Applications

While AppleWorks brought much needed day-to-day productivity to early versions of OS X, Apple ended support for it in 2007 with the debut of Pages and the iWork suite. Despite this, a number of people still rely on or use AppleWorks, and periodically ask about the support options for AppleWorks and AppleWorks documents in recent versions of the Mac OS.… Read more

Volkswagen and Fish Labs have partnered to create yet another iPhone/iPod Touch advertisement, err, game. This time around, VW is giving you the opportunity to pull the Scirocco R out of your pocket and take it for a spin around the Nurburgring.

The game's title is a bit misleading. You don't actually get to complete a full 24-hour endurance race, which I'm sure would be impossible with the handheld's battery life. Rather, the game drops you in at last leg of the race in 11th place with 23 hours and 50 minutes already on the … Read more

Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users' computers.

Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. It's then your job to tell it who they are as well as confirm its guesses. If someone you're tagging is in your Google address book, you can also look them up very quickly with auto-complete. Otherwise, Google gives you the option to add them as someone new; this information then gets synced back up your Google address book.

The system worked very well for me, but it was slow going. I had to leave the program running overnight for it to finish processing my 3,700 or so photos for faces. It also had my processor humming, since it was doing all the work on my machine instead of Google's giant server farm.

That's not to say Google hasn't included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you've got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive--and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.

And for photos it thinks contain people you've verified as contacts, it gives you quick "yes" and "no" buttons that can add or reject name tags. Oftentimes, clicking "yes" adds a few more suggestions for photos of that person that the program feels is safe enough to recommend. There's also a way to group accept or group decline its suggestions, which saves time you would have otherwise spent clicking the buttons one at a time.… Read more

For more than a few iPhone owners, homebrew apps like Snapture--which endows the iPhone camera with extra features--were reason enough to jump through jailbreaking hoops.

Thankfully, that's no longer necessary, at least for this particular app: Snapture has gone legit. It's available in the App Store for an introductory price of $1.99.

Snapture provides a wealth of handy camera tools, starting with full-screen shutter action: tap anywhere to capture a snapshot. That makes self-portraits a lot easier than trying to nail the Camera app's tiny shutter button.

You also get zoom and pan capabilities: just reverse-pinch … Read more

Updated 5:45 p.m. PDT with more details about e-mail push.

Some of you who have been restlessly awaiting the arrival of Google's official Gmail push solution for mobile phones can relax now. On Tuesday, Google expanded the over-the-air syncing capabilities in its Google Sync service to include Google's e-mail--but only for the iPhone and iPod Touch (version 3.0), and for Windows Mobile phones.

Google Sync began as a beta service to sync Google calendar items and contacts to iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Symbian Series 60 phones. Owners of iPhones, iPod Touches, and Windows Mobile phones … Read more

Using smart phones as navigation tools is all the rage these days, what with a slew of applications available for the iPhone and Android platforms that utilize those devices' built-in GPS systems in determining users' real-time location.

One such service is from Waze, which in August released its iPhone app after being available on Android for several months. Waze's service is meant to help drivers figure out where they are and how best to get where they're going, all with the help of a large community of other motorists.

Among the information that Waze provides are traffic flow, … Read more

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn't been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter's API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.

All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each … Read more

Streaming video continues to be largely MIA on the iPhone, but streaming audio? Ho, boy--it's an embarrassment of riches. Pandora, Slacker, Rhapsody. NPR News, Public Radio Player. The only thing missing? A killer sports app.

It's missing no more. ESPN Radio streams ESPN shows, podcasts, and even live college football games from stations around the country.

This is sports radio done right.… Read more

If you're a strategy gaming type of person, you know there is no shortage of tower defense games in the iTunes Store. It shouldn't be that big of a surprise, I suppose, because the iPhone and iPod Touch touch screens might be the best interface for games of this genre. Using your finger to choose and place towers couldn't be more intuitive. But even with the huge amount of tower defense games, some manage to rise above the rest. One of my apps this week is a sequel to one of the more popular games in the … Read more