Coming soon: integration with RunKeeper, yes, you’ve read correctly.

Zombies, Run! is a pure indie game, developed by Six to Start and Naomi Alderman in the UK and it has already achieved the target funding so it’s a reality. You can visit the game’s site here. It’s also avilable in the App Store for $7.99. Android users will have to wait untill spring, sorry for that.

Take a closer look at their video:

Where can I get it? The Brydge is a kickstarter project, meaning they have to get support to get the funding. You can see how well they’re doing here. There still pledges open for $210, including speakers or $170 without.

Seen at macstories, here.

1. God uses a Mac – Designed by godusesamac – Available at: CafePress

2. Heart – Designed by Magnetism Studios NY – Available at: Insanely Great Tees

3. iHungry – Designed by Soulthrow – Available at: MySoti

4. Tribute – Designed by Guilherme Bermêo – Available at: rebdbubble

5. Steve Jobs for President – Designed by Magnetism Studios NY –
Available at: Insanely Great Tees

I’ll continue with the next set soon. There are tons of them!

1. Create a separate list using the Reminders app. It’s good to share a new list, not the default ones.
2. Connect to the web version of iCloud at http://www.icloud.com/ using your AppleID.
3. Click on the Calendar icon.





4. On the left hand side, you’ll see your recently created shopping list.
5. Click on the share icon and add your shopping mate(s) assigning them rights to read or read & write.





6. Enjoy!

Oh, btw, now imagine sharing your groceries dictating the with Siri directly into reminders!

Since iOs 4, you can disable your iPhone’s auto rotation feature without additional software. This can be obvious for a lot of iPhone users but I keep telling people who didn’t know. The other day, queuing in the airport I heard two guys saying “I can’t understand why Apple doesn’t do the same thing for the iPhone that did for the iPad [to prevent the landscape mode when flipping the iPhone]” We need a short post about this, I said to myself.

To prevent the screen from flipping automatically on your iPhone do the following:

• Tap the home button twice
• The multitask bar will appear
• Swipe your finger to the right the furthest until you see the iPod controls

• Tap on the lock image

• Done, your iPhone has auto rotation locked. Check that in your status bar you’ve got an icon showing that.

To restore auto rotation follow the same steps the other way around.

Preview is one of those useful apps that we all use but we don’t really know. As its name states, it previews lots of graphical file types and it implements (meaning that opens, mainly) Apple’s version of Adobe PDF specification. Is that kind of apps so well thought…well, guess what, it comes directly from OPENSTEP, NeXT’s operating system. But this post is not about Preview but about the capability not only of opening but also creating PDFs from multiple PDF (or image) files.

Yes, it’s so simple as dragging and dropping, you know, Apple’s style. Step by step:

• Open a PDF file using preview

• Make sure you’ve got the sidebar displayed. If you don’t you can use the icon on the toolbar or through View > Sidebar > Show Sidebar
• You’ll need the Thumbnail view (it’s the default view). If the PDF has more than one page, make sure you display all the pages in the thumbnail view so you can insert the other pdf file at the end or in between.
• Now drag and drop the other file, on top of the sidebar and release whenever it suits you (in terms of paging)

• A blue line will show you where Preview understands you want the dragged PDF to be inserted
• Make sure it’s all inside the same surrounding blue box or you’ll get two PDFs opened in Preview instead of one single merged PDF
• Click on Save and you’ll get a new PDF (with the name of the original; click on Save As if you wish to preserve the original PDF files)

Apart from PDF files you can also add images (those that Preview suppports, most formats) and other postcript file types. Not Microsoft Word, sorry. Just print the Word docs you need as PDF files and you’ll get going.

And that’s about it, no need to pay for extra software nor to download crappy apps.

Apple was clearly aiming at the iPhone and the iPad symbiosis with its latest iOS update, 4.3. The coolest of all the new features is what they call “Personal Hotspot”, a replacement for the existing tethering option, that shares the iPhone’s internet connection with up to five devices through WiFi, USB or Bluetooth (these last two were already there with tethering)

Sharing your iPhone’s internet connection converts your iPhone in a hotspot and your 3G enabled iPad in a redundant device (sorry for that). You can now walk around with your iPhone and your WiFi-only enabled iPad and connect to the internet anywhere.

Technically, Iphone 4 Personal Hotspot enables a 802.11g network using WPA2 encryption, which is standard in terms of bandwidth and good in terms of security. The SSID broadcasted is your iPhone’s name and the password can be changed in settings. There are some flaws that I’m sure will be covered in next updates such as being able to change or even hide your network’s SSID, enabling MAC filtering, etc.

Personal Hotspot is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4G GSM, iPod touch 3rd and 4th generation and both iPads. Activating this cool feature is done under Settings -> Personal Hotspot.

Alfred is a free, yes I said free, app that combines local and remote search with fast app launching all glued together with a well thought keyboard and keyword schema. If you love keyboard shortcuts and need to search and launch with ease, if you love Spotlight, this is your app.

Once installed, Alfred sits silently in your menu bar waiting to be invoked with the “alt + spacebar” combo, purposedly similar to “cmd + spacebar” that invokes Spotlight. Once invoked a simple but tremendously powerful search field appears waiting for you to start typing.

As you type, Alfred tries to find the best match for your request, based on files in your system (applications, documents, images) as well as keywords (google, gmail, lucky) that will result in special actions like opening gmail or searching google, thus improving Spotlight’s local search. Besides that, a hotkey combo is offered for each search result (cmd + result number) being the “enter” key the hotkey for the top ranked result.

The search criteria and the definition of keywords can be fine tuned through Alfred’s preferences as well as some other things like launching Alfred on startup, hotkeys, search window positioning, etc.

There are also goodies like integrating some system commands directly into the Alfred’s search bar (try typing “trash”, “sleep” or “screensaver”) or integrating a simple calculator (try 32*34 for instance). Tweaking of these also found in preferences.

Last but not least, there is something that stat freaks will love: the “usage” tab. Alfred tracks your usage and learns from success on search results, classifying them for future searches. It also has an experimental section that you can discover yourself

When it comes to system’s resources, Alfred is also pretty efficient, as it takes as little memory as an average dashboard widget and nearly no CPU time (little process involved here)

And where’s the trick? Well, Alfred is pretty powerful but it can be improved. There’s a powerpack that includes stunning enhancements that you can buy for £12 single user license. Click here to get the powerpack. You can get Alfred for free through the App Store or at their website here.

It was somehow predictable, having in mind the way Apple attracts developers with their revenue share model. They did it for the iPhone and for the iPad, and finally here it is also for Mac: the brand new App Store, available with the new Snow Leopard udpdate 10.6.6. Now we will be able to download apps right into our Mac just as we did with the iPhone and the iPad (and the iPod Touch also)

There’s little to explain as this new store is exactly as the iPhone/iPad versions. It has both free and paid apps, they can be found in 21 different categories and they’re reviewed and rated by users.

Besides having great apps and games that we had in our portable devices (such as the one pasted above), the strongest points of using the app store are:

• Easy installation, “direct to your dock” as Apple states.
• Version control, automatic updates of your downloaded apps.
• Download and “redownload”, useful if you change your Mac.
• Have the App Store suggest you the 3rd party app you need to open a file.

The weak points:

• You can’t test the apps before buying them.
• There should be a way to pay once for an app and make it downloadable in both the portable devices and the Mac.

On the developer hand, Apple shares the revenue on a 70% for the developer 30% for Apple basis. Developers interested, click here.

The store has a handfull of apps already. Check them here.

Haven’t had the time to write for a while, work has kept me away from the real important things

Here goes a quick but useful tip: how many times have you started typing an email address in Mac Mail and, without even looking and blindly trusting auto-complete, you’ve sent the email to the wrong recipient? That’s annoying, here’s how to clean up all or some email adresses in Mac Mail.

Method 1:

• Select Window > Previous Recipients
• A window appears with all used recipients
• Highlight those you want to delete (multiple selection with the command key)

Method 2 (individual recipients only):

• Open a new message window ( Cmd + N)
• Type the recipient you want to delete
• Click on the small arrow besides the recipients email
• Select “Remove from Previous Recipients List”

And that’s all, one of those small fetaures that makes Mac OS X Mail so useful, as usually this sort of utilities are way under the hood.