Review: Pid an old-fashioned platform game with modern anti-gravity gameplay

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Great accessories that match your Mac

If you're enough of a fan of Apple’s designs that you insist that your accessories not spoil the aesthetic, take note: We’ve rounded up some of our favorite gear that will blend right in with the aluminum-and-black motif of an Apple-equipped home or office.

And if you’re doing some last-minute holiday shopping for a Mac-using friend or family member, you can't go wrong with these items—they're sure to look at home next to any Mac.

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Review: Curio 8 gives you more planning and presenting power

Nathan Alderman is a writer and copy editor, and frequent Macworld contributor based in Alexandria, Virginia.
More by Nathan Alderman

Equal parts project manager, vector graphics engine, digital notebook, and slide deck, Zengobi’s Curio 8 makes an ideal tool for anyone planning something big, complex, and multifaceted. Though it costs more than twice as much as the low-end version of Curio 7 () I reviewed last May, it packs plenty of potent new features within a pleasantly refreshed interface.

Rebuilt from the ground up for Lion and Mountain Lion, Curio 8 casts away the confusing multiple editions and feature sets of its previous version. For a single price, every user can employ all of the program’s top-flight tools and abilities. (This also eliminates any feature-set confusion in Curio’s top-notch help files.) Files from older versions migrate seamlessly into the new one, but users should keep in mind that Curio 8 uses a different file type that previous Curio versions can't read.

It’s easy to add a multitude of customizable, trackable elements to your project.

Within each Curio project file, users can create a series of Idea Spaces to house different aspects of their business presentation, lesson plan, novel outline, or photo scrapbook, among other uses. In a wedding planning guide, for example, one Idea Space can hold to-do lists, another the guest list, a third the seating chart, etc. Easy but powerful vector graphics tools and flow chart creators —here called “mind maps”— assist with the planning. You can adjust these and any other elements’ shapes, colors, fonts, and much more, and save your own custom templates for any element.

Curio lets you drag in not only photos and video files, but also live Web page views, Google Drive documents, and live-updating file previews from a host of programs, including Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Word’s heavy hitters. In Curio 8, you can now add YouTube and Vimeo videos, or record your own audio and video with the Mac’s built-in tools. You can also link a project to your Calendar and Reminders, even if they reside in iCloud.

To help you track your project’s progress, Curio can assign checkboxes or “percent completed” markers to any element. It’ll then monitor those parts of your work project-wide to let you know which remain undone. Using your Mac’s Contacts, you can assign different elements to different team members, or even have multiple team members working on different parts of the same element.

A revised interface takes its cues from iOS, and lays out buttons and menus in a user-friendly way.

Curio 8 offers several higher-end features I hadn’t seen in Curio Core 7. You can easily turn any project into a slideshow presentation, complete with customizable Core Image transition styles. And Mac users who remember Sherlock, the old Mac OS’s rudimentary Internet search tool, may delight in Curio 8’s Sleuth. In one handy window, it can search piles upon piles of Websites creative professionals may find useful, including font foundries and image libraries. The levels of thought and care Zengobi put into this and every other Curio feature never failed to impress.

This attention to detail extends to Curio’s new interface, whose floating menus and tactile switches are heavily inspired by iOS. Despite the many different buttons and options that surround every edge of the Curio window, the interface proves easy to learn. The friendly, comprehensive Getting Started walkthrough project helps considerably.

Zengobi’s concentrated as many features as possible into logical buttons and menus. For example, just one button opens the menu to insert every possible element into a presentation; clicking on the element you want leads into more detailed specifications, without cluttering up your screen. Everything’s labeled with ToolTips in case you forget what a particular icon signifies. A new Share button exports your work as text, HTML, RTF, or PDF.

Finally, Zengobi gratifyingly fixed a few of the quirks that annoyed me in Curio Core 7. Video playback now works flawlessly, and while most Idea Spaces remain too big for a 13-inch laptop screen, holding the Q key zooms out to show the whole page, and releasing it refocuses on wherever your cursor points.

The Sleuth window makes web searching even easier for creative pros in search of good resources.

While Curio remains more expensive than many rival programs, I have yet to review a better, friendlier, or more powerful tool for taking on any project under the sun.

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Review: Twitterrific 5 brings elegance to the foreground

Follow @dmoren

Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two.
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Up to a point, pretty much all Twitter clients look the same since, at their most basic, they all display a list of tweets. But within that spectrum, The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific 5—the latest update to what was arguably the first Twitter client for iOS—has taken pains to distinguish itself from the competition and from its own previous editions.

The difference is apparent from the get-go. The previous version featured recognizable elements of iOS, from the buttons and the titlebars to the pop-up menus that appear when you tapped on an avatar or a tweet’s reply button. The new version instead features a much more seamless design; yes, tweets are still broken up by dividing lines, but they still seem to flow into each other in a way that most common clients don’t. The new design also isn’t afraid to buck established conventions: Tap on a user’s followers, or the people they’re following, and you’ll get a grid of avatar thumbnails instead of just the usual scrollable list.

Worth a thousand words: Twitterrific 5 shows you a scrollable list of avatar thumbnails when you view a user's followers or the people they're following.

Content is front and center in the new design, which features large tabs at the top for Tweets, Mentions, Messages, and Favorites on the iPad; on the iPhone, those labels are condensed into icons, and Favorites is shunted into the sidebar. Symmetrical round buttons on the left and right allow you to view a sidebar and compose a tweet, respectively. There’s also quick access to lists from the sidebar, and a simple search that offers you the ability to look for tweets or a particular user. On the iPad, the sidebar can be pinned permanently to the left hand side if you feel lost without it.

The Iconfactory’s used animations for effect here, with dialog boxes flying in from the edge of the screen, but they’re not overwhelming or unnecessarily flashy. (Well, except perhaps the pull-to-refresh animation that features the iconic Twitter bird hatching from an egg, but there’s something too hypnotic about it to just dismiss it.) And despite those animations, the app is fast and responsive, with tweets loading and scrolling quickly.

The same low-key enthusiasm pervades all of Twitterrific 5. Subtlety is the name of the game here. Per-tweet controls like reply, retweet, and favorite don’t appear until you tap on a tweet. Indicators on the mentions and messages tabs are small colored triangles. The palette in general is fairly monochromatic, with the rare exception of highlight colors that really draw attention. Tweets you haven’t read yet have their timestamps in purple, instead of gray. Above all, it’s simple and not overwrought.

Any way you want it: From font face to line spacing, Twitterrific 5 offers a large number of options for how tweets are displayed.

Twitterrific has long been heralded for its customization features, and version 5 offers quite a few of those. From the sidebar, tap on the change font size button (Aa) to summon a window with a number of display options, including changing the font face throughout the app (by default it’s tried-and-true Helvetica, but four other options are also available), adjusting font size up and down, choosing from small or large avatar icons, and adjusting the spacing between lines of text. There’s also a brightness slider, independent from iOS’s own, and a choice between dark and light themes. In a nice touch, there’s an option elsewhere in the app’s settings to have Twitterrific automatically shift from dark to light themes based on time of the day.

Despite that customization, you won’t find a laundry list of services for Twitterrific to interact with for uploading images and videos. You can choose a Sync Service to keep your Twitter timeline in the same position across devices: Twitterrific offers support for both iCloud, which allows syncing between the iPhone and iPad versions of the app, and Tweet Marker, which supports syncing across multiple clients, including Twitterrific for Mac. In addition, the app will detect if your device has the Instapaper or Pocket apps installed, and provide options for bookmarking URLs to those services.

Compose yourself: Writing a tweet offers autocomplete of usernames, and the ability to quickly add images.

Gestures are on display here as well. Tapping and holding the profile picture in the top left will prompt you to change accounts, if you have more than one configured. Swiping left on a tweet will bring up a reply window to that message, while swiping right will show you the conversation thread or replies to that post. And when composing a tweet, you can tap the character counter to clear all text, and tap and hold on the camera icon to just attach the latest photo from your device’s camera roll. In one bit of hocus-pocus that I’d never seen before, a two-finger swipe up or down in Twitterrific hides or reveals iOS’s status bar. The Help section contains a list of all available gestures and where you can use them.

Twitterrific’s emphasis on simplicity does have a few casualties beyond its integration with services. Push notifications are nowhere to be found, for example, though the app’s description says that you’ll get in-app notifications for mentions and direct messages. For notifications while the app isn’t in the foreground, you’ll need to set up a solution like Boxcar. If you’re a fan of other external services, such as Favstar, you won’t find easy access to them here either.

Twitterrific 5 does offer gap control, which lets you go back and load all the tweets you may have missed. While it does a good job of eventually loading all tweets, I found that it took more taps to load all my tweets than it did on Tweetbot.

There are plenty of Twitter clients on iOS, but Twitterrific has been around the longest and The Iconfactory’s willingness to completely redesign the app every few years is part of the reason the app’s success lingers. While Twitterrific 5 features a more competitive ecosphere than ever, there’s no reason it can’t co-exist alongside other excellent clients like Tweetbot; there’s audience enough for both Tweebot’s industrial design and Twitterrific’s more spartan approach.

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App Review: AltaMail is a modest improvement over iOS's Mail app

AltaMail from EuroSmartz offers users more control over their inboxes with wireless (and offline) printing, inbox filtering, and enhanced attachment options. But the email client for the iPhone and iPad also lacks options that power users likely want. As a result, the app’s utility falls somewhere between what causal emailers and true power users demand.

While AltaMail duplicates many features found in the built-in Mail app, it offers enough improvement overall to be of use to most iPad and iPhone owners, especially given AltaMail’s support for basic email tasks as well as more complex printing options.

Wireless printing from a tablet or smartphone is one of those technologies that, after trying it for the first time, you wonder how you ever lived without it. Thanks to the ubiquity of wireless printing through Apple’s AirPrint and HP’s ePrint technologies as well as wireless-capable printers from all manufacturers, you can print an email or document from your iOS device to a printer with relative ease.

AltaMail supports wireless printing through the aforementioned technologies, Google Cloud Print, and its own WePrint software, which enables printing over cellular networks (if installed). WePrint also enables you to use AltaMail to print to older printers that don’t offer wireless functionality by using your Mac as an intermediary between your iOS device and the legacy printer. (The WePrint app must be installed on the computer.) While it’s true that the WePrint feature is but a variation on “I’ll email it to myself and print it later,” its integration here is useful, even if the result isn’t quite as groundbreaking as EuroSmartz claims.

The version I reviewed, AltaMail 3.1, introduces custom push notifications from your email accounts, although it takes some initial work to set that up. In order to provide highly customizable notifications, AltaMail requires a free companion app called WeNotify to be installed and running on your Mac. WeNotify enables users to sync their accounts without leaving their login credentials on AltaMail’s servers, thereby ensuring data privacy. Although initial setup takes some doing, power users will welcome the ability to customize notifications, provided that they use AltaMail for all of their iOS emailing needs.

In addition to printing emails, AltaMail includes an option to save emails in PDF format. Unfortunately this option is available only as a $2 in-app purchase—which seems an expensive add-on to an app that already costs $5.

AltaMail does not currently offer Dropbox or iCloud sync support, although EuroSmartz says that cloud syncing is coming soon. AltaMail does offer local file sharing through a wireless network, though. Your iOS device is assigned a local IP address which enables you to load files into AltaMail directly for later attachment. Quite frankly, simply emailing yourself a file is probably faster and easier than going through the process of loading files directly into AltaMail, which requires WeNotify—yet another free Mac companion app available on EuroSmartz’s website.

Although it falls short when it comes to importing and exporting files, it’s important to remember that AltaMail is an email app; in that sense, it does its job well. AltaMail handles writing, editing and reading email well and supports contact groups and templates—both welcome features for email power users. Sure, AltaMail’s peripheral features are lacking at times but the core email app does its job well.

Most of us have hundreds if not thousands of emails in our inboxes. AltaMail is useful because it makes taming your inbox easier and offers yet another alternative to iOS’s built-in Mail offering.

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Review: The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings is undoubtedly one of the best role-playing games released in recent years and, as the name implies, it’s the sequel to the original Witcher game that was released on the PC back in 2007. Both games are based on the popular series of fantasy novels written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that follow the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, a witcher who roams the mediaeval fantasy kingdom of Temeria, slaying monsters and generally being mean and moody.

The Witcher 2 introduces a new storyline in which a mysterious group of assassins seems bent on bumping off all the local nobility. This leads Geralt into a web of political intrigue and skullduggery as he attempts to discover the identity and motives of his mysterious foes.

Role-playing fans will quickly find themselves drawn into this rich (and often adult) storyline. However, the Witcher games are a little unconventional when compared to more traditional RPGs, such as the Dragon Age series. You don’t have a range classes that you can choose to play, such as wizards, priests, and rogues. Geralt is essentially a swordsman, although he does have access to a limited range of magic signs and alchemical potions that can give him an edge in battle. The combat and skill systems are also quite complex so you’ll need to devote a bit of time to mastering them at first.

The original Witcher game is also available on Steam the Mac—and at a mere $10—so role-playing fans can go back and enjoy the saga of Geralt right from the beginning.

Some may find the lack of different character classes a little restrictive, but the vividly drawn world of the The Witcher 2 will appeal to anyone that enjoys old-school role-playing games. With the first game also available now you’ll have many hours of engrossing role-playing action to see you through the long cold winter months ahead of us.

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The 28th Annual Editors' Choice Awards

Hundreds and hundreds of products are released for the Mac each year. A few products truly stand out as impressive examples of quality, value, and innovation. These are the products that we recognize with an Editors’ Choice Award.

When it comes to the Eddys (as we affectionately call them), Macworld editors start with a list of candidates; this year, the list included well over 200 products (eligible products must have been released between November 1, 2011, and November 1, 2012). We take a close look at all of the candidates, debate the pros and cons of each, and determine whether a product meets our stringent standards for quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence. After weeks of deliberation, we assembled a final list.

Ladies and gentlemen, Macworld presents the winners of the Eddy Awards.

Apple

MacBook Pro with Retina Display
$1699 and $1999 for 13-inch model, $2199 and $2799 for 15-inch model; Apple

A Retina display is a display with a pixel density so high that you can’t discern individual pixels at a normal viewing distance. You’ll pay a few hundred dollars more for a MacBook Pro with Retina display over a standard MacBook Pro, but the benefits are well worth the money. Graphics pros will love the intense image detail, and text is so crisp and clean that you might mistake your on-screen text for a printed page. If you’re worried about not having enough on-screen real estate for your work, you can always use a higher resolution than the default. The Retina MacBook Pro also comes with a speedy SSD, which gives these laptops a nice performance boost.—Roman Loyola

Fusion Drive
Optional upgrade on select Macs starts at $250; Apple

Solid-state drives are fast, but they’re pricey and their limited capacity often requires you to shuffle music, movies, and photos to a second, sometimes external, drive. Hard drives have high capacities and a low cost per gigabyte, but aren’t nearly as fast as SSDs. Apple’s Fusion Drive is a clever innovation that uses software to marry an SSD and a hard drive into a single storage volume that takes advantage of the strengths of both drives.

A typical hybrid drive uses a small amount of NAND flash (8GB in the case of the Seagate Momentus XT) with a standard hard drive, and comes as one physical device. In contrast, the Fusion Drive uses 15 times more flash storage, and the two drives that make up a Fusion Drive can split apart and serve as individual devices, if you so desire. Available as a build-to-order option on the 2012 quad-core Mac mini and new thinner iMacs, the Fusion Drive also relieves you from deciding which apps and files to keep on which drive. Appearing to both the user and applications as one volume, the Fusion Drive automatically moves your most-used files to the faster flash-storage portion, while moving untouched files to the slower hard-drive portion during periods of downtime.—James Galbraith

Tweetbot 1.0
$20; Tapbots

I fell in love with Tweetbot for iOS, but then it ruined me: No Mac client could compare. Turns out the only Mac app for Twitter that could match the experience of Tweetbot was Tweetbot. You can find numerous great Twitter apps for the Mac, but Tweetbot earns this Eddy because of its cleverly implemented approach to bringing an iOS app to the Mac. The app will feel familiar to anyone who has used its iOS counterparts, but it still embraces the fact that it is running on a desktop instead.

On the Mac, Tweetbot lets you Control-click (or right-click) almost anywhere to access extra features: You can right-click a user’s name or avatar to follow/unfollow, mute, reply, or direct-message; right-click a link to compose a new tweet with it, save it to a read-it-later service, or email it; right-click a hashtag to mute it or tweet with it; and so on. Tweetbot integrates with every power-user service you’d want a top-notch Twitter client to offer, including syncing service Tweet Marker and a slew of link shorteners and photo and video services. It’s a first-class Mountain Lion citizen, integrating cleanly with Notification Center, too. I now use Tweetbot to read Twitter across all my Apple devices, and I’m thrilled that I have it.—Lex Friedman

MacJournal 6
$40; Mariner Software

You’ll have no problem finding a writing app for the Mac; the market has dozens of options, from basic text editors with minimal tools to word processors with so many features you may not even know what to do with most of them. MacJournal is designed for personal writing, whether you want to work on a collection of poems, notes from a lecture, a daily journal, or brainstorming for your next great idea. MacJournal’s strength is its easy-to-use organizational tools, which focus on a tiered system of tracking entries in a user interface similar to that of Apple’s iLife apps. MacJournal also has support for encryption and password protection, and can serve as a way to post to a blog on WordPress or Blogger.—Roman Loyola

Wireless Solar Keyboard K760
$80; Logitech

Logitech

We rarely give an Eddy to a keyboard, but Logitech’s Wireless Solar Keyboard K760 has earned the honor by being functional, flexible, and even a little bit fashionable. The Mac-matching K760 is one of the best keyboards on the market thanks to an appealing design, good keys and key layout, a nice batch of special-function keys (that work with both OS X and iOS), and a reasonable price. But what makes the Bluetooth-wireless K760 truly stand out is that it can pair with up to three devices—Mac or iOS—simultaneously, letting you switch between devices with a simple button press: One second you’re editing an important work document on your Mac, and the next you’re composing tweets on your iPad. The K760 doesn’t offer a numeric keypad or other extended-keyboard keys, but the benefit of those omissions is that the K760 is small and light enough to slip into your bag for travel. The K760 is sufficiently versatile to be the primary keyboard for your desktop Mac, your MacBook, and your iPad or iPhone—without sacrificing full-size keys or a standard key layout.—Dan Frakes

iPad mini
$329 to $659; Apple

Apple

The iPad mini has been widely—and justifiably—criticized for its lack of a Retina-quality display. But in every other way, it’s just as much of an iPad as its Retina-equipped larger siblings, wrapped in a package that’s about half the overall size and weight. Inside the mini’s incredibly slim but solid body, you’ll find the CPU, GPU, and screen resolution of the iPad 2 along with the wireless and camera features of the fourth-generation iPad. The result is a smaller device that offers full compatibility with all 275,000 (and counting) iPad-optimized apps, as well as performance that’s surprisingly non-mini. In fact, the biggest praise I can give the iPad mini is simply to describe it as what it is: a more portable iPad. I suspect that enough people will be wowed by the iPad mini’s features, design, build quality, and—most important—size to make it the best-selling iPad. If it’s any indication, the mini has already become the favorite iPad of many a Macworld editor.—Dan Frakes

iPhone 5
$199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB, $399 for 64GB; Apple

Apple

To what should be nobody’s surprise, Apple finally increased the size of its smartphone screen—in its own particular way, of course. The iPhone 5’s taller screen is still the same width as every previous model’s, but the additional pixels provide more room for developers to exercise their creativity without hampering owners’ ability to hold and use the device with a single hand.

The new version is no slouch in performance, either: The iPhone 5’s A6 processor handily beats its predecessors, and the addition of LTE cellular technology means that the network connection finally brings actual 4G speeds, instead of the previous model’s reheated 3G. Likewise, better cameras on the front and back mean that the camera you carry with you everywhere is even more capable. Few things are more futuristic than the ability to conduct high-definition FaceTime calls no matter where you are (assuming your carrier supports it).

Oh, and did I mention that all of these impressive capabilities fit into in an attractive new package that’s somehow, amazingly, smaller and lighter than the already sleek iPhone 4S? Once again, Apple has managed to top its own flagship product, with a device that makes its once-impressive forebear look decidedly long in the tooth.—Dan Moren

Pogo Connect
$80; Ten One Design

Ten One Design

I’ve been waiting for a pressure-sensitive stylus since Ten One Design previewed a pressure-sensitivity test back in July 2010. Since then, several companies have attempted to conquer the mountain that is pressure-sensitivity support, and have encountered difficulty: Apple allows you to send this information only via Bluetooth, and each app must be individually altered to recognize and accept this information.

Ten One’s Pogo Connect cannot surmount these problems entirely, but the company, partnering with iOS app developers, has made the process as simple as possible for users. You don’t need to pair your Pogo with the tablet in the traditional way, or worry about turning it on or off to conserve battery power. Compatible apps have a single switch to pair the stylus—and once paired, the connection lasts until you quit the app or turn off your iPad. It’s an elegant solution, accompanied by an equally elegant pen.

The company’s pressure-sensitivity engine is sleek, and one of the best at recognizing both pressure and speed input that I’ve seen. And although the rubber nib—an 8mm beast similar to other companies’ rubber-nib offerings—may not please everyone, it offers decent friction against the iPad’s surface for fast lines and detail work. We don’t know what Apple plans for the future. But looking at the pressure-sensitive styluses on the market today, the Pogo Connect is the one to beat.—Serenity Caldwell

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