Indholdsfortegnelse for Aug-13 i MacLife

MORE MAC|LIFE, LESS PAPER The Hottest Articles on MacLife.com The 25 Best Quick-Fix Phone Games For many of us, the games we turn to the most are the ones that offer immediate, short-term thrills. For those needs, we present our picks for the best quick-hit games for iPhone and iPod touch, all of which let you play a game, level, race, or round in a few minutes or less. http://bit.ly/ML_BestQuickFixGames Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for iPad Review First released in 2003 for Xbox and PC, KOTOR was one of the most revered games of its generation, a sprawling epic set thousands of years before the events of the Star Wars films—and now it’s fully playable on iPad. http://bit.ly/ML_KOTOR 8 Apps for Healthy Meal Planning Eating healthy is…

YOUR OPINIONS, RANTS & RAVES Happy to Help My subscription to your magazine just paid for itself with the homemade Fusion Drive how-to in your June issue. I loved the speed of my SSD but hated the capacity. So, on Memorial Day weekend, I decided to give your tutorial a try. After a couple of solid back-ups, I dove in. Success! I fused my 128GB OWC 6G SSD with a 750GB 7,200rpm Apple drive. The combination of speed and storage is jaw-dropping. Keep up the great work! —Chad Gwinn I just completed the June 5-Minute How-To: Using Extension Numbers with Contacts in iOS. I applied it to two of my most frequently dialed numbers. The fact I no longer have to dial those pesky extension numbers has made my day…

Fourteen months after the introduction of Creative Cloud, Adobe has cut ties with its decade-long tradition of selling its most popular software in standalone or “Creative Suite” packages for Mac. The most-current versions of Photoshop, InDesign, and others now require monthly subscriptions in lieu of a one-time purchase or upgrade, with new features available only to those who continue paying. As of June 17, that leaves longtime users with three choices: Miss out on new features by sticking with last year’s CS6 (which is still available for purchase), replace their favorite tools with something else, or shell out each month for Creative Cloud. Priced at $49.99 per month with annual commitment, Creative Cloud assembles more than 35 desktop or mobile applications and services under one roof, capped off with 20GB…

THE GEAR WE’RE LUSTING AFTER MIKEL UE BOOM www.ultimateears.com $199.99 • Logitech’s UE line of headphones and speakers is popular around our office, so we’re all looking forward to the UE Boom, a rechargeable, 360-degree, water-resistant speaker that can play music from two Bluetooth devices, for back-and-forth DJ’ing between our cubicles. You can even link two speakers together for stereo sound with the UE Boom app for iOS and Android. SUSIE MINX AIR 200 www.cambridgeaudio.com $599 • Even though AirPlay speakers tend to be way more expensive than Bluetooth speakers, I love how I can send my music from iTunes to multiple speakers in the house. The Minx Air 200 is sized for a bookshelf but packs a 200-watt amplifier and built-in subwoofer, and it has both AirPlay and Bluetooth,…

After 230 slow news days without an Apple press event, Tim Cook and company came out swinging at the Worldwide Developers Conference: Ready for the first post-cat Mac OS X update? POW—here it is, and it’s named after a California surfing spot, ’cause Apple’s cool like that. You say Apple’s given up on the Mac Pro? BOOM—here’s a new one that’s super powerful and looks like something Darth Vader would use to torture a Jedi. You think Windows 8 phones look sexy? BAM—iOS 7 is so pretty you’ll put a ring on it. Apple’s execs threw each punch with a bit of swagger, like they had something to prove after months of quietly taking abuse from increasingly feisty competition. When the dust settled, Apple had revealed iOS 7, OS X…

PopCap’s original Plants vs. Zombies—a streamlined twist on tower defense that put the fate of a suburban home in the hands of undead-fighting foliage—debuted before the free-to-play craze, and it was a huge hit on numerous platforms, even becoming one of the best-selling iOS apps of all time. As a free-to-play affair, Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time expectedly strikes a different tone than its premium predecessor—and it’s not the time-travel theme that most strongly defines the direction of this initially iOS-exclusive sequel (out July 18). By and large, the sequel hews closely to the winning formula of the original, tasking you with defending grid-based locales from the oncoming zombie waves by smartly placing various offensive plants, such as peashooters (literally, they shoot green peas), explosive cherries, and potato…

Life is but a dream If you have kids, you have photos. And if you have an iPhone, you have lots and lots of them in your pocket. Disney’s Story understands that most parents probably have hundreds of photos and videos sitting in their Camera Roll, but don’t know where to start with organizing them. With an emphasis on speed and simplicity, the app helps you effortlessly create personalized stories out of your favorite moments without having to pore over dozens of unrelated pictures. When you launch Story, your existing photos will automatically be split into events. By utilizing the hidden metadata embedded in each picture, Story skillfully organizes your photos and videos, even knowing that pictures taken at different places on the same day are probably unrelated. Tapping on…

Though it draws heavy inspiration from a certain legendary sci-fi TV and film series, Star Command doesn’t fiddle around with any namby-pamby prime directive. Sure, diplomacy is sometimes an option with the strange crafts you encounter in this slick pixel-based quest, but it’s just good portion of your focus during more peaceful stretches good portion of your focus during more peaceful stretches good portion of your focus during more peaceful stretches way more fun to blow your adversaries out of the stars—or die trying—in this oft-intense adventure. A good portion of your focus during more peaceful stretches of exploration is on managing a diverse crew and tinkering with your starship. Spending tokens from mission encounters lets you recruit new crew members, buy additional chambers for your vessel, and upgrade existing…

Angry Birds Friends brought the fowl-flinging sensation to Facebook, and now the socially connected spin makes the return trip to iPhone and iPad while maintaining a free-to-play approach. It still requires a Facebook account, but linking up lets you tackle six new stages each week in a tournament against friends, challenging you to set the best scores by using an array of power-ups—which can, expectedly, be bought in bulk with real cash. There’s still a competitive angle to figuring out the best use of items to smash through a stage, but when those perks can be purchased without limits, the playing field hardly seems level. Angry Birds Friends has appeal for fans, but the freemium concessions come at the expense of some charm. The bottom line. Though an interesting tweak,…

For the ultimate in speed, it’s hard to beat a solid-state drive. Unfortunately, capacities are limited, and you’ll still pay a steep premium for the largest models. Buffalo’s new DriveStation DDR attempts to bring together the capacity of a traditional platter-based hard drive with the speed of an SSD in the form of the DriveStation DDR. It’s a novel concept, and while we were skeptical at first, the DriveStation has us convinced that it is possible to have it all: super-fast data speeds and lots of storage in a budget-friendly package. From the outside, the DriveStation DDR looks just like a plain-jane external drive—emphasis on plain-jane; Buffalo isn’t known for flash. It’s a black box measuring 1.8x5x8 inches, with a couple of subtle LEDs tucked into one edge. Small rubber…

Unless you spend your entire life within arm’s reach of a power outlet, or you never actually use your iPhone, it’s likely that at some point you’ll get frustrated by your iPhone dying at an inconvenient moment. We’ve come to love Mophie’s battery cases, and often depend on them when away from power for a day, and there’s now an impossibly slim version built for the iPhone 5. At 1500mAh, the Juice Pack Helium for iPhone 5’s capacity is even a little higher than the iPhone 5’s own battery. (A chunkier 1700mAh Juice Pack Air is $99.95, and the 2100mAh Juice Pack Plus is $119.95.) So you’re almost doubling the life of your iPhone when you slip it into this case. Mophie gear has always been well made, but this…

Living in Hawaii, I was lucky enough to be able to give the Optrix iPhone Adventure Suit a taste of all the elements. Photojojo was even kind enough to send a Super Sucker mount (an incredibly strong suction base available for $50 extra), which allowed me to take the iPhone surfing. At first I was a little worried about dunking my phone in water, but the Optrix quickly put my mind at ease. The included documentation advised me to test the case without an iPhone in it, just to make sure there weren’t any factory defects. I tested mine underwater overnight, and not a single drop entered the case. It’s two pieces: a slim case for your iPhone, and the larger plastic Optrix. The well-constructed inner case looks great—if it…

Marking the first time the venerable strategy franchise has appeared on Mac, XCOM: Enemy Unknown tasks players with running a clandestine, multinational anti-UFO agency at the dawn of a full-scale alien invasion of Earth. Your time is split between XCOM’s underground headquarters, where you’ll manage the agency’s finances, direct research into alien technologies, and manufacture cool weapons and gadgets based on those technologies; and in the field, where you’ll direct squads of soldiers through turn-based, semi-randomly generated tactical battles against alien death squads. That might sound complicated, but XCOM manages to make itself completely accessible to players of all stripes, and offers the freedom to advance the game’s storyline at your own pace. While the managerial stuff is important (and surprisingly involving), it’s the battles that are the real meat…

Compared to more basic to-do apps that focus on simplicity by limiting your options, Pagico goes in the other direction. But don’t let that put you off, because this is its greatest strength. You can dump nearly anything into it: ideas, files, contacts, PDFs, images, notes, to-dos, whatever, and organize anything in your life and work. The inbox collects everything, and you can file items into the database individually or organized into defined projects. Keyword tagging makes it easy to create Smart Collections—isolating any tasks tagged “errand” in any of your projects, for example. The Dashboard presents a neat graph of your appointments and due dates, and Pagico’s Contacts feature lets you link tasks, notes, emails, and files to contacts, for a souped-up address book. But both of these features…

One of the biggest problems all laptop makers face is finding a good balance between a machine’s power requirements and its battery life. Apple’s done more than most, of course, with both the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air offering up to seven hours of use between recharges, but that’s no reason to neglect battery management on your machine. Used properly, your Mac notebook will not only stay powered up longer than you expect, but it can also reduce those trips back to the Apple Store to get a non-user-replaceable battery replaced—something that can cost you up to $199. Even if you own an older Mac notebook, an Apple-branded battery for the old-style 15-inch MacBook Pro is still a painful $129, giving you even more reason to maximize your Mac’s battery…

Computers used to be all about expandability. Essentially, you owned a box that could be tailored to your needs as your requirements evolved. A popular upgrade path was storage, adding new hard drives as your files grew in size and number. But with Apple’s touchscreen revolution, everything changed. The iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are more like appliances than “traditional” computers—they’re sealed boxes that forever remain as they were the moment you purchased them. You can no more extend their storage capabilities than you can add a new compartment to your fridge-freezer. A quick look at Apple’s modern hardware suggests its entire line-up is heading in the same direction, but iOS devices are more restricted than Apple’s desktops and notebooks. After all, if you need more storage for a MacBook…

STAY IN TOUCH WITH US ON TWITTER: @MACLIFE Having just attended my first Apple presentation amid an enthusiastic pro-Apple audience, I got to thinking: what is it that turns so many of us into diehard Apple fans? I came up with six reasons why I’m happy living inside the company’s well-manicured walled garden. Reason one: Apple makes fantastic products. Sure, each of us has our quibbles with iOS, Mac OS X, etc.—no device is perfect for everyone in every way. But if you’re a Mac|Life reader, chances are you agree that Apple devices are generally fun and fairly easy to use. They are also very pretty. Hey, it matters! It’s natural to want things that make us say “ooh”; that feel great in our hands; that reflect well on us…

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, shortly followed by an Apple IIc, and I’ve spent most of my retirement savings on Apples ever since. I have 779 Word files, 277 Excel files, my Quicken account, and 11 database files. I don’t need and don’t want more gimmicks, clouds, split screens, and all of the other prattle that Apple (and Windows) keep force-feeding us. I live in an adult community and have a reputation of being a computer guru, but most the articles in Mac|Life go right over my head. Most of the people I know are afraid of their computers and have no idea how to use the vast majority of what they offer. While I own an iMac, an iTouch, and an iPad, the hype about the diabolical…

Outdated electronic equipment isn’t usually worth a whole lot, but that’s not at all the case with Apple’s very first commercial product, the Apple I. At an auction held in Cologne, Germany in late May, a functioning Apple I was sold by Auction Team Breker for a whopping $671,400. The winning bidder—who has chosen to remain anonymous—not only took home a piece of computing history in the form of the original Apple I circuit board (which was originally released in 1976 and required additional hardware to function) autographed by designer and Apple cofounder Steve “Woz” Wozniak, but also a 1978 letter signed by Steve Jobs himself. The winning bid set a new record for an Apple I, surpassing the previous record of $640,000 set last fall, and is a far…

Where I work, Intel is also known as Chipzilla because it romps through the personal-computing market as effortlessly as did Godzilla through Tokyo. But times are changing. Tablets and smartphones powered by processors based on designs from the British firm ARM have transmogrified personal computing, and Intel is being forced to play catch-up. Intel makes three lines of chips for general-purpose computing: Core, Xeon, and Atom. (Yes, geeks, I know about Itanium, Xeon Phi, Pentium, and Celeron, but this is Mac mag, OK?) Nearly all Macs use Core processors of some flavor, and the Xeon finds a home only in the long-neglected Mac Pro. Among all Macs—all Apple products, for that matter—there’s nary an Intel Atom processor to be found. Why not? Because Atoms are exceptionally low-power chips—and I mean…

You opened that beautiful Apple box to find your gleaming new Mac inside it ages ago! It booted up and immediately seemed so much faster than what it replaced. Apps opened with a speed you found astonishing, and any task you could throw at it seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. But, the novelty of your no-longer-new Mac’s incredible speed wore off a long way back. Now, you find yourself tapping the table impatiently, sighing as you wait for applications to open and documents to load. And if the cursor changes to a spinning beach ball, you get that sinking feeling that tells you you’re going to be waiting a good long time for whatever you were doing to finish. It isn’t you. You’re not becoming irrationally…

Hang back for now Freshly liberated from the Google+ app, Hangouts appears hell-bent on reinventing the messaging wheel, but winds up leaving off too many spokes to make this a smooth ride. While the free, universal app offers cross-platform support between iOS, Android, Chrome OS, and web browsers, it’s really a baby step toward loftier goals—which will eventually include SMS and Google Voice integration. However, both features are currently MIA, and the app requires you to sign up for Google+ before you can communicate. For those used to AOL-style instant messaging, Hangouts might feel like touching down on an alien planet. To start a new Hangout, you can select up to 10 Google+ users from the jumbled mess of those in your circles, as well as random folks presumably pulled…

Twitter has long been a way for musicians to connect with their fans, but the standalone Twitter #Music app is something different: It’s an opportunity for the social networking company to leverage its ubiquitous service to turn users on to new artists. The glossy iPhone offering pulls data from tweets and trends to build visual grids of artists in different categories, with iTunes audio samples just a couple of taps away. The app looks and sounds great, but much of the functionality comes up shorter than expected. Full tracks can only be streamed by paid Spotify and Rdio users; the selected sample song often seems random (not always recent or a single); and the recommendations are scattershot. The bottom line. Twitter #Music feels more like an adequate social networking tie-in…

Happily into the abyss The best score-chasing games compel you to play over and over (and over) again each time you fire them up. Luckily, Impossible Road is a game worthy of such obsession, as the unflinchingly difficult quest to guide a ball along an endless roller coaster track rewards persistence, and wastes no time in getting you back into its dazzling world upon inevitable failure. Each randomized course starts with a straightaway and then quickly twists like mad into the white haze, with touches of the left and right sides of the screen letting you navigate the turns. Rolling through numbered gates ups your score, but it’s inevitable that you’ll fall off of the route sooner rather than later. That’s not necessarily a death sentence. In fact, a large…

iPhone users rarely have any need to envy their Android-toting friends, and the recent introduction of the lauded Google Now feature to the existing Google Search app on iOS means there’s even less reason to do so. Google Now gathers weather, places, travel, and customized interests into neat stacks of virtual “cards.” Related entries are grouped to minimize clutter, but users can temporarily eliminate unwanted entries by swiping them off the screen, or permanently toggle off entire categories in Settings. The experience looks and feels identical to the Android version, although Search currently doesn’t access the iOS calendar, so it can’t display any of your upcoming events. Otherwise, Now is search on steroids—it predicts information you’ll need based upon activity in your Google account. The feature works best for Gmail…

Bring in the noise Digital Performer 8 is an evolution, not a revolution, which makes sense: the interface, toolset, and capabilities of this combination MIDI/audio editor are the results of over a quarter-century of intensive use by top Mac-based musicians and audio engineers. Compared to Apple’s Logic, DP8 offers more robust support for editing audio for video—the degree of audio synchronization and video playback is rock solid. And unlike DigiDesign’s ProTools, DP8 doesn’t skimp on the MIDI-editing side. It’s probably the most feature-laden MIDI sequencer currently on the Mac. Plus, version 8 has a boatload of new effects plug-ins, interface tweaks, extra goodies for guitar players, and a bunch more additions. While previous 32-bit versions were limited to working with only 4GB of RAM, DP8 is fully 64-bit, dramatically extending…

Despite the “III” in the name, this version of Ulysses is a new product. Rather than iterate on Ulysses 2, the app reimagines the text editor in a way that visually resembles Mail and conceptually sits somewhere between iA Writer and the project-based Scrivener. The three-pane interface becomes a management and writing solution for text files. Projects and sources are managed in the sidebar, and a second pane is used to select documents. The main pane is your workspace. Pop-ups and tear-off palettes then give access to flagged favorites, exports (to TXT, RTF, and PDF), statistics (counts/reading times), and document navigation. With its beautiful default theme, friendly launch screen, and witty instructions, we found Ulysses III immediately usable. Although the app relies on Markdown, newcomers are eased in via a…

As consumers, we face the lifelong dichotomy of wanting to know our good money is well spent while also wanting to get the most bang for our buck. With speakers, this is rarely different. Nyne’s NB-250 sounds lush, there’s no denying it, but Killer Concepts’ Rocksteady XS is making waves at half the price. Does a Benjamin honestly represent the gap between these two products? Taking a look under the hood, we can see that part of Nyne’s higher price tag comes from its double 7W output, which is twice the oomph of the Rocksteady XS. Both speakers carry a respectable passive subwoofer, but even at higher volumes the NB-250 keeps the party going without wavering, while the Rocksteady can start to lose its midrange at about peak volume. Still,…

Smart Pack is one of those names, like Genius Bar, that some will agree with while others will just roll their eyes. Bags are subjective, and this one from iHome doesn’t ooze style, but it’s got some functional features that some users might find attractive nonetheless. There’s a dedicated place for each of your gadgets, starting with a padded laptop pocket right up against your back, lined with luxurious fake fur. I toted my 15-inch MacBook Pro there, eschewing its usual sleeve, and barely noticed its weight. Next is the “big pocket” for miscellaneous stuff. It zips open wide with a little gusset so nothing falls out. But because there are so many other pockets on the bag, this pocket doesn’t hold as much as you might expect. Shoving in…

Although Spotlight lets you find apps and files with ease, it doesn’t let you do a great deal with them. Additionally, it’s a closed system that you can’t extend and can barely customize. By contrast, Quicksilver can put your entire Mac at your fingertips, through a pane-oriented command system utilizing an object/action/argument structure. The basic Quicksilver interface is easy to learn. A shortcut (Control + Space by default) triggers the app and you start typing to define an object. Characters needn’t be contiguous (although you get better results if they are) and if Quicksilver doesn’t immediately display what you want, you can use the cursor to rummage through a dropdown results menu. Post-selection, you tab to the second pane and use the same workflow to choose an action (email, launch,…

If your Mac’s feeling sluggish, there’s often a very good reason for it. You might need to shut down an app or two. Maybe your hard drive is running with less than 10% of free space, and it’s having trouble finding room to shuffle around your working files. Perhaps you need to upgrade your memory—particularly if you bought a bare-bones model without any upgrades. At other times, though, the cause is less obvious. You’re not running many applications, you have a generous 16GB of memory under the hood, and your hard drive is only half full, yet your apps aren’t so much running as taking a leisurely stroll, and the web has reverted to dial-up speeds. That’s when you need to investigate further. When playing detective, your first stop should…

One of your Mac’s many talents is its ability to share a single Internet connection with multiple devices, such as your iPhone or iPad, or even another computer. This can be really useful in a range of situations. You might be in a hotel room that doesn’t have Wi-Fi but does have a wired Ethernet connection. Here, you can plug your Mac into the wall and share the connection out over Wi-Fi, allowing you to get your iPhone or iPad online, too. Conversely, you can also share a Wi-Fi Internet connection with another computer using an Ethernet cable between them. This is especially useful if you’ve got an older machine that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. In both these cases, you need a Mac with an Ethernet connector, marked with a symbol…

“It’s been a privilege and an honor, and I’ll miss you all.”—Susie, leaving the magazine after seven action-packed years. Follow her on Twitter @sfsooz to find out what’s next. “Noooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooo!” —Chris H. does his best Darth Vader impression after hearing that Susie is leaving. “What’s that, Susie? Ha ha, you’re so funny!”—John, talking to Susie’s empty chair and entering a dangerous place. “She’s gone. Oh I, oh I, I’d better learn how to face it.” —Robin, lamenting Susie’s departure in song. “Ooh! Can I be Oates? I’ve got the right hair.”—Mark, getting into the fantasy of a Hall & Oates duet with Robin.…

Win: an iHome smart pack stuffed with goodies! • Susie reviewed the iHome Smart Pack for Mac on p73, and while she found its size and layout weren’t quite right for her, it’s built with Apple lovers in mind, with dedicated pockets for your MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and chargers. You could win it for yourself, but that’s not all. Susie is stuffing it with lots of mystery goodies from the Mac|Life testing lab, sure to bring a smile to any Mac lifer’s face. Who’s a Winner? In our May issue, we gave away a VerticalMouse, whose straight-arm positioning is designed to reduce strain in your arm and wrist. It’s now headed out to lucky reader Gabe Sapuay. Congratulations! OUR CONTESTS ARE ONLINE! For more details on this month’s contest—including rules…

It’s hard to imagine life without our iPads. What didn’t exist just over three years ago has transformed the way we do many things, from watching TV and reading newspapers to making music and planning vacations. Whether we’re traveling with our mini or lounging on the couch with its big brother, our iPads are never out of arm’s reach. And people are dreaming up new uses for it all the time; it’s become so ubiquitous, we barely bat an eye when we run into one throughout the course of our day. Apple’s tablet has infiltrated just about every corner of the world, and all sorts of people—from new moms to veteran quarterbacks—are getting in on the act. RECIPE FOR SUCCESS The iPad has made serious inroads in almost every area…

HEARTTHROB (DELUXE VERSION) TEGAN AND SARA $12.99 ($7.99 for regular version) Tegan and Sara Quin have built a strong indie following over the past 14 years, but with the January release of Heartthrob, the Canadian twins took a big step into the pop spotlight. This record exemplifies pop music at its best, with songs that have both hummable hooks and emotional resonance. And it’s definitely worth shelling out the extra three bucks for the deluxe version, which comes with two quality bonus tracks and the music video for “Closer,” the album’s first single. THE WALKING DEAD SEASON 3 (SD) $27.99 ($42.99 HD) Like a lot of other Walking Dead fans I know, I lost interest midway through the sluggish season two. I stopped watching, and though I always intended to…

Communication is probably the thing we use our Macs, iPhones, and iPads for the most, from typing an email to making a call to sharing the mundane details of every sandwich on social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. But if your idea of social media is just that—self-absorbed types blathering on about sandwiches and latte art and guffawing over the latest meme that will seem trite the next day—you’re missing out. Twitter can be a useful tool for sharing information and making connections, if you don’t let your feed get cluttered by vapid oversharing, and Facebook gives you plenty of options for banishing its most annoying quirks, if you know where to find them. We’re here to help, with tips and tidbits about LinkedIn, Path, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram,…

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 SUSIE Hueless Slapping a black-and-white filter on a color photo is one thing. Hueless ($2.99, iPhone) is another. It lets you shoot in black-and-white from the get-go, with live exposure and contrast sliders. It can save your images as JPEGs, or even as TIFFs for serious editing or printing later on. CHRIS H. Robot Unicorn Attack 2 Robot Unicorn Attack 2 (free, universal) is free-to-play done right. In-game currency comes quickly in this intentionally absurd endless runner, so the only thing you’ll ever need to pay out of pocket for are optional licensed music tracks (Corey Hart!). Better…

The Lytro camera is an amazing way to add perspective to photos, but at $399, it’s beyond the financial grasp of many amateur shutterbugs. Thankfully, FocusTwist promises to deliver refocusable, ready-to-share images for a whole lot less, creating images where the key focus can be changed to another object with just a tap. FocusTwist is fairly specific about how to create a so-called twist, requiring you to be a certain range from foreground and background items. Once settled, simply tap the screen and it’ll begin recording a series of images that captures objects from the entire focal range. It produces effective, oft-dazzling images, albeit ones that can only be viewed via the app or its companion website. The bottom line. There’s not a whole lot to FocusTwist, but it delivers…

Legendary game designer Sid Meier brings his eye for quality to Ace Patrol, a free-to-play, turn-based tactics game set in the skies above World War I. Managing a squadron of four pilots, it’s your job to direct them through missions that involve bombing enemy supply lines, escorting bombers, and much more. Controlling the planes is limited to tapping on movement markers, but things like altitude and g-forces affect your maneuvers, and your pilots gain new abilities with experience. Beyond the campaign, there’s also a single-device multiplayer mode, but however you tackle it, Ace Patrol is light, fun, and surprisingly involving. Expect to shell out for more than the first few missions, however. The bottom line. Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol is a deceptively deep, highly polished, and surprisingly addictive look at…

The summer-concert and outdoor-festival season is in full swing, and every year around this time, the wife and I get out and about to check out at least a few fests and shows. We have a great time, but between travel, planning, and juggling all of the little important details—not to mention dealing with the ample heat—there are always a few minor snags to deal with along the way. Thanks to a handful of important apps, troubleshooting is getting easier and easier to tackle, allowing us to relax and have fun without sweating all of the small stuff—and sweating too much in general! Bad weather, forgotten gear, and dehydration are no match. We’re prepared for both the best and the worst with these handy apps for concertgoers. When you’re out…

Wish you could video chat on the biggest screen in your home? Me neither. But for those who do, Logitech’s TV Cam HD makes it happen in stunning detail. With an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection and HDMI-out to your TV, it lets you video chat from your couch, while a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens puts the whole room on display in 720p. In my testing, everyone I’ve chatted with has remarked on the sharp image quality. They’re surprised not just by what they see, but how much they see. Putting into perspective the fuzziness of most computers’ webcams, the visuals here are remarkably crisp, performing even in low light. With four noise-reducing microphones, audio comes through clearly as well, though sound can drop off if directed away from the camera.…

Like predecessors Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Anomaly Korea, 11 Bit Studios’ Anomaly 2 turns classic tower defense upside down. Instead of fortifying a base with turrets, cannons, and soldiers, Anomaly 2 places you in command of the incoming horde. Armed with a combat suit capable of setting up decoys, detonating EMP pulses, and healing units, you’ll be tasked with leading a convoy of tanks, armored mechs, drones, and mobile labs through hostile territory, blasting through metallic alien defenses to clear roads or liberate important objectives. As the third entry in the series, Anomaly 2 has firm command of the game’s basic conceits: Missions, friendly units, and enemy types are varied and work well together, and the large maps are flexible enough to support multiple play styles. For example, enemy Chargers…

Eton’s FRX3 is a jack of all trades. It’s a radio with AM, FM, and NOAA weather bands. It’s an LED flashlight. It’s an alarm clock. It’s a portable speaker. You can power it with three AAA cells, the hand crank, the built-in solar panel, or by plugging it into a USB port or AC adapter (a cable is included, but the AC adapter is not). Oh, and the internal rechargeable battery can charge your iPhone, too. Eton manages to cram all that into a fairly compact 6.9x5.8x2.6-inch package. The hard-plastic shell is durable enough to survive minor bumps, but the FRX3 seems better suited for family emergency or camping kits, rather than hardcore mountaineering. The radio, clock, and flashlight features of the FRX3 are fairly simple. The sound quality…

Oh, I don’t even own a scale,” I used to say breezily, in the smugly dulcet tone of one of those people who claims to never gain weight. Then I had a kid and put on a bunch of pounds. And just as tracking my jogging stats with RunKeeper became an extra push to lace up my sneakers more often, a high-tech superscale like Withings’ Smart Body Analyzer WS-50 seems like just the thing to keep me honest and on track to meet my weight-loss goals. We’re nerds. We need to embrace it. Physically, the WS-50 is a beauty, with a modern look, deep gray glass, and an easy-to-read LED display. It runs on 4 AA batteries, which are included, but it’s no basic electronic scale. The WS-50 weighs you,…

• TIME MACHINE TROUBLE I have a wireless router with a USB port and a 1TB external drive. Previously, backups with Time Machine weren’t an issue since I was plugged directly into my Mac with the drive. Now, with the drive attached to the router, Time Machine doesn’t recognize it. How can I get Time Machine to back up over my network? Every router will be different, but we can show you how to do it with an Apple Airport Extreme; the process should be similar with any modern router and a Mac running Mountain Lion. To begin, connect your drive to your router using a USB cable, remembering that some hard drives may require an external power source in order to operate. Visit your router settings to ensure that…

Although the English alphabet is pretty simple, with just 26 letters, there are plenty of characters beyond A to Z. Some are so commonplace you use them every day: currency symbols, punctuation, and mathematical notation. Many other useful characters are also available to Mac users, but they’re somewhat hidden from view, largely through not being displayed on standard Apple keyboards. There are also accented characters, along with graphical components that can be useful in design and social networking, such as arrows, shapes, and emoji pictographs. This tutorial is designed to provide a succinct guide to exploring these special characters, along with enabling you to more easily add them to your documents. Along with using Apple’s built-in keyboard and character viewers (which we’re showing on Mountain Lion, but similar versions exist…

$10,000 APP STORE CARD The App Store recently hit a landmark 50 billion downloads, and to celebrate the occasion, Apple handed out a $10,000 gift card (for use in the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore) to the lucky downloader of that 50 billionth app, Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio. But what do you do with $10,000 in App Store credit? Plenty! If you’re reading, Brandon, take note of these ways to blow through 10 grand. Music Time to build up that music library! For a fraction of that gift card, you can buy the complete works of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, U2, Madonna, and Michael Jackson (including all collections and remastered reissues). TOTAL SO FAR $2,730 Television iTunes is a great way to watch television. With only…