scroll

Smart Scroll is a handy preference pane that can give you much more flexibility with trackpad, mouse (and Magic Mouse), and keyboard scrolling, including coasting iPhone-style scrolling.

Smart Scroll works in the background, but its settings interface gives you extensive control over its five primary features: the iPhone-style "Super Scroll" that lets the content of a window continue scrolling even after you let go of your trackpad or mouse (you can easily control the speed and amount of "coasting," stop with two fingers, and even reverse the x and y axis to match the iPhone); the &… Read more

Two years before the first iPhone, Apple applied for a patent that has become one of the staple gestures of the iOS platform. I recall when we first received the original iPhone at the Apple Store (where I was the Lead Specialist). We unboxed and powered-on a demo unit and the first thing we did was swipe through the preloaded iTunes playlist, amazed by Apple's new mobile operating system.

It is that gesture, the basic swipe-to-scroll motion that is one of the true signatures of Apple's iOS platform, that has been approved by the United States Patent and … Read more

Judy's TenKey is a three-in-one desktop calculator that has some interesting extras. It can be a standard full-function calculator, an adding machine, or a scientific calculator. A scrolling tape shows you just where you are in a running tally of calculations and automatically recalculates totals when you change something; multiple undos extricate you when you change something you shouldn't have. You can customize the look, add sound, and more.

An optional demo walks new users through the many features and settings Judy's TenKey offers. It starts by explaining how to hide the onscreen number pad, since most … Read more

StealthBomber is a free, 2D arcade game in which you pilot a "stealth bomber" dropping bombs on a steady stream of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles.

You hold your device vertically (portrait, not landscape), with your bomber moving back and forth at the top of the screen and your enemies moving left to right on the bottom of the screen. You move horizontally using a touch-screen slider at the base of the screen (or just touch and drag anywhere to move), and you drop bombs with an adjacent button. A set number of enemies, all with varying speeds … Read more

StarCannon is a remake of classic arcade shooters of the past, with 2D shoot-'em-up action and challenging boss fights. The graphics are smooth even on the older iPhone 3G. The controls are mostly effective, but can sometimes feel sluggish using a touch-to-move system rather than an onscreen joypad. Your ship fires automatically as long as you are touching the screen so you can play the game using only one finger or your thumb.

You can acquire three different weapons as you play and, just like top-down arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon lets you upgrade each weapon with more … Read more

Publishers aren't wasting any time getting their books onto the new iPad.

Publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Kaplan Publishing, McGraw-Hill Education, and Pearson have signed deals to be among the first to port their textbooks over to Apple's new tablet. Heading to the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch will be their textbooks, study guides, and test prep manuals.

Announced on Wednesday, the agreements were made with ScrollMotion, a company that develops the iPhone e-reader app Iceberg Reader and works with publishers to digitize their books for the mobile market.

The digital textbooks promise a slew … Read more

Google introduced two search features Friday that focus on delivering search results without having to visit the search results page.

Universal search features such as weather, time, and flight-tracking information can now be found in the Google Suggest drop-down list of possible results for relevant queries, such as "weather San Francisco." In addition, Google has released an extension for its Chrome browser called Quick Scroll that is essentially Google's take on the Control-F (or Command-F for you other folks) basic search function.

Google has offered image-based answers to simple questions such as "What time is it … Read more

When you open a folder in the Finder you should be able to scroll through your documents in the Finder with no problem; however, there may be an issue where when scrolling through your documents the scrolling behavior is jerky and choppy. This may be due to several reasons, including disk usage, and corruption in DS_Store files or caches, all which may interfere with the icon loading behavior of the Finder.… Read more

Super Screen Capture provides multiple options for making copies of onscreen images, but outdoes itself with its added abilities.

The interface was intuitive; we only consulted the Help file's instructions once to learn how to properly save images. We loved how the program's five tools for making screen captures were laid out on a small toolbar that stayed at the top of our desktop. We simply clicked on an option and the capture happened almost instantly with the Full screen and Window. The Shape, Polygon, and Scroll options meant we needed to click and drag our mouse to … Read more