Though we call them late 2013 Mac Pros, it took us until March of this year to receive our new entry-level Mac Pro. Apple released the redesigned Mac Pro near the end of last December, but high demand quickly pushed the systems’ estimated ship date to February 2014 and beyond. At $2999, the least-expensive Mac Pro features a single quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor running at 3.7GHz, 256GB of PCIe connected flash storage, 12GB of RAM, and dual AMD D500 graphics with 2GB of VRAM each.
Seven or so years since the introduction of iOS, getting stuff from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac—and vice versa—is still a pain.
Sure, there are plenty of ways to sync or share files. You can sync data using iTunes or (for some apps) Dropbox. You can send files via email. You can sync Safari bookmarks, Reading List URLs, and open tabs over iCloud. You can share photos via PhotoStream. You can even share clipboard contents using utilities such as Command-C. But these are all piecemeal solutions that each work for one particular type of data, but not others. (Alas, Apple’s AirDrop feature handles many kinds of data, but it currently works only for sharing files from Mac to Mac, or from one iOS device to another—it doesn’t work between OS X and iOS.)
Initially, after updating to OS X 10.9.2, all seemed fine with my 2009 Mac Pro. Then I launched Skype. The application could no longer detect the camera built into my 24-inch Cinema Display. I quickly confirmed that this failure was not specific to Skype. It extended to all programs that accessed the camera—notably Apple’s FaceTime and Photo Booth. For example, shortly after launching Photo Booth, a message appeared that said “There is no connected camera.”
Instead of a view from the camera, this message appeared in Photo Booth after updating to OS X 10.9.2.
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.
Eliss Infinity is a follow-up to (or rather, an enhanced version of) the original Eliss. It’s elegant in its own way, although self-consciously retro in appearance: all raw pixels, plain lines and flat colors, like a pastel-tinged Asteroids.
The pinnacle of my programming career was being asked to be one of the people on my high school’s team at some sort of programming contest. I only knew Applesoft BASIC, and half the problems required a more advanced language than that. Thus ended my life as a coder.
But thanks to Apple’s scripting language, AppleScript, I am just powerful enough to be dangerous. I have written many bad AppleScripts in my day. I will probably write many more.
Sky Guide’s timeline controls let you speed forward and backwards through the stars.
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.
The HP Z Display Z27i is a 27-inch professional desktop monitor with 2560 by 1440 native resolution. It features a high-quality IPS screen, LED backlighting, and an anti-glare that many people—including myself— find desirable.
The Z27i also offers far greater ergonomic flexibility than most monitors, providing height adjustment, tilt, and the ability to rotate into portrait orientation. Other niceties include four downstream USB 3.0 ports and plenty of connection options such as VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI. Though the Z27i does support DisplayPort, it does not offer the DisplayPort out connection necessary to allow for that spec’s multi-streaming feature that lets you daisy chain monitors.
Twitter follower Toby Sax is anxious for me to revisit an old Mac 911 column that lays out the steps for creating mail merged documents in Microsoft Word. In a series of tweets Toby writes:
How do you insert an email address from Outlook rather than Apple’s Contacts application?
How do you maintain a letter format within the resulting email message?
When I tried this the letters went to Outlook’s Drafts folders and not to its Outbox as you suggested. Why?
Thanks for allowing me the chance to revisit this topic, particularly as it lets me answer some outstanding questions that followed it. For the sake of convenience I’ll pull portions of that column (in italics) into this one and answer as I go.
Everyone has their favorite (or least favorite, depending on how you look at it) beefs with Apple’s iCloud service. But one of my biggest frustrations is that many of iCloud’s most-convenient features require you to use Apple’s apps—those features simply don’t work with third-party programs.
Take iCloud Tabs, the feature that automatically syncs any open Safari tabs across all your OS X and iOS devices. The key word here is Safari—iCloud Tabs doesn’t support other browsers. But this is where third-party developers step in to help. Like previous Gem MyPhotostream, Josh Parnham’s free CloudyTabs is a simple OS X app that lets you liberate a little bit of iCloud—in this case, that bit is iCloud Tabs.
Eets Munchies invites tinkering and experimentation. Like its PC and Xbox 360 predecessor—from Klei Entertainment, of Don’t Starve and Mark of the Ninja fame—this puzzle platformer asks you to move and manipulate wacky objects to help a hungry rodent find dessert. Although Eets doesn’t have quite the feverish pull of other similar puzzlers, it does a splendid job at continually introducing you to new elements and allowing plenty of room to learn and get creative.
Like a film director yelling “action” and “cut,” much of your time in Eets Munchies is spent pressing “Go” and “Stop” buttons. You don’t have the power to control the game’s lemming-like protagonist directly, but you can strategically place objects like bridges and fans to help guide him or her toward the end of the level. The goal is that when “Go” is pressed, the rodent will march right to its pink birthday cake stress-free.
As the game progresses, however, standard planks and trampolines give way to zany new objects, like inflatable elephants and a disembodied brain that induces an anti-gravity effect. Each new item introduced also comes with a fresh game mechanic, which makes for a steady progression of challenge—one of Eets Munchies’ biggest strengths. The most enjoyable aspect of the game, though, is that it never punishes players for failing. If a setup doesn’t work, you can simply do a little rearranging and try again. It’s not quite a sandbox environment, but the spirit of tweaking and tinkering is at the heart of this experience.
There are a handful of brilliant moments in Eets Munchies, wherein a dozen puzzle elements come together like a Rube Goldberg machine—but the total game package leaves something to be desired. Puzzle Maker mode has novelty value, but not being able to share your created level online is a missed opportunity. Also, the tone of the game comes off as kid-centric, almost like a cartoon animation app, but its often-difficult gameplay seems more suited for adults; it’s hard to believe that a young child would be able to solve some of these puzzles. And any sort of narrative background has been omitted. These elements certainly don’t ruin the core fun, but they do make the experience feel somewhat incomplete.
The bottom line. Eets Munchies will nourish your inner level designer, but the experience as a whole is a bit inconsistent.
If you’re an intergalactic space miner by trade, there are worse fates than getting stranded on a giant red planet rich with subterranean minerals, danger, and excitement. With nowhere to go but deeper and deeper beneath the planet’s surface, Mines of Mars teases you along into its Metroid-style adventure by putting up subtle barriers and giving you a means to overcome them: mining. The balance between gathering, crafting, and exploring is well tuned to draw you in, even if other aspects of navigating the planetscape feel weak by comparison.
You start your adventure by discovering a mysterious robot-run surface facility that’s decked out with useful buildings, which replenish your assorted systems like health, ammo, jetpack fuel, and more. Equipped with a weak blaster and a pickaxe, your initial excursions into the dark realm below are limited. You can only carry so much and venture so far before you run out of fuel, and the monstrous inhabitants you encounter are eager to get their claws on you, as well.
Hauling the raw materials you uncover up to the surface, where you can smelt ore and cut gems, lets you amass enough of both to upgrade your weapons and gear—which is where Mines of Mars sets its hooks in. Most upgrades help you overcome obstacles in some way, allowing you to push deeper. Whether it’s a new helmet that expands your field of view, an enhanced suit that lets you withstand hotter temperatures closer to the planet’s core, or a more powerful blaster to zap the tougher foes you encounter, every new piece of kit holds some untold promise of what’s to come. Questing for the raw materials to build such gear quickly becomes addictive.
As enjoyable as it can be once you set into a steady routine, Mines of Mars has issues that prove irritating enough to trip you up along the way. The control scheme, for one, is unintuitive and unresponsive. You can get around, but it’s hard to do so without accidentally expending precious jetpack fuel when you don’t intend to. Tricky aiming also makes combat more of a cumbersome chore than a worthwhile aspect of the gameplay, and minor glitches pop up too, ranging from your jetpack refusing to shut off to warp portals zipping you back and forth unpredictably. It’s a shame, since these unpleasant quirks mar an otherwise enjoyable experience.
The bottom line. Mines of Mars puts a cool building and crafting spin on the side-scrolling action genre, though its fun is whittled down a bit by control issues and minor bugs.
Mice are a part of the computer experience that is hard to live without, even more so if someone is going to be gaming. There are tons of different mice to choose from based on the needs of the customer. Mionix recently released two new entries into th…
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
If it’s just the wallpaper you want quieted, you can do so from the Wallpapers & Brightness screen.
Got enough stress in your life? Looking for a nice game to help you relax? Lyne is a puzzle game catering to stressed-out iOS gaming fans.
Lyne is a universal app for both iPhone and iPad, although its bite-sized, one-thumb gameplay makes most sense on the smaller screen. It is naturally suited to the portrait handgrip of the commuter gamer, but unusually, it can be also played in landscape. The only difference is that the triangles rotate to suit the new setting.
Each level presents a grid of triangles, diamonds, and squares of (initially) various pastel colors, along with a few octagonal junction boxes. By tracing your finger across the screen you must draw a line connecting all of the yellow triangles, starting and ending with the heavier-bordered end blocks. Then you draw another connecting all the red squares, and so on. You can use each connecting line only once and touch each shape only once, and you also have to pass through each junction a set number of times—the number indicated by dots.
It sounds absurdly complicated, but it isn’t at all; indeed, you’ll grasp wthe gameply within a couple of tutorial levels. It all feels wholly natural—you wonder why no one has made the game before.
The nuances of Formula One racing are mostly imperceptible to the layman. It’s all angular momentum and downforces; a system of geometry, physics, and engineering in which minute adjustments have outsized effects. As a result, a game like F1 2013—the latest of Codemasters’ annual racing series, brought to Mac by Feral Interactive—tends to require technical precision and strict execution.
F1 2013’s controls are delicate, subtle, and responsive, leading to daring passes and disastrous spinouts in equal measure. Career Mode plops rookie drivers at the beginning of a standard 19-race season, setting them up with both a team and the potential for a more lucrative contract if they perform well enough. This is obviously the centerpiece of F1 2013, and it’s where the game’s rigid demands are most keenly felt. At best, an ill-taken hairpin turn may add half a second to your time; at worst, you’ll earn a blown tire or a 10-second penalty for cutting corners. A perfectly driven curve is highly satisfying in the moment, but these imperfections add up: it’s possible to race well—but not perfectly—and still not meet your team’s goals at the end of a 22-lap race. Given the effort and time it takes, ho-hum results are frustrating.
It doesn’t help that F1 2013’s tutorial is a slog, despite not covering enough of Formula One’s subtleties and quirks. Good luck sussing out the intricacies of qualifying, or how to best take off after the green flag. Fortunately, Codemasters has packed in a few features to make F1 2013 somewhat more approachable and inviting for newcomers. Opponent A.I. and driver assistance mechanics—including automatic braking and track overlay with optimal course and speed information—are fully customizable, and the Flashback system makes a welcome return: you can effectively “rewind” a race several seconds in order to undo a crash or penalty.
Mid-race saves are a particularly considerate addition to the F1 series: standard races last dozens of laps and can take up to half an hour to complete, following at least another half-hour of qualifying procedures. Other game modes, such as Grand Prix (a customizable 10-race series) and Scenario Mode (a series of specific, in-race challenges) thankfully offer shorter, three-lap races and benefit as a result: these modes are more compact and less punitive, and they cut away a lot of the pre-rendered cut-scenes and filler that make Career Mode so unenergetic. Scenario Mode in particular is punchy and digestible.
Despite the promise of cross-platform online features with the PC version (released five months prior), F1 2013’s multiplayer lobbies were almost always empty in our testing. However, one of the game’s more pleasant surprises is local split-screen multiplayer action. Having a friend to race against certainly doesn’t make the game any easier, especially if you’re both relatively new to it, but misery loves company.
The bottom line. Navigating the tension between laser-cut simulation and players’ desire to have fun and succeed is an unenviable task, but F1 2013 comes closer than ever to succeeding. For those willing to practice, F1 2013 is technically impressive and robust.
(Editor’s Note: We initially tested F1 2013 with OS X 10.9.1 installed, which was the listed minimum and recommended version on Feral’s website and launch materials, and experienced occasional mid-race crashes. Feral has updated the minimum spec to 10.9.2 on Steam—as it offers significant performance boosts for video cards—and says that it is updating all storefronts with that information. We played a considerable amount more of the game after updating to 10.9.2 and did not experience any additional crashing issues. While Feral says that F1 2013 is playable on OS X 10.9.1 for most players without problems, we’d recommend updating to take advantage of the performance enhancements and hopefully avoid the crashing issue we first encountered.)
