Innehållsförteckning för Apr-14 från MacLife

MORE MAC|LIFE, LESS PAPER The Hottest Articles on MacLife.com 10 iOS Apps for Film Buffs iOS features dozens of great apps for learning about movies, cataloging your collection, and even watching a thing or two. Here are 10 of the best. http://www.maclife.com/AppsforFilmBuffs Outread Review A reading app that promotes speed, Outread’s unique method actually helps as much with comprehension as consumption. With a pleasant interface that gradually increases your reading dexterity, Outread acts as a smart highlighter, guiding your eyes rather than hypnotizing them. http://www.maclife.com/Outread Baldur’s Gate II Review Dungeons & Dragons is more portable than ever, thanks to the iPad re-releases of BioWare’s celebrated Baldur’s Gate games, and Baldur’s Gate II definitely recaptures the magic of classic AD&D—but its old-school design doesn’t make a flawless transition to iPad. http://www.maclife.com/BaldursGateII…

If it was new, cutting-edge, and technologically exciting (and not made by Apple, Microsoft, or Google), then it was probably on display at the 2014 International CES. As they do every year, countless companies from around the globe converged on Las Vegas, NV in early January to attend CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) to demonstrate their latest innovations, from automobiles and robots to speakers and cell-phone cases. Arguably the biggest story of this year’s CES was the continued expansion of the 4K “Ultra HD” TV market. Manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and LG all had incredibly sharp new Ultra HD sets on display. Curved, Imax-like UHD TVs (such as Samsung’s massive 105-inch U9500 model and LG’s flexible 77-inch OLED TV) were being pushed as a major innovation, while smart TVs…

THE GEAR WE’RE LUSTING AFTER MIKEL POWERUP 3.0 SMARTPHONE CONTROLLED PAPER AIRPLANE www.poweruptoys.com $49.99 Even when expertly fashioned by a master office craftsman, paper airplanes have virtually no staying power. Enter PowerUp, which—with its successfully Kickstarted 3.0 incarnation—adds an engine, rudder, and remote-control iPhone app meant to turn your creations from a product of boredom into a legit flying toy. JOHN NEST PROTECT www.nest.com $129.99 »I know smoke detectors are important to keep my family safe, but they drive me nuts by chirping at night or going off unnecessarily. Nest Protect is the smart, app-connected smoke detector that promises to change that. It’ll warn me of actual danger (with a human voice in addition to an alarm), but it’ll also offer a subtle alert when there’s just a cooking snafu,…

ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM BENTON 2014 is going to be another big year for Apple. At the very least, we’ll get a look at the highly anticipated iPhone 6 and its presumably larger screen, along with the usual refreshes of iOS, OS X, Macbooks, and iPads, but there are a few persistent rumors out there that just might be ready to ripen. We understand that Apple didn’t want to detract from iOS 7 and the spectacular iPad Air last year, but Apple fans and watchers alike are itching for something groundbreaking and new—and we think Tim Cook is going to deliver. While Apple’s competitors have been reacting to every little rumor and report, Jony Ive has undoubtedly been perfecting Apple’s next revolution, whether it be something we can wear, watch, or work…

With thousands of apps to choose from for every conceivable kind of task, Mac users are spoiled for choice. But how do you decide which to use? The most popular apps are not necessarily the ones that suit your needs or your particular style of computing. Then there’s the cost—the software that gets the most ink might be rich for your blood and have more features than you’ll ever need (or want) to use. Whether you’re interested in finding new apps to replace those you’ve outgrown or you’re looking for a new feature set, we’ve put together a selection of gems that might just fit the bill. FLARE $9.99 Mac App Store There are tons of photographic filters in iPhoto, but Flare goes above and beyond. If you just want…

When iA Writer burst onto the scene in late 2010, it was a game-changer. The first true alternative to Pages, its ultra-minimal interface introduced a new kind of word processor, one that eschewed underutilized features for a sharp focus on simplicity. Writer Pro for iOS attempts to build on that concept. With a completely new workflow designed to tightly organize your thoughts, IA Labs pushes its minimal interface to the max, but loses that trademark simplicity in the process. Launching Writer Pro, you’ll immediately notice several visual changes. For one, the interface is a lot darker; while the composing window is still white, the other screens and elements have all been given a black coat of paint, lending the interface a somewhat weightier feel. You’ll be asked to import any…

An old giant rethinks iPhone news Yahoo! has long been an underrated collector of news, complete with its own network of top-notch columnists and contributors. With a bit of flair and the acquired tech behind the shuttered Summly app, Yahoo News Digest dials down this mountain of news to find the top articles and deliver them to your iPhone as rich, twice-daily bulletins. With News Digest, Yahoo! has crafted a delightfully simple interface that lets you read and navigate articles with ease. Each digest (delivered at 8 AM and 6 PM ET) presents around 10 stories from a variety of subjects. Quickly scrolling through headlines provides a concise, color-coded sampling of the top news, though we’re surprised to see that there isn’t a better use of Summly’s expert summarizing in…

Putting a touch-based spin on stealth Many notable stealth-action games provide the capability to deal out death as desired—not so in the first episode of République, which follows Hope, a teenage girl held captive for possessing revolutionary materials within the school of a totalitarian regime. Aside from wielding the occasional pepper-spray bottle or a one-time-use taser, she’ll need to creep around every corner and stay totally unseen to avoid being recaptured. And unlike in the average stealth affair, you’re not even directly controlling her actions. Instead, you’ll take the role of a disillusioned security worker, who helps free Hope and shepherd her through the facility by viewing her surroundings via closed-circuit video cameras and sending directives to her device. It’s an approach well suited for a touch interface, as you…

For all of its strengths, Fightback is a game that feels tuned to reward in-app purchases more than strategy or skill. It’s thematically framed precisely where a machismo-laced brawler should be: somewhere between ’80s tough-guy films and cheesy arcade games from the early ’90s, with enough humor and narrative backbone to make the story moderately entertaining. The combat system is enjoyable, albeit a tad repetitive. You stand in the middle of a room as foes attack from the left and right; swipes and taps are used for punches, kicks, and evasion moves, plus you can occasionally use a gun. Character upgrades are necessary to progress, though, and in-game currency comes slowly—that means either grinding through the same levels again or spending cash. The bottom line. Fightback’s base combat is entertaining…

I love to turn my hands from writing to other creative pursuits as often as I can, in order to keep my brain firing on all cylinders. My latest adventure is into the world of papercrafting—and to a lesser extent, origami—where I’ve found joy in the elegance of engineering with only paper, scissors, glue, and some coloring pencils. It’s the perfect activity for keeping your kids busy, too, and it’s a world ripe for collaboration. It was Tiny Paper Zoo Plus ($1.99, universal) and its collection of delightful paper animal figurines that first made the idea click with me. It has 15 animals to choose from—including my favorite, Betsy the rhinoceros—with blank templates for fans of coloring in, plus prefilled graphics for those wanting a more professional look. You don’t…

An entry-level Thunderbolt drive with a price to match Thunderbolt drives have finally entered the realm of affordability. While they’re still not as cheap as their USB and FireWire counterparts, what once cost upward of $500 for a few hundred gigabytes can now be had for a much more reasonable sum. But as the prices have dropped, so have the expectations. Early manufacturers pulled out all the stops to maximize performance, with SSD drives and RAID arrays designed to squeeze every last bit of data flow from the channels, but newer drives cut costs by utilizing slower-spinning disks that don’t really take full advantage of the I/O advantages Thunderbolt provides. To that end, Seagate has bundled its 5,400 RPM Backup Plus 1TB External Hard Drive for Mac with a plug-and-play…

Your plastic pal who’s (kinda) fun to be with! After spending a brief amount of time with Romotive’s Romo, an attachment that turns your Phone or iPod into an adorable treaded robot, it becomes amusingly clear what the little guy is—a modernday evolution of the awesome toy robots produced in the mid-’80s (remember Verbot and Omnibot?). As with those old Christmas-list toppers, you interact with Romo by programming him with a series of commands. These commands range from simple, such as determining its movement speed, to more complex tasks, like reacting when it is picked up or when it sees a particular color. Setting up Romo is easy. It just requires downloading a free app and plugging your iPhone/iPod touch into the base. From there, Romo comes to life, introducing…

This ’80s throwback offers 21st-century sound and features Astaple of breakdancing competitions and hip-hop culture for more than two decades, the boombox is—like all things ’80s in origin—slowly making a comeback. It’s only natural, then, that someone should come along and harness its iconic design with modern technology in the form of a portable Bluetooth speaker system. In this case, that someone is prolific audio purveyor iHome, and the something is the iBT44 Boombox. This $199.99 system boasts twin 4-inch woofers and 1-inch tweeters enclosed in what can best be called a 2014 reinterpretation of the classic boombox design. In addition to the requisite speaker drivers, the device sports a large LCD display, FM radio tuner, hefty volume and tuning knobs, an infrared remote, and a five-band equalizer with physical…

HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, IPHONE & IPAD Let Smart Playlists Do the Work! Do even more using playlists that populate themselves automatically As well as the ordinary playlists you create in iTunes and manage by dragging tracks or albums in manually, iTunes also offers Smart Playlists. Smart Playlists are much cleverer, and potentially can do much more with much less work required from you. The principle is that Smart Playlists are automatically filled with tracks that match whatever criteria you set up. If you add tracks to your library by a certain artist or in a certain genre, any relevant Smart Playlists will automatically have those tracks added to them. You can identify a Smart Playlist by the cog icon next to its name. When you click…

OS X can helpfully alert you to emails, messages, and other events We’ve all had that sinking feeling when we’ve realized we were due at a meeting 20 minutes ago, or forgotten a birthday. Luckily, Notification Center can make these mishaps a thing of the past. It displays little pop-ups on your screen to tell you about new emails, Calendar events, a new iMessage, or a note you’ve left for yourself using the Reminders app. Notifications also appear in the Notification Center sidebar, which you access by clicking the rightmost icon in the OS X menu bar. You can also place two fingers on the right-hand edge of your Mac’s trackpad and swipe left onto the trackpad to slide the sidebar into view. You control notifications mainly in System Preferences,…

STAY IN TOUCH WITH US ON TWITTER:@MACLIFE READY FOR THE NEXT BIG THING? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at least one of Apple’s big three rumored devices—the iWatch, iTV, or iPad Pro—will finally launch this year. Okay, so that’s a pretty small limb to go out on since Tim Cook keeps teasing some big stuff, but the real point here is that, after four years of playing things relatively safe, it’s time for Apple to roll the dice again. And when you’re talking tech, nothing’s more exciting than that. What’s got me most interested is the fact that I have no idea how Apple will make any of these ideas work. I have reservations about all of them, but after seeing how much better…

Starting a business together had long been an aspiration for the brothers Jackson, but doing what, exactly? As of 2008, they’d gone in different directions in their professional lives: Tom was a multimedia producer at the New York Times, Jamie was teaching math to sixth-graders, and Miles was doing freelance programming work; youngest brother Connor, meanwhile, was studying computer science at NC State University. Video games were a lifelong passion for the set, but trying to make a living as an indie studio in an age of big-budget console titles never seemed feasible. But then the iPhone debuted, and shortly thereafter, the App Store. Tom was the first of the brothers to obtain the original device, and seeing early game success stories on the touch device reignited that spark for…

Rik Myslewski ruminates on how your home appliances may soon be using their spare cycles to help process your Big Data Some Really Smart People™ are contemplating how to turn your home into your own personal supercomputer within the next three to five years. Well, supercomputer may be a wee bit overstated, but it’s a lot snappier than saying, “getting your microwave oven, TV, refrigerator, and iPhone to work together to solve large data-set problems in a miniaturized version of how the big boys crunch data.” The germ of the idea is simple. There are two buzzword-terms that geeks are tossing about with abandon these days: the Internet of Things and Big Data. The former refers to the fact that smart devices that communicate with one another over the Internet…

WHAT ELSE COULD COOK AND COMPANY BE WORKING ON? WE CAN ONLY GUESS Over the last few pages, we’ve brought you a look at the products that have long been rumored to be in development at Apple. But surely that can’t be all that Cupertino has in store, so we’re tapping into the Mac|Life team’s imagination to come up with some other potential Apple products that, let’s just say, aren’t so heavily rumored. iStache It’s the ultimate expression of Apple’s mission to match fashion with function. Attaching to your upper lip with Apple Magic, iStache provides the perfect microphone placement for phone calls and voice recordings. With iStache in the Cloud, you can even stream your iTunes collection directly to your face. (Stroke iStache left or right to skip tracks;…

The little apps that will help your Mac tick happily away iSTAT MENUS $16 http://bjango.com This monitoring system provides all manner of graphs and statistics about how your Mac is performing, from CPU and disk usage through to network activity and heat sensors. It also includes an excellent clock replacement. Not only can its display be heavily customized, but there’s also a calendar within the menu that optionally lists your day’s events, and a world clock that’s the best on the Mac. MOOM $9.99 Mac App Store Moom provides a staggering range of alternative controls to OS X’s window controls, such as using a grid to drag out how a window should be resized and positioned, and edge drags to move and zoom a window to half a screen. Tinkerers,…

Making every day memorable The App Store is home to plenty of digital journal tools, but all of them require effort from the author to be useful. Heyday solves this problem in a very elegant way—and one that actually makes us want to participate. The free app converts existing photo libraries from an iOS device into an automatic journal of your life, complete with geolocation data and time stamps. The speed and accuracy at which Heyday accomplishes this task is nothing short of amazing, but the occasional coarse location can be confirmed or updated as needed. On days when photos aren’t taken, the app continues to work in the background with minimal battery impact, capturing key places visited. The app creates events with details of when and where they happened,…

Fragment produces effects that nothing else in the App Store even attempts to mimic, yet remains exceedingly easy to use and explore. You can choose from one of 46 built-in base effects, which are essentially distortion masks based on a variety of shape combinations—from simple frames to abstract designs, including crystal shards, geometric patterns, and circular constructs. You can zoom and rotate the distorted image in real time, which adds a truly fun aspect to the process of discovering cool visual combinations. Deeper controls are available, or you can use the shuffle feature and then tweak the results. Also, you can “refragment” and run a completed image through again with different effects, providing even more creative opportunities. The bottom line. Fragment is a tremendously useful and enjoyable graphics tool that…

Colorful (but short-lived) calamity Chaos is the defining element of Colossatron: Massive World Threat. At any given moment, your gargantuan, snake-like, robotic alien creature could span a couple dozen weaponized segments in length while a barrage of tanks, helicopters, and flying drones assault it from all sides—and that’s all wrapped within a delightfully cheesy local newscast overlay, with the anchor and on-scene reporter chatting while bits of info pop up on the display. Colossatron offers no active control of the mechanical beast as it writhes around seven fictional cities, bashing structures and blasting military foes with raucous abandon. Instead, you’ll manage its arrangement of weapons. As little Powercore segments float into view, you’ll drag and drop them onto the snake to expand its length with a new turret—such as a…

Lyne is all about forming pathways between likecolored shapes positioned on a grid—you’re essentially joining the dots, but are restricted to 90-and 45-degree angles. Abstract sounds pleasingly chirp away in the background, confirming every connection; it all feels very pleasant, and at first it’s disarmingly simple. Soon, though, the game bares its teeth. Shapes are positioned in a manner that makes successful pathways between them far from obvious, especially once you realize paths cannot cross. Junction boxes add to the task, demanding you enter them a specific number of times to illuminate all their lights. At this point, Lyne could have become a frustrating mess, but intelligent design does away with any notion of such a problem. The bottom line. It might be lacking in originality, but Lyne more than…

Is this the machine that all pros have been hoping for, or is it style over substance? While the old Mac Pro limped along, receiving halfhearted updates (and wasn’t even available for sale in some countries), Tim Cook promised that Apple was “working on something really great” for pros. We expected to see something new and unusual, but the extent to which Apple has reinvented its high-end desktop is astonishing. We’ve never seen anything quite like it—the closest thing is possibly the G4 Cube. It’s a workstation-class computer that’s just 9.9 inches high and 6.6 inches wide, and it operates almost silently. As a physical object, its shining black aluminum exterior is well into objet d’art territory, and as a computer it is absolutely a thing of gripping, unchecked desire.…

Control isn’t its strong suit It’s early days still for officially supported iOS gamepads, with the top peripheral manufacturers taking their best respective shots at creating controllers that’ll make games feel all the more precise, comfortable, and entertaining. MOGA’s Ace Power controller for iPhone and iPod touch sadly fell short of doing all three things consistently, and Logitech’s PowerShell is no better an option, due primarily to an unresponsive directional pad that fails an otherwise promising-looking accessory. As indicated by the name, the PowerShell wholly encases your iPhone 5/5c/5s or iPod touch (5th gen), with the iOS device fitting snugly within a wide, lightweight plastic frame. Unlike the expandable but cheap-feeling MOGA design, Logitech’s controller is solidly built and nicely contoured, with lightly rubberized grips on the back plus a…

What a short, strange trip it is Charming and mysterious, The Stanley Parable is a first-person exploration game set in an abandoned office building. Stanley dutifully plucks away in his cubicle, day in and day out, until the day that every single one of his coworkers inexplicably vanishes. A honey-voiced narrator guides Stanley in his search, alternately directing him toward the truth or complaining when he walks through the wrong door. One playthrough of The Stanley Parable may only take a few minutes, but mapping out, stitching together, and uncovering its secrets and alternate paths takes hours, with each new revelation posing more questions than it answers. At the end of each run, Stanley is deposited back at his desk, primed to explore again, pick a different door, or go…

A better keyboard than a cover Logitech was well prepared for the iPad Air’s debut, with its Ultrathin Keyboard Folio delivering an excellent case/keyboard combination shortly after launch. Boasting the same $100 price point, the company’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover offers a different kind of experience—and while the keyboard itself remains quite good, the design doesn’t seem nearly as well conceived. The Ultrathin Keyboard Cover offers a full QWERTY board that connects via Bluetooth and can be charged via its USB port. As with the Folio, the hard plastic core feels sturdy and the keys are nicely responsive. In fact, the Cover’s keyboard has a slight (but noticeable) advantage over that of the Ultrathin Keyboard Folio and the similar FabricSkin Keyboard Folio, as it has separate tab and caps lock keys…

Enjoy smoother, more detailed images on a regular monitor without investing in a Retina-enabled Mac, using HiDPI mode Try and spot a pixel on the screen of any new Retina MacBook, iPad, or iPhone. You can’t. Apple has rolled out Retina displays to provide smoother, finer graphics all around. The trouble is, switching back to a non-Retina screen, like an external display hooked up to a Mac mini or Mac Pro—or a second screen on a laptop or iMac—can be jarring, because the coarser pixel grid looks jagged and ugly. You can’t affect the actual pixel density of these desktop displays, but you can fake the Retina-esque feel of an Apple display. The trick is to enable HiDPI mode; it doubles the number of physical on-screen pixels given over to…

Now you won’t have to live in fear when your children are using your iPhone Whether you’re lending your iPhone to your children or setting up an iPhone of their own, you need to be sure they’ll be safe using it. If they’re tech-savvy older children, you might want to ensure they won’t be visiting inappropriate websites, installing and playing unsuitable games, or running up huge bills buying extras as In-App Purchases (IAPs). Simply put, an IAP is extra content or features you buy within an app, as distinct from in the App Store itself. IAPs are widely used to unlock added features, or to buy virtual goods. In games, for example, you might pay to unlock levels, acquire extra lives or power-ups, and so on. Some free apps turn…

YOUR OPINIONS, RANTS & RAVES LETTER OF THE MONTH One point not covered in the “Rush to the Bottom” article is the lack of memory on tablets and phones. I buy fewer apps because my 64GB iPad 4 is almost full, and that’s even using a Sandisk 32GB wireless flash drive for videos and photos. Give us 2TB devices. The cloud is not an alternative to on-board memory.—Mike Wow, now that’s a power user! I don’t think that 64GB is much of a limitation for most folks, but you do make a good point. App sizes are only getting bigger as developers strive to take full advantage of growing power and feature sets, so devices fill up faster. These days, fitting even the essentials on an entry-level 16GB iPad takes…

Apple Stores have a minimalist look that make them stand out from other storefronts, but no Apple Store is as unique as the one on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This location is world famous due in large part to its iconic glass-cube entranceway (designed by architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson) that serves as the entranceway to the subterranean store proper. Christopher Tan, a Malaysiabased Apple fan, software architect, photographer, and self-described “aspiring brick artist,” was so inspired by the Fifth Avenue shop that he decided to re-create it using nanoblock. “The end result is composed of around 2,000 nanoblock pieces” Like LEGO, nanoblock is a constructionbrick-based toy line; however, as the name implies, the blocks are much smaller. (The nanoblock website states that the smallest nanoblock piece is “a mere…

EVERYTHING IS DEBATABLE Hellogoodbye $9.99 I fell for this band when they were pumping out ultra-catchy, electro-smacked pop for a punk label a decade ago, and even harder still when they turned down the beats and focused on more introspective (but still catchy) acoustic-tinged tracks a few years back. New album Everything is Debatable refines the sound a bit while finding a middle ground between past approaches; the lyrical depth is a bit lessened, but these songs will grab you hard after a few listens. HAWKEYE VOL. 1: MY LIFE AS A WEAPON $10.99 Available through the Comics by Comixology app, this first collected trade of Marvel’s ongoing Hawkeye series (launched in 2012) is an excellent introduction to one of the best comics running. Fraction’s take on the arrow-slinger blends…

Back in the old days, Mac OS used to be quite customizable and hackable. We spent many happy hours radically overhauling our icons and applying dramatic new skins to windows (which, on reflection, would in some cases have been more suitable as part of an HR Giger–designed science-fiction film). It wasn’t always practical, but hey, it was a lot of fun. But then things started to change with OS X. With each release, the new interface became increasingly locked down and it became harder for developers to create apps that enabled you to fiddle. With OS X Mavericks, quite a lot of the Apple-designed texture has gone. For better or worse, Calendar now has a basic grey window in place of its stitched leather; elsewhere, icons throughout the system continue…

The best big-name and indie games for your Mac PORTAL SERIES $9.99 (Portal), $19.99 (Portal 2) http://store.steampowered.com Portal makes you look at the world with new eyes by arming you with a gun that can create two apertures. A chasm can be passed by walking through one aperture to emerge from the other on the far side, and high-up platforms become reachable by leaping into a portal at the bottom of a pit to emerge from the exit with momentum that propels you through the air. All the while you’re taunted by a cruel AI…. Play in order to appreciate fully. STARCRAFT 2: WINGS OF LIBERTY $39.99 for base game, $39.99 for Heart of the Swarm expansion pack http://us.battle.net StarCraft charts the human race’s struggle for survival in space. Its…

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 Kids-in-Mind for iPad If you’ve got young kids, then you know that even seemingly safe Disney movies can sometimes be too scary for them. That’s why I appreciate Kids-In-Mind for iPad ($1.99), which painstakingly lists every scary or sexy element for new movies, from tame stuff to “no way.” Cash Cow It’s a relatively old puzzler, but Cash Cow ($0.99, iPhone) has always been a favorite. Its quasieducational, Bejeweledesque action starts simple—match coins to make dollars—but quickly goes from easy to challenging to frantic as new elements are introduced. Even now, it’s surprisingly addictive. Rhythm Thief & The…

Hailing from Russian email juggernaut Mail.ru, myMail is a new client for the rest of the world that consolidates multiple accounts into a free, universal app. The service uses proprietary algorithms to detect settings for virtually any IMAP or POP email service, including Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Outlook. All that’s required is the address and password. We were able to get some notoriously finicky accounts to work without a hitch, though Outlook and Hotmail accounts took a few tries to register. But once up and running, we enjoyed the multi-panel, gesture-based UI, which feels right at home on iOS 7. Lingering bugs with push notifications are a definite downer, though. The bottom line. There’s a lot to like about myMail’s slick interface and wide scope, though it still feels like…

Don’t slow down to look at this wreck Kart racer Angry Birds Go! feels more like an elaborate advertisement for other products rather than a purposeful game. Trying to sell you toys is one thing, but sponsored boosts—including a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish–branded speed enhancer that shoots a stream of virtual cheddar crackers behind your kart—are an utterly nauseating new twist. While the ads feel incredibly audacious, Go! doesn’t stop there. Rovio’s biggest free-to-play experience to date messily merges elements from every irksome freemium tactic out there, including an energy meter that limits how much you can play at any given time, a grind-like approach that demands you play scads of similar events to make laboriously slow progress, and even paywalls that block access to the top-tier karts, which sell for…

Fun with physics, again Cut the Rope 2 is the first numbered series sequel, and expectedly, it’s the most notable shift in design and mechanics seen in any of the later entries due to one major alteration. Instead of adorable green creature Om Nom waiting patiently to receive the candy you’ll typically maneuver through physics-centric puzzles, he can now be shifted and manipulated around the screen to solve the myriad conundrums you’ll encounter in the 100+ stages. That’s not exactly a subtle tweak to the formula, but what’s surprising is how little it seems to alter the triedand-true sensation of playing the series’ single-screen puzzles. Cut the Rope 2 spans five worlds and incorporates various new elements, such as a creature whose tongue forms a barrier when tapped, plus cookie-attracting…

Minimal to the max iA Writer on OS X never really felt like a Mac app. Released several months after iA Labs changed the face of iOS word processing, it pretty much offered the same stripped-down experience on a larger screen. Despite its relatively high price tag, the app was little more than an iCloud companion, a place to jot down an idea or two while away from your iPad. But Writer Pro is different. Designed and developed alongside its iOS counterpart, the OS X word processor finally feels like a standalone app with its own identity. It has a lot of the same features that we didn’t like on the iPad and iPhone apps, but the desktop interface gives them the room they need to operate; what felt cramped…

Lens-blur effects come into focus, all over again Few would deny that the iPhone takes pretty amazing pictures, especially considering the size of the optics involved. But Apple’s prodigy will probably never match the real-life depth-of-field effects a good digital SLR is capable of producing—but with the right software, maybe it doesn’t have to. The makers of Snapheal and Intensify are back with Focus 2, an all-new version of the Mac application formerly by Coppertino. With those software gurus turning their skills exclusively to music products, MacPhun picked up the torch and the result is a product that nicely complements the company’s other consumer product offerings. Focus 2 simplifies the task of adding lens blur to images, with preset categories for portrait, nature, architecture, macro, and tilt-shift, or full control…

Clementine steps out on her own The world of The Walking Dead is brutal and tragic, and not just because it’s swarming with zombies. Half the survivors are remorseless bandits, and the others are paranoid and distrustful because of the former bunch. Everything goes wrong, good people die in agonizing ways, and something horrific and sad waits around seemingly every corner. It’s certainly no place for a child—so, of course, that’s the role Season Two of Telltale’s acclaimed adventure series casts you into. All That Remains, the first episode of the new season, shifts your control to Clementine, the little girl players spent most of the previous season protecting. Opening shortly after Season One’s ending, it then jumps ahead 16 months, showing us a Clementine who’s noticeably older and considerably…

TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS THE RIGHT APP FOR THE JOB In versions of OS X prior to Mavericks one could change a file’s default open app by going to “get info” and changing the “Open With” option, and then select “Change All” to have the file always open with that app; however, something changed in Mavericks and now the changes won’t save. Is there a way around this? There are two built-in ways in OS X to set the default application for a specific file. One of these methods is using the Get Info panel (which we have covered in the past at bit.ly/ml_defaultapp). The other way is using the “Open With Other” option. To set an application using this method, navigate to a file, then right click on that…

Access website logins and bank cards on all your Apple devices Remembering login details for a multitude of websites isn’t easy. Passwords either end up being difficult to remember, or you make them too simple. Safari and many other web browsers can save your credentials so you can set a stronger password and never have to memorize it. You might want to log into the same websites on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or another Mac. iCloud Keychain saves you having to enter the same login details on all of your devices. It can remember bank card details as well—but it won’t store the security code from the signature strip. Apple says your keychain is protected with 256-bit AES encryption. With Keychain set up, the first time you log into…

APE|LIFE Discover the most interesting news from the world of apes! For too long, apes have been underrepresented in the digital sector. But thanks to the proliferation of equalopportunity devices such as the iPhone and iPod, that has finally begun to change, and technology is at last getting into the hands of our simian friends. And as the number of iOS-using apes continues to grow, so does the amount of ape-inspired software and hardware that’s available. BANANA KONG Featuring responsive controls, a decent set of play mechanics, and lots of banana-collecting action, Banana Kong is a surprisingly solid free-toplay endless runner that authentically conveys the feeling of being a hungry gorilla pursued by a deadly wall of lava. The sound effects are top-notch, too—particularly the “BA-NA-NA!” call that marks the…