Guide to Mac, iPod, iPad and iPhone news and reviews
It took some time, but Macworld Lab finally got a stock configuration Mac Pro. This new Mac Pro has a single 6-core Xeon processor running at 3.5GHz, with 256GB of flash memory, 16GB of RAM, and dual AMD D500 graphics. With a $3999 price tag, it’s $1000 less than our previously tested custom Mac Pro, and this stock model held up well in our benchmarks.
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Reader Clint Grosse, like many people, faces the “laptop or iPad” decision. He writes:
I want to purchase either a 13-inch MacBook or iPad soon. I would only use either when traveling and would primarily need it to check email every day or two, write a document occasionally (I don’t know how that might be done using an iPad, since Word doesn’t appear to be an option) and, sometimes, be able to go to an online auction site. Also, I might want to occasionally listen to a CD and watch a DVD. And flash/thumb drives? Without USB ports, they’re not an option for iPads are they?
As you’d expect, you can do everything you desire with a laptop (okay, you’ll also need an external CD/DVD player if you want anything other than the old non-retina 13-inch MacBook Pro that Apple still sells, as Apple’s other laptops no longer include such media players). Let’s now run down your list in regard to the iPad.
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Reader Andy Ingram is befuddled by an iOS limitation. He writes:
I have multiple AirPlay-compatible speakers around my home but it seems that I can stream music from my iPhone to just one of them. Yet on my Mac I can stream to multiple AirPlay speakers. Isn’t there some way to do this on iOS?
Not without some help from a third-party as Apple specifically limits AirPlay output to just the single destination.
If you’d like to stream music that’s on your iOS device, take a look at Thomas Schwitzer’s $3 Multiroom Music/Radio Player app. The “on your iOS device” is in italics for good reason. This app will not send music you’re streaming via your device—Pandora, iTunes Radio, or a music subscription service such as Spotify or Beats Music—to multiple AirPlay devices. It must be music you have on the device itself. For that $3 you have the ability to stream to two destinations. You can add up to six destinations with an in-app purchase of $2 per destination (so, $8 to add four additional speakers).
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We’ve likely all had to cope with something — a product, a person, a place — that was almost perfect, but shot down by some critical flaw. I imagine that for many people, Chil’s updated Notchbook case for the iPad Air may fit into the same category. …
Over the past year, I’ve seen more and more photo collages pop up on my social media timelines. Some folks use iOS apps such as Frontback for an automatic front camera/back camera collage, while others manually put multiple pictures together with an iOS program such as Diptic.
But you’re not limited to the iPhone or iPad to build collages—nor do you have to spend bank-breaking money on an image editor. For just $1, you can pick up PicFrame (Mac App Store link), a standout app for making quick and easy—and easily shareable—image collages.
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The best reading apps vanish before your very eyes, letting you immerse yourself in a sea of words and stories, forgetting for the moment about beveled edges or highlighted buttons. And though Quote-Unquote Apps’s Weekend Read beautifully implements iOS 7’s design schema, its true power is how quickly it lets you forget about the interface and how deeply it pulls you into the scripts, screenplays, and other documents hidden within.
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A few years back a world without Quicken as the mainstay of personal finance apps would have been unimaginable. It was the go to application for managing personal finances on your Mac. Now it’s hard to imagine that world without IGG Software’s iBank 5. iBank 5 is a best of class app that continues to add features and value and which should be your personal finance app of choice.
How easy is it to get iBank 5 up and running and so you can start tracking your current financial status? Let’s put it this way; I had 11 bank accounts and an investment account set up and all transactions imported in less time than it took to boil a pot of coffee water and steep a press pot. This is in large part because of an an optional IGG Software subscription service called Direct Access ($5 per month, $13 per quarter, or $40 per year), which connects directly to your banking institutions using your authentication information and downloads transactions directly into iBank 5.
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Word Puttz definitely gets points for its original premise: take a casual game of Scrabble, throw it on a miniature golf course, add an octopus, and you’ve got this new free-to-play affair. Okay, so the octopus doesn’t actually have much impact on gameplay other than being your guide to this oddly linguistic puzzle hybrid, but it’s worth mentioning for the sheer oddity — and in that vein follows the essence of Word Puttz itself.
Adapting the basics of a crossword puzzle for a putt-putt course may not sound like the easiest transition, though to the developers’ credit, it’s actually fairly simple. Instead of a golf ball, you spell out words to move your way across the green, with limitations imposed via prerequisites like grabbing four coins or attempting to reach the goal in 30 letters or less. The latter is your stand-in for par — all you have to do is spell out a word that passes over the cup.
There are other, weirder permutations. You’ll race your cephalopod teacher to the end of a round by spelling out words as fast you can, for instance, and Super Mario Bros.-esque warp pipes (which deposit a letter to a different part of the green) make a surprising appearance. Word Puttz is free-to-play, though like the developer’s mobile You Don’t Know Jack port, the teeth of its microtransactions aren’t terribly sharp. Go over par and you can buy new sets of letters, or run out of lives by failing too many holes and you can replenish them — though you’ll get a new one for free in 15 minutes.
The bigger problem here, at least for avid crossword fans, is that a lot of the requirements to finish any given hole have a greater focus on Word Puttz’ golf-tinged mechanics than they do with, say, pulling off 14-letter-word combos. There’s also something amiss with the letter randomizer, as the game appears prone to doling out bad letter draws — which of course you can buy your way out of after a handful of free trade-ins. The novelty of Word Puttz can sadly overshadow its wordplay at times.
The bottom line. Word Puttz is a solid free-to-play puzzler, though it won’t scratch the itch of advanced word nerds.
It’s no surprise that a cartoon like Adventure Time would branch out into video games to attract its young (and alternately, geeky adult) audience. What is slightly more startling is how well the latest effort from Cartoon Network stands on its own merits. While certainly effective as a tie-in to the cartoon, its card-battling mechanics are so strong that Card Wars could have done without the license and proven just as sophisticated and inventive.
Named after the popular episode of the same name, Card Wars sees the residents of Ooo challenging each other in a series of one-on-one card bouts. A match starts by laying down four tracts of land, which face against an opponent’s four tracts to form lanes. Those lanes usually define the face-offs between cards, and buildings act as modifiers to the creature cards in play. Each creature can be “flooped” (or tapped) for a special ability, as well. Your goal is to wipe out enemy creatures so that damage inflicted can instead afflict your opponent for the win, progressing through different opponents across the lengthy campaign.
The mechanics are easy to grasp, but with cards that do everything from weaken attack traits to possess enemies, it proves a remarkably deep experience. Each character can also be leveled up for increased HP and MP, and all of the playable characters have special abilities that complement their respective play styles. For example, Jake is best for use with corn-heavy fields — a clear reference to the episode — while Princess Bubblegum is a strong healer. The card collection aspect is rich as well. You gain cards for defeating opponents, but you can also sell cards for coins, or combine them into stronger cards once you receive special recipes. And all of this is delivered with Adventure Time’s signature zany style (complete with plenty of voice acting), so fans will definitely appreciate the humor.
Despite all of these smartly balanced play mechanics, however, an unwarranted energy mechanic rears its head. The energy was supplied generously enough that we didn’t often hit the wall while playing, but it certainly seems more at home in a free-to-play app than a premium one. Purchasable gems are also used to save yourself from a loss or buy premium chests, but they can be earned in-game for finishing challenges. Luckily, the underlying mechanics are so refined and fantastically fun that the energy-based annoyances are easy to ignore, and they’re thankfully not too onerous.
The bottom line. Adventure Time: Card Wars is an impeccably designed card-battler with the show’s signature humor generously slathered over it. Don’t be turned off by the energy mechanics — this is one game that makes that minor annoyance worth tolerating.
Reader Ingrid Hansmann wishes to go back in time. She writes:
I visited a web page about a year ago that had some information that I wanted. I’ve since returned and the page has changed. Is there any way I can see the old version?
There is. Google caches many webpages and there’s a chance that an old version of the page you’re looking for is available in cached form. Just use this formula:
Enter http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: and then paste in the full address of the page you want to visit. For example, if I wanted the cache from http://www.example.com/fuzzybears I’d enter this into my browser’s address field:
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The Tomb Raider games have a long history of showing off the world-class acrobatics and survival skills of Lara Croft. But how did she get that way? In the new Tomb Raider (Mac App Store link) Square Enix reboots the series to give us an origin stor…
One of the challenges facing educational game developers is how to strike a balance between lessons and fun. Too much teaching, and the game ceases to keep a child’s attention; too little, and it becomes just another game. That’s one of the reasons Slice Fractions is so great: it has mastered teaching kids about fractional math without having overt lessons to do so.
Slice Fractions tasks players with clearing a path for a woolly mammoth to get from one side of the screen to another. The mammoth’s path is blocked by chunks of ice or lava that must be eliminated by hitting them with equally sized blocks. This is achieved by slicing up a large block hanging in the sky, and then popping the bubbles holding it up in the correct way to make sure the blocks drop where you need them to. Anyone who’s played Cut the Rope will recognize the similarities right off the bat.
The educational aspect of Slice Fractions is presented in a number of different ways, giving kids a variety of opportunities to see how fractions translate in real-world terms. Early levels focus on shapes and sizes, while later levels bring in the numeric representations of fractions. Mastering the levels earns players goofy hats for the mammoth.
Slice Fractions does a really great job of teaching without making it feel like a lesson, though it also dynamically gives hints if it senses you’re stuck. The controls are straightforward and easy to use, with the exception of the levels that allow you to slice up a brick any way you choose; even if you know the shape and size you want, it can be difficult to be exact with touch controls. The only other drawback is that the game is very short. More free content is coming, but it’s something to keep in mind if you have a kid who’s likely to fly through it.
The bottom line. Slice Fractions is a charming, albeit brief game that teaches fractions in a fun and effective manner.
Way back in the 6th grade, my family couldn’t afford a computer, but my teachers started to assign school papers that, ideally, would be typed on a typewriter—or, if that wasn’t an option, neatly handwritten. Both were painful processes that led to sheet after sheet of paper weighted down with dried correction fluid.
Then my best friend Ed got a word processor. It wasn’t a fully-capable computer—it was just a machine you could use to type documents. And since Ed was my best friend, he let me use that word processor. It had a nine-inch CRT display with green, pixelated text on a black background, and you had to view your text through the (significant) curvature of the screen. It wasn’t much compared to today’s technology, but at the time, that word processor was heaven sent.
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I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to get excited by a smartphone mount. It sticks to something and holds your phone—whoopie. But I’ve been using iMagnet’s $25 iMagnet Mount for Smartphone for a while, and I’m impressed.
Instead of a standard rubbery suction cup, the iMagnet mount uses a sticky, silicone-gel cup that stays on remarkably well and, in my testing, attaches to more surface types than regular suction cups. The mount doesn’t leave a mark when you remove it, and you can wash the gel surface if it gets dirty to restore its Dyson-like suction power. The mount worked equally well on the windshield and dashboard of my car, as well as on my kitchen counter and cabinets.
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You’re a masked lord of Waterdeep.
No, bear with me here. Waterdeep, the legendary city of Dungeons & Dragons’s Forgotten Realms, is a bustling metropolis, run by secretive lords with their own agendas, who are more often than not engaged in political machinations against one another.
That’s the backdrop for Lords of Waterdeep, developed by Playdek and based on Wizards of the Coast’s popular tabletop board game.
And though there’s no faster way to make someone’s eyes glaze over than to explain that Lords of Waterdeep is a “European-style worker placement game,” this isn’t Clue or Monopoly. Don’t worry if you’re not a D&D aficionado—the setting mainly provides flavor; you don’t need any special knowledge of the classic role-playing game to play or enjoy Lords of Waterdeep. All you need is some willingness to indulge in some fantastical intrigue and a thirst for victory.
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Even if your camera doesn’t have GPS built-in, you can add location data to your photos using Aperture 3.5.
There are three major ways to do this. The first two involve looking up locations in Aperture’s Places, then applying that data to your images. The third technique pulls data from pictures captured with your iPhone. Since iPhone images are automatically geotagged, they can be used to mark photos captured with a regular digital camera.
Here’s how it all works.
This method is terrific when you’ve captured pictures at a location displayed on a map. For example, I shot a series of photos at Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. If I zoom in on a map of that area, the Wharf is displayed. So all I have to do is drag my pictures on to that location to tag them. Here are the steps.
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