Newton’s Lore

If you want to get in on the game with Spore Creature Creator, you can download it here. Ars Technica has some more information on getting it running on machines with not quite the right graphics card here.

Incorporating some iPhone categories this year (because hey, they’re cooler than those boring old Macs), we have

• Best iPhone Web Application - Remember The Milk for iPhone and iPod touch 1.0 You’ll never forget the milk again! (runner up was AP Mobile News Network 1.0)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application - ScreenFlow 1.1.1 from Vara Software Limited for capturing and producing screencasts. (Runner up was the cool Bee Docs Timeline 3D Edition 2.1 for producing 3D timelines, strangely enough)
• Best New Mac OS X Leopard Game - Guitar Hero: III Legends of Rock 1.1 (Runner up Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars 1.09)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience Macnification from Orbicule BVBA (Runner up, Checkout 2.1 point of sale system from Werck BV)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application - Screenflow 1.1.1 (Runner Up FotoMagico 2.2 from Boinx Software Ltd.
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product - Squirrel (alpha), a financial management application from Axel Péju (runner up Flow 1.0.1, an FTP client with editor and QuickLook from Brian Amerige)

If you want to use your Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote) with your Mac (via Bluetooth) (perhaps because you liked Tony Stark’s movie UI and a Wii is a cheaper way to get accelerometer gear check out

• DarwiinRemote
• The Wiinstrument for use with MIDI and/or Garageband.
• Remote Buddy

For the more programmatically inclined there’s

• WiiremoteJ
• Wiimote Simple (an open source Java library)
• WiiJuce

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Frets On Fire. May be more playable with an external keyboard so you can pretend it’s an axe

Check out the Lego-touch application for building Lego on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Ambrosia software is celebrating its 15th birthday as a Mac shareware house and as such is offering 10% off to Macworld attendees and at its online store.

Following their earlier assessments of Apple and the iPod, Greenpeace has given video game maker Nintendo a 0/10 environmental score. Motorola and Nokia also copped serves.

We’ve been having a lot of fun playing with a 3 year-old and some not-3-year-old-oriented applications. If you have a 3 year-old handy and would like to try it:

• Chess (standard in the Mac’s Applications folder). Spin the board in 3D. Push pieces to infinity. Get it to speak its move. Speak your move to it. Watch it play itself. Show a hint. Doesn’t let you turn on ‘permanent’ show hints though, which might be nice.
• Stellarium - Accelerate time, zoom out so you can see all of North, South, East and West simultaneously. Turn off the ground. Watch the days pass.
• Celestia - hit ‘d’ to get the demo tour of the Universe.
• AppleWorks - Open a wordprocessing document and the clip-art Library.Let the child drag things from the clip art library into the wordprocessing document.
• NeoOffice - Open a wordprocessing document, up the font size and let them type away to their heart’s content
• Photo Booth - take some photos with them, offer to print them out to give to people

Apple have revamped the iPod range with

• iPhone price drop - Apple has dropped the 8Gb iPhone to $399 for “this holiday season”, some US$200 off! Probably to align the pricepoint with the iPod touch. You can now set a 30 second soundgrab from (some several hundred select) iTunes songs as your ringtone for only US$0.99.
• iPod Shuffle - “new hues” (PRODUCT) RED, silver, black, blue and green
• iPod Nano - now in a new form factor with a 60% brighter display with 320×240 resolution display at 204 pixels per inch, it plays video. Colours: Silver, black, blue, green and (PRODUCT) RED. Includes new games Vortex, iQuiz and Klondike. AU$199 in Silver (4Gb) and AU$279 for 8Gb models. iPod nano TV ad here.
• iPod (now “iPod classic”) now with AU$349 for 80Gb or AU$479 for 160Gb or storage (as much storage as my laptop!). Available in Black or Silver
• iPod touch - with an iPhone like touch interface and wireless connectivity (it detects when you enter Starbucks and lets you download music from the iTunes store free of download charges (I think)). Flash based, the touch comes in at AU$419 (US$299) for 8Gb or AU$549 (US$399) for 16Gb. Shipping date estimated at 28th of September. Assuming you don’t wait until the iPhone arrives in Australia of course
• iTunes 7.4 - Syncs songs you’ve downloaded onto your iPod touch. Automatically grabs incomplete downloads from your iPod touch and completes them. Larger video viewing area.

Blizzard software (Makers of Warcraft/Diablo/StarCraft) have a job ad for a Mac Software Engineer.