Review: Microsoft Flight looks beautiful, might as well stay grounded

Microsoft Flight Despite its beautiful looks and impressive lineage, Microsoft Flight fails to offer a truly compelling gameplay experience.

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Microsoft Flight is the current incarnation of a long and illustrious franchise of games, dating back to 1977. Unlike SimCity, you can start playing Microsoft Flight for free: Simply download the game and embark on a series of missions planned to both teach you the basics of flight, and hook you into buying later missions and additional aircraft. Microsoft Flight is the last of its kind: Microsoft permanently stopped work on the game in July 2012, just a few short months after releasing it.

The futuristic Icon A5 Deluxe is not yet in production, but you can fly it in Microsoft Flight.

Microsoft Flight's graphics are gorgeous, and the scenery feels realistic. Hawaii serves as the backdrop for the first introductory missions, in which you get to fly two aircraft bundled with the free download: A thoroughly modern Icon Deluxe light aircraft and a WWII-era Boeing PT-17 Stearman biplane. These missions run you through the rudiments of taking off, controlling the craft in the air, and landing.

Microsoft Flight lets you play several missions in Hawaii for free.

You can fly Microsoft Flight with nothing but a game controller. There are realistic touches like preflight checklists, but in the early stages, the game runs through them on its own, checking items off as you look on.

The Icon A5 cockpit feels almost like a car's—and the GPS works.

While the introductory missions are interesting and fun to play (especially the landing tutorial) and the graphics were strikingly beautiful, gameplay is marred by having to navigate using landmarks, rather than traditional waypoints. In particular, one of the challenges starts out midflight, and you're supposed to land the plane. The trouble is, it's not clear where the airstrip is. No heading is provided, and there's no clear way to figure out which way to go. The careful narration that leads you through many of the other missions is utterly lacking on this one. Manually switching on the aircraft's GPS map does reveal an airstrip, but after navigating all the way to it and executing a landing, I discovered it wasn't the right airfield and failed the challenge after all.

Another point of frustration is the low number of available missions. Microsoft Flight starts you off with less than ten missions and once you want to make progress, you have to pay up.

Microsoft Flight lets you switch between several cameras to get a better look at the action.

In other words, the game suffers from the same issues plaguing many other "pay to play" titles, and even its fancy graphics were not able to redeem it. It is easy to understand why Microsoft ceased developing the game.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Review: GmailWiz is a productivity tool that might hurt your productivity

Many of us spend hours each day reading and writing emails. This activity, while essential, can often become quite repetitive. Sometimes, especially if emails are part of your work, you may need to reply to several emails with the same short sentence or response. This adds up to a large amount of time wasted doing the same work. A free Chrome extension called GmailWiz aims to take Gmail's own canned responses feature to the next level, by turning this time-intensive task into one that takes no longer than half a second and one click. Although it's a good idea, the current implementation is lacking.

The add-on adds four new buttons to your message interface, each stands for a different instant reply.

GmailWiz is built around InstantReply buttons, each containing its own instant reply. There are four of these buttons, pre-set with names such as "Like!", "Got it" and "Let's discuss", each with its own matching icon. You cannot change these icons or names, but you can change the actual text to match your most-used replies. Every time you want to use one of them, simply click on the appropriate button and the reply will be written and sent for you instantly. At least, that's the plan.

Reality is quite different, unfortunately. While GmailWiz shows lots of potential, it fails to deliver on its promise. To start, the add-on's website claims you can choose who will receive your InstantReply (reply only to sender or to all), and that "each InstantReply button can have its own setting". This is not the case, and switching between Reply to Sender and Reply to All affects all InstantReplies. In addition, you can add several versions for each InstantReply, but there's no easy way to switch between them except visiting the Options page again. Even if you go through the trouble of doing this, the replies don't actually change every time—it's more like trial and error.

Let's give GmailWiz a chance and assume you only want one possible reply for each button. A reply can be simple or formatted text, can include numbered or bulleted lists, and can include URLs that automatically turn into links. You can't however, include links with custom anchor text, or any custom HTML, and RTL support is only partial. So now that you've managed to create four (or less) InstantReplies, is using them painless, at least? Not quite.

Create your chosen reply for each button, and choose whether they reply to sender or to all.

Some of the time, GmailWiz works without a hitch. You click an InstantReply button, and your chosen reply is written and sent immediately, before you can even think about it. You're now free to move on to the next email, having saved considerable time. On other occasions, however, GmailWiz hiccups. Blank emails are sent instead of your chosen replies, or the reply is actually written, but the email is not automatically sent—it just sits there waiting for you to hit send. This last one is not so bad, giving you an opportunity to edit your email, but this lack of consistency is not something you want to see in a good app.

If these issues are not enough to deter you, this might: GmailWiz does not work with Gmail's new Compose feature. If you'd like to use it, you have to be using the old Compose, otherwise you'll be sending out blank emails left and right. Support may be added along with other features in the future, but all my attempts to contact the developer were in vain, and I failed to learn more about any future plans for GmailWiz, if any.

GmailWiz brings a bright idea to the table, and attempts to increase productivity by cutting the time you spend on repetitive emails. Unfortunately, as it stands, I recommend that you stay away from this add-on, and look for productivity elsewhere. The add-on is half-baked, and that's putting it mildly. Unless you somehow get it to work consistently, you'll be spending more time tweaking it and fighting with it than you would just writing the email yourself.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can install the latest version of the software directly into your Chrome browser.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Rumor: BlackBerry Q10 Might Come to T-Mobile This May

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DisplayMate: Your New iPad Might Not Be Fully Charged at 100%

Typically, a 100% figure on your battery indicator means it’s time to pull the plug. But this may not be true for your new iPad, according to new research by Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies.

According to Dr. Soneira, all mobile devices use a certain mathematical model for their charge indicators, which is based on charge rates, discharge rates and recent discharge history of the battery. Using these numbers, it calculates and estimates how much running time your gadget has left — which is actually pretty difficult to do since most batteries degrade slowly as they discharge, then will typically surprise the user with a quick drop-off toward the end.

Dr. Soneira says that on the new iPad, this mathematical model isn’t quite working correctly. “It should not say 100% until it stops recharging and goes from the full recharging rate of about 10 watts to a trickle charging rate of about 1 watt,” he wrote to us in an email. “Otherwise the user will not get the maximum running time that the iPad is capable of delivering.”

 Soneira says that he measured the power drawn by the AC Adapter and found that the new iPad continues to charge for up to one hour after it reads 100%. He claims that it’s not only your iPad that does this — other tablets and smartphones also lie about their charging status. So if you’re particularly scrupulous about fully charging your gadgets, you may want to leave them suckling on a source of juice for at least an hour after your indicator says 100%.

While we haven’t verified these results ourselves, Soneira’s article on the topic is pretty thorough. You can head over to Displaymate to read his full analysis yourself.

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Meexo Is the Uncreepy Dating App You Might Actually Consider Using

Here’s the first thing that’s different about Meexo: The platform is completely mobile. “We wanted ownership of a smartphone to be the lowest common denominator,” David said to me. Thus, the app does away with the entire website portion of a social network, offering users the dating experience exclusively on the phone.

Meexo also emphasizes privacy. “Each person’s account is tied to their particular device,” David explained, “and they’re only allowed to make one account per device—although they can sign in through multiple devices.” This acts as a safeguard against people making multiple accounts and posting fake photos and details about themselves. And when a person messages another within the network, no actual phone number is shared—so there’s no risk of getting that crazy 4 AM phone call from stalker types.

But what about the biggest reason people still recoil from online dating like it’s the plague—the fear of being discovered by someone they know? Meexo addresses that issue, too. You can connect the app to your Facebook account (other social networks to come) in a kind of reverse “find friend” feature. The app uses this data to ensure sure your contacts never accidentally come across your profile. Ah, those mortifying moments: eliminated.

What’s more, the more a user explores the app and selects profiles they’re interested, the more the app learns about one’s dating preferences, and the more it matches the user up with their type. David described it to me as the “Pandora” of online dating—that is, the app gets smarter the more you use it.

The app also attempts to solve the problem of getting too many messages from others, especially women from interested men. When users join the network, they receive virtual currency, but spend some of it when they message other people. This forces them to be more selective about who they (virtually) approach—although replying to a message costs nothing. But what if you need more credits? Taking a leaf from the Dropbox incentive, those who convince others to join the network via their personalized code get their credits boosted.

Lastly, Meexo includes a number of extra geeky features to help kick off those awkward first conversations. For instance: comparing music tastes. When you and your partner both have your phones out, you can place them side by side and connect them via Bluetooth. Meexo scans both libraries on the phones and starts an animation of the cover art of songs or albums you share, floating seamlessly from one screen to the other. It’s a detail nerds (ahem, admittedly, me) would definitely appreciate. And in the future, David tells me, their engineers plan to add in other ways to view what you have in common with a potential match—mutual contacts, for instance.

Meexo isn’t perfect. It’s iOS-only, there’s no way to uncouple a profile from a device (besides a tedious manual process), and you can only block your Facebook friends for now. But in a world where online dating still carries a stigma, Meexo makes a sincere effort to do things better.

The app went live yesterday, and is available in the iTunes Store for free.

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Ribbon Hero 2 Game Teaches Ins and Outs of MS Office, Might Redeem Clippy

Remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office paperclip? Well, he's back, with a vengeance! Ribbon Hero 2: Clippy's Second Chance (free) is a Microsoft Office add-on that's also a game. Microsoft Office Labs's tongue-in-cheek game features the most infamous paperclip around--only he's much nicer this time, and even manages to be helpful.

Each level happens on a different time period, and you get bonus points for not using hints.Ribbon Hero 2 is an educational game for grown-ups: It tries to teach you to use Microsoft Office with no videos or long texts, but just with small, fun interactive tasks. This is Microsoft's second take on the format, expanding the original Ribbon Hero game with more content and introducing new game features. The game integrates right into Office, and is available as a button on the Ribbon interface (the game requires Office 2007 or 2010).

The game's storyline starts off with a comic strip showing Clippy sitting in his mother's basement, playing a video game. His mother is disappointed in him because it's been so long since he held a job (2001, to be exact). She sends him off and tells him not to come back until he's gainfully employed.

Looking at the classifieds, Clippy notices an ad for someone who "loves to help" and is experienced with Microsoft Office. One thing leads to another, and Clippy finds himself in a time machine that has gone out of control and takes him to the Middle Ages.

Each level features a comic strip starring Clippy.That's where Ribbon Hero 2's gameplay starts: Each level happens in a different time period, and features tasks you must complete in different Microsoft Office 2007/2010 programs. There are tasks for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even the note-keeping application OneNote.

When you launch a task, its application opens and loads a document for that task. The documents are beautiful and playful, and they relate to the period in which you're playing. For example, you learn about animations in PowerPoint in the Middle Ages level by applying a Fly In animation to a knight, to make him charge at a dragon. Then (in the same task), you change the effect to make the knight fly in from the left, and then use the Ribbon to preview the animation.

Ribbon Hero 2 is shown as a sidebar, and monitors your activity to see when you complete each part of the task. So as soon as you apply the Fly In animation (in the example above), Ribbon Hero automatically detects this and applauds you, moving you to the next step. This worked well for me, except for one time when I did something in a way the game did not anticipate--I got the job done, but it wasn't detected. To fix this, I restarted the task and did it like the game wanted me to. If you're not quite sure what to do, you can click the button captioned "Need a Hint?" Each step has multiple hints--if the first hint isn't enough, you can ask for another one. The fewer hints you use, the more bonus points you get upon completing the task.

Exercise files are themed according to the period, and even contain some light humor.One drawback of Ribbon Hero 2's monitoring engine is that it sometimes slows down Office. I once launched Word for some routine work and made a bit of text bold; Word froze for a few seconds, and then made the text bold and popped up a message saying something like "Bold Text! 5 Points!" Ribbon Hero 2 was monitoring my work even when I wasn't actively playing it. That's okay with me, but it really shouldn't make Word less responsive.

Ribbon Hero 2: Clippy's Second Chance is a playful, innovative experience, and it's a great way to become more proficient at using a suite of applications many of us spend countless hours in. This is one game most of us can safely play at work, and best of all, Clippy is no longer trying to guess whether or not you're trying to write a letter.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Erez Zukerman

Ribbon Hero 2 is a game built by Office Labs to help people explore some of the new and useful features in Office 2010 and 2007. Although we’re not actively developing or supporting this project any further, based on popular demand we’re keeping the download available for anyone who might have missed it. The game follows the story of Clippy and his travels through time as he explores different time periods and tries to get back home. With each time period, the player gets to explore a new game board with challenges they must complete to get to the next level. Each challenge takes the player into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote to complete a task. It allows you to discover new Office features by actually using them, with a hint button to fall back on in case you get stuck. There are a ton of features in Office that can help you be more productive, organized, and creative. What are you waiting for? Discover them the fun way through Ribbon Hero 2.

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Energy Saving Software Might Help You Save Power

I'm all for saving energy, especially if it means saving money on my utility bills. But I'm not sure that Energy Saving (€20, 14-day free trial), an application designed to help you monitor and reduce your use of energy and other resources, can really help with that task.

Energy Saving makes it easy to see how much you're spending on a certain appliance or another item in your home.First of all, for an application designed to help you reduce your energy consumption, Energy Saving sure comes with a lot of bloat. Before you can even begin installing the software, you have to accept or decline options to include add-ons like the Yahoo Toolbar, Shopping 4 Causes, PC Optimizer Pro, WeatherBug, and KNCTR.

Once you get past all of those options, you're finally able to get Energy Saving up and running. The software features a decent interface: it isn't exactly elegant, but it's plenty user friendly. It includes options for tracking the use of power, water, gas, and heating oil. As you click on each of these options, Energy Saving guides you through the process of creating the records you need to begin tracking consumption. My biggest complaint, though, is that the application lacks any real customization. For example, my water bill presents the per-unit cost in cubic feet, but Energy Saving only allows me to enter the per-gallon rate. (Which is strange, too, since this is a European application with a decided European feel, as it reminds me to enter the VAT when entering prices.)

Energy Saving's handling of heating oil is a bit confusing, too, as it asks me for the "Filling Date" and "New Level" of my oil tank. After a filling, the oil tank is full, so I entered the full capacity as the new level. But it later asks me for the full capacity of the tank and the amount paid for a filling. It calculates the per-gallon charge based on that full capacity number, which results in an incorrect per-gallon price. It should ask me how many gallons of oil were added and the overall price to come up with the correct figure.

More useful is how Energy Saving lets you track how much it is costing you to use specific appliances and items in your home. You can, for example, figure out how much it costs you each time you run a bath or how much your cell phone charger adds to your electric bill when you use it for a half hour.

Energy Saving also delivers (optional) tips on how to reduce your energy consumption. But the ones I saw--"Run your dishwasher at full capacity" and "Must the hot tap water be open when you are brushing your teeth?"--were pretty obvious.

Overall, I found Energy Saving a bit confusing to use, and I do wish the application let you customize it to your specific needs. It does offer some useful features in the way of monitoring the ways you use your utilities, but so, too, do some of the nation's big utility companies -- and they offer them for free.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the trial of this software.

--Liane Cassavoy

Why is the bill so high? Is the meter working properly? Why have we used so much gas, fuel and oil this year? This program allows you to record the consumption of electricity, water, gas and heating oil. Thus you can identify the cause of higher bills more easily. The clearly arranged, graphical analyses make it possible to compare the data to track changes related to the resource consumption ("Are we more efficient?"). The program also has a cost calculator for electricity and water, allowing an efficient and easy calculation of the resource consumption of a selectable appliance. In addition, the software has many tips on energy savings which will allow you to reduce monthly expenditure on electricity, water, gas and heating oil. Features of Energy Saving at a glance: - Recording of consumption of electricity, water, gas and heating oil. - Calculation of consumption and the cost of electricity and water. - Many opportunities to create a transparent, graphical summary of stored data. - Ability to print the single entries and all analyses. - Many tips on energy savings are included. - Integrated help system. - Automatic program updates (deactivation is possible). - Multilingual (at the moment English, German and Polish). - Intuitive program interface. - Free e-mail support in case of problems or questions. - Minor updates of full version for free.

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