Macgasm

With Christmas in a few short days I’m feeling festive! So festive that I’m going to ignore that this elf might be creepy. This little guy was found playing Cut the Rope in an Apple Retail store in Washington by Tony Taylor. Thanks for uploading it to our Macgasm Flickr Group!

Photo Credit: Tony Taylor

Do you want to be a photographer or just play one on the web? Here’s your chance! Join Macgasm’s Flickr group and upload all your beauty shots of your Apple gear. Each week we select one lucky participant to be featured on Flickr Find Friday. Go join our Flickr Group now. Get creative. Upload up to 7 pics a day. Tune in on Fridays (like you ever miss a post, right?) and see if you have what it takes to be featured. Good luck and happy snapping.

That’s a stork. Ever seen one before? I haven’t, either. But you know who has? Macgasm Editor-in-Chief Joshua Schnell, who was graced with his first daughter Monday morning  at 8:45 AM. Aletha Grace Schnell rang in at a respectable 8.05 pounds and sports a dramatic head of dark hair and her father’s delicate, girlish facial features.

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This week’s Macgasm deal is the Ultimate Designer Toolkit for only $49, normally priced at $99. There’s just a little over a day left to snag 50% off of a one-year subscription for unlimited access to over 60,000 premium creative designer resources.

The kit includes tons of Photoshop gradients, layer styles, and paint brushes; high-resolution textures and patterns; and a wide variety of vector elements and illustrations. Combined with included CSS frameworks, PSD to HTML tutorials, web graphics, and more, this kit is a must have for anyone seriously involved in creating functional and aesthetic design for web and mobile.

Head over to our deals page for the detailed info and a chance to get this opportunity while it lasts. If you want to keep up with our software bundles and deals, make sure to check out deals.macgasm.net early and often, or click there now and sign up to be notified by email.

Pew! Pew! Mega Man X, the SNES classic, has been reworked, and it is now available for your iPhone and iPod touch for $4.99 USD. Pretty neat, eh? Well, for those of you with more dollars than skill, you can also purchase Mega Man’s upgrades through in-app purchases instead of winning them the old-fashioned way. That, my friends, leads me to what I find the most interesting about this game.

For the past ten to fifteen years, a portion of the gaming market (Read: teh hardcorez) has been complaining about the lack of difficulty in modern games as compared to the days of yore. Fairly recently, we have seen a trend in games that makes both the casual and hardcore gamers happy: the easy button. I’m not talking about predefined levels of difficulty, mind you. For example, everyone plays the same levels on Angry Birds. If you’re skilled or incredibly persistent, you get to play all of the levels. As for the rest of the population, certain levels will give us enough of a problem that we’ll just stop playing altogether. That’s where the easy button comes in.

By offering an easy button, the casual gamers get to skip through the hard parts to the rest of the game while the experts can enjoy their hours of toiling. It’s win-win. For some games, the recent Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Wii for example, the easy button appears automatically when you fail a level enough times. For platforms like iOS, the easy button is a great way for devs to squeeze a little more money out of their casual gaming customers by offering the easy button for a price. Discussion of the ethics of this tactic is beyond the scope of this article, but I’m glad that it exists at all. The easy button allows us to have our cake and eat it too.

The Moog synthesizer is an iconic electronic instrument developed by the late Dr. Robert Moog in the 1960s, and one of the first commercially successful monophonic synthesizers of its time. It rose to prominence in 1967 when Wendy Carlos recorded the album “Switched-On Bach” using the Moog, performing classical music using synthesizers. When Moog introduced a more portable unit called the Minimoog, bands such as Yes and Tangerine Dream took it and made it a signature part of their sound.

The amazing thing about technology is that it constantly evolves, and today you can have a digital recreation of the Moog synth on your 4th gen iPod touch, iPhone 4 or 4S (the processing power required precludes the use of previous models of iPhone). Enter the Animoog.

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Speech recognition company Vlingo has been acquired by Nuance, one of its primary rivals, thus proving that there’s life beyond Siri.

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We recently reported about an iPhone issue in which your iMessages could keep going to the same phone even after it’s wiped, and it looks like there may be a simple solution: Put a password on your SIM card.

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This week the guys are going to take a look some fantastic products from Tether Tools. While it’s not mentioned specifically, the table top that is shown off during the video is also from Tether Tools.

The products shown off this week:

• SecureStrap ($18)
• JerkStopper ($22)
• AeroXDC External Compartment ($50.00)
• Aero Table ($200.00)

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