Macgasm

Ticket to Ride Pocket, the iPhone version of Days of Wonder‘s award winning train board game, is getting a major update with the focus on multiplayer. Yes, finally, you can play against your friends across the world. The new Multi Mode uses GameCenter to find friends to play against, and each Multi Mode game can have up to four of your friends in it. What’s more, you can play multiple games simultaneously against multiple sets of friends. This mode also supports asynchronous gameplay, so you can switch from game to game, or even to another app without losing your progress.

“This is the update Ticket to Ride players have been clamoring for since we released Ticket to Ride Pocket,” said Eric Hautemont, Days of Wonder Founder and CEO in a press release. “We love online gameplay, but faced a challenge: how do you create a great online experience on a device like the phone that is constantly being used for other functions? We needed to build an experience where players could come and go as they please yet have something meaningful to do when they played; the thought of having multiple games going at once was what convinced us this could work. With Multi Mode, we’ve given players what they want without compromising on the gameplay that made Ticket to Ride so popular to begin with.”

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Update: Coolermaster has informed me that the Wake Up Folio is also compatible with the new iPad (third generation).

Coolermaster is a name familiar to anyone who has ever dabbled in building their own PC, providing products like cooling fans, power supplies, and PC enclosures for twenty years. More recently, they have expanded to peripherals, and are now producing products for the mobile space, including iPad 2 cases.

Recently I was looking for a new case for my wife’s iPad 2 to replace the Dodocase, which sustained a cracked corner from some unknown mishap (I blame the kids, and not my own butterfingers). I have to share that whenever a tech product needs to be purchased, I launch on an exhaustive research project. I scour the Internet in a quest for the ultimate solution, usually involving a combination of needed features and price point. In this case, we had a few criteria in mind when we chose, ultimately, the Coolermaster Wake Up Folio.

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It’s time to get excited about Thunderbolt, people. Dave Helmly from Adobe posted a video demo last week showing how he was able to edit full resolution RED video footage (i.e. footage that would bring most laptops to their knees, begging for mercy) using a MacBook Air. How did he accomplish this amazing feat?

Using a MacBook Air with a Thunderbolt port, Helmly hooked up a Sonnet Echo Express Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis, inside of which was a RED ROCKET card. That was in turn connected to a Promise RAID, where the video files were stored. And then he used Adobe Premiere, naturally, running on (cough) Windows 7 using Boot Camp. (Did a small part of you just die inside? I know, I felt it too.)

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Mackie, maker of sound reinforcement and recording gear, introduced their new DL1608 mixer last week at NAMM. For many live sound engineers, the Mackie name is synonymous with the mid-priced, workhorse sound mixer, starting with the LM-1602, introduced in 1988. If you’ve ever done live sound, you’ve probably come across one of these mixers somewhere in your travels. The new DL1608 builds on that legacy, but with a twist. It uses your iPad as the brain for the mixer, eschewing physical faders and knobs for touchscreen ones instead.

The mixer is built with a large cradle where your iPad is inserted, creating the face of the mixer. Of course, with an iPad’s horsepower at your disposal, there’s a lot more that you can do than just virtual faders, and the Mackie DL1608 takes full advantage of the power of the iPad, including the killer feature, wireless control over the mixer.

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The Moog synthesizer is an iconic electronic instrument developed by the late Dr. Robert Moog in the 1960s, and one of the first commercially successful monophonic synthesizers of its time. It rose to prominence in 1967 when Wendy Carlos recorded the album “Switched-On Bach” using the Moog, performing classical music using synthesizers. When Moog introduced a more portable unit called the Minimoog, bands such as Yes and Tangerine Dream took it and made it a signature part of their sound.

The amazing thing about technology is that it constantly evolves, and today you can have a digital recreation of the Moog synth on your 4th gen iPod touch, iPhone 4 or 4S (the processing power required precludes the use of previous models of iPhone). Enter the Animoog.

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Well, look who’s back. It turns out that the problem wasn’t you — it was Apple. The recent App Store update that caused havoc with devices running iOS 3.1.3 has been resolved, and Apple has fixed whatever the problem was. So if you have an older iPhone or iPod touch stuck on the previous previous version of iOS, you can rest a little easier. You’ve not been put out to pasture just yet.

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Apple has purchased Israeli flash memory technology company Anobit for a reported $500 million. It marks the largest acquisition Apple has made since acquiring NeXT from Steve Jobs for $472 million. It will be the first acquisition for Apple in Israel. The office of the Prime Minister of Israel was quick to congratulate Apple this morning, welcoming Apple to Israel via Twitter.

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I have a love-hate relationship with emoticons. On the one hand, they allow you to express mood or your intended meaning in written communication. It can imbue your otherwise neutral statement with feeling. On the other hand, it demonstrates laziness. Why bother writing something clearly, when you can just stick a happy face at the end? :)

Whatever your opinion about emoticons, it’s clear they are here to stay. Simple emoticons combining colons, semicolons and parentheses or other letters have developed into a language unto itself. But if you want to take it a bit further and spice up your iMessages and texts, Emoji is ready and waiting for you.

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