Macintosh/iPhone software update round-up – March 5, 2009

Macintosh and iPhone software updates and announcements for March 5, 2009:

Macintosh

• Ambrosia Software has announced the immediate release of Multiwinia, their new real-time online strategy war game for Macintosh. Multiwinia features furiously-paced action and a beautifully rendered landscape populated with digital stick men ready to follow your orders to destroy their opponents. Darwin is dead. Prepare for war.
• Karelia Software today announced the availability of Sandvox Designs, an on-line showcase for website designs created by Karelia and third-party developers for use with Sandvox, Karelia’s easy website builder for the Mac. Featuring over 70 designs, the new site offers Sandvox users the opportunity to learn about new designs as they are released or updated, and to view descriptions, thumbnails, and full-size previews of real-life websites created with each design.
• Boinx Software is one of the first Mac software companies to offer free interactive web seminars and FAQ sessions to help users get the most out of BoinxTV, FotoMagico and other Boinx Software products. Beginners and Pros alike can talk directly with product managers and developers to ask them questions and learn about advanced techniques to make their own workflow more efficient and productive. It’s easy for everyone with Internet access to tune into a Boinx Live-Webinar from their computer at home, or at the office, to follow the activities on the presenter’s desktop. The next two Live-Webinars from Boinx take place on March 10, 2009 at 5pm UTC (5pm GMT, 1pm ET, 10am PT) and 11pm UTC (11pm GMT, 7pm ET, 4pm PT, 8am Tokyo) respectively.
• Brainjuice has announced that the official release of Blogo 1.2.5, its Mac desktop blog editor and Twitter client, is available for download. The latest release adds custom post slugs as well as support for tags in Movable Type and an improved interface for Ping.fm, allowing the user to choose between blogs, microblogs or status updates when posting.
• Independent software developer Reggie Ashworth has announced AppDelete 2.2, an update to his popular application deletion utility for Mac OS X. With a simple Drag & Drop, AppDelete will delete any chosen app with all of its associated items that belong to that application. Mac users will no longer have to hunt through their system to find and delete these items manually. AppDelete is a must-have utility for beta testers and the perfect companion to any Mac fanatic’s toolbox.
• Freeverse and MrJoy announced today they are donating their smash hit Tower Defense game, Hordes of Orcs, to the non-profit Games For Soldiers organization. In turn, Games for Soldiers will deliver the digital copies of the game to over 20,000 American armed services personnel stationed throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait.
• Maintain has announced the release of Cocktail 4.3 (Tiger Edition). This version adds ability to clear potentially harmful files such as most common trojans, worms or other files that may harm your system in any way, adds ability to clear CrashReporter and HangReporter logs, addresses an issue in which Cocktail may stop responding during a scheduled clearing of caches and fixes compatibility issues with QuickTime 7.6. The update is highly recommended for all users of Cocktail (Tiger Edition).

iPhone

• Zynga has announced the launch of Scramble Live—the mobile version of its popular word game—exclusively for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Scramble Live, a fast-paced casual game that challenges players to quickly find words in a grid, marks the first word game on the iPhone that allows players to compete live with other users on Facebook, the iPhone, and iPod Touch in real time. Scramble is currently one of Facebook’s Top 25 games with more than 1 million monthly active users, and its popularity continues to grow.
• The Perfect Guy is now available for your iPhone. Just press “Speak” to hear phrases such as, “I would love to go shopping with you,” “I made you breakfast in bed.”
• The revolution that is MouthOff has begun. The ripples of a new viral campaign, masterminded by “the studio of dreams,” ustwo, have started to spread, with hundreds of people filming themselves using the new iPhone app MouthOff. The campaign site, called “showusyourmouthoff,” is being hit with YouTube clips of people, babies, dogs and more using the MouthOff app, which syncs an animated mouth in realtime with the sound of your own voice.
• Flurry, the leading cross-platform mobile application analytics provider, today announced the release of two ground-breaking extensions to its analytics service: User Path Tracking to monitor the sequence of actions completed in mobile applications by consumers; and, Dynamic Parameters to analyze user-generated content and other user action data within mobile applications. These never-before-seen mobile analytics features are available for free on all Flurry-supported platforms: iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Java ME. A demo with live data is available for developers to preview the upgraded service.
• Blue Lightning Labs today announced their new iPhone application Mathemagics, an application for learning to mentally calculate math problems at phenomenal speeds. Mathemagics contains 15 different math tricks for multiplying, dividing and squaring numbers faster than many people can use a calculator. Aspiring Mathemagicians are challenged to achieve new levels of competence, from apprentice to mathemagician, for each trick.
• Mariner Software has announced the immediate availability from the App Store, of their first iPhone and iPod Touch application, Mariner Calc. In development for more than a year, Mariner Calc takes advantage of almost two decades of spreadsheet experience on the Macintosh operating system. It also introduces leading edge functionality for the iPhone—the ability to view and edit native Microsoft files (.xls format Excel 97 and up).
• Roy Couchman has announced Doc2email for iPhone. Doc2email uses the image capture capability of the iPhone to allow information on paper documents to be collected and sent by email from anywhere at any time. Users can now capture paper based information for use in business processes such as expense reports, insurance claims, order entry and other time and security sensitive applications.
• Portable Arts has released version 1.0 of 5000+ Sounds, an iPhone/iPod Touch Sound Machine. This new sound app has over 5000 sounds and can loop, delay, randomize, or even remember favorite users sounds for later play. A built in search engine makes it easy to locate the exact sound your looking for. In addition, users can add sounds to a favorites list making it much easier to locate the same sounds for later play.
• NewReleaseTuesday.com (NRT), a Christian music, social and entertainment mega-site and part of the FrontGate Media group, continues to innovate and lead the market with the announcement of the first Christian music application for Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch.