Author: Serenity Caldwell

At a friend’s birthday party last year, I ended up parked in front of their PlayStation watching them play through half of Thomas Was Alone, an eerily beautiful platformer about a group of sentient colored blocks and their journey to the outside world. We paused for cake at some point, and Thomas’s journey was left unfinshed—until this week, when a well-timed screenshot from MacStories’s Federico Viticci alerted me to the fact that the game had finally been ported to the iPad.

On first glance, Thomas Was Alone appears to be your typical platformer: You guide a series of colored blocks through platforms, perilous acid water, and spikes to reach portal doors at the end of each level. Been there, done that, fallen to my death a thousand times because after all these years I still don’t know how to time double jumps.

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When I chatted with Adobe a few weeks back about the Adobe Voice app, an Adobe engineer noted that the frustrating thing with presentation software such as Keynote or PowerPoint is the sheer amount of customization you feel like you must do before making your very first slide. Like Voice, Unsigned Integer’s $20 Deckset (Mac App Store link) aims to remove this obstacle while making it easy to create clean, attractive presentations. But unlike Adobe’s iPad creation, this Mac app goes about the task in a very different—and delightful—way.

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When I chatted with Adobe a few weeks back about the Adobe Voice app, an Adobe engineer noted that the frustrating thing with presentation software such as Keynote or PowerPoint is the sheer amount of customization you feel like you must do before making your very first slide. Like Voice, Unsigned Integer’s $20 Deckset (Mac App Store link) aims to remove this obstacle while making it easy to create clean, attractive presentations. But unlike Adobe’s iPad creation, this Mac app goes about the task in a very different—and delightful—way.

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It seems to be a music-themed week here at Macworld, between Wednesday’s staff pick and Apple’s rumored deal to pick up Beats Music, so I thought it only fitting that today’s pick follow the trend. That pick is Hum, an impeccably designed little app for holding your songwriting snippets, lyrics, chords, and more.

What’s your story? That’s the question the Adobe Voice app for the iPad is clamoring to help you answer. The app combines the boring task of making slideshows with a fun, iMovie Trailers-esque feel; it’s one of the company’s most beautiful iPad apps to date, and it’s incredibly easy to use.

The Reminders app makes it simple to keep track of tasks, grocery lists, and even daily exercises with multilayered lists and checkboxes. You can make these lists even more powerful, however, thanks to time and location-based reminders.

For example, I have a “Places to Eat” reminders list, to keep track of interesting new restaurants I want to try. But when you’re craving food on a Friday night, it’s difficult to remember to look at the list.

That’s where time-based reminders come in: I can simply set up an alert on a restaurant I’m interested in visiting by tapping the entry, then tapping the info button to the right. Flip the “Remind me on a day” toggle, and you’ll be able to pick when the app should alert you. You can even make the reminder repeat, in case it’s 6PM and you’ve already ordered takeout.

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For most people, one computer is probably sufficient. It might be a desktop, or a laptop, or you might just make do with iPads or iPhones. But somewhere down the line, you might adopt more. You get a work computer. You decide you want a traveling laptop. You might replace your old Mac, but it still runs fine for basic Web browsing and writing emails.

When you buy multiple iOS devices—an iPad to go along with your iPhone, for example—you don’t have to worry about transferring your software or syncing your passwords. By default, they’re tied to your Apple ID, and that data downloads over to your new device when you set it up. Macs, however, are not quite so lucky. Apple’s iCloud service offers limited sync capabilities for your passwords and user account data, but doesn’t widely support app data; and worse, new computers require you to either clone your old drive to your new computer or copy over any non-Mac App Store applications. And, of course, the big whopper: Your average Mac laptop has a whole lot less storage than its desktop cousins, especially if you value the speed of a solid-state drive (SSD).

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The iPhone 5s has an excellent array of hardware and software features that make it a great tool for taking photos, but there’s only so much it can do with a fixed lens and a digital zoom. Olloclip’s line of clip-on accessories do quite a lot to improve this problem, letting you play with zoom, focus, and image manipulation. While I’ve had fun playing with the company’s 4-in-1 model in the past, my current obsession is its new specialty macro kit—a 3-in-1 lens with 7x, 14x, and 21x macro magnification.

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Threes is the kind of game you can pick up almost instantly: It’s cute, has great music, and a simple premise. Combine number pairs! Add one and two to make 3! What could be easier?

Well, from the amount of times my gentleman friend has yelled “I hate this game!” in my general vicinity, probably a few things. I suspect that part of the reason he’s been grumping in earshot is that my score is currently 61,000 points higher than his. Whoops.

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I’m a big fan of FiftyThree’s Paper app for free-form sketching, drawing, and even note-taking. You can do quite a lot with this relatively simplistic drawing program, and I’ve been using it as my primary doodle pad for quite some time.

For those who have never experienced Paper, here’s the deal: The iPad app is a series of moleskine-esque digital notebooks (in landscape orientation) where you can use remarkably real simulations of brushes and pens to sketch, ink, marker, or watercolor. Each brush costs $2, though you can buy the Essentials pack for $7. For me, it’s a go-to app on my iPad mini, and I recommend it to pretty much everyone.

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I grew up in Los Angeles, a city not so much famous for its stargazing as it was for its murky purple night haze. But in the summer, my family would drive up to the mountains above Lake Tahoe and stay at our cabin for a few weeks. Free from light pollution and smoggy skies, it was there I learned to love the stars.

Years later, I’ve forgotten much of what my father taught me about constellations and moonrises, but I still take pleasure in stargazing. Sky Guide, a $2 app from Fifth Star Labs, is the perfect replacement for my lack of expertise: It’s a beautifully constructed app that helps you find the stars, satellites, planets, and constellations above your head.

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This story originally ran in September 2013 with the launch of iOS 7. Now that iOS 7.1 is out, we’ve updated it with some of the new accessibility changes available.

iOS 7 has many snazzy effects and cool new animations, but it’s not for everyone: Some users have reported feeling dizzy from the operating system’s motion effects, while others (my father included) are having issues reading the system’s default text. But you don’t have to deal with feeling ill every time you look at your iPhone—there’s another way. Here’s how to de-animate and re-boldify iOS 7.

Reduce motion in iOS 7