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If you're looking for the best of the best, check out the highest rated products on MacLife.com for the month September.
In spite of a few bugs and its getting-long-in-the-tooth status, Counter-Strike: Source still holds up as an incredibly fun, challenging title. Yes, you’ll die ad infinitum, and there’s a long learning curve, but when the moment comes and you have the other team’s best player in your sights, there isn’t a feeling like it.
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For pen-and-paper organizers, the Echo’s searchable text and audio-recording features can add new dimensions to your note taking. Unfortunately, the Mac software lacks the Custom Notebooks feature, and the nifty 3D recording headphones are now a $29.95 add-on.
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Virtual TimeClock ’10 Pro Edition contains everything a small- to mid-sized company needs to track workers and time-dependent benefits. A lack of visuals in the documentation is made tolerable by a clean and well-thought-out interface. Reporting features can’t eliminate rote administrative tasks entirely, but it can make some of them a lot less onerous.
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Flickery is faster, cleaner, and arguably an all-around better experience than Flickr. Frequent users shouldn’t hesitate to drop $18 on this impressive software.
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Torchlight’s appeal is easy to grasp. Players can jump in and out with no need to find a save point--just launch Steam and pick up from exactly where you left off. Namely, battling evil while your dog trots back to town carrying 78 pounds of treasure.
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Cross-platform OnLive puts the Mac on par with PC gaming like nothing else, even Steam, which requires you to download the games--the Mac-compatible games, that is. OnLive offers true parity, letting us play Windows-only games against Windows players, without needing Boot Camp, virtualization, or even a top-end gaming machine. We did most of our testing with a 2.16GHz MacBook with integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics--a 3-year-old Mac that would choke on virtually any of today’s hottest Mac games--and it worked the same as all the other, newer Macs we used. You don’t get any physical copy of your purchased games (which is the entire point of a streaming service, after all), even with prices comparable to boxed software. But the convenience factor of instant-on play and cross-platform portability add plenty of value. No downloads, no patches, no watching your hardware race toward obsolescence. Hopefully, as the service grows and the game roster expands, the performance will remain solid, but so far OnLive is off to a great start.
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Its sweet feel--and sound--make the Tactile Pro 3 one of our favorite keyboards ever.
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If you’re looking for a great pair of noise-isolating earbuds that do double-duty as a phone headset, Etymotic’s hf3 are the new gold standard.
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