Mac Links

The Mac has never really been known as a gaming platform, though that hasn’t stopped companies such as Pangea.

I first became aware of Pangea through the game Bugdom (around 1999-2000), a simple 3D game that came bundled with some Macs. Bugdom and it’s sequel Bugdom 2 involved wandering round as a bug following various simple quests such as collecting items.

While the games produced by Pangea may not be able to compete with those produced by the major PC and console game developers, it’s clear that there is still a market for them. Indeed with the development of the iPhone and iPod touch as gaming devices, Pangea has the opportunity to take their games to a much wider audience. This was demonstrated at the 2008 WWDC where Pangea showed one if it’s classic games Cro-Mag Rally running on an iPhone. Similar to Mario Kart, Cro-Mag Rally features cavemen racing in Flintstone style karts, in the demonstration the karts were controlled by turning the iPhone like a steering wheel.

Other games developed by Pangea include -

Otto Matic - An adventure game featuring a robot called Otto who has to try and save the earth from invading aliens.

Nanosaur & Nanosaur 2 - Third person shooters featuring dinosaurs.

Enigmo - A puzzle game involving guiding substances into containers, this game is also coming to the iPhone.

Visit Pangea’s website for more information and to download games.

Of all the Mac blogs there is one that in my opinion stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of both quality and frequency of posts - cult of mac

Written by Leander Kahney and contributed to by Pete Mortensen, cult of mac reports on all the latest news, rumours and developments in the Mac community.

For those who are unaware, Leander Kahney is also the author of the books ‘The Cult of Mac’ and ‘The Cult of iPod’ - the image of a head with a shaved Apple logo which features in the header of the site is also featured on the cover of the book.

Whether you are a dedicated Mac user or someone who is interested in making the switch this is one blog that has to be bookmarked.

I am selling sold my PowerBook G4 12″

It’s a very portable Mac in good working condition - I have looked after it well and will be sad to see it go, the battery life is still good 2-3hrs depending on use.

Specification -

1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 processor; 512K level 2 cache

12” 1024×768 display

Ge/force FX Go5200 64MB video memory

768MB RAM

60GB hard drive

Slot-loading Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)

Built-in AirPort Extreme Card for wireless networking (802.11g)

Built-in Bluetooth 1.1

Built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet and 56K V.92 modem

FireWire 400 port, two USB 2.0 ports, audio line in, headphone out.

Mini-DVI output port for DVI, VGA, composite and S-video output.

Auction ends ended on 04-Oct-07 16:50:54 BST

Large photographs can be viewed here.

Integrity is a really useful little app for web designers and site owners, enter your website address and it crawls all the pages of your website checking for broken links, if it finds any broken links it then lists them along with the address of the pages they appear on and where possible the actual text of the link.

Integrity is freeware and requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.

I did think I pretty much knew about all the browsers available for Mac OS X, on the iMac in front of me I have the usual suspects installed - Safari, Firefox, Camino & Opera.

In the past I have tried newer & lesser known browsers such as Shirra & Flock, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across Darrel E. Knutson’s Macintosh page that I realised just how many browsers there are.

Darrel has compiled The best list of Macintosh Web browsers on the Internet - granted the list includes RSS readers & other apps that maybe can’t be strictly classed as web browsers, but the list also includes more obscure browsers such as wKiosk - a restricted full screen browser designed for, you guessed it - kiosks.

Definitely worth a visit.

Need to match a font from a logo or trying to come up with a suitable font for a design?

FontDoc makes the process much easier than using Apple’s Font Book or other third party apps.

A simple interface allows you to view all the fonts installed on your Mac and you can view by font name or input your own custom text which is really useful.

FontDoc can be downloaded here - http://www.integrity.com/homes/tomandkaren/FontDoc/

Open Source Mac is the perfect place for both switchers and veteran Mac users alike. It’s a simple but well designed site that features some of the best open source mac software available for Mac OS X.

Categories include RSS, video playback, graphics and more. Definitely worth bookmarking.

Sometimes as a website designer it’s handy to be able to quickly check the measurement or spacing of part of a web page, Free Ruler allows you to do this.

It can be dragged over the top of other applications such as a web browser and you can measure in pixels, inches, picas, or centimetres.

Transparency, length and position can all be altered for different scenarios and you can choose to use horizontal & vertical rulers independently or together.

Free ruler can be downloaded from the creators website www.pascal.com/software