As the frequent readers of the SM Blog know, I’m a bit of a nerd. Over the last five or so years of my life, I have become a really big comic book fan, especially of Marvel.

When I saw the news of this new iOS app by Marvel, called Marvel Unlimited, I got very excited about its prospects. It is a really cool concept, but it does have some interesting quirks that need ironed out.

The basis of the app is similar to the Netflix model, pay about $10 a month and have all the Marvel comics you can read. It does have some restrictions on availability for certain comics, and this is what the ‘Unofficial Apple Blog’ had to say on that:

Marvel Unlimited is essentially Netflix for Marvel comic books. Users can subscribe for US$10 a month to access a catalog of over 13,000 Marvel comics back issues. For a limited time, users can also pay for a year’s subscription for only $60. The service serves up the comics in HTML5 and allows users to download six issues at a time.

While 13,000 back issues seems like a lot, there’s not much rhyme or reason to the selection or continuity of what’s available. And that doesn’t make a lot of sense because when collectors are reading a series, they generally read them in order. Also, the most recent issues of comics on offer will be at least 6 months old. That’s because Marvel doesn’t want to hurt its newsstand sales.

It’s not getting the best reviews right now on the App Store, but everyone acknowledges it is the right idea. It just needs to be tweaked and adjusted then Marvel has something that could be a hit. If you’d like to take a look at it, it is a free app and has some free content on there as well to try out. It’s an app I’ll be keeping my eyes on over the coming months.

Mobile photo editors rejoice! Adobe has released their Photoshop Touch app for the iPhone. This is an app that is for those of you out there that want to do a lot more with your images. Apps like iPhoto and others, can do color changing, red eye, retouching, etc, but with Photoshop Touch you can add things like layers, that will give you much more flexibility. CNET did a nice little write up on the app itself and goes into a little more detail:

“The most surprising aspect is that it’s a feature-identical version of the tablet software… But if you have a yen to composite up to 16 layers (or 3 layers at the maximum file size of 12 megapixels), you’ll be able to do so on any Android (4.0 or later) or iOS (iPhone 4S/iPod Touch 5th generation or later) device. As of now, the company has no plans to support Windows Phone.

The biggest differences between the tablet and phone versions are in the user interface — the tutorials are less interactive, more of a getting-started guide, and the app screens have been arranged slightly differently to accommodate the narrower devices.” For more from CNET on this app click here.

One area that iOS devices have really been missing out on is in the higher end editing area. Apps like this are moving the iPad and iPhone in the right direction for the photo professionals out there.

Go check out this app if you’re interested on the App Store. It’s $4.99 for iPhone and $9.99 for iPad.

Looking for a cooler looking way to lock your screen on your Mac? Well, if you’re not, you should be.

I stumbled across Lock Screen Plus as I was looking over CultofMac.com, and I had to pounce on it. It’s rather straight forward, you can lock the screen manually or set a timer for it to lock by itself, it there is nothing happening on your computer.

 

It also gives you some really cool themes to lock your screen with. I have a comic book theme for mine called Metropolis, that also gives you the time, location, and weather.

There are 19 different themes to pick from, you can also adjust the sound it makes when it locks and unlocks. You can choose to have a ‘swipe to unlock’ feature with your  trackpad, or you can click to unlock.

It’s really handy if you walk away from your desk and you want to lock your screen, and it does it with a little more flair than the regular options in Mac OS.

It’s only 99¢ on the Mac App Store and it’s worth checking out.

Check it out here.

This app has been all over the Apple news sites the last couple days, and I finally decided to look into it and it looks cool. Rabbit is a video chat program, that is not all that different from Google+ Hangouts. You can do large group video chats, share video and content, and it does it all in a cool looking user interface. It can run in the background while you’re doing your everyday work, and you can open up a chat room and just wait for your friends and family to join you. It is also a Mac only program, that requires Mac OS 10.7 ‘Lion’. Right now it is beta, so it’s not available to the public yet, but it has a lot of promise and looks a lot better than what Google+ has to offer.

Head to Rabb.it to see more!

One of the best features of getting a Mac is all the software it comes with. You get awesome apps like iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband for your home media usage. You also get apps like Time Machine for back up, and Mail as an awesome email client. There are times when you may want/need something new for you Mac to make things even easier.

With the addition of the Mac App Store, there are a ton of options out there now to help round out your software collection. There are a couple apps on the Mac App Store that I really enjoy using, and use all the time.

BETTERSNAPTOOL

I don’t like to give Windows a whole lot of credit, but their snap feature in Windows 7 was pretty cool and handy. The ability to have windows side by side, just by moving the window to the side of the screen is helpful. With the addition of BetterSnapTool, you can bring that function to Mac OS.

 

For $1.99 this app is awesome and worth checking out! Head here to download it!

SKITCH

I have a certain person in my office that is in love with this app, and to be honest it’s awesome. If you are a student or someone that works on the computer a lot, it is very handy. You can take screen shots with it, annotate images, blur text you don’t want seen in images, and a ton more! And one of the cooler features of it is, if you are an Evernote user, it integrates with Evernote.

Skitch is free and a must have app. Head here to check it out. 

That’s just a couple of awesome apps, PCMag.com has listed the Top 50 Apps for the Mac in an article. Now not all of them are on the App Store (like CS6), but most of them are.

Here is one of the apps that they spotlight in their article:

Head here to check out the rest of their list! 

For you gamers out there, remember when there was a new Rock Band or Guitar Hero game that was coming out every couple weeks? It seemed that everyone loved to play plastic, fake instruments pretending to be rock stars in their living rooms. Well, as fast as the craze of the music game genre caught on, it was gone just as fast.

If you find yourself going through withdrawals of wanting something new in the musical game genre, I stumbled across a cool music game app: Magic Piano.

It’s pretty straight forward, you just tap the little dots on the screen when they reach the edge of the screen.

It has a rather large collection of songs that you can unlock by playing the songs you start out with.

It is an iPhone and an iPad built game – and the best part… IT’S FREE!

So, if you want to scratch that musical itch while on the go – PICK UP THIS APP NOW!