Macgasm

PopCap Games has put three of their iPhone and iPod Touch games on sale until January 3rd 2010. Chuzzle, Peggle, and Bookworm are only $1.99 each. This is a great deal. If you’re at all interested in fun and quirky puzzle games, I’m sure you know the name PopCap.

So, you bought those three games on sale, but what about the game that put PopCap on the map? Bejeweled! Luckily, Bejeweled 2 is available for the VERY reasonable asking price of $2.99. “Wait a minute,” you’re probably saying. “I could just play Bejeweled in the browser for free, right?” Right, you could. However, the app doesn’t need an Internet connection to work, and Bejeweled 2 for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers four different game modes from which to choose.

Classic
This mode is what one might call traditional Bejeweled. You match jewels, and go through a set of levels.

Endless
Similar to the classic mode, Endless has you match jewels through levels. The difference is that there is no end to the levels in this mode. You could go on forever as long as you don’t lose!

Action
Once again, you have the classic gameplay, but a timer is introduced. The longer you take to match the jewels, the closer the timer gets to empty. However, if you complete a lot of successful matches, the timer will gain time.

Blitz
This is the most interesting addition. This mode only lasts one minute, but it hooks into your Facebook account. You can compare your scores directly with your friends and compete for the number one spot!

Those all come together to make an incredibly fun game for a very affordable price. Jump on it!

Photo Credit: merfam

Here’s a quick tip for all you multiple monitor users.

Have you ever gotten extremely annoyed that your second monitor doesn’t have a menu bar at the top of the screen? I know I do. I get really annoyed when I’m doing work on my second monitor, then have to scroll all the way to my first monitor in order to access the application’s menu items. It’s a giant pain, and I’ve never full understood the rationale behind its exclusion from the basic OS X install. The extra 10-15 pixels of space isn’t really all that valuable in my opinion.

Anyway, there’s this nifty application called SecondBar. It’s currently in development and is far from a perfect solution, but it does give you access to a menubar on your second monitor. It doesn’t currently support spotlight, or those menubar application icons that some of you have come to use daily, but it does currently give you all the application menus, and that’s a fine first step if you ask me.

The program is pretty stable in its current iteration, and while I would like to see support for Spotlight, and Menubar items, I think they’re on the right track.  It’s been a handy add on to my daily grind, and it has undoubtedly saved me quite a bit of time.

Unfortunately it’s hard to show off the effect, so I took a snap with the only camera I had available (my crappy iphone camera). I guess a screenshot would have worked, but that could have been easily faked. Ah well.

You get what you pay for. ;)

If you’re planning on entertaining for the holidays, and have any intention of serving up wine from your wine collection, you might want to have your collection organized for your guests. Some of us might only have one or two bottles, but if you’re into wine there’s a good chance you might have a cold room, or cellar set up. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick your bottle of wine before you trudge down to the cold cellar? Vinoteka let you do that, and it lets you organize a whole slew of information about your wine collection.

You can set up digital cellars, and organize your wine in a way that matches your cellar so that guests can go down and make sure they’re picking the right bottle instead of poking around in the cold.

Vinoteka is absolutely amazing. It makes managing your wine collection a breeze, but it’s not for the faint of heart. If you’re not serious about managing your wine library then this might be a little bit overwhelming for you. This application is geared towards someone who’s pretty serious about their wine and wine tastings, so keep that in mind before you drop some coin on the application.

The great thing about the software is that it scales very well for new users, and it’s delightfully easy to manage the different sections of the program. The usability is simple, and simple is how it should be. If you have more than a couple of bottles of wine kicking around your house then you’re gonna want to check this out. If you’re more of the one or two bottle types, you might not need this software package.

There’s a free trial, so you can try before you buy.

Happy Holidays, and be responsible in your alcohol consumption! We need your traffic to the site in the new year.

So, Christmas is over now, and all of our gifts are exchanged. (Our holiday giveaway is still going until the 31st, by the way.) Now comes the time when we tally up all the good stuff. Frankly, I want to know about it. Did you get any cool tech gear this year? Maybe you gave someone an iPod or a MacBook. Please, let me know about what gifts lit up the faces of you and yours.

Please reply in the comments of this post or you can hit me up on Twitter and Facebook. Tell me all about the sweet gifts you gave or received, and I might just mention them in an upcoming article about Mac users and the holiday season.

Photo Credit: nlnnet

Merry Christmas! I love this time of year. The cheer really yanks on my heart strings. I hope you all got what you wanted from Santa. More importantly, I hope you all enjoy yourselves and your loved ones. This truly has been an amazing year for me personally and for the site as a whole. When I sit back and think that I actually have my dream job, I get a little misty eyed. You, the reader, mean a lot to me. I’m not just blowing smoke either. Knowing that people read and appreciate what I write humbles me beyond words.

When I am sitting with my family this evening, eggnog in-hand, I will truly feel blessed. I could not ask for more. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all a merry Christmas. If you’re reading this, you are responsible for making me *that* much happier. Thank you.

Love,
Grant

Photo Credit: terren in Virginia

One of the coolest things about the holiday season is all the bundled movies that seem to keep popping up in box stores around the country. Two for one deals are one of my favourite past times. It seems like box stores aren’t the only ones bundling up movies these days. Apple has decided to extend the practice to the iTunes store.

There’s a ton of options available, there’s double and triple features, HD and non-HD options. If you’re dying for a last minute gift idea or two, this might just be right up your alley, then again, you might have a difficult time convincing the gift receiver that you didn’t download the movies for free. Maybe you should stick with physical DVDs and Blu-Ray discs this year, you don’t want to come off as a cheapskate do you?

Happy Holidays

If we’re moving to online commerce solutions, and the AppStore is going to be our medium of application sales for our mobile devices, then shouldn’t we be taking a moment to talk about sales policy, and whether or not consumers should be able to recoup sales prices.

For instance, today Tap Tap Revenge 3 was free on the iTunes store. I was super excited to download and try it out. I haven’t played a Tapulous game since the first Tap Tap Revenge was released. It was a win-win for me, but what about those people who purchased the application just before it was repriced, or offered for free? Are they entitled to compensation, much like we’re entitled to compensation on sales items in box stores? If so, what happens to the 30% that Apple took off the top of an App sale? Currently all refunds fall on the shoulders of developers, and despite what some might say, we’re completely entitled to refunds on applications that don’t meet our expectations.

It seems like a common problem, and I’m surprised that no one has brought it up yet. I haven’t had it happen to me personally, but I know some people who purchased an app a week ago, only to have it go to a free version this week. For the most part a dollar isn’t really with complaining about, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Do developers have an ethical duty to disclose that an application will be going free?

I’d argue that they do. I think that any time someone’s willing to pay money for an application, and the developer has decided to make the application free in the following days, refunds should be sent out. The problem is that the developer shouldn’t be on the hook for the 30% that Apple pocketed, but they should at the very least be doing everything in their power to reimburse the 70% in profits that they took in. If it applies to the rest of the sales world, then why doesn’t it apply on the AppStore? Do the have some kind of special status? I know really sure what the legalities are of all of this, considering I’m in Canada, and hopefully someone can fill me in. But, on the surface it seems a little unethical to be taking my full amount today, and giving away the application tomorrow.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear what people think about this.

Edit: Email’s in to Apple.  Hopefully I’ll have something else to add.

For an operating system as advanced as OS X it’s absolutely ridiculous that we have to resort to hacks in order to switch between iTunes tracks while working in another window. There’s a number of solutions to get around the problem and until recently I’ve been using a little hack for a universal shortcut. It wasn’t pretty.

I stumbled across Sizzling Keys a couple of days back, and I’ve been meaning to share it with everyone. It’s a preference pane, and it’s sole task is controlling iTunes whenever you’re not using iTunes. For instance, if you’re in Pages writing an essay, and you accidentally Rick Roll yourself you can push a key combo and skip the track, or you can puts another key combo to restart it. It’s up to you.

It works exceptionally well, and it’s painfully cheap to buy. Well, actually it’s free to use, but there’s a $4.95 upgrade options for a pro version.