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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software

Braid comes to the Mac


You have to admit: for all of the gaming woes that the Mac faithful has suffered, there's fortunately never been a shortage of great indie games for us to play. Aquaria made it to our platform, World of Goo appeared pretty early on, and now Braid, Jonathan Blow's terrific deconstruction of Super Mario Bros., has appeared on OS X thanks to the kind folks over at Hothead Games. The game has won more awards than you can count, but I can personally tell you it's great, as I played the XBLA release when it first arrived. It's a classic 2D platformer in the vein of Mario with a very important twist: you can reverse, slow, and replay time throughout the various levels. That twist results in an extremely artistic game that takes apart the original Mario story and ends up with something very much more beautiful and sad.

"Artistic"? "Beautiful"? "Sad"? Can I say these things about a videogame? Of course I can -- Braid stands in a class of its own as an experience that uses art and gameplay together to tell quite a story. If you're a fan of innovative games or just great interactive experiences, and haven't played through it yet (it's fairly short, maybe six hours at the most), it's definitely worth a look. The Greenhouse is selling the Mac or PC versions for $14.95.

Filed under: Accessories, Analysis / Opinion, Peripherals, Apple

TUAW Hands On with the Apple Keyboard


Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel-- not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing.

So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel-- the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin-- Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.

But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability-- you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.

Continue readingTUAW Hands On with the Apple Keyboard

Filed under: Odds and ends, MacBook, Flickr Find

Flickr Find: Geek Your Earings, PowerBook Style

TUAW reader Scott Benson pointed us to these fab-u-lous earrings made from the power buttons of two old Powerbook cases. After drilling a hole in the tab, they make a beautiful and geekalicious pair of earrings. From an Apple-female-wise karma-point-of-view, these earrings go a long way towards making up for the fact that the iPhone was designed in a way that forces women to trim their fingernails or otherwise tupe loke this.

[Via Treehugger]

Filed under: Odds and ends

Top Ten Most Beautiful Mac OS X Applications

Top ten lists are all the rage recently and Phillip Ryu gives us a unique one--the top ten most beautiful applications for Mac OS X. He's got a nice write-up and I agree with most of his choices.

10. Transmission
9. Voice Candy
8. Podcast Maker
7. Transmit
6. Quinn
5. AppZapper
4. Acquisition
3. Coverflow
2. Newsfire
1. Delicious Library

I would add to his list RapidWeaver and Comic Life, both programs that have impressed me with their ease-of-use and well-designed user interfaces. What apps would you add in your own top ten list of most beautiful Mac OS X applications?

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.


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