At first pass, you might think that The Wonders of Geology exists purely to show off the incredible photography of Michael Collier. While that’s certainly a good reason, it also functions as an excellent textbook, sure to instill enthusiasm for geology into any student.

Michael Collier is more than a photographer. He’s a geologist, too. Read his words or listen to him speak, and you’ll hear the kind of passion that a cook might use to talk about their favorite recipes.

The bulk of the app is made up of a slideshow of Collier’s photos, which are jaw-dropping on the iPad. The lighting, composition, saturation, and crystal-clear resolution on each one is perfection. You can pinch-to-zoom on all of the photos (without losing resolution), and each one has a tiny caption in the top left corner so you always know what (or rather where) you’re looking at.

If you choose, you can switch on narration, in which Collier himself gives talking points about each geological feature, often with visual pointers appearing so you can focus on exactly what he’s referring to, and sometimes even animations. You can swipe to turn pages at your leisure, or let the app move on autopilot, providing you with a guided tour of everything it contains.

There’s high-resolution cross-sections of prominent mountains and canyons, and there are wide shots of some of America’s best known ranges, but this is only the beginning. You’ll find bird’s eye views of tectonic plates and faults, as well as fascinating looks at volcanoes, glaciers, and areas of erosion. For each photo, you can click on a “Map” tab, which pops up a full-screen map and shows you exactly where in the world the photo was taken. There are also diagrams, a table of contents, thumbnails, and more.

Touching on all corners of North America, The Wonders of Geology is a wonder itself. It functions perfectly well as a beautiful coffee table book, but plumbing its depths reveals far greater riches. It’s a must-own for educators, or anyone interested in the majesty of nature. The price is probably steeper than you’re expecting, at $12.99, but this level of quality doesn’t come cheap. It’s worth every penny.

Presenting: the untold, little-known story of one of Apple’s earliest and most influential artists. Susan Kare’s place in history is among its most important and foundational, yet her body of work is comprised of something that most people take for granted and never give a second thought to.

I have to be honest: I’d never heard of Susan Kare before I picked up this book. And once I did, I flipped through its sparse, white pages with lots of empty white space thinking, Okay, so it’s icons. What’s the big deal? It turns out, it is a mighty big deal. You may not have heard of Susan Kare either, so let me give you a quick history lesson. Stay with me, it’s worth it — it ties directly into Apple history.

In 1983, when Apple was designing the first commercial Mac, they hired Susan Kare to come on board and design various parts of their operating system’s user interface. Her first job was the creation of several of the Mac’s earliest fonts, including the classic typefaces Chicago, Geneva, and Monaco — fonts that had characters that were, for the first time ever, spaced according to the width of the character, instead of every character width being identical. But the work she is best known for is what came next: designing the sublime and inviting icons used in the Macintosh OS.

Susan Kare Icons collects many of these original pixelated icons in generously-sized formats that let you best appreciate their lovely simplicity. Her earliest prototypes, as the book explains, were drawn with an ink pen on graph paper, with each graph square representing a pixel. Kare designed each icon to be as something as instantly recognizable as a traffic sign, and this design philosophy is evident in all of her earliest works.

One of her most recognizable icons is the Mac command key icon, and the book provides its fascinating backstory, which also demonstrates the lengths to which Kare went in looking for inspiration. The command symbol was first seen at Swedish campgrounds, designating points of interest for sightseers. It was made to look like a stylized castle as seen from above. She’s also responsible for the “Happy Mac” icon that Apple fans know so well (and which is featured on the cover of her book), as well as loads of UI elements, file icons, and even some of the earliest program icons.

Over the years, she moved on with Steve Jobs to NeXT, and eventually worked with Microsoft and IBM on many of their interface elements. More recently, she’s crafted the images used in Facebook’s popular “Gifts” feature. Thumbing through Susan Kare Icons, you may be stunned at just how many of its eighty icons you recognize.

The genius of her work is how she’s able to distill complicated functions down to simple, instantly-understandable images. Take her tortoise and hare icons, for example; they were placed on opposite ends of a slider in the first Mac control panel to indicate a range of speed settings. It’s simple, elegant, and everyone understands it.

Jobs gets the majority of the credit for ideas that changed the world, but this book makes it clear that Susan Kare is an artist who changed the world in her own right. Every one of us still use her thousands of designs daily — or modern designs that build off of her work and would not exist without the foundations she laid. Susan Kare Icons should be required reading for any student of iconography — particularly those interested in 8-bit pixel art. Because Kare might just be the inventor of the entire genre.

Each copy of the book, which is available exclusively at the artist’s website, is personally signed by her. Selected icons from her library are also available to buy as art prints, including a pair of pixelated representations of the ultimate Apple icon himself — Steve Jobs.

What groundbreaking game would you expect to come next from the makers of Scribblenauts? Their answer might surprise you, but in a way, it’s every bit as innovative.

Run Roo Run assigns you a single task: getting a kangaroo from one side of your screen to the other. Along the way, you’ll encounter all sorts of obstacles that must be jumped over, as well as some fun twists to the game mechanics that come along after every set of levels.

But let me back up a bit.

The minimalistic story presented at the outset has Roo, a mother kangaroo, chasing her kidnapped baby Joey across Australia. It sounds pretty heavy for a cute  little platformer, but 5th Cell presents it like a lighthearted Wile E. Coyote cartoon. All that really matters is that you’re a kangaroo hopping your way across the screen. The game has the feel of a side-scroller, but it’s not; the screen never moves. Instead, you simply try to guide Roo across the screen and avoid the traps and obstacles along the way, so every level is a single screen.

The controls are a study in the simplicity of design. Roo will move forward on her own, you just have to tell her to start, and when she needs to jump. Both of these actions are activated with a single tap on the screen. You don’t even have to touch the area of the screen where you want her to jump from or to; a single tap anywhere on the screen will instantly make her jump.

As you advance through the game’s many, many levels, the obstacles multiply and become ever more complex, with different kinds of obstacles, double jumps, elastic materials to spring from to jump further, anti-gravity, and so on. Ultimately, the game comes down how well you can strategically time your jumps. There’s a time clock running every time you start a new screen, and medals are awarded based on how fast you pass that screen; the time is cumulative, though, so each time you restart a screen, it adds to your final time, resulting in a lower score. (An easy cheat for this is to simply restart the screen, which restarts the clock.) There are the usual leaderboards through Game Center, which let you compare scores against your friends.

Progression through the game is marked with a map screen, which shows the line you trace through Australia. Screens are grouped into chapters, each of which includes a few added “extreme” levels, that are just as hard as they sound. There are twenty chapters that come with the game initially, but what gives the game some of its innovation is that once you buy the app, it automatically delivers a new chapter to your device once a week (for ten consecutive weeks) — at no additional cost or effort from you. Downloadable content is certainly nothing new for gaming, but it’s nearly unheard of for arcade or puzzle games, and having it auto-delivered gives Run Roo Run the feel of 5th Cell trying something new — and possibly revolutionary.

Many an iOS puzzler or platformer can be played once or twice, and then forgotten about in favor of something new and different. By design, Run Roo Run has a built-in way of guaranteeing that players will keep returning to the game, and it could herald a whole new way of gaming on portable devices.

Fortunately, it’s fun enough to give you a good reason to keep coming back. It has a high degree of polish and perfectly hits the sweet spot between “easy to play” and “hard to master.”

Numberlys screenshot

It’s magical the way that Moonbot Studios, creators of The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, imbue brilliant creativity and pure joy into everything they create. I have no idea how they do it, but I hope they never stop. Numberlys is a perfect melding of their glorious animation and the inventive ways they make the reader part of the story.

Imagine the world of Metropolis, if it were inhabited by adorable little round-headed creatures with big, expressive eyes, who know nothing of letters or words. In this invented world, there are only numbers. Numbers are used for everything, including names, objects, and places.

Numberlys screenshot

In this drab but fascinating world, we’re introduced to five characters who grow tired of their humdrum existence and decide that they need something better than numbers to express themselves. It’s a pivotal decision that inspires them to create the first alphabet, an action that will have major ramifications for their world.

Numberlys screenshot

As the app plays, the action switches between silent movie-style “caption cards,” which narrate the Numberlys’ tale, and the animated scenes. You can turn off the curiously Russian-accented voiceover for the narrated segments, should you want to read it for yourself or aloud to someone else. The animated scenes — and Numberlys is probably made up of a good 50-60% CGI animation — are utterly euphoric, on a Pixar level of quality and expressiveness. Our five little heroes are a delightful crew who have a tendency for pratfalls and a talent for creativity. When they go rogue from society and commandeer a massive factory to build their new alphabet, the viewer is invited to join them in their work.

Numberlys screenshot

Using crazy and clever tools of their trade, they bend, twist, hammer, and bounce on huge metal beams until they arrive at the desired shape — actions that you control. A few letters are created in pairs, but for the most part, your objective is to build the entire alphabet, a single letter at a time. You can go through them one by one, or pull down an index menu (an artistic marvel in its own right that’s designed as spinning gears) to select a letter or scene to jump to.

Numberlys screenshot

Moonbot’s insistence on crafting Numberlys in a stylized way works on every level, right down to the grainy, black and white aesthetic. The color red is inserted at opportune moments, representing the things that you can interact with. Numberlys also gives Moonbot an opportunity to playfully change the perspective, switching to portrait view instead of the landscape view that Morris Lessmore used. These little shifts tell me that Moonbot isn’t interested in tying themselves down to one way of doing things, that they love trying new methods, and that they make serving the needs of a story (or an app) among their top priorities, regardless of what those needs may be. The app also comes with a lovely original soundtrack that plays non-stop throughout the story.

Numberlys screenshot

Numberlys is a storybook in structure, even though it feels more like an interactive short film. It beautifully conveys a child-like wonder as each new letter is completed — a thinly veiled reference to Moonbot’s passion for words and storytelling. It’s a passion they do a marvelous job of passing on to their fans.

I did experience one glitch: the app crashed on my first generation iPad every time I reached the mini game for the letter B, no matter how many times I tried to access it. I assume this will be fixed in a future update; Moonbot has been great about updating and patching their apps in the past.

Numberlys screenshot

There simply aren’t enough positive words I can heap upon Numberlys. It’s that good. But thanks to the little guys in the app, we have an infinite supply of letters and words to build and weave together in wonderful ways. Numberlys is a masterpiece that every iDevice owner must have.

I love discovering awesome apps that I haven’t seen or heard anybody else talking about. Here’s a delightful gem that’s part game, part “experience,” and all fun. It’s perfect for kids and adults alike, and I guarantee it’s like nothing else on your iPad.

Windosill is the creation of artist Patrick Smith, an artist who specializes in surrealism and vector-based images. It’s hard to describe exactly what Windosill is, and that’s by design. It’s made to be something you experience in a tactile, visual, and auditory way — not something you read about or talk about. As such, there are no instructions, nothing to read inside the app, no story, and nothing I would call a character. So there’s no speaking, and no music, either.

Instead, Windosill presents you with a delightfully unexpected hybrid experience, where you’re presented with page-after-page of interactive art, a sort of storybook diorama, where strange objects and peculiar creatures exist everywhere you look. There’s a small wooden engine that you guide from one side of the screen to the other. Your aim is to get it to the end of this odd little journey, usually by unlocking a door on the right side of the screen. Doors are unlocked with a tiny white cube, so usually your purpose on each page is to find this cube — or coax one of the creatures into giving it to you.

Touch something on the screen — anything — and it reacts. Absolutely everything in this unique little world is interactive, so you can tap, drag, spin, or stretch anything you see. It gets really interesting when you see how the various things on a particular screen interact with one another. Everything functions with realistic physics and has its own sound effects as well. No detail is overlooked.

You may think, on first brush, that Windosill was made for iPad, since it works so beautifully with the touchscreen controls. The app actually started its life as a Flash-based browser game, yet I can’t imagine a more perfect home for it than the iPad. The only nitpick I can offer is that the $3 price feels a bit steep for what’s an hour-long experience at best. But it’s worth it.

But the best advice I can give is to slow down and enjoy it, anyway. Gamers used to blasting through puzzle games aren’t going to get the best experience from it, because this is an adventure you should take your time with, soak up, and explore with great care. Playful, charming, and inventive, Windosill is a feast for the mind and the senses — a rare treat where every bite should be relished.

The blank grid you start with

There are so many apps out there, and iTunes does a terrible job of showing us all of the can’t-miss stuff. Today I’ve got a $.99 app you’ve probably never heard of, but which you every iOS user should own. Because it’s without a doubt one of the coolest apps I’ve ever seen.

A developer named Spool created BeatForge, but don’t bother looking them up. You won’t discover very much. Their website is practically empty. And the description of BeatForge that’s in the iTunes Store is remarkably brief. It turns out, there just isn’t that much that can be said to describe BeatForge. Like the Matrix, you have to see it for yourself.

My first creation. I started with the diagonal line and then added more as I went. The result was really cool.

The app presents you with a simple grid. A vertical line moves across it sideways, and when you type various squares on the grid, they activate sounds that play when the line passes over them. Typically, the top half of the grid represents musical notes, while the bottom half is for various percussion sounds. This unassuming UI presents you with nearly infinite possibilities for creating fun, original musical beats and sequences. It’s one of the cleverest uses for iOS’ touchscreen interface I’ve ever seen.

I tapped random squares just see what would happen. Yep, this sounded cool too.

The brilliance of BeatForge is that it automatically keeps every sound in time and in harmony, so no matter what you do, it sounds great. Because of this, absolutely anybody can create music. I don’t play any instruments (I took several years of piano when I was young, but it’s long gone now), but the beats I put together just fiddling around with BeatForge turned out fantastic no matter what I did. I tapped some patterns, and was presented with soothing melodies. I tapped completely random squares and it resulted in sounds more of electronica kind of complexities. And it always sounded good, no matter what I did. It’s impossible to make bad music with BeatForge, and that’s its genius.

Okay, so how about a simple line pattern? Still good!

But there’s more to the app than just the music grid. Swipe a finger down, and the grid slides about halfway down the screen, revealing a list of options. You can change the grid to different kinds of pre-programmed sounds, such as rock guitars or video game-style pings, for a total of 8 different sound grids. There are nine different chords that you can switch around, which adjusts your music sequences accordingly. There’s also a shuffle button, that automatically randomizes the chords for each cycle. This goes a long way toward keeping your music from becoming repetitive. Then there are five sets of beats, which you can alter at will, each one giving your music a different kind of rhythmic sound. Mixing-and-matching these various options vastly opens up the possibilities for what you can do.

The options menu.

You can change any of these options on-the-fly, as your song is playing, to see what your current creation sounds like with each. There are also “play” and “stop” buttons, a “clear grid” button, and a meter for changing the rhythm’s speed. Finally, the are options for saving your song or playing pre-made ones. That doesn’t mean you can record your own songs. BeatForge remembers your grid layouts and option selections, but it doesn’t offer any means of recording the music you play (though there’s nothing to stop you from recording your beats with your own external equipment!). It simply plays your grid in real-time, and will go on forever until you tell it to stop.

Finally, I tried drawing a shape. Not sure what I was going for, but even this sounded awesome.

Intuitive and endlessly fun, BeatForge is one of the smartest and most enjoyable music apps I’ve ever encountered. The only thing it lacks is the ability to share your creations with others. But the price is right, at just $.99. If Spool updates it regularly with new sound options and allows users to share what they make, BeatForge could easily become one of the hottest tickets on iTunes.

Apple believes that Mac OS X Lion is the easiest-to-use version of Mac OS ever, so they opted not to create a user manual. Having brought OS X more in line with the intuitive user interface of iOS on the iPad, the theory was that users would already know what to do with Lion, and have no need of instructions. But this very idea is an advanced one, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Best suited for those who know nothing about computers, or at the very least are recent converts from Windows, Wallace Wang’s My New Mac, Lion Edition is the missing manual that Lion users are looking for. Its 472 pages contain everything you want to know about how to use your iMac or MacBook, in everyday language.

Structured a lot like a …For Dummies book, My New Mac is laid out in a branching tree structure, with loads of chapters and sub-headings, each one tackling a different aspect of how Lion works. Users who have never before done things like connect a computer to the Internet, download & install apps, burn a CD, or import digital pictures from a camera, will finally understand these how these cryptic things work.

Unlike traditional manuals, Mr. Wang helps you learn by suggesting projects for you to complete. Instead of explaining every single thing you can do with your Mac, the book zeroes-in on 56 specific tasks that the majority of users want to do, and teaches you how to do it. Also unlike the typical user manual, Wang isn’t afraid to show off his sense of humor (in addition to being a writer, he’s also a standup comic). For example, Chapter 19 is titled, “Giving Your Macintosh Multiple Personalities with User Accounts.” Now there’s a title Steve Jobs would never have approved.

This is the third edition of My New Mac, and as such it provides lots of instructions regarding Lion’s new features, like Mission Control, Launchpad, and the Mac App Store. You’ll also find step-by-step instructions for the overhauled versions of Mail, iPhoto, iMovie, and more. Experienced users won’t find a lot of advanced tips or techniques, but My New Mac isn’t really aimed at them. Wang’s book is plainly written, covering all of the basics that Apple newcomers need to know, and it gets my recommendation.

X is for X-Ray screenshot

Developer Touch Press might just be who Apple was thinking of when they invented the iPad. Their remarkable, acclaimed apps — which include The Elements, Solar System, and March of the Dinosaurs — specialize in making virtual objects tangible, letting you touch and interact with all sorts of fascinating things.

One of Touch Press’ latest apps is called X is for X-Ray. The idea is to x-ray everyday objects so you can see what’s inside them, and learn more about how they work. Twenty-six objects — one for every letter of the alphabet — are given the x-ray treatment, and you can touch and play with every one of them. Sometimes in surprising ways.

X is for X-Ray screenshot

The standard page in X is for X-Ray, which I suppose is technically a sort of interactive textbook (only way more fun), shows you one of these objects and then gives you a full page of text containing interesting facts about said object. There’s a page icon at the bottom of the screen, and if you tap that, it changes the page of facts into a short poem. Clearly this latter detail is there for kids, as the poems even come with an option to have the app recite the poem aloud to you, using pre-recorded audio.

X is for X-Ray screenshot

The pictures of the objects are stunning, allowing you to swipe-to-turn them a full 360 degrees, and even pinch-to-zoom in. Swipe down over the object to turn on the x-ray effect, which transforms the object into a see-through version of itself; you can spin and zoom in on the x-ray version, too. If you like, you can even swipe just halfway down, and view the image in an overlay of both versions. If you have a pair of 3D glasses laying around, you can double-tap on most of the images and get a stereoscopic version, which (you guessed it) is also rotatable and zoomable. The interaction is super smooth, with zero lag (even on a first-generation iPad).

X is for X-Ray screenshot

The beauty of the app is its attention to detail. Almost every object has some unique effect, like the way the car engine’s pistons turn when you rotate it in x-ray mode. Or the zipper, which doesn’t rotate, but actually unzips to show you (gasp!) an x-ray peek at the insides of your iPad. The piggy bank has coins inside that react to your device’s tilt controls. There’s even a page that talks about Hugh Turvey, the photographer who captured all of the incredible images used in the app, and sliding your finger down over his portrait reveals a human x-ray underneath.

X is for X-Ray screenshot

I have a feeling there are even more little secrets contained within X is for X-Ray that I have yet to uncover, because that’s how Touch Press works. They make learning fun in a whole new way, and this app is a perfect example of that dynamic. It’s something that both I and my four-year-old have had loads of fun with. It’s brilliant.

Grid view

From the popular (Sears, JC Penney) to the obscure (Spy Museum Store), there’s truly something for everyone in the attractive app Catalog Spree for iPad. You’ll find catalogs for clothes, electronics, gadgets, toys, gifts, tchotchkes, and even foodstuffs like the Popcorn Factory and Omaha Steaks.

Cover Flow view

When you first open Catalog Spree, you’re presented with a huge list of catalogs that you can easily browse. There are two views available, both similar to how you peruse your music or movies in iTunes — a grid view or “cover flow.” Just tap on a catalog you want to read, and it downloads wirelessly to your iPad. The catalog will load itself automatically and show you a standard two-page view. You can flip through the pages the same way that page turns work in iBooks, or you can use the strip at the bottom of the screen to quickly scroll through all of a catalog’s pages. There’s also a search function that will take you straight to whatever you’re looking for. If you haven’t selected a catalog yet, searching will display a complete list of catalogs that your search term appears in — and it’s remarkably fast. You can even subscribe to your favorite catalogs and get notifications when new editions are posted, or when there’s a special offer.

A catalog's cover page

I’ve always been wary of placing orders on web forms from my iPad, because it’s not the easiest or most stable platform. But ordering from Catalog Spree is easy, and it works very well. You can select items to buy from inside the app, but purchasing is done when you tap on the shopping cart icon, taking you directly to the ordering page on a corresponding retailer’s website. I placed an order using the BBC America catalog (and website), and it went off without a hitch. I still wish Catalog Spree offered the option to place your order right inside the app itself, instead of taking you to a website, but I can understand how this was a more feasible option for all involved.

Inside the BBC America catalog

The catalog selection is robust, and new editions — and new retailers — are added almost daily. The available catalogs include Coldwater Creek, Woolrich, Nordstrom, Chicos, Filson, Bullock & Jones, Oriental Trading, Hammacher Schlemmer, Plow & Hearth, Red Envelope, Magellan’s, and dozens more. I was pleased to see charity catalogs like UNICEF and Heifer included as well. I’d love to see more big-name catalogs included like L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, Pottery Barn, Disney, or Toys ‘R’ Us (sorry guys, no Victoria’s Secret, either), but with new catalogs being added all the time, they’re bound to appear sooner or later.

Subscription options

Don’t see a catalog you’re looking for? There’s a built-in “Request a Catalog” suggestion box function you can use, and the devs at Padopolis will consider your request. You can bookmark any catalog page you like, or mark it as a favorite with a star. The app also boasts Facebook integration, so you can share products or brag about purchases to your friends. The pinch-to-zoom function is pretty unique; a magnifying glass pops into existence when you reverse-pinch, and you can slide it over any part of a catalog’s page for a closer look.

The Shopping Cart icon takes you to an order page at the retailer's website

Smooth, responsive, and glitch-free, Catalog Spree is a must-have for power shoppers, and it’s free. It’s the best catalog experience I’ve had on an iPad, light years ahead of the likes of Google’s Catalog app.

Age of Enigma screenshot

There’s something charmingly retro about the new Mac adventure game Age of Enigma. It doesn’t have state-of-the-art graphics or cutting edge game play. What it does have is a great story, terrific puzzles, and an engrossing whole package that’s much greater than the sum of its parts.

Age of Enigma puts you in the shoes of Ashley Reeves, a medium who specializes in helping the dead find peace. As the game begins, Ashley has a horrific nightmare about a house fire. When she wakes, she finds a summons that brings her to the very house from her dream — a mysterious, haunted place that’s home to five spirits who haven’t been able to find rest in the afterlife. Each spirit comes from a different part of the world and historical time period. One by one, Ashley is tasked with earning the spirits’ trust, after which she must venture into the events of their lives to find a way to set right their worst mistakes.

Age of Enigma screenshot

But there’s more happening than just the spirits Ashley must help. The story’s undercurrent is about Ashley herself and her own journey to discover the extent of her abilities and her destiny with a shadowy organization called the Fraternity. Along the way, she meets a guide named Nathan, who appears to be helping to point her in the right directions so she can help each of the lost spirits, but who has a surprising agenda of his own.

The game progresses as you solve its puzzles, which represent a wide variety of mini games. There’s a mosaic tile game, matching games, word puzzles, and much more. And then there are practical puzzles, like finding the key to a room you must enter to continue the game. There are several of these interspersed with the mini game puzzles, and I found the puzzles and story elements to be well balanced.

Age of Enigma screenshot

It’s never frustratingly difficult, but Age of Enigma provides some very satisfying challenges. Most of the puzzles randomize their variables, giving the game some replay value. This actually comes in handy, since you can go straight to any of the 26 mini games and play them again after you defeat the campaign mode. And many of these mini games are worth playing more than once.

Age of Enigma screenshot

The art style used by developer Casual Box adds to the retro feel, falling somewhere between a cartoon and a comic book. But parents should be warned that given the game’s subject matter, it contains some occultish imagery, so it’s probably best to keep the kiddies away. French composers the Cleophas Brothers contribute the haunting original soundtrack (which you can buy from iTunes), and there’s both the standard Adventure mode, there’s also a Casual mode that makes it much easier to solve the puzzles and progress through the game faster, for those more interested in the story than the gaming.

Age of Enigma screenshot

Although this version of the game is for the Mac, an iPad version is currently in the works. (The game began its life a few months ago as a boxed CD-ROM game for PC called Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost, though Casual Box created it almost entirely on Macs.)

It reminds me of old school point-and-click adventures like Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. Frankly, I sorely miss those kinds of games, and hope that Age of Enigma will mark their return. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s engrossing and addictive, and adventure lovers will adore it.

Selective focus — pictures that have areas blurred out — with is all the rage with photographers. Focus is a neat little app for the Mac that makes it quick and easy to apply selective focus effects to any picture, along with a few other photography tweaks.

Selective focus is a commonly used tool these days that gives your eyes a specific area of an image to focus on. When implemented properly, it’s a subtle but powerful way of getting the viewer to zero-in on what you want your photo to be about. Take the image of my son at the bottom of this page, where he’s standing at the back of a caboose. The original image shows a small boy contrasted against the size of the big, red train car. But the second photo is cropped and blurred so that instead you notice my son’s reaction to where he’s standing more than you notice the caboose.

Focus makes this process exceptionally easy. It uses gestures and click-and-drag effects to let you select the area you want to have the optimal focus, and then guide lines show the areas where blur will be applied. You can adjust these lines by dragging, and Focus‘ best feature might just be how it seamlessly shows in real time how the blur effects look on your pictures. There’s a circular filter that you can expand and contract the size of, or there are filters that use lines, which you can set vertical, horizontal, or tilt to the exact angle you want.

Everything about Focus is made to be easy enough for photography novices to use, but powerful enough for professionals. For example, unlike other photo editing tools, there are no measurement values shown on any of the effects sliders. In other words, Focus doesn’t tell you when you’re using a filter at say 10% strength or 50% strength or what have you. It just shows a blank slider, eliminating numbers from your end of the equation so you can edit your pictures in a more instinctual way, settling on simply whatever looks best to you.

In addition to selective focus, the app also gives you the power to easily straighten an image that’s off-kilter, and/or crop your pics with simple lines. There are presets for common aspect ratios that you can use, and there’s also a slider that lets you adjust how vivid the color saturation is. There’s also an override for the amount of preset blur that’s used — allowing you to increase or decrease the amount of blurring. You can even use OS X Lion’s gesture effects like pinch-to-zoom in your editing. A recently added feature automatically defaults the focus area on your image using facial recognition, which drastically simplifies the process even further.

The $9.99 price feels a bit steep for an app that does just a handful of very specific photo editing effects, and it’s the only facet of the app that gives me any sort of pause. There are plenty of apps for both Mac and iOS that can do the things that Focus can do — and many of them cost less. But what Focus does, it does exceedingly well, with intuitive simplicity and elegance. Developer Coppertino is adding new features regularly at no added cost, which will only increase its value over time. If selective focusing is what you’re primarily interested in doing with your pictures, you won’t find a better way of doing it. (Check out some of my own before and after images edited with Focus below.)

I edited the 'before' photo (top) to look more like an Instagram style picture (bottom)

The original image (top) was a lovely picture of my daughter, Emma; the edited image pops with more natural colors and lighting, and puts the emphasis on her face

There's nothing really wrong with the original image, which I took a few years ago at Gettysburg, but I find the 'Focus'-edited image a lot more interesting visually

Each level starts with disjointed lines like these…

Deceptively simple Blueprint 3D represents an entirely new kind of game: one specifically made for the touchscreen format of the iPad and iPhone, that wouldn’t work on any other kind of device.

The gameplay mechanic behind Blueprint 3D is a little hard to explain verbally, but super easy to understand once you see it in action. The idea behind this puzzler is to form a standard blueprint schematic by manipulating it in 3D space. Turn it, flip it, twist it, anything you can think of. The pieces are stuck in place, but by changing the orientation of the entire blueprint, you can line them up to form a 2D drawing. The clock ticks while you work, so your objective is to put the drawings together as quickly as possible.

Nothing but a touchscreen could make a game like this playable (Microsoft’s Kinect might be able to do it, but players would suffer for not being able to physically touch their screens). Personally, I find it terribly exciting when games like this come along, that take full advantage of the iOS platform. It’s available for iPhone, but the iPad version is where it truly belongs, because the level of detail in the line drawings is easier to make out on the larger screen.

The game is split into categorical packs such as architecture, electronics, military, space, and more, with several dozen puzzles in each. Tackling one puzzle after another, the game moves fast once you get the hang of it (hint: look for similar kinds of lines or shapes that go together, and try to line them up). The kind of instant gratification it provides makes it all the more addictive. It’s not hard to find yourself spending an hour or two, playing the game all the way through in a single setting. Thankfully, developer FDG Entertainment promises more packs in the future (I’m hoping for a Christmas pack). It’s also loaded with achievements, which manage to make even the most mundane aspects of the game fun.

Another area where the game excels is in its construction. It’s the kind of game Steve Jobs would have loved for its attractive, clean design. It’s just phenomenally well made, with enough attention to even the tiniest details to prove that the developer considered this a labor of love. The interface looks like an architect’s drawing desk, while the broken up schematic that you manipulate is smooth and responsive. (You can even alter the speed of its movements in the Settings menu.) The sound effects are great, with a satisfying click for every button and a photo snap when you succeed in setting a blueprint right. It’s a very inviting game environment, and everything just works exactly as it should. I experienced no glitches or crashes in all the time I spent playing.

Blueprint 3D never creates too much of a challenge for the player, but there’s something remarkably gratifying about putting those drawings together. Somehow, it never gets old. Thanks to its triumphant design and perfect interface, and its wildly original gameplay, this is one of the very best time-wasters you’ll find in the App Store.

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot

Combining grammar with strategy, word puzzle fanatics are in for an addictive treat with the terrific W.E.L.D.E.R., from Ayopa Games.

A bit of a steampunk vibe infuses W.E.L.D.E.R.‘s every pixel, with metal welding sounds and visual effects. It puts a number of twists on the usual word-building grid game. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no timer. Instead of the motivation of a ticking clock, the game presents you with limited resources that you must use wisely, or game over.

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot showing gaps caused by rusted metal tiles

With a minimum of four letters — unlike the usual three from most word games — you can build any word you can think of. The letters disappear, and new ones slide down from the top of the screen to take their place. Every level comes with a prescribed number of words that must be built, in order to advance. You’re also given a certain number of “swaps” (or moves) that you can perform, before you run out and lose the game. You start out with less swaps than the number of words you need to build, but you can earn more swaps by building bigger and better words.

As you might imagine, minimal movement is what you’re after, and the more words you can build with just one swap, the better. Sort of like Scrabble, lettered tiles have colored backgrounds that correspond with how many points they’ll score you; score enough points, and you get more swaps added to your bank. There are also blank wooden tiles that you can use to stand in for any letter — though you don’t get any points for doing so. But things get a lot more interesting when the game starts introducing variant tiles that have properties that change things dramatically.

W.E.L.D.E.R.'s dictionary function

There are tiles that burn red hot, which you can’t swap, but which will move with gravity as tiles beneath them are eliminated. There are the rusted metal tiles, which are like immovable rocks: you can’t swap them, and they don’t move for anything. When these start piling up, it can create some major challenges, particularly when they’re at the top of the screen, because they’ll prevent the columns beneath them from receiving new tiles, creating huge gaps in the board. Then there are the gold and jewel-encrusted tiles, which give you greatly increased points. If you manage to combine any of these tiles in a single word, it multiplies your points dramatically.

There are also special swaps you can earn over time, including the group swap (which is exactly what it sounds like), the reverse swap (do a reversal of up to a entire row or column of tiles), and the jump swap (switches any two swappable tiles on the board, regardless of where they are). These are very limited resources, so again, it takes a strategic mind to know when to use them and when to save them for later.

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot showing gold & jeweled tiles

Game Center leaderboards let you see how you stack up against your friends, and there are a huge number of clever achievements that are more thought-out than the seemingly arbitrary achievements you might find in other games, making you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. There’s a nifty dictionary feature that lets you tap on any word you’ve spelled to see what it means, using iOS 5′s built-in dictionary. There’s Twitter and Facebook integration, so you can share your biggest victories with others. And there’s even iCloud capability that transfers your saved games from one iOS device to another.

W.E.L.D.E.R. is a highly polished word puzzle game that gets my highest recommendation. It’s a blast, and I can’t stop playing it!

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

Giving you the power to conjure anything you can imagine is Scribblenauts Remix, a wildly creative game that’s perfectly suited for iOS.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it may surprise you to learn that Scribblenauts Remix is a port of the best parts of two Nintendo DS games: Scribblenauts and Super Scribblenauts. The game takes you through level after level where you’re presented with various challenges. To solve these puzzles, you quite literally use your imagination. Just think up an object or a kind of person that can help you, and when you type in the word, that thing is instantly created in the level. If it’s an object, you can grab it and use it to help you; if it’s a person, they have minds of their own and will immediately set out to solve your problem for you.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

It’s sort of the ultimate sandbox game, because it has a vocabulary of thousands of available words, and when you add adjectives to the mix, you’re presented with hundreds of thousands of possibilities. For example, if you’re presented with a house that’s on fire, you can write the word “fireman” and one will appear to put out the fire for you. But you’ll get different results if you write “angry fireman” or “lazy fireman,” for example. You can call up anything from vehicles to buildings and monsters, and more. Just about any adjective you can think of will change the nature of your creation, so feel free to experiments with descriptors like colors, moods, “giant/tiny,” “cold/hot,” and anything else you can think of. There are also special items like potions, which will fundamentally alter your creations after they’ve been created.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

One thing that always amazed me about the original game is how they crammed such a huge dictionary of available words/objects into a game made for a system as small as the DS. The second game magnified this enormously, yet the full dictionary appears to have survived the transition to iOS. That said, I thought up several words that the dictionary didn’t recognize. (Though to be fair, I work with words for a living.)

Most of the fun of the game boils down to conjuring multiple things up and seeing what happens when they interact. The game wisely comes with a “playground” mode on the main menu, where you’re set free from the puzzles to create anything you want. Don’t like what you’ve made? There are no penalties to drag anything you want into the trashcan in the top right corner of the screen. If you ever get stuck, there are always hints available to spark your imagination.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

The levels feel as though they were designed specifically to train you in how to play the game, by showing you the possibilities of what you can do. 50 puzzle levels may sound like a lot, but it goes by remarkably fast, and it pales in comparison to the original game’s 220 levels. Still, Remix costs a fraction of what the DS game sold for, so I guess you get what you pay for. But I found myself hungry for more when it was done. I have no idea if developer 5th Cell has any plans to add more content during the game’s life cycle, but it would be most welcome if so. As it is, it feels like a very abbreviated version of the original.

I created this little homage to Back to the Future Part II in the sandbox mode

In the DS games, you could type out your words of choice or you could write them out by hand, using the DS’ stylus, and the game was capable of reading your writing (well, more or less). With the iPhone and iPad’s touchscreen capabilities, I was surprised to find that handwriting isn’t supported in Remix. Especially on the iPad, where you have plenty of room to write with your finger, it could have worked quite well. But maybe some sacrifices had to be made to keep the app to a decent download size.

At once both overflowing with possibilities and over far too soon, Scribblenauts Remix is nonetheless a blast to play and works so well on iOS, you might think it was made specifically for this platform.

Like its namesake game, Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots is a simple game with a simple objective, yet wickedly addictive gameplay that will have you slice and dicing for hours, thanks to a terrific new mode of play.

Fruit Ninja is, of course, the enormously successful portable game that gives you the simplistic-sounding goal of slicing virtual fruit with your finger as it’s tossed into the air from somewhere off-screen to the bottom. What gives it staying power are the bombs that are randomly tossed with the fruit, which you must avoid or game over. The bombs turn the whole thing into an exercise in reflex control — not only must you be quick, you must be discerning as well.

DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots may not seem like the most obvious property for a tie-in, until you remember that Puss is a master swordsman. His character adds very little to the game beyond a few victory-inspired voice-overs and some fun variants on the blades you’ll use. Those blades include Puss’ standard sword, four claws, a “guitar” blade that looks like the neck of a guitar, a “magic beans” blade (based on a story point from the movie), and inexplicably, a rocket blade. (Maybe this makes sense if you’ve seen the movie; I have not.) You can unlock the differing blades and some Puss-themed backgrounds by achieving feats throughout the game. But these variants are purely aesthetic, changing nothing about the gameplay.

What really sets Puss in Boots‘ flavor of Fruit Ninja apart is the “Challenge” mode, a new gauntlet-style series of mini games that each present unique twists on the Fruit Ninja formula. In one small round after another, you’re charged with slicing up all that fruit while avoiding bombs — but in new and unusual ways. There are challenges with sets of shuttered windows that fly open, and you have to quickly slice the fruit behind them, but not the bombs (of course). There’s the challenge with the gigantic, solo bomb bouncing around and obscuring much of the window, while regular-sized fruit bounce behind it; you can guess what the objective is there. Or maybe you’ll have to slice up specific types of fruit on a conveyor while frantically avoiding the bombs that intermittently appear alongside them.

The classic game mode is well represented, too, with fine-tuned controls and nicely randomized targets. There are the expected leaderboards and whatnot online components, but nothing resembling a multiplayer mode. The faithful will be happy to hear that tomatoes have finally been added to the mix.

Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots might not offer quite enough difference from the original game for longtime players, but it’s the best reason yet for newbies to jump on the fruit-slicing bandwagon.

But this fact is now being addressed by many game developers who are realizing the new gameplay innovations they can put into established game genres because the touch controls tablets offer. One game that is doing this is Squids.

Squids was developed by Game Bakers, a new game development company that has a very good pedigree. It’s run by a group of former Ubisoft employees who have worked on top tier titles like Splinter Cell Double Agent and Tom Clancy’s EndWar.

Squids is a curious little animal – on the surface it looks like a game for kids with its impressively designed squid characters and cartoon backdrop. But underneath this cuteness is a very robust, and surprisingly deep tactical role playing game, one that is surprisingly challenging.

Presentation

Squids uses a very cute design aesthetic. The characters are all fully realized and maintain the Squid theme quite consistently. Yes, the characters you see — Steev, Vahine, Clint, Kapono, Winnick, Vesper – are all squids. Game Bakers managed to turn these formless animals into really cute looking characters. The environments are also quite engaging, with really richly colorful backdrops.

Gameplay

This is where Squids truly shines. The first few minutes I played with the game. I thought it was just a silly kids’ game where you direct the squid you’re controlling and hit enemies with them. But it’s more than that. Squids is like a mish-mash of different games. Think of it as a hybrid of an RPG, Angry Birds, a strategy game and a game of pool. It sounds like a mess but it’s not. Your Squids character have different classes – there’s a scout, a healer, a shooter, among others. You can improve their attributes by leveling them up using pearls and also with the accessories that they can equip. The battle system is simple but really deep. You fling the squids around, by touching one of the squids then pushing back. Just like in Angry Birds, the farther you push back, the longer they travel. When they hit an opponent they will also ricochet off them just like a cue ball when it hits other balls. This is where you need to strategize how you want the squids to hit their enemies. You can string together your attacks and even make combo attacks to damage multiple enemies. The battle system is turn-based so you really have time to think about your moves.

I find myself going back again and again and replaying levels to see if I can improve how I attack the enemies. It’s absolutely fun and not boring at all.

One weakness of the game is that there’s a feeling you’re left to your own devices. The instructions are quite sparse and doesn’t really detail the exact role playing elements of the game.

Value

Squids is sold for $O.99 and has 21 chapters. Even though the price point is really attractive , I feel that 21 chapters is just too few for such an entertaining game. I’m hoping that Game Bakers will offer new chapters for free periodically to really bump up the value of this game.

Conclusion

Squids is a surprisingly well made game that delivers where it matters most – the gameplay. This is a deep, challenging game that you’ll obsess over for weeks to come.

The cover

Confession time: I’m a serious space junkie. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved everything about the space program. So try as I might to keep my review of this interactive book objective, I can’t deny that this is a subject very near to my heart.

Man In Space, presented by BBC Magazines’ Sky at Night Magazine, is a glorious celebration of the American and Russian space programs. Part historical record, and part examination of the people, technology, and events that shaped this pivotal moment in time, the app takes you through all aspects of the space programs with a special emphasis on the most important milestones.

The Gemini Seven section has nice biographies for all seven astronauts

You’ll find the stories of NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs, Russia’s Soyuz program, and stories of the world’s earliest rocket scientists, mankind’s multiple space stations, and a look at what the future holds. There are complete breakdowns on the famed “Mercury Seven” — NASA’s first seven astronauts, and the crews of the eleven manned Apollo missions, as well as a tribute to the astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 fire. There’s even an entire section on Virgin Galactic’s upcoming spaceport and public space flights, with details on how the ships work, the construction of the spaceport itself, and more.

Beautiful, high-res photos fill out nearly every page

But of course since this is an iPad app, it’s no ordinary book. Instead of just text and pictures, many sections of the book are interactive in fun and educational ways. There are dozens of historical videos that play in windows right inside the app. There are rotatable 3D models of history’s various spacecraft. Panoramas of the moon’s surface that you can swipe through at your leisure. There are high-res photo slide shows. All of these touch-friendly activities engage your brain in ways that simple text-on-a-page can’t.

The app contains dozens of historical videos like this one

A helpful menu is just a single tap away, and it contains everything you need for navigating the app. You can swipe left and right (and up and down) to scroll through the pages, of course, but the menu gives you a scrollbar at the bottom that you can slide to quickly sweep through pages to find the one you’re looking for, quick and easy. Tehre’s also a table of contents available on the menu, allowing you to jump to any section of the book. There’s also a nifty page map, which zooms out on the entire book and shows you the pages like slides, so you can see the entire layout and again, jump to any page you like.

The map view

Did you know that first-man-in-space Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash just seven years after his historic orbit around the Earth? Neither did I, and this is exactly the kind of fascinating insight that’s on every page of this book. It’s a treasure trove, informative enough to be a textbook but fun and gorgeous enough to be a coffee table book. The fact that it’s an interactive iPad app is the icing on the cake.

This timeline is chocked full of details that you activate by tapping the dots

One gaping hole in this history lesson is the absence of any sort of memorium for the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia astronauts. These were critical parts of the story of manned spaceflight that must never be forgotten or glazed over, yet the app gives both tragedies little more than a passing reference in its section on the shuttle program.

The Apollo Program section presents tabbed breakdowns of each crew and mission

On the technical side, I experienced no issues at all; the app is simply beautiful and solidly constructed. For space lovers like myself, Man In Space is a must-have app (despite one glaring oversight). And even if your interests are rooted solidly on the ground, I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be fascinated by this lovely tribute to the remarkable men and women who stepped off the Earth and soared into space.

I sat down to try out Riot Rings for the first time, intending to play for fifteen or twenty minutes. Two hours and dozens of levels later, I knew that Cervo Media was onto something special with their clever little action puzzler.

Riot Rings bears some similarities to Zuma and Luxor, with balls that must be fired to match at least three colored balls on the board, and thereby make them disappear. But Riot Rings brings enough twists to the formula to make its own mark.

The silly backstory claims that animals have escaped from zoos all over the world, and your job is to return them to their captured states. You do this by matching at least three animals — which are shaped like balls, of course — making them disappear from the screen and return to the zoo where they belong. To fire a ball at the track, just tap the spot on the track where you want the ball to land. What makes Riot Rings different is that, instead of levels that simply change the shapes of their tracks between levels, each level is so different it’s practically a completely different game. With more than one hundred levels to play through, the game’s imagination and variation seems to never end.

Every level brings some new challenge, some new wrinkle in its basic gameplay, which goes something like this. In the center of the screen is a catapult that you fire with a tap. The tracks are usually circular or oval in shape, but vary wildly, and often change shape as you’re playing. As you progress through the game, you’ll be challenged with multiple tracks, overlapping tracks, tracks that skip or spurt, clouds that obscure the top-down view, boulders that block part of your range of fire, and loads more. In most levels, new animals come flying in to add to the complications, and they can add up fast. That’s bad, because if so many animals are on a single track that the circle closes, you lose.

There are other challenges too, like giant bees that fly slowly in and try to destroy the catapult; it takes a lot of animal/balls to destroy bees, so you’ll find yourself tapping those bees like crazy until they finally die. Fortunately, the game helps you out with special weapons that appear now and then to give you an advantage. You might see a hypodermic needle that you can pick up and then throw at an animal track, making it slow down or even stop moving altogether. Or there might be food of some kind, which you can pick up and throw, causing a large number of animals to break free from the track and go off to chase it.

In addition to the campaign, there’s a Free Play mode, which lets you revisit any particular level and replay it to try for a higher score; and a Zen Mode, which keeps the game going infinitely, and tasks you with surviving as long as possible. These three modes give the game a high replay value.

If you’re ready for a new puzzle obsession, give Riot Rings a try. You won’t be disappointed. It’s better than Angry Birds!

[Editor's note: this review is based on the iOS version of Riot Rings, but there's also a Mac version available.]

Let's Create Pottery: Inbox

Part creative tool, part game, Let’s Create Pottery is a sublime, fascinating app for iPad and iPhone that simulates the art of pottery creation.

From molding and casting to painting and selling, Let’s Create Pottery takes you through every step that professional potters use to create art. The process is streamlined, of course, but the app definitely gives you a good sense of what it’s like to work with clay.

The crux of the game is the app’s first stage, where you start with a small lump of clay and spin & mold it. There’s an in-app Inbox that’s part of the game, where you are sent orders from customers around the world of increasing difficulty. Each order includes a photo of the kind of piece the customer wants, and your job is to mold and paint your work to resemble the photo as closely as you can.

Let's Create Pottery: Spinning Wheel

The pottery wheel spins on its own; your job is to massage it into shape. Slide your finger along it upwards, and it gets taller. Push in, and it contracts. Pull out and it expands. Pottery is an art of subtlety, and the app smartly conveys the sense of delicacy and finesse required to work a lifeless piece of clay into something beautiful. It can be a painstaking process, which might frustrate some iOS players, but I appreciated the realism. Ultimately this part of the app is basically about matching shapes, but there are stars beneath the photo that indicate how you’re doing at achieving the right shape (and paint job). The stars track your progress as-it-happens, so as you mold your clay, you’ll see more stars added when you get closer to the desired piece. The stars disappear when you’re getting it wrong.

Let's Create Pottery: Firing

Once you’re happy with your creation, you send it directly to firing, where you watch it sit in a furnace for an abbreviated hardening session. After a few seconds, your piece is good and hard, and you can take it out and view it. Spin it to appreciate it from all angles. The imperfections and micro-cracks on the surface are nicely done and realistic in appearance. From here, you select colors, paint brushes, or other decorations to add to the piece, and again, you’re given a star meter to show how close you are to getting it right.

Let's Create Pottery: Painting

When you’re satisfied with your finished work of art, you can sell it at auction. A simulated auction screen lets you watch the dollar amount grow as your work fetches a particular sum. That amount is then added to your available funds, which you can spend at the in-app “store” (it’s not a real store; no real-world money required) to acquire new materials and paint colors and whatnot for future pieces. If your work is a customer order, instead of auction you can choose to simply fulfill the order. If the customer likes what they receive, you’ll get a nice little payment via your Inbox.

Let's Create Pottery: Auction

The game portion continues to progress this way with ever-harder pieces for you to create, essentially teaching you the basics (and eventually the complexities) of pottery-making while adding enough objectives to make it not feel like a tedious tutorial. It also gives you a bit of a “sandbox” feel in that you’re free to take orders or sell your work at auction. I often found that if I wasn’t pleased with how an order had turned out, I’d sell it at auction instead, and then try again at fulfilling the order.

Beyond the game, Let’s Create Pottery can also be used as a terrific simulator for creating pottery, and its subtleties ensure that no two pieces ever turn out quite the same. iDreams, the app’s developer, has created a thriving fan community where talented potters are constantly posting their latest pieces for others to see, and there are some genuinely amazing pieces there. You’re invited to add your own work to the gallery through a quick tap inside the app.

Let's Create Pottery: Community Website

I never experienced any crashes with the app, but I did have one odd issue. Occasionally, as my pottery was spinning or when I was painting my creation, the app would respond about a good centimeter below the spot where I touched the screen. So instead of placing a painted stripe exactly where I wanted it, or shaping the clay in the place where I touched the screen, it would happen below that spot. It appears to be an odd glitch, and as I said, it only happens infrequently.

There are some nifty graphical effects and sound used throughout the game. For example, molding is always done in an outdoor setting, and you’ll hear birds chirping and other sounds of nature while that wheel is turning. Your device’s gyroscope and accelerometer are put to fun use as well, causing the screen’s background to shift whenever you move your device. Hold it up and turn to your left, and the background will react, as if you’re looking through a portal. It’s wholly unnecessary to the app, but undeniably cool.

Your enjoyment of Let’s Create Pottery will entirely depend on how much patience and appreciation you have for the artform. It’s not in any way what most players think of as a traditional “game,” but it is a very rewarding experience for would-be artists. I daresay there are even some things you’ll learn from the app that you could take with you in the real world, should you pursue learning to be a real potter.

The World home screen

National Geographic’s The World app for iPad is an interactive globe onto which dozens of flat, paper maps can be overlaid for more detailed views. Like a real-world spinning globe, it’s designed as a cool way to learn about the Earth’s geography.

When you first fire up the app, you’ll be presented with a virtual globe that’s covered in yellow dots. Each dot represents one of NatGeo’s printed maps. Pinch-to-zoom in on the globe, or use one finger to rotate it in 360 degrees, and you’ll discover even more yellow dots. The globe starts as a terrain map, but you can switch it to a reference map or a detailed ocean map, showing the features of the ocean floor.

The World map overlay

Select a dot, and the globe zooms in on that region and overlays it with a square paper map that’s applied to the curved shape of the globe. As cool as this sounds — and it is a very cool effect — the maps all feel very dated. The maps show the standard country borders, city locations, railroad lines, airports, major highways, bodies of water, and some other minutia. This is all well and good, but when we’re used to being able to get on Google or Bing and zoom right down to the street level, and even get detailed directions from one place to another, these printed street maps feel downright ancient. Most of the maps’ resolutions do hold up down to the city level before becoming fuzzy. There’s also a built-in snapshot function which lets you capture an image of any part of the globe or map that you want, and then share it with a friend via Facebook, Twitter, or email.

The World map closeup

A “Maps” tab at the bottom of the screen takes you to a complete list of all of the regional maps it has available; you can sort these by continent or alphabetically. A “Nations” tab sends you to a list of the world’s nations, listed visually as their national flag. Select one, and you’ll be taken to a close-up of that country, along with a concise but detailed sidebar full of information. There are stats that consist of things like population numbers, government type, life expectancy, major religions, languages spoken, and more. There’s also a brief article that sums up the country’s history.

The World nation view

The final tab at the bottom of the screen is “Photos,” which is loaded with  professional-quality pics, and NatGeo only chose the best of the best to include in their app. (You can also reach these photos via a sidebar tab in the “Nations” section.) The pictures are universally stunning, with incredible clarity, genius composition, and colors that pop right off the screen. I didn’t recognize a lot of the locations in the photos, which made learning about them all the more compelling. Every photo comes with a caption. Sadly, you can’t zoom in on any of them. But you do have the option to scroll through these hundreds of photos by swiping left or right. I could spend hours going through them all, because it makes for a fascinating means of discovering interesting places in the world.

The World photo view

The World feels like somebody wanted to find a way to put all of National Geographic’s legacy maps of various parts of the globe onto the iPad in an interesting and interactive way. It might be a flawed concept from the outset — because the maps are old fashioned by today’s standards — but it’s still remarkably fun to play with. Ultimately, it succeeds if you use it as an interactive learning tool, because it’s just plain fun and fascinating to use.

Just because it’s not useful for the kinds of things we’ve come to expect from interactive maps (like street maps or detailed directions) doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile experience.

Jetpack Joyride

From the creators of Fruit Ninja comes this non-traditional side-scroller. There’s just one level to master in Jetpack Joyride, but that’s okay, because the point isn’t to move through level after level, it’s to keep upgrading your character and equipment.

The controls couldn’t be simpler: just touch the screen to move your on-screen, jetpack wearing character (who goes by the name of Barry Steakfries — no joke) vertically up, or let go to descend as he speeds non-stop to the right. There are countless other games in the App Store that feature this kind of control scheme and character movement, but Jetpack Joyride has fine tuned the feel of it until it’s just right.

Jetpack Joyride

But there’s a twist. (Isn’t there always?) Your jetpack is more than a mere conveyance. When you fly up over the evil scientists who built your lethal jetpack, and who run about fleeing from your rampage, the fire it produces turns to gunfire, shooting straight down at your hapless victims below. Obstacles are everywhere; one strike and you’re out. Round over. Complicating things further, the jetpack builds speed the longer you use it, making the game ever-harder to master.

Jetpack Joyride

You’ll want to collect the floating coins along the way, and look for the special slot machine coins that you redeem at the end of each round in the in-game slot machine to pick up rewards. Some of these will shoot you along further in this round (even though you’re dead) while others can be used in your next round. There’s also a built-in store called “The Stash” where you can use the coins you’ve collected to buy better stuff.

Jetpack Joyride

Power-ups are easy to grab; like everything else, you simply fly into them. They instantly replace your jetpack with much more powerful vehicles, which include a flying dragon, a teleporter, a gravity inverter, a metal stomping suit with killer feet, and more. Developer Halfbrick has already added a set of new upgrades and promise more in the future, at no cost. These clever power boosts change the entire dynamic of the game, providing a welcome change of pace from the jetpack, but they only last as long as you can avoid obstacles. The longer you play, the bigger and better upgrades, achievements, and rewards you’ll unlock. There are even numerous versions of the titular jetpack that you’ll eventually acquire as you get better at the game, which do a lot more than just fire bullets (I’m not spoiling the surprises here).

On first pass, Jetpack Joyride seems like an incredibly simplistic exercise. But the more you play at it, the deeper you’ll find its rewards go. Halfbrick has scored again with another game every bit as addictive and fun to play as Fruit Ninja.

I really hope this isn't a swear word in Japanese.

Have you ever used an ink brush? The kind used so often in Japanese art and character writing? Whether you have or haven’t, you’re going to find that Psoft Mobile’s Zen Brush simulates the feel of using one with staggering realism.

Zen Brush exists for one reason and one reason alone: to simulate the feel of using an ink brush. And it does this one thing exceptionally well — with some nifty, if awfully limited, options.

This is me committing art. Stand in awe.

Adjusting the size of your brush is done via a simple slider in a tiny menu bar at the bottom of the screen. All the app’s margins are contained in that menu bar, such as varying between three ink opacities, two eraser tools (one for full erasure, one for partial opacity), a “clear screen” deletion button, and an Undo button. Unfortunately, you can only undo a single time; there’s no full history stored. You can export your images to your Photo Library of course, and there’s even a built-in function for uploading your image to Twitpic.

Background selections. The brush width slider is in the lower left.

Built in are 38 different paper backgrounds to choose from, and a few of them not only change the backdrop but the color of the brush as well. This brings up an important point: Zen Brush doesn’t put its focus on ink colors. There’s no color palette at all. The ink brush simply changes based on whatever background you have, and these colors are entirely pre-set. At least one of the backgrounds even offers a brush with gradient colors, but again, you can’t adjust any aspect of this gradient.

Writing letters is just as smooth as drawing.

But let’s not mince words: the real draw of Zen Brush is the remarkably smooth effect of the brush stroke. I can’t imagine the codes and algorithms the app’s makers had to use in order to get the brush strokes so perfect, but they are just that: absolute perfection. You can practically see the bristles of the brush touching the page in your mind’s eye. Just the act of moving your finger across the screen is so fluid, the first time I fired up the app I wasted half an hour just wiggling my finger across the screen with no purpose beyond watching the ink flow.

What? Clearly, it's a banana. Made using the gradient brush/background.

Zen Brush is a must-have for art enthusiasts of any kind, and for app lovers who like being able to do new and different things that no other app can do. It’s not terribly robust, but what it does, it does brilliantly. (Note: my review was conducted with an iPad, but the app is also iPhone compatible.)

Snapseed: Home Screen

You’d have a hard time finding a photo editor that makes tweaking those pictures to perfection as easy as Snapseed does. Also inside: a before-and-after gallery of my own edited photos.

The beauty of Snapseed is its simplicity; with nothing but a few taps and gestures, your pictures are transformed with snazzy effects. You know those HDR photos where shadows are made darker, light made brighter, and colors made more vibrant? Or how about those “lomography”-style pics? Those over-saturated pictures like the ones that are birthed out of Instagram? You can jump right on that bandwagon, too. And loads more.

When you first open up Snapseed, you’re presented with a bare-bones screen. Select a photo from a drop-down menu at the top of the screen — it can be any photo saved to iDevice’s Photo Library — and you’ll see it on the right. On the left, there’s a list of icons representing the different filters and editors you can use on your photo. There are just 11 of these icons, so it seems like a pretty small set of tools, but don’t let that fool you. There’s almost no end to what you can do, particularly if you use multiple filters on the same photo.

Snapseed: Editing Screen

Along with some basic tools like cropping and rotating, there are more advanced filters labeled stuff like “Drama,” “Vintage,” “Grunge,” and “Black & White.” Pick one of these filters and you’re taken to an editing screen, where the real magic happens. This is where that wondrous simplicity comes into play: whatever filter or effect you’re applying, all you do is slide your finger left or right across the screen to adjust its settings. Want to increase the color saturation? Slide your finger to the right. Want to make it monochrome? Gesture to the left. To switch between filters, you scroll up and down, which causes a contextual menu to appear in the center of the screen, letting you select which filter you want. Honestly, it takes a lot more effort to explain how to use the app than it does to use; once you try it, you’ll see just how ingenious the interface is.

If you like what you see, you tap the “Apply” button in the bottom right corner. If you want to go back or start over, just tap the “Back” button in the bottom left. One of Snapseed‘s best features is the “Compare” button, which will show you your picture before you applied any filters just by holding your finger down on it, so you can instantly see the difference between the two. Using these filters, you can do all sorts of nifty stuff, like add frames, make part of the image focused while the rest is a blurred, and more. One of the best tools is the “Selective Adjust,” which lets you apply filters to any part of the image you want. Just tap the spot you want to adjust, and then pinch-to-zoom to change the size of the spot.

Once you’re happy with what you’ve got, you can save the image to your Photo Library (don’t worry, it saves a new copy instead of overwriting the original), or share it to Facebook, Flickr, or via email. You can also print it if you have the right hardware.

Snapseed is advertised as a photo editor, but what it really does — exceptionally well — is add drama to any photo. The filters and tools are so well made that it’s just impossible to create a bad photo. And unlike most image editing software, it achieves something rather remarkable: it makes photo editing fun. I can’t say enough good things about it — it’s my new favorite photo editor. To show off what Snapseed can do, here are some photos both taken and edited by a complete novice (me).

In the Air: Before

In the Air: After

Gettysburg Farm: Before

Gettysburg Farm: After

Corn Field: Before

Corn Field: After

Lens Flare: Before

Lens Flare: After

Flowers: Before

Flowers: After

Lightning: Before

Lightning: After

Gettysburg Monument: Before

Gettysburg Monument: After

Sunset: Before

Sunset: After

Tiger: Before

Tiger: After

Gettysburg Monument: Before

Gettysburg Monument: After

Autumn Tree: Before

Autumn Tree: After

Bamboo Stylus for iPad

Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus for iPad is a sleek, super stylish accessory that looks and feels great. But does it work?

The Bamboo Stylus is meant for use in conjunction with Wacom’s Bamboo Paper app, which is pretty darn great in its own right. Bamboo Paper is one of the best iPad apps for handwriting I’ve seen yet, brilliantly recreating the look and feel of a real ink pen’s writing. But is the Bamboo Stylus really the best stylus for your iPad?

If form factor was everything, the Bamboo Stylus would take the cake, hands down. It’s longer than most styluses, with a brushed metal finish that screams “high-end” or “power executive.” It’s made entirely of metal, so its heft feels extremely solid in your hand; I’d go so far as to say it inspires confidence. The grip is satin textured, which does nothing to take away from its tactile, brushed metal surface. It merely adds a bit more friction to hold onto. It’s so cool, it feels so right in your hand, that if ever there was a stylus aesthetically worthy of the uber-coolness of the iPad or iPhone, the Bamboo would surely be it.

Bamboo Stylus for iPad

Even the smaller details are appealing. The flat metal pocket clip is easily detachable, and the seam where it was attached all but disappears when you screw the top back on. The bulb is much narrower than that of your standard stylus, a feature very much welcomed by this reviewer. Though I still don’t know why no one’s created a fine-point stylus for iDevices yet; it seems like a no-brainer since Apple’s mobile gadgets are so perfectly suited for handwriting.

When it comes to usage, it works well, but I can’t call it perfect. I can’t help comparing it against the Targus Stylus I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed to have marginally less-effective contact with the iPad’s surface than the Targus. Whereas Targus’ stylus registered contact with the touchscreen 100% of the time, the Bamboo Stylus only achieved about 90-95%. The Bamboo’s rubber tip seems to be not quite as smooth as well.

Most users are probably unlikely to notice the discrepancy, particularly if they’ve never tried a different stylus. So with its utterly perfect form factor, the Bamboo Stylus makes for a great accessory for any iOS user.

Targus Stylus for iPad

Despite Steve Jobs’ wishes for finger-only input devices, there are a number of tasks on your iPad or iPhone that are made considerably simpler with the use of a stylus. I’ve been using Targus’ acclaimed Stylus for iPad extensively (and almost exclusively) for the last week, and the verdict is positive.

Prior to getting my hands on the Targus Stylus for iPad, I’d heard a lot of good things about it. It’s one of the highest-rated styluses among users and critics, so I was eager to see if it lived up to the hype.

I tried it out with a number of apps, emphasizing productivity apps for things like sketching and handwriting, as well as some basic games like match-3 or crossword puzzles. Most especially with drawing, it worked like a dream. My first-generation iPad couldn’t always keep up with my strokes, but its accuracy was spot-on perfect. It was great at handwriting, too (though handwriting on capacitive touchscreen devices is always doomed to frustration, since you can’t let any part of your hand touch the screen while you’re writing). It also worked well with Apple’s built-in virtual keyboard, though of course one-finger (or stylus) typing is by definition slower than using two or more fingers. It felt good when turning virtual pages in iBooks or Kindle, too.

It’s best feature is its most important: the rubber tip. It’s a hollow bulb design (just like most touchscreen styluses), made of black rubber. A good touchscreen stylus needs to have just the right combination of rubber consistency so it slides smoothly across the glass surface, good rubber flexibility so its hollow ball form squishes just the right amount to simulate the human finger, and tightness in how it’s attached to the handle of the stylus. If any one of these factors is off even just a fraction, the user will feel it with every stroke or tap.

Targus Stylus for iPad

Targus’ Stylus for iPad gets that magic formula just right, or as close to perfection as any stylus has ever come. It provides such perfect tactile interaction that I was surprised to find myself using the Targus Stylus for tasks that didn’t require it. By adulthood, we’re so programmed to use pens or pencils for so much of what we do, there’s something about using that same form factor to navigate my iPad that just feels right.

It’s not a perfect accessory. At just under four and a half inches, it’s a little on the short side. I wouldn’t have minded it being longer, to feel more like an actual ink pen or pencil. It’s also remarkably lightweight. Don’t get me wrong — I never felt like I could break it or anything. It’s nice and solid. But it weighs less than half an ounce, which combined with its minuscule size, caused me a bit of concern that I could lose it quite easily.

As I said earlier, I’ve only been using it for about a week, so I have no idea how it will hold up over time. Rubber is far from indestructible, so I assume that eventually it will wear out. (It comes with a one year warranty.) It comes in a number of colors, but currently no other sizes.

The Targus Stylus for iPad (which also works just as well with iPhone and iPod Touch) is not a replacement for the human finger. But it might just be the best augmentation tool available. If you want to expand what your iDevice is capable of — particularly when it comes to art or handwriting — a stylus is a must, and a few nitpicks aside, this is the best one I’ve ever used.