Moustaches are becoming quite popular nowadays. Facial hair has become hipsterized  — the more ironic your moustache is, the better. While not everyone can actually grow thick, bushy soup strainers (there are a lot of men who suffer from this), everyone can take pictures – and this is where Like A Sir comes in.

Like A Sir is a cute little entertainment app that allows you to add various types of moustaches, high hats and monocles to a person’s photo. The app came about because of a Reddit comment of a person who wanted an app “That lets you take photos and add top hats, monocles and mustaches, and share it with friends on Facebook or Twitter.” Developer Adrian Chrysanthou contacted the redditor and told him he will work on an app that does just what he wanted.

Like A Sir was released a few weeks after Chrysanthou talked to the redditor who came up with the idea and it has met with a lot of positive response. It was even featured in the frontpage of reddit.com/iphone. The app is currently on its ninth version.

The app works well on what it does. There are 11 moustaches to choose from, four monocles, five hats and even a martini glass. To use the app you just need to take a photo using the app or use an existing photo from the photo library. The photo is then scaled to fit a square and that’s where you add the details you want. You can share the photo in Facebook or Twitter.

A gripe about the app is that controls can be a bit hit and miss. There are times when scaling just stops working. There’s also a weird glitch where when you use the back camera, the app shows an extremely enlarged version of the photo and it is hard to scale it down to the proper size. The front camera works a little better but it’s still a variation of the same glitch. Aside from this, placing the moustaches can be a lot of fun and it’s quite funny when you look at the finished photo.

Like A Sir costs 99 cents at the App Store.

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Music guessing games really took off with the release of Song Pop. The mechanics of that game was extremely straightforward – you listen to a snippet of a song and the person with the fastest time in guessing the song takes the point. It mimics the game mechanics of an old game show called Name That Tune.

A new app is riding on the wave of Song Pop’s popularity and hoping that it will get its own following. Name That Jam! has similarities to Song Pop in that the object of the game is to guess what the song is based on a small sampling of the song. The difference with Song Pop is that there is a “back and forth” element to the game. You choose which song you want your opponent to guess and vice versa. Only one song is sent to your opponent to guess and after he has tried to guess it, it’s his turn to send a song to you. Then you amass points for each correct answer.

Name That Jam! is a fun game especially if you’re a music buff. I don’t know how extensive the library is but I do keep getting some songs quite often so maybe it’s not that deep yet. Another glitch in the app is that I always get a “File Error: Unable to configure network read stream” message. I don’t know how rampant this error is but the developers should look into it ASAP.

If you’re a music buff then you should take the time to check out Name That Jam!

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The incorporation of cameras on practically all types of devices has turned many people into obsessive shutterbugs.  Every single moment has to be captured on camera – and not just the important events like weddings or birthday parties but even things you’d consider mundane like a trip to the mall, the restaurant (you can see all of the food porn proliferating all over the internet), and even the bathroom.

These photos do accumulate and before you know it, you’ve already occupied gigabytes of precious hard drive space with your thousands of photos. But, let’s face it, many of those photos are just wasting space because you’d often download duplicate photos on your computer when you back up your devices. This has become more of a problem now with the automatic uploading of images on cloud storage services.  At some point it is going to become quite unwieldy and you’ll have a hard time cleaning up your hard drive.

This is where iRemoveDuplicate comes in. This is a handy app for the Mac OSX that does one thing with great efficiency – it finds all of the duplicate photos in iPhoto and removes it from your hard drive. This is a quick and fast app – just one click and iRemoveDuplicate will look for all of the duplicate photos in iPhoto. After it has done its search it will display all of the photos with duplicates. You can then tell iRemoveDuplicate to either delete the photos or tag it as duplicates (if you don’t want to delete it just yet).

This is a great app to have especially if you need to manage hundreds or thousands of photos. The app costs $4.95 but the price is worth it especially if you’re the type who accumulate a lot of photos and want to streamline your hard drive periodically.

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Popping games, by principle, is a game mechanic that is very easy to learn and play. There are also a lot of variations to the basic premise of “popping” things on screen. Even though it’s easy to learn, mastering these games can take time, and the difficulty ramps up if you introduce new elements to the game.

Take Splash It! for example. This iPhone app is a deceptively simple game but it can be quite challenging. The object of the game is to pop the paint bubbles that start fall down from the top of the screen. But if you think it’s that easy think again. There are buttons at the bottom of the screen with the same colors as the bubbles falling down. In order to pop the bubbles you have to press the button with same color as the bubble you want to pop. This is the only time you can pop that bubble. At first it’s easy to do press the correct button and pop the bubble but as more and more bubbles fall down and the rate at which they fall increases it turns into a mad scramble of pushing buttons and popping bubbles. It gets quite stressful quickly.

But this cool game mechanic is what makes Splash It! such a fun game to play. It’s a game of skill, hand –eye coordination and reflexes. It’s also such an easy game to pick up that even kids will immediately get the rules and be able to play it almost immediately.

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There are a lot of cool apps that are part of the iOS app library. While there are a lot of free apps that you can download, there are also a lot of wonderful apps that you need to buy in order to use. There are some app developers that offer their paid apps for free for a limited time and you need some resourcefulness to find out about these offers.

If you want to get more info about paid apps that go free you can try using 3 Magic Shots. This app has a simple aim, provide daily information on paid apps that is offered for free for a limited time. This app, which is available exclusively for the iPhone (sorry, no iPad version), gives daily updates on three apps that become available for free. The interface is quite clean – with three icons representing the three apps featured for the day. Touching on an app icon provides you with more information about the app – how it is trending worldwide, a score that is based on the usability of the app, its functionality, user friendliness, quality of the app and how much time they think you’ll spend with the app. This is actually a unique feature of 3 Magic Shots and one of its selling points. Other features include the ability to share the app on your Facebook or Twitter account and a link to a YouTube video of the app being used. It’s quite nifty and you wont’ get lost. If you decide you want to download the app you can just touch the bottom right tab and it will open up the App Store.

It would’ve been awesome if more than three apps are made available every day since there are a lot of apps that turn free daily. But that’s a minor gripe for an app that does what do well.

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There are many people who have aspirations to become a DJ, and it’s quite understandable. A DJ’s job is cool. You get to spin records you like, create the atmosphere at parties and there’s a level of cerebral involvement in putting records together into a cohesive and engaging set.

The advent of digital technology has democratized the DJ scene. You don’t really need to buy those expensive DJ machines just to get into DJing. For the budding DJ, DJing software is a great option because it is more affordable and it can still be used in conjunction with actual DJ equipment in case you want to pursue DJing seriously.

One of the players in the market is DJ Mixer Pro, a software developed by DJMixersoft.com. The company is composed of a group of programmers who also moonlight as DJs. The app contains the usual features you’d expect from a DJ mixer – two turntables, a mixer, cross fader, and speed adjuster. You get to control and manipulate the songs that you are playing for maximum flexibility. You won’t have problems loading songs and for those who are still trying out their budding DJ skills, there’s a handy BPM counter that makes it easy to match beats between two songs.

DJ Mixer Pro is a really cool app for DJs of all levels. Beginners and DJs with intermediate or professional skills can use this without any trouble. It is versatile enough to address different skill levels.

One complaint I have is that DJ Mixer Pro is too stark. It is mostly blacks and whites and this may be hard to see especially in an actual club setting. I haven’t seen if there’s a way to change the color scheme but it would be cool if it could be done.

You can never go wrong with DJ Mixer Pro.

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Scrapbooks. Invitations. Photo collages. Storify-like visual stories. Birth announcements. Desktop wallpapers. Email stationary.

GoodTimes helps you use your own photos to create these kinds of things and so much more, with style, simplicity, and a great sense of fun. With simple drag-and-drop techniques, you can package a collection of photos in a beautiful presentation, to share with family, friends, and your favorite social networks.

With 39 pre-made templates to choose from, there’s something in GoodTimes to suit almost any need. Once you’ve picked a template that works for you, you can insert your photos by clicking on the predetermined spots. Some of these spots will have frames around them, others are just highlighted areas of the template. Everything is rendered in high-res, photo-realistic detail, be it the picture frames, backgrounds, or the real-world objects that add style and flavor to your creations. The app even makes recommendations on what kinds of pictures will work best in each photo spot: individual shots, group shots, and so on.

Developer TheKeptPromise specializes in helping people capture and share memories, so their attention to the smaller details is exceptionally high. You’ll find all sorts of little flourishes — including conditional grid lines, Mountain Lion gestures, dynamic rendering, Instagram-like photo filters, built-in video tutorials, and much more — that show just how much TheKeptPromise cares about making your photo collections look their very best. And the enormous library of 3D objects that comes with the app can add greatly to your creations. Although as big as this library is, I can’t help wondering if TheKeptPromise plans to add more objects, templates, frames, and backgrounds to the app in the future.

Once you’re happy with what you’ve created, share it with your friends on Facebook, Tweet it to your followers, or post it to Flickr, all from inside the app. Or you can just save it as an image file and do with it what you will.

GoodTimes is a smart, well-made productivity app for making fun, practical presentations out of all those digital photos taking up space on your hard drive. I can’t imagine anyone being unable to find good uses for it.

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With the Internet being as interactive as it is, web forms are a critical element in any web site. They allow users to submit information that can be processed for various reasons. Whether you have a blog, an online newspaper, a business web site, or an e-commerce site, you will certainly have the need for web forms.

Creating web forms need not be a task for rocket scientists, thanks to tools such as CoffeeCup Web Form Builder. This Mac app makes creating web forms as easy as pie, with an intuitive interface. All you need is a rough idea of what you want your form to look like and what the basic elements are. You can then choose from a wide array of fields included in the software, and you only need to click and/or drag to design your form.

CoffeeCup Web Form Builder allows for customization is available as well, so that you can add your own touch to the web form you’re creating. From changing the text to the number of allowed characters to colours to sizes – you can tweak to your heart’s desire.

Even better, CoffeeCup Web Form Builder allows you to use a responsive theme so that your form will work and look good in any device. With a single click, you can preview and then publish your form. Easy!

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Casual games are a huge part of the iOS app arsenal – and there’s a reason they’re so popular. Casual games are easy to pick up and play and it’s also easy to stop. It makes for the perfect formula for when you’re bored during a commute or when you’re waiting for a meeting or appointment. You can then just close the game when something important needs your attention.

Casual games exploit various game mechanics and one such example is TennisSolo, a game developed by Anix LLC. TennisSolo is the quintessential example of a casual game. You can pick it up anytime and stop at any point.

So what is the game about? The mechanics of TennisSolo is simple – you try to keep a tennis ball in play by continuously bouncing it on a tennis racquet. This is similar to the basic skills training that novice tennis players perform to get a feel for the ball and the racquet. You bounce the ball by shaking your iPhone in an up and down motion – basically the same motion that you perform if you were holding an actual racquet. The object of the game is to get the highest score in bouncing the ball. There is an added feature to the game where if the ball is about go out of bounds you can shout and the game will compensate for it. Anix calls it the Sharapova Effect. I don’t know if you can really do that inside a crowded place without getting weird looks.

The game is skills-based in a way but there really is no way to ramp up the difficulty. All you do is bounce the ball until you make a mistake and the ball falls. You can choose from three different balls and three different types of racquets. But these seem to be just skins with no real discernible difference in how you play the game. There are no achievements or badges to make you want to progress further into the game. As a casual game it fulfills its objectives but I don’t see any long-term replayability here.

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Temple Run helped bring the endless distance game genre to a new generation of gamers. It was an addictive and fun game to play. Subway Surfers further improves on the Temple Run mechanic and made it much more engaging to play.

Subway Surfers introduces many features that makes it, in my opinion, the better game. First, the controls are much better. Subway Surfers has opted not to use the gyroscope functions of your smartphone or tablet to make your character move from side to side. There are also more goodies to be had. The different power-ups are fun to get and you get to unlock more things in the store with the coins you collect. There are also more characters you can unlock in this game, which is quite cool since the game’s design aesthetics are top-notch. It has a cartoony feel but rendered as 3D. Kiloo Games also engages gamers to return again and again by offering various updates – like seasonal characters. For example, for its Halloween update the security guard who chases your character was turned into Frankenstein’s monster. A minor skin alteration, but still fun nonetheless.

Another noteworthy game feature in Subway Surfers is that it gives purpose to your endless running and coin collecting. There are missions you can decide to take that, when successful, will increase your score multiplier (up to 30x). You need to perform three things in order to become successful in the mission and this gives you purpose in what you’re doing.

Subway Surfers is a game that you should have in your smartphone or tablet.

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The iPad is a great medium for the development of certain games, in particular puzzle games. The touch controls have made it possible to innovate the game genre and has made it more intuitive and immersive at the same time.

The Room is an example of how a puzzle game has been implemented flawlessly on the iOS. The game has a deceptively simple premise. You are inside a room and there is a contraption that is on  the table. You need to solve the various puzzles in order to unlock the contraption and reveal  the answers to a mystery.

The concept is standard fare – it’s been used in other games so many times. What makes The Room stand out though are the deviously clever puzzles. You will spend hours trying to solve the puzzles. Fireproof Games, the developer of the game, didn’t just focus on presenting gamers with cool challenges, they also made sure that the ambience and atmosphere of the game is top-notch – which is hard to do given that the only thing you really see all throughout the game is the contraption and the various puzzles that you unlock.

There is only one downside to this game – it is extremely short and ends with a cliffhanger ending. Hopefully, Fireproof Games is already hard at work developing a sequel because this is one of the best games ever released on an iOS device.

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HotMacApps Review:

CrazyTalk7 is a great facial animation application. It allows you to take images of people, creatures, objects and make them talk. Not just with a voice over, but actual movements and muscle reflexes. Also the best part is how easy it is to get going, you can select a few sample characters and then add your own voice overs either by typing your text or just speaking it, then the software automatically adjusts the animation to go with its new script.

CrazyTalk7 can be seen as a fun “toy” application, however it is also very powerful, it can go into great details and can be used to create some great short animations. Now obviously its not at the same quality as what you would expect to see in recent releases but its not that far off. You can literally create your own cartoons, youtube channels and stories with CrazyTalk7. Its also fast and quite easy to use after a little playing around. Another great thing is the speed, it processes all characters and voice changes quite quick compared to some advanced animation software like after effects or anime studio.

• Platform: Mac
• Price: $29.99
• Version: 7.031.1031.1
• Category: Video
• Size: 168 MB
• Developer: Reallusion Inc.

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