Rob LeFebvre - page 54

The clock app in iOS 7 is pretty straightforward. There’s an alarm, stopwatch, timer, and a world clock. The latter allows you to add any number of cities to your list and your iOS device will tell you the time in each city. You can rearrange them into any order you like with a quick tap on the Edit button in the upper left. To add new cities, simply tap the plus button in the upper right.

The world clock defaults to an analog representation of the time to the right of each city. We can fix that.

Reminders are delightful thing. Apple’s implementation syncs across the Mac to iPhones and iPads, and if you log in to iCloud.com, you can share Reminders with friends, family, co-workers, and the like. They’re super useful.

Sometimes, though, you might want to single out a specific Reminder for special attention. There’s really no starring system or tagging available within Reminders itself, so you’ll have to get creative.

The native calendar app on your iPhone or iPad is pretty great, and since it’s built right into iOS and the info is on your iPhone, not the internet, you have access to all your calendar events even when you’re offline or can’t find a network signal.

Now, many of us use Google Calendar to schedule our stuff. Personally, I like that I can sync my calendars across the web and my iOS devices, and share events with other Google Calendar users. But I’ve always wanted to have my events on my iPhone’s Calendar app, too, for the whole “can’t find a network” reason above.

It’s pretty easy, really, to get it all to sync together.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s a game about an acrobatic hedgehog, Wide Sky from Marcus Eckert. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter Nadine thinks.

When you launch Safari these days, you’ll get the Top Sites page, showing all the sites you visit most frequently in Safari. If you’ve disabled this default view, you can get to it with a quick Option-Command-1 in Safari.

Did you know, however, that you can rearrange these Top Sites more to your liking? You can even delete sites you don’t want appearing there, as well.

Spicy Horse Games (Akaneiro), the studio spearheaded by American McGee (American McGee’s Alice), and DeNA (owner of mobile games studios Mobage and ngmoco;), announced today that iOS game The Gate is now ready in the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Originally titled Hell Invaders, The Gate is an innovative mashup of a game that brings a digital collectible card game together with the fun of a real-time strategy (RTS) game into one beautiful package.

Spend some time with physics-puzzler, Drei, and you’ll get a first-rate gaming experience on your iPad.

Spend a little more of that precious time with this game, and your faith in humanity just might be restored.

That’s the idea here with this innovative game: work to solve puzzles together with an another anonymous player somewhere in the world, and remind yourself that we’re all interdependent.

Maybe that’s a good idea, considering all the things we need to work together to solve in real life.

Sure, you can open up Apple’s Maps app on your iPhone (or iPad, but really, who does that?) and enable live traffic information with a tap or two. It’s super helpful while you’re on the road, and helps you avoid the nasty traffic snarls that might be up ahead.

But what if you’re planning a trip from your Mac running Mavericks? Shouldn’t you be able to access that kind of data on your Mac?

Well, you can! Mavericks makes it super easy to enable, too.

For the iPad I use at home, I want minimal bulk. I’m willing to sacrifice protection for that privilege, but I want to be able to use my iPad 3 in as close to the original form factor as possible.

For iPads I’ve used with kids in classrooms, or ones that might be used in hospitals or in the enterprise, I’d rather have more protection, even if it means a sacrifice of heavier, bulkier, proportions.

Otterbox has long been the industry standard super-high protection case, but this new entry into the field, the K Kuvs Klover iPad Case is a strong contender for just as much protection for half the price.

iOS 7 has brought some great new gestural support, like being able to swipe from the left side of the screen to go back a page in apps like Settings, Mail, and Safari.

Did you know, though, that you can use the same gesture to peek at your list of email or iMessages from within those specific apps? I didn’t either, so figured I’d pass it along to you.

While other web browsers exist and thrive on iOS, Safari is the one Apple includes with it’s iOS system software, and it’s probably the one most of us use often, no small thanks to the fact that it’s integrated at the system level. Every click through, unless third-party apps (like Mailbox) allow something different, takes us to Safari as our main browser.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ways to protect more of your privacy, you’ll want to enable the Do Not Track feature in mobile Safari, as well as possibly block cookies, which are bits of code that store your preferences on website servers for return visits.

Australian publisher Halfbrick (Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja, Age of Zombies) announced Tuesday that its new free-to-play band simulator game Band Stars will release to the App Store on Thursday, December 5.

The game, developed in collaboration with Australia-based Six Foot Kid, has been in development for a while, with an early build available last March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. Come this Thursday, you’ll be able to download the game for free onto your iOS device and start a band.

The login screen wallpaper in OS X Mavericks is a pretty boring dark gray linen picture, with the Apple logo in the center. Yawn.

Far better to put in your own image, thereby customizing the login screen for your very own purposes, am I right? It’s not too tricky to do so, though it does require replacing some system files and will get rid of the Apple logo image itself.

If you don’t mind replacing that Apple logo with a much larger image, thereby hiding the linen look but losing the Apple logo, then here’s how to do just that.

According to a new report from IBM, the greed consumer-driven shop-fest known as Black Friday.

The report shows a new high for online sales for this 2013 reporting period, as well as a soaring rate of mobile shopping, in which folks used smartphones to browse for deals while people were more likely to complete purchases with tablets.

The most interesting finding, however, was how much more iOS users spent than those on Android. Take that, Google!

We’re big fans of Apple’s Pages app on iOS here, as it allows us to create and edit good-looking documents easily and on the go. Pages’ stunning array of templates, combined with the ease of use associated with an app built by Apple itself for its flagship touchscreen device, make it a must-have app on anyone’s iPad.

Color us excited, then, when we heard about a hidden feature in Pages that lets us delete backgrounds from photos right from within the app itself. Instant Alpha is a super helpful feature when we need to get rid of a large solid color background without dropping the image into an editing program first.

Developer Frogmind has just updated its award-winning iOS game, Badland. The update is the conclusion to the Day II story-based levels, with 10 new levels and 30 new missions to accomplish, along with seven new Game Center achievements.

The final tally, then, of levels in Badland is now 80, fully double what the game started with back in April.

Sure, it’s pretty easy to type an address into the Maps built into Mavericks, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could just click your way to Map nirvana?

In the latest version of OS X, you can send your directions or Map locations right to your iPhone or iPad, so why not make things even easier and more streamlined? Just launch Contacts and you’ll see.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include an app for quick notes, food television, and an app to help you visually keep track of your life.

Here you go:

Writedown — Productivity — Free (Pro version: $2.99)

Sometimes, you have to write something really quickly on the go. Like, say, if you were supposed to find an app to write up for your daily post on a tech blog.

Actually, never mind that example. It’s crazy and would never happen. But if it did, Writedown might be a good fit. It’s a quick and easy document creation tool that cuts out all the distractions (other than ads, in this Lite version). You just type your thing in a clean interface, and then you can export it to a text, e-mail, social media, or share it with AirDrop.

It’s bare bones, quick, and easy to use. Not that I’m using it right now.

Crazy.

Writedown

EndlessTV – Seasons — Lifestyle — Free

Now that we’ve gotten that pesky Halloween thing out of the way with all its gross movies and candy and fun, we can get down to the serious business of planning “The Holidays.” And if you’re need appropriate programming on your phone or iPad right now, EndlessTV’s “Seasons” app might be what you need. It features quick-loading, topical shows (mostly about food) that you can swipe through at your leisure.

I learned how to make a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin and I don’t even know what I’m going to do with that knowledge.

EndlessTV – Seasons

Time Planner — Productivity — Free

When you need to track stuff you need to do, it’s essential to have an app that can handle tasks and to-do items as well as a robust calendaring system. Time Planner does just that, and does it very well. It also adds a colorful palette, a nicely organized way of creating tasks and reminders, and a list of categories that really helps you focus in on what each task is about.

Choose to add a task to Home, Work, Rest, Lifestyle, and other categories to color the tasks with a visual cue. When you start looking at your schedule for the day, you’ll have a colorful reminder of the things you’ll need to focus on, perhaps noticing that you spend too much time at work, and not enough on restful activities.

You can have Time Planner remind you of stuff you need to do by day, time, or location, which is pretty much what all to-do apps should have these days.

Time Planner

Songkick Concerts — Music — Free

Like live music? Got an iOS device full of music? Songkick Concerts looks like the app for you, then, as it trawls your music library to find concerts in your area. Be the first one to grab tickets to hot events, all based on your own music preferences. Sounds good, right?

If you’re traveling to a new city, never fear, as you can use Songkick Concerts to search your destination for upcoming concerts from those very same artists. Want to see Kanye West in Madison Square Garden? I mean, who wouldn’t? Use this app to find out when and where he’s playing, and tap through to buy tickets right within the app itself.

Of course, you’ll want to use Songkick Concerts to bargain shop as well, since it lets you compare venues and prices for all the artists you must obviously want to go see, since they’re in your music library.

Songkick Concerts

Songkick Concerts — Music — Free

Like live music? Got an iOS device full of music? Songkick Concerts looks like the app for you, then, as it trawls your music library to find concerts in your area. Be the first one to grab tickets to hot events, all based on your own music preferences. Sounds good, right?

If you’re traveling to a new city, never fear, as you can use Songkick Concerts to search your destination for upcoming concerts from those very same artists. Want to see Kanye West in Madison Square Garden? I mean, who wouldn’t? Use this app to find out when and where he’s playing, and tap through to buy tickets right within the app itself.

Of course, you’ll want to use Songkick Concerts to bargain shop as well, since it lets you compare venues and prices for all the artists you must obviously want to go see, since they’re in your music library.

Songkick Concerts

The holy grail of mobile devices like the iPad mini, in my opinion, is a bulk-free, cable-less charging system that can position Apple’s diminutive tablet in various ways.

The iPort Charge Case tries to make this dream come true, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. While the iPort stand can indeed hold my iPad mini in both portrait and landscape orientation at a wide range of viewing angles, the need to place my gorgeously designed device into a bulky plastic case sort of kills the whole idea of “mini.”

The iPort Charge Case and Stand does indeed have some very valid uses in and around the home, but ultimately, due to the way it changes the use experience of the iPad mini, it isn’t quite the world-changer it hopes to be.

It’s a day for giving thanks, here in the US, and a ton of iOS developers have decided to thank us all by putting their fantastic games on sale for the iOS platform. We’ve slogged through the sales out there for this weekend and put together a list of the best deals and sales on games we could find.

We’ll keep updating this post as we get more great gaming deals to send your way.

The external monitor support in Mavericks is much improved, as we noted in yesterday’s tip on getting the Dock to show up on your second monitor.

The menu bar itself will dim when you’re not actively on a specific monitor, as well. In other words, if you’re using monitor A, the menu bar will look opaque, as per usual, while it will dim and go see-through on monitor B. When you switch your active focus by using the cursor on monitor B, though, the menu bar will brighten and not let you see through it, while the menubar on monitor A will go semi-transparent and dim.

There is a way, however, to just hide the menu bar altogether on your secondary monitor, if that’s how you want things to work. The preference is in an unintuitive place, though.

Time Planner — Productivity — Free

When you need to track stuff you need to do, it’s essential to have an app that can handle tasks and to-do items as well as a robust calendaring system. Time Planner does just that, and does it very well. It also adds a colorful palette, a nicely organized way of creating tasks and reminders, and a list of categories that really helps you focus in on what each task is about.

Choose to add a task to Home, Work, Rest, Lifestyle, and other categories to color the tasks with a visual cue. When you start looking at your schedule for the day, you’ll have a colorful reminder of the things you’ll need to focus on, perhaps noticing that you spend too much time at work, and not enough on restful activities.

You can have Time Planner remind you of stuff you need to do by day, time, or location, which is pretty much what all to-do apps should have these days.

Time Planner

With the new iOS 7, you’re able to search your iPhone from any icon-bearing home screen. Simply drag downward on the iPhone screen on any page, and you’ll see the Search field. Type in whatever you’re searching for–Contacts, Apps, Music, Messages–and your iPhone will display all of those things in a nice list for you. All you need to do from there is tap the result you want to check out, and iOS 7 will take you to that specific bit of data.

However, maybe you don’t want to search everything on your iOS device. Maybe you don’t keep Music on there, or you don’t want to see a list of Podcasts or Mail when you search your iPad for a specific app.

Lucky you; it’s pretty easy to customize. It might even help you save a bit of battery, too.

Activision announced its new app, released Tuesday to the App Store: Skylanders Collection Vault. With it, collectors of the video game/collectible toy game series can track and manage their collection on the go, or at least on the couch with their iPad in hand.

If you download the app, you’ll be able to share and compare your collection with family and friends for free, and even sign up for a holiday wish list sweepstakes. Even more essentially, you’ll be able to read up on each of the Skylander characters, along with their powers and backstory, browsing your own wish list, images, videos, and unlocking special content.