Generally, a Mac owner is expected to have a lot of Apple peripherals, like keyboards, mice, and even displays and display adapters. I’m no exception, which isn’t very strange, because I love the way most of them look and feel. Apple doesn’t offer everything you might need, though – full-size headphones, a great love of mine, are something that could use the nice design touches of Apple, but I had to look elsewhere for a fitting solution that also has an acceptable sound quality.

I set out for an affordable and quality headset. Design may be important, but since you typically wear the things, it’s best to do a selection based on technical merits. However, I found a set of ‘cans’ that qualify quite well in both departments. Read on for the full review of the Steelseries Siberia headphones. Also, read the last bit of the post for a shot at winning a free Siberia.
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Ah, I remember the day when Lights Off was released, the first truly native game for (jailbroken) iPhones. With not even a rumor about Apple’s now legendary and infamous App Store, the game was available for free through the somewhat clandestine Installer app. Designed by Adam Betts and developed by the now Apple-employed Lucas Newman, Lights Off was not only a joy to play, but also beautifully designed.

It made me incredibly excited about the prospect of native games on the iPhone. Fantastic iPhone-worthy design coupled with addictive games was a reality I couldn’t imagine. That turned out to be a positive limitation on my brain, since the introduction of the App Store has brought about mostly horribly ugly (yet sometimes quite playable) games. It’s Ramp Champ that brought me back to those good thoughts, though.

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I just recently got my hands on a mouse I used and loved over eight years ago, and it forced me to reconsider an experience I have taken for granted for a very long time: using a particular mouse with my computer. In this post I detail me falling in love again again with a mouse from my younger years, and ask some of my friends about the way they use their mice.

I can’t design without one. Some people use tablets for this, but I can not wrap my mind around using a ‘pen’ for pointing at stuff on a screen. Even with my Cintiq, I find it rather annoying and clunky to use the Mac OS X or Windows UI. Try double-clicking with a tablet pen if you want a good example of why the computer interfaces of today are made for mice, and not digitizer pens.
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There’s been so many iPhone OS 3.0 feature roundups that I’m not even going to bother doing a roundup of UI changes, as most users are quite familiar with this newest version of the iPhone firmware already.

This is a post about the details, but there’s a few things I won’t go into. For instance, please don’t get me started on those pinstripe icons. Seeing them on a huge banner at WWDC was painful enough, and then having to recreate the same stripes for this blog post’s graphic was the proverbial needle under my fingernail.

However, it’s worth a blog post to look at those nice little touches that have been added to the already impressively well-designed iPhone UI.
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Since the last gaming article on Flower, one might expect a post on a relaxing and casual game, but I want to talk about Armored Core for Answer instead; the latest game in the line of the Armored Core series is everything but casual.

I hadn’t played an Armored Core game before, but as a vocal mecha lover, I wanted to give it a shot after I had jumped through a bazillion hoops to make a Japanese Playstation Network account and downloaded the (also entirely Japanese) demo. I started up the game, enjoyed the horribly designed menu – a real stalwart quality of Japanese games in general – and went straight into the first mission.

I lasted about 30 seconds. I was literally blown away, mentally and ingame, by a 3000-feet (about a kilometer) high walking fortress with six long-range cannons firing projectiles the size of a bulky SUV. At that moment I realized that this was a game that was practically tailor-made for me.
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A lot of people ask me about the ‘boring’ part of running a freelance shop, like time tracking, billing, and invoicing. My workflow is very simple, and for the last few years it has depended almost completely on one solid-as-a-rock app: Billings by Marketcircle.

As a nice extra, Marketcircle’s Ryan Cash and Alykhan Jetha were kind enough to allow an interview about Billings to supplement this look at my personal workflow and share some background on the application and great upcoming things for users.

You guys can also win a Billings license – details on that at the end of this article!

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