Macgasm

People are obsessed with achievements these days. I personally never understood the need to ‘unlock’ achievements, but I’m clearly in the minority. Achievements are everywhere thanks to apps like Foursquare, and countless other video games, but we can now add photography applications to the achievement mix.

100 Cameras in 1 is a digital mashup of Camera+ and Foursquare. The application lets you hipsterize your photos like countless other application on the App Store, as well as unlock a bunch of achievements through Game Center.

Achievements include things like saving a photo with each of the presets, taking a photo of a cat, and other equally awesome and bizarre scenarios.

The applications badge/achievement system could use a bit more polish, and a greater incentive to actually strive to complete achievements, but on the whole the application is pretty nifty.

If you like Camera+, Hipstamatic, or Instagram you’ll probably like 100 Cameras in 1. I’m not a fan of the application name, and it probably screams “spam” to a lot of people, but I assure you, this application is worth a try.

Notificant by Carmel Cloud is a cloud-based notification application for your Mac. What makes it especially noteworthy is that it can send notifications across all your Macs and/or via email. Even better, an iOS version is coming soon.

After you download and launch Notificant, the app will ask you to create a free account with Carmel Cloud. Once that’s completed, you can send yourself notifications either through the app on your Mac or from the web-based service.

Adding a notification is simple. Click on the menubar icon and tap “New Notification.” A pop-up window appears with a large box in which you write your reminder (though you are limited to 160 words). Then you can schedule the notification using the date and time picker, and you can decide which devices you want the reminder sent to, including your email address. If you want to include a URL in your notification, click on the gear icon to shorten it. That’s it. When you’re done hit “Notify,” and your reminder is in the system.

When your notification arrives, you’ll hear a sound and a small rectangular window will pop up on the top right of your screen. Simply tap the “X” to dismiss it. If you sent the notification via email, it will appear just like any other email message. Keep in mind that the email notification may not arrive exactly at the specified time. It will depend on how quickly your server updates your messages.

From the menubar, you can set your sound preferences and determine whether or not you want the app’s icon in your dock. You can also launch the website from the menubar icon.

Carmel Cloud’s website is simple and beautiful. There you can update your profile, see upcoming notifications, archive notifications, and send notifications to yourself.

What’s Macgasmic

Simple and effective, Notificant helps you remember things you might otherwise forget. It’s unobtrusive and much handier than scheduling alarms via iCal or other calendar programs.

What’s Not

Since I only have one Mac (poor me), the feature allowing me to send notifications to all my Macs isn’t all that helpful. However, once Carmel Cloud makes it possible to send notifications to your iOS devices as well, Notificant could become a must-have application.

Although I know it’s unavoidable, I hate signing up for cloud-based services. If you don’t want to sign up for another cloud service, you might take a look at Alarms by Stefan Fürst ($15). It’s not available in the App Store, and it doesn’t send notifications to all your devices, but like Notificant it is simple, fast, and unobtrusive and, unlike Notificant, it syncs with iCal.

Summary

If you need a reminder now and then, and if you want your reminders to appear across all your Macs and (soon) your iOS devices, then give Notificant a try. It’s like a digital string around your finger.

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Hosts: Josh Schnell & Grant Brünner

Since the inception of the iPhone, it has had a camera. Many users, myself included, relied heavily on the built-in camera app, mostly because it was the only application available with the introduction of iOS 1.0. The Apple-included Camera.app has rema

ined mostly unchanged since its initial release. Since the opening of the App Store, camera applications have been very popular. Just doing a quick search of ‘camera’ in the App store yields well over 15 pages of applications.

The Built-in Apple Camera application does some very simple things. It takes pictures, it can also take High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos, and it can take video. Outside of this, the application does not do much. This is one reason why camera applications have become so popular. One of the most popular of these other camera applications has been Camera+.

Camera+ takes the basics of Camera and expands on it to be a complete post-processing application. There are a myriad of options available. You can do the basics, like adjust the flash and crop a photo you’ve just taken with the application or even one that appears in your Photostream.

One of the most interesting functions of the application is the effects that you can use to change the look of your photo. These effects range from changing the tint to changing the depth of field to even making the photo look like it came from a toy camera.

For those who miss the ‘good ol’ days of analog,’ there is $0.99 in-app purchase called ‘I ? Analog.’ This add-on pack gives effects like chromogenic and pinhole. These can add a distinctly ‘old school’ feel to your picture.

To add to the ‘old school’ feel, Camera+ also allows you to put gridlines within the view so thatyou can use of one of the four corners to frame up your shot. This is something that many people do not learn about with digital photography.

You do not have to use Camera+ to take photos if you do not wish.You can just use Apple’s built-in Camera app and use Camera+ for post-processing. You can share the photos out to the world over Facebook, Twitter, and even Flickr.

One of the issues is that Camera+ is very processor intensive. It takes a rather long time to complete any operation. This is not necessarily a problem, but it can be rather tiresome having to wait all the time.

As of right now, Camera+ is an iPhone/iPod touch only application. It will work on the iPad, but there is no native iPad interface—it is just the iPhone application scaled at 2x. If the rumors of the iPad having a camera do pan out, I would hope that TapTap would provide an iPad interface as well.

If you like to add some variation and changes to your photos but do not wish to take the time to learn all of Photoshop’s intricacies, then Camera+ may be a good alternative. It costs $1.99 and there is the $0.99 in-app purchase should you choose to buy it. It’s worth the money just to have the various effects to be able to make your photos absolutely unique.

Earlier today, it was announced that Apple customers have downloaded 10 billion apps.

That’s right, billion — with a b.

The lucky winner of the $10,000 iTunes gift card promised to the customer with the 10 billionth app is Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK. Gail’s lucky download was Paper Glider, a free game that involves flying a paper airplane through an office. (There’s a link below.)

Apple’s Phil Schiller said:

With more than 10 billion apps downloaded in just two and a half years—a staggering seven billion apps in the last year alone—the App Store has surpassed our wildest dreams. The App Store has revolutionized how software is created, distributed, discovered and sold. While others try to copy the App Store, it continues to offer developers and customers the most innovative experience on the planet.

In its press release, Apple updated the public number of apps available for its various devices — 350,000 apps to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users, with 60,000 iPad-native apps.

This week, Apple updated its FAQ for iBooks, the iOS-based e-book ecosystem introduced with the iPad.

The updated document includes information about Collections, introduced in the latest version of iBooks, version 1.2:

Yes, you can organize your books into a bookshelf or list view. You can also organize your books into specific collections on a topic of your choosing. For example, you can put all your books and PDFs related to your work in a single collection. To use Collections, tap the Collections button, or the name of the collection on your iPhone or iPod touch to change or add new collections.

In college, I took classes in art history, philosophy, and music performance, to name a few. I could not tell you one thing I remember from any of those classes. I do, however, remember the night my buddy Will and I stayed up until 6 AM playing about 400 levels of the infamous “bubble game.”

This type of game has cropped up over the years from several different companies on several different gaming platforms, all under different names and with some variations, but anyone that has played one of them will immediately attest to its addictive nature.

Except for being free (ad-supported, with optional paid upgrade), this iOS iteration is similar to its predecessors. Colored bubbles are launched from a targeted shooter at the bottom of the screen toward a mass of slowly-descending colored bubbles. The object is to connect three or more bubbles of the same color, thus popping them. The goal is to clear the screen before the mass of bubbles reaches the bottom.

On console versions, the game controller rotated the shooting arrow left or right, making aim an eyeballed calculation. Because the iOS games (the iPhone/iPod touch version, a newly-released version 2, and separate HD iPad version) are touch-based, the player can tap where he wants the bubble to land, and the shooter shoots immediately in that direction.

At first, this could be considered cheating, but gameplay proves it brings its own challenges. The iPhone/iPod touch version is small enough that inaccuracy of touch makes for difficult aiming. This version also includes a whirl mode that is particularly interesting. Other options include a color-blind mode, where bubble color contains a corresponding geometric shape.

No bubble game would be complete without crazy, annoying, computery carnival muzak. Music can be turned off in settings, but that goes against the whole bubble game experience, doesn’t it?

If you’re looking for a free, fun game that you can whip out at any time and play one level or fifty, Bubble Shooter Free is perfect.

There’s been a barrage of great news for some of our writers this week, and I just wanted to publicly congratulate them on their achievements. While both will continue to contribute here for as long as they can and are able to, both Lisette and Grant have landed some super-sweet jobs.

Lisette Voytko has taken a position at Pivotal Labs, and Grant Brunner will be working at the popular online ancestry website Geni.

Congrats goes out to the both of them. I can’t think of more suitable jobs for either of you, except maybe here at Macgasm. ;) I’m super proud of all the contributors.

I just wanted to publicly acknowledge that news, so thanks for obliging me.