Back in the day, our best options for learning were either slowing down a song, having a friend teach us, or hoping it was featured in a guitar magazine. Apple has a surprising amount of available technology for picking the guitar back up — my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro are at the heart of my learning process. Here’s a look at how I’ve used them, and some tips for those who’d like to do the same.

The iPhone

Every Monday night, I take a lesson from an excellent blues guitarist. Rather than take notes and write down the various chord progressions he shows me, I instead shoot video of the homework parts of the lesson on my iPhone 4S. I then quickly edit the clip in iMovie to add a title and then re-save it to my camera roll.

I also have a few apps on my iPhone to help me out. I have an iRig, which I pair with their Amplitube app (free). While I don’t use the app as my main practice amp anymore after I bought a modeling amp, I do use the app as my tuner and for the Song feature to play along with a song I’m learning.

GarageBand for iOS ($4.99) is also a handy practice tool. I really hate using a metronome, but having something keep the beat is crucial. So my solution is to use a sample drum loop from GarageBand on my phone that sounds close to to the beat I want.

The iPad

My iPad is the device I keep on my music stand while practicing. I use Apple’s Camera Connection Kit to import the video from my iPhone onto my iPad. I’m also toying with shooting the video on my iPad and skipping this step, but I find the small size of the iPhone is easier for recording when I’m also holding a guitar. Then I watch my lesson video and follow along, pausing and fast-forwarding as needed.

I also use Songsterr to look up the tabs for songs I’m interested in, and then use its iOS app ($9.99) to “favorite” the song. Then the app becomes my music sheet when I’m playing. While Songsterr isn’t perfect — some songs are transcribed perfectly, some are good enough and some aren’t even close — I find it does an adequate job.

We’ve covered reading apps on the iPad already, so I won’t go into it too much here, but there are two apps I use for reference: Zinio and the Kindle app. I subscribe to several guitar magazines on Zinio, so I reference those while practicing. I also have some music theory books I’ve purchased for Kindle that I’ll look up chord fingerings on.

The Mac

While the iPad sees the majority of the music action, I still use my Mac. When I find (an accurate) song on Songsterr’s site I want to practice, I’ll mute the instruments on the web view of the song and then use Audio Hijack Pro to record the backing tracks. While my Amplitube setup lets me play along to the song, I find this is good if I want to do any recording, or if I don’t want to listen to the additional guitar parts.

After that I import those into GarageBand for Mac ($14.99)  and lay down guitar tracks on top of them. I have an amp (a Peavy Vypyr 75 watt) with a USB port, so I can hook my Mac up to it without having to mess around with mikes and the like. I’ll also use the drum loops in GarageBand to outline a basic song structure to jam over. If I want to try and mimic jamming with friends, I’ll use the Magic GarageBand feature to add some drums, bass, keys and harmonica to a track. One thing I don’t like about Magic GarageBand — the jam session feature in Apple’s software — is that I have to click “Open in GarageBand” to change the key; it would be nice to be able to do that from the main screen.

Coda

It’s been a lot of fun getting back into the guitar, and a lot of that fun has been how much iOS devices and OS X have aided me in the process. While I’m still in the early stages of getting going again, the skills and techniques I’m gaining with the software, in addition to the instrument, will form a great foundation for future work. It won’t be too long before I’m recording full demo tracks in GarageBand.

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Ticket to Ride ($6.99, update is free) was one of the earliest games we looked at for this weekly feature, and it’s still one of our favorites. As both a train and a board games nut, Ticket to Ride is right up my alley. An update released Thursday upgrades the graphics for the new iPad’s high-resolution display, as well as making the game a little easier for color blind users.

For newcomers to Ticket to Ride, here are the basics. The object of the game is to complete train routes and stop your opponents from completing theirs. At the start of the game, you choose destination cards. If you complete these routes (Vancouver to Montreal, as an example) you earn the extra points shown on the card. If you fail to complete it, those points are deducted from your score.  You’ll draw colored wagons and locomotives from a deck of cards. Match up the colored wagons to the route color (locomotive cards are wild) to complete the route. This is the sort of game where your victory can also screw your opponent out of their victory  – which, to me, is very sweet.

I’m color blind, and one nice concession the game’s developer, Days of Wonder, made originally is having small symbols on the routes and cards to help those that can’t see color. This  made it easier for us to match them up. The problem was, you could only see the the symbols on the zoomed-in view. Now, with the Retina display, you can see the colors on the main map. I’m not going to lie: other improvements aside, this is a big deal for me.

According to the email I received from the friendly PR person, the Retina display allows them “to display the same high-fidelity, finely-detailed paper textures and beautiful background illustrations that are featured in the real world Ticket to Ride board game.”

I never thought I’d say this, but I like the Retina maps better than the physical board game version (although I do think the font on the board game version looks nicer). While I appreciate the beauty of console quality graphics on my iPad via games like Infinity Blade II, I value the look and feel of an upgrade to games like Ticket to Ride more. This upgrade is one of those upgrades that really make me feel like I was suffering playing the game on my old iPad.

So far the only thing I’m disappointed in is online play, which is still disjointed. While you can join a game with a random stranger right from the play screen, I still had better results going to the More screen and choosing Online from there. I called them out on this the last time I looked at the game and it’s disappointing to still see this as an issue.

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iBooks

Apple’s iBooks app was my default reading platform until I got a Kindle device. Amazon’s selection, Whispernet technology, and the ability to read my books on just about any device I owned moved me to that platform. Now iBooks uses your iTunes account to sync notes and reading position, and the selection for new releases seems to match Amazon’s new releases. What I had forgotten was just how good books in iBooks look. When reading the sample chapter of Michael Connelly’s The Drop via iBooks I noticed the typography overall was crisper and the design markedly different from the Kindle app. Even side-loaded books looked better, probably due to different fonts in the iBooks app.

I also noticed an improvement in the rendering of PDFs compared to the original iPad. Assuming the PDF is of a high-enough resolution, the text and photos will be much clearer on the new iPad thanks to the display. The one thing I’ve always enjoyed about the iBooks app is how well it manages ePub and PDF files.

The problem I’ve noticed with iBooks, however, is it seems to take a very long time to open — about 13 seconds. I’m not sure if it’s because of the size of my library or just the app itself.

Amazon Kindle app

While the iBooks app looks better, the Kindle app still looks great on the Retina display.  Even if you’ve blown the text up to the largest font size available, the text is very clear with no discernible anti-aliasing.  The latest version of the app has an interface that is similar to the Kindle Fire app with tabs along the top for Books, Newsstand and Personal Documents. As an aside, I’ve always enjoyed how seamless Amazon’s Personal Documents makes reading side-loaded books. I hope someday Apple will let iBooks readers store side-loaded ePubs in iCloud.

While I was previously critical of how Newsstand items rendered in the Kindle app, I did notice  a very slight improvement with the new iPad. The text is still slightly too heavy for my tastes and it varies from magazine to magazine. The pages do load smoothly, however, and I did not detect any focusing issues.

Zinio

Zinio has the toughest load to bear with the Retina display. Delivering quality text on a Retina display, even if you use your own API, isn’t that taxing — displaying 50-plus pages that are graphics is, however. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me that Zinio had the worst growing pains. The version of the app available when the new iPad launched had issues where the pages would slowly load as tiles. The first release of the updated app showed a marginal improvement. The app that is now available (version 2.2.2 — check your updates, it launched almost immediately after 2.2.1) is a big improvement. The only time I notice the tiling effect is if the magazine is still being downloaded. While the focusing still isn’t instantaneous, it’s not any worse than usual.

I’m a guitar player, so the litmus test for me is how easily I can read the tablature in a magazine. On the iPad 2, I still had to zoom in to make out the small numbers. On the new iPad, it’s much clearer minimizing the need to zoom in. I have also noticed an improved sharpness in my photography magazines, especially with National Geographic.

Comixology

The iPad really got me back into reading comics, and Comixology quickly became my go-to source for digital comics. The new iPad really makes this a fantastic reading experience. With older iPads, the text would be fuzzy enough to force me to use the pane-by-pane view. With the new iPad, I don’t need to. While the issues look great as they are, Comixology is stepping up their game by updating (for free) most of their library to what they call CMX HD.  At the time of publishing, roughly 1,000 titles have been upgraded. When you are shopping for comics it will say CMX HD in the lower right hand corner of the page if it is available in HD. This was the app I was most looking forward to on the new iPad, and it has not disappointed me at all.

Newsstand

This is somewhat of a mess. Updating apps for the Retina displays really drives home for me how discombobulated the entire Newsstand experience is. At the time of publishing, few Newsstand apps from my library have been updated. Non-updated Newsstand apps have a noticeable focusing issue where the page takes several seconds to load, and it focuses in annoying tiles.

Overall, I’m very pleased with most of these apps, especially iBooks and Comixology, and how they’ve adapted to the new display on the iPad. I’m hopeful that having to deal with delivering large files will change how Zinio and Newsstand issues are delivered, ideally by using the text APIs to make the text even clearer and the files smaller.

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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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Now with OS X Mountain Lion, which should arrive some time this summer, true feature parity for Notes, Reminders and Notifications comes to OS X. I’ve spent some time with the new features, and I’m eager to share my experiences with you.

Notes

Notes syncing from iOS back to OS X has always struck me as a tacked-on feature, with notes buried in Mail.app, making viewing and editing notes awkward and unpleasant. With Mountain Lion, notes get their rightful position in their own app. The Mountain Lion version is a near-duplicate of the iOS version, and I do not view that as a criticism, because Notes on iOS is very elegant in its simplicity.

What I found interesting is while Notes can be turned on and off via the iCloud System Preference, it apparently still uses IMAP for some of the backend transfer as I was asked to enter in my passwords for my Gmail accounts. Notes appear to sync quickly, within a minute or so of being edited.

I’m really excited about Notes being easier to use in OS X. I swap between Evernote and Notes for my note-taking needs, with Evernote getting my article-length notes clipped from the web or imported PDFs, and Notes getting my day-to-day notes, like what printer my Mom has, dial-in codes for meetings, meeting notes, etc.

Reminders

Reminders, formerly To-Dos, made a lot of sense living in iCal pre-iOS. However, the Calendar iOS app never had to-dos, and with the advent of the Reminders iOS app, it became very uncomfortable having them stored in iCal. I always found iCal’s handling of to-dos unwieldy, and being stuck in a small pane off to the side didn’t help. It’s been said that the areas of OS X and iOS that are the most polished are the ones Steve Jobs was very involved in — if so, I’m fairly confident the man never managed a task list in iCal.

Now with Mountain Lion, to-dos are moved to their own Reminders app, and life couldn’t be better. It’s a nearly identical copy of the iOS app in looks and function, with two big differences: on OS X you can choose if a list is on iCloud or your Mac, and I cannot see a way to set a location-based reminder. While OS X isn’t really location aware (even though it does have Find my Mac), it would be nice if I could set a reminder in OS X for something I need to do at work and have my iPhone remind me when I get there.

Overall, I’m happy with Reminders in Mountain Lion as it allows me to easily manage my to-dos. While I still expect to handle most of my project-level task management in OmniFocus, Reminders will be the app I use to remind me of life’s daily minutiae.

Notifications

The last of what I call the Big Three features to migrate from iOS to OS X is Notifications. Users of Growl will find Notifications very similar as notifications are displayed in the upper right-hand corner. As with iOS, you can choose if an app displays a banner, an alert that shows up in the middle of the screen, a badge icon, or all three.

Right now, obviously, only the apps built into Mountain Lion are supported. According to this piece by John Gruber, only apps acquired from the Mac App Store can send events to Notifications. As an aside, you can configure Mail.app to only alert you if you receive an e-mail from someone you have flagged as a VIP, which helps cut down on the popup clutter.

So far my experiences with Notifications have been light, with not many apps supporting it. I’m not sure if Notifications will ever fully replace Growl for me since not all the apps I rely on Growl for are available in the Mac App Store.

Final thoughts

Apple’s headline on the Mountain Lion web page is “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac,” and that’s pretty much true based on my usage of it so far. I’m happy there is feature parity between iOS and OS X for Notes and Reminders. If you don’t complement your Macintosh with an iOS device, you may not derive the same excitement I do from these new features. But if you’re a  heavy user of Notes and Reminders you will be thrilled that these apps are now on OS X.

One hope I have, with OS X moving to a yearly upgrade cycle, as iOS has always had, is that features that complement each other on both operating systems will be released at the same time, and not with the lag we currently have.

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Zinio

Selection:

Zinio is the oldest, most mature magazine platform on the iPad, and as a result has the largest selection. The music and photography sections are well stocked. The only writing magazine available I like is The Writer (Writer’s Digest is missing) and for Apple-related magazines Macworld magazine is available, but MacLife is not.  As an aside, while Zinio does carry adult magazines, those are not available on the iPad app due to Apple’s guidelines. Where Zinio’s selection truly shines is the large back issue catalog — Digital Camera World has issues going back to 2002. News and tech-related magazines tend to have a short shelf life, but for arts magazines I love I can go that far back. The News section seems well stocked, but, oddly, the the Russian version of Forbes is the only one available.

The  shopping experience is very unobtrusive. Since Zinio’s primary business is selling magazines, it’s very easy to browse the store and purchase magazines from either your browser or app. Zinio does a good job at organizing the magazines into sections, so you can browse just by Photography or Music sections. It would be nice to see another sub-level where I could sort by just guitar-oriented magazines.

Zinio has the highest up-front cost of the three options because most subscriptions are for the year, and individual prices are close to newsstand prices.

Reading Experience:

The first few releases of the app were rough going with each page taking a while to come into focus, but with the latest version of the app, I barely notice it on an iPad and never notice it on an iPad 2. The text has a nice weight and the images look fine. You can sort your reading view by issue release date or title, but you can’t group them by section. The quality varies on the table of contents between magazines. Some magazines just show you the content page; others have an interactive table of contents, making it easy to get to the article you want to read. There is an option to display a lengthy article in an easy-to-read text format, but it not used nearly enough. You can bookmark pages, but not highlight passages.

Macworld magazine in the Zinio app

Amazon

Selection:

Of the three options, Amazon has the poorest digital selection with roughly 420 Kindle magazines available. Amazon’s Arts and Entertainment digital magazine section has only 120 magazines; Zinio’s Photography section (also under its Arts section) has 118 magazines alone. That said, there are a few magazines like Guitar World that are available on Amazon, but not Zinio. Searching the store is a bit of a hassle. The default sections are too broad making it hard to narrow your selection. Also the keywording isn’t implemented well; searching on Photography did not bring up Digital Camera World, but searching on Camera did.

There are also no back issues available. This is a problem if you get into a new interest and want to get a backlog of magazines. As I mentioned in the Zinio section, it’s nice to get into a new hobby like photography and be able to scour the back issues.

In terms of pricing, I found Amazon to be the most consumer-friendly. Most magazines can be subscribed to month-to-month for about $1 to $2.99 and a free 14-day trial is available for all magazines. Unlike Zinio, you do not have to purchase a full year upfront.

Reading Experience:

Your magazines are well-integrated into the Kindle app, showing up in both the All Items view and the Newsstand tab. I found the page layout view to be the poorest of the three, with the text being slightly heavier than Newsstand and Zinio; it’s about halfway between regular and semi-bold. Against  a white background it’s not bad, but it really looks poor against a color. What is nice is Amazon’s Text view for magazines is much more useful than Zinio’s. It’s supported on each page and you can customize the layout and fonts.

Finding old issues you want to download, again, isn’t clean. All of your old issues are in a Periodicals: Back Issues folder. Back Issues also seem to go into the Archived section of the Newsstand tab. What’s a little weird is if you archive a magazine it only shows up in the Archived area, not also the Periodicals: Back Issues folder.

Mac|Life magazine in the Kindle app

Newsstand

Newsstand isn’t one service. Instead, it’s a collection of magazine apps that are grouped by Apple into their Newsstand folder in iOS 5. While each app does have its own idiosyncrasies, there are  some common themes I’ll be mentioning here.

Selection:

The selection for Newsstand roughly falls between Kindle and Zinio with around 1,620 Newsstand apps available. However, it’s in searching the thing falls down on its face. You can either search the store for the magazine and then refine the search for Apps only, or you can scroll through the entire Newsstand catalogue. It’s darn near impossible to browse a section. Shutterbug magazine will show that it’s in the Photo and Video section, but clicking on that section shows me all of the Photo and Video apps; not just Newsstand apps. You also cannot search and purchase through the web.

Most magazines are available for monthly $1 to $2.99 subscriptions with a few I’ve seen having a minimum of a three-month subscription. There are no free trials. Back issues vary from app to app; some only go back to when the app was launched, some go back over a year.

Reading Experience:

For the most part, reading a Newsstand magazine is on par with reading a PDF of the magazine. While that’s largely true of Zinio and Amazon, at least they offer niceties like the table of contents and a text view; the Newsstand apps I’ve tried do not. Also, there is no bookmarking or text selecting. Newsstand apps take a second or so to focus in on my iPad, but it’s better on my iPad 2. However, unlike the Kindle app, the text looks fine in page layout view.

While Newsstand does a decent job of grouping magazine apps together, the entire reading experience feels kludgy. If you have a lot of apps, it’s hard to find out which ones have recent copies since the app stays in the same place in Newsstand even after a new issue has been downloaded — although some of the apps show a “new issue” flag on the app. You can turn on notifications and badges, but I limit my notifications to alerts that are truly important.

An obvious point that bears mentioning is that Newsstand is the only one of the three that’s not cross-platform. One of the draws of Zinio and Amazon Kindle is they do work on non-Apple devices. If you also have a Kindle Fire in addition to your iPad, Newsstand is not the choice for you.

Mac|Life magazine in Future's Newsstand app

Where my purchases go

When I look for a magazine, Zinio still remains my first destination since that’s where the bulk of my library resides. After that, I look on Amazon for a Kindle version. If it’s not on Kindle but is on Newsstand, well, frankly I make a decision if I really need the magazine that badly. There are two reasons I choose the Kindle second, even though the quality is the poorest of the three: it shows up with the rest of my books in the Kindle app, so I only have two apps that I need to look towards for reading — and it is cross-platform. One thing I’m trying really hard to do is make sure the content I consume is cross-platform. With iOS, I know I’ve got some lock-in on apps, but since Zinio and Amazon have gone out of their respective ways to make sure my content can be read on different platforms I know I can read my books and magazines on a Kindle Fire if I get one.

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Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least.

I’m starting to think there’s a union rule: In every shooter, the helicopter, plane, train, or automobile you use to arrive will be destroyed. Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation ($6.99, Universal) for iOS is no exception. Combined forces of Very Bad People doing Very Bad Things have taken over some cities in America. Even though the American Armed Forces number over a million soldiers, apparently it’s up to just you to solve this problem.

Well, not just you alone. As in most of the Modern Combat series, there are various NPCs that accompany you through the 13-mission campaign that spans Los Angeles to Pakistan. I’d say they help you, but most of their support so far seems to involve yelling encouraging things and laying down random covering fire.

Games like Modern Combat 3 are starting to make me question my decision to pass on the iPad 2. Not so much for the increased graphics performance — when I did a test restore of a friend’s iPad 2 a while back to check it out, I didn’t notice a huge difference in games — but for the AirPlay Mirroring. I’m rapidly coming around to the idea of sitting on my couch playing a shooter on my iPad and TV. MC3‘s graphics are quite good. I’m starting to get as much value from a $7 iPad app as I am from $60 Xbox games.

The only problem I had with this game was with controls. When I wrote about Shadowgun, I raved about how customizable the controls were. In MC3, I didn’t have that flexibility. As a result, I’d end up shooting when I wanted to look around. With Shadowgun, I could move individual controls around; in MC3 I could only choose between three presets I was never fully happy with.

Even so, with 13 single player missions and 6 multiplayer maps for the low cost of seven bucks, Modern Combat 3 is this week’s Game for the Weekend.

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I’m a simple man, and at times I like simple games. At its core, Monster Hunter Dynamic Hunting ($0.99 until Oct. 24) is a simple game. The object is to defeat various monsters in an arena setting. This isn’t a game where you run through corridors seeking treasure and fame.

Every duel has a timer you need to beat. Each monster has different attacks and defenses; a gorilla may be vulnerable to head attacks but his stomach is heavily armored. So, you need to plan your attacks instead of just standing there hitting the thing with your sword. Although, take it from experience, sometimes that works in a pinch. At the end of each match you get a letter grade based on how long it took you to win your fight, your ending health, etc. It’s a good way of getting you to want to improve your performance, as well as a somewhat humbling experience. What do you mean I got a D? I won the fight, didn’t I? Apparently this is a game where style points matter.

The graphics are good. Not great, but good. While they don’t fall into the category of something like Infinity Blade, they don’t make my eyes bleed, either. Getting used to the controls took a little bit of time, too. I’ve got large fingers and an old brain and I had a hard time remembering whether dodging was a swipe or two-finger tap. Also, since this an iPhone-only game (it will run in 2x mode on an iPad, but it’s not optimized for it) I found my fingers blocking some of the action on the screen.

Monster Hunter is on sale this weekend for $0.99 to celebrate their new update that adds four new monsters and some gameplay improvements.

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Setting up iCloud backups

Go to the iCloud settings and choose Storage and Backup. Make sure iCloud backup is set to “On.”

According to Apple, this is what’s backed up: Purchased music, TV shows, apps, and books; photos and video in the Camera Roll; device settings; app data; home screen and app organization; messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS); and ringtones. Apple’s mantra is anything that can be re-downloaded isn’t backed up, so your apps and any apps that have downloadable content aren’t stored in the cloud. If you have large amounts of app data, like PDFs in GoodReader, you may find yourself going over your free 5 GB limit. Naturally, if you do want all that data backed up, you can buy more storage: 15 GB is $20 per year; 25 GB is $40 per year; and 55 GB is $100 per year.

To specify which app data is or is not backed up, while still in the Storage and Backup section of the iCloud settings, click on Manage Storage and then your iOS device. Here, you can specify which apps iCloud backs up, and which it doesn’t.

iCloud backups happen whenever the device is plugged in, on a Wi-Fi network, and locked (meaning it’s at the Swipe to Unlock screen). If you want to check when the last backup was, or force a backup, at the bottom of the Storage and Backups screen there is a Back Up Now button.

Restoring from backup

Right now, backups and restores are done on the assumption you’ve either replaced your device, or your whole install is so messed up you had to nuke from orbit. The only way you can restore data is from the setup screen on a fresh install of iOS; you can’t just restore the specific data from a single app you accidentally deleted. This will be less of a problem once apps are updated to store their own backups in iCloud.

To reset your device, under General, choose Reset, and then Erase All Content and Settings. Your device will be restored to factory conditions and you will be prompted with this screen.

Restoration is a two-step process: first the device settings are restored, then all apps are re-downloaded from Apple’s servers. The restoration happens in order: the first app on your first screen is the first app to be re-downloaded. If you want to prioritize an app, tap on its icon. According to Apple, the restore will attempt to download the same version of the app that you had installed previously. If that version is no longer available, the latest version of the app will be restored instead.

The Aftermath

After doing several restores this weekend to try this out, I found the process relatively smooth with few surprises. I did have to re-enter a few email addresses. These all seemed to be Gmail addresses I had set up as Exchange accounts. However, it didn’t tell me which Exchange server it needed the passwords to. I also had to re-enter my iTunes password and my Game Center password. All fairly minor inconveniences. It did lose that I was syncing wirelessly to my MacBook, so I had to set that up again. I also recommend letting the Wi-Fi re-download from Apple’s servers completely (and not switch to iTunes syncing for apps) to ensure everything comes down clean. If you’re in a restore state, it’s best to limit the variables.

What’s nice is if you suffer a critical failure on the road you can get yourself up and running easily. This is great if your iOS device dies; you can swap it out at the Apple store and restore from backup while you’re there.

It’s important to make sure when you do this you have the time to check out that everything restored properly. It would be embarrassing to need to restore your device before a big presentation and find out the hard way Keynote or your specific presentation didn’t restore properly.

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This week we bring you the first game I’ve seen that takes full advantage of what iOS 5 and iCloud can mean for gaming: Scribblenauts Remix ($4.99). In addition to being a fun puzzle game, Scribblenauts  also takes full advantage of iCloud by syncing saved games across iOS devices.

The goal of Scribblenauts Remix is to help Maxwell get Starites on each level. You help him by creating objects he can use to interact with his environment. Creating objects is achieved by writing them out.

For instance, to get the Starite on the first level I wrote “hammer,” providing the main character with one he could use to attack the tree the Starite was stuck in and shake it loose. For some levels you need to get to the Startite that’s visible on-screen, while on others you need to create a number of necessary objects to unlock the Starite; in one I needed to create eight items a person in school might need. There is some level of intelligence to the notepad you use to create items; if you type in something it doesn’t recognize, it will suggest alternatives.

The laid-back nature of  the nature of the game is great for mobile gaming. You won’t find yourself in an awkward situation where you’re almost at your stop on the train, but aren’t in a position to quit the game quite yet. The graphics are fun and cartoony. Warner Bros. claims there are unlimited solutions and outcomes but I haven’t had much of a chance to test out that claim. There are definitely multiple ways to solve a level, though the goals never change. While you can create different objects each time you play the schoolhouse level, for instance, in the end you still need to create eight objects it’s happy with.

What’s really great is since it’s a Universal app and uses iCloud to sync saves, you can switch between devices at will. I didn’t have to do anything special to get fame syncing to work, but I assume you need to have Documents and Data under iCloud’s Settings ticked. What I did notice is it will sync the levels you’ve unlocked and your score, but not your progress through an individual level. How they use iCloud is exactly how I hope all game developers use it. Not being able to sync my save game state is a major pain. Since iCloud also keeps the data after you’ve deleted the game from your device, you can pick up where you left off when you reinstall. Fantastic stuff!

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