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Holiday giveaways: Cellar 2.0 for the wine lover
The crowds in the stores and the recuperation from holiday over-indulgence got you down? We've got the prescription: holiday giveaways galore! This one is perfect for your New Year's Eve entertaining; we're giving away five copies of the $2.99 Cellar for iPhone [iTunes link], which can help you keep track of that wine you liked so much that you forgot what it was called, not to mention your own middle name and where you live. Viva la vino! Just leave a comment on the post letting us know about your favorite wine, and you'll be entered in the giveaway. Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post letting us know your favorite wine. The comment must be left before Monday, 12/28 at 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. Five winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prizes: each winner will receive one promotional code for Cellar 2.0 (ARV $2.99) Click Here for complete Official Rules.
Cellar 2.0 adds handy email hooks to wine manager
What cheers the soul more on a cold winter's night than a fine glass of wine? An app to keep track of that wine, perhaps. The new 2.0 version of the $2.99 Cellar for iPhone [iTunes link], out now, adds more fun and new sharing options to the good-looking wine management tool. If you're a high-level oenophile looking for a hardcore wine research and cellar inventory app, Cellar may not be for you (I'd recommend the powerful and savvy Drync for $4.99, or the free ad-supported version), but for casual imbibers and wine fans, it's a charmer. Cellar is simple to use and fun to show off. You add bottles one at a time to your collection (slotting them into the cellar, the garage or the wishlist), customizing the look and label of each bottle and adding vintage, price, ratings and other details if you have them. Your bottles are displayed attractively in a horizontal rack, which can be swiped back and forth; turning the iPhone or iPod touch from landscape to portrait mode switches you into a new detail view where you can see your notes and other info about a particular wine. The UI is graceful and well-detailed without being garish; an app about wine, after all, should carry itself with a degree of classiness. When I first looked at Cellar last summer, one of the drawbacks of the app was that there wasn't a good way to share your wine collections or favorite bottles with friends, nor could you easily back up your cellar data. Both of those issues have been amply addressed. You can now create 'bottle links,' very long encoded URLs (amenable to abbreviation by URL shorteners like TinyURL) that, when opened in the iPhone mail app, Mobile Safari or popular iPhone Twitter apps, auto-launch Cellar and load the bottle into your collection, label and all -- magical. You can also backup and restore wine libraries from your Mac or PC, or merge libraries with other users in the vicinity using the app's built-in Web server via Wi-Fi. New searching, sorting and statistics options add to the improved/introduced feature list with 2.0. Cellar 2 doesn't have the wine search capability of Drync or some of the other wine apps on the store, but it does have panache; it's a showcase app for my iPhone on looks and functionality, and it's perfect for keeping track of the bottle you drank out on the town that you want to remember for purchase later on. Check out more of the Cellar interface in the gallery below. %Gallery-80305%
TUAW First Look: Cellar puts your wine collection in your pocket
Beverage choice should be simple: coffee or tea to rev up, wine or beer to spin down (App Store links). Of course, when it comes to drink choices, there's definitely an app for that: from the makers of espresso-instructions app Barista, we now have the $0.99 Cellar (under App Store review and appearing momentarily). Cellar's slick UI and quick data entry make keeping track of your wine library almost as fun as actually drinking the wine you collect.When you start up Cellar, you face an empty winerack; you can add bottles one by one, entering both vintage details and customizing the look/label of the bottles with photos of the bottle labels. You can adjust the number of bottles of each kind of vino you have stored away, and then as you polish them off the 'empties' are stored in the Garage area of the app for reference or repurchase.Cellars isn't an industrial-strength wine database or collection manager (My Wine or Velvet Vine Wine Pro might be better choices there, or a general-purpose database like Bento), but it is a handy way to remember what you've bought and liked. I'd like to see future versions support importing label images from the photo library (for iPod touch users) or download them from online wine libraries. Update: Apparently the library-select feature is already in place for iPod touch users. Readers also suggest checking out Drync for higher-end wine cellar management.Cellar's $0.99 introductory price won't last for long. Check out the gallery for more Cellar shots.%Gallery-67042%
Tabula Rasa celebrates the holidays with FPS view
It's here! FPS view, along with several other exciting features, have now been implemented on Tabula Rasa's live servers with the latest patch: Deployment 15.7.In addition, we have a new instance map entitled The Empire Sector, which is available to level 50 players who must also meet a certain Logos requirement. The CELLAR arena's location has also been expanded with a new entrance to the Edmund Range wargame map and the Epic Caves of Donn instance is also live with this patch. If that's just not enough, the holiday seasonal decorations are now in game for Tabula Rasa's second winter holiday event. Check out the complete patch notes for more information as to what's new on the live servers today.
A tour through the new Tabula Rasa arena
The newest Tabula Rasa PvP arena, named the C.E.L.L.A.R. (Coalition of Enlistees Likely Looking for Aggressive Retaliation), has been gaining some attention since its introduction in Deployment 8 this week. This arena is set up as a boxing ring, complete with suitable equipment, colored corners and the whole nine yards. Earlier this week, the members of the TR MOG clan held a tournament in this arena, and we were lucky enough to attend. We figured we would take this opportunity with the tournament in play to snap some screenshots and create a handy guide to the arena for those who aren't familiar with it just yet.%Gallery-9822%
