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With a 13.1 inch tall mid-sized model, Helical Robotics’s HR-MP series robots can scale immense wind turbines to inspect them for damage. Unlike the similar tethered prototype GE and International Climbing Machines began developing last year, these wheeled robots are wireless. Controlled by a radio signal and equipped with digital cameras, the climbing robots may serve to replace high powered telescopes used to inspect wind turbines from the ground, which grow less effective as towers get taller and blades get longer. Remote controlled climbing robots also offer a safer, more practical alternative to inspectors climbing up themselves.

Weighing 42 pounds, the HR-MP20 model (pictured above) can carry up to 20 pounds of sensors and other equipment, has a top climbing speed of 43.6 feet per minute, and, according to Helical Robotics, offers a radio control range of 2500 feet. Using five neodymium magnets, the robot is capable of clinging to curved metal surfaces ranging from 7 feet in diameter to flat planes. Controlled by a technician on the ground, once the HR-MP20 scales a tower, it can navigate onto the blades for inspection.

via: TreeHugger

image via Helical Robotics

Crescent Moon Games, known for its quality iOS gaming work (Aralon: Sword and Shadow, Dig!), has just released it’s well-regarded iOS game, Ravensword: Shadowlands, for Mac OS X.

Apple gave Ravensword: Shadowlands the Editor’s Choice designation for the iPad version, which can still be purchased for $7 on the iTunes App Store. The Mac OS X Version, enhanced with graphical upgrades like realtime shadows, bloom effects, and high resolution textures and environment models, is in the Mac App Store right now for $13, which seems like a pretty decent deal.

This open-world role playing game has been called the Elder Scrolls of mobile gaming, and the full experience is now on the Mac, in addition to the higher end visuals. There’s a huge 3D high-fantasy-themed world to explore, hundreds of items to find and use, and an epic storyline and soundtrack to immerse you in the gameplay. You’ll get to try out various weapon types like bows, crossbows, hammers, swords, and axes, and get places faster on horses and flying mounts, as well. You’ll fight your way past enemies, counting on your armor upgrades and looted items to keep you safe and vanquish your foes across a ton of multi-part quests.

Sounds like a pretty typical Friday night, no?

If this sounds like fun to you, you could do worse than pick up a gorgeous open-world fantasy RPG for $13 on the Mac App Store, right? Ravensword: Shadowlands requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later to run on your Mac.

Source: Mac App Store

Like an odd cross between Sudoku and a collectible card game, Star Trek Rivals, from Elephant Mouse Games, is out for iOS on the App Store to capture your attention today, on the release date of Star Trek: Into Darkness (have you gotten your tickets, yet?).

The game is free, has all your Star Trek reboot characters in it, and is pretty simple to learn, but hard to master. It plays asynchronously, and you can play a bunch of games at once. Did I mention it’s made out of Star Trek? What’s not to like?

At the start of each match, you get five cards, each with a still from one of the movies on it. The cards have a number on each edge. When you place a card down in the three by three grid and hit Submit, your opponent gets a chance to lay a card down. If the number on his card that touches the edge of your card is higher, he’ll capture your card. Then it’s your turn. Lay down a card with a edge number higher than one of hers, and you’ll capture that card, plus any others that it originally captured, like the board game Othello. Simple, right?

You can purchase new cards in the store with credits you earn through matches, or with Latinum you can purchase as well. It’s a pretty typical free-to-play business model, and not too intrusive. The only annoying things, so far, are the full screen ads that pop up randomly after you submit a card for play. Choose either ad supported or in-app purchase supported, Elephant Mouse, not both.

The strategy starts to make sense after only a few games, and it’s a fun, mindful way of spending a few minutes as you wait in line to see the movie tonight, anyway.

If that’s not enough, the developers have dropped some sweet Star Trek Rivals wallpapers on us, just for you Cult of Mac readers, so go ahead and download your favorite from the images posted below.

Universal app Star Trek Rivals is available in the App Store now for free. Beam up a copy today.

Every year Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. It’s the only time out of the year that third-party App Store developers can meet with Apple engineers face-to-face. For the indie dev making apps out of his home office, WWDC is Mecca. Besides the knowledge that can be gained, the conference holds tremendous networking value for many who make their livings from selling apps on the iPhone and Mac.

WWDC 2013 sold out in under two minutes this year, and about 5,000 developers will be descending upon the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the week-long conference in June. Some new information shows how WWDC attracts quite the international audience.

iOS developer Adam Swinden created a list of hundreds of WWDC 2013 attendees he polled online. “After creating the WWDC 2013 Attendee List I noticed that many of the people introducing themselves on the Glassboard were from all corners of the world,” said Swinden. “So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see them all plotted on a map.”

The above map shows a small sample of devs who have paid $1600 for a WWDC ticket + airfare to attend next month. Apple will be uploading its session videos for registered developers to watch for free as WWDC is happening, but that hasn’t stopped people from wanting to attend in person.

As you can see, App Store developers are sprinkled throughout pretty much every continent. A larger map is available here.

WWDC isn’t going anywhere soon.

Source: Symbolicating

Have you used the hot new app “Bang With Friends?” No, don’t answer that. Keep your dignity in tact. You can guess what it does.

Apple has suddenly pulled Bang With Friends from the App Store after it went live last week. The app doesn’t contain any explicit content, but it’s obviously not meant for your kid to check out while searching for the latest Angry Birds game.

No word yet on why BWF has been pulled, but the service’s website says that it’s “working with Apple to get back into the App Store shortly.”

Source: Valleywag

Via: CNET

Limelight is a new iPhone app for collecting movies and sharing them with friends. Released earlier this week by indie dev studio 9:42 AM, Limelight is pitched as a ”new way to browse and organize your movie library.”

Inspired by Delicious Library on the Mac, Limelight borrows from similar digital bookshelf apps and adds a unique social element.

I’ve been a proponent of an app called TodoMovies for quite some time because I simply can’t keep track of all the movies I want to see. Limelight takes TodoMovies a step farther by separating movies into “To Watch” and “Watched” lists. Sharing is also a crux of the experience; you are encouraged to follow other users within the app and share your library with friends on Twitter and Facebook.

The app is exquisitely designed, and navigating through the various windows feels fluid. Movies are displayed as poster thumbnails, which can make it occasionally tricky to find a specific movie when the poster isn’t easily recognizable. Trailers are available for each movie along with cast and crew info.

Limelight isn’t going to be for everyone, but it’s a well designed app that should appeal to certain movie lovers. Get it now in the App Store for $2.

Source: App Store

Between midterms and college parties, surf happens

Like this.

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Snapshots is a fantastic idea, and one I can see being used pretty heavily at weddings — or by, say, a gaggle of journalists who shoot an event and might need to pool their images.

The concept is spectacularly simple: Get a bunch of people together, and make sure they’re all running SnapShot on their iPhones; then have them upload all the images or videos they shoot via SnapShot to an “event” that you’ve all picked. Voila! Your BBQ/beach party/wedding/gadget press event has been covered from every conceivable nook and cranny.

The app has all the standard stuff, like posting stuff to Twitter and Facebook, and a comments area for the images and videos. But who cares. It’s the main feature that makes this app so brilliant .

Guys, where did *you* get your tickets?

Seriously, have you gotten your tickets, yet? Star Trek: Into Darkness is coming this weekend, and it looks like the entire US is heading tot he theater to see it, en masse.

Fandango is having a good run of it, claiming that 71 percent of the pre-release ticket sales are coming through it’s very convenient service, with 32 percent of that traffic coming via mobile apps.

Further, they just told me that 15 percent of the mobile ticket sales through the Fandango app are coming from iPhone users, while 6 percent are coming from the Android mobile app.

What’s more is that if you purchase your tickets via Fandango (at least the website, we’re checking on whether this is true for mobile Fandango users), you’ll get a free copy of the 2009 Star Trek film. Wait, 2009?! That is a lot longer ago than I remembered.

Regardless, it’s great to see Fandango doing so well as a service. I can still remember trying to print my tickets at home, finding out I had no ink in the printer, and then going to the ticket window, anyway. I really don’t ever want to not use my iPhone to purchase tickets and get into a film again.

Are you going to Star Trek: Into Darkness this weekend? Have you already bought tickets? Via Fandango? Mobile?

Let us know in the comments below.

Hugs all around, guys!

The band, OK Go, known as much for its fabulously nerdy and complex videos as for its quirky and upbeat pop music, have made an app. Before you go, “meh,” and move on, thinking that this is another one of those record publishing tie-in apps that, really, no one loves but the publicist trying to push it, take a look at the video here.

Get it? These guys made the app. Ok, mostly guitarist Andy Ross, but the other guys certainly had a hand in the app. They definitely appear in the video above. Singer and bassist, Tim Nordwind, had this to say when we asked about the app.

Andy showed me this game about a year ago. And I showed it to five friends, who showed it to five more friends etc…Say The Same Thing connects people in a really fun and unique way that almost makes me feel like I am both psychic and having a super good time all at once.

You heard it here first, folks. Tim feels psychic and super good when he plays his good buddy Andy’s app. Right?

Andy also told us a bit about the app, too, saying,

We knew the game was really fun to play in person so I just decided to start working a simple, barebones app version in my spare time. I sent this to the band and our friends and we were playing it constantly… it was almost more exciting to play as app. So we just decided to make it a real thing and share it with everyone.

Yes, they made it a real thing. So exciting.

Can you picture it? The band, touring endlessly in buses, jets, and on trains. Waiting backstage and in hotel rooms. Just dying to pass the time. And, being the nerdy smart guys they are, they came up with a game they could play. Like an intelligent rock-scissors-paper where everyone wins! That’s Say the Same Thing in a nutshell, and you really should check out the app and support these successful rockstars in conquering yet another media format.

Say The Same Thing is available as a universal app in the iTunes App Store right now, for free. Ok? Go!

So, the game we’ve been telling you about since before it even had a name is out now for Mac, PC, and Linux, and it looks as good as the developers promised. It’s a sequel to Anomaly Warzone Earth, originally released on iOS, and it will only cost you $13.49 for the first week after launch. You can grab it on Steam, or Anomaly2Game should you so desire. And really, it’s a pretty desirable game.

Warsaw, Poland-based 11 bit studios kicked things off last February when they announced a mystery game that you could purchase before you even knew what it was, and then announced the name of the game not too long after.

Well, here we are, and there it is, ready for you to grab for less than a decently sized pizza at 10 percent off the eventual retail price of $15.

This new tower offense / tower defense game makes the jump to Mac and other computers from iOS, bringing along some great gameplay. You’ll be fighting off a new horde of aliens who have overrun the Earth, itself a cold and barren planet in the wake of the invasion. Humanity is almost extinct, and its up to you, your wits, and your strategic thinking to save the world for the surviving members of the human race, using new morphing mech units, power ups, and a ton of bad-ass vehicles.

When you tire of the single player campaign, you can switch to one-on-on multiplayer battles and choose the heroic offense or the evil alien defense (or is it the other way around?), blasting your buddies or defending against them. Whichever side you choose, you’ll have a ton of fun with this gorgeous game.

Source: Anomaly 2

Ein Klassiker MADE IN ENGLAND!

Muss man dazu noch mehr sagen? In diesem Fall schon. Dem M1500 GYB dient dunkel fast schwarzes Leder, hell graues Wildleder und schwarzes Mesh als Obermaterial. Diese Konstellation aus qualitativ hochwertigen Materialien und Farben wird durch die roten Akzente, die hier und da auf dem Schuh auftauchen, abgerundet.
Für den gewohnten Laufcomfort sorgt natürlich eine gepolsterte ENCAP Zwischensohle in weiß.
Alles in allem ist der M1500GYB ein Hochgenuss für jeden Sneaker Liebhaber!

Flimby rules

Video: Sean Benik
Surfers: Dylan Graves, Dane Gudauskas, Alejandro Moreda, Blake Jones
Location: Caribbean

The Caribbean edit from our July issue feature, Lava Lamp Brick of Piña Colada Deliciousness

D. Graves and D. Gudauskas show you the wayves