Rob LeFebvre - page 90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWyZUszyJHg

Apple just posted its new iPad mini ad, “I’ll Be Home,” in which an adorable young girl, shown on an iPad, plays “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” on the ukulele via FaceTime to her Grandfather, who is shown on an iPad mini.

It’s thirty seconds of holiday cheer, presented without comment or text, with only an Apple logo and some suggestion of snow at the very end. It’s a sweet little video, and honestly, Apple, you had me at ukulele music.

Source: YouTube

Life is Magic is a location-based free-to-play game that uses your actual location to populate its fantasy/steampunk-themed role playing game (RPG). We reported on it back in September after a meetup with the game developers at PAX, but the game is live on the App Store now.

It’s like an online multiplayer game that turns the real world around you into a gorgeously illustrated land of magic, complete with dungeons, monsters, and treasure. The combat will feel familiar to anyone who’s played a turn-based JRPG game like the Final Fantasy series.

Ever wanted to view your videos, pictures, or documents from your Mac without having to put them on Dropbox or Google Drive? If you know you need specific files from your Mac desktop at home, you’d probably just use one of those cloud services. But what happens when you get to work and need a file you forgot about, or a family member’s house and want to show off some photos or video from home?

That’s where QuikIO comes in.

iTunes 11 came with several changes, many of which we detailed in our iTunes 11 Tips feature a couple of weeks ago.

One of the changes made was the loss of a “find all duplicates” feature that was really handy for finding and deleting duplicate files in our rather voluminous iTunes libraries. Luckily, Apple re-included the feature in the latest version of iTunes 11, version 11.0.1

Ever wish you could just write on your iPad or iPhone and have it type up your notes for you? Long for the days of the Newton, or just wish you had Android-style handwriting recognition on your iPhone? Well, wait no longer, as MyScript Notes is here, powered by the same tech as what powers the Samsung Note, so you know it’s gonna be good.

OS X’s Help menu is fantastic, if underrated. It even lets you find menu commands by highlighting them when you search within the Help search field. If you hit enter after typing in a search term, however, you’ll get the Help Viewer, a useful little hyperlinked app windwo that just, well, hovers over all your other app windows. This is good to start, but when you want to hope back into the app you’re trying to learn more about, the Help Viewer stays on top, even when it’s not the mouse focus.

Want to fix that? Here’s how.

Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers vs. Evil is a deck-building card game published by Cryptozoic Entertainment. Today, the company announced that a stand alone iOS game app based on the deck-building game becomes available tomorrow, December 19. It features characters from the Penny Arcade comic, including Gabe and Tycho, and will launch at a $4.99 price point. The iOS game was developed by PlayDek Games.

Apps are a great gift to that person on your holiday shopping list that already has an iOS device. You used to be able to do this from in the App Store, but that was taken away as of iOS 6. iTunes gift cards were the only way to go.

Now, however, the option to send apps as gifts is back, along with a way to schedule the gifting email so you can better target a birthday or, say, winter holiday that might be coming up. Hint, hint.

Here’s how.

Like many modern human beings, I keep electronic calendars. I use Google calendar for many of them, but I also have a couple on my Mac, a couple on my iPhone, and the like. I have a calendar for each of my three jobs, for family events, I have shared calendars for groups I belong to, and, of course, Birthday calendars. My Calendar app is a many-colored thing.

But what happens when you just want to see one of these calendars at any given moment? Just birthdays, for example, without cluttering it up with a bunch of job-related stuff? If you use the built-in Mac OS X Calendar app, this is pretty simple. Here’s how to do it.

It’s possible that you’ve been unable to save Facebook photos to your camera roll since upgrading to iOS 6. Maybe you’ve just given up on saving photos from the iOS Facebook app, even. Several users reported this issue when iOS 6 first came out, but maybe you missed out on any solutions.

Well, there’s a potential simple fix that might make it possible for you to start saving Facebook photos to your Camera Roll again.

There are bound to be times when you would like your OS X Mountain Lion Mac to not go to sleep. You can set you Mac to Never sleep in the System Preferences, Energy Saver preferences pane, but that’s not always going to work. Even when it’s set to Never, your Mac may still, in fact, go to sleep. The other problem with the Energy Saver preference is that you only have the ability to set the sleep action to hold of foor three hours, or never. What if you wanted to keep it from sleeping for four hours? Or four and a half hours? Or eight hours?

With a neat little Mountain Lion-only Terminal command, you can set it to whatever you like. Here’s the scoop.

One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

So what’s behind the door on Saturday the 15th? Arcane Legends for iOS, a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online game (MMO) that’s bound to please.

One of the best cloud-based services out there, Dropbox, has gotten its iOS app updated with a shiny new design and photo gallery, which adds its own tab and a scrollable timeline of the automatically uploaded photos from your iOS device of choice.

Ever since iOS 4 (I think – thanks, Shane!) came out, you’ve been able to send more than one photo attachment per email message, up to a maximum of five. What happens when you need to send more than five photos in one email, though?

That’s where Instamail Photos comes in. It’s on sale right now for $0.99 in the App Store and works pretty darn well.

Those photo screen saver modules that Apple includes with Mac OS X are gorgeous, right? With Aerial, Cosmos, National Geographic, and Nature Patterns on offer, the basic photo Screen Saver is just right to keep things pretty when you step away from your Mac for a moment or two. I’ve gotten tons of complements on the photos, and they’re just the default ones.

But sometimes I want to see the previous photo in a screensaver slide show. How do I do that without waiting for the whole rotation of photos to move through, just to see that one photo again?

Back in the 90s, I was in a modern rock band. Yeah, I know, who wasn’t? Anyway, one of the thing we did, as most rock bands do, was to create our own demo tapes and recorded music. We used a variety of hardware to get our music onto tape, and then when I got my first Mac, I started using it to record multitrack demos right in my living room.

The thing about home recordings is that they sound like they’ve been recorded in your home. We wanted a more highly polished, stuiod sound. That’s when we found out about T-rackS, a Mac application that worked like a mini mastering studio, letting us apply various audio processing sets to our mixed down songs, without having to pay someone a lot of money to do the same thing. It made our music sound a LOT more professional.

I lost track of T-rackS software, and I assumed that it had gone the way of System 8, honestly. Then IK Multimedia came up with a revamped T-RackS, ready to purchase and use right now, and I knew I had to try it out.

The critically acclaimed RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is now available on the Mac App Store. The development team promises that your choices really do matter, and will determine the fate of the people and kingdoms in the game. You’ll fight blood-thirsty monsters as protagonist Geralt of Rivia, as well as navigate politics, lies, and gorgeous environments.

I’m sure you’re like me and get tons of email from people you don’t necessarily want email from. While OS X Mail has the new VIP feature to group important contacts into one mailbox, what about all those emails from contacts you feel are less than important, but might want to keep around, just in case.

There is a way to sort all those emails from non-important contacts, using Smart Groups in the Contacts App as well as a Smart Mailbox in Mail app. Here’s how.

Scheduled as a December 13th launch, 1Password, version 4.0.2, is available now on the iTunes App Store.

The updated app brings a host of new features, and is available for $7.99, which is 50 percent off the typical price of the security app from atebits software.

A new report from Reuters takes to the streets (or, malls, rather) of the globe to find out what folks are actually purchasing from retail shops around the world, including Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung retail spaces in cities like Sydney, Seattle, Palo Alto, Shanghai, Bangalore, Singaporte, Paris, London, Mexico City, and Boston. They spoke to store employees and retail shoppers to find out, really, what’s selling and what’s not.

Guess what they found out? While Apple may be the darling of naysayers who like to crow about the stock slippage or the competition from Android and (sometimes) Windows Phones, Reuters found that the people they talked to and the stores they visited were far from anti-Apple, and, in fact, positively glowing about the Cupertino-based tech company’s products.

I keep my iPhone in silent mode most of the time; custom ringtones mean relatively little to me. However, as anyone who keeps their iPhone on silent at work knows, text messages and other notifications that come in can still cause the iPhone to vibrate. This can be a little embarrassing, especially if you have set your iPhone on a particularly resonant surface, like a meeting table or a classroom desk, say.

Remember iDisk? It was a great feature of the otherwise forgettable MobileMe service, and it let you access your free Apple-provided internet disk space just like Dropbox or Google Drive do now.

Interestingly, you can make iCloud work the same way, with a little app called iClouDrive, from Zibity Software. Here’s how.

SantaKid, a children’s picture book by an author more known for his prolific career as a thriller writer, James Patterson, is now coming to the iPad.

It’s been released by the Hachette Book Group for Little, Brown publishers, the iPad-only app is available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store, just in time for…well, you know.

Calling GODUS “a delightful reinvention of the god game from 22cans and Peter Molyneux,” the game’s Kickstarter page has some new details on the project, the second from Curiosity’s 22cans games studio. With nine days left to go and about half of its funding goal met, Project GODUS just may be worth a look. Originally set to release on iOS, Android, and PC, the game will also be available on the Mac platform: welcome news indeed for those of us firmly in the Mac camp of gaming.

Are you constantly sending your buddies in the office links to funny Imgur pictures or hilarious YouTube videos? Is that why your office IT department shut down any non-corporate instant messaging services on the office network? Do you still want to send your co-workers funny links to lighten the monotony of the cubicle farm you all work in?

Whatever the reason, if you want to be able to send and receive links quickly and easily without having to copy and paste them into an IM client or email, The Great Link may be the app for you. It’s easy to set up and simple to use. Here’s how.