Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-13 i MacLife

MORE MAC|LIFE, LESS PAPER The Hottest Articles on MacLife.com The 25 Best Mac Games Today When it comes to really getting invested in a game, the iPad is the best platform in Apple’s portable arsenal, but too many free-to-play games aim only to empty your wallet. So we’ve assembled our list of the 25 best, all of which offer loads of entertainment without a price tag. http://bit.ly/ML_BestFreeiPadGames Terminal 101: 4 emacs Easter Eggs Easter eggs are fun, hidden features implemented in software for users to find. The developers of emacs (the text editor built into Mac OS X) included many hidden Easter eggs to be discovered by its users. We’ve highlighted a few of them for you to try out. http://bit.ly/ML_EmacsEasterEggs 8 Apps for Getting Involved and Doing Good Doing…

YOUR OPINIONS, RANTS & RAVES If It Ain’t Broke... Much as I have enjoyed seeing insane new ideas from Apple over the years, maybe for the sake of keeping the company solvent, we need them to take a leaf out of the Coca-Cola handbook: if it ain’t broke, don’t change the taste, or for that matter, invent new flavors!—Rob Vines I mostly agree, but with the caveat that Apple does sometimes need to go out on a limb a shake things up. Part of the reason that I’m a fan of Apple is that I believe they will lead me in exciting new directions. The trick is to innovate in positive ways by introducing products that are not only unique but quite good, and by enhancing existing products in ways…

Superheroes are big business. You don’t have to look any further than the movie theater for proof, where this summer you’ll see fans lining up for films like Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and The Wolverine. But what if a two-hour superhero flick isn’t enough? What if you want to learn more about these iconic characters and experience more of what they have to offer? What if you want to go back to the comic books that started it all? Luckily, thanks to digital distribution and a variety of iOS apps, visiting the world of comics is easier than ever. With world-renowned characters such as Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Captain America, and blockbuster movies like The Avengers under its belt, Disneyowned Marvel Entertainment is easily one of the top…

Software companies of all shapes and sizes converged on San Francisco in late March to exchange information and display their latest wares at the 2013 Game Developers Conference (GDC). In addition to seminars, discussion panels, awards ceremonies, career guidance, and plentiful displays of technology, the event—not surprisingly—provided a chance for developers to display their new and upcoming games, including ample content that’s headed to Mac and iOS. One of the most promising titles is Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, which Electronic Arts is bringing to iOS this summer. A direct sequel to the PC classic Ultima IV, Ultima Forever is reportedly “the biggest RPG to come to iPad,” according to EA spokespeople. This co-op online title features hundreds of dungeons, thousands of lines of dialogue, and a “quandary” system…

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SEASON 1 $19.99 Created by Joss Whedon—best known these days for directing The Avengers—Buffy the Vampire Slayer is television at its finest. Despite its silly name, BTVS deftly builds a tale of action, horror, comedy, and drama around some of the most endearing characters to ever grace a screen. Admittedly, Season 1 isn’t the best that the series has to offer, but I might as well start my digital collection at the beginning. NIER GESTALT & REPLICANT 15 NIGHTMARES & ARRANGE TRACKS $9.99 Originating in Japan, this awkwardly titled album would be a pain to obtain in physical form, but downloading it over iTunes is a snap. The music spans the spectrum from techno to rock to classical—there’s even an 8-bit chip-tunes track—frequently offering a fascinating…

QUAD-CORE’ PRODUCTIVITY When I kept paper to-do lists, I used to draw two lines to divide the page into four sections, and group tasks based on if I needed to do them today, next, or later. (Later got two sections to hold all the stuff I didn’t want to forget but couldn’t do right away.) Paper is great for this, because rewriting the lists every day made me think harder about how many things I was mentally committing to do—and purge or delegate as many as I could. Eisenpower brings this quadrant-style task management to your Mac. You can relabel the four sections however you like, and have pages for all your projects, each with their own labels. It’s easy to reorder tasks, or drag them from one section to…

BUDGETING ON A BUDGET For the price of a happyhour pint, SimpliBudget can cover the basics of financial planning and budgeting (including earmarking some funds for happy hour). The program features password protection, and iCloud syncing to other Macs or the $1.99 universal iPhone/iPad app. Support for QFX, QIF, and OFX file formats allows you to download and import your bank statements. And the simple interface makes it easy to tell where the lion’s share of your dough is going. The app is solid, with just a few kinks to iron out. While instructional videos on the simplibudget.com web site help, it takes some trial and error to realize you have to switch over to the “Transactions” window to import your financial data. Some spelling errors also surfaced, and we…

PASTE ALL OVER THE PLACE The clipboard is ubiquitous for copying and pasting content between apps on one device, but of course it only remembers one thing at a time. CloudClipboard remembers everything you copy, and lets you paste it to any Mac or iOS device through iCloud syncing. To send something from your default clipboard into the cloud, just click the CloudClipboard icon or window. There’s also an option to auto-paste, in the background, everything you copy into CloudClipboard. Once in CloudClipboard, your information is divided into categories: Text, Webclips, Links, and Photos. You can title items, edit text and URL entries, preview photos, and launch the URLs of all your Webclips. The only things missing are a search field and the ability to reorder items. You can use…

TYPE LESS, BUT SAY MORE There’s no reason to every type your name again. Or your email address, or anything else that you find your fingers pounding out over and over. TypeIt4Me lets you set short abbreviations that instantly expand to the longer entry, which can save you tons of time and keystrokes. (The app even tracks those stats for you.) TypeIt4Me comes with a few sample clippings, and as our library grew, we really appreciated all the sorting options. You can order your list by most used, last used, alphabet, last added, and so on, and sync your clipping sets over iCloud to other Macs—and iOS devices with TypeIt4Me Touch ($4.99, universal). If you want to get old-school, a printable list of your clippings and abbreviations is one click…

SHARE STUFF AS EASILY AS SHARING LINKS Sharing links is easy. Send them with Messages or email. Use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social network to share with your friends and colleagues. But what happens when you need to share a collection of stuff? Dropmark aims to simplify this process, allowing you to share not only links and images, but videos, files, music, and nearly anything else on your Mac. Dropmark installs as a menubar item that is tightly integrated with the Dropmark website. Find something you like, drag it to the Dropmark menu, drop it into one of your Collections, and it’s instantly added to Dropmark’s cloud. Collections make sharing a bunch of stuff as easy as sending someone a single link, giving them read-only access. You can…

PUT YOUR BEST FACES FORWARD No matter how “first world” the problem may be, it’s still a drag when a friend calls you and a horrid, pixelated, grainy mess appears on your iPhone’s beautiful display. Ensoul Contacts (ironically, a Mac app) solves this easily. On first launch, it asks your iPhone’s screen size and pixel density, a nice touch. The clear main interface lets you select a contact on the left, then drag in a photo from your iPhoto library (or other sources) on the right. If you use iPhoto’s Faces feature, Ensoul can even auto-match the faces to the contacts, which worked seamlessly. Once you’ve selected a photo, you can zoom and crop it, add filters, and preview how it will look on your exact model of iPhone. Ensoul…

Storm Raiders is the best entry yet in the Sky Gamblers aerial-combat franchise, sending you soaring through two separate World War II campaigns—the Battle of Britain and Asia-Pacific War—packed with diverse missions, intense action, and impressive visuals. Even more notable are the eight-player dogfights, which span a large number of play modes (like team deathmatch and capture the flag) and deliver ample competition whenever you want it. The Mac version doesn’t control quite as comfortably as the iOS version, but it’s still plenty enjoyable. The bottom line. Great combat and a tiny price make Storm Raiders a Mac flight favorite. SKY GAMBLERS: STORM RAIDERS 1.0.3 Atypical Games www.atypicalgames.com PRICE: $4.99 REQUIREMENTS: OS X 10.7 or later [+] Excellent flight action in both campaign and multiplayer. [–] Limited control options. Keyboard/trackpad…

If you’re up for a bit of a challenge, here’s what to do... 1 BACK UP YOUR MAC back up your mac Open the Mac App Store. You’ll need to purchase and install Mountain Lion if you don’t already have it. Otherwise, click Purchases at the top of the window, locate Mountain Lion in the list and click its Download button. Once complete, the Applications folder will contain a file named “Install OS X Mountain Lion.” If you already use Time Machine, open its System Preferences pane, click the Options button and check that you haven’t excluded system files, your user account, or any other folders from the top level of the hard drive from its backups. If you don’t already use Time Machine, connect a Mac-formatted drive, flick the…

Available free for iPad, Haiku Deck uses slick themes to help users create stunning presentations in as little time as possible. This is the kind of app the iPad was created for: fast, effective, and virtually effortless, even for people who have never made a presentation before. Pick a theme, start typing, and Haiku Deck goes to work scanning for high-quality, Creative Commons–licensed digital photos that might make a great backdrop. Text can be laid out in a wide variety of preset layouts, with the most recent version adding numbered and bulleted lists. If you have custom backdrop images ready to go, Haiku Deck can import them from the iPad photo library or a range of cloud-based services. Image filters can be applied for additional customization, and backdrop photos may…

Many music players in the App Store subscribe to Dieter Rams’ principles of good design, but as far as we can tell, only one pays direct homage to his timeless vision. To say that T3 Player is inspired by Rams’ Braun radio is like saying the iPhone 4S is inspired by the iPhone 4. We’re not so sure that he’d approve of the ornamental speaker grille that dominates the screen, but it’s still one of the nicest music players we’ve ever used. However, it’s a classic case of form over function. Rather than sync with your library, T3 uses a playlist-based approach that gets tedious, plus reverts to the first song when playback stops. It also doesn’t play nice with iTunes Match. The bottom line. T3 Player’s interface sings, but…

Considering the ample success of the original, Super Stickman Golf 2 expectedly doesn’t mess with the excellent side-scrolling golf formula too much, employing the same mechanics while adding fresh courses, customization options, and another gripping multiplayer mode. Nearly every hole comes across like a puzzle to somehow solve with a club and a ball, and the sequel has even more tools handy to require incredible precision from players with each shot, like portals, lasers, and repulsing magnets. Whatever the layout, though, the 20 courses have that familiar pull that entices you to dig back in and battle for leaderboard domination with double-digit below-par tallies. Beyond playing solo, Super Stickman Golf 2 maintains the thrilling speed-based multiplayer mode from the debut, which now supports eight local players, or four online. But…

Living in a one-bedroom in San Francisco is magical and romantic and cramped. After almost 10 years in my skybox, it’s time to find a bigger domicile before I delude myself into thinking our just-barely-walk-in closet might make a suitable bedroom for my nearly 2-year-old son. So, every Sunday is now a rat race up and down the Bay Area’s freeways, tromping through one open house after another. When my agent emails me listings, I fire up Real Estate by Trulia (free, universal) for full-screen photos, nearby school ratings, and crime maps. If I find myself in a neighborhood outside of our usual house-hunting zones, it’ll tell me what’s for sale (or rent) nearby. Waze (free, iPhone) is my GPS app of choice, letting me easily plan the best route…

The tiniest router around The Kanex mySpot is a small, portable wireless router that can transform any Ethernet connection into a wireless Internet hotspot for up to 16 devices simultaneously. Connecting is a breeze: simply plug in an available Ethernet cable into the LAN port on the mySpot, and then plug the retractable USB cable into either a USB port on your laptop, or a USB adapter like your iPhone charger. After making the physical connection, the mySpot springs to life, creating a small wireless signal that you can connected to with any Wi-Fi-capable device. While the mySpot doesn’t have 802.11n, we found that the 802.11b/g connection provided a fast enough experience with a standard Internet connection; however, 802.11g connections have a maximum theoretical throughput of 54Mbps. Kanex does provide…

Photoshop and Painter might still rule the roost for digital cartoonists, but Manga Studio by Smith Micro is gaining ground quickly. Designed for the more specific needs of sequential artists, it includes multiple panels, speech balloons, and pens and pencils that behave just as they would in the real world. Version 5 adds tools such as quick mask and layers so that your brush strokes stay neatly within your boundaries, a feature that’s been sorely missed in previous incarnations. It also includes 3D posable characters, objects, and backdrops, which means you can create drawings with a realistic sense of perspective and anatomy. Despite all these useful new features, Manga Studio could still do with a lick of paint on its clunky user interface. It ditches OS X’s familiar traffic lights…

Plenty of paper has been saved thanks to the iPhone and other portable devices: we no longer need to jot down lists and phone numbers or even snag the daily newspaper. As such, the Little Printer’s concept of bringing paper back into our phone-centric lifestyles feels like a novelty, but it’s hard to turn away such an adorable device. Still, much as we might want the Little Printer in our homes, considering its abundance of charm, we can’t figure out when or why we’d actually need it. The Little Printer is a compact thermal printer, much like those used in cash registers, which can print out all sorts of content using BERG Cloud’s web interface: news headlines, the top daily Instagram photo from your friends, foldable origami animals, and a…

Shooter’s delight Having a photo shoot on the other side of town in the pouring rain with no way to get there but on a bicycle (or parkour) is going to require a special kind of camera bag, and Chrome is betting you’ll want their new Niko Camera Pack for your pricey gear on such a day Chrome built their reputation as a leader of San Francisco–made, hand-crafted messenger bags with the kind of aesthetic that appealed to the skateboarders and bike messengers who founded the company. Known for their straps with vintage seatbelt buckles, Chrome bags have become as much a fashion statement as fixed-gear bikes and wearing your keys on a carabiner.carabiner. Thankfully, the newest addition to Chrome’s camera bag line comes without the seatbelt, and favors more…

Compared to the days of film, digital photos are a marvel: you can take as many as you want and see the results instantly. No need to wait ages to finish a roll, have it developed, and then try and remember why you took the shot in the first place! Digital has not only changed the way we take pictures, but also how we organize them and, for the first time, has allowed us to edit our shots until they look their best with minimal effort. Doing this isn’t as intimidating as it sounds, especially with iPhoto. This app comes with many one-click tools designed to improve your image, such as balancing the contrast and making the colors richer, for instance, to make them stand out. iPhoto’s tools are organized…

Many contacts that you enter are work (or other) numbers that use extensions to connect you to the person you’re trying to call. Remembering these numbers can be tricky, but fortunately, iOS offers a solution for extension numbers, and can automatically enter them for you when calling your contacts. WHAT YOU NEED An iOS device with Apple’s Contacts app 1 Choose a Contact to Edit To set up a number for a contact that uses an extension, open your contacts and navigate to the contact (or create a new one) that you wish to add the number for. While typing the number, you may notice the special button in the lower, left-hand corner that is labeled “+ * #”. Tapping this button will reveal the pause, star, pound, and wait…

Can you believe the iPad just turned three? It seems like only yesterday that Steve Jobs stood on stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveiled it to the world. Some people shrugged their shoulders and coolly categorized the tablet as a big iPod. It was hard to argue with them because, well, it kind of was, but I preordered one anyway and was amazed by how big a difference the size made. The iPad wasn’t something totally new, but it wasn’t really like anything that had come before, either. It was hard to put a finger on exactly what it was back then, but in the years since, the device has become many things to many different kinds of people, and for a…

Somebody needs to put Cable companies in their place. In this day and age, why should I need a cable subscription to access HBO, ESPN, Showtime, etc., on my iPad? Why can’t I deal directly with the content providers? Since I can’t think of a reason why HBO wouldn’t like to take money directly from me, I can only assume that the big cable companies put the squeeze on them not to; that they use their cable TV leverage on content providers to keep their hands in my wallet when I go digital. I don’t mind paying my cable company when they’re the ones piping TV into my house, but they need to get out of the way when I’m streaming off the Internet.—Marty Donner Part of the problem seems…

New to the world of digital comics? Here’s what representatives of some of the most notable publishers suggest that you check out first. Marvel http://bit.ly/ml_marvel “Marvel NOW! is a great launching point for fans of the Marvel characters in movies and television. Fans of Iron Man looking forward to the next movie this May can start with Iron Man #1 from Marvel NOW! or read the entire first story arc now collected in Iron Man Vol. 1: Believe. We’ve also launched new series for Avengers, Captain America, Thor: God of Thunder, and Guardians of the Galaxy under Marvel NOW!” —Jim Nausedas, sales director of print and digital media, Marvel DC http://bit.ly/ml_DC “iBookstore has a great search functionality that allows readers to search by key storylines. For Batman fans, Legends of…

THE GEAR WE’RE LUSTING AFTER…THIS MONTH CHRIS S. iPHONE 5 ADVENTURE SUIT www.photojojo.com $130 (or $180 with Super Sucker mount) It’s almost summer vacation time, and I’m really looking forward to stress-testing this protective iPhone 5 case while taking underwater videos of my kids. It’s got a built-in wide-angle lens, and it goes deeper than other waterproof cases, up to 15 feet—it’ll survive a 15-foot drop too. (Sounds like a challenge!) I wonder how many bars I’ll get at the bottom of a swimming pool. SUSIE SCOSCHE CONTROLFREQ www.scosche.com $139.99 I’ve used and loved several Scosche products over the years, and I hate my car stereo. So I’m buying myself a controlFREQ, which has everything. I can connect my iPhone via Bluetooth and use the free app as a remote…

While there will always be major software packages that retail for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, the Mac App Store (and its influencer, the iTunes App Store) has made it easy to find myriad light applications and utilities to just a few dollars each. In preparing this year’s 20 Under $20 list, we loved the idea of presenting 20 killer Mac apps you might not know about—20 is such a round, pleasant number, and would hopefully let us find something for everyone. But $20 per app might not seem like the bargain-basement price that it used to, even just back in the summer of 2011 when we did our last 20 Under $20 feature. But guess what? Most of these polished, stable, user-friendly, and utterly useful applications don’t come anywhere…

LEAVE A VISIBLE TRAIL TOWARD ‘DONE’ With a heavy emphasis on productivity and efficiency, Snail doesn’t overwhelm you with due dates; rather, it simply collects your tasks in a “stack” in your menu bar, until you’re ready to tackle them. Adding something to your stack is as easy as dragging and dropping, and Snail’s minimal, single-day interface makes sure you don’t get too far ahead of yourself. As you dive into each task, Snail keeps track of your time, so you can target any productivity pitfalls. A built-in digital stopwatch shows you exactly how long you’ve been working, but you have to remember to start it; when you inevitably forget, Snail lets you edit your saved times. Bright red alerts show you when you’ve neglected one of your tasks and…

Mint.com is such an amazingly helpful resource that it’s almost unbelievable to think that it’s free. We can input all of our various financial accounts—checking and saving, credit cards, loans, investments, and more—and track them all in real time from the sleek web portal or the iOS app, which is much handier than juggling logins for each institution’s website. And now, thanks to the excellent and free Mint QuickView app, you can keep an eye on your finances with a single click on your Mac. Mint QuickView nestles a handy icon in your menu bar, a click of which provides a handy at-a-glance view of your current financial situation. It shows your total cash and credit card debt, along with a breakdown of spending by category and a listing of…

GOOD-BYE, GOOGLE READER NewsBar shows just how slick an RSS app can be; it displays articles beautifully and it’s easy to customize the look, behavior, and alerts. Folders, under Preferences > RSS Feeds, let you bundle related feeds together, and NewsBar can even pull in your Google Reader feeds (before that service disappears in July) and merge them with your local feeds, so they’ll keep working seamlessly when Google Reader goes dark. Not everything was perfect, though: our folders weren’t copied from Google Reader, and dragging each feed to a folder one at a time took a while. You can import and export OPML files (say, to transfer your feeds in from another reader), but it’s a little hidden, in Preferences > RSS Feeds, behind a gear button. NewsBar can…

WHERE TO READ YOUR READ-IT-LATERS WHEN IT’S LATER Your digital reading pile can get as disorganized as that stack of magazines on the nightstand, especially if you use more than one service. ReadKit streamlines your reading with offline support for Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus bookmarks from Pinboard and Delicious. (Pinboard and Instapaper require paid accounts.) ReadKit lists each account in the sidebar, including categories such as Delicious and Pinboard’s private folders, and the way Pocket splits your entries into Articles, Videos, and Images. Mouse over a service’s name and select Hide to collapse the lists. The toolbar along the bottom has a button to switch the view from folders to tags, and a tag button under the preview pane lets you add new tags to each entry. You can…

A BETTER SELECTION Over the course of the past few OS X updates, Apple has taken to bringing some of the better features of iOS “back to the Mac.” PopClip adds one of the ones they left out. On our iPhones and iPads, selecting text automatically brings up a context menu, but when using our Macs, those options require an extra right-click. With PopClip, a customizable, iOSstyle pop-up menu appears over selected text, allowing easy access to the actions we use most. But the real power is in its extensions. Dozens of options are available to soup-up PopClip, from integration with Fantastical to translation and spotlight searching, and PopClip is smart enough to know which ones you might need for your block of text. We experienced a couple of crashes…

EPIC EXPLORATION Finding your way through elaborate and impressively rendered mazes is the goal in each of Shardlands’ atmospheric stages, and you’ll do so by clicking to make heroine Dawn move to a location, as well as dragging movable panels into position and clicking buttons. There’s a nice puzzle-solving aspect to the navigation, as well as a bit of action, as you’ll have to avoid hazards plus dispatch enemy beasts using your surroundings. But the thankfully deliberate pace lets you consider each move before you make it. The bottom line. Nicely paced and presented, Shardlands offers an intriguing array of subtle (but smart) exploration puzzles. ShardlandS 1.0.1 Breach Entertainment www.breachentertainment.com PriCE: $3.99 REQUIREMENTS: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or later [+] Intelligent mazebased navigational puzzles. Slick visuals and music. Deliberate…

MILO Bluelounge $14.95 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 PURPLE VECTOR Cygnett $18.99 GREAT 4.0/5.0 RED VECTOR Cygnett $19.99 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 TERAGLOVE Moshi $20 GREAT 4.0/5.0 ENHANCED-BASS HI-FI NOISEISOLATING EARPHONES Monoprice $7.11 SOLID 3.0/5.0 iDC SLEEVE FOR iPAD MINI iDreamcase $12.95 GREAT 4.0/5.0 5-INCH INK PEN/STYLUS Monoprice $6.97 GOOD 3.5/5.0 NUTOUCH GLOVES Newer Technology $19.99 GREAT 4.0/5.0 TRAINER FOR iPHONE 5 Griffin $19.99 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 MACRO CELL LENS BAND Photojojo $15 AWESOME 5.0/5.0 NEST Bluelounge $14.95 AWESOME 5.0/5.0 3FT MFi CERTIFIED LIGHTNING TO USB CHARGE/SYNC CABLE Monoprice $11.77 AWESOME 5.0/5.0 SUPPERLEGGRA PRO Acase $19.95 GREAT 4.0/5.0 iFIT-1 Satechi $15.99 SOLID 3.0/5.0 BOLTS TALK Griffin $14.99 GOO GLIF Studio Neat $30 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 KLINGG Klingg $19.95 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 RADSLEEVZ RadTech $19.95 GREAT 4.0/5.0 PROTECTOR CASE FOR iPHONE 5 Griffin $14.99 EXCELLENT 4.5/5.0 ACPOWER RadTech $14.95…

Ever since iTunes was introduced in 2001, Apple has continued to tinker with it, updating how it works and how you access and play music. iTunes 11 has introduced some interesting new interface components, the best of which is the new album view. This presents a grid of albums, and clicking one expands a track listing. However, although this feels simple and elegant, simplicity and elegance within iTunes are only skin-deep. The app remains a complex, frequently unwieldy beast, primarily because it now has to deal with managing all kinds of media on your Mac, including books, TV shows, movies, and apps. At best, you can sometimes hide the clutter, but iTunes is no longer an app with a razor-sharp focus, and even accessing music can be done in several…

Each month, the Mac| Life staff gives you a peek inside our iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches to show you the latest gems, oddities, and WTFs that we’ve uncovered in the App Store. NightSky Boasting an atmospheric silhouette aesthetic, physicsbased platformer NightSky ($4.99, universal) tasks you with guiding an ethereal sphere through puzzle-filled stages. Excellent controls, neat play mechanics, and soothing music complement the game’s increasingly challenging levels. Timehop Timehop (free, iPhone) shows my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and Foursquare posts from today’s date, one or more years ago. You can see them in the app and easily re-share, but I love getting the optional daily email and seeing how much things have changed in just one short year. Spunk and Moxie As taxing as it is cute, Spunk and…

Tablets have inspired an entirely new type of music creation app, and Chordion is an excellent, visually sophisticated example of this genre. It’s a creative tool that makes it easy to try out different musical shades and chord structures with ease. The main idea is that you use your left hand to trigger chord changes while “strumming” accompaniment with your right hand, which keeps it all harmonically in lockstep. As you select chords, the entire color scheme of the interface changes, a nice visual cue to keep track of what you’re playing. The built-in synthesis engine is serviceable but basic, though you can use Chordion with other iOS synthesizers that support MIDI-in to seriously expand the creative possibilities of real-time live performance. The bottom line. Musicians can find some real…

Developed by Angry Birds creator Rovio, The Croods is a villagebuilding game inspired by the DreamWorks animated film—and with two large studios behind the title, you might expect it to be a sure thing. Instead, this freemium title isn’t the least bit charming, and all it seems to want is your money. Your objective is to create resources for the prehistoric Croods family by trapping, taming, and caring for wild animals, which produce items that help other animals and your surroundings. Problem is, you’ll often run out of supplies and be forced to wait hours for more resources—unless you spend money on crystals. It’s slow and tedious, and doesn’t capitalize on its colorful source material. The bottom line. The Croods fails to leverage the strengths of its creators, all while…

Powerful, portable sound Until the Thunderstorm, the best way to get killer sound when using your iPad was to plug in the very best headphones you had, or maybe send the audio to a set of real speakers, using a cable or AirPlay. But now Belkin’s made it possible to hold a powerful, room-filling set of speakers right in your hand. The Thunderstorm is a sturdy plastic case that your iPad (2 or 3) snaps right into, with a soundbar-like speaker along the bottom. It totally rocks—the speaker system is designed by Audifi, experts in mobile-audio engineering, and it delivers full, rich sound with plenty of detail and oomph. You can turn it all the way up without hearing any distortion, and it gets surprisingly loud. Movies are more immersive,…

Believe it or not, email used to actually be a productivity-enhancing tool, although by now you’re probably drowning in a deluge of spam, sales pitches, and social media notifications. MailHub is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail that aims to help you quickly sort through the useless stuff and focus on the truly important messages. MailHub’s many options take some effort to master, but you’ll learn to speed through deleting, filing, and setting reminders with an arsenal of keyboard shortcuts. MailHub installs itself as a toolbar that sits atop your Mail window. Mouse and trackpad users can quickly click toolbar items to file messages, create reminders, and add additional mailboxes. All of these capabilities are backed by keyboard shortcuts, which is where MailHub really flies. MailHub’s neatest trick is that it’s…

Western Digital has been making streaming set-top boxes for several years now. Their WD TV line has consistently packed a lot of value into their little black boxes. The latest, called WD TV Play, continues in that tradition, offering a plethora of content options at a lower price-point than some of its competitors. At 4.2 x 4.1 x 1.1 inches, the blocky, roundedcornered WD TV Play immediately brings Apple TV to mind. The two devices share a lot of similarities while streaming Internet content to your television. Like Apple TV, WD TV Play features apps for Netflix and Hulu, and can stream local files. Where WD TV sets itself apart, however, is in the services it offers beyond the iTunes Store. Since WD isn’t married to Apple’s content universe, it…

Infested with greatness StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is more than the average add-on piece of downloadable content so prevalent in video games these days. Blizzard approached the second iteration of its massively popular real-time strategy game as a trilogy from the start, each portion allowing you to delve deeper into the gameplay and backstory of StarCraft’s three warring factions. Heart of the Swarm is a beautiful dive into the slimy muck of the Zerg, and the centerpiece of an inevitable conclusion to a three-part story. Picking up almost immediately after the events of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty—which is required to play this expansion—the story finds the former Queen of Blades in a more human-like disposition. Heart of the Swarm eases players back into the StarCraft play system…

The current conventional logic with solid-state drives goes as follows: they’re new, they’re cool, they’re speedy, and yes, they are expensive. But once you go SSD, it’s incredibly hard to go back. This theory is fully proven with OCZ’s new Vector solid-state drive, the 256GB variant having occupied my mid-2011 MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and making me dread the day I have to send the review unit back. To begin, OCZ went back to the drawing board and got the Vector’s underlying design completely right. Abandoning the SSD industry’s popular-but-muchmaligned SandForce 3 controller, OCZ purchased South Korean solid-state drive controller Indilinx and built the Vector’s current Barefoot 3 controller in-house and from the ground up. The results speak for themselves. themselves. During benchmark testing, the Vector…

Whether you get your photos printed professionally or use your own household printer, it’s not unusual to find the prints you produce often look different from how they appeared while you were editing them on your Mac. Colors may shift and appear differently, brightness may increase or decrease, and the problem might get even worse when you send a photo to a friend and discover their computer displays your photo differently again. No matter how you print your photos, getting them wrong time after time is frustrating, time-consuming and expensive, and you can multiply the first two by a factor of ten if you need to wait a few days for each batch of shots to be delivered. The problem lies in the screen you’re using—or, more precisely, how it’s…

Believe it or not, the iPad celebrated its third birthday on April 3. Three years might make the device a baby by some standards, but there’s no question that the iPad has already matured into an indispensable part of the Apple ecosystem—we can barely imagine a time without it. There’s been a vast number of apps made available for iPad in those three years, but here are the ones that the Mac|Life editors count as their personal must-haves. Kindle I couldn’t last a week without the Kindle app on my iPad. I use iBooks, too, but the ebook selection at Amazon is much bigger. As an Amazon Prime subscriber, I can even borrow select digital books. The Kindle app also makes it super easy to archive a finished book in…

“I’m about to Vulcan mind-meld with my Mac. I hope.”—Susie, beginning testing on the NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile (see p68). “Where are my dragons?!”—John, startled upon waking from a fever dream, after having watched the season premier of Game of Thrones the previous night. “Clearly, this game sets new standards in the naked-guyon-a-bike platforming genre.” —Chris H., after playing Chillingo’s iOS game Icycle: On Thin Ice. “Play Ball!”—Robin, getting pumped for her World Champion Giants on opening day.…

WIN THE THUNDERSTORM! Our love affair with Belkin’s Thunderstorm, an iPad case with skull-rattling speakers great for games and movies, began back in January when we demoed it at CES. Our review of the 30-pin version (which fits iPad 2 and the third-gen iPad) is on p62, and one lucky reader will win our demo unit, which we will miss because it’s awesome. Who’s a Winner? In our March issue, we gave away the Brydge+, a keyboard case for iPads that also has built-in Bluetooth speakers. That was won by TJ Wang—congrats to you, TJ! OUR CONTESTS ARE ONLINE! For more details on this month’s contest—including rules and how to enter—visit: www.maclife.com/June_13_Win And don’t forget to check out our Facebook page for even more special contests with awesome prizes (www.facebook.com/maclife).…

If you’re someone who started using Macintosh computers well before the all-inclusive friendliness of the iMac, you can still remember when owning an Apple machine felt gloriously different. And sometimes, maybe you think about those beige dinosaurs collecting dust in a basement, or discarded to the dark storage places of a university, and long for the dullish glow of the monitor. But for one man, the excitement of Apple’s early days still holds true, as he spends countless hours finding new ways to play with old technology. During the day, Niles Mitchell packages software on its way out to medical facilities. But a long-time fascination with the Macintosh has led this easy-going Indianapolis man to experiment with classic machines during his off-hours and post the results on YouTube for other…

You’re being cheated by a growing herd of money-grubbing lowlifes—lowlives?—who are buying patents not to create products, but merely to extort patent-infringement settlements from companies that actually produce something. In the legal world, if someone doesn’t use their patents for anything other than lawsuits, they’re called nonproducing or non-practicing entities—NPEs, for short. In the less-formal world, they’re called patent trolls. Fighting a typical NPE suit can cost a company well over $2 million. Faced with that cost, the target company often chooses to settle out of court for around half a million or so—not only to escape those crippling legal fees, but also to avoid having their executives distracted from building a business and their engineers forced to research defensive strategies and comply with litigation demands rather than design and…

HOW YOU FIND THE TIME Appointments go on the calendar, and tasks go on the to-do list, right? But when are you going to get these tasks finished, then? You could schedule them on your calendar, but if you don’t actually do them, the calendar keeps marching on, and your task could be forgotten. SmartDay links your iCal calendar with the tasks on your Reminders list, so open space in your day is filled up with tasks you have to do. But if you don’t do them, they don’t just vanish—SmartDay keeps moving those tasks into free moments until you check them off. The integrated notepad is a nice touch, and you can link notes to tasks and calendar items, meaning that all the info you need is never more…

YOU’VE BEEN FRAMED A picture is worth a thousand words, but why limit yourself to just one picture? Diptic lets you create square-formatted collages of up to six photos. This is a port from iOS (the universal iPhone/iPad app is also $0.99), and it’s just as easy to use here, with Multi-Touch trackpad gestures and easy-to-understand options and sliders. All the frames are adjustable, and you can drag in photos from the Finder, iPhoto, or Aperture, or access those libraries through the Open File dialog. (Scroll all the way down and click Media at the very bottom of the sidebar to see your iPhoto and Aperture albums and events—the Media browser is a little hidden.) You can adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation and hue of each photo individually under the…

KEEP IT SECRET. KEEP IT SAFE In the world of passwordmanagement applications, the program that saves you time gets the glory. pwSafe serves as a secure repository for your various passwords. You can enter individual URLs with the site’s username and password, and optionally sort them into categories, like Finances or Social Networking. When you want to log on, select an entry and click the Open button. pwSafe will open the site in your browser and load the password in your clipboard—you just enter your username and paste in the password. This is much more secure than jotting down lists of passwords in an unencrypted text file somewhere on your hard drive, and since you don’t need to keep your passwords memorized, you can let pwSafe generate strong passwords for…

THE SWEET SPOT BETWEEN TEXTEDIT AND WORD If you need a word processor that’s more capable than TextEdit, but don’t want the huge footprint (or expense) of Word, then Write 2 may ably fill that need. It’s a streamlined but capable option that includes helpful features like columns and header/footer support, along with a live word count, plus you can save to and edit Word and Rich Text file formats. Columns and tables made here don’t transfer over to Word docs, though, so it doesn’t play quite as nicely as hoped. The bottom line. Affordable, fast, and easy to use, Write 2 is a worthwhile lightweight word processing option. WRITE 2.0.7 MOApp Software www.writetheapp.com PRICE: $6.99 REQUIREMENTS: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7.4 or later [+] More robust feature set than…

HOW TO FIND THINGS IN THE CLOUD With our files scattered across so many cloud services, it can be a pain to remember where we put things. With Doo Document Organizer, that problem is a thing of the past. Think of Doo as kind of like a Finder for the cloud. Once you link your storage services—Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive—it quickly indexes your files and folders and presents them all for easy viewing, either as a giant list or organized by location. It does the same for your email or any local folder on your Mac; just tell Doo where to look and it will add whatever it finds to your library. And if you’re wary about letting Doo see too much, it’s easy to eliminate folders and wide…

PHOTO MAGIC The last time we reviewed Snapheal (version 1, 4.5 stars, Apr/12), we marveled at how it could easily erase unwanted objects from your photos. MacPhun calls it magic, and we said, “It’s a bold claim we happen to agree with.” Version 2.2 keeps that magic, and fixes a lot of the problems we had—and for $3 less. You can now import from Aperture as well as iPhoto, Photo Booth, and the Finder. In the Erase tab, you can paint on objects you want to remove, use the polygonal or free lasso, or even choose the Clone tool to pick the exact part of the photo you want to use to cover the unwanted part. Erasing modes include Shapeshifter, the most universal according to the app’s tooltip, as well…

BEARDED PUZZLES Getting from one place to the next is trickier than it seems in Hairy Tales, a colorful Mac puzzler that finds you moving and turning various tiles to send the hero safely toward a goal. Initially, this means little more than evading hazards and creating a safe path forward, but as the 70-plus stages progress, you’ll encounter new obstacles, like enemies and fixed arrow tiles. It’s solidly smart and only occasionally frustrating, though the samey puzzles turn a bit monotonous before too long. The bottom line. While not consistently enthralling, Hairy Tales is a pleasant and accessible puzzler for all ages. HAIRY TALES 1.24 Arges Systems www.hairytalesgame.com PRICE: $4.99 REQUIREMENTS: OS X 10.6.6 or later [+] Navigational puzzles are smart, but rarely overwhelming. Good for kids and adults…

When Apple updated the iMac and Mac mini in late 2012, it introduced a new storage option called Fusion Drive. Despite the name, it’s actually two drives working in a special arrangement. It pairs 128GB of flash storage with either a 1TB or a 3TB hard drive. Apple bills it as providing the high capacity of a hard drive with the performance of flash storage, in a way that has no impact on how you work and store things. Pure SSD configurations remain an option on some Macs, but they’re still costly for their capacities. Replacing a Mac mini’s 1TB hard drive with a 256GB SSD costs $300, and a 768GB SSD on the 27-inch iMac is an eye-watering $900. Hence Apple’s attempt to find a compromise between speed and…

We may ask a lot of our calendars on our phones, but they’re really only as smart as we make them. If we forget a friend’s birthday, it’s because we forgot to add it; if we’re late to a meeting, it means we messed up an alert. Tempo Smart Calendar, the first of what is sure to be a new generation of calendar apps, aims to take user error out of the equation by integrating with your social schedule like nothing else. Along with the usual iCloud and Google syncing, Tempo also scans your email, contacts, and Facebook friends to generate a complete picture of your life, from tomorrow’s presentation to next month’s ski trip. It’s not just appointments that Tempo’s after, either. Once let loose on your iPhone, it…

Unlike the iTunes-like apps that have revolutionized modern comic reading, Marvel Unlimited takes a much different approach, serving up all-you-can-read access (via $9.99/month subscription) to a large chunk of the publisher’s deep archive of books older than six months. It’s a novel and promising approach, though where and how you can read the offerings are current roadblocks to its success. Once you sign up—on the website, not through the app—and log in, you’ll be bombarded with 13,000-plus back issues, all ready to be consumed with an active Internet collection. Needless to say, there are ample riches within the stockpile. But unlike the smooth, minimal approach employed by comiXology’s Comics app, the cluttered and somewhat sluggish reading experience here disappoints. And while you can use a panel-by-panel reading approach, there’s no…

Catching scads of fish at once and then blasting them with a firearm as they’re launched into the sky? It sounds like dumb fun, but there’s much more beneath the surface of Ridiculous Fishing—and that’s not simply an easy water pun. It’s the difference between a game designed for laughs and an experience made with heart, and the distinction between a title you’ll pull out for moments and one that’ll command your attention as you plunge into the vivid depths. Ridiculous Fishing has the skill-based soul of a classic arcade game. Casting your line below the boat, you’ll tilt your iOS device to not initially snag the dozens of distinct fish floating below, but rather avoid them. Reaching the deepest point possible is the first goal, and then it’s on…

Built on the back of Snake, the classic arcade and mobile navigational game, Nimble Quest sends your fantasy hero parading through open stages filled with enemies, with simple swipes used to turn your self-propelled lead to avoid running into walls and foes. As you slay evil creatures, you’ll encounter allies, who will join your party by following your lead and thus creating the snake-like pattern. Staying alive amidst the building chaos of each stage means constantly turning, evading and attacking foes, and utilizing dropped power-ups, with the goal of lasting as long as possible through subsequent stages. The retroleaning aesthetic charms, as does the swoon-worthy soundtrack, though Nimble Quest’s role-playing elements are just a bit too superficial to add a truly long-lasting hook. The bottom line. Nimble Quest is an…

HTML5 sites with no coding—thanks, Adobe We’ve done our fair share of dabbling with HTML code over the years and even put together a website or two, but that was before mobile and HTML5. While Dreamweaver is still the center of Adobe’s web-design universe, Muse is targeted at designers who want to create websites without having to tinker under the hood writing code. It may still be too overwhelming for casual users, but it does let creative pros quickly mobilize their content with interactive, HTML5-powered sites. Muse runs in Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR. While cross-platform AIR is great in theory, apps written with it tend to be a bit sluggish compared to those specially written for OS X or Windows. Adobe Muse is no exception, even on our 2.7GHz…

For some, there’s nothing cooler than the idea of controlling computer software directly with your mind. No buttons, no keyboard, no mouse—just a link from your brain straight to your computer that translates thoughts into onscreen actions. Technology isn’t there yet, but NeuroSky’s Brainwave Starter Kit is taking us in that direction. Or, at least, it’s trying to. The main component of the Brainwave Starter Kit is the Mindwave Mobile headset. Originally released about a year ago in a slightly pricier package, the Mindwave Mobile somewhat resembles a pair of headphones, but it relies on two sensors—one that presses against your forehead and one that clips to your ear—to measure your brainwave patterns. By determining your levels of focus and/or relaxation, the headset interprets those patterns as input for various…

Dock ’n’ roll With portable speakers like Jamboxes and Boombots, we’re willing to sacrifice high-quality audio for lightweight, wireless freedom, but at home, we want our speakers to fill every inch of the room with sound, even if it means tethering our iPhones to clunky docking stations. Soundfreaq’s Sound Stack is a bookshelf hi-fi that lets you keep your iPhone in your pocket, but its Bluetooth sound quality mainly serves as a reminder of why many of its peers stick to a dock-only format. Right out of box, Sound Stack has the feel of a powerful, high-end speaker, and for $399, it should. Its industrial design looks like a fivespeaker rig, but it houses an intricate 2.2 speaker configuration that matches “two full-range drivers with two active subwoofers in a…

A challenging run for anyone The latest installment of indie studio Gaijin Games’ beloved Bit.Trip series returns to the persistent sidescrolling action of 2011’s Bit.Trip Runner. But beyond its super long title, Bit.Trip Presents…Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien is a pleasantly fresh experience, relying on the strengths of its predecessor while simultaneously morphing into a game accessible to nearly anyone. Yes, Runner2 can at times be incredibly frustrating—but only if you want it that way. Spanning 100 levels, Runner2 sees you guiding series protagonist Commander Video through increasingly difficult cartoonish stages. Gone are the retro-inspired visuals of the original Bit. Trip Runner, replaced here with highly stylized 3D environments. Still, the core gameplay remains: you’ll jump, slide, and kick your way past spikeladen enemies while collecting gold pick-ups in…

TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS ⋙ TRUE IDENTITY I got a fourth-gen iPod touch off of eBay. I have it named and have an Apple ID. But, when I go to the App Store or Game Center, etc., the previous owner’s Apple ID shows up and it asks for a password. How do I clean this up and get my Apple ID to show up? The best way to “clean up” a device that was previously owned is to reset iOS and all of the settings to start anew. This will wipe the device of all of the previous owner’s settings and content, allowing you to enter your information as if the device were new. To do this, go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.…

There’s a lot more you can do with your video clips than simply cutting them and placing them in a project. For one thing, you can improve the quality of your shots; if you’re filming something handheld, i.e., with your camera not fixed to a tripod, you may need to compensate for the fact that it’s hard not to make the camera shake, even a little, when recording anything. iMovie contains some clever technology that analyses your shot and does its best to stabilize your footage. In the best cases, your video can look like it was mounted on a dolly, greatly improving the viewing experience. Because iMovie has to zoom into your shot in order to smooth out the motion, you may wish to alter the amount of stabilization…