Macgasm

I grew up with the Grand Theft Auto series, and I’ve played most of the editions since the very first one. I never bought into the concept that GTA was destroying society, and I certainly supported them when that crooked lawyer from Florida was doing his best to destroy video games.

This instalment of the Grand Theft Auto series, now available on the iPad, is a direct port from the PlayStation Portable, which we thought we should point out directly at the top of our review. I haven’t played the PSP version, or the Nintendo DS version so we can’t comment on how the iPad port holds up to the original, but that being said there’s a lot love about the iPad edition, and a couple of things to hate.

What’s Macgasmic

Grand Theft Auto took the touch inputs seriously, and managed to create some pretty interesting game play based on touch interactions. For instance, when you steal a car, you’re occasionally met with a hurdle of some kind, having to hot-wire it, or hack it with your PDA. The task isn’t hard to complete, but it gets you using the rest of your hands instead of just your thumbs.

Also, the game is a little bit of a throw back, returning to the top-down view that was present in the early GTA games. I have to say, I very much prefer this perspective for a mobile version of the game. Outside of some control issues, as noted below, it feels like it belongs on the iPad.

The game has a host of side missions, and feels a lot less drudging then GTA 4 on the 360, as well as the subsequent games that were released. You may have written off some of the GTA games in the past because it felt like you were not doing anything more than playing a glorified taxi driver, but GTA: China Town Wars really takes it to the next level. There’s the obvious Taxiesque quests, but you can also deal drugs, and partake in a whole host of side missions, including stealing cars, blowing up cars, putting out fires, and all the other antisocial behaviours that have come to embody a GTA release.

What needs work

While it’s a bit difficult to get used to the perspective change alongside the lack of actual control buttons on the iPad, there’s certainly a lot of charm and nostalgia felt while playing the game.

GTA: China Town really highlights the difficulty developers have moving their games to a device that lacks physical buttons. Targeting with your weapons takes quite a bit of time to figure out. Essentially, I’ve been running in circles and running towards an enemy while tapping on the shoot button. It works out alright, but it seems a little bit clumsy, and certainly takes awhile to get used. Keeping in mind that there’s very little that RockStar could have done to circumvent the problem, due to the lack of haptic feedback available on the iPad. It’s hard to fault the game in any way shape or form.

This is also why I tend to avoid games with these layover control schemes. I think there’s a real opportunity here for an evolution in game play, and hopefully some of the bigger firms, like RockStar, start to take chances and make something happen. The Epic Citadel preview comes to mind here. They’ve given gamers the ability to use the traditional overlay keyboard as well as a more intuitive control scheme for the iPad—tap to move, tap and drag to rotate.

Final Thoughts

Grand Theft Auto: China Town Wars for iPad is everything you’ve come to expect from the franchise. The port, which seems to struggle on occasion graphically (see the screenshot below), provides enough replay value that we have no difficultly recommending the $9.99 game. There will be some hurdles along the way, and getting used to the top-down view and control scheme is going to take some time, but once you get comfortable with it all, you’ll be running down cops in no time.

Plex 9 has really changed my expectations for what a media center computer should be, and it’s done it in a way that Apple has yet to fully grasp. I don’t want to think about the ways that I need to connect my media to my television. I just want it to work without having to worry about how it works.

Plex 9′s Media Manager solves this problem nicely. Instead of having to map network drives on all of my machines, the Media Manager lets you connect to media libraries in a way that was previously unprecedented. Having multiple media center computers in a house is no longer a chore to maintain. Plex 9 makes it a breeze.

Plex for the Mac

I’ve been using Plex for about two years now, and while it’s been great previous to this release, the application ran painfully slow on my early Intel Mac Mini. I was getting a little closer to my limit every time I opened the application over the last year, but with Plex 9, the Plex team has obviously fixed the problem. The application is more responsive, and has given my Mac Mini new life as a media centre computer. I’m very grateful for that, so a huge thanks goes to the Plex team for making it possible.

Essentially, Plex is a media center for your computer.  You can run it on a desktop, a laptop, or a Mac Mini hooked up to your television. It will go out and grab content from each machine and let you stream your audio, video, and pictures across the network to which ever computer you’re operating at the moment.  Also cool, is the ability to add some video plugins to popular online video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Revision 3, Funny Or Die, as well as some others. It really bring new media into the living room in a way that the Apple TV kind of struggles with, in our opinion.

Media Manager

Managing media is a big enough pain, and the complexity of worrying about backups, file storage, disk locations, and all that fun, fun stuff is one of the reasons why I argue that renting television shows is the way of the future. When multiplying the organizational nightmare that is media files across two, or even three computers, the task can be a little bit daunting. With the Media Library, you can now have one computer acting as the main storage device, while the rest stream your videos across the network. The process for adding movies and videos to a machine is so streamlined compared to previous versions, I find myself wondering why I spent so much time setting up an AFP network to move files across my network with Plex last year.

So, if you’re the type of person who worries about how much work maintaining a media center can be, worry no longer. Plex 9 has gone a long way to reducing the complications. Videos just show up, album artwork and movie covers manage to appear on their own, and best yet, managing television show series all seems to be automated. Everything was working out of the box, unlike previous editions where I had to manually remove duplicate files, wrong movie artwork, and manually organize my TV shows. The less time I have to think about organizing my files for Plex 9, the more I’m likely to recommend it to friends and family. Again, the Plex team has really done an excellent job with this version of the application. It’s a full head above the last version.

Plex for the iPad

Plex for the iPad is what AirPlay will be once the iOS 4.2 ships for the iPad. If you have even a remote interest in streaming your media from an Apple TV to an iPad then you might want to consider the possibility of streaming from a desktop, laptop, or media center to your iPad—Plex for iPad does it, and does it well.

You can bet the farm on the fact that Apple’s going to be making sure that the media types streaming across Airplay are the traditionally supported codecs that have been available to you on your iPhones and iPods. Plex doesn’t care what your file type is — MKV, Divx, or H.264 — it’ll still stream your videos directly to your iPad, no transcoding necessary.

One downside is that while Apple’s Airplay is going to let you stream to other 3rd party hardware like speakers, docks, and high-fidelity stereos, Plex for the iPad might not extend that far.

Plex for the iPad relies heavily on your wireless network, so if you’re running on a 802.11G, or worse 802.11B network, you’re going to see some problems with your content streams. For the most part, the 802.11G network seems to be able to handle your typical movie streams with ease, but HD movies struggle a little bit.

Remote Issues

The iPad app comes complete with a remote to control Plex on your computers. It’s handy, when it works, but for the most part it’s a struggle, and I found myself relying on RowMote Pro to navigate the Plex menu system from the couch. For some reason, no matter what library I selected, and which machine I was connected to, the remote just wouldn’t work.

Some suggestions

This application is a key example of innovation in a space that has seen very little change over the years. Being able to start a movie on my couch, and finish it on my iPad anywhere around my house is a huge game changer. That being said, there is room for improvement with Plex, and more specifically with the iPad application. For instance, there’s more than enough screen real estate to provide a nicer looking interface on the application. While the list view is handy for quickly navigating menus, we’d love to see the “Cover Flow” view, or other layouts available in the desktop application make their way to the iPad.

The Sims 3 has rolled out on the iPhone, as EA games continues to bring mobile versions of their popular catalog to the App Store. Like most of the other Sims games, Sims 3 Ambitions will take you through the traditional life situation simulations, but this time there’s added emphasis on getting a job, and starting a family—kinda sounds a little too realistic if you ask me.

The game looks absolutely fantastic, even on my iPhone 3G, which is a pleasant surprise. The game held up well, and hasn’t crashed yet, which is a big deal these days.

Unique to Sims 3 Ambitions is the ability to import your characters from any of the other iOS Sims games, which should save you some time when you start up the game the first time.

Also pretty important to people playing on their iPhones and Touch devices is the ability to both control and listen to your music while you’re involved in your game play.

We won’t spill the beans too much about the Sims 3 Ambitions. Think of this as a teaser for an upcoming full-featured review of the game. We want to get some playing time under our belts before we tell you exactly what we think about the release.

If you can’t wait for our full review, and find yourself wanting to buy the game immediately, you can buy it on the AppStore for $4.99.

Apple released iOS 4.2 Beta to developers today. We decided to give it a run on one of our development iPads to figure out what’s new, what’s not, and what’s busted, so we could pass it along to you before you go out and do something crazy.  We’ve also recorded a quick video showing off the changes in real-time, so look for that towards the end of the article.

So here’s what we’ve found so far.

20 Apps in a Group

More screen real-estate on the iPad should mean more space for applications in groups, and Apple’s delivered. Groups on the iPad now have the ability to store 20 applications. It’s still not enough for your Twitter applications or games, but you should be able to maximize your screen space with 20 applications per group.

Unified Inbox in Mail.app and Threaded email

Steve Jobs wasn’t joking when he said that a unified inbox on the iPad was on the way. It’s here, and it works great. Personally, I prefer keeping my email segregated, but a lot of people love it this way. If you like it on your iPhone, you’re going to like it on the iPad, since it’s the exact same setup.

They’ve also added the ability to see threaded emails. It’s a far cry from Gmail’s threaded system, but it’s still way better than nothing.

AirPrint

We were expecting printing capabilities, but we weren’t expecting the marketing lingo that would come with it. WiFi printing is now labelled AirPrinting, and a whole lineup of HP printers are on the way to support the technology. You can now print from Photos, Safari, and any other application that decides to use the API. This is a huge win if you’re still printing off stuff for work. In Photos you can either print from each photo, or you can print multiple photos at once.

Lock is now a mute button

This change is a little controversial. Previously if you wanted to mute your audio you would just hold down the volume button, and the music would immediately turn off. But now, the screen orientation lock has been reprogrammed to be a mute button, and the screen orientation lock is in your multitasking bar. It’s not the best situation, and we’re hoping this is one of those bugs that may have slipped through the cracks at Apple. It’s not a deal breaker, but it makes locking something a step or two longer.

Another thing we should point out — the mute switch doesn’t actually work for us. Music keeps playing out the speakers on the iPad, despite the mute being turned on, so, it looks like it might be a bug.

Game Center

Obviously Game Center was coming to the iPad, and it looks even better on the bigger screen. Can’t wait until we get some massively multiplayer games in the App Store. If you’re wondering, I’m Macgasm in the Game Center, not Dorkins, but you can follow him too.

Spotlight Preferences

There were rumours circulating the internet that 3G iPhones were slow because of Spotlight, and if that was the case, the updates to Spotlight clearly illustrate what the problem was. You can now toggle different criteria for your Spotlight searches on or off. For instance, you can turn off searching Podcasts, or Events if you never want Spotlight to index those parts of your iPad. Personally, I’ve turned everything off since I never use Spotlight on my iPad.

Restrictions

iOS 4 now lets you disable application access in the Settings application. You turn them on, enter a password, disable applications, and then watch as people get frustrated that they can’t download any apps, or use Safari. It’s a great tool if you have kids who like to rack up application purchases on your credit card, or if you want to stop a classroom from surfing the net during class.

Bigger Fonts

There’s new accessibility options in the Settings application. You can now increase the font size of Apple’s core applications, so if you have a hard time reading the small fonts in mail, you can now maximize the text so you can read comfortably.

Airplay

Airplay makes an appearance on the iPad with iOS 4.2 beta, but we are unable to fully test the features because we lack Airplay capable devices. Hopefully if any of you guys are running the beta, you can explain it a little in the comments, or even email me a screenshot so we can add to this list.

Safari gets some small updates

You can now get a nice listing right next to the url bar that lists off how many active websites you have open at one time. It’s a small tweak, but it’s also pretty substantial if you notice that Safari is lagging behind on you.

Apple’s also changed the + icon with the tradition share icon between the bookmark bar and the url bar. From this menu you can still add a website to bookmarks, your home screen, email a link, and as of now you can print via AirPrinting.

Video Demonstration

ABC clearly gets it. First, they bring an amazing application to the App Store that allows people to watch their entire lineup from their iPad. Now, they’re adding a whole new layer to your TV viewing experience with their “My Generation” application.

If you’re looking for an interactive experience while watching ABC’s My Generation, you’re going to want to check out the collaborative application from ABC and Nielsen. The application uses the iPad’s built in microphone to pick up audio queues from your television, PVR, or download, and then provides you with interactive information from the show. You can get polls, trivia, and other tidbits of information about the shows, all in real-time, from the comfort of your couch. You know how everyone’s complaining about how the iPad hasn’t been as revolutionary as the iPhone? Well, it’s looking like things are starting to pickup. Nielsen’s Media Sync Platform could be a huge first step in providing an entirely new television watching experience. There’s been multiple kicks at this can before, with reality television trying to get people to use their computers during shows, but it seems like the iPad could be a better suited device in this case.

While the application is free on the AppStore, we’re uncertain if it will work outside the US borders. The ABC application doesn’t work currently, without some VPN magic, and we wouldn’t be surprised if the My Generation application does the same. We’ll try it out for you once we figure out what My Generation is, and where we can actually watch it up here in Canada.

Article Via Electronista

If you’re a musician of any kind you know that GarageBand just doesn’t really seem to cut it. It may just be my setup, but if you’re recording anything longer than ten minutes the application starts to lag and somehow misses notes and entire words. Grant and I had to entirely abandon GarageBand for our podcasts. Apple better get things together because Avid will very shortly begin trying to steal some of Apple’s lunch. They intend to offer an entry-level package of ProTools alongside their M-Audio product line.

M-Audio has a whole range of music creation products including microphones, keyboards, and control boxes that let you record directly from your instruments into a computer with a USB or Firewire interface. The ProTools SE package that they will begin to sell includes 24 track capability, pro effects–reverb, EQ, and guitar amp/ distortion effects, as well as 3GB of audio loops. If there was ever a reason for GarageBand to worry, this would be it. ProTools is already a recognized name in the industry, and an SE edition of their software is going to be a very intriguing option for budding musicians.

You can currently purchase Recording Studio and Vocal Studio bundles for $99.00, and purchasing KeyStudio will bring the bundle up to $129.00.  The SE ProTools version should be available at your local Best Buy, Fry’s, and music shops in the near future.

Article Via Electronista

If there’s ever been one game that I let slip through my fingers without actually playing, despite constant self-reminders that I needed to try it out, it’s Left 4 Dead. Since hearing the news that Valve was planning on bringing the Left 4 Dead series to the Mac, I’ve vowed to pick it up once it ships, but the exact date has been unavailable until today.

Continuing with their teaser like approach to announcing release dates for the Mac, the Valve team has dropped a subtle hint that Left 4 Dead will be available on the October 5th for PC, Xbox 360, and Mac. Okay, so they didn’t come right out and say Left 4 Dead would be available on October 5th, instead, they have listed “The Sacrifice,” some downloadable content and digital comic, will be available on the Mac platform on the 5th. We’re hoping that means that the games will also be available before then.

Are you ready to kill some zombies on your Mac?

Article Via Macworld

We already know that we’re getting 27-inch LED Cinema Displays, considering they were announced by Apple back in July, and we already know that they’ll have a resolution of 2560X1440, an iSight camera, a microphone and speakers. What we don’t know is when in September they’ll be shipping.

We’ve seen small hints over the last week that Apple’s gearing up to release the monitors to the masses in the near future, and through small tweaks on their website, we can deduce that the shipment date might be sooner rather than later.

References to the 27-inch Apple LED Cinema Display were on display when customizing a Mac Pro. Despite not having an option to select one, the copy on the site did specifically mention the monitor. Now, on international Apple stores, it seems like Apple has discontinued both the 30-inch and 24-inch monitors completely – estimated ship time: currently unavailable.

If you’re looking to buy a sexy new 27-inch display from Apple, you might want to keep your eyes on their website early next week. It’s just a hunch, but it seems like Apple’s about to start taking orders for their new monitor.

Article Via Mac Rumours