Rob LeFebvre - page 75

iBooks is not only a fantastic e-reading app on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s also a fantastic study tool. If you need to read books for class or your own learning objectives, you can use iBooks to highlight words or passages, search the text for specific words or phrases, and make notes that appear in the margins as little colored sticky notes.

Using these tools could help you become a much more organized studier, letting you go back to a passage in a book to remember the important things with a couple of taps. Here’s how, using iBooks 3.1, the latest version of iBooks.

What’s more satisfying than screaming through the air, blasting enemies coming around you in a full 360 degree radius, firing all your weapons and avoiding enemy flack and planes?

Doing that with your buddies, of course! Namco’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy is a gorgeous, fast-paced dogfighting air combat game for your Mac at an inexpensive five bucks. Using Apple’s Game Center system, you can join up to three other buddies to play in cooperative and competitive modes, like Survival, Free For All, Capture The Flag, and more. Even better? You can invite your buddies who may not have a Mac but who do have an iPhone or iPad for some real-time multiplayer dogfighting action. Here’s how.

Known for its collectible card and board game business, Cryptozoic Entertainment put its latest creation, a free-to-play digital collectible card game named HEX, up on Kickstarter with an initial goal of $300,000.

As of today, with 17 days left to go in the full fund raising time period, the project has garnered over $970,000. That’s a pretty good pledge amount right there.

HEX is being billed as an massively multiplayer online (MMO) trading card game for Mac and PC, with the deep strategic game play of a collectible card game mashed up with the social and roleplaying aspects of an MMO, all on your Mac, with dungeons, quests, story lines, advanced AI, and–of course–beautifully illustrated card decks to collect, purchase, and use to claim dominion over your opponents.

When I opened iBooks on my iPad mini the other day, I tapped the Collections button, and selected “Purchased Books” as my filter option, to see what I had in my account that I wanted to read. Oddly, I saw a ton of the same book, over and over, sitting on the shelves.

For some reason, this only happens on my iPad mini. My iPhone only shows one copy of each book, even when I select the same Purchased Books option. Same with my iPad 3. But, it’s still annoying on the mini, so I went online to try and figure out what was going on.

There is a bug here that other users are seeing, as well, and there’s really only one way to “fix it.”

Game Center, now on OS X as well as iOS, is Apple’s online leader board and game matching system. It lets you challenge your friends for both real-time as well as asynchronous multiplayer gaming, as well as give you bragging rights each time you beat out your frenemy’s high score on a Mac game you both play.

Did you know, however, that Game Center also lets you challenge your buddies on iOS, as well? With Two Towers, you can issue your challenge from your Mac, and your friend will be able to accept that challenge on their iPhone or iPad. You can then both play together, cross-platform. Cool, right? Here’s how to make it work.

 Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid-state drive in it, like my MacBook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get tricky and a bit advanced. If you’re using a MacBook Pro M1, optimizing storage is even more crucial to ensure you get the best performance from your device.

Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.

When Siri was updated along with iOS 6, we showed you a bunch of ways to use Apple’s personal digital assistant the right way, like using punctuation and finding out the weather.

Yet time marches ever onward, and we’ve compiled yet another five tips and tricks to help you master Siri, whether you’re looking to create a secure password or just pass the time with a few laughs. Enjoy! Discover even more secret siri commands to improve your Siri experience here.

Crescent Moon Games, known for its quality iOS gaming work (Aralon: Sword and Shadow, Dig!), has just released it’s well-regarded iOS game, Ravensword: Shadowlands, for Mac OS X.

Apple gave Ravensword: Shadowlands the Editor’s Choice designation for the iPad version, which can still be purchased for $7 on the iTunes App Store. The Mac OS X Version, enhanced with graphical upgrades like realtime shadows, bloom effects, and high resolution textures and environment models, is in the Mac App Store right now for $13, which seems like a pretty decent deal.

Like an odd cross between Sudoku and a collectible card game, Star Trek Rivals, from Elephant Mouse Games, is out for iOS on the App Store to capture your attention today, on the release date of Star Trek: Into Darkness (have you gotten your tickets, yet?).

The game is free, has all your Star Trek reboot characters in it, and is pretty simple to learn, but hard to master. It plays asynchronously, and you can play a bunch of games at once. Did I mention it’s made out of Star Trek? What’s not to like?

If you’ve tried to use Siri to call or text someone, you know it’s pretty simple. Just say, for example, “Call Joe Smith,” and Siri will call the person named Joe Smith in your Contacts App.

But did you know that Siri can also identify people via their relationship to you? You can say, “Call my brother,” or “Text my daughter,” and Siri will call or text that person, provided you’ve done a little set-up in the Contacts app.

You can also use Siri to define these relationships, so you don’t even have to open Contacts. Here’s how.

Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.

There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.

In OS Lion, Apple introduced two new features, called Autosave and Resume which mirrors this functionality. Turning off SafeSleep, then, is really just disabling a duplicate feature. It shouldn’t affect Autosave or Resume if you’re running OS Lion or later, and it could potentially save you gigabytes of hard drive space.

Here’s how to do it, though we caution you not to do this if you’re even slightly uncomfortable with the idea.

Well, that’s some positive news. The CW television network is bringing its television content to the Apple TV, the first network to do so directly, instead of via Netflix or Hulu. Even better, you won’t have to have a cable subscription to access the CW programming on Apple’s set top box, like many other content providers require.

The CW plans on launching an app to bring shows like Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and 90210 sometime in the next few weeks, according to a report at Deadline, though no release date has been reported.

There are plenty of funny things to ask Siri. One of my daughter’s favorite things to do with Siri on my iPhone, besides rename me all sorts of ridiculous names, is to ask it questions.

“Siri,” she’ll say, “what is your real name?” Siri will reply with how she really doesn’t like talking about herself. Hilarious, right?

I’m almost afraid to show my daughter this tip, because she’ll now have a ton of funny questions to ask Siri, getting truly cute and laughable responses along the way. I may never get my iPhone back.

Here is a list of some of the best funny things to ask Siri. We’ll leave finding out the answers to you.

There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.

QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.

Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.

The band, OK Go, known as much for its fabulously nerdy and complex videos as for its quirky and upbeat pop music, have made an app. Before you go, “meh,” and move on, thinking that this is another one of those record publishing tie-in apps that, really, no one loves but the publicist trying to push it, take a look at the video here.

Get it? These guys made the app. Ok, mostly guitarist Andy Ross, but the other guys certainly had a hand in the app. They definitely appear in the video above. Singer and bassist, Tim Nordwind, had this to say when we asked about the app.

So, the game we’ve been telling you about since before it even had a name is out now for Mac, PC, and Linux, and it looks as good as the developers promised. It’s a sequel to Anomaly Warzone Earth, originally released on iOS, and it will only cost you $13.49 for the first week after launch. You can grab it on Steam, or Anomaly2Game should you so desire. And really, it’s a pretty desirable game.

Warsaw, Poland-based 11 bit studios kicked things off last February when they announced a mystery game that you could purchase before you even knew what it was, and then announced the name of the game not too long after.

Well, here we are, and there it is, ready for you to grab for less than a decently sized pizza at 10 percent off the eventual retail price of $15.

As you may know, Siri is backed by the seriously amazing knowledge web site, Wolfram Alpha, which makes dynamic computations about your search terms based on a its own collection of built-in data, special algorithms, and other secret fancy methods. Or, to put it another way: magic.

Anyway, Siri taps into Wolfram Alpha and can come up with some great stuff, like calculating tips for you, for example. Siri’s connection to Wolfram can do even more than that, like generating a secure password for you. Here’s how.

I suppose since I’m a gamer, I assume everyone else is. If you’re not, or you don’t use the fantastic cross-platform digital gaming portal, Steam, this tip won’t apply to you. Check out the last couple of tips for great space saving ideas, instead. Or, heck, read a review or two on Cult of Mac. I hear they’re pretty good.

For you Steam gamers looking to save some space on your hard drive, there’s one place you should really look.

According to Reuters, US authorities have called Apple out for collusion with electronic book publishers, saying that the Cupertino-based company conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices when negotiating iBooks by playing them all against each other and against rival eBook retailer, Amazon.

The US Justice Department accused Apple of price fixing in April 2012 in relation to Apple’s negotiations with five publishers when it was launching the iPad in early 2010. The Justice Department has settled out of court with each of the publishers, which included HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and Pearson’s Penguin Group.

Talking to Siri can be either an exercise in frustration, or a miracle of modern technology, depending on your mood and how successful the Apple digital assistant is at interpreting what it is you’re asking. Typically, when you activate Siri with a long press and hold on the Home button, the input is collected via the microphone built into your iPHone or iPad.

If you have a Bluetooth accessory, though, you might not know that Siri can listen through that device as well. Here’s how to get Siri to do just that.

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

Crowd-sourced funding is hot these days, with outfits like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allowing anyone with a hot business idea to pitch their service, product, or–in this case–app to those bleeding edge enough to want to support an idea before it’s even built.

MiWallet has that hot idea, and now they want you to help fund it. Think of the convenience of the Apple Store app checkout via iTunes connected with the security of Google Wallet, and you’ve got the general idea.

Heroes and Castles, Foursaken Media’s mix of a third-person shooter with the castle defense genre, is a heck of a lot of fun to play, and today the iOS game has gotten a big old update, with a ton of great stuff to extend the fun, possibly enticing new players to try it out as well.

There are three new characters to play and level up: a stealthy (and free) Assassin, a natural-magic Druid, and a brawny Barbarian character. You’ll be able to put each through their paces in a brand new single player campaign, available as an unlock upon completion of the original campaign, with an entirely new environment and a ton of new enemies to battle.

Have you ever had one of those Siri moments, where you ask her to search for something, and she interprets your speech incorrectly? I’m guessing all of us have, at one time or another.

One thing Siri doesn’t do very well is provide for “no I meant…” error correction, at least using speech. Next time you use Siri and the result is something you didn’t expect, don’t just press the home button in frustration, but correct Siri using your iPhone or iPad keyboard instead.

Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive?

When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how.