Fly Free Photo Editing & Viewer Software

Posted on Friday, February 17, 2012

Fly Free Photo Editor is a well designed Freeware Windows image editor with a great feature-set and a slick Mac style interface. Features include, batch resize, batch photo slideshow PowerPoint, direct upload to Flickr, Google and Facebook and an HTML to image web page converter.

Syndicate – Bullfrog’s Old 16-bit Masterpiece Gets a Makeover

Posted on Friday, February 17, 2012

The Guardian have pimped a great preview of a remake of Bullfrog’s old game Syndicate. I actually played the original against Peter Molyneux at Bullfrog’s offices prior to the game’s original release and loved the multiplayer mode which was an awesome LAN gaming experience.

Game on: Syndicate – previewGamers with the urge to fire guns in an apocalyptic or dystopian future aren’t exactly short of options. They can, to name just a few big franchises: bust caps in the irradiated asses of Fallout’s post-nuclear ghouls; tear Mass Effect’s space-faring mercenaries new ones; pump Deus Ex’s digitally-enhanced terrorists full of cyber-lead and mow down weird insect-zombie-aliens in Gears of War. Clearly, shooters-in-nightmare-futures aren’t exactly in short supply. So launching a newcomer in a marketplace this crowded is a very bold move indeed. Lucky for Syndicate (PS3/Xbox 360/PC) that it’s not a newcomer then. In fact it’s older than any of the above. It’s 19 years since developers Bullfrog released the original Syndicate for home computers on the MS-DOS operating system (essentially Windows before the windows) and 16 years since sequel Syndicate Wars for MS-DOS and the original Playstation, the last instalment in the franchise until now. The originals were, like much of Bullfrog’s output, classics – bold, innovative games full of very cool, very new ideas. In the original Syndicate – as in the reboot – the player takes on the role of a microchip-enhanced super-agent working for one of the many shady corporations doing battle for world domination. In this dark tomorrow every man, woman and child has had a computer chip (and clunky metaphor for consumerism) implanted in their brain by their parent corporation. As your syndicate’s dirty enforcer you have the power to hack in to these chips, mess around and, if the situation demands it, blow the chip and the brain around it to smithereens. Making your messy way through missions with a team of up to four agents you bribe, blackmail, kidnap and brain-explode your way to full-scale corporate global dominance. In essence, it is a mafia game re-imagined by a drunk, psychotic William Gibson. Now, having been badgered out of retirement by a new developer like a cyberpunk Paul Scholes, the franchise has undergone a radical makeover.

via Guardian

WinLauch – the Mac OS X Launchpad for Windows

Posted on Thursday, February 16, 2012

Wunderkit for Mac OSX Released

Posted on Thursday, February 16, 2012

In short time the nice people at 6Wunderkinder have released the first version of the desktop client for the excellent Wunderkit task management suite. It doesn’t do much that you can’t accomplish on the website at this time, but it’s nice to get it out of the browser and into its own app for organisational purposes.

Previously: Wunderkit iOS App Released, Wunderkit is Now Open to All, Wunderkit – First Look and Wunderkit brings recurring tasks, notes and collaboration to Wunderlist interface

12 Awesome Mountain Wallpapers

Posted on Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Ah, mountain scenery, the views, the peaks, the snow-capped ridges – you can almost smell that cool fresh air. We’d like to celebrate mountains with a round-up of some of the better wallpapers out there. We’ve poured over Wallbase, tip-toed through InterfaceLift and managed to filter out the anime bollocks that infects every single category at DeviantArt to bring you the finest mountain wallpapers around. Enjoy.

Mt. Santa Chocobot 2.0 – Download

ProCSSor – Excellent CSS Editor Mac OSX

Posted on Tuesday, February 14, 2012

CSS is the backbone of all good websites and as key to a modern web designer’s skill-set as creating animated GIFs were to the last decade’s pre-bubble coders. And while there’s a certain masochistic streak in many programmers that dictates that they have to use the most primitive text editor available, others have embraced the joys of bespoke CSS editors.

ProCSSor does two main things – it enables you to edit CSS code and it enables you to save that code with all the speed-sapping detritus removed. All code written in the app is beautifully colour-coded to enable you to quickly discern your divs from your desktop. It has a cool droplet function to enable you to colour-code any CSS file and user-configurable formatting styles. It’s available in the App Store now for $6.99.

Better Explorer – Windows 8 Style File Browsing

Posted on Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Explorer is one part of Windows that has only really improved since the release of Windows 7 – the XP era version wasn’t markedly different to the one in Windows 3.1 We’re prepared to forgive and forget though, if Microsoft bring some of the UI improvements in Metro to the rest of the forthcoming Windows 8 and its die-hard system applications. And if you can’t wait, then there’s Better Explorer.

This open source project aims to bring some of the cool new Windows 8 functionality to Explorer for all Windows generations. It features a  ribbon control UI,  tab functionality together and all standard explorer browser controls. The project’s still in alpha and is already looking very cool, so we fully expect the finished software to be a must-have Windows application.

The Best Smartphone Reddit Client is on Windows Phone?

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

Hans Solo Carbonite Ice Cube Tray

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

Whisper, “Someone who loves you,” to your ice cubes as they slowly melt in your glass of Scotch thanks to this pretty awesome ice cube tray. The Han Solo Carbonite Silicon Tray is a rubbery silicon tray that can be used for ice, jelly or chocolate to create your very own deep freeze Solos. We particularly liked the first review of this product on Amazon, which said, “I was under the impression it would hold molten carbonite as it states clearly in the title this is a CARBONITE MOLD and it’s very poorly constructed for this purpose. Secondly, it’s SMALL. No, you can’t put people in it it’s a stupid ice tray so maybe if you shrunk people down it would work. Extremely disappointed. But I guess it makes ice, whatever.”

Hoverbar – Adjustable Arm for iPad 2

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

Confession – I don’t even own an iPad (been holding out for a retina display version, maybe my wait will be over soon), but if I did own one I’d definitely snag one of those mind-bendingly groovy arms. The Hoverbar transforms your iPad into a secondary or tertiary touchscreen on your iMac or bolts onto a desk or cupboard for work or kitchen duties. It’s available now for $79.99.

Rubbernet – Network Bandwidth Monitor for Mac

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

Rubbernet – Conceited Software – $29.99

It wasn’t that long ago that we used to fire up a dial-up modem when we wanted to connect to the Internet and check something out. After we’d tied up the only phone line into the house and pissed off other members of the family who wanted to make a phone call but got line noise screeched down their ears, we’d get offline and continue using our computers with no wider connectivity. Times have changed of course and us first-worlders now treat the Internet like any service that’s connected to our house. But none of this means that bandwidth is suddenly some infinite resource, any more than electricity or water is. And when you want to find out what’s consuming all your bandwidth, it’s actually a fairly tricky process.

Rubbernet’s job is to monitor all the network traffic in and out of your Mac. On the dashboard you get a summary of what’s running at that moment, a list of apps and their statuses, upstream and downstream charts and access to further computers you might be monitoring. This being a Lion-friendly app, you can view fullscreen (great for network monitoring stations) or resize the in-app windows as you see fit.

The main window displays the apps, their status (active, inactive or idle), which user ‘owns’ that app, download and upload rates, total data downloaded and uploaded and the last activity of that app. To keep tabs on your system, you can start Rubbernet when you start your Mac and just let it quietly record how much data each of your applications is consuming. It was something of an eye-opener for me to discover that I was getting through a couple of gigabytes of data in Firefox alone.

Rubbernet also enables you to isolate certain activities, such as Back To My Mac, Skype and the System. This is a great way of tracking down errant applications or processes that are eating up your precious bandwidth. I’d always wondered how much data Skype used and it turns out that it’s a pretty frugal sort of an application, while my web browser’s a data glutton.

If you want you can also monitor other Macs on your local network. To get everything set up you simply install a small system application on the target computer and you can connect to it when you first start Rubbernet. In this way it’s possible for a system admin to track data usage on individual Macs on the network – the connections tab is particularly useful in this regard because it enables you to view hosts, ports, apps and bandwidth usage.

If you need to do some network detective work because something’s consuming far too much bandwidth, then Rubbernet’s perfect for the job. It enables you to monitor everything that’s going out from and into your Mac or other Macs on your local network. It has a clean and easily read interface, a minimalist but carefully designed feature-list and a reasonable pricetag. Recommended.

VW Hydrogen Powered Hovercraft Design is Future Now

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

VW  have made some of my favourite cars over the years. I was an obsessive Beetle owner (I owned three) and always had a soft spot for the Golf. However nothing comes close to the awe and majesty that is the Aqua Concept – a car so cool that they’d turn Spy Who Loved Me era Roger Moore away at the dealership.  The Aqua’s two motors are powered by a hydrogen fuel cell meaning it has zero carbon emissions and it features four fans and integrated airbags that inflate to make it hover.

Cool Tidies to Help Tame Cable Madness

Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2012

Picked up a set of these Cable Drop cable tidies from Amazon because,  despite the fact that I’ve got a relatively cable-free Macbook Pro setup, my desk was disappearing beneath a spaghetti of intertwined leads.

Ninja Blocks – Bridging Your Social Sites with the Real World

Posted on Friday, February 10, 2012

Nazis. From the Moon.

Posted on Friday, February 10, 2012