I downloaded the various free version guides and used those for almost a year, but didn’t pick up any of the Apps since each one had something missing. I tried out the Free Audubon Guide to Owls and loved it. My paperback field guide now had dried to the point of sounding crackly and was threatening to drop out pages. Hesitant as I was to invest $9.99 in an App, the Audubon Wildflowers of North America App truly is stunning. The information is well organized. You can search for plant names by latin name common name or even other. Having these combined is a great time saving touch. It works well even with multiple search terms.

The App gives you space in an account to record a life list of plants. It also has the invaluable ability to identify plants for you. If you think you can get a solid identification online just by Googling for plants, good luck. The over abundance of information about plants one is something that even Google can’t manage with it’s robotic inability to understand the difference between weeds. There are dozens of kinds of amaranth plants and some of them are poisonous, which I would not have known or find out from looking up the plant from Google.

In the Audubon Field Guide to North American Wildflowers has an excellent plant identification system which is accurate and easy to use. It starts you off with the plant shape color and other attributes and narrows it down. If you don’t know what that huge plant is that’s in your flower garden which ‘looks like it is something’ there’s an App for that. Whatever it is, flora or fauna it’s going to be in one of the the Audubon Field Guides.

Game Loft has produced and successfully released it’s first MMO clone. Order and Chaos has been called a World of Warcraft knock off. But I feel like I have been playing Guild Wars pre- Searing. When I think of elves that have the long floppy ears, and characters with tree trunk shaped feet then I think of Wow. The human character designs only slightly resemble those good old shoeless, ugly, WoW avatars that you had come to love.

Right now for $6.99 at the Apple App store you can play in any iOS device for three months. It is the usual fair of choosing from four races, human, elf, ogre, and undead. There are professions to choose from such as warrior, mage, monk (cleric) and rouge.

There is also an infestation of human scammers who will steal your account on the pretense of doing a trade outside the game. They get your email account name and then crack your password. There are creeps scamming in other ways, and there are jerks selling gold too.

As long as you know enough to stay away from these guys you will be ok. Chat is easily shut off so that you can ignore specific channels or all of them. It would be nice if you could have a master toggle to shut those off long term. As it is now, you have to shut the channels off each time you log in. If you are a new player it is a good idea to prepare yourself for the rude language and crudeness of some of the other players. Once you have that controlled, you can throughly enjoy the game.

Since it is new you can expect glitches. I was able to see other characters walking around up in the air as the surfaces they were traveling on disappeared. And my character was also able to see through walls and stick her feet through them. Up until the first major patch. I’ve seen enemies get buried in rocks or hillsides, and I am still able to kill them and collect from them. The loose-ness of the textures is in the players favor though. I don’t know how many times before I’ve wished I could shoot through rock.

There are so many advantages to playing an MMO on iPad vs playing on PC or even laptop. I fear I may sound way too happy. It can and has been criticized for simplicity, but the most addicting games are the ones which conquer the struggle between being simple and monotonous.

Gameplay is faster than any MMO I have ever played. I won’t bore you with a list, but if you can think of a title, I’ve been there and done that. On iPad which loads everything in a split second, spells not only look fantastic, but they fly off quickly. Battle doesn’t lag. When you run, your character doesn’t stop and run in place while you wait for the next area to load. The auto targeting works perfectly. When you get attacked unexpectedly, your character begins to attack right back. No time and HP are wasted flailing about trying to get your character to turn around and start to do something. Once triggered you can come in and put out bigger attacks. You have to get used to the flow of traveling with the left hand and the camera with the right. Even when looting the corpse has to be picked from the right side of the screen or the right hand.

When you want to talk to an NPC, all you have to do is click in their icon. Then your character will run directly over to them and a menu will open. Or you will be give a choice between bargaining or speaking with them. There is no messing around trying to get your character into the right place to trigger the NPC. It just smoothly transpires without any additional frustration that you get in some games.

The iPad makes you faster too. The interface is very small. The touch commands are effortless. You swipe, tap and point which gives you a tactile feeling of being inside the world itself. Spells and strikes for warriors are mapped to three fingers of the right hand on a ring at the bottom right corner. It works very well. The ring spins to accommodate more moves. A double ring at some point in the future would work well for getting the rest of the right hand fingers into the game. A hidden panel to the right side of the screen opens for one touch access and release if health potion is or other effects that can be set off even during battle, depending on what it is.

The other speed boost to MMO play is there is no set up time. In traditional MMO’s you can spend an hour or more just setting up before you can get to play. There were hundreds of little icons to select from and then arrange on the desk top, and in bags. The whole prep time has been pruned back to give not only ease of use but also pick up and play-ability. You can press the power button and return to play right where you left off.

Depending on how long you are gone, you may even return with all your Quests and buffs still in place, or even mid battle. Which isn’t a good idea, because your character could get killed when you aren’t there.

Death is nasty. You are without death penalty until level ten, but that comes quickly. The penalty is taken out of your character’s money! It is terrible. If you wander into the wrong area, or if you are going against higher level characters they take even more of your hard earned silver, and could clean you out. You do revive in conveniently located cemeteries but it’s no consolation.

There certainly are lots of people complaining about everything from the map to looking for NPC’s to finish quests. Indeed the maps can use a whole lot of improvement. They need to be labelled, right now the place names are toggled on a button. The locations of shops and trainers should be indicated on zoom. There are many forts and towns which are not on the map at all. Shapes show up on the map and turn out to be large rocks or giant tree stumps. Important structures such as impenetrable walls of mountains or shuttered dams in the north are not notated and they should be. There are excellent mobs and hunting grounds that are hidden in these areas, and they deserve exploration.

The game encourages you to team up but so far at level 22 I haven’t seen where it is required. The quests are easy and give big experience points. You can make it through the levels to 20 easily from experience points gained from Quests and occasional hunting.

You can form Guilds of course. If there is someone that yiu would like to talk to you can exchange in game names and add them to your friends list, invite them to share a Quest or join a Guild. Right now you can’t shut off private messaging called Whisper. So theoretically someone can accost you verbally privately and be pretty vulgar. You can Ignore that person by holding a finger on the character name. I don’t know if that blocks the entire account to prevent stalking, but it should.

There are several cute little pets to choose from. They made it easy to acquire them. Although the prices fluctuate. I got a baby wolf and a baby panda. The prices on both of them increased the next week after I bought them. The pets just do a few cute animations and make adorable noises. They are fun to look at and take pictures with. They don’t do anything, I don’t think they take damage, but they do growl when enemies are near.

The graphics are not bad there are many pretty areas, full towns, temples and statues. There are glowing lights and sparkles coming from magical places in the environment. Where colorful butterflies play, and rainbows of sunlight dapple the leaves. Some of the sculptures are lit with purple and blue fog. When you get bespelled by some baddies, then indigo bubbles infest your brain. The negative spells are imaginative, filling your poor character’s mind with dark tracings or greenish ick. The gothic area around the Silent Castle is chock full of zombies, screaming banshies and harpies. The area is a great deal of fun, if not cliche. It is one of those places in the game where you never know what is going to spring up or how huge it will be.

The layout in the towns can be repetitive. The interior floor plans are similar, which makes it easier to get in and out. Some of the enemy dwellings are exactly the same too, and I hope to see more and better interior models as I advance through the game.

Considering this is a mobile game that can be played on an iPhone or iTouch it is amazing how much stuff they were able to get in there. If you compare it to WoW and not something with gorgeous graphics like Guild Wars, the you won’t be disappointed. The graphics are not at the level of Infinity Blade, but there is much more to do in this game and I for one am liking this game even better.

Game play is very familiar. Your Quests do consist of going to find someone or an item. Then you kill a number of creatures or person(s) and return to the Quest giver to be rewarded. All very standard stuff, but it is all easily done. One of the strengths of the game is it’s simplicity and lack of clutter.

You can have a good time with it, without all the concerns that you have to deal with on a PC MMO. You can stop playing at any time and you will be returned right back to where you were seamlessly without any loss of distance travelled. There are many streamlined innovations in porting a game like this one to touch interface. The desktop MMO’s have even had special custom keyboards for the multitude of short cut commands to run a game taking up an entire qwerty keyboard, function keys and number keys too.

Order & Chaos Online is the best MMO I’ve played since Guild Wars. Period. It does what an MMO needs to do which is to let you kill things, and loot them. The game mechanics get out of your way and allow you to do that without impeding your progress or your good time.

The game is a fine value for the price. The subscription fees are low. You can make micro purchases in game for gold and crystals. Watch out for that . You can use as many iPads or iPods as you have on your iTunes account. You need a Gameloft Account which is free, for who ever is playing on each device or you can log in your own character across your multiple iOS devices. Order & Chaos Online gets 9 spell books out of 10.

You can set Safe Spots for your dog to stay in, and get alerts on your phone if the dog leaves your designated area or yard. In the event of a loose dog, you can get turn by turn directions to connect with your agile Houdini. They back up the $14.95 a month Escape Artist service plan with toll free telephone support around the clock.
The collars are also outfitted with a Rescue button, so that if someone finds your lost dog all they need to do is press the button and you will immediately get the location.

No security system is ever perfect. The same downsides which apply to your cell phone apply to the SpotLight products. If the battery dies then it’s no good. The collars work on TMobile cell service, so if your dog leaves the TMobile area then it isn’t going to get a signal to you until it is picked up by a tower. It is recommended that you check the service map carefully before buying it. For now if you’ve got a big doggie that jumps fences and eats the neighbor’s chickens, then this will be a helpful stop gap.

Unless you have a tea cup sized dog. Then the little one will need a wagon to carry the giant cellphone sized transmitter. For a price of $249.00 and operating on TMobile it doesn’t seem like you are getting equivalent value. A much smaller transmitter is probably out there, but the big clunky one is what they can resell cheaply enough to make a profit. There is also an activation fee of fifteen dollars as well. The unit is not waterproof either. For the Pomeranian owner your best bet is to teach her how to use an iPhone.

You can select a female or male avatar to play as. You can also customize your character by putting in your own photo for your face. Then you can pick clothing and skin tone. I have seen console games with character customizations that don’t match the capabilities of this little App.

As long as you get the answers right, you are fine. But when you get it wrong, your character falls down a hole, just like on the show. You are given Life Savers, which eliminate two out of four multiple choice questions. If you do well you are rewarded with new background skins, and trophies. You can play two player Bluetooth, or on Game Center.

One little problem I had with the App was that I could not get back to the main menu. Once the game got going, if I paused it, there was no way to access the Green Room to change outfits, or go to the Leaderboards between rounds. Unless you fall and start over. This is a fun game. If you enjoy the Ellen show, or if you like Trivia type games check it out at the Apple App store for iPad and iPhone. This one is worth a buy.

Yeah I like the game, I’m number 5 on the Leaderboard, see you there.

With an new iPad 2 and the additional Apple Digital AV Adapter you can play the game on an HDTV, which sounds like fun. This past week the iPads got Epic Games and ChAIR Entertainment’s free update. Infinity Blade has new optimizations specifically for iPad 2, which I would guess is why it is crashing on original iPad. A 500 megabyte update just might do it. If you’ve been lucky enough to all ready grab an iPad 2 the new and improved processing power will reportedly make it look and play better than ever. In a fashion similar to the old PC games were, it means that it’s time upgrade or die.

Infinity Blade retails for $5.99 and requires an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, third or fourth generation iPod touch or first or second generation iPad running iOS 3.2 or later to install and run.

Here’s a Top Five Valentines Apps List.

Number 1 is Valentines Day HD which allows you to customize sweet tarts with your own personalized messages. It is Free and you can use it several ways to make candy hearts using the images that you create with it.

Number 2 goes to Valentines Day Hidden Objects, which isn’t free but there are very cute bears that will cheer you up in this hide and seek game.

Number 3 goes to a set of three games offered by Team Lava. The three iPhone games will expand to an acceptable resolution on iPad also. Bakery Story, Restaurant Story and City Story Valentines Day top the popularity charts. With a free demo to get you attracted to their iced offerings, Bakery Story Valentines Day was a very easy cake dash type game.

Number 4 is Valentines Photo Effects you can decorate and add stickers, backgrounds and borders to create individualized photo art which you can email or export to your social media of choice.

Number 5 is Love Match HD, which is a memory match game. As the Valentines themed items are revealed for a split second you have to remember where you have seen them before to match them up and remove them from the board.

It has an elegant interface. You can see any of your characters and what they have equipped. Make a wish list, keep track of your favorite brokers, which are neatly sorted by category. It even has a feature where you can see the weekly trends. When you have to be away from your PC you can still keep on seeing how the bidding is going on your own listed items. If you are holding onto a Noble Wise Dragon King Sword and are thinking about selling it, then the Aion Exchange could tell you when you’ll make a killing.

Gamers can pick up the app through Apple’s App Store for $2, and it is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

It will be two years on Mothers Day that I ran right into a book case in stellar geek fashion, and broke my left hand. Following that incident and the fifteen years lapse since I had picked up an axe led me to believe that I would never play again. It was Tap Tap Revenge 2 on iPod Touch that started it up again. I found my left hand tapping the circles, and I was turning the iPod sideways and holding it like a guitar. Hmmn. Could music therapy work for me? I had brought my arthritically frozen up thumb back to life once before by learning to play mandolin. I figured my chances of being able to play guitar were about 1%.

For the heck of it I put in ‘guitars for girls’ into Google, and low and behold a whole world of awesomeness opened up. I was led immediately to Luna Guitars, and read eagerly that the designers were women. One of them a stained glass artist. A hobby for me is painting recycled glass, and I love the design aspects of Tiffany- style art in any form. I sold the old mandolin on eBay.

The first Luna Guitar that I got was a revelation. I picked out the Starry Safari. It is a travel sized guitar. The artwork on it is a reproduction of the famous painting Starry Night. I got a matching guitar strap and went at it. Was I ever surprised. The thin neck and low action were a dream compared to guitars I had played in the seventies and even miles better than guitars I had played in the 1990′s.

I was playing Heaven by Brett Dennen and Fireflies by Owl City, as well as Taylor Swift and P!nk songs the first week. The guitar was magical. It got the angst out, and my broken hand, although it hurt and often needed a wrapping of Tiger Balm, it was improving. I could move my fingers more normally doing daily tasks because of the guitar playing. Who Knew? Pun intended.

A lot of things happened, as they say in manga, and then I got an iPad. I stumbled across a couple amazing guitar Apps. I had all ready been impressed with the number of jamming and recording tools for iPod and iPad, but this was even better. Pocket Amp looked like fun. Then I came across AmpliTube for iPad. This App provides you with a full recording studio, and a host of pedals. You can add fuzz, grunge, flange, metal or any sounds you want while practicing in your headphones. You can use the iPad as a tiny living room Amp with it too.

The iRig is a connector that comes with AmpliTube software. With that you can plug your guitar cable right in, and then use the iRig to go into the iPad. These technologies are a revolution. Not so many years ago the recording equipment that is just on one screen of the AmpliTube App would have taken up an entire room. I used to run sound boards for concerts that were each six feet wide, and I had to stand on a foot stool to reach across the whole thing to do the effects for bands. The pedal sounds are classic and what makes each guitarist unique. Inside the App you can have numerous effects, which you can control and adjust any way you like. The variety of noises is limitless, and the living room still looks neat as a pin. You don’t have to drag fifty different cables through your house, not to mention lifting all that gear, ouch.

These discoveries made me lust for an additional guitar. For new years I was given a terrific surprise. The Luna Flora Passion Flower acoustic electric guitar. Just from looking at the pictures of it my fingers wanted to feel its fretboard. It is gorgeous and it sounds rich and sweet. The harmonics it makes are angelic. The rosewood fretboard made my fingertips feel more agile than ever. Compared to the last thin body guitar I had, the hardware in it is like rocket science. So much more than only two lowsy knobs one for gain and one for treble bass. It has a B-band preamp and a tuner built in. No more expensive handheld tuners. Even the iPod had a great polyphonic tuner App that I could use with the iPod earbud mic for the acoustic guitar.

Apple’s devices and Apps have made making music much more accessible than ever. For music to play there is an App for that, like my favorite Ultimate Guitar Tabs which not only has many versions of each song, but it also will Auto Scroll the music for you! The leaps made for music in such a short time are remakable.

Another source of musical ingenuity is Youtube. Once you have found the music you want to play, no matter how obscure it is, someone has done a guitar tutorial for it. Gone are the days when you would have to spend up to ten dollars each song for sheet music. It wasn’t tablature either. It was old fashioned note for note musical notation. It made it very hard to learn things like folk and rock songs back in the day, because the music didn’t tell you how to actually play the song. There used to be a huge disconnect between the six string guitar and sheet music. All of that confusion is gone. If you have some musical knowledge like I did, or none at all this is an exciting time to get into learning instruments with the help of gadgets that make your musical life easier.