Fieldrunners is a very popular tower defense game for iOS and Android, it usually costs between $3-$8 depending on the version, but guess what? You can download and play it for free using nothing but the Chrome web browser and Google’s web store.

Head over to the Chrome web store to start playing

You’ll want to download the game to be able to resume games, but you can also just play the game directly at the appspot url. The game can be loaded in either standard or high def mode, so choose accordingly based on your screen resolution.

Technically it’s supposed to be for Chrome only, but you can usually load the game with Safari or Firefox as well. You won’t need Flash either because the app is HTML5. Similarly, you can download and play Angry Birds for free with your browser too, just in case you haven’t beaten that dead horse enough yet.

Over-the-Air (OTA) updates are one of the better refinements to iOS as part of the whole “post-PC” thing, they bring delta software updates directly to your devices, making for quicker updates and using less bandwidth (a delta update means only the differences between the iOS versions are sent, preventing a much larger package from being transferred iTunes or Apple). OTA updates work on all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, but sometimes the over-the-air download does not work, or does not display. If you run into those issues, we’ve got solutions to fixing OTA updates for iOS.

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Siri’s gender and voice accent is different based on the region, with a female voice for USA and Australian users, and a male voice in the UK. Regardless of which location you’re in or where you bought the iPhone, you can change the gender and the accent of Siri yourself just by switching the language settings.

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iOS 5.0.1 has been released to the public, the update addresses the battery problems that were associated with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, but also brings multitasking gestures to the iPad 1 and resolves several other bugs and issues. The update comes as build 9A405 and is highly recommended for all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users running the newest iOS.

Download and Update to iOS 5.0.1

There are several ways to get iOS 5.0.1:

• OTA Preferred method: download through Over-the-Air update by tapping on “Settings” > “General” > “Software Update” and then tapping on “Download and Install”
• Download from iTunes: launch iTunes and you will get an update notification

If you’d rather download and install the firmware yourself and you know how to use IPSW files, use the links below.

iOS 5.0.1 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links from Apple’s servers. Right-click and “Save As” to avoid problems:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4 GSM
• iPhone 4 CDMA
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 1
• iPad 2 Wi-Fi
• iPad 2 GSM
• iPad 2 CDMA
• iPod touch 3rd gen
• iPod touch 4th gen

For those wondering, GSM is generally AT&T and CDMA is generally Verizon.

The brief release notes are as follows:

– Fixes bugs affecting battery life
– Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
– Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
– Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation

From our own experience, iOS 5.0.1 makes a significant difference in battery life. How does it stack up for you?

Does anyone like the CAPS LOCK key? Yes, it can be useful for typing some things that happen to be all uppercase, but as many internet readers know, it can also be an obnoxious key that many Mac users accidentally press on their keyboards, leading to ALL THEIR LETTERS APPEARING UPPERCASE.

If you’re a Mac user who has become fed up with caps lock, either because you think it’s annoying or because you accidentally hit the key sometimes when typing, you’ll be pleased to discover that you can disable that key on any Mac keyboard completely, rendering it inoperable. This is done through an OS X systems setting, and requires no manual intervention with the keyboard itself, it’s all handled through a preference panel.

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A hidden autocorrect suggestion bar has been uncovered in iOS, and with a bit of patience you can enable it yourself with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5+. The discovery was made by iOS developer Sonny Dickson, who provides the details on how to edit your iOS backups to turn the feature on without a jailbreak. This is pretty easy to follow, but it helps if you have even a tiny amount of experience editing markup or code:

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Have you ever noticed that some files and folders display truncated names when they’re placed on the Mac OS X Desktop? A file or folder named anything over a certain character limit will be shortened with a series of three periods, something like “Mobile Documents Sync” will display as “Mobile Do…ync” and so on. One of our readers ran into this when setting up file syncing between Macs with iCloud and wrote in suggesting it was a bug, but it’s not.

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Typing on the iPad onscreen keyboard can be a little strange for some users who are accustomed to either an iPhone and typing with their thumbs, or even a Mac or PC and accustomed to typing on a regular touch keyboard. But one great way to improve iPad typing and make it faster is to use the Split Keyboard feature of the iPad keyboard.

The split keyboard is one of the most under appreciated features that iOS has with the iPad, it makes typing while holding the device significantly easier in both landscape and portrait modes by allowing you to use thumbs to type, rather than setting the iPad flat and trying to type like a normal keyboard, which is cumbersome and difficult for many of us.

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Apple has pushed out a Java update for Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6 users, the download weighs in between 65-75 MB and includes a variety of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and security updates. No reboot is required for installing the update.

You can grab the update from the  Apple menu’s “Software Update” or through a direct download from Apple’s servers. The direct download links below are for the Java update for both Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6 in .dmg format:

• Download Java for OS X 10.7 Update 1 (direct download)
• Download Java for OS X 10.6 Update 6 (direct download)

The Java update is recommended for all Mac users.

You can now delete songs directly from the Music app on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. The music removal action is achieved directly on the iOS device without having to re-sync to iTunes, allowing you to rapidly clear out music or songs you don’t want stored on the device.

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Using iCloud, sharing a Calendar from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac OS X iCal with anyone else is now easier than ever.

This is a straight forward process that requires iCloud, set it up if you haven’t already and you can get sharing, here’s how:

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Looking for a few more gorgeous wallpapers for your desktop? This pack of colorful aurora themed images should do the trick, with two variations of each image, one with a Windows 7ish aurora stripey look and the other a blurred faint aurora more reminiscent of OS X. They all look great, and with the 2560×1600 resolution they should fit just about any screen size you’re working with.

Download the wallpaper pack from DeviantArt

The wallpaper pack is hosted on DeviantArt, if you’re having trouble finding their download link it’s highlighted clearly below in an image, just look on the right side of the DA page.

These background pics come from the same artist who produced the great looking star field and other aurora 6 pack, they’ve been keeping my Mac beautiful for months now.
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If you’re in a hurry, visiting a busy Apple Store for a quick purchase can be the worst part of the experience. With all the store reps tied up with other customers, you can just sit around waiting aimlessly to buy something you already know you want. Apple’s newly updated Store app aims to reduce that wait time, by allowing you to pre-order Apple products for quick in-store pickup, and with some other items, just buy them outright from your iPhone via the apps self checkout EasyPay option, skipping the lines completely.

Install the app on your iPhone, and with eligible store items you use the iPhones camera to scan the bar code and pay directly from your own iPhone with a credit card, no interaction with store personnel is required. Pay and you’re on your way.

Grab the Apple Store app with EasyPay from iTunes

For those wondering, the EasyPay portion of the app requires an iPhone 4 or newer due to the higher resolution of the camera used for scanning barcodes.

Here’s the official feature list via the iTunes App Store:

– Buy products on the go and pick them up at your favorite Apple Retail Store, or have 
them shipped to your door.
– Personalize an iPad or an iPod with free engraving, plus get signature gift wrapping for 
select Apple products.
– Buy an iPhone with just a few taps.
– While in an Apple Store, quickly purchase accessories on your own with EasyPay 
(requires iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S)
– Request help, check in for reservations, and meet up with a Specialist at the store.
– Make Genius Bar and One to One reservations and sign up for workshops and events.

This is a pretty great app for anyone in a time crunch (or for the agoraphobic), hopefully Apple expands the purchasable items list to include even more products.

Using Mission Control on the Mac, you can quickly create a new Desktop Space just by grabbing an app from the Mission Control window, and then dragging the window into the corner, then letting it go on the “+” plus icon.

This will instantly generate a new desktop space, or a virtual desktop, with that app or window you dragged and dropped onto the plus icon.

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A hidden panoramic photo mode has been discovered in currently shipping builds of iOS 5 by an iPhone developer. The panorama option is enabled by adjusting a plist file in the Camera.app, but making modifications to plist files in iOS requires a jailbreak.

After the com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist file has been modified by setting ‘EnableFirebreak’ to YES, the Camera app shows the panorama option and will take and create panoramic images which can then be saved or sent just like any other image.

The user interface is clearly incomplete, and the final result is a bit rough as well, indicating the unfinished nature of the feature. You can see a sample pieced together image here (it’s a large 6122×2852 pixels).

The discovery was made by @conradev and @chpwn on Twitter, who both posted individual photos demonstrating the user interface and resulting images (shown above).

The panoramic camera option will be available to current iOS 5 jailbreakers through the Cydia store shortly with an app called Firebreak, but for those who aren’t interested in jailbreaks the discovery indicates that Apple is likely working to bring such a feature to future versions of iOS and the iPhone’s camera app.

If you’re like me you end up reading a fair amount while laying in bed using an iOS device. If you read in the dark, you can give your eyes a rest by turning on a little known Accessibility feature that inverts the display of the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to show white text against a black background rather than the default setting.

Inverting the screen colors basically reverses every screen color on the display to be it’s opposite. White becomes black, black becomes white, blue becomes orange, and so on. The net effect is sort of like a dark-mode or night-mode, since much of the iOS screen colors are bright, and by inverting them everything gets darker.

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In the never-ending quest to make version numbers irrelevant, Firefox 8 has been released. Technically it’s not supposed to be out until tomorrow, but as with past Firefox releases, the download was pushed early to the Mozilla public FTP servers and is widely available for anyone to pick up for each supported platform (Mac, Windows, Linux).

Features of Firefox 8 include Twitter search integration, improved HTML5 support, better extension/plugin security, and some tab improvements that I couldn’t identify. When you first launch Firefox 8 you’ll encounter the new add-on manager, which checks to make sure you installed the add-ons and not a third party. You’ll also notice that the default Firefox page seems to think it’s a beta version, but when you check the version number it’s 8.0. Firefox 8 feels a bit faster too, particularly when loading from cache.

Download Firefox 8 Now

Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux versions are available, these are direct download links:

• Download Now (Mac OS X)
• Download Now (Windows)
• Download Now (Linux)

Mac OS X Lion users may be disappointed to discover that true Full Screen support is still absent in this release. You can enter into their own baked version of full screen mode with Command+Shift+F, but there is no full screen button in the upper right corner until you’re already in, and the overall approach Firefox takes feels sloppy compared to Safari, Chrome, or any other OS X Lion apps handling of full screen mode. This leaves Firefox as the only remaining popular Mac browser that hasn’t adopted full Lion feature support, but I’m sure it’ll come eventually.

Exciting news for those who like to jailbreak the iPhone and iPad, a Dev Team member has discovered a bug that will allow for an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak. No time estimate has been given by @pod2g, but he cautioned on Twitter not to expect a release soon, although he is actively working on the jailbreak.

There is a jailbreak for iOS 5 available right now but it is limited to a tethered experience. You can read about the difference between tethered and untethered jailbreaks but the simple answer is that an untethered jailbreak is always preferential because it does not require the iOS device to be connected to a computer during boot. This means you can reboot an iPhone or iPad on the go and have full access to all applications, whereas a tether won’t without the assisted boot procedure.

There is a so-called “semi-tether” jailbreak available for iOS 5 right now, and while it’s better than nothing it’s still fairly limited in that it requires a tethered boot for full device and app usage.