Category: Reviews-HowTos

The debut of Avira Mobile Security is something of a head-scratcher: iPhone owners generally have little reason to worry about the security of their device, at least on the software front. Apple works hard to keep its mobile operating system locked dow…

Codemasters has a seasoned pedigree when it comes to racing games, and it shows with F1 Challenge for iPhone and iPad. As the name suggests, F1 Challenge is an officially licensed Formula One game, but this top-down racer’s real draw is its unique co…

One of the true rewards of playing a monster-training game is the ability to create your own cool-looking creature and customize it to your liking. Monster Adventures not only lets you decide what such a beast looks like, but its mash-up of role-playin…

Reader Bob Kadarauch isn’t interested in a do-it-all device. He writes:

Does anyone manufacture hardware specifically, and only, for using FaceTime? I want to give my 90-year-old mother a “picture phone.” If I tell her it’s a computer, sh…

When I attempted to update my new iPhone 5s to iOS 7.0.2, I got an error message in iTunes that claimed there were purchased items on my iPhone that had not yet been transferred to iTunes on my Mac. It warned that I should transfer these items bef…

This week’s column looks at some problems involving album art going AWOL on iOS devices, and the iTunes Store app having trouble getting up in the morning with iOS 7. I also answer a couple of iTunes Store questions related to gifting items and c…

iOS 7 packs a lot of changes: new icons, new app interfaces, and new features, such as Control Center. But you may not have looked closely at one part of iOS 7 that you’ll use a lot: its keyboard. Uncover hidden characters and handy shortcuts wit…

You’d think that after seven full lessons on the workings of a “simple” image cataloging and editing application such as iPhoto we would have thoroughly exhausted the subject. But no, I have just a little more to talk about before I can wrap…

Lately I’ve been bombarded with questions regarding tiny problems too small to consume an entire column space. But that cup now overfloweth, and so, onward.
The unrotatable Remote

Since I upgraded to iOS 7, Apple’s Remote app won’t rotate. W…

The end of summer means cooler weather, more-colorful trees, and new Apple products. But here at Mac Gems HQ, it also means the end of GemFest (a.k.a., the Summer of Gems). We started the 2013 edition way back on July 22 and continued through Septe…

If you search for endless runners on the App Store, you’ll find a slew of games in all sorts of settings, using a variety of people or animals as subjects. Buddy & Me is another one of those games, but rather than emphasize challenge and dynamic …

Pivvot bills itself as a “game of strategic avoidance.” In Pivvot, the player controls a ball tethered to a winding track by tapping the sides of the screen, maneuvering around various obstacles that could shatter the ball.

The game feature…

It’s hard to say whether or not Boson X is truly inspired by the April discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle, which physicists believe explains why matter has mass. There’s theoretically some common ground. Whereas Higgs, which can supposedly expla…

Apimac’s iDatabase 2.3 is a basic flatfile database application that offers 22 templates and 14 different field data options for handling a variety of data types. While it doesn’t go deep in terms of features, iDatabase does offer enough in th…

Smile Software is a name familiar to Mac users for Acrobat-style productivity tools like PDFpen, which recently made the leap to iOS. Now the company is back with a companion app for scanning documents and converting text to editable format, but it doe…

Reader John Lufkin would like to stay up to date on all his devices. He writes:

I subscribe to a number of Google calendars and while those calendars appear on my Mac, they don’t show up in my iPhone’s Calendar app. How can I configure the i…