To celebrate the release of Faces for iPhone, Ambrosia software is giving away Mondo Solitaire for tweeting. 

Faces, is an exciting new program that allows you to decorate photos and make funny faces with a mere touch of a button.  Good for laughs, this app is available at an introductory price of only $0.99.

Join the festivities today and get your free copy of Mondo Solitaire for Mac!

http://makefac.es/

It is fascinating to see why people pirate software.  ZDNet had an article about just why younger people tend to pirate stuff.  Reasons include financial, the thrill, and just because it’s out there.  The article goes on to talk about how many legal options are not as readily available or is not consistent enough to access.  For example, a game is launched in Japan first, but users in the U.S.A. want to play too…as it’s not legally available, they’ll make there way to obtain it via illegal means.  Malware whether we like it or not is coming heavily towards Mac users.  Read on past the jump to find out why!

Read More …

Astraware® announced the availability of three games on the Mac App Store – Astraware Solitaire, Astraware Mahjong, and OddBlob.

“We’re eager to extend our success with iOS gaming to the Mac,” said Howard Tomlinson, CEO of Astraware. “We look forward to reaching even more customers with our new games on the Mac App Store."

Astraware is delighted to bring three of its classic family-friendly games to Mac users. Astraware Solitaire includes 12 of the most popular single-player card games, each with customizable rules, and a choice of card backs and backgrounds. OddBlob is a fun arcade puzzle game where the graphics were entirely created by hand from modelling clay, and Astraware Mahjong takes the ancient tile-matching game and gives it a modern twist with 3D graphics, more than 30 puzzle layouts, multiple difficulty levels and a daily puzzle challenge.

It’s never to early to get ready to file your taxes.  Now, you can get the headache out of the way easier with Turbo Tax 2010 Basic (Available for both Mac and PC users) for free!

Just go here and get your copy…no credit card is required – enjoy!

One of my family members recently gave me a PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver).  It had plenty of RAM (1.5GB) and it was the 800Mhz version.  Looking through the list, I have a couple of possibilities in terms of modernizing this Jaguar (10.2) flavored Mac.    I thought at first about going to 10.5, the last iteration for the Motorola processors.  However, I was 67Mhz short of fulfilling the system requirements.  Digging around, I did find people having success by having another Mac that meets the requirements and then just cloning it and putting it into the older G4 Mac.  Unfortunately, I don’t have another Motorola based Mac to play with.  So I’ve opted for Tiger (10.4) which most peripherals and devices still have support for today.  This Mac however only has a CD/RW drive in it so it brought about the challenge of loading a DVD.  At first I tried just hooking up an external DVD drive and running the setup inside Mac OSX, but it only asked me to restart and it would just bypass and step over the installation disc.  Having only a Windows keyboard (connecting to the PowerMac G4 with a KVM switch), I found out that “Alt” is the equivalent to a Mac keyboard’s “Option” key.  Holding that down during boot gave me the ability to choose another drive to startup from.  I selected the Tiger install disc and it loaded MacOSX setup which upgraded my Jaguar install.  Can anyone say “hello Spotlight”!

USB is a wonderful thing.  Having it allows you to add a plethora of other peripherals and devices not limited to additional storage, optical drives, networking capabilities, sound, and more!   Without USB in this case, my poor PowerMac would never have seen a new operating system unless I got a new drive and performed surgery on it.

With Tiger on it, I can use many newer programs as well as adding a Wi-Fi USB card to give it wireless networking capabilities.  According to Apple.com, iWork 09 should still work on this Mac.  As to iLife, looks like I’ll still be able to use iLife ‘09, although I won’t be able to take advantage of the “Learn to Play” feature of GarageBand ‘09.

Overall, I’m very excited about my “new” Mac.  I’m sure this little guy will be able to do – and perhaps with a bit of help from the family over at the Dallas Apple Corp. (which is also the oldest Apple users group in the nation), I’ll be able to bump this guy up to 10.5 and be able to get the absolute most out of a non-Intel based Mac.

Cross posted with Apple Corps. of Dallas (Any additions and updates will be on the ACD post.)