Rob LeFebvre - page 64

The Peablins are back.

The Peablins, for those not in the know, are the stars of 10tons’ hit iOS game, Joining Hands, a cute little puzzler that challenged players to connect a bunch of cute, gentle creatures across a variety of landscapes and levels.

The sequel takes the warmth and cute-factor of the first game and just knocks it out of the park. It helps that Joining Hands 2 is also a pretty fantastic little puzzle game, too.

As it turns out, I end up having to sign a lot of documents, such as contracts, IRS forms, and the like. Many of these are in PDF form (bravo), and some even let me fill them out via my keyboard (even better).

Unfortunately, they still expect us to print these babies out, sign them with a pen, and then get them back into some sort of digital format, via a scanner or picture with our iPhone or something.

Luckily, Apple’s own Preview makes all that superflous. It’s super easy to get your pen and paper signature onto a PDF. Here’s how.

If you’re an early iOS 7 beta adopter, you might want to restore iOS 6 for a number of reasons. Perhaps you just don’t like the beta experience, preferring a less changeable, buggy iPhone software. Maybe you just want to put the official iOS 7 software on your iPhone when it releases, possibly in early September. Maybe you just miss the iOS 6 version of Maps.

For whatever reason, though, it’s a fairly straightforward process; here’s how to do it.

Having finally fulfilled its Kickstarter premium rewards with backer MiDocks units, manufacturer Mi has begun selling black and a silver brushed aluminum MiDock on its own web store.

This unibody iPhone dock is lightweight, solid, and has a fairly impressive look about it, as if Apple or Twelve South could have designed it. It’s a wonderful first effort from the company, and backers and early adopters alike will find much to like about the MiDocks they bring into their homes.

I can remember saving up my allowance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, itching to get just one more Star Wars action figure from the local department store. When I’d get there, money clenched in my sweaty little hand, I would bliss out at the sheer variety and number of action figures on display.

Which to choose? That robot bounty hunter looked super cool, but it certainly wasn’t Boba Fett, who took my money that day. My younger brother opted for Bossk, because apparently we’re a family who loves bounty hunters.

Today, however, you won’t have to choose. There are nine new videos detailing nine characters from the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II game, set to release on iOS on September 19th.

Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.

Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.

The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.

Network locations are extremely useful if you use your Mac across a variety of networking environments, like a Proxy-laden school building, a super secured enterprise site, or a special set up at home. Each environment could take a ton of extra time setting up the details if you only had one networking setup system.

Luckily, Mac has always had this idea of Locations, a way of setting and saving all the little networking details for each location you use your Mac in. Did you know, however, that you can switch between network locations in the Apple menu? I didn’t, so I figured I’d share what I found out.

Oh, hey, look, it’s another game from Rovio, the 800-pound gorilla avian in the gaming world, with more money and sales than pretty much everyone else, based on one intellectual property.

When Rovio mentions a new game, especially one based on Angry Birds, we listen.

There are a host of accessibility options within iOS, and many of them can be the difference between someone being able to use a mobile device and not being able to use it. There are also a ton of reasons why those of us without a disability might want to check them out.

That said, it can be time consuming and even difficult to hop into the Accessibility section to activate specific features, especially if you are dealing with some sort of disability. That’s why Apple has set iOS up to make them easier to access right from the Home button. Here’s how to set it up and use it.

Most days, you won’t hear us talk too much about a gaming genre that’s been beaten to death with a large stick, but upcoming Puzzle Knights is an exception to that rule, what with it’s interesting blend of, yes, matching colors, but also tactical strategy, light RPG elements, and online arena battles.

The game is expected to release sometime in the first or second week of September, so keep your eyes on this one. It’s exclusive to iOS, but will let you connect via Facebook to battle your FB friends.

When you drag a bunch of items into a folder in the Finder on your Mac and some of the items in there have the same name, your Mac will ask you if you want to replace the items in the folder you’re dragging to. This is all well and good when you’re trying to do just that, but what about when you want to merge the files from the first folder to the second?

Well, it’s amazingly simple.

When the paid version of the very fine Feedly RSS aggregation service, Feedly Pro, was announced at the beginning of this month, the only option available was the Life Membership, at a fairly affordable $99.00.

Today, though, we just noticed that Feedly Pro’s monthly and annual subscriptions are available for purchase, at $5.00 and $45.00, respectively.

If you’re a fan of famous action director John Woo, you’ll be as excited as we were when we heard that he’s working on an iOS game, Bloodstroke, in development with Moonshark Games (Stan Lee’s Verticus, Neil Gaiman’s Wayward Manor) and to be published by Chillingo.

AppAdvice reports that the game will be an on-rails top-down action game that tasks players with protecting and escorting their in-game employer through hazardous level after level.

Every once in a while, I’m listening to a song via the Music app on my iPhone, or (lately) listening to iTunes Radio on my iPad through a bluetooth speaker in the house, when I want to quickly figure out what’s playing, or maybe mess with the controls, skip a song, or something like that.

Typically, I’d double click the Home button to get a basic controller to pause or skip a song, or click into the home screen, find the Music app, launch it, then tap the Now Playing button, and then make any adjustments.

Now, however, with iOS 7 beta’s new Control Center, you can tap right through to the Now Playing song with a swipe and a tap. Here’s how.

Glu Games (Gun Bros, Contract Killer, Death Dome) has a certain reputation for violent free to play games, but the San Francisco-based developer has quite a variety of game genres to its credit, including fantasy and city-building games.

Zombies Ate My Friends is another free to play game, sure, but it has a charm about it that helps cynics like me look the other way when it comes to the typical mechanics associated with the business model. The artwork is pleasing to the eye and there is a sense of whimsy to every aspect of the game, from dialog to undead-smashing weaponry (there’s a ukulele!), that elevates Zombies Ate My Friends from “yet another cash grab” to “worth a download and your valuable time.”

It used to be a no-brainer to enable the Apache web server included with Mac OS X. You’d hop into the System Preferences, fire up the Sharing preference pane, and then you’d be good to go.

Starting in Mountain Lion, however, Apple hasn’t given a user-friendly checkbox as in previous OS X releases. Instead you need a little bit of Terminal magic.

Here’s how to enable and start the Web Service in OS X Mountain Lion.

This one caught me off guard this week as I played through the new offerings on the iOS app store, looking for choice games to show off to you.

Little Galaxy is surprisingly captivating, encouraging yet another try to beat my previous high scores, or–in a recent round of the game on the couch with my daughter–trying to beat each other’s score.

Needless to say, she won.

Rovio just released two new videos on YouTube. Above is the actual teaser trailer for the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II, itself revealed last month.

In the trailer, the dark side Emperor pig is seen making a recruiting video of sorts for all the young piggies who need new weaponry to fight those upstart Jedi birds. It doesn’t go as well as planned, of course; this is Rovio in the director’s chair, not George Lucas.

The cool thing here is that the Emperor is voiced by none other than Ian McDiarmid himself, the actor who plays the Emperor in the real Star Wars films.

Sure, there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts to navigate Spotlight, making it more of a power user tool than you’d think.

Did you know, however, that you can reveal found items in the Finder using Spotlight? Me neither. So here’s how.

Apple highlights a new iOS app each week: the iTunes App Store App of the Week. Last week, it was a frustratingly compelling puzzle game, Doodle Fit 2, that Apple chose to spotlight.

This week, it’s another game, this time a beautiful dogfighting flight sim called Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders from Atypical Games. It’s the first of the two games Atypical has developed for the Sky Gamblers series, with the follow up, Cold War, recently released on the App Store as well.

Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders is free for a limited time to celebrate the honor.

Over at iPad Insight, Patrick Jordan found this unique feature in YouTube’s new version of its iOS app, and I though it was too cool not to share.

If you’ve used the iOS YouTube app in the past, you know that in order to find a new video, either browsing or searching for it, you had to stop the video you were watching and then perform your search, or scroll through videos on offer.

No longer is that the case – check it out.

It seems like every time you turn around lately, there’s some new photo leak of what sources promise to be a true look at Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5S or 5C casing, LED flash, or colors.

It’s with that caveat that we cast a skeptical eye, then, on this latest reveal, sent to us by Twitter user @leakschina, of what a Chinese language website claims to be a photo of the back of the box of the new iPhone 5S, showing a capacity of 128GB.

In a new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Reuters spends time painting the two-year veteran of Cupertino’s top spot as deft, methodical, and tough. While he has earned a reputation as more of a delegator and less of a diva than Jobs was, the sources in the article say that he is still a focused CEO who expects results.

A person familiar with Tim Cook’s meeting style said “He could skewer you with a sentence. He would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t think that’s good enough’ and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.”

Not bad for a CEO whose own board is deeply concerned.

Lucky Frame’s fantastic iPad and Android game, Gentlemen!, is now available on the Mac App Store, bringing the delightful Victorian-themed dueling game to the big screen for the first time.

We reviewed the game favorably when it released on iPad, enjoying the frenetic gameplay and the whimsical art style. It’s still a go-to app when we’re looking for something to play with a friend on the same iPad.

Now that it’s on Mac, though, we can now go head to head with up to four friends via local multiplayer, flipping and leaping and, well, stabbing our buddies with glee.

Let’s be clear: I love tower defense games. I’ve been a fan since the first time I played Desktop Tower Defense on Kongregate, I fell hard for Gem Keeper and Fieldrunners, and I carry a torch for Kingdom Rush.

These are tough waters to compete in, especially with a free-to-play business model that needs to encourage players to spend real money to help fund the game itself. There’s a delicate balance in tower defense games, between too easy and too difficult.

Does Super Hippo Studios Limited’s Pirate Legends TD bring enough to the table, then, to stand next to these others?