So here are my impressions of how Apple’s own productivity apps, which have been optimized for the new iPad’s high-resolution display, fare on the new tablet:

Keynote

Even if Keynote is your least-used app of the iWork suite, if you give just a trivial amount of presentations it is easily the suite’s killer app for you. The ease of hooking your iPad up to a projector and pretty much eliminating the not-so-silent prayers that go along with marrying projectors and presentations is a gigantic stress reliever. When I started looking at the new Keynote app and opened up a few of my presentations I was overjoyed with how great even graphics not optimized for the Retina display look and how crisp and un-pixelated the text looked. Then I crashed back to earth when I realized unless I was hooking into a truly fantastic display — which most conference rooms don’t have — there would be little to no difference in what the audience would see since the iPad screen is a higher resolution than the display.

Where I did find handy was how graphics looked on the Retina display. Looking through a draft of an old presentation, I could see where I had cheated and downloaded a Creative Commons graphic file that wasn’t a good resolution. On the original iPad and my MacBook, I could fool myself into thinking it wasn’t that bad. On the new iPad, I could see that, yeah, it really did look that bad.

What I haven’t been able to benchmark efficiently is how well the beefed-up GPU and 1 GB of memory will aid the creation of graphics-heavy presentations. My limited, non-scientific tests didn’t yield a marked difference on a 30-slide presentation where most if it was full-bleed graphics. However, a 30-slide talk is pretty small. If someone creates large, graphics-heavy presentations regularly, I’d love to hear from you.

Numbers

If Keynote is in the running for the least-used app of the suite, Numbers is likely the winner of the never-used award. People who are spreadsheet users probably aren’t using Numbers. Still, Numbers, in a way, I think benefits the most from the new display. It’s been my experience that spreadsheets often try to cram too much text into one page, making it impossible to read. On the new iPad, text set to the smallest size was perfectly readable, while on the original iPad it was a blur.

Pages

During testing, when I opened a file with Pages on my old iPad, I realized just how much I’d been suffering for my art. My first reaction: I used to work on this thing? Opening a document with 10-point type was an awakening. Sure, I was amazed at how great my e-mail looked, but when I opened a document with a couple thousand words I’d typed on my old iPad, the, dare I say it, awesomeness of the Retina display hit home. Even now, looking at my MacBook Pro, my iPad is going: Look at me. Now look at your MacBook, Now look at me. That display looks like the bad end of the horse, doesn’t it?

How the apps affect my workflow

What I love about writing these articles is it forces me to take an inventory of my current writing process and tools. The new iPad with an external display is looking like a more visually comfortable writing environment than my MacBook Pro. The key tool for me is iCloud, so my main writing tool is Byword for iOS (which also looks awesome on the new iPad) and OS X because it looks great and syncs between all three of my devices. Pages is well-poised to take the top spot for writing apps this summer when the OS X version of iWork becomes fully iCloud-aware.

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The fitRAIL is billed as an “exercise mount” for both the original iPad and the iPad 2. It’s a sturdy, collapsible aluminum and steel gadget that manages to be both portable and secure when holding your iPad, and it’s an elegant solution to a problem I’ve been trying to solve since getting my first iPad.

Your screen, your stuff

The fitRAIL is basically a harness for your iPad that folds out so as to clamp down perfectly on the display consoles of most upright cardio equipment — ellipticals, treadmills, climbers and the like. It folds down to a small size and comes with a pouch for convenient carrying, and features sticky (albeit easy to remove) pads to keep your iPad securely in place, along with a hook attached to a neoprene strap to make sure it won’t pitch forward. The stretchiness of the neoprene strap and double grooves in the base make the fitRAIL easily compatible with any generation iPad.

It hooks over the top of the machine’s console (and seems to work with every variety I could find), and then hangs there, buttressed by rubber bumpers in the back to keep it from bouncing around too harshly. That way, you can watch or read whatever you want as you work out (so long as you downloaded it before to your iPad or you have internet access at your gym) instead of being beholden to whatever your gym chooses to play on its televisions.

Not just a gym rat

The fitRAIL also works remarkably well outside of the confines of the gym, which is good news in case you’re not often the type to stick with your New Year’s resolutions. It can be configured to work as a display stand, or as an angled prop for typing, in which capacity it easily outperforms other devices with similar purposes, like Apple’s own Smart Cover. You can also hook it over a door for hands-free viewing in a pinch.

Smart design that avoids too tight a niche

My office is virtually a graveyard of iPad stands. Too many of these were single purpose devices that quickly outlived their usefulness when something that not only acted as a stand, but did something else, too came along (the PadPivot comes to mind). The fitRAIL is a stand, yes, but it also offers a very specific function that satisfies the demands of many like myself who’ve been looking for a simple, easy-to-install way to mount an iPad to cardio equipment. It’s smart design that avoids being too precious, and that’s why it’s got a permanent place in my gadget bag.

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Let me start by saying that if you’ve given up on Office for Mac after the disappointment of 2008, you should have another look at the latest offering. I feel like the Mac department over at Microsoft is finally getting the support and resources it needs from corporate to give its products a fighting chance alongside Apple’s own offerings.

General impressions aside, here’s what you need to know about the new PowerPoint.

More Windows and More Mac, All at Once

Amazingly, Microsoft managed to make the new PowerPoint interface feel more like its Windows-based twin, while also changing the design so that it looks more at home on the Mac desktop. One of the features that helped the new design is the inclusion of the ribbon. Yes, it’s a controversial feature, and many Windows users don’t like it, but I’ve grown accustomed to using it, and I welcome its inclusion on the Mac side of things.

The ribbon in PowerPoint 2011.

The ribbon, for those who haven’t tried any recent editions of Office for Windows, resides at the top of your interface underneath the tool bar. Commands and tools are organized by sections, like “Home,” “Theme,” “Charts,” “Slide Show,” etc. If you’re used to hunting around in menus for Office commands, you probably won’t like them, but for those new to the suite, it’s a much more logical means of organization.

Office 2011′s ribbon has all the same content as the Windows version, but it looks decidedly Mac, as you can see from the screenshots, so there’s no confusing what environment you’re working in. You can easily hide or show the ribbon, so it doesn’t get in the way of the presentation you’re working on. You can also customize it by rearranging tabs and changing commands, so there’s really no reason to dislike it unless you just prefer things not change.

Slide Layers Make Everything Easier

It’s hard for me to even convey how frustrating it is to manipulate the order of objects in past versions of PowerPoint, especially in presentations and slides where you’ve got a lot going on. I used to work at a company where we used PowerPoint as print publishing software, so that should give you some idea of how complicated layouts could get.

The new Reorder Objects tool in PowerPoint 2011 allows you to easily manipulate even the most complicated slides pretty easily. It looks like the new Windows 7 Flip 3D feature, fills your whole screen, and lets you click and drag layers to rearrange. No more hoping this is the last time you have to click “Send Backward.”

Media Manipulation

PowerPoint 2011 approaches the simplicity Keynote has in terms of adding media. You can use the Media Browser to drop photos, music and video in from various sources, including your iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries. Even Aperture showed up in the source menu in my tests.

You can also edit stuff more easily — and with more options — from within the app. Doing basic retouching on photos is quite easy, and about on par with what you can do in iPhoto, only without having to leave the app. PowerPoint also has some other neat image editing functions, like the Remove Background tool I used to cut out Justin Long and John Hodgman in the screenshot below in about 30 seconds.

Better Cross-Platform Access and Collaboration

Working together with distributed teams is easier with the new PowerPoint, since you can collaborate wirelessly in real time, and communicate with each other via Live Messenger or Communicator. Plus, you can access and make changes to your presentations on the go with the PowerPoint web app. Finally, publishing your slide show to the web so that it’s viewable by others is a snap, and your audience doesn’t need to have the program to take part.

There are still some limitations to using PowerPoint 2011 on the Mac. You can’t access your presentations on the web from your iPhone’s or iPad’s browser, for example, and I still think presentations made in Keynote might look a little better, too.

Overall, that’s about all I have to say against PowerPoint 2011. Earlier today on Twitter I asked how many still used Office for Mac in some capacity, and was surprised to find that a lot of you still do. That Microsoft is delivering software at this level is great news for those users. If I was still in the business of regularly making presentations, this is definitely the tool I’d use to get the job done. In fact, it may just inspire me to include a slideshow the next time I give a talk.

Stay tuned to TheAppleBlog for coverage of what’s new in the rest of the Office 2011 suite, too.

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As with all Apple products, the unboxing of the Apple TV is a lesson in minimalism. It’s hard to imagine the tiny black square of plastic, hardly bigger than the gum-stick remote, bringing all your entertainment to your living room.

Installation and Setup

Compared to other set-top boxes, installing the new Apple TV exemplifies the “it just works” philosophy associated with Apple products, assuming you have an HDMI cable. Would it kill Apple to spend an extra 20 cents for an HDMI cable to ensure everyone can run it out of the box?

The Apple TV connects to the television (in my case a 60-inch 1080p plasma) using only an HDMI cable, so long as you have one. After that, just plug in the power cord. Here we see the first minor flaw in the new Apple TV. That power indicator light flashes, a lot. How that slipped past QA, I don’t know, but hopefully a firmware update will fix it. Until then, a spot of electrical tape will do.

Initially, you control the Apple TV with the included remote. However, if, like me, you have an Apple Remote kicking around that came with an old MacBook, and think the play/pause button in the center of the wheel was the pinnacle of design, you can use that, too. Owners of an iOS device will definitely want to upgrade to the Remote app, especially to ease the pain of text entry.

From the setup menu, you choose a language, and whether or not to send diagnostic and usage information to Apple. After that, you add the Apple TV to your Wi-Fi network, though Ethernet is also an option. Lastly, you turn on Home Sharing, both on the Apple TV and in iTunes 10 on every computer you want to access content from. It’s as simple as entering your iTunes ID and password.

It’s important to remember that if iTunes can’t import it, the Apple TV can’t share it. If you want .mkv video, you should be using VLC on a home theater PC. But if you’re looking for ease of use, well, I had the Apple TV up and running in about five minutes.

iTunes

Not surprisingly, the UI has big text for readability and navigation, but the layout could be better. Simplified from the previous iteration, it’s a little too simple, dumping a lot of different content into non-intuitive “Internet” and “Computers” categories. As the prominent placement of two of the five main menu options indicates, the iTunes Store kiosk in your living room is still open for business.

Performance of iTunes was amazing, at least on my connection, which runs in excess of 20Mbps down/0.5 Mbps up. The top movies display as icons, and my screen was filled almost instantly. If you want the virtual equivalent of walking the aisles at Blockbuster, you can browse by genre, or do a search, which is predictive and offers movies and related categories like actors and directors.

A selected movie offers a trailer, the quality and price of rental, an “Add to Wish List’ and a “more” option. The last provides reviews from Rotten Tomatoes and customers, as well as links to other works by the principal actors and creators of a film.

The Television section works similarly, though the dearth of content becomes obvious when browsing by network. There are nine “networks” subdivided out of four: Fox, ABC, BBC, and Disney. Choosing a title provides information on quality and viewing license, and paying for the rental is easy, though delivery is a little annoying. There’s no indication when a download has begun, though you’re notified when enough of the content is available to watch, which took less than a minute in my experience.

The 720p video quality was, in my opinion, very good, and only the extreme videophile should have something to complain about. Overall, the experience at the iTunes Store is excellent, but then Apple makes coin on this, so why expect anything less?

Netflix

The Netflix experience is likewise excellent. Unlike the iPad and iPhone app, which is little more than a wrapper for the web page, the Apple TV version of Netflix is tailored to the device. Just one example, the Netflix iPhone app doesn’t handle television well, allowing you only to play the next show in a season. The Apple TV, by contrast, provides a list of episodes for each season.

Netflix on the Apple TV provides a half-dozen ways to browse content, as well as search. It’s nicely laid out, and works well, though not as smoothly as the iTunes Store. Movie icons take longer to load, and there can be a slight pause when navigating some menu options as the Apple TV “Accesses Netflix.”

Playback, however, is good. It takes about ten seconds for a video to start, better for me than running Netflix on a Core Duo Mac mini. Video quality doesn’t seem quite as good as Apple TV rentals, but, again, nothing to complain about, which sadly, isn’t the case with local content.

Streaming Local Content

Curiously, Apple chose to sort local content for home sharing by the computer it resides on, rather than by content, as with the previous Apple TV interface. It’s annoying, and there’s no real reason for it, since a pool of all available content would be much more usable.

Once you select a computer, the familiar, if dated, Front Row/Apple TV interface is presented. On a good note, streaming performance has been excellent, despite my efforts to stress the local network. I’d planned on using Ethernet to connect the Mac mini to the Apple TV, rather than relying on the 802.11 b/g of the older computer, but there was no need. So far, access is quick and content streams without issue.

Unfortunately, some of the other aspects of the Apple TV could be better. While photos load quickly, home movies don’t show up at all, neither locally or from MobileMe. That’s seems odd, since the Gallery app for MobileMe does play movies on other iOS devices.

Like photos, music seems an afterthought on the new Apple TV. It works, and streaming sounds great, but the means of access seems quite basic. The rest of the content (YouTube, Radio, flickr, etc.) seems not to have changed much. It’s all quite functional, but nothing special.

While opening the Apple TV to the App Store might substantially change the purpose of the device, its focus now appears to be video. From presentation to delivery, you get the feeling that most of the work went into making the Apple TV a top-line, video streaming device. With AirPlay coming soon, it’ll be even better at video. In short, the Apple TV seems to have finally lived up to its name.

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Hardware

13” MacBook Pro: It was time to retire my cira-2006 WhiteBook and I chose the low-end Pro model. I debated upgrading to the higher-end 13” or the 15”, but, since I had a 500GB drive I would be transferring, I decided on the low-end model. It’s a fantastic machine I don’t want to picture life without. No regrets.

Logitech Wave Keyboard: I’ve never been a big fan of Apple’s keyboards. The clear white model feels too squishy, and the aluminum one feels too firm. I got the Logitech Wave on an impulse buy at BJs Warehouse one day and I like it. My only complaint is it’s not bluetooth, and with the laptop I’ve stopped using it because I don’t want to lose the dongle or tie up a USB port. No regrets.

OS X Software

Parallels Desktop 4.0 Upgrade: I hadn’t planned on getting this — version 3 was doing fine for me. However, at some point the Version 4 trial got my system in a state where I couldn’t easily downgrade from it and preserve my virtuals and I ended up saying, “screw it” and upgraded to 4.0. I still use it heavily as there are Windows apps I need to use. It gets used enough I’ll likely be upgrading to Version 5 next year. No regrets.

Things: I’m constantly struggling with managing my to-do list. Until I got Things, no system worked for me. I tried Moleskine notebooks, Google Tasks, Evernote, having my wife remind me, iCal alerts — you name it. I got Things because of its iPhone integration (more on that in the iPhone section) and I love it. I was the site lead for an ISO audit and it was incredibly helpful managing the project. No regrets.

The Sims 3: The Sims franchise and I go way back; I’ve played all of them. Once I got the new Macbook and could actually run games, I grabbed the Sims 3. Overall, I like it. I was hoping it’d let me run without the CD like Spore does, and that’s probably the biggest reason I don’t play it much — I thought it’d be a perfect on the train game, but I tend to forget to grab the CD. Slight regret, only because I don’t play it as much as I’d like.

LaunchBar 5: I had to upgrade when I went to Snow Leopard. I use this tool every day and still barely scratch the surface on its features. As an aside, check out ScreenCast Online’s excellent LaunchBar tutorials. No regrets.

iLife 09: Granted, it came with my new MacBook, but I had also purchased a license on my old laptop. I only really use iPhoto and it’s been a mixed bag. The Faces feature thought my wife was both a booth babe from E3 and a bearded game developer. I like the Flickr and Facebook exports, but I’m disappointed it doesn’t sync photos I’ve uploaded to non-iPhoto created sets. However, I like having a central photo storage that I can get to from any application (using the new Services in Snow Leopard).  Slight regret.

iWork 09: I’ve been waffling between iWork and Office for most of the year. Each have their advantages, but I’m finding how well iWork integrates with Snow Leopard’s Services has resulted in me using it more. Keynote simply rocks; I used it for every presentation I had to give this year. No regrets.

iPhone Apps

I started going through my iTunes receipts to give an accurate list of everything I bought … and rapidly decided that list was too long to bore you with, so instead I’m just going to mention the high and low points. There’s also a few I bought just because there was a great deal on them, so I’ll ignore them for now, too.

Games

Myst: I got this trying to relive my gaming youth. While it’s an amazing technical accomplishment — it’s the entire Myst game, right there on your iPhone — I’ve been disappointed; I just don’t think it scales down well to the iPhone screen. This one is a regret.

Flight Control: Holy cow, is this game addictive or what? Not only do I regret getting this game, I think my boss regrets me getting it too — when he got an iPhone and asked for a game recommendation, it was the immediate choice and we’re both infatuated with it. Seriously, though, no regrets.

Peggle: This is a game that’s hard to describe; it’s like an inverted version of Blockout merged with pinball. The idea is to make these colored blocks go away by aiming a canon of sorts at them. It’s a fun game, but my one big issue is being color blind, I have a hard time telling the difference between some of the blocks.

Productivity

Quickoffice and DocsToGo: I bought them in a hope that my iPhone would become a netbook of sorts, and it didn’t quite work out that way. It’s not a fault of either program (they are both good) but my own work habits. While it’s rare I’ll attempt to do work on these, the few times I’ve had to use them puts them in the no regrets column.

Things: I’ve covered this already, but the iPhone app is a perfect companion to the desktop; I tend to use the iPhone app more than the desktop version. I only have two complaints: I can’t define Areas of Responsibility on the iPhone, and the data sync doesn’t happen via the cloud, but they seem to be working on that.

Byline: I float between Byline and the Google Reader web app. I frequently use Byline more because it’s a stand-alone app and syncs very well with Google Reader. However, both of them expose a limitation of the iPhone OS that drives me nuts: because apps can’t talk to each other, I can’t “send to Evernote” as I can when viewing Reader in a traditional browser. No regrets.

Wooji Presentation Remote and Apple’s Keynote Remote: This was the year where I had to give a few presentations, and, being the geek that I am felt I needed an app on the iPhone to control Keynote. It was a disaster, Since it uses a Wi-Fi connection to the laptop the iPhone battery drained too fast and I felt myself looking down at the iPhone for my cues, falling into the dreaded “staring at the index cards” presentation method. I ended up going back to the Apple physical remote and using my Macbook and Keynote in presentation mode.

In 2008 it felt like I had more regrets than 2009. Perhaps that was a case of the App Store launching and just going nuts buying it, or this year I was more discerning about my purchases. How about you? What purchases did you make in 2009 you liked or regret?

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During the first three weeks of operation, the MicroCell was down form some period of time on nine separate days. Periods of outage lasted from 15 minutes to several hours, but were usually less than an hour. There was no discernible pattern, and for every instance but one the fix was: unplug, wait, plug back in.

The single outlier was a little more insidious. While my iPhone reported “five bars,” attempting to make a call would result in immediate failure. That episode required deactivating the MicroCell with AT&T, reinstalling it as if it were new equipment, and about three Zantac.

If this makes the MicroCell sound like a product not ready for sale to the general public, it’s not. Those paying $150 for a MicroCell in eligible cities are participating in a “public trial.” If one didn’t know they were a beta tester, the uncharacteristically helpful technical support gives it away.

Diagnosing my problem, it was suggested that updates to the firmware by AT&T may have been responsible. Of course, the MicroCell is supposed to reboot itself when the firmware is updated, but even a tech support placebo can make you feel better. It was also suggested that I try priority mode configuration, and that appears to actually have worked.

By switching the connection order of the MicroCell and wireless router, the MicroCell supposedly reserves sufficient bandwidth for voice and data at all times. Why it needs to carve out a 3G slice of bandwidth on a Wi-Fi network remains a mystery, but I’m not complaining. The outages stopped after changing the device setup. My initial fears concerning bandwidth throttling proved unrealized, or maybe a firmware update solved that, too. Either way, speed tests with and without the MicroCell connected have the same results.

While it appears that my hardware issues have been resolved, a longer look at call performance is not as positive as my initial assessment. To the MicroCell’s credit, it has yet to drop a call. Further, call quality to and from individuals remains generally very good, but, strangely, there are problems calling some businesses.

Maybe my MicroCell hates talking with people in India, but calls to and from toll-free numbers or businesses are often choppy. My observation is that phone numbers that aren’t point-to-point, one number to one number, are far more likely to break up. It may be anthropomorphic on my part, but it’s like the MicroCell hates being put on hold and transferred, but then who doesn’t?

Finally, I continue to be disappointed with the range of the device. AT&T says 5,000 square feet, but I say 50 squared, or about 50 feet in a straight line. That’s very close to being unacceptable for me, but being as Apple is still playing coy with Verizon, or vice versa, my options are limited. If yours are too, the AT&T 3G MicroCell remains a relatively pleasant cell on AT&T’s prison network.

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• Mac OS X 10.5: Resetting the SyncServices folder
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There are even more support articles around the web, although I think you get the picture. Let’s be clear, syncing any type of data is not trivial. Syncing multiple forms of data (contacts, calendar, bookmarks, etc.) is even less so.

If you use Sync Services and you don’t have issues, count yourself amongst one of the lucky few. If you use Sync Services and you have problems, then read on…

To cure your Sync Services woes, The folks at Spanning Sync recently released a great set of three applications called Spanning Tools. Here is what the package includes:

• Calendar Cleaner: resolves calender conflicts, duplicates, etc.
• Contacts Cleaner: resolves duplicate contacts, bad data with contacts and more.
• Sync Tune-Up: the big-kahuna tool. This one enables you to completely remove any bad Sync Services data and then start syncing with fresh (clean) data.

Where Sync Services gets crazy is when you begin using additional applications that leverage the functionality. Some of these applications include: MobileMe (AB, iCal, Safari, etc.), Microsoft Entourage, Daylite, Missing Sync, Google Contact Sync (from Address Book), Spanning Sync, BusySync, iSync phones and many, many more

What I like about this software suite is that it is focused. You have a specific toolset to resolve some potentially big data synchronization issues. What’s also great is that this suite of tools is very inexpensive – $20. Thus, for a nice crisp Mr. Jackson, you can own a complete toolset to ensure that your Sync Services data is kept clean, fresh, and consistent.

If you’re looking for a something sync-oriented to add to your utilities arsenal, then definitely head on over to the Spanning Tools site – you won’t regret it.

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The developers of iBank, the robust alternative to moribund Quicken for the Mac, have gone mobile with their latest product. With iBank Mobile for the iPhone and iPod touch you can bank on the go, but probably not go it alone.

To be fair, there is no perfect personal finance manager (PFM) in the App Store. There are standalone apps like the cryptically-named iXpenselt, and cloud apps like Mint and Quicken Online Mobile — which unbelievably does not sync to Quicken for the Mac or PC.

Synchronization with the desktop is where iBank Mobile comes in. Certainly, it was a much improved experience over using it as a standalone application. Creating fake accounts, transactions, and categories using iBank Mobile for the purpose of review was incredibly time consuming. Having said that, once iBank Mobile is up and running, it follows the money pretty well.

Accounts

Left, the Home screen provides an overview of accounts and access to the spartan control scheme: Home, Spending, Settings, Sync, and New Transaction. The Spending screen shows categories and activity. Drilling down from Spending lists transactions sorted by category, each transaction selectable for details. Transactions can also be accessed by account.

The interface is straightforward and useable to this point, with one minor complaint. Accounts can only be sorted alphabetically, though they can be grouped in two lists: Primary and Other.

There is also an issue regarding general performance, at least on an iPhone 3G. Upon first accessing accounts, totals may appear as “calculating” until iBank Mobile catches up. Scrolling through transactions is a little sluggish, too.

Transactions

Creating a transaction is a guided process: Account → Transaction Type & Amount → Payee → Categories & Memo. Payee editing benefits from autocompletion, which is great, but lack of a “back” button through every step of the transaction process is not so great.

Split transactions work well, especially if you already have a list of categories, as there is no autocompletion here: select or create. Categories are best derived from the desktop software, which underscores an important point. Whether using iBank Mobile is a chore or a pleasure really comes down to whether or not you use iBank for the Mac. Syncing is where iBank shines.

Synchronization

Even if you don’t plan on syncing with iBank, the passcode option protects your transaction data on the iPhone, while encryption is used during syncing. As for syncing itself, it just works. Via Wi-Fi, MobileMe, or WebDAV, setup is simple. Syncing more than 5,000 transactions took about five minutes, while normal syncing after setup takes seconds.

Summing Up: Bronze Award

As a standalone application, iBank Mobile is rather spartan; no online options, no bill calendar, no charts, no budgeting, just transactions and spending. According to the developers, customer feedback will be a driving force in updates, though direct download of transactions from financial institutions is a priority. For now, I don’t recommend iBank Mobile as a standalone PFM, but then I don’t recommend any standalone PFM application for the iPhone and iPod touch. However, I do recommend iBank Mobile as complement to the desktop product.

The value in iBank Mobile is tracking where your money goes as you spend it over time, like cash from an ATM withdrawal. That information then easily integrates into iBank for the Mac through the excellent syncing options. What you do with that information is up to you, but the first rule of personal finance is knowing where the money goes, and iBank Mobile makes that possible wherever you are.

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I think I may have achieved a grasp of Gameloft’s concept design strategy for their iPhone catalog. It seems to have something to do with being “inspired” by titles and franchises that are already wildly successful. You can’t help but see the similarity between Hero of Sparta and God of War (even syntactically). Likewise, with Rise of Lost Empires ($4.99, iTunes link), their new real-time strategy game for the platform, which resembles a certain other title in which humans and orcs do battle strategically.

Don’t get me wrong, Gameloft’s “inspiration” strategy is not something I’m against. It has resulted in some very fun games to date, and Rise of Lost Empires is, hopefully, just one more opportunity for them to get iPhone gaming right with yet another lovely homage. If the original dev studios aren’t bringing the platform any love, I’d rather Gameloft did than no one at all.

RTS On a Phone?

Once upon a time, I was a devout real-time strategy fan; Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, and so on. I like that they’re generally easy to grasp, but become very challenging very quickly. I also like building and resource management, which is something very few other types of games offer.

But on a phone? A touchscreen phone, no less? I used to play Warfare, Inc. on my Palm pilot back in the day, and the iPhone port was fairly successful, but in general, good RTS games require a depth which doesn’t seem to fit with the iPhone’s casual vibe.

Surprisingly, I found Rise of Lost Empire’s controls to be very intuitive and easy to use. Whether or not depth of play is sacrificed on the portable platform is another story.

Graphics & Audio

Rise of Lost Empire doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t look amazing, either. The isometric perspective works very well for buildings and structures, but characters and sprites look a little generic and lazy, in my opinion. It all adds up to give the game sort of a retro/RTS traditionalist vibe, which is not a bad thing.

Audio is pretty good. Characters even have recorded vocal snippets for when you click on them, order them to do things, etc. I really appreciate that opposing factions have different death cries so that I can keep track of what’s going on, even if I’m not watching the action at the moment.

What surprised me about the game’s graphics was that even though I’m playing this on a 3GS, occasionally there is actual lag when the action gets intense. It only happens when there’s an inordinately large number of sprites sharing the screen at the same time, but considering how fast the game boots and loads, it still came as quite a shock.

Gameplay

Gameplay is where Rise really falls for me, and unfortunately it’s the most important category of all. I give credit to Gameloft for trying to find the right balance between gameplay depth and ease-of-use, given the platform, but I find that they don’t quite find the right mix. In fact, they may miss the mark on both counts.

The game takes resource gathering out of the equation, having revenue come in automatically from your home castle, and any farms you build. It takes the problem of commanding grunts or peons off your hands, but that’s an integral part of the RTS experience, and as a result Rise feels more like a shallow RPG (thanks to Hero leveling).

Finally, the difficulty seems manageable enough, but level design leads to massive gaps in how achievable a particular goal is. Castle defense against waves of enemies seems unmanageable, while simple attack-and-destroy missions require little more than a quick trigger on your hero’s “Heal” ability and a small group of tightly clustered soldiers.

Verdict

Lag issues and questionable difficulty scaling mar an otherwise nicely put-together iPhone RTS in Rise of Lost Empires. In other words, unless you have a really bad RTS itch, and you need to scratch it with an iPhone offering while you wait for Starcraft II to come out, you might want to skip this particular Gameloft offering. Try out the free version (iTunes link) before you go coughing up any cash, at least.

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I was not terribly impressed with The Sims 3 for iPhone, but as I said in my review, it did whet my appetite for the Mac desktop version of the game. So much so that I went out yesterday afternoon to pick it up. Best Buy was all out of the collector’s edition, but I wasn’t committed to the idea of carrying around a Plumbob USB drive anyway, so I picked up the regular copy for $49.95 and got to playing god.

And play it I did. I played for nine straight hours yesterday, and another few today, eating in a hurried frenzy only when my Sim was sleeping. All for you…a truly selfless act. Here’s what I found as a result of my living-by-proxy marathon.

Graphics

The Sims 3 definitely looks better than its predecessors. Objects and sims are more detailed, textures are smoother, and animations are better looking. The real difference with regards to graphics, however, doesn’t have to do with any landmark improvements in the basics (there aren’t any astounding changes), but rather with the way the world as a whole is set up.

Nice, interactive vistas

The Sims experience has always been primarily compartmentalized, with your house being one location, and social settings and the houses of others being entirely different, closed-off modules. In The Sims 3, the walls between modules are largely taken down. If you zoom out, and pan, you can see and interact with your neighbors’ houses, parks, and community buildings, and even the ocean.

Clicking on objects that you can see results in actions being made available, without ever having to exit out to a town map. The town map is still available, though, in case you want more simple navigation across greater distances.

Visually, the open world makes The Sims 3 look and feel much more like the life simulator it’s meant to be, and it’s one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from The Sims 2, in my opinion.

My test machine was an iMac with 4GBs of RAM running an ATI Radeon 2600HD graphics card. The game should run fine any any computer using the new NVIDIA cards, too.

Sound

Simish is back in full force, and it sounds just as silly as ever. They seem to say “zune” a lot more frequently than most other words, so either that’s the sim version of “the” or Microsoft’s done some very keen product placement.

Sweatin' to the oldies

Music is well done again in The Sims 3, with a decent variety of tracks available for your stereo systems, and some genuinely pleasant sounds coming from your sim’s guitar if you build up their Music ability.

Other ambient sounds are all fine, although it does seem at times like the game is far too quiet considering everything that’s going on. I suppose finding a nice balance between too noisy and too quietly for a life simulator like this would be quite the challenge, and it’s the type of game that you like to have something else on while playing anyway.

Gameplay

Let’s take a look at a few different aspects of gameplay within the new Sims.

Work

As in real life, I generally prefer to keep my options open and succeed as a Sims freelancer by selling paintings, working as a writer, and, new in Sims 3, selling the fish that I catch. The last one is not one that I actually do in real life, in case you were wondering. No good fishing spots in Toronto, is the problem.

For the sake of this review, I decided to pursue a career in rock stardom to see what sticking to the more conventional professional pursuits available in the game was like.

As in previous games, in order to earn promotions in your chosen field, you have to build up your skills and keep your mood elevated. Depending on what you do, you also might have to strive to get along well with your co-workers, and in The Sims 3, you actually know which fellow sim is your boss, and you can butter them up.

I found career building not quite as challenging as in previous versions, which is good because other aspects of the game are now much more rich and deserving of attention. Also, I tend to forget that your sims now have a limited lifespan (since Sims 2), so the pacing is actually entirely appropriate. Currently, I’m a pop star, but I’m approaching retirement age, so I’m not sure I’ll reach the top of my career ladder.

This is where I rock sold out crowds

Work is much more interesting than in past games because you can influence your performance by changing how you are working. A context menu attached to the task in the upper right-hand corner of the screen lets you choose between a variety of different ways of working, including working hard and slacking off, which affect your mood and job performance. This is a huge improvement over the hours of doing nothing in previous versions.

Play

There’s so much for your sims to do in their spare time in this game that it hardly feels like they have any. As mentioned above, you can go fishing, and check out various other activities in town. You can also grow your own food by gardening, and paint as in prior installments.

Frankly, I didn’t find time to do much in town, though the options are numerous. In-town activities also include random events like sales, concerts (both performing and attending), and chess competitions. I actually ended up trying to find mood modifying cheats so that I could enjoy them all, but no such luck.

Life in General

Overall, the experience is just far more rich and detailed than in previous versions. They’ve taken out some things that were annoying, and added some that are much more fun, so it doesn’t feel too cluttered. That said, I think trying to further detail day-to-day affairs would really hamper my enjoyment of the franchise. As it is, it feels like too much to do, too little time, which is exactly the opposite of the iPhone version.

Me playing a computer game in the computer game I'm playing

Verdict

If you like the previous Sims games, you definitely won’t be disappointed with Sims 3. Some things have been taken out, but better things have been added, resulting in a much more enjoyable experience overall. This is a must-have for Mac gamers.

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