Reader Henry Ingram has a new problem with an old email account. He writes:
What with all the security breaches going on I’ve been changing passwords. The problem is that I have an old email account that was taken over by AT&T a few years ago but is now run by Yahoo. I’ve had a heck of a time changing the password plus my iPad won’t accept the new one. Is there a way out of this misery?
I’ve been in a similar situation and quite honestly the AT&T/Yahoo relationship in regard to account settings is a nightmare. You go to Yahoo to do something as simple as change your password and you’re passed along to the AT&T site because it controls these kinds of settings. A one-stop shop it is not.
Although many use Office for everyday word processing and number crunching tasks, there’s a substantial contingent of customers who live and breathe the presentation leg of Microsoft’s productivity tripod, which has finally made an impressive (though somewhat handicapped) transition to mobile. Together with Word and Excel, PowerPoint for iPad makes up Microsoft’s newly mobilized Office trilogy. This trio of apps features a touchscreen user interface often slicker than their desktop equivalents, but more importantly, documents can be opened and edited with complete confidence that they’ll look exactly as they do on Mac or PC.
Editing or sharing files from iPad requires a monthly or annual Office 365 subscription—otherwise, PowerPoint is little more than a document viewer. At a minimum of $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year, it’s an expensive proposition, especially for occasional users whose only computer is an iPad. When viewed as a complement to an existing Office 365 subscription, however, PowerPoint for iPad delivers a lot of bang for the buck, with an intuitive, streamlined set of tools for creating or editing presentations on the go. The only real exception is when the app winds up being hamstrung by iOS file management restrictions.
For example, images from iPad photo albums (including Camera Roll and iCloud) can be imported with ease, but content stored elsewhere is strictly off limits—including OneDrive, which is otherwise the only cloud storage option available for saving files. Microsoft bundles a generous quantity of fonts, shapes, and templates into a 215MB download, but power users will find the lack of clip art, animation, and audio/video playback limiting compared to desktop versions.
PowerPoint also isn’t nearly as robust as Apple’s Keynote when it comes to playing completed slideshows. While lecturers can scribble notes using a virtual pen or call up a simulated laser pointer, the app lacks any kind of true presenter view, and AirPlay support is frustratingly limited to mirroring only for now.
The bottom line. PowerPoint for iPad succeeds at making presentations finger friendly, but Keynote blows this app out of the water when it comes to actually showing them.
There hasn’t been a new tactical shooter on the Mac in a while. But leave it to an independent developer then to dish up some sweet tactical goodness in the form of Insurgency (Steam link). Tactical shooters are defined by gameplay that requires you to think and act strategically, while often featuring realistic damage and bullet physics. In Insurgency, you can die in one shot if you aren’t careful. Call of Duty this is not.
At its core, this game demands teamwork and patience. If you aren’t capable of either, move on. Those willing to learn the nuances of the game’s mechanics will find a very tense and satisfying shooter.
The search for a good messenger bag that doubles as a laptop bag is something many travelers find themselves facing at least once. Between bags that are either good for carrying around a multitude of things every day, or ones that only have the capacit…
Vlambeer specializes in twitchy, arcade-style games that get really hairy (while remaining plenty fun) in a hurry—like iOS greats Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing—and its latest Mac entry, Luftrausers, certainly maintains that philosophy. You’ll pilot a tiny plane as enemy craft and carriers launch a barrage of gunfire, zipping about and laying waste to foes while trying to maintain a score-boosting combo streak. And much as the combat itself proves entertaining, it’s matched well by an awesome customization system that allows you to swap various parts to create the fighter of your dreams.
Luftrauser’s sepia-drenched 2D backdrops are minimal but effective, with attractive details like your ship’s propulsion kicking up pixelated water right below—but you’ll rarely linger in a play session for long. Lasting a few minutes amidst the mayhem of encircling fighters and missile barrages from below is a pretty serious accomplishment, and it’s unlikely that you’ll have more than a moment or two to take in the scenery along the way. The key to extending each attempt by seconds or even minutes is finding the right arrangement of parts to create a plane that fits your own tendencies and play style.
Ship parts unlock as you complete bite-sized missions (like killing a certain number of fighters, reaching a noted score, etc.) and level up your profile with continued play, and they often vary wildly in purpose. For example, do you want a standard machinegun, a spread shot, homing missiles, or an ever-firing laser? Would you rather be swift and light, or heavy and well armored? It’s possible to make a ship that can bash through foes with ease and still survive, dive underwater without taking damage, or even defy gravity and float freely amidst the fracas. But every positive quality seems to have some opposing drawback, and with 125+ total combinations (each given a unique name), it’ll take a lot of trial and error to create an ideal, balanced option.
Luckily, you’ll learn quickly whether a plane is for you, and with what are usually just couple-minute play sessions, you can mix and match and experiment freely. Controlling a plane in 2D proves a bit fumbly, but that seems intentional; Vlambeer could have made another rote, precision-minded dual-analog shooter where you’d easily blast through scads of ships, but instead opted to make something charmingly awkward and oddly gripping. Cheers for that.
The bottom line. Luftrausers soars thanks to compelling customization and simple, entertaining blast-’em-all action.
There’s a lot of gear out there for your Apple devices, but how do you know which are worth your time and what’s not worth your money? In our Gear We Love column, Macworld’s editors tell you about the products we’re personally using—and loving.
Bluetooth speakers are everywhere, and I love their wireless connectivity—with so much else in my tech life going wireless, having to dock or otherwise physically connect my iPhone or iPad to speakers seems increasingly anachronistic. But with a few exceptions, I haven’t been especially impressed by the sound quality or features of Bluetooth speakers. IK Multimedia’s $300 iLoud, on the other hand, is a portable Bluetooth speaker done right.
Reader Shannon Riley believes two iCloud accounts are better than one. He writes:
I’ve set up two iCloud accounts on the iPad Air that my girlfriend and I share—one for her iCloud ID and another for mine. The problem is that I see only my account’s bookmarks in Safari. What do I need to do to have her bookmarks appear as well?
If, on the iPad, you travel to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and take a long look at those two iCloud entries, you’ll find that one has more options listed in fine print beneath it than the other. Specifically, one will list Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari, Notes, Keychain, Photos, Documents & Data, and Find My iPad. The other includes just Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.
Windows 8 aside, computer users have been trained that a mouse is the proper way to navigate through the desktop for many years now. Trackballs, trackpads, and touch screens have entered the fray, but the staple has continued to be the mouse — even as…
As someone who runs a freelance consulting business, it’s important to track my time accurately so that I can bill my clients properly, and there just so happens to be a plethora of standalone timekeeping apps available for iOS.
How do you wade through this crowded category in order to find an app that’s right for you? Fortunately, I’ve done some leg work for you, but time tracking can be rather detailed and everyone has different needs and preferences. My criteria may not exactly match yours. Luckily, many of these apps provide limited free versions so that you can try them out before making a commitment of time and money.
From the moment the App Store launched, The New York Times has been at the forefront of the digital newspaper revolution. There’s been a constant stream of apps and subscriptions, but for the most part, its initiatives have revolved around an unimaginative repackaging of the paper. With NYT Now, the Gray Lady seems to have figured out a formula that may pay off. Rather than delivering a rich stew teeming with every subject it has to offer, the app serves as sort of a greatest hits package, aimed at casual readers who might not have such a ravenous news appetite.
The app does well to keep the general look and feel of the Times website intact, but everything is presented in a more traditional mobile fashion, which has its drawbacks. The main page consists of an occasional daily briefing—where you can quickly scan a smattering of stories across a variety of topics—along with a current list of articles handpicked by the Times’ editors.
Navigation is mostly accomplished by scrolling, but there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the importance of one story over another; on the web, there’s a clear hierarchy of news that isn’t quite as obvious in the app, despite its top-to-bottom layout. Articles can be easily bookmarked and shared, but any related videos and galleries that appear on the main page strangely aren’t packaged in the story view.
With such a stripped-down interface, we expected to get a condensed summary when clicking on a story, but that’s not the case—subscribers get access to the full stories as they appear on the Times’ site, reformatted in a neat Instapaper-like presentation. So while the content may be limited, the $7.99 monthly subscription presents a decent value based on word count alone. However, its target audience probably doesn’t want to scroll through a thousand words on the Korean ferry crash, so we’d like to see a cheaper (or free) version that lifts the 10-article limit and offers edited versions of stories.
The bottom line. NYT Now is the Times’ best effort to date to reach the mobile generation, but it’s still a bit more iterative than innovative.
Diablo III () was a good-but-not-great dungeon crawler that managed to infuriate old fans and failed to satisfy critics clamoring for Blizzard to once again raise the bar. The game demonstrated the well-worn formula of dungeon crawling: you kill dozens of increasingly exotic enemies, find loot, sell it in town, and then repeat. Diablo III disappointed many because it didn’t push the genre in any new directions; it simply kept to its formula but did it very well.
If someone finds your lost iPhone or iPad, the first thing they’ll do is turn it on. If you’re in an accident, or you have a medical emergency, first responders often look for your phone or tablet to identify you and learn important information such as allergies and blood type. In this video tip, we show you how to easily create a custom lock-screen image that can save your device—or you.
Transcript
I’m Macworld senior editor Dan Frakes.
iCloud’s Find My iPhone or iPad feature is handy for tracking down your device if it’s lost; for sending a message to someone who might have it; or even for wiping its contents if you decide it’s unrecoverable. But what if a Good Samaritan finds your device before you even realize it’s missing? Or what if you’re in an accident, or have a medical emergency, and you want to make it easy for emergency personnel to discover vital information about you?
You know the one where you get a track from iTunes Match and it’s not perfect? How about the one where you’ve just got too much stuff in your iTunes library and it slows iTunes down to a crawl? Or that thing where there are numbers at the beginnings of track names and you’d really like to get rid of them? Well, read on to find out how to fix these problems.
Glitched tracks from iTunes Match
Q: I’ve found that some old purchased iTunes songs are glitching when played directly from iTunes Match. Have you come across this? How can I fix it?
I’ve come across a number of similar problems with iTunes Match tracks since the service went live. One of the most common is truncated tracks, where the tracks just cut off after a few seconds or a couple of minutes. But this also happens with iTunes purchased downloads, so it’s most likely just a server problem. I’ve found that redownloading those tracks resolves the issue.
I admit it. I’m a proud member of the Cult of Outliners. Outlines are the best tool I’ve ever found to create my book and other writing projects, presentations, business plans, and more. My love for outlining programs goes back to MORE and Acta, running on classic Macs, and I roll my eyes at inferior attempts like Microsoft Word’s Outline view.
For many years, my outliner of choice has been OmniOutliner Pro (Mac App Store link), from The Omni Group. The current release, version 4, is long-awaited (version 3 was released in 2005) and provides a welcome user interface refresh, as well as many tweaks to make working with outlines easier. But work remains to be done to use outlines in other programs, and you should try before you buy the Pro version.
Family Guy made its name on TV by being simultaneously derivative and edgy; it riffed on The Simpsons’ formula of an animated nuclear family with a drunken, lovingly-dumb father, but its gags went further or weirder. And it did it well. So you might have reason for thinking that Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff—which takes its cues from The Simpsons: Tapped Out—might also push boundaries and poke fun at conventions. You’d be sadly mistaken. The Quest for Stuff is a shallow, money-grubbing, cynical, and downright boring freemium city builder with few redeeming qualities.
On the positive side, great care has clearly gone into the graphics, with all the little visual details replicated on even minor characters and buildings. It’s chock full of the same sharp dialog you know and love (or hate) from the show—albeit mostly without voice acting. Many jokes are recycled from the series, but there are plenty of original (and funny) ones that self-consciously reference the senselessness of your experience and the minutiae of previous episodes. The game hits its high point before you even start playing, though, delivering a delightful animated opening in which Family Guy gets canceled again and Peter fights the Giant Chicken (revealed to be the president of Fox) in a battle that destroys the entire town.
Your job is to rebuild Quahog, a feat made challenging not through difficulty but rather suffocating timers that drag progress to a standstill. You don’t play The Quest for Stuff so much as periodically jump in and tap stuff for 30 seconds to bank money and experience, and put Peter’s friends and family to work on new quests/activities. That’s all done so that you may eventually rebuild a new section of the town or unlock new characters, costumes, and quests—ready to repeat ad infinitum.
What’s worse are the minuscule amounts of money and experience most buildings produce on a rolling basis—some as often as every minute, others over a few hours. These resources halt production entirely until you tap to reset them. It’s a slog to get anywhere without splashing the cash, whether you’ve played for five minutes or several hours, and it’s simply not worth the trouble to wade through the crap for well-written speech bubbles and quest descriptions.
The bottom line. No amount of fan service or witty writing can save Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff from mediocrity born of leaden pacing and shameless freemium money-grubbing.
No matter how many different scanners we’ve tested over the years, we’ve still yet to find a truly elegant solution. Whether we’re making digital reproductions with our all-in-one desktop printers or copying paper with the massive units in our offices, we’re constantly stymied by jams, blurry images, and slow, clunky interfaces. Even the simple, camera-based apps on our iPhones have their shortcomings, and we often find ourselves retaking and cropping images until we get them right.
With a gorgeous interface and a good developer pedigree, we had high hopes for Scanbot. There’s a clean, simple aesthetic that runs through every screen, helping you capture and organize your documents with ease. The priority here is speed, as Scanbot’s foolproof interface can attest to, but it doesn’t come at the expense of professional features, including high-resolution output, a low-light indicator, and automatic edge detection. Our final products weren’t always perfect, but the powerful cropping tool and one-touch enhancer fine-tuned things nicely.
Scanbot is the first app from the creators of the now-defunct doo storage service, so we were hardly surprised to see a tight integration with the cloud—but we weren’t expecting such comprehensive synergy. Nearly every major service is represented, and you can set your image to automatically upload to your favorite. It’s a much better method than the standard save-and-email strategy most of the other scanner apps use, though you can still clutter up your Camera Roll if you so desire.
The app’s interface does a nice job of prompting you with tips on how to take better scans, but we would have liked a little more control over our documents, most notably a perspective or skew tool to straighten crooked scans and flatten folds. Also, we wish we were able to organize our scan into folders instead of rushing off to the cloud every time, and we had some issues with moving and resizing the digital signature.
The bottom line. Scanbot certainly isn’t the first scanning app for the iPhone, but it might be the first one we actually use regularly.
) was a good-but-not-great dungeon crawler that managed to infuriate old fans and failed to satisfy critics clamoring for Blizzard to once again raise the bar. The game demonstrated the well-worn formula of dungeon crawling: you kill dozens of increasingly exotic enemies, find loot, sell it in town, and then repeat. Diablo III disappointed many because it didn’t push the genre in any new directions; it simply kept to its formula but did it very well.
