journals

My latest fixation: Frenzic

By Nick, February 22, 2007

Frenzic's tagline is "Addiction never felt so right." Typically I take marketing with a grain of salt, but in this case, they may be onto something.

After the last few articles, I think I’m ready to discuss something, well, fun. Enough serious crap, it’s time for dessert! This isn’t really a review, but a brief overview of my latest Mac addiction.

Two days ago I downloaded Frenzic, a puzzle game recently released by The Icon Factory and ARTIS software. I burned through the one hour of play time demo period in no time. I’m not a big first-person-shooter or role-player-game person; most of the games I play tend to be of the strategy variety, from various simulation games (Sim City 4 on Macintels, please!) to puzzle games, so it’s no wonder I would be interested in Frenzic.

Frenzic’s tagline is “Addiction never felt so right.” Typically I take marketing with a grain of salt, but in this case, they may be onto something.

So how does one play Frenzic? As counterintuitive as it may sound, it’s hard to explain because Frenzic is so simple and straightforward. The game board has seven circles: six on the outside and one in the center. Each circle holds six wedge-shaped pieces. One by one, a wedge will appear in the center circle, with a timer. Your goal is to place this wedge into an empty space of the same relative position in one of the outer circles. When you fill a circle, the pieces in the circle disappear, giving you more spaces to place wedges. If you have wedges of matching colors, you get additional points, and depending on which circle…
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What happened to SpyMac?

By Nick, January 25, 2007

Web 2.0 happened to it, obviously. Or rather, the abuse of Web 2.0.

Okay, I almost never visit SpyMac; about the only time I do is when another site links to it. Recently it was The Unofficial Apple Weblog. It’s been a while since I visited SpyMac last, so when I saw what has happened to the site, I was in shock. Like, claw-my-eyes-out-of-my-head shock. Like, I-want-to-pay-a-visit-to-the-webmaster-and-kick-him-in-the-nuts shock.

So what is the new SpyMac? Well, take one part Myspace, one part YouTube, one part Flickr (minus the great layout and attractive design) and one part internet buzzwords. Mix them together until creamy. Pour into a baking dish and bake until smoldering. Imagine every social networking site and every content sharing site in existence merged into one incoherent mess of user-supplied content. On top of that, the “Mac” in their name seems to be just for show, as relatively little on the site seems to relate to the Mac at all, much less Apple. For some reason, Their old content-driven site is still operating, for the time being at least; SpyMac notes that “Classic is what we’re calling the bits and pieces of the site that haven’t been re-coded yet for Leapfrog.” I wonder how on Earth they could possibly integrate their old news-based paradigm into their new Web 2.0 site.

SpyMac calls their new site ”Leapfrog," which they describe as “Spymac’s vision of how the Internet’s content should be viewed and explored.” They also note that “it leapfrogs [oh, so clever!]…
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Clickable Bliss releases Billable 1.1

By Pilky, January 14, 2007

Clickable Bliss have released Billable 1.1, an updated to their billable service tracking software. New features include international tax support, invoice numbering, database backup and a new statistics bar, as well as various performance improvements. The developers have also put together a screencast of the new features.

Billable received a 4/5 when we reviewedit back in September.

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Microsoft Unveils Office:Mac 2008, Mac Equivalent of the Ribbon

By Liam, January 13, 2007

From the “Microsoft on the Mac” card table out in the hall…

If you went to Macworld and were curious enough to check out the Microsoft booth, you already know all about the new version of Office:Mac. You will have especially heard of the Mac Business Unit (aka MacBU’s) answer to the Office division’s Ribbon, which garnered Microsoft the ”Most Innovative Product of 2007” award from PC World. According to Ars Technica’s Charles Jade, the Elements Gallery “...expand[s] when selected, temporarily devouring screen space and giving access to options like templates...”

Jade also commented on another Word feature, the Publishing Layout View, which they claimed that “Unlike Notebook View from Office 2004, PLV actually seems useful. It makes desktop publishing at least as easy as Pages, which sets the bar pretty low, but still.”

For Excel, the headlining new feature is Ledger Sheets. “Ledger Sheets enable anyone to use Excel to handle common financial management tasks,” Microsoft explained in a press release announcing the new version of Office:Mac, “Home and small-business users can balance checkbooks, track accounts or manage investment portfolios more easily than ever.”

PowerPoint is receiving Office Art 2, a feature carried over from Office 2007, with added support for Quartz technologies.

Mysteriously, Entourage was not covered as much by either Ars or Microsoft themselves. The only listed new feature is a large widget-like app called MyDay, which, while obtaining most of its data from Entourage, is not exactly a feature of the personal information manager itself.

When asked…
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Xtreme Nterviews at Macworld, part 1

By Arden, January 12, 2007

One of the greatest things about visiting Macworld Expo is meeting the people behind all the toys and software we use on a daily basis, and there’s no better way to determine what goes on in their heads than to conduct an interview. We were originally planning to conduct a roundtable discussion with several people, but we got several nays and no yays to that, so we went back to a normal interview format. Except these aren’t normal interviews—they’re Xtreme Nterviews, completely unscripted and ad libbed as we go. This makes it both more challenging and more fun, as it keeps you slightly on your toes to come up with another great question and keep the interview going. And as you’ll see, I think we did a great job at that.

Disco burns a hole in your pocket

I ran into Austin Sarner, the young man behind the notorious applications AppZapper and Disco, not to mention My Dream App and MacHeist (but more about those later), at his small, but still very much existent booth. I thought it would be good to get an opinion from the “other side,” and see what he thinks of all the hubbub his applications have been causing. This X-Nterview is a bit short, mostly because it’s my first one ad libbed.