Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2014 i MacLife

MORE MAC|LIFE, LESS PAPER The Hottest Articles on MacLife.com The 25 Best Games to Play With iOS 7 MFi Controllers As of this writing, only a limited number of notable games actually support iOS 7 controllers, but there’s plenty of great stuff in the mix. www.maclife.com/BestGamesforMFi iTranslate Voice 2 Review iTranslate is great for quickly converting text to other languages while on the go, but it’s less handy for actually holding a conversation. Thankfully, the developer has just refreshed its companion app, which harnesses the power of voice, as well. www.maclife.com/iTranslateVoice2 8 Apps That Teach About the Universe The universe is infinitely vast, and despite millennia of studying the skies, we’ve barely begun to unlock its secrets. With these apps, you can gaze at cosmic beauty, learning juicy factoids about…

Myst co-creator Robyn Miller discusses his new film and 30 years of Mac-based projects Robyn Miller’s name is sure to be familiar to anyone who played Mac games in the early 1990s. Myst—which he created with his older brother, Rand, who together founded Cyan—was an instant hit upon release in 1993, and may well be the largest game to ever debut exclusively on the platform. That atmospheric first-person adventure game went on to sell more than 6 million copies across various devices, and the brothers followed it up with sequel Riven, which was similarly a smash. Apple recently marked three decades of the Macintosh by featuring the brothers on its elaborate 30 Years of Mac website, lauding how their “attention to detail set the tone for video games for the…

Is game-maker King.com also the king of all trolls? Candy Crush Saga is known for being one of the most popular, addictive, and profitable gaming apps on iOS. Chances are you’ve played it, or you know people who play it, or you hate watching people play it, because it seems like everyone is always playing it all the time. The game, however, is also becoming synonymous with something else: unscrupulous, ENCOM-like corporate greed. Released in 2012, Candy Crush Saga became an overnight sensation, earning over $600 thousand a day. The game’s developer, King.com Ltd., has a lot riding on this sweet success: Candy Crush Saga brings in almost three quarters of King’s total revenue. To keep that cash flowing, King aggressively pursues copycat developers. Many say too aggressively, as King…

How would you spend 50 bucks on music, movies, books, and more? SHERLOCK: THE NET WORK $4.99 If I have one complaint about the otherwise-excellent Sherlock TV show, it’s that each season (or rather, series) is only three episodes long. (Granted, each episode lasts an hour and a half, but still.) Fortunately, you can experience more exploits of Sherlock and Dr. Watson—with actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman reprising their roles—in Sherlock: The Network, an iOS game in which you help the consulting detective solve 10 challenging cases. THE LEGO MOVIE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK $7.99 Certainly, the big draw of The LEGO Movie’s soundtrack is the infectious “Everything Is AWESOME!!!” by Tegan and Sara, who worked in collaboration with comedic rappers The Lonely Island. But you would be remiss…

EXPAND YOUR iPHONE’S HORIZONS WITH A MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY TOOLKIT PHOTOJOJO POCKET SPOTLIGHT $30 www.photojojo.com This little video light is much beefier than the iPhone’s flash, providing balanced, less-harsh light for photos. It simply plugs into the headphone slot for power, and you can pay a bit more and get it with colored filters. OLLOCLIP QUICK-FLIP CASE $49.99 www.olloclip.com Normally, this is a simple protective plastic case, but it has a section that folds out to accommodate the Olloclip, which then doubles as a shutter button. It also has a tripod mount. JOBY GORILLAPOD GRIPTIGHT $29.95 www.joby.com Carrying a big tripod around with your little phone isn’t exactly ideal, so grab this elaborately monikered flexible stand. The clamps hold any phone tightly, and you can make it stand just about anywhere.…

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 FxGuru Action Movie FX has been a big hit for a long time, so a copycat app seems well overdue. FxGuru (free, universal) is a worthy competitor, with a wide variety of a la carte effects (you can get six for about five bucks) that offer everything from UFOs and falling satellites to earthquakes and dancing skeletons. AaaaaAAaaaA-AAaaAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration) The prem¬ise of this game ($0.99, universal) is simple: plummet off a futur¬istic floating sky¬scraper, fall through score markers, and tag buildings on your way to a (hopefully) soft landing. It’s even more addictive than…

Apple won’t allow third-party keyboards within iOS, so TouchType went a different route: designing an entire notes app to house its fan-favorite Android typing approach. Using what it calls "magical prediction technology," SwiftKey Note offers three auto-correction options that are perched atop Apple’s usual keyboard. The center one will insert automatically by tapping the space bar, while the others must be tapped. SwiftKey pays attention to your typing and intelligently parses such data to predict which words you might tap out next. We’ve found that Apple’s predictive typing has become less intelligent over the years, so using Swiftkey Note was like a breath of fresh air—but it’s only usable within this app, which is sadly limiting. The bottom line. It’s not the alternative keyboard savior we’ve longed for, but SwiftKey…

A devilishly fun revival The original Dungeon Keeper series on PC turned the tables on old-school fantasy conventions, making you a dark overseer—rather than a do-gooding hero—tasked with carving out a vast subterranean realm and populating it full of insidious traps, not to mention evil minions primed for slaughtering virtuous warriors. This streamlined, free-to-play iOS reboot is a different beast from its predecessors, but the series’ trademark humor and absorbing lair-crafting remains blissfully intact. With a quick tap of your ungodly finger, you can harvest gold and ore resources, lay down defensive infrastructure, and send your imps scattering to do your bidding. Building out your dungeon and lording over its many moving parts occupies a good chunk of your time here. Luckily, action-packed raids balance out the resource-gathering and dungeon-expansion…

An iOS classic extends its brilliance Eliss Infinity hurls you into an abstract universe where you sort planets for obliteration. They materialize somewhat randomly on the screen and must be manipulated by your digits, making them a suitable size to dump in "squeesars" that periodically appear and wink said planets out of existence. Naturally, there are twists that hamper any thought that you’ll be done with your planet disposal within mere minutes. As you move through Odyssey mode’s 25 sectors, it’s soon clear that each requires a different approach to succeed. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and frustrated as your fingers perform an intricate dance atop your device, desperately holding back some planets while tearing and flicking others into the abyss. But even the toughest levels are solvable with the…

iOS-caliber Photo Stream performance right on your Mac To read Apple’s description on its website, Photo Stream is a flawless cross-platform service that "just works" across all of our devices. Snap a picture with your iPhone and the photo will be magically beamed to all of your iCloud-enabled Macs and iPads, ready to be touched up in Photoshop or emailed to friends. But while Photo Stream works as advertised across our iOS devices, it’s not quite as seamless on our Macs. Depending on the age of your machine, a trip to iPhoto can bring up the dreaded pinwheel of death, crippling your workflow while you watch it spin. Even on our 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina display, loading our stream is far from instantaneous, often taking several minutes to populate…

Smart new features for the top diagram and wireframing app OmniGraffle is known for being the top diagram and wireframing app for the Mac. It’s gathered a loyal following for a feature set used for everything from app design to drawing up plans for a new kitchen. OmniGraffle 6’s most visible change is its "one-window" design. Inspectors to edit your document no longer float in separate windows; they live within one window alongside your document. While you can still open inspectors in floating panels of their own, this substantial change means the messy and overlapping windows found in previous versions are gone. Instead, there’s a more carefully considered approach to accessing the tools that live at the heart of OmniGraffle, and full-screen support (which arrived a few versions ago) finally…

Scan-and-grab OCR made simple Optical character recognition (OCR) is pretty amazing technology, but a computer-science student from Germany hopes to make it more convenient with Condense, a Mac application that scans a user-selected block of text from anywhere on the screen and extracts it into editable format. The app works in windowed or menu mode, where a custom hotkey is used to initiate the process. Three available contrast settings (normal, medium, or high) enable extracting type from any background, with the option to automatically copy to the clipboard, ready to paste into other apps. In our tests, Condense matched the accuracy of full-blown OCR software, although the actual scanning process tended to be a resource hog, occasionally freezing the cursor entirely on our MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Likewise, the…

Lara’s revival is brutal and beautiful Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider reboot is a game about searching: for ancient relics, forgotten tombs, and undisturbed grottoes, yes, but also for the self-assurance necessary to transform from a shy archaeologist into a brutal killing machine. Lara Croft’s baptism in blood—her own and, often, her enemies’—takes place on a fictionalized Yamatai, a hidden Japanese island full of pristine forests, snowy mountain ranges, and a sect of violent cultists who worship the shaman-queen Himiko. The first several hours are tense and painful: shipwrecked, alone, and impaled by a piece of stray rebar, Lara searches for food and shelter before taking her first human life defending herself from a disturbingly touchy-feely scavenger. It soon turns into a full-scale action-adventure, complete with gunfights, explosions, and undead samurai.…

Bring the magic of AirPlay to your Mac With AirPlay, you can connect your iOS device to your Apple TV and enjoy what’s happening on your little screen on a much larger HD television. But not all of us have an Apple TV. Some might even be using a Mac mini as a media center, and despite the fact that Apple makes Macs, it isn’t allowing us to display our iOS devices on them. Thankfully, third-party developers saw an opportunity. X-Mirage is the latest app to offer this feature, and using it couldn’t be easier. Once installed on your Mac, the AirPlay function becomes accessible on your iOS device and you can use it to watch films on your Mac’s screen or let everyone enjoy the game you’re playing. Obviously,…

iTunes 11 has some handy playback controls with hidden features Even if you’ve never used iTunes before, you should easily be able to get comfortable with its basic controls for media playback. It uses all the standard, ubiquitous play/pause, skip forward and backward controls found on everything from an iPod to a home stereo. But iTunes also comes with a few neat additions in the form of an AirPlay mode, a MiniPlayer, and a great feature called Up Next to make things more fun. Up Next is a way of seeing—and even changing—what gets played next or scheduling when a track is played. It was introduced in version 11 and gives you even more control over your music. The MiniPlayer is an option that we think more people should make…

Use the new Drummer feature to give your songs some human rhythm GarageBand has always been strong when it comes to electronic music; a combination of MIDI editing and drum machines let you build up some banging beats. For more traditional songs, things have been tougher. Loops are limited in number, and few people have access to a real drum kit (or, for that matter, a tame drummer) for studio recordings that would add the human touch to songs that primarily comprise guitars. In GarageBand 10, Apple’s entry-level tool for musicians brings across a feature from Logic Pro: Drummer. Although a little cut down from its Logic incarnation, GarageBand’s Drummer nonetheless gives you something akin to a session drummer inside your Mac, with scope for adding human rhythms to songs.…

APPLE SHOUDN’T BE FOR EVERYONE OK, so that title is a little inflammatory, and honestly, I only partly mean it. But it gets to what I think is an important point, or rather, a lesson that I hope the folks at Apple have learned as they prepare to launch big new products this year: that they don’t need to make things that dominate in market share, or even things that everybody wants. In some ways, it’s better that they don’t. Going all the way back to its pre-iPod, Mac-only days, Apple’s success has never been built on having the biggest audience, but on cultivating customers who are extremely passionate. Consider that Apple has become one of the wealthiest companies in the world without selling the most units in any major…

Thinking of getting a new Mac Pro? If so, you’ll want to consider investing in some of these interesting add-ons One of the key features of the Mac Pro is its expandability. The old-style pro-level Mac could be opened up, so you could add or swap storage drives, or slot in a new PCI Express card. The new design allows user access to internal components such as the SSD, graphics card, and memory sticks, but most of its expandability is done through its six Thunderbolt 2 and four USB 3.0 ports. The speed allowed by the Thunderbolt 2 protocol means externally connected peripherals can match internal components for performance, and because you can daisy-chain up to six devices per port, you can have up to 36 Thunderbolt peripherals connected at…

THE GEAR WE’RE LUSTING AFTER CHRIS H. GALILEO www.motrr.com $149.95 »The iPhone’s built-in camera is pretty great, but sometimes you need a little something extra to give your photos more “oomph.” Enter Motrr’s Galileo: a Bluetooth-enabled iPhone stand that can rotate your device in practically any direction. It allows you to take stunning 360-degree panorama photos with ease, plus it can do time-lapse shots and you can use it for remote monitoring. JOHN SPEAKER BAND www.bemwireless.com $49.95 »OK, so it’s not exactly the iWatch, but Bem Wireless’s Speaker Band still looks pretty neat. This wearable Bluetooth speaker lets me listen to music no matter what I’m doing, and the microphone allows me to use it to answer phone calls or talk to Siri right from my wrist. You can get…

THE MAC|LIFE GUIDE TO GETTING THE MOST APPLE FOR THE LEAST AMOUNT OF GREEN When you look around an Apple Store, cheap isn’t exactly the first word that springs to mind. From the floor-to-ceiling windows to the glass spiral staircases, just walking through its doors can make you feel like a million bucks. But you don’t have to leave feeling like you can’t afford anything inside. There may be $3,000 towers to ogle and 4K displays to marvel at, but everything in your local Apple Store doesn’t have to put you in debt. There’s a reason Apple sells so many products to so many different people these days—if you look hard enough, there’s an iPhone, iPad, and Mac built for every budget. And that goes for accessories and apps, too.…

WELCOME TO YOUR NEW PUZZLE OBSESSION You wouldn’t know it from the screenshots—what with that clean, minimal design and little faces on the number tiles—but behind the delightfully cheery exterior of Threes! lays a complex and calculated puzzle core. Its number-blending mechanics are simple on the surface and incredibly easy to pick up, yet careless play is quickly punished and low scores prove inevitable without constant consideration for each and every move made on the board. Success is often elusive in Threes!, yet seeking it has quickly become our favorite new single-minded pursuit. Basic addition drives this latest collaboration from Greg Wohlwend (Hundreds) and Asher Vollmer, who previously paired for the also-sharp Puzzlejuice. Everything takes place on a four-by-four grid, wherein every tile is shifted by your swipe and the…

One gadget, many electronic music uses KORG continues its onslaught of cool iOS audio apps with Gadget, a slick, lovely sounding iPad offering with 15 synth devices—each capable of some true sonic mayhem, and all wrapped into a productive sequencing environment. It’s not hard to quickly whip up some pounding electronic dance music, especially once you get the hang of the interface, but there are significant holes in the slick veneer. You’ll find beat boxes, polyphonic and mono synths, and a handful of weirder gadgets, including an 8-bit synth for video game-style sound effects. The fact that KORG decided to include all 15 devices at once is the reason the app is priced at just under $40—which, while expensive on the surface, is still an excellent per-device value. Gadget’s recording…

Don’t forget about Dre’s service Streaming services have been trying to crack the modern music discovery conundrum, and Beats Music—which features the branding of the popular Dr. Dre-backed headphones—is the latest such offering, serving up more than 20 million tracks with a heaping helping of music expertise. Beats Music initially builds recommendations based on your selected top artists, with a "Just for You" screen suggesting tracks and albums, along with playlists matched with your own. And the more you use the service, the better it becomes at learning your tastes. More adventurous listeners can use "The Sentence" to create mixes based on where you are, how you’re feeling, who you’re with, and what style of music you want to hear. For example, we flipped through the variables and inputted "I’m…

Nearly 20 years after its debut, Japanese role-playing classic Tales of Phantasia makes the leap to iOS. Unfortunately, its new free-to-play format and associated changes make it a less-than-enjoyable trip back in time. Though its solid battle system remains intact and the voice acting brings emotion to the typical (but endearing) save-the-world story, its new approach ruins the experience. Battles last much longer than usual and offer little reward, which makes leveling up a repetitive chore. On top of that, in-game shop prices have doubled and critical save spots in dungeons are now missing. What was once a fantasy classic is now just a sad, damaged grind. The bottom line. Tales of Phantasia’s crass cash-in on nostalgia comes at the cost of its own magic and value.—Giancarlo Saldana TALES OF…

Getting your house in tip-top shape is easier than it looks No one likes cleaning. Tedious and toilsome, it can eat away at our precious weekends and force us into corners of our homes where no one should venture. But it needs to be done—and for whatever reason, someone decided that spring is the best time to do it. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be as bad as you imagine. You might not realize it, but you’ve got a digital cleaning assistant in your pocket, ready to help take some of the hard out of all that work. Before you can start straightening up, you’ll need to straighten out what has to be done. Errands To-Do List (free, universal) will keep track of every little job and then some. With…

An iPad Air case with a few tricks up its sleeve iPad owners rarely have reason to be envious of competing tablets, but even the most ardent Apple fan did a double-take when Amazon released Origami-style cases for its latest Kindle Fire line. Now, the folks at Moshi have done it one better with a versatile case that literally carries a slim keyboard along for the ride. Moshi’s VersaKeyboard combines a stylish, textured front cover with a rugged polycarbonate back that perfectly conforms to Apple’s latest iPad Air models for maximum protection. The thin, gray front is designed to fold up into a stand behind the iPad in portrait or landscape mode, although we found it better suited to the latter. The back of the case also has a trick…

A magical stylus that helps you do and undo When Paper by 53 first appeared in the App Store, its beauty was in its simplicity. Unlike other iOS drawing apps, it didn’t try to emulate a desktop workspace by cramming a bunch of features onto a small screen; with an elegant set of digital tools, it redefined our expectations of art in the Multitouch era. In many ways, Pencil is the perfect complement to Paper’s singular style. Designed to mimic the look and feel of a high-quality carpenter’s pencil, it doesn’t succumb to the usual stubby stylus pitfalls. When gripped like a normal pen, its soft, cushioned tip gives it a spongy, almost brush-like quality that belies its precision, while a touch of weight adds just the right amount of…

This bird plummets like a lead balloon Cockatoo is made to help folks who spend time working on their Macs while listening to music, by providing quick, easy control over iTunes while you’re in other applications. In its current state, however, Cockatoo is one notch above worthless—and it’s not even free, unlike similar utilities. The Cockatoo interface is a single window that can be programmed to appear when your mouse goes to the extreme right or left side of your screen, displaying album artwork, basic controls, and your playlists. You can also view a master playlist of all your music, but this is where we ran into our first major gripe—there’s no search tool of any sort. It’s a tedious drag-andscroll affair. In testing Cockatoo, we frequently found ourselves opening…

Secret octopus father of the year Octodad: Dadliest Catch reconstructs the tried-and-true gaming tradition of inescapable challenge in a new, orange cephalopod body—and a three-piece suit. It’s exactly as endearing as it sounds, occasional irritating objective aside, and it delivers a pleasantly confounding stumble through mollusk fatherhood. The titular Octodad is, in fact, an octopus masquerading as a human man with a wife and two kids—and the entire game is an extended pursuit to protect that loving fagade. To that end, Octodad must preserve his cover by performing tasks that any normal father might, like making coffee, grilling burgers, buying cereal, or taking the family to the aquarium. Perhaps more than in any other Mac game in recent memory, the experience is really defined by its wholly unique and willfully…

TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS »THE CASE OF THE INVISIBLE FILES I accidentally downloaded three video files to my desktop, each with an MP4 extension, that are roughly 2.1GB. These files do not show up on my Desktop and therefore are not giving me the option to delete them. They are nowhere to be found in the Finder. What is strange is that I can open VLC player and play them from where I initially played them when I first downloaded them. Can you help? It’s entirely possible that the file you downloaded included a "." as the first character of its name. Files that are named this way are considered "invisible" on Unix-based systems, and will therefore not be visible to you in the Finder. If this is the case,…

Get perfect results by fixing red eye, noise, and more in Photoshop Elements Unfortunately, while most cameras can take good pictures with lots of light outdoors on a summer’s day, shooting indoors under artificial light can lead to disappointing results. Happily, software such as Photoshop Elements can go some way toward rescuing them, with tools for the removal of red eye (caused by light reflecting back into the lens from your subject’s retinas) and electronic noise (caused by amplification of the signal from the sensor, also known as raising the ISO). However, there are some things that can’t be fixed. In dim conditions, your camera will try to keep its shutter open longer to let in more light. If the subject moves, or the camera wobbles, you’ll get motion blur.…

BYE-BYE, BIRDIE Flappy Bird has flown the coop. Send in the clones! Despite having been released back in 2013—and featuring simplistic gameplay that many would describe as terrible—free-to-play iOS game Flappy Bird inexplicably exploded in popularity in the last couple of months, reportedly earning more than $50,000 per day in ad revenue. But just as suddenly as the phenomenon started, it came to an abrupt end when developer Dong Nguyen pulled the game from the App Store in February, claiming that the game was too addictive to be allowed to exist. Other game makers have no such concerns, however, and are flooding the App Store with countless clones in an attempt to duplicate a fraction of Flappy Bird’s dumbfounding success. Here are a few of the most egregious. FLOPPY BIRD…

YOUR OPINIONS, RANTS & RAVES LETTER OF THE MONTH I was reading the February issue of Mac|Life and got to the page sharing staff members’ memories of Macs, so I thought I’d share some of my Apple journeys and memories. My Apple memories go all the way back to 1979–1981, when my best friend and I were selling and installing Apple IIs to anyone and everyone we could. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep any for myself. Things changed and I was “forced” to make a living building, supporting, and networking Windows PCs. However, my love for Apple never left and I began collecting Macs when I could, creating my own Mac museum. I now have the following iMac vintages: an indigo blue G3, a pedestal 17" G4, a 20" white G5,…

Don’t like LogMeIn’s new pricing? Here are a few alternatives Users of LogMeIn’s free remote-connection service had the rug pulled out from underneath them earlier this year, when the company abruptly switched gears to a paid-only business model. Mac and PC owners now have to cough up $99 per year to access two computers via desktop, web, iOS, or Android. If you’re looking to join the ranks of former users proclaiming #LogMeOut, here are a few of our favorite alternatives—and with one exception, they’re cheaper, as well. EDOVIA SCREENS For those looking to skip the subscription route entirely, Edovia offers one of the most cost-effective solutions around with Screens, available as a universal app for iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad ($19.99) or Mac ($29.99, Mac App Store). For the cost…

Rik Myslewski offers a snapshot of where photography is heading A group of gifted guys from Galway, Ireland, is working on a way to take the “point” out of “point-and-shoot” cameras—specifically, the camera nestled in your iPhone. What these researchers are investigating is a way that a handheld device such as your iPhone could capture full HD images of an entire environment—360 degrees in all three axes—and then be able to selectively view any part of that image, zoomed or not, completely distortion-free. Sure, there are rudimentary devices, such as those made by Kogeto and GoPano (Google ’em), that can let your iPhone capture 360-degree video panoramas that you can scroll through horizontally, but at this stage in their development, they’re more fun curiosities than useful tools, being low-res and…

Your Mac, iPhone, and iPad are beautiful objects, but we don’t often think about what’s going on under their enigmatic exteriors. Here, they bare all in revealing photo spreads! BE HONEST: most of us don’t really know what a crankshaft is or what it looks like, yet that doesn’t hamper our ability to drive. Similarly, you don’t have to know what a stick of RAM looks like or even what it does before you can use your Mac to edit your snaps in iPhoto, compose a chart-topper in GarageBand, or just muck around in Facebook. But sometimes it’s just plain fun to find out about stuff like that, as well as interesting. So let us be your guides to the guts of the stars of the current Mac and iOS…

Social news without the excess On the surface, Paper looks a lot like what might have happened had Facebook invented Flipboard before Flipboard got the chance, and then slapped on a moniker rather too similar to an existing hugely popular (but entirely different) iOS app. Move beyond the snark, though, and you realize something surprising: Paper makes using Facebook almost pleasurable again. Facebook on desktop ceased to be fun a long time ago, and even the once-streamlined mobile app is increasingly full of cruft. The idea with Paper appears to be to strip back everything, bring stories to the fore, and turn the Facebook experience into a kind of edited newspaper. By default, your own Facebook feed is loaded, but you can add broadly defined sections ("Tech," "Planet," "Pop Life,"…

OptimizeMe doesn’t just keep a log of your daily activities, it also tells you how to improve them and how each one affects another, living up to its billing. The app organizes your manually inputted activities into four categories: health, creativity, routine, and pleasure. Whether it’s walking to work or taking a shower, you can record everything. Each activity also lets you select your mood, and while this may sound silly and superficial, it can actually lead to an insightful analysis of your day. OptimizeMe takes all of your recordings and correlates them with one another, so it can shine a light on how to improve your productivity and mood throughout the week. The bottom line. Manual logging can be a pain, but OptimizeMe gives you valuable tools to feel…

Hardly a stroke of genius John Woo’s reputation as a director and filmmaker was built on graceful action set pieces and high-stakes melodrama. Unfortunately, his first foray into mobile gaming has neither. You play as a private security contractor code-named Lotus, whose task is to escort a brilliant, nervous doctor through a series of levels stretching from Hong Kong to Beijing, all while dispatching oncoming enemies. Lotus has the predictable arsenal of guns, swords, and explosives at her disposal, and the key to Bloodstroke is striking a balance between them. Virtual buttons handle the shooting and grenade lobbing, but the close-quarters bloodletting is automatic; Lotus careens into enemies like a sword-wielding pinball, lashing out with her dao blade as soon as she gets into range. Frustratingly, the auto-running mechanics suck…

Lost Yeti’s retro-chic aesthetic is a throwback to an era long before mobile titles, and it’s undeniably adorable, looking like something that might’ve been released in the 16-bit era. Taking a page from the puzzle classic Lemmings, you don’t actually control the creature in Lost Yeti, and therein lays the challenge. Apart from having to angle the little guy in the right direction (he only makes clockwise turns when hitting a barrier), you’ll need to slide certain sections of a level—including obstacles—on their x-or y-axes to guide him. You’re quickly forced to split your brain between guiding your yeti and avoiding hazards or enemies within the same space in real time, even as the clever mechanics ramp up in complexity. The bottom line. Despite the often-tricky difficulty, it’s tough not…

Do the time warp? We’ve all heard the questions from mobile users who can’t live without physical keys, but those incredulous remarks have largely faded over time, as touch devices—particularly iOS ones—have come to dominate the market. Still, for anyone who has held back on buying an iPhone due to its lack of physical inputs, or heavy mobile typists who still haven’t fully adjusted to tiny touch keys, the Typo Keyboard aims to bring you into the modern era of handsets by strapping a familiar-looking keyboard to the iPhone 5 and 5s. Typo’s branding is an intentional (but clever) misnomer; in actuality, the device is designed to minimize typographical errors. It does so by packing in an entire QWERTY keyboard on the bottom, with a design that’s so similar to…

A sleek, powerful audio player It’s hard to imagine now, but iTunes started out as a simple audio player. It didn’t try to sell you anything, nor did it support movies, TV shows, books, or apps. Depending on whom you ask, iTunes has grown either more feature-rich or bloated over the years. But in this multimedia world, what if all you want to do is play music from your computer? Then Vox 2.0 might be for you. Vox is as streamlined as iTunes used to be, but it has a few features iTunes doesn’t offer even today. You can drag music into Vox from any storage device to create playlists, or you can have it absorb your entire iTunes library. It can even play file types that leave iTunes scratching…

Email organization gets task-oriented Email hasn’t changed much over the years, but a new generation of mobile and desktop apps is out to challenge the status quo with unique new ways to wrestle incoming missives—or just put them on ice until a later date. Mail Pilot for iOS debuted in early 2013, as a third-party attempt to build a better mobile email client. The developer has since turned its attention to the Mac platform, with the same modus operandi: incoming emails are treated as tasks that can be checked off, swatted aside, or resurrected in the future. For those of us who tend to treat an inbox as a to-do list already, this sounds like a match made in heaven. In daily use, however, Mail Pilot for Mac lacks the…

Finally, a worthwhile iOS controller The first standalone iOS 7 gamepad is also the top iOS game controller to date, as SteelSeries throws its hat in the ring with the Stratus Wireless Gaming Controller. While not quite a perfect specimen, this tiny Bluetooth option executes the fundamentals in a way that the recent Logitech and MOGA options (for iPhone and iPod touch) do not. What’s initially most surprising about the Stratus is just how small it is. Photos without a basis for comparison can be deceiving; it’s actually about the size of an older iPhone in terms of dimensions, albeit a bit thicker. It’s a full-service controller, with two analog sticks, a d-pad, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons, and it connects wirelessly via Bluetooth to any iOS 7…

Your quest for an amazing microphone is over In the world of Mac audio hardware, Apogee has always been the Rolls Royce of interfaces and converters in professional studios, as well as the luxury choice for serious hobbyists. Apogee’s original MiC microphone is one of the more popular bus-powered mics for folks needing a single unit that works on both Macs and iDevices. This newest incarnation of that microphone, the MiC 96K, retains the cardioid condenser design of the original, but now includes a pristine 24-bit, 96KHz recording ability, bringing the already stellar sound quality up to the highest pro-level standards. The very first thing you’ll notice about the MiC 96K is how solid it feels in your hand. It’s manufactured entirely in the United States, and the overall build…

Discover how improvements in Mavericks help you work smarter »WHAT YOU NEED » OS X 10.9 » Some personal files Every new version of OS X adds some enhancements to file management, and Mavericks is no exception. It introduces important new features, some of which are immediately obvious even if you’ve used previous versions of OS X, but there are others that aren’t so "in your face." That’s why we’ve compiled this guide to the Finder. Finder is always running on your Mac. Its smiley face, at the left-hand end of the Dock, has been a key component of the Mac desktop since the 1980s. Clicking this icon brings any Finder windows that are open to the front, or if you don’t have any open, creates a new window. You…

Mavericks keeps you in touch with Facebook contacts at all times Social networking means we can stay in touch with friends and contacts anywhere, anytime. We’re used to tweeting or sharing snaps from our iPhones, and we can also integrate with social networks using Mavericks. Here, we focus on Facebook, but the principles are the same for the other social networks that Mavericks supports. Once you have Facebook configured, you can send things to it from a wide range of apps. Your Facebook friends are added to your Contacts, complete with profile photos, and any changes they might make to their details on Facebook are updated in the Contacts app. Your Facebook notifications come straight to you in Mavericks’ Notification Centre. You can post to Facebook without needing to sign…