Fan favorite (and BAFTA award-winning) point and click adventure game series Broken Sword is getting a sequel, called The Serpent’s Curse, and it’s being funded in part via Kickstarter. It’s a new adventure for Mac (and PC) starring series regulars George and Nico being developed by series creator, Charles Cecil, and his company Revolution Software.
Mac gaming portal, GameAgent, today announced a new version of its web portal. The new update will launch in September of this year and include information on over 150 Mac games, as well as some new game discovery features.
Reader James G writes,
I use the iPad’s locking feature requiring a 4-digit pin. The problem I was worried about is that the default setting has a button allowing you to see photos without knowing the 4-digit pin.
With the dozens of login names & passwords I’m required to remember, I often take a screenshot whenever I’ve created a new login or changed my password. So some of my “photos” are part of what I want to protect. Until recently I hadn’t realized that by default the pin didn’t block looking at the pictures.
I had looked and not found a way to turn that off, but after writing to you discovered there is a way to do it.
So, as James found out, there is, in fact, a way to keep your photos private when using the passcode security on an iPad, but you have to disable the default slideshow option first.
When people think computer gaming, they may not think Macintosh right away. However, there are a host of games both new and old, expensive and cheap, indie and triple-A for the Macintosh platform. The following list, then, is of the best strategy games the Mac platform has to offer; all of these received an over 80 score on Metacritic, a gaming review aggregation site. Most of them are playable on modern Macs, with a few exceptions as noted.
Built into every Mac are a host of accessibility options. People with visual disabilities may need to zoom into the screen, making everything on it bigger in order to see enough to use the Mac. Individuals who experience blindness can use VoiceOver, which has the Mac speak everything on screen, including menus and dialog buttons. Other people with visual impairments may need to invert the Display colors and adjust the contrast to help them with eye fatigue as well as seeing the items on screen.
Here’s another one of those “so simple it hurts” tips that we find from time to time, leaving us scratching our heads, wondering why we didn’t figure it out sooner.
When you’re browsing the web, whether you’re on a computer or your iPhone, you don’t always want to open links in the window you’re browsing in. Neither do you always want to open them in a new tab in the foreground. Sometimes, especially when you’re doing internet research, you want to open tabs in the background. On the Mac, it’s simply a matter of Command clicking a link in your current browser, or setting a preference or two for your favorite web apps.
You can do this on iOS, too, with a simple tap in Settings. Here’s how.
One of the 200 new features touted by Apple for OS X Mountain Lion is a boon to those of us who have to type the same text string or phrase over and over, including email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and the like. It’s also a great way for people with motor disabilities to be able to type at a much faster rate than otherwise. Here’s how to set it up.
Adobe updated their cloud-based photo management app, Revel, to version 1.5 across both Mac and iOS apps. The new version includes the ability to sort photos into albums, share private web albums on the Adobe Revel website, and add captions to photos. Along with an updated user interface and new photo themes, you can use your Facebook ID to sign up for a Revel account.
Real-time strategy never looked this good.
Today, Eufloria was released in an iPhone-only version for three dollars, while the five dollar universal version has been updated to include support for the iPhone 4S, Retina graphics for the new iPad, iCloud saves, and game session saving (for when you hit the Home button by accident).
Curious about who, exactly, is behind the growing number of TV ads for and against this or that political candidate, this or that political issue? Well, wonder no longer, as the developers behind Super PAC App bring Shazam-like audio recognition technology to the political advertisement space.
iPhone and iPad video recording is fast becoming a standard way of sharing the view of our world these days. With the new HD video options in the iPhone 4S and the new iPad, of course, the videos are getting even larger. What’s a budding videographer supposed to do with these huge files when sending them to our friends and family?
Turns out, you can trim the videos down right on your iOS device using the Trim feature. Here’s how.
The most noticeable change in the way Safari works in its latest version is in the way it allows you to search. Just like Google’s Chrome web browser, Safari now includes an integrated search in the previously URL-only address bar at the top of the browser.
There are some tricks to narrow down search results, as well as a couple neat ways to save specific searches for later use. Let’s check them out together, shall we?
Longtime supplier of smartphone panels to Apple, LG Display, has begun producing a new, thinner display that is thought to be for use in the upcoming iPhone 5 from Apple. The production schedule is in line with the rumored September 12th announcement of the new iPhone model.
Wait, what? You haven’t played Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP? What’s wrong with you? It’s only one of the best games out there on the iPhone and iPad, garnering several awards from around the web.
The hit universal iOS game is now available for the Mac, and the latest update is Retina Enabled, for all you Macbook Pro owners. I can think of worse ways to spend eight bucks, as Sword and Sworcery is truly a masterpiece of indie design, complete with a brilliant soundtrack by Jim Guthrie, who seems to be involved in the new PSN game, Soundscapes, as well as the soundtrack for Indie Game: The Movie.
Sssssssssssss Boom!
If hearing that sound makes you break out in a cold sweat and go running for the nearest shelter, you may be a Minecraft addict.
Mojang, creator and continuing developer of Minecraft for Mac and PC, wrote a post today on their blog detailing the upcoming update to Minecraft Pocket Edition, the version of the indie runaway hit building, mining, and crafting game for iOS. Here’s a hint: it’s got creepers.
Finding stuff on the web is pretty easy. Finding stuff you don’t already know about, surprising stuff, is hard. That’s what the developers behind Trapit are trying to fix.
Trapit for iPad allows you to discover things you’re already interested in as well as stuff you may not even know you’re looking for using algorithms that run in the app behind the scenes. What that means is that once you start using Trapit, it will learn what you’re into, and start finding stuff that might be of interest to you, based on what you’re already checking out as well as new stuff that might be cool for you to see.
The app also curates its own content into a Featured Traps section, which will help you discover even more content for that surprise factor.
Back in April, we told you about a nifty way to bring a “Now Playing” message from iTunes to your Dock. Now that Mountain Lion is out, that feature is missing. Luckily, there’s another slick way to get a notification of the track name and info right in Notification Center. Which sort of makes sense, since that’s where notifications go.
Using a third-party app from MediaFire, NowPlaying, you can make this happen on your own Mac running OS X 10.8, more commonly known as Mountain Lion.
In an investor note today, Barclays investment analyst Ben Reitzes comes down squarely on the side of many others who believe a set top box is the way Apple has “cracked” the TV scene, rather than with an integrated television set created by Apple hardware designers. His opinion is that Apple is more likely to create a TV product that focuses on the software and not the hardware.
“We believe consumers would welcome such a product from Apple,” wrote Rietzes, “as well given that many younger customers seem to be watching content on demand on smaller screens (iPads, laptops) in private places – and only Apple seems to be the company that can redirect that content back to the big screen.”
Hey, everyone, it’s Back To School time, and students everywhere will need to take part in a time honored tradition – taking notes. IRIS, originally an OCR software company, announced today the availability of two new digital note taking pens that will take handwritten notes and turn them into editable text. The IRISNotes2 Express and Executive pens will fit different needs and budgets, but should prove a boon to anyone – especially students – who need to take fast notes and then get them into a digital format.
It sure is great to be able to see the first few lines of emails as they come in on the iPhone, but it’s equally helpful to see more subject headers on the screen at one time. The more emails I can see at once, the more I can ignore, focusing more closely on emails that look promising.
iOS allows you to change the number of emails up on the screen at one time with a simple trip to the Settings app on your iPhone and iPod touch. It’ll even work on your iPad, but that may not be as important as it is on a much smaller screen.
Mail will notify you whenever an email comes in via the new Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion. While this seems to be a pretty cool feature, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of mail coming to one of your accounts, or several email addresses, each with their own high volumes of electronic communications.
It’s fairly easy to control the Notifications preferences for Mail, of course, but here’s the thing. Mountain Lion’s Mail app lets you choose one specific mailbox to receive notifications from. This can be a valuable time and attention saver, especially if you marry it to the power of a Smart Mailbox to filter even further.
Finnish gaming company Kukouri Mobile Entertainment created and developed Tiny Troopers, which was picked up by Chillingo, one of the larger and more successful iOS publishing company, itself owned now by Electronic Arts (EA). Tiny Troopers was released to iPhone and iPad as a universal app at the beginning of June, updated a month later, and then given a price drop mid-July.
Today, excitingly, it’s available for pre-order on Mac via Iceberg Interactive, an up-and-coming publisher of Mac, Linux, and PC games. Iceberg Interactive may best be known for Oil Rush, a real-time naval strategy game for all three computer platforms.
In a fantastic blog post, designer Josh Lehman begs us all to stop using the metaphor that many of us, press and developer alike, continue to spout when we hear a complaint about the price of a $0.99 app. “Look,” we say, again and again, “you’ll spend $4 on a cup of coffee at (insert your favorite coffe brand here, usually Starbucks), why won’t you spend a paltry $1 on my app?”
Lehman sees through the falsity of this argument, and then shows us why this attitude isn’t selling apps, either, regardless of its accuracy.
As we reported earlier today, Apple and Samsung CEOs were on deck to sit down and have a last chat before jury deliberations begin in the next couple of days. The plan was for Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Kwon Oh Hyun to talk on the telephone and perhaps come to some sort of peace before any potential damage can be done by the full jury resolution of the trial taking place in Northern California over the alleged patent infringement Apple took Samsung to court over, and that Samsung then countersued Apple for.
While the telephone call took place today, there was no resolution, according to an in-court report by Kevin Johnson, a Samsung attorney.
“We will see you tomorrow,” he said.
There are a few of us iPad users that may have gone a little bit crazy with the Newsstand app when it first came out. We thought it would be super cool to read ALL of our magazines on the iPad, especially when we travel – what better way to avoid paying the per-issue price in the airport magazine stand when we could have the latest issues of our favorite rags all loaded up on our magical iPad? Sounds great, right?
And then we got on the plane, and realized that we still had to turn off all electronic devices before take off, and wait till about 10,000 feet before we could read them. What a bummer. Then, when we tried to figure out how to unsubscribe from the darn things, we realized we were at a loss. We tried going back into the iTunes App store app description, we messed around in Newsstand, all to no avail.
Here’s how to do it, though, with little to no hassle.