Rob LeFebvre - page 53

I’ve been a fan of Apple products from way back. As I left for college, my dad bought an Apple IIGS for the home. All I remember was a ton of boxes and a computer that came with big, fat manuals.

When I got my first Mac, it was a Performa 638CD. It was a beige box contained in (I think) white boxes. It wasn’t very exciting.

Then, back in 2008, I bought the very first model iPhone, the one with a silver back and a black plastic area on the bottom to let the signal in. The box was delightful.

Everything was sensual, from the solid rigidity of the glossy cardboard box to the way each piece nestled gently, safely, inside its own separate section. The iPhone was the first thing I saw when I opened the box.

This first iPhone iteration was a brand new object of desire. I’d never seen such a device, let alone the kind of phone that would all but become ubiquitous over the next five years. If the choirs of angels didn’t sing when I lifted the rectangle of glass and plastic from its carefully molded resting place inside the packaging, but they should have.

Underneath the iPhone were three separate sections: one for the headphones, one for the iPhone dock and a final one for the charging brick. Under those glorious white accessories was the 30-pin connecting USB cable.

What an achievement of design, this box. The packaging alone proved that Apple was making this iPhone for people like me. This wasn’t just messing around; this device was worth some seriously put together casing.

When I was the tech guy for a small non-profit in Alaska a few years back, we used to order new Macbooks every few years to replace the ones that were obsolete or end of life. We’d purchase a dozen or more, depending on the budget.

Opening the boxes to set the MacBooks up became a ritual: I knew exactly what I would find in each box. Every piece had its special place inside the package, which itself had a foam piece glued to the inner top of the flip-up lid to help cushion the MacBook from any inadvertent harm when being transported in the retail carton. There was a handle built in to each container, and everything just, well, fit.

That’s the thing about every product Apple designs these days: the stuff each device comes in is as much an object of attention as the actual iPhone or Mac that it comes in.

It says to purchasers: “Yes, your device is special. It is made just for you (in California).”

It’s yet one more thing that Apple gets right: the box that brings your new miracle of technology into your life makes you feel good even before you use the device itself.

So as you open that shiny new iOS or Mac that came from under the tree in brightly wrapped paper, pause a moment to notice the attention to detail heaped upon the lowly packaging.

You’ll feel good, and be glad you did. Happy Holidays!

Rob LeFebvre is Cult of Mac’s Games Editor.

Square Enix announced Tuesday the release of the very first Tomb Raider, the initial game in a long-running franchise that has spawned sequels across console platforms, PC, the Mac, and even a couple of movies.

The release today to the iPhone and iPad is a direct port of the original game, complete with charming old school graphics and gameplay. And buttons. Lots of crappy virtual onscreen buttons.

Even though there are a ton of games out there that have refined this type of gameplay that you can get for a similar price, you’ll surely get to see where this popular genre got its start.

With all the RAM we have these days, it’s easy to get some serious screen clutter going on when you have a ton of apps open.

You can hide the current app with Command-H, and you can hide all the other apps except the current app with Command-Option-H.

But did you know you could go to any app that’s currently running, while simultaneously hiding all the other running apps?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the included Flashlight–along with the ease of access within the Control Center–to be a fantastic addition to my life. I always have my iPhone with me, which means I always have a quick flashlight with me. I use it to see in my over-crowded closet, behind the sound board at gigs, and into my shed during the dark hours of the winter up here in Alaska. It’s handy.

One thing, though, that’s kind of a pain is turning the thing off. Yeah, you can slide the Control Center up, then tap the flashlight icon to turn it off. But I’m usually trying to manage my phone along with whatever thing I needed from the shed or the closet and those couple of steps can seem like too much.

I’d thought I’d seen it all when it comes to misogynistic, women-as-objects gamification strategies out there, but apparently there’s yet another fine example sent directly to our Cult of Mac inbox recently.

Here’s the pitch for oh-so-scintillating dating simulator, “Mingling At The Gallery:”

Don’t have the time or comfortability to go out, date and meet new people? That’s no longer a problem because ZOOB has created a game providing the experience of your own dating adventure, mingling with people through an engaging, fun and educational iOS app called “Mingling at the Gallery.”

Sure, the company name sounds like the ugly stepsister of n00b + boob, but it might be fun to play a game about the complex interactions needed in successfully navigating a night out at an art gallery, with maybe some tips thrown in for those of us who need a little practice.

Then I watched the promo video.

Looking at the Facebook Games Of The Year list, it’s pretty clear what Facebook gamers enjoy. A majority of the 22 titles are casual, with hits like Candy Crush and Farmville 2. One comment heard around the Cult of Mac writer’s room was, “Who’s ever heard of these games?”

The one game that stands out is Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent, a fairly mid-core gaming title. We asked Jon Radoff, CEO and founder of Disruptor Beam, how it feels to rise to the top of Facebook’s casual-game environment.

“I think Facebook wanted to develop a list that contains some of the most popular games in the world (like Candy Crush) but they also made an effort to include innovative and more unique games,” Radoff told Cult of Mac by email. “Game of Thrones Ascent stands out among the games because we created something new: a story-driven strategy game, which nobody knew would work on Facebook until we tried.”

While no one puts baby in the corner, you can ignore that time-honored advice and actually put the Dock in the corner on the screen of your Mac.

While the traditional tools for moving the Dock around will let you move it to the right, left, or bottom of the screen, this little bit of Terminal magic will have the dock pinned to the far corners of your Mac’s screen, either the right bottom, the top left, or any other corner you can imagine.

The problem with the native Contacts app on your iPhone is that you have to keep the addresses, phone numbers, and emails updated on your own. If your friend moves, or gets a new number, it’s up to you to get the information and enter it correctly into your Contacts app. That’s just so old school.

Addappt is a new app that aims to change all that. You invite others to download and enter their own information in the app, and then every time something changes on their end, the entry in your app changes, too. Better still, the app will push the changes to your native Contacts app, something I’ve not seen before in an app of this type.

Some users have reported problems with sending text messages to their friends and family after the upgrade to iOS 7.

Typically, when iMessage is unavailable, your iPhone should send messages as SMS ones instead, denoted by the green chat bubble as opposed to the regular blue.

If, however, your iPhone won’t send texts automatically, here’s a possible fix.

While all of us aren’t destined to get our heads buried deep in lines of programming languages, chances are that most of us, and especially our children, will benefit from knowing the basics of how the most ubiquitous devices in our world operate.

Despite the current backlash against the “coding for all rhetoric,” teaching kids the basics of programming can’t be a bad thing. Heck, teaching ourselves to code may be a fantastic lead in to a rewarding hobby, a new career path, or both.

That’s the idea behind the “Hour Of Code,” a national initiative set to run December 9 – 15, 2013 that’s designed to take kids through the basics of programming in their schools. This new app from Codeacademy is specifically tailored to the process, so even if your kids (or you!) don’t have a school that’s participating in the Hour of Code, they can still get the benefit.

As you can see, it’s snowing in the Terminal.

This bit of fun is seriously easy to make happen, and it looks super cool when you maximize the Terminal window to full screen. Here’s how to make it snow on your own Mac.

If you’ve never given the classic Fallout games a try, now’s your chance. GoG.com is giving three of them away for free for 48 hours, as part of the classic games digital distributor’s Winter Sale for 2013.

You can get the Mac version of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free until Friday, December 12, so get on it now.

There are tons of solutions to get iOS photos from your device to some sort of backup system, from Dropbox to iPhoto. Backing up your photos is imperative, especially on iOS, as the iCloud backup system doesn’t back up photos, and PhotoStream only keeps the last 1,000 photos on your phone synced to all your enabled devices.

Backing up to cloud services is extremely convenient, but what happens when you no longer want to pay for the storage, or would rather hang on to your digital memories on your own computer? Sure, you can connect to your Mac with a cable, but then you’ve got to do the hard work of figuring out which photos you’ve already backed up.

Sync Photos To Storage, a new app from developer Simplex Solutions, aims to make this process much, much easier.

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a system by which you can create amazing workflow recipes. There’s also an app in the App Store that lets you use the incredibly powerful recipes right on your iPhone. Send all your Instagram photos to Dropbox, for example, or email all your Photos to a specific address. There are tons of recipes you can browse and steal use, plus making your own custom recipes is a snap.

Since emails can often contain things you have to make reminders for follow-up, let’s take a look at turning our emails into reminders using the IFTTT app right on your iPhone.

The Room Two launched today on the iTunes App Store. As the sequel to Apple’s 2012 Game Of The Year (The Room), it has a lot to live up to.

Our reviewer called it a “must download” game, and we picked the original locked box puzzle game as an iOS Game of the Week.

The Room Two promises more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Developer Fireproof Games found the perfect mix of eye candy, just-tough-enough puzzle solving, and a haunting soundtrack in the first game, so any more of that is extremely welcome.

Fleksy, the developer of an innovative third-party keyboard for the blind, launched its own integration software development kit (SDK) by partnering with four other app developers to include in their software.

The partners include Launch Center Pro, Wordbox, GV Connect and BlindSquare, and they’ll demonstrate the innovative approach to keyboarding for everyone.

You probably know that you can press the power button on your Mac to get it to sleep or even turn off.

As has been true for a while, now, you can use the power button on your Mac to manage your Mac in three different ways. The specifics of what each type of button press has changed recently in Mavericks, as Apple states on its knowledge base article about the new power button features.

Every time I think I’ve found my favorite pair of gaming headphones, Steelseries sends me another one to try out.

This time, it’s the H Wireless series, a fantastic, well-designed headset that connects via optical or analog inputs to provide stunningly good Dolby sound without wires. You can, of course, connect an iPhone or iPad to the box, as well, getting a quality sound to walk around the house with.

Seriously, these are my new favorites.

The Elder Scrolls Online, from Bethesda Software, is coming April 4, 2014, and not to the hot new consoles, oh no. The hotly-anticipated online sequel to one of the hottest role-playing games of the past few years is coming to Mac and PC before releasing to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 the following June.

Imagine that–a huge gaming title coming to your Mac before your console-loving friends can get their hands on it.

Ok, sure, this is more of a tip for those with a Macbook Pro or Air, or any other Apple laptop in the last few years with the fantastic tiny power brick design to it.

I know that I’ve struggled for years on the best way to tuck the two pieces of the power cable away. I’ve generally settled on wrapping the thin part of the cord around the included flip-out handles and then wrapping the larger cord around my hand. Sometimes I separate the two cables and do the same thing, so they fit better in a flatter bag or backpack.

This new tip, though, from Twitter user J Cornelius, just plain astonished me when I saw it. Why didn’t I think of that?

Facebook Messenger, the standalone app for the social network’s chat system, was updated Tuesday night. The new version of the chat app, which also includes the now-standard bug fixes, adds two new features that can be accessed with a tap to a friend’s chat icon.

All you need to do is tap on a profile picture in any conversation in Messenger to view their Timeline on Facebook. The other option is to call them using Facebook’s voice chat for free.

I’ve played digital card games on my iPad before, including some heavy hitters like Might And Magic: Duel Of Champions and Magic 2014.

I’ve played some real-time battle arena games, like Raid Leader or Skulls of the Shogun, and enjoyed them as well.

But I’ve never, until now, played such an engaging mashup of the two gaming genres. What Singapore-based Spicy Horse has done here is create nothing less than a sublime, well-balanced, purely addictive combination of collectible card game, arena-based real-time strategy, and a training/leveling up system that just begs for exploration and mastery.

iTunes Radio competes with other non-on-demand internet radio services, like Pandora. It allows you to pick a seed artist or set of artists and then let its magical algorithms decide what other songs and artists best fit your seed. It then feeds you a stream of music that you can like or dislike along the way, theoretically building a “station” of your favorite music, based on your own tastes.

To access iTunes Radio, all you need to do is launch your Music app with a tap, and then tap on the Radio icon in the lower left. Once there, you can create stations on your own, edit stations you’ve already created, or even listen to iTunes featured stations.

It’s also trivially easy to share your own stations with other folks.

Whale Trail and Blip Blup developer Ustwo released a new trailer for its upcoming game Monument Valley, a stunningly beautiful game that looks to be influenced by the art of MC Escher, with gameplay that seems similar to hit indie game, Fez.

Aside from those obvious comparisons, what the trailer and accompanying screenshots show is a mind- and perspective-bending gameplay trip through various and brightly-colored worlds, guiding the silent princess protagonist through crazy architectural geometries.

Designer Ken Wong calls it “a beautiful, exploratory experience, somewhere between exploring a toy shop and reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”

To get to my Mac’s System Report, the one with all the info on my RAM, Hard Drive, CPU specs, and the like, I’ve usually gone up to click the Apple menu, clicked on About This Mac, then clicked on the More Info button. Once there, I’ve clicked on the System Report… button. That’s what, four separate clicks?

In the interest of saving time, there’s a much faster way to get to the System Report.