Let’s get this out of the way right up front, ok? Scattered Entertainment’s The Drowning is a drop-dead gorgeous free-to-play game with a well-designed control scheme that (almost) makes playing a first-person shooter (FPS) worthwhile on a touchscreen. This is, in fact, an important release for those three facts alone.

Ultimately, though, the game suffers as a direct result, I think, of these very same features. I went into the game expecting to find at least some console-level depth in storyline, level design, and the like. What I found, however, was much less interesting.

We’ve seen our fair share of cool MacBook decals and engravings over the years, but holy crap this one might take the cake. as the most trippy MacBook engraving ever.

Your retinas can get lost for days swimming through this weird Illuminati vortex. The redditor who created it said he designed it using Illustrator and then used a laser at his school. It’s a lot more permanent than a decal, but at least the warranty is still intact.

Source: Reddit

Motorola has finally revealed all most of the details of the Moto X after months of leaks, and while the handset looks great and is customizable to a fault, what we really want to know is how its specs stack up against the best smartphones out there.

Specs aren’t everything, but it is important to keep in mind whether the Moto X will still be able to run the best apps after 12-24 months. Here’s a chart that GigaOm cooked up that compares the Moto X’s specs to the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S 4.

Minigore 2: Zombies, the wonderful dual-stick shooter from Mountain Sheep, is now free for a limited time to celebrate Minigore’s fourth anniversary. It’s arguably one of Mountain Sheep’s most enjoyable titles on iOS, and that’s saying a lot when you consider the same studio is also responsible for Bike Baron and Ice Rage.

The big upgrades you can add to your devices aren’t always going to be the ones that can make the biggest difference in how much you get out of them. It’s often the little innovations that can really change the way you use them. One example would be the much-talked about Tile, which goes beyond the iDevices we have and will serve to help us keep tabs on a slew of our personal belongings.

When focusing on little innovations for iDevices, Cablekeeps are a great example of an add-on you can use with your iPhone iPod, or iPad that does something small that can mean a lot more – like getting cable clutter out of your way. Cablekeeps allow you to wrap up the excess cord onto your Apple power adapter so that the unsightly extra length of cord gets wrapped up quickly and neatly for those moments when you want to grab and go everything you’ll need to charge those iDevices of yours. As a frequent traveler, this little innovation can be a big help in keeping the cable clutter down and ensuring you’ve got everything you need to keep powered when you take your iPhone on the road. If you want to get one of these – available in orange, light blue, or green – Cult of Mac Deals has them going for only $12.99 right now.

One of the finer console ports to date, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been raising expectations of mobile gamers since its release last month. It’s almost the exact same game as its Mac, PC, and console versions, bringing deep strategic gameplay and a brilliantly conceived science fictional world to the iOS platform.

Today, though, XCOM: Enemy Unknown got an update, and a bit of a price drop. It’s now $14.99, down from $19.99, and has a whole new way to play: Second Wave.

The ongoing iBooks antitrust case between Apple and the United States Department of Justice took a very interesting twist this morning when the DoJ and 33 state Attorneys General laid out plans to remedy Apple’s wrongdoings and restore competition to the market.

The DoJ wants Apple to terminate all of its deals with book publishers, and refrain from entering into any new ones for at least five years. It also wants the company to start selling e-books from rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Apple has begun giving away free content today via the App Store app for iPhone. Its first giveaway is for Color Zen, “a new and addictive kind of puzzle game” for iOS which is available free for a limited time “exclusively for Apple Store app users.”

On my Macbook Air running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, when I click on the Time Machine backup menubar item, I see the option to browse other backup disks. That’s a pretty cool option, if I need to switch between different disks to backup my Mac; maybe to make a secondary backup for redundancy.

In Mavericks, the Time Machine menu bar icon doesn’t have this option any more, instead only showing Stop This Backup when backing up (or Back Up Now when it isn’t), Enter Time Machine, and Open Time Machine Preferences. If you’re wondering where the option to browse other backup disks has gone, you’re not alone.

Samsung has admitted that a Korean PR agency did offer money to app developers to promote a competition on the popular developer question and answer website Stack Overflow. The electronics giant insists that this is “clearly against” its cooperate policy, and says that it cancelled the plan as soon as it was made aware of the situation.

Yesterday, the makers of the upcoming Ashton Kutcher vehicle and Steve Jobs biopic Jobs released a featurette that went behind the scenes of the upcoming film.

Today, we get a new promotional clip, in which Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak try to figure out the name of their new computer company? Whatever could it end up being?

For iOS users, the Pebble Smartwatch has largely existed as an exercise in frustration. While Android users can tie the Pebble Smartwatch into their smartphone’s central nervous system in all kinds of ways, the feature set of the e-ink proto-iWatch has been comparatively worse.

Case in point? Pebble Smartwatch owners who have an iPhone in their pocket couldn’t even get email notifications on the face of their watch. That’s a big deal: getting notified of new emails is seemingly one of the big things you’d want a second screen on your wrist to do. Luckily, that’s being rectified.

Already explored all of Rapture on your Mac? Gear up, soldier. It’s time to soar up to the air city Columbia in Irrational Games’s incredible, award-winning sequel to the Bioshock series, Bioshock Infinite. It’s coming to the Mac App Store at the end of the month.

Two years ago, Apple overtook Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. It was a heck of a feat for a Silicon Valley company: for the first time, the world seemed to value silicon computer chips more than the bubbling, black goo of long dead dinosaurs. The future seemed rosy, and in the following months, Apple’s share price eventually rose to over $700 a share… before cratering thanks to bizarre Wall Street pessimism.

Somehow, though, even though analysts are bleaker about Apple’s futures than they have ever been, Cupertino has once more managed to claw the title of world’s most valuable company from Exxon. How?

I know, I know. This is technically the third post I’ve written about the Panasonic GX7. But it’s also the first post since it has existed as anything except a Schrödinger’s Rumor.

The GX7 is Panasonic’s best-looking Micro Four Thirds camera to date, in terms of both styling (it’s retro-hot) and design choices. It’s also priced to go up against cameras like Fuji’s X-series, at $1,000 for the body alone, and $1,100 for camera and 14–42mm (28–84mm equivalent) kit lens.

Quip is an odd new app that looks like it could be incredibly useful. It’s billed as a word processor, but it combines text editing with instant messaging, change tracking and sharing — plus it has a very cool interface.

Oh, and it works on your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac (in the browser).

Poor Canon. When it comes to compact cameras, its heart is in the right place, but the market is shriveling so fast that sometimes it’s hard to see the point. Today’s example is the Vixia Mini camcorder, a video version of its quirky Powershot N. The Vixia Mini is a square box with a flip-out screen and a fisheye lens. And as a nod to smartphone users, it has Wi-Fi built in. But do we care?

A rear panel believed to be for the upcoming second-generation iPad mini appears to have been leaked from Apple’s supply chain. The panel is largely the same as the existing one — suggesting the new model will look identical to the original — but it has a new Apple logo on its back.

Photowerks is a Smart Album app for the iPhone and iPad that you will actually use. Unlike previously-written-about SmartAlbums, Photowerks uses easy spinning dials to set criteria for your saved searches, and it is also quick and very nicely designed.

Two guys named Mike met up on the TouchArcade forums a few years back and bonded over their love of retro platform games with a hook. A literal hook, to be specific.

Mike Meade and Mike Gaughen competed with each other to see who was the best Hook Champ player, moving on to challenge each other over Super QuickHook. When those speed runs came to an end, the two Mikes decided to make their own hooking endless runner, and Mikey Shorts, an App Store Best of 2012, was born.

On Thursday, August 8, the long-awaited sequel is set to release in the App Store. Mikey Hooks aims to be everything Mikey Shorts was and more, with a host of new ideas and features to keep us all jumping and hooking our way to joy.

Remember MobileMe? When Apple transitioned to iCloud, MobileMe users with paid plans were coaxed over with 20GB of complimentary storage. Apple had originally planned to take the free gigabytes away on September 30th, 2012, but the deadline got pushed back another year.

In an email to affected customers today, Apple reminds everyone that the free storage promotion comes to an actual end this year on September 30th.

“When it expires, your iCloud storage will be automatically adjusted to the free 5 GB plan,” explains Apple. “If you exceed your storage plan on September 30, 2013, iCloud Backup, Documents in the Cloud, and iCloud Mail will temporarily stop working.”

If you need more storage than 5GB, you can upgrade your iCloud plan now.

Source: Apple

Apple has been without a head of retail for nearly a year. Since John Browett was hired and quickly fired last year, Tim Cook has been in charge of the company’s retail operations. Apple has made it clear that it’s on the hunt for a new executive to fill the role, but there hasn’t been any candidates to fit the bill.

While Apple does occasionally make high-profile hires from other companies, promotions often happen from the inside. Tim Cook himself is an example. He was Chief Operations Officer before Steve Jobs died and made him CEO.

As Apple continues to seek a new retail leader, don’t expect the position to be filled by someone currently on Apple’s roster. But that doesn’t necessarily rule out former employees.

Released last month, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is the followup to the critically-acclaimed Kingdom Rush, one of my personal favorites in the Tower Defense genre, what with its cute little hand-drawn characters, wacky sense of humor, and some of the most finely-tuned tower defense levels I’ve ever played.

Kindgom Rush: Frontiers, then, just got a marine-flavored update today with six new nautical-themed creeps to defend against, two new heroes to deploy when things get rough, and some extra maps and achievements to keep you entertained far beyond the already stellar gameplay of the original release.

With compelling new features and a surprising array of customization options, the long-awaited Moto X is putting an interesting new face on Android. All the details on Motorola’s first flagship phone since the company was purchased by Google have finally been revealed.

The Moto X, which goes on sale later this month, runs Jelly Bean out of the box and features a 4.7-inch, hi-res display. The 16GB model will be priced at $199 with a two-year carrier contract, and the 32GB model will cost $299. We knew customization would be a big part of the phone before it was announced at today’s big launch event in New York City, but Motorola plans to offer a whopping 504 different color combinations.

One of my favorite new features of the Podcasts app in iOS, on iPhone or iPad, is the ability to stream episodes directly, rather than have to download them. It’s made me much more independent and willing to try out new podcasts; I simply don’t have to subscribe to ones that don’t catch my fancy, then delete and move all the downloaded files.

To the uninitiated, though, the difference between streaming and downloading is a tricky one. Here’s how it all works, and how to either download or stream podcast episodes as you decide which is best for you.