service 24/7 – 365 days a year. That includes being open at 3am on Christmas! If you ever have any problems, they are on it right away. (Those of you outside the U.S. Do you think you can find a French server company open on the weekends, let alone on Christmas? Answer: NO.)

Liquid Web
4210 S Creyts Road
Lansing, MI
48917-9526, U.S.A.

What is it?

LaunchBar is an award-winning productivity utility that provides instant access to your applications, documents, contacts and bookmarks, to your iTunes library, to search engines and more, just by entering short abbreviations of the searched item’s name.

It should definitely be on your list of must have applications for Mac.

Read more about it and get it at Objective Development

Bruce Schneier writes about how he leaves his wireless network open to share a free internet connection with others. He’s so nice!

“Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people — and attracts the most criticism — is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.

To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it’s both wrong and dangerous.

I’m told that uninvited strangers may sit in their cars in front of my house, and use my network to send spam, eavesdrop on my passwords, and upload and download everything from pirated movies to child pornography. As a result, I risk all sorts of bad things happening to me, from seeing my IP address blacklisted to having the police crash through my door.

While this is technically true, I don’t think it’s much of a risk. I can count five open wireless networks in coffee shops within a mile of my house, and any potential spammer is far more likely to sit in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a scone than in a cold car outside my house. And yes, if someone did commit a crime using my network the police…”

Read the whole article

VLC has been updated and I think I forgot to mention it! How dare me. Anyway, this is my favorite Mac media player and it’s free. Sometimes the Mac’s Quicktime is just a bit too quirky for me and VLC always comes through to play movies and music.

Download VLC

From Wired:

All Google had to do was futz with its search algorithm, and the entire PayPerPost world was thrown into total chaos.

The details are somewhat complex, but the gist is this: Google assigns a PageRank rating of 0 to 10 for every site it indexes. The ranking reflects the significance of a site as determined by Google — the higher the rank, the more popular the site. When Google modified its PageRank algorithm a couple of weeks ago, however, thousands of bloggers working for PayPerPost (”posties,” as they call themselves) found their rankings wiped to zero, which meant they were suddenly ineligible for PayPerPost work.

PayPerPost isn’t taking it quietly, though. Izea, the Orlando, Florida, business formerly known as PayPerPost, has rolled out a new product that it thinks will save its bloggers from the financial ruin wrought by Google.

PayPerPost’s business model has been controversial from the start. It recruits bloggers to post promotional content on behalf of advertisers in exchange for a fee. The advertisers are surprisingly legitimate: Sweeney Todd, the new Tim Burton movie starring Johnny Depp, for example, is among the products being touted by PayPerPost right now.

There are roughly 100,000 PayPerPost bloggers, many of whom have seen their revenue completely evaporate since Google modified its PageRank algorithm.

Because advertisers hire posties based on their PageRank scores…

continue reading

Yup. According to this site, the Wii is good for you.

I LIKE that!

Now, if you could just FIND one.

From the consumerist:

Yep, it’s another one of those “email Steve Jobs” posts.

Reader Stephen wrote us a nice lengthy complaint email and cc’d Steve Jobs:

Hi Consumerist!

I purchased a MacBook Pro in November of 2006. Prior to the expiration of my one year warranty, I’ve had several component failures. Since being without the laptop affects my work productivity, I put the repairs off and figured I’d just bring it in with a laundry list of items just before the warranty expired.

On October 15th, I asked my wife to drop the laptop off at the Apple Store in Raleigh, NC for a display-related buzzing sound, a top case replacement (the coating was peeling off) and a SuperDrive replacement (an Apple firmware upgrade killed it). The Genius at the store said the buzzing noise was a…

Read the whole letter and post.

It has a happy ending! Yay.

From Time:

The thing is hard to type on. It’s too slow. It’s too big. It doesn’t have instant messaging. It’s too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it’s too cheap!) It doesn’t support my work e-mail. It’s locked to AT&T. Steve Jobs secretly hates puppies. And—all together now—we’re sick of hearing about it! Yes, there’s been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. So much so that it seems weird to add more, after Danny Fanboy and Bobby McBlogger have had their day. But when that day is over, Apple’s iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. Why? Five reasons:

1. The iPhone is pretty
Most high-tech companies don’t take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing. But one of Jobs’ basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology. All the cool features in the world won’t do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.

An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into “airplane” mode (i.e., no cell service, WiFi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar! Cute, you might say. But cute little touches like that are part of what makes the iPhone usable in a world of useless gadgets. It speaks your language. In the world of technology, surface really is depth.

2. It’s touchy-feely
Apple didn’t invent the touchscreen. Apple didn’t even reinvent it (Apple probably acquired its much hyped multitouch technology when it snapped up a company called Fingerworks in 2005). But Apple knew what to do with it. Apple’s engineers used the touchscreen to innovate past the graphical user interface (which Apple helped pioneer with the Macintosh in the 1980s) to create a whole new kind of interface, a tactile one that gives users the illusion of actually physically manipulating data with their hands—flipping through album covers, clicking links, stretching and shrinking photographs with their fingers.

This is, as engineers say, nontrivial. It’s part of a new way of relating to computers. Look at the success of the Nintendo Wii…

Read the rest at Time

From Wired:

After Apple fanatic Nick Haley posted his homemade iPod Touch commercial to YouTube last month, a few ad execs at the Cupertino based company saw it. But rather than send him a cease-and-desist letter, they bought his ad, flew him out to Los Angeles to reshoot it in high def, and will be broadcasting it during the World Series this weekend. THAT’S how you love your customers, people!

Check it out here.