Macgasm

As a screenwriter, I often have a hard time turning my ideas into an engaging structure. While I can hit the beats and write solid dialogue, I often struggle with keeping the audience wanting more. Luckily, a friend of mine recently told me about Contour.

Contour, by Mariner Software, is a story development system crafted by Jeffrey Schechter, a writer for film and television. Contour asks you the tough questions about your story forcing you to think of it in terms of a story as opposed to just theory and meaning. By using Contour, you can create a beatsheet which can be the starting point for your screenplay. (more…)

OpenFeint is an open source mobile social gaming network with millions of players, and it has recently been acquired by GREE, Japan’s leading social gaming platform, for $104 million. GREE and OpenFeint are uniting forces to build an ecosystem for 100 million users, but they say that both powerhouses will still maintain their individual focus. From their site:

GREE will continue to grow its network in Japan and develop great games that showcase their platform’s capabilities. OpenFeint will continue to grow our network, accelerating planned upgrades with GREE’s backing.

(more…)

“App Stores” are simply web browsers with a fancy front-end. They are all the rage, but Steam is far from a bandwagon jumper. The folks at Valve pioneered the digital storefront for gaming, but why is their store such a pain in the butt to use?

I’m not an avid Mac/PC gamer, but I probably play one or two games per week. I certainly don’t need Steam running all the time. Oh, it tries to run all the time, but I stop it from autolaunching. So when I want to play a Steam game, I click the Steam icon. It bounces in the dock for a while, and then I get to look at a login dialogue as it forces me to sign into my account before it does anything. Once I get past that, I am usually treated to a “Steam wants to update” dialogue box. I sigh heavily, and I update Steam.

(more…)

We’ve all been there. Trying to fish our headphones out of our bag, we accidentally pull everything out, since it’s all jumbled up in a mess that makes a diagram of the human intestines look like a straight line.

Well, there’s a nifty little solution to this problem named the AppleCore. While the name may end the company up in trouble with you know who, their clever cable wrap system looks ingenious. I ordered two medium-sized ones and a small one in black before I got to writing this post.

Article Via BGR

With rumors of the iPhone 5 being very similar to the iPhone 4 (just with an A4 chip) floating around, the guys behind This is my next are claiming something very different, as you can see from their mockup.

According to Joshua Topolsky, Apple’s next iPhone will be a massive departure from previous designs, and will sport nearly edge-to-edge glass and a teardrop-shaped back, in addition to being thinner than the iPhone 4.

The screen, it is said, would retain the same resolution, but be enlarged to 3.7 inches. Such a shift would keep the pixel density within the range of Apple’s “Retina display” standard.

(more…)

According to Lala’s founder, Apple acquired them for their talent, not their streaming application. Not too long after Bill Nguyen made those comments, rumors about a digital cloud locker started resurfacing with a renewed vigour.

(more…)

We’ve been assuming that LTE won’t be in the new iPhone any time soon. It doesn’t make sense just yet. But, after re-listening to the financial call from Wednesday, it became pretty obvious that LTE is still a ways down the road for Apple.

Apple’s known for not tipping their hand to the public during their financial calls, but when it came to LTE it was pretty clear that the technology just isn’t there yet. If Apple’s downplaying it in financial calls, there’s probably an excellent chance that the technology won’t be in the next handset from Apple. iPhone 5 won’t have LTE.

(more…)

It’s major holiday time, and that usually means some app developers are looking to cash in on the super long weekend. EA has placed a bunch of their games on sale this weekend. Instead of listing them all off for you, we’ve decided to pick a couple of our personal favorites for both the iPhone and iPad and pass them on to you.

If you’re looking for the entire list, you can get EA’s listing on the App Store. For the record, I’ve played all the games we’re listing here and enjoyed each of them.

Get the download deets