Mountain Sheep’s Bike Baron has been chosen as the Starbucks App of the Week, making it available for free for the first time ever for customers who have downloaded the Starbucks app.

Bike Baron is a an extreme biking game where the objective is to navigate through dangerous terrain and deadly obstacles. Our sister site TouchArcade has a review of the gameplay:

Bike Baron successfully merges an excellent interface with charming art and sound design. Those things pull you in, and then the game tries to break you. If you’re looking for a casual biking experience where you’ll spend a lot of time soaring through the air, look elsewhere. If you get gleeful at the thought of pixel-precise jumps, trial and error, and endless retries, well, you might be a bit mad. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – those are the exact things you’ll find in Bike Baron.

Bike Baron comes from the cartoon school of physics. Levels are designed with a certain wackiness, with huge jumps, loops and explosions. But the Baron is slightly more realistic in design. Like most people, he’s vulnerable to hitting his head, blowing up, smacking into ledges or crushing himself under his bike. Honestly, if you’re going to participate in this kind of extreme biking, you really ought to be made of hardier stock.

Though the game originally debuted in 2011, it has been updated several times, adding a slew of new features like additional levels and level editing tools. Bike Baron can be downloaded for free through the Starbucks app, which began offering mobile downloads back in April.

Starbucks is an iPhone app that can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Apple today released updated versions of Java 6 for OS X, bringing additional improvements to security, reliability, and compatibility. This is a standard update to Java 6, which is distributed by Apple. Java 7 is available through Oracle.

Java for OS X 2013-004 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_51.

On systems that have not already installed Java for OS X 2012-006, this update disables the Java SE 6 applet plug-in. To use applets on a web page, click on the region labeled “Missing plug-in” to download the latest version of the Java applet plug-in from Oracle.

Please quit any web browsers and Java applications before installing this update.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5717 for more details about this update.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for information about the security content of this update.

There are separate updates available for both OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion/Mountain Lion which can be downloaded through the Mac App Store or from Apple’s software download site.

FiftyThree, the company that created popular iPad sketching app Paper, today announced that it received $15 million in funding for future projects, which will focus on both collaboration and physical creation.

We are especially focused on two areas:

TRUE COLLABORATION—Social media has changed the way we communicate, but real collaboration has been left behind. Still nothing has surpassed the simple act of sitting down in a room with a group of motivated people. We believe a breakthrough around collaboration will revolutionize the creative process. How we work together. How we discover new collaborators to work with.

PHYSICAL CREATION—Tools have helped us evolve and we’ve evolved to use tools as a way to extend our ability to express something. And that doesn’t end at the touch screen. Moving beyond touch and into the physical world of accessories opens up creating with greater dexterity and expressiveness.

FiftyThree founder Georg Petschnigg expanded on those two concepts in an interview with The Verge, explaining that the team hopes to create “a suite of mobile tools for creativity.” Currently, the company’s only app is Paper, which is an intuitive sketching app that offers a quick way to capture ideas on a distraction-free canvas.

The app, which was designed by engineers who formerly worked on Microsoft’s now-cancelled dual-screen tablet project Courier, won a 2012 Apple Design Award and was later named Apple’s iPad App of the Year.

And you thought the U.S. had deserts!

As beautiful as the maps turned out, Minar created the project largely just as a tutorial on how to make a vector-based map. (His code and more background on the process are on GitHub.) “It’s mostly a demo project with readable source,” he writes on his blog, “but it’s also kind of pretty.”

This particular map includes all flow lines, which is why you see a lot more blue than you might expect in desert areas–it encompasses seasonal water flow, like creek beds that are dry for much of the year. Down in Florida, the Everglades don’t have well-defined enough flow lines, so the swampy preserve isn’t included, and the state looks mysteriously white in comparison to, say, New Mexico.

And here’s California and some of the surrounding area (look how all the squiggles converge on the California Delta near the San Francisco Bay over at the left):

You can see the full zoomable map and pinpoint precise waterways here.

[Gear Junkie]

Apple’s Messages app for OS X has received a significant amount of criticism since its introduction last year as the evolution of iChat. The app has suffered from a number of issues including loss of messages, out-of-order message display, poor synchronization among iMessage devices, and search problems.

While Apple has addressed a few of these issues, such as the out-of-order message addressed in OS X 10.8.4 earlier this month, a number of them remain, perhaps most notably the searching issue. For users with significant numbers of messages, searching can easily cause the entire Messages app to lock up, requiring the user to forcibly quit the app. Even in instances where the app remains functional, navigating results is difficult and awkward, with a lack of filtering options to help narrow down results.

Flexibits, the development team behind the popular calendar app Fantastical for Mac and iOS, has taken on the task of fixing searching in Messages with a new Mac app, Chatology, launching today. Chatology is a standalone app that directly accesses the user’s Messages database to provide fast and flexible searching.

“We made Chatology because we were so frustrated searching for our messages,” said Michael Simmons, Co-Founder of Flexibits. “There were no solutions to fix this so we created one, and we think all Messages and iChat users are going to love Chatology as much as we do.”

With instant search capabilities, the ability to filter by images or links, and much more, Chatology is the fastest way to find all of your messages.

Search options in Chatology allow users to search by name or message content, and then optionally filter results to the current day, past seven days, past 30 days, or past year. With a conversation selected, users can easily switch between viewing the conversation in its entirety or just all images or all links from the conversation.

Chatology is also able to tie into Messages in some ways, reading the status of Messages contacts in order to show whether they are currently online or not, as well as optional keyboard shortcut integration that allows Messages users to launch Chatology by simply pressing command-F while in Messages.

Chatology has one primary function, and it does it well and quickly, but many users may hesitate when they see the app’s $19.99 price tag. We chatted with Flexibits’ Michael Simmons about the pricing decision, and he noted that it was based in large part on the amount of work required to develop the solution to Apple’s search issues. Simmons says:

This is a tool that solves a problem that, if you have the problem, you probably *really* want this solution. It wasn’t simple to develop (as you can imagine) so we think $19.99 is a fair price considering the frustrations Chatology eliminates. We think anyone who uses Messages or iChat that is looking for a past chat is going to want Chatology.

One other issue to note with Chatology is that is only available through the Flexibits Store and can not be sold through the Mac App Store due to Apple’s sandboxing policies that would prevent an app like Chatology from accessing the Messages database.

With OS X Mavericks also now available as a developer beta, potential Chatology customers may also be curious about whether Apple will solve Messages’ issues for the upcoming release, but with much work left to be done on Mavericks it is unclear how the final version will perform. Simmons notes that he is hopeful Apple will make the needed improvements, pointing out that Flexibits would have preferred to “not have to write an app like Chatology and have functionality like this built right in.”

Chatology is available now exclusively from the Flexibits Store and is priced at $19.99. A 14-day free trial is also available.