Think you’ve seen the last of The Walking Dead on your Mac or iOS device? Think again.
Telltale Games, the award-winning developer of recent hit games The Walking Dead: Season One and Fables: The Wolf Among Us, announced Tuesday the coming premiere of the second season of The Walking Dead video game series for Mac, iOS, PC, and home game consoles later this year.
The Walking Dead: Season Two is available for pre-order right now from Steam and the Telltale Games Online store.
One of the much touted features of iOS 7 is the new organization feature of the Photos app. When I opened it for the first time, back in the beta, I was dismayed to see the Year view.
The photos? They’re tiny! How the heck am I supposed to find the photo I want? I’m old and need glasses. Sheesh.
Ahem.
It turns out to be much simpler than you’d think to scan through the photos in this view.
There you are, sitting in front of your Mac, important work on the screen, when an Update notification shows up. Oh no! Your Mac wants you to update some software, but you really do not have the time.
What’s a busy professional to do? Before Mavericks, you could dismiss the notification, and wait for it to pop up again. In Mavericks, however, you have a bit more control over your Mac than that.
As you may have seen in our previous post on Apple’s fourth quarter (Q4) financial report, the Cupertino company has beat out Wall Street expectations this quarter, showing off a revenue of $37.5 billion with a hefty 7.5 billion profit to go along with it.
To help you make sense of Apple’s business this quarter, as well as some general trends of the last five years, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to put together some charts in an easy-to-read format to show you how the numbers break down, from revenue and profit margins to how many devices Apple is selling, to how much money it’s making from those sales.
Let’s take a look at some of the numbers in visual form, and see what we can take from it.
One of the great things about Messages, for me, is the “read receipt.” I know if my child has seen my messages to them, of if they’ve just been “delivered” but not read. I like it.
Some folks, though, might want to turn off this feature so they don’t give off the signal that they’ve actually seen a message. it goes a long way towards plausible deniability when things go wrong.
If you’re one of those folks, though, you might have noticed that when you upgraded to iOS 7 that–even if you have the preference for receipts toggled to OFF, you might still be sending out read receipts.
Luckily, there’s an easy fix.
Back in OS X Lion and then again in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple hid access to the user Library folder to prevent neophyte OS X users from messing around in the areas of the file system that could cause some damage to their Macs.
That’s fine, of course, but it took a lot of messing around in the Terminal to get that access back, and who remembers Terminal commands from last year? Not us, that’s for sure.
Luckily, Mavericks has a much easier way to turn Library access on.
Seriously, you guys, you have got to try out Device 6, from developer Simogo Games
Yeah, I know it’s $3.99, but dammit, skip the latte this morning and just buy this game. Oh, and watch the video below.
Yes, Kickstarter projects are still a dime a dozen, but this game is worth your attention.
It’s Sentris, a music-creation tool that masquerades as a puzzle game. Want to play a music or rhythm game without having to figure out how to hold a plastic guitar? Sentris is the game for you.
We saw Sentris last month at the 2013 Seattle Indies eXpo (SIX3), which was co-located with the Penny Arcade Expo in downtown Seattle.
Developer Samantha Kalman hopes to release a full game–she’s only put together a stunning prototype at this point–and she’s taken time to explain why in the video below.
There’s nothing I like better than a game that charms from the get-go, and delightfully indie Towncraft is one of those games.
Developer Flat Earth Games has created a gentle yet deep crafting game that plays as equal parts Sim City and Minecraft, with hundreds of crafting recipes, super cute music, and adorable artwork.
What’s not to like?
I rely on the iPhone to get me around most places, even in my current hometown. I just really have a bad sense of direction. But ever since the advent of online maps and the GPS function of my iPhone, I’ve longed for the ability to quickly look up an address on my Mac, hit a button, and have the directions go to my iPhone.
That’s never been possible until now, with the advent of OS X Mavericks and the addition of the new Maps app to the Mac. Ideally, you’re supposed to be able to just launch Maps, get a set of directions, and then hit the little Share button to send those directions to your portable device.
I was super disappointed, then, when I went to send some directions to my iPhone from my Mac today and didn’t see my iPhone or iPad listed in the Share list.
Innovative iOS game, Badland, just updated with a new Halloween theme, four new multiplayer characters, and a new level. In addition, the update drops the price to $0.99, giving us all a chance to discover the scary action for 75 percent off the regular price.
This is the first time the developer has dropped the price so far, so be sure to check it out if you have a buck to spare; it’s worth it.
There you are, listening to your favorite song, when you just want to get to the good part. So you look at the Music app that’s playing that favorite song, and you wonder, “How on earth am I going to scrub through the song to move to where I want to?”
In iOS 7, the visual upgrade gives us a red line in the track being played. You can definitely tap, hold and drag that red line along the track for some high-speed scrubbing, but what if you want to move along the track more slowly, or have a more fine-grained approach?
Here’s how to do just that.
In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.
We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.
Mac gamers rejoice, as Mac game port superstar Aspyr just announced the fantastic news that the latest hilariously bloody Borderlands 2 downloadable content (DLC), “TK Baha’s Bloody Harvest,” is available for Mac on the very same day it is available for PC gamers, bringing us all closer together in our need to blast each other away in 2K Games’ brilliant first person shooter game.
Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.
Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.
Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.
We’ve been trumpeting the tale of a fantastic game in development from the all-star team at Industrial Toys for a while now. Titled Morning Star, it had some serious pedigree and promise.
A sci-fi themed first-person shooter from Alex Seropian, the dude that co-created Bungie (Marathon, Halo) is huge news in the first place. A game that includes author John Scalzi and artist Mike Choi among many other hugely talented folks that will launch exclusively on mobile? That’s ginormous news.
Color us fascinated when President Tim Harris penned a blog post on gaming site Gamasutra about why the team had to rename the game, and how they went about it. It’s a super interesting behind-the-scenes look at the very real business side of game development, and it’s worth a look.
Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.
The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.
Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.
Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:
GarageBand is already the best prosumer music creation and recording app out there. Today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple showed off the newest feature for creating your own music: Drummer.
Holy crap, does this raise the bar for anyone using GarageBand out there.
Safari 6.1 has just been released to bring Apple’s web browsing app for Mountain Lion into line with the newly announced OS X Mavericks version of Safari, with features like Shared Links, the new Sidebar, and Power Saver.
This updated version of Safari is available now for all users of OS X Mountain Lion via the Software Update panel in the Mac App Store.
The iPad mini, announced today, is suddenly a fantastic gaming device. While the original iPad mini introduced a fantastic iPad form factor at 7.9 inches, the iPad 2-equivalent display and CPU just doesn’t quite cut it for higher-end gaming apps.
Of course, all of Apple’s iOS devices have been great for gaming ever since the App Store launched back in 2008. Games make up a huge portion of the 1,000,000 apps out there to date, and it’s not surprising anymore to see console-level gaming experiences show up on both iPad and iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage today at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to kick off the special keynote event that we’ve dubbed here as the iPad Event.
Cook began his presentation with some numbers, including the nine million new iPhone 5s and 5c models that were sold over the first weekend of availability. Cook called it the biggest iPhone launch, ever, and showed a video to underline his point.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.
It still surprises me when someone says, “I don’t play video games.”
Games are a touchstone of cultural relevance these days. With the advent of the iOS platform, with its ready availability of a wide variety of video games for all types of players, it’s hard to not see their influence. Not playing video games is like not reading novels or not watching television: sure, some folks choose that, but they’re missing out on a common cultural heritage and discussion.
That said, video games can seem intimidating. Or feel like a waste of valuable productivity time. I won’t bore you with statistics and studies that say otherwise, but trust me on this: video games can be a viable leisure time activity for all of us.
So how do we get you playing games? In the case of my girlfriend, it was finding the games that made sense to her. For my dad? He still won’t play them. So this list is as much for him as it is for you. You’re welcome.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.
Most video games transform you into a warrior, a thief, a space alien or race car driver. A new breed of games aims to make you a better person by putting you in the shoes of a young father with a son dying of cancer or playing the part of someone grappling with depression, immigration or sexual identity issues.
Called “empathy games,” they hope to change one of the most often criticized aspects of these beloved pastimes: that they foster violence and isolation. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s widely read 2011 book “Reality is Broken” set the playing field for a world where games reward good behavior and nice guys finish first.
Whether this feature has been in iOS since the beginning or not, this is the first I’ve heard of it, so I’m guessing there are a few of you out there that haven’t found the sleep timer in iOS, either.
If you want to listen to music or audiobooks before you go to sleep, it’s generally a good idea to have a way to turn the music off after you’ve fallen asleep, right?
Well, it turns out that there’s a sleep timer right in iOS itself, but it might not be where you’d expect it to be.