Sure, you’ve used location-based Reminders on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, but did you know that you can create them from your Mac, as well? If you’re running OS X Mountain Lion and have iCloud enabled on both your Mac and your iOS devices, you can have a seamless location-based Reminders system right out of the box. Here’s how.
It’s pretty clear that the iPhone is going to boost Apple’s bottom line this coming Wednesday, September 12, when it’s expected to release along with an invite-only event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Michael Feroli, chief economist for investment firm, J.P. Morgan, thinks it might actually raise the overall U.S. economy.
Yeah, that’s kind of a big deal.
Steam, the online portal for Mac and PC games, announced a new beta feature coming tonight to PCs and soon to Macs – The Big Picture. Parent company Valve has created a new way to play games purchased through the Steam store, using the same exact Steam friends list and games you already own.
Once you’ve updated the Steam client, you’ll be able to click a button and play your games with a controller, a mouse and keyboard, or what have you. Valve has made the new interface controller-friendly, designed to kick back on a couch and play games right on the big screen TV you already have in your living space.
Here’s another one of those quirky, brilliant hidden features of the iPhone’s operating system. I’m sure you’ve all muted a phone call while on the line with someone, right? What about when you’re on speaker phone? Mute makes sure that the other person can’t hear you, but you certainly can still hear them. That can be frustrating, especially when in a room with other folks, like during an interview.
Sometimes it’s just good to mute both sides of the conversation, right? Hold is the way your iPhone can do that.
With the profusion of menu bar icons in the upper right of our Mountain Lion screens, it might be time for a change. If you’re bored with the same old Notification Center icon that everyone else who’s upgraded to Apple’s latest Mac operating system has, this tip’s for you.
Cheaper e-books would be great, right? According to industry executives, that may just happen in the next one to three months after a federal judge entered an approval of an antitrust settlement between several e-book publishers and the Justice Department itself.
In the final settlement today, publishers Lagardere, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins have the next 10 days to notify e-book retailers like Amazon that any previous agreements regarding e-book pricing are no longer valid. The deal gave publishers only seven days to notify Apple, interestingly enough.
According to the report in the Wall Street Journal, one executive, who asked to not be identified, said, “It could be pretty fast.”
The publishers have to let retailers out of any agreements that prevent discounting, and the retailers are also able to terminate said contracts within 30 days.
This last weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), I spent time with the developers at Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic: The Gathering, to talk about their latest Magic: The Gathering expansion, due out on iOS, PC, and console, Return To Ravnica. They sat me down in the nice room behind the Magic and Dungeons and Dragons booth for some hands-on time with the expansion, which takes players to a new plane in the Magic: The Gathering Universe, Ravnica.
The expansion comes with new single player opponents, each with their own deck and playstyle. As in the original iOS version of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, once you beat one of the computer enemies, you unlock their card deck to play in your own battles with the online multiplayer.
For someone who uses their iPhone a lot (and I mean a LOT), it’s funny how many little things I just don’t know about. iOS is a brilliant and complex thing, and finding all the hidden features is pretty tricky. Take today’s tip, for example – I rarely use my iPhone as a phone, really, so it’s with that in mind that I want to point out how easy it actually is to create a conference call with Apple’s magical device.
OK, so maybe I’m too impatient, but waiting for those otherwise-useful banner notifications in OS X Mountain Lion is rather annoying. I’ve long grown used to the Growl-style pop up badge, which has an actual close button on it. The new banner notifications in OS X 10.8 have no such thing, and when I want to click on something underneath them, my ire is quickly aroused. Where’s the Close button!? iMessages gets one, why not general notifications and alerts?
Well, there isn’t one, and that’s just the way it is. Luckily, there is also a way to close these 5-second tests of my patience, though.
The Arctic. A tribe of mystical, peace-loving Eskimos. A greedy, visionary corporation named Toxi Co. (get it?). A freak accident unleashes goo that mutates all in its path, including a massive polar bear named, you guessed it, Fatty Sparkles.
Can’t you picture this on your television or movie screen? How about as a turn-based multiplayer digital board game? I bet you can see it both ways, and that’s what developer, Lantern, is banking on. Co-founders Austin Hice and Carlo Eugster in 2011, Lantern began with a dream to make games influenced byt he storytelling they learned about while working in film and television. This past weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle, they showed off a pre-release four-player demo of the game, and it caught our eye.
Apple cut its order for memory chips slated to go into the upcoming iPhone 5, according to a report at Reuters this evening. Citing a “source with direct knowledge of the matter,” the report says that while the South Korean chip manufacturer is still on the list as an initial supplier of memory chips for the new iPhone model, but that Apple continues to decrease its reliance on Samsung as a chip supplier.
You may have played any one of a half-dozen similar location-based games on the App Store, from PerBlue’s Parallel Mafia and Parallel Kingdom to Self Aware’s Fleck, but you’ve never seen a location-based game like Life Is Magic before.
If you haven’t had the chance to play Basion on the Xbox or your Mac, yet – heck, even if you have – you owe it to yourself to pick this game up for your iPad.
Bastion is available on Mac or the Xbox gaming console for around $15. The iPad version was released today at a fantastic $4.99, making this the best gaming deal you can get for a brand new out-of-the-gate game.
We all have that contact or three that just can’t seem to take a hint. They keep calling and calling, and we really just need to get our work done. If you use the audible ringer on your iPhone, there’s a way to ignore that caller (along with any other folks you’d like to selectively mute) with a silent ringtone.
You may have noticed that in addition to all the things Mountain Lion adds to OS X, its also taken a few away. If you run a web server on your Mac, or develop websites on your local machine, you’ll also have noticed that the option to turn the local web server on or off is missing from System Preferences. Apache, the industry-standard web server that has come bundled with OS X since the first version, is still there, but there is no longer a way to enable the actual server.
Until now, that is, with a third party app called VirtualHostX.
The universal Kindle App for iOS was updated today with quite a few new features for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Included are adjustable margins when running on the iPad, allowing you to choose from three new layouts. Amazon has also added faster highlights to let you mark important stuff to reference later as well as an improved brightness control, highlighting for images, a notebook feature to gather all the bookmarks, notes, and highlights for studying, and better navigation for print replica textbooks.
Capcom announced today the upcoming release of three of its wacky courtroom games to the iPhone and iPad. Originally released on Nintendo’s dual screened handhelds, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy HD will include all three of the Phoenix Wright games, with Ace Attorney, Justice for All, and Trials and Tribulations stepping up to the courtroom bar.
CodeWeavers announced today the return of Quack: Flock the Vote, a program in which Codeweavers will offer their Windows compatibility software for free download over a 24-hour period and to use for 12 months if 100,000 American voters pledge to vote in the coming elections.
The company even has a thermometer graphic to measure the number of pledges.
I’m not that fickle in the rest of my life, honest. When it comes to news reading apps on the iPad, however, I’ve had many loves. First came Flipboard, which grabbed my attention with its well-designed layouts of web links and images shared by people in my social network circles.
Then I found Trapit, which added both AI and editorial curation to my newsreader, though it is a bit lacking in the design department.
Now, there’s News360 for iPad, and I think I’ve fallen in love. Again.
If you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion, you’ll have realized as soon as you launched Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, that the default location for saving files is iCloud. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?
Nope, of course not! Why would we even be writing this tip if you were?
There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of the cloud, via iCloud. You can still save to iCloud; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while in Text Edit (or in other iCloud-enabled apps).
Sunside Games announced that their well-received iOS game, Crow, is coming to the Mac platform this Thursday, August 30, 2012. Crow for the Mac will have Game Center support, including leaderboards and achievements, as well as high rez graphics and a remastered soundtrack.
“Crow has had an incredibly successful run so far on the App Store. It’s a really unique immersive experience and it demonstrates that there is a desire for something fun and different. We’re really excited to bring this experience to the Mac,” said Richard Cowgill, CEO of Sunside, Inc.
Telltale Games announced today that the third episode in The Walking Game video game, “Long Road Ahead,” will launch tomorrow on Mac, via digital game portal Steam of Telltale’s own website store. The adventure game will also be available on Xbox 360 and PC tomorrow as well, while PlayStation Network players can get it today, the lucky devils.
These days, most of us are caught in an odd transition from paper to digital documents. Most of us create documents on our Macs, but also need to deal with a ton of actual dead-tree paperwork on a daily basis.
There are a bunch of optical character recognition (OCR) apps out there for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad of varying quality and interface design. Quick Reader is one of the less expensive ones, at $0.99, so might be worth a try if your budget is tight.
Remember that tip we gave you about showing more than seven days in a week in iCal? It’s been a while, but there used to be a way to enable a Debug menu in iCal to allow you to open multiple iCal windows, change the number of weeks that appear before and after the start date in Day View, and even show more than just seven days in a week.
Well, that debug menu has gone away in Mountain Lion, but we found a cool Terminal command that does something similar.
There’s a new icon on the Apple TV tonight, and it’s kind of a sweet surprise. The 2012 iTunes Festival will be in London, with apps available on iPhones, iPads and Macs for free streaming of the event.
Looks like Apple decided to get an app onto the Apple TV as well, ahead of the September 1st launch date.