World of Goo

The millions of Goo Balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore — but they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. Drag and drop living, squirming, talking, globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues so that you can direct the Goo Balls to their goal on the other end of the stage.

Massive Online Competition - Human players around the world compete in a living leaderboard to build the tallest towers of goo in World of Goo Corporation’s mysterious sandbox

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Fun Puzzle Game
Very cool puzzle game!

I bought this game for my wife for Christmas I ended up playing it just as much as her. You basically need to build these structures that the little oil blobs crawl across. Your structure needs to deliver the little blobs to a final destination. Sounds simple right? Well, as the game progresses they start releasing different kind of blobs that react differently based on the obstacles, etc. It ends up getting pretty challenging.

It reminds me of the old lemmings game which was also tons of fun.

The graphics are pretty good, and the game has a unique look to it.

Music isn’t bad or annoying either.

Nice change of pace from the standard shoot em’ up game. I would recommend this for any gamer.

5 Stars Great Game… worth the money…
The game is worth the money. Fun, and works on a MAC or PC. Great way to pass the time on a plane ride…

5 Stars An underlooked gem of a game!
I got this game from Amazon for 9.99 through a lightning deal. My wife loves puzzle games and I thought it would be a great early Valentine’s Day gift.

The game has more than 40 levels and is very easy to learn how to play. There is a good amount of creativity in solving the different levels. The levels are a combination of construction and physics, but in a fun way. The soundtrack is also nice, and the graphics are colorful and fit the mood of the game nicely.

This is also available on the Nintendo Wii, but I have not played that version.

P.S. My wife loves it!

2 Stars Great if you never downloaded the free Adobe Flash Player
Here’s a bit of a dissenting opinion on World of Goo. While the game certainly has some pretty visuals and music, the actual gameplay feels like I headed over to Kongregate and played one of the many physics-based Flash games there. You build constructs like bridges and towers in varying angles and degrees, get from point A to point B, then do it again.

Certainly the counter argument to this is that the level design transcends that simple play, but when the levels are put under the ruthless microscope of this weathered gamer and judged for their mechanics, I just didn’t see that materialize. The game quickly wore out its welcome just about halfway in (two hours or so worth of play), there’s just no meat to the core mechanics, and the game seemingly wants to coast you through by relying on it’s aesthetics and wannabe art house subversiveness.

Note that this game is a five-star game for a lot of gamers who will be drawn to the game due to the art direction and off-mainstream quirky swagger of the title. I personally just found it to be a boring, fairly banal puzzler that is more flash ( pun intended ) than actual gaming substance.

5 Stars SMART & FUN
Before you know it, you’ll be hooked on this game! It’s very well-done, smart, fun & non-violent!

The only reason I gave it a 4 stars instead of 5 is because you could only create 3 player’s profile at a time which kinda sucks if you are more than 3 in the family.

Buy/More Info

World of Goo

The millions of Goo Balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore — but they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. Drag and drop living, squirming, talking, globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues so that you can direct the Goo Balls to their goal on the other end of the stage.

Massive Online Competition - Human players around the world compete in a living leaderboard to build the tallest towers of goo in World of Goo Corporation’s mysterious sandbox

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars Great if you never downloaded the free Adobe Flash Player
Here’s a bit of a dissenting opinion on World of Goo. While the game certainly has some pretty visuals and music, the actual gameplay feels like I headed over to Kongregate and played one of the many physics-based Flash games there. You build constructs like bridges and towers in varying angles and degrees, get from point A to point B, then do it again.

Certainly the counter argument to this is that the level design transcends that simple play, but when the levels are put under the ruthless microscope of this weathered gamer and judged for their mechanics, I just didn’t see that materialize. The game quickly wore out its welcome just about halfway in (two hours or so worth of play), there’s just no meat to the core mechanics, and the game seemingly wants to coast you through by relying on it’s aesthetics and wannabe art house subversiveness.

Note that this game is a five-star game for a lot of gamers who will be drawn to the game due to the art direction and off-mainstream quirky swagger of the title. I personally just found it to be a boring, fairly banal puzzler that is more flash ( pun intended ) than actual gaming substance.

5 Stars SMART & FUN
Before you know it, you’ll be hooked on this game! It’s very well-done, smart, fun & non-violent!

The only reason I gave it a 4 stars instead of 5 is because you could only create 3 player’s profile at a time which kinda sucks if you are more than 3 in the family.

5 Stars Great Game… worth the money…
The game is worth the money. Fun, and works on a MAC or PC. Great way to pass the time on a plane ride…

5 Stars An underlooked gem of a game!
I got this game from Amazon for 9.99 through a lightning deal. My wife loves puzzle games and I thought it would be a great early Valentine’s Day gift.

The game has more than 40 levels and is very easy to learn how to play. There is a good amount of creativity in solving the different levels. The levels are a combination of construction and physics, but in a fun way. The soundtrack is also nice, and the graphics are colorful and fit the mood of the game nicely.

This is also available on the Nintendo Wii, but I have not played that version.

P.S. My wife loves it!

5 Stars Fun Puzzle Game
Very cool puzzle game!

I bought this game for my wife for Christmas I ended up playing it just as much as her. You basically need to build these structures that the little oil blobs crawl across. Your structure needs to deliver the little blobs to a final destination. Sounds simple right? Well, as the game progresses they start releasing different kind of blobs that react differently based on the obstacles, etc. It ends up getting pretty challenging.

It reminds me of the old lemmings game which was also tons of fun.

The graphics are pretty good, and the game has a unique look to it.

Music isn’t bad or annoying either.

Nice change of pace from the standard shoot em’ up game. I would recommend this for any gamer.

Buy/More Info

SiteSpinner V2

SiteSpinner V2 is an affordable, easy-to-use yet powerful drag-and-drop editor for quickly creating sophisticated websites. No need for an image tool. The program includes built-in graphics creation and editing functionality to allow you to create and edit graphics right in the work-window. Features include image and graphics shading, transparency, and rotation. Layout functions include a snap-to grid, snap-to tabs, pixel-precise positioning and more. Layout your images and text anywhere on the page you want. Just drag, drop and position. Move your text, draw an image, insert a picture. Everything can be easily moved with your mouse to wherever you want. Edit and spell-check your text. SiteSpinner V2 includes a word-processor style text editor. Choose your font style and size, type in your text, create links, check your spelling. Position your text anywhere on the page. Page and Project development. Update and include objects across multiple pages easily. Auto site-wide link updating. Meta-tag editing, and more. SiteSpinner V2 also includes many advanced features. Create sophisticated mouse-over effects. Align, center, or size your site using relative positioning and relative sizing. One click to preview, one click to publish. SiteSpinner V2 has a built-in FTP feature for publishing directly to your web site. SiteSpinner V2 can publish to HTML and to SVG. SiteSpinner V2 does not include any Spyware, Adware or Junkware.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Great program!!
SiteSpinner has truly been a life saver. I developed a web site for our non-profit organization that had several pages and information. This program was easy to use, truly WYSIWYG, and it came with everything I needed. When I ran into trouble the techsupport team and community was there to back me up. Highly recommend to anyone who has a limited budget and limited web design knowledge. You really don’t need to know html or any other language to use this product.

I plan on upgrading to the pro edition in order to incorporate animation this year!

5 Stars Great Product and Service
I have had Sitespinner for 5 years. The free upgrades are great. The support is phenomenal. For the price, there is nothing better.

1 Star Wrong tool for publishing an HTML newsletter!
This is a non-frame-based tool. It doesn’t have the concept of editing text in a table. Yes you can create a table. To put text into a cell of the table, you create the table, then create a separate text object, save that text object, then resize that text object, then drag that object into the table cell and hope that it fits. God forbid that you want to edit backgrounds or size of font. This tool is only fine if you’re doing VERY simple design. DO NOT BUY THIS TOOL IF YOU WANT TO PUBLISH A NEWSLETTER!!!

If you cut and paste the HTML into a publishing tool, the imbedded objects do NOT retain their positions. In other words, What You See Is NOT What You Get!

4 Stars Great value and easy to use.
This program is easy to use. The online forums are great. It’s all you’ll need for a basic, nice looking site. And it is a great value compared to Dreamweaver.

5 Stars Perfect For Most Any Project
Site Spinner is perfect for almost any project. It is drag and drop easy. Not an html pro? This is for you. An html pro with a simple project? This will make it faster.

Buy/More Info

iLife 09 Family Pack

iLife ‘09 makes it easier than ever to get the most out of the photos, movies, and music on your Mac. In iPhoto ?09, you can organize and find your photos in two new ways: Faces, based on who is in your photos, and Places, based on where they were taken. iMovie ‘09 lets you make the movie you want in the time you have. With new themes, you can give your movie a professional look in seconds. Or use the new Precision Editor to fine-tune your masterpiece. With Basic Lessons in GarageBand ‘09, you can learn to play piano and guitar. And you can compose and record your own songs with new guitar amps and stompbox effects. Illustrate your journey with photo books including new travel maps iMovie ‘09 Make movies with ease using advanced drag-and-drop editing Fine-tune your movies with the new Precision Editor Enhance your movie with dynamic themes and animated travel maps Smooth shaky clips with automatic video stabilization Add finishing touches with new titles, transitions, and effects Browse all your video in the full-screen Library Browser GarageBand ‘09 Learn to play piano and guitar at your own pace with Basic Lessons Learn to play a hit song from the artist who made it famous with Artist Lessons Re-create the sound of legendary guitar rigs with new amps and stompbox effects Jam using virtual instruments with Magic GarageBand Jam in full screen iWeb ‘09 Easily add dynamic content like RSS feeds and iSight videos using the iWeb Widget Browser Let your friends know when you update your site with Facebook notification Publish to virtually any hosting service using built-in FTP support Easily manage multiple websites and selectively publish one at a time notice iDVD ‘09 Get started quickly with Apple-designed themes featuring animated menus. Author customized DVDs with a range of options for customizing menu screens. Combine video and photos for stunning, high-quality slides

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Worth the Upgrade
iLife ‘09 adds great features that enhance photo organization in iPhoto. iMovie brings back many features it lost in iMovie ‘08. Garageband also adds some nice features in music lessons.

2 Stars iMovie is terrible–again. The rest of the programs are ho-hum
I bought this for one reason and one reason only: the desperate hope that iMovie had been fixed from the 2008 version to be more like the 2006 version. Didn’t happen. iMovie is now worse than ever. Editing audio files is probably the most frustrating thing I’ve tried in a while. The interface is just unintuitive, and I found myself looking for features that used to be there (fade out video effect in conjunction with audio fade out) thinking they’ve got got to be there somewhere, and then finding out that they simply don’t exist anymore. I honestly think they don’t want to make iMovie work the way it should to force people to buy the much more expensive Final Cut, even if you don’t need all of the features of a full video editing software. Working with HD video in iMovie is a joke; it lags, stutters, and crashes for no apparent reason.

iPhoto is ok, but still WAY behind programs like Adobe Lightroom II. The face recognition would be awesome if it worked well, but it doesn’t. It wanted to group my grandmother and my sister together (I guess there is a little family resemblance there). The GPS feature is awesome if you have a GPS enabled camera, but if you have a camera that nice you’re probably using Lightroom at a minimum, and even more likely a professional software suite like CS4.

Garage Band works like it should, but there aren’t any improvements that make it worth upgrading, especially with how poorly iMovie works.

Frankly, this is just another ho-hum release with more set backs than improvements. You don’t need to upgrade unless you just have to have GPS photo tracking or face recognition software. If you were hoping (like me) that iMovie would be fixed, think again. It’s terrible and makes iLife 09 simply unacceptable.

1 Star Still missing key organizing features.
iPhoto has a long ways to go before becoming a great organizer. Events seemed like a great idea when they were released in iPhoto 08 but the trouble with them is that you can’t put events inside of other events. The reason this is such a problem is that after you load so many thousands of photographs there becomes to many events and it becomes cumbersome to sludge through them all.

Their solution to this problem in 08 was the add the ability to merge events together. When this happens everything becomes one large event, it doesn’t maintain the groups of the events you merge together. I guess I can forgive them not totally thinking this feature though in iPhoto 08 but nearly a year and a half later they should have got this right by now. Adding events inside of events is a lot more important than even features like faces and places.

Doing a search is also limiting from the search box. You can’t set multiple search criteria at a time like in the Finder or Adobe Bridge. In other words I can’t say show me the files with these keywords that were taken during this time period and have this rating. I can only do one at a time. Yes I can do this with a smart folder but I would like to have option not to since I don’t always want to come back to the search later.

Posting to Facebook and Flickr only gives you access to some of the features on those sites. You can’t enter in all the information about the pictures from directly with in iPhoto (captions for photos, who can see the pictures, what should be the key photograph for an album etc.) Also iPhoto doesn’t pull the previous albums you created back in to iPhoto so you can only view some of your albums not all of them.

If you ever have to move your information to a new hard drive down the road all the work you did to put together slide shows won’t come across with the rest of the photos. I found this out the hard way as a spent a lot of time setting up manual Ken Burns effects so that they would pan from one particular area of a photograph to another. Now the only way a can access them is to boot back and forth between my old hard drive. It is a good thing I happen to have two drives in my machine or I would have to recreate them. I imagine this is what you would have to do if you had a laptop.

The recent area on the sidebar only shows the last event you look at. This is ok but I would like to see a history of the last several events I viewed. The last 12 months area doesn’t organize those photos by events so you just gets this massive number of photos which isn’t very convenient.

1 Star Huge disappointment!
iMovie - How is it possible that the iMovie “upgrades” have less features than the versions they replace? I mean, seriously, iMovie 08 was a complete disaster, now iMovie 09 is only a slight improvement over 08, still way shy of the capabilities in the 06 version. Apple did not reinstate plug-in support for 3rd party effects, so if you own hundreds of dollars worth of these I guess Apple is telling you they don’t want you to use their dumbed-down iMovie software any longer. Worse yet, they removed most of the cool built-in effects and give you about 12 or so really boring ones as a replacement? What are they thinking? Isn’t software supposed to improve with each iteration? Okay, enough on iMovie.

iPhoto - No good…period. The much-anticipated face recognition simply does not work. Does not matter how good your pics are, what angle the face is captured, etc, etc…it just does not work. That leaves us with “Places.” If you have a high-end digital camera with GPS to encode the location on your image files, this could be a nice feature. If you don’t, it’s again useless unless you want to manually tag each image with its location. If you have a large collection, this is near impossible.

iWeb - Ok, this one is an improvement. Added FTP support is the way it should have been from the get-go, but I will give Apple credit for finally adding this capability.

iDVD - No changes

Garage Band - Limited new built-in audio effects and music lessons. Basic lessons seem to be pretty good, but the highly advertised “learn-from-the-pros” lessons are an additional charge per lesson, available thru iTunes (another revenue stream for Apple via iTunes).

Overall, I think Apple’s software products are sliding, whether intentional (dumb-down iMovie so we can sell more Final Cut software) or unintentional. I regretted the ‘08 “upgrade,” and against my better judgement, decided to try the ‘09 “upgrade.” Fool me twice, shame on me…

1 Star No Excuse!
I’m a positive person, so here’s the good news first:

iPhoto has some great new features like face recognition.

GarageBand has a cool new interface.

iWeb has cool new widgets.

THE BAD

iMovie is still a travesty. Audio editing is impossible. Audio importing and placement is impossible. Clip editing is impossible. I realize I am overusing the word impossible in this review, but iMovie ‘09 is simply impossible. Totally non-intuitive and frustrating. My wrist was aching after only 15 minutes of trying to manipulate the editing controls. Also, it keeps crashing on my MacPro. In my book, there is no reason an Apple native app should crash so often on any Mac. Playback is stuttery and any editing I have tried to do just brings up the spinning beach ball of death. Avoid iMovie ‘09 like the plague and just go download ‘06 again. Whoever designed the new iMovie needs a spanking.

Buy/More Info

iLife 09

iLife ‘09 makes it easier than ever to get the most out of the photos, movies, and music on your Mac. In iPhoto ‘09, you can organize and find your photos in two new ways: Faces, based on who is in your photos, and Places, based on where they were taken. iMovie ‘09 lets you make the movie you want in the time you have. With new themes, you can give your movie a professional look in seconds. Or use the new Precision Editor to fine-tune your masterpiece. With Basic Lessons in GarageBand ‘09, you can learn to play piano and guitar. And you can compose and record your own songs with new guitar amps and stompbox effects. Illustrate your journey with photo books including new travel maps iMovie ‘09 Make movies with ease using advanced drag-and-drop editing Fine-tune your movies with the new Precision Editor Enhance your movie with dynamic themes and animated travel maps Smooth shaky clips with automatic video stabilization Add finishing touches with new titles, transitions, and effects Browse all your video in the full-screen Library Browser GarageBand ‘09 Learn to play piano and guitar at your own pace with Basic Lessons Learn to play a hit song from the artist who made it famous with Artist Lessons Re-create the sound of legendary guitar rigs with new amps and stompbox effects Jam using virtual instruments with Magic GarageBand Jam in full screen iWeb ‘09 Easily add dynamic content like RSS feeds and iSight videos using the iWeb Widget Browser Let your friends know when you update your site with Facebook notification Publish to virtually any hosting service using built-in FTP support Easily manage multiple websites and selectively publish one at a time notice iDVD ‘09 Get started quickly with Apple-designed themes featuring animated menus. Author customized DVDs with a range of options for customizing menu screens. Combine video and photos for stunning, high-quality slides

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars iLife 09 Be careful
I have iLife 05 on my 1.5 GHz Powerbook G4. I knew that some parts of iLife 09 would not work on my machine when I purchased it. However, I had read elsewhere that one could download previous versions that would upgrade my 05 version to the latest version that would run on my ‘antique’ machine.

Well, you can’t.

iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes work. iMovie will not install and I am not interested in Garageband.

So it is rather expensive for a limited upgrade. Apple Support suggest I could purchase iLife 08 or upgrade my machine (one cannot upgrade Powerbooks)

Looks like Apple is taking a page out of Microsoft’s book.

Sign of the times I guess.

1 Star No Excuse!
I’m a positive person, so here’s the good news first:

GarageBand has a cool new interface.

iWeb has cool new widgets.

THE BAD

iMovie is still a travesty. Audio editing is impossible. Audio importing and placement is impossible. Clip editing is impossible. I realize I am overusing the word impossible in this review, but iMovie ‘09 is simply impossible. Totally non-intuitive and frustrating. My wrist was aching after only 15 minutes of trying to manipulate the editing controls. Also, it keeps crashing on my MacPro. In my book, there is no reason an Apple native app should crash so often on any Mac. Playback is stuttery and any editing I have tried to do just brings up the spinning beach ball of death. Avoid iMovie ‘09 like the plague and just go download ‘06 again. Whoever designed the new iMovie needs a spanking.

Also, when I fired up iPhoto ‘09 the first time after installing, it said my library needed to be upgraded. Then it proceeded to tell me that my photos had been upgraded with a newer version of iPhoto, and that I needed to install the latest version of iPhoto in order to access my library, then it shut down…um…I just installed the latest version of iPhoto. To fix this, I had to re-import all my photos from scratch. None of my albums were preserved, so now I’ve once again got 15,000 random, uncatalogued photos that I was accessing just fine before I installed iPhoto ‘09.

Avoid iLife ‘09 unless you like pain, misery, confusion and frustration.

2 Stars Not worth the $79. Problems applenty…
I’ve been a mac user for two years now and couldn’t be happier with my macbook pro, mac mini, ipod touch, and shuffle.

iLife was a huge letdown.

First the good:

I like the iWeb and Garage band apps. They work as advertised (so far).

iWeb seems to be more intuitive and easier to work with. I just gave Garage band a cursory look (I’m not a big GB user) and it seems to work fine. Nice addition of the lessons, I might actually use this piece.

Now the bad:

iPhoto face recognition does not work. Period. I had to go through ALL of my photos to correct or add names to every single face. Zero recognition.

iMovie was a disaster. Completely corrupted my current video of my wife’s baby shower. It caused the video to play in gray scale and static. Not sure what that’s about. I will have to start all over with the video capture to see if it fixes it.

All in all, a waste of money and complete disappointment.

Updates had better be on the way because this is horrible!

4 Stars The value of iLife varies depending on your needs
I’m happy with the new iLife. The improvements to iPhoto and iMovie are both very welcome. The lessons feature of Garage Band might be something I might use. The additions to iWeb are good but the program still is only useful for a personal site. It just doesn’t offer the search engine optimization capabilities or speed of loading that a business site needs in today’s web environment. iDVD has some expanded features and new themes but isn’t a have-to-have update.

I’ll cover iPhoto first. The new face recognition ability is awesome and amazingly good. I never bothered to make smart albums of individuals before. I went through several thousand photos in a few hours and did that with ease. That one feature makes almost the purchase price worth it all by itself. Geotagging is great. I gave my recent vacation photos location tags and will continue to do so. I’m researching a handheld GPS to sync with my camera so I automate the process. As the number of geotagged photos grows, especially my bird and travel shots. This could turn into a terrific feature. And the tags translate to Flickr maps.

The new built in sharing features in iPhoto are also nice. I can upload to Flickr without exporting and using Flickr’s flaky software, or without having to buy a third party plugin. iPhoto also works with Facebook. There are existing free upload plugins for other services like Picasa and Shutterbug that should work.

iMovie has gotten back some of the functionality it lost in the 08 “upgrade”, not all of it and you still can’t use the old third party plugins I bought prior to that, but it is better. The anti-shake function actually does a pretty good job of smoothing out hand held clips. And being able to edit audio directly in the program is very nice. It’s a good but not spectacular move up from the last version.

I use Garage Band, too. The new features are limited here. There are some nice interface tweaks. Those don’t add much in the way of functionality, but it looks nice. For guitar players, Garage Band has some added effects.

The ability to buy lessons might prove to be a good feature. That will depend on what lessons become available. Right now Apple seems more interested in getting big names for the lessons than great teachers. Whether or not the lesson library becomes worthwhile will be something I’ll watch. I certainly wouldn’t buy iLife for the GB upgrade.

4 Stars Nice upgrade, but face recognition is quite weak
I bought the iLife ‘09 upgrade with great expectations for the

face recognition feature in Iphoto. Such feature can really help

to bring some structure in a huge pile of pictures that I was too

lazy to organize manually.

So, does face recognition work? Well, only about 60% of the time. Its quite a bit

weaker than Google’s Picasa face recognition.

Like a psychic running amok, Iphoto sees faces in trees and in other

mysterious spots. More irritating is that it completely misses some

30% of obvious faces in typical photos. Its hard to understand why.

Once faces are detected, the process of tying them to people is

generally OK. It makes suggestions of snapshots that might

match the given person. The more faces it knows of a person,

the better IPhoto gets, but it runs out of steam soon. This process

leaves a good portion of the faces undetermined. To get those

remaining faces properly named you have to manually flip

through thousands of pictures.

In summary, faces in Iphoto works, but is not up to the

general apple standard. Its quite a bit weaker than

the similar feature in Google’s Picasa.

Another missed opportunity is its non-existent interface

to Apple’s address book.

Instead, you are making a totally separate people database with just

the name, full name and email of a person.

For a company that made all tools work so seamlessly together,

this is an unexplicable miss. A few smaller bugs in the naming in

the pop-up menus show that the new features were added

quite sloppily.

On the positive side, the ‘places’ tool is quite nice. Any picture

that I took with the iphone magically showed up on the correct

spot in the map. Adding locations to non-geotagged pictures is

quite easy and flexible. An hour of work results in a nice virtual

map with pins all over the world you’ve traveled.

Overall, this is a useful upgrade with some disappointing

misses.

Buy/More Info