Each week brings a bevvy of new iPhone games to our digital doorstep, but time doesn't permit us to cover each one individually. Therefore, here's a roundup of some new and interesting titles you might want to check out:

Alice in Wonderland: You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a movie by its trailer--and Tim Burton's latest attempt to make Johnny Depp look weird (aka "Alice") offers little appeal to me or my kids. The eponymous tie-in game, on the other hand, is a surprisingly charming little platformer. Don't take my word: There's a free two-level lite version you can try before plunking down your $4.99.

Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front: The second chapter in Gameloft's World War II-shooter saga, Global Front ($7.99) features six-player online battles, three new vehicles to pilot (when you're not on foot, that is), and five war-torn locations spanning Europe and Africa. If there's a better WWII shooter for the iPhone, I haven't played it.

Knife Toss: Admit it: You've always wanted to throw knives at a circus clown strapped to one of those giant spinning wheels. Now's your chance! Use the accelerometer to aim, then tap to toss. Knife Toss is cute five-minute fun. And it's currently free, though I believe it usually costs 99 cents.

NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator: You know what NASA should do to raise money? Sell time at the controls of an actual lunar rover. Until then, you can pilot a virtual rover in this free app, which also provides a photo gallery and information about the futuristic concept-vehicle. Drive the LER to various moon bases before your power runs out. I wouldn't call this a keeper, but it's fun for a few minutes--and free.

Phineas and Ferb Arcade: "Mom! Phineas and Ferb have their own iPhone game!" If you heard Candace's voice in your head while reading that, you're undoubtedly a fan of Disney's hilarious cartoon. And you won't think twice about dropping $1.99 on this app, which serves up three fun arcade-style games. But what's this? No voices from the show? Curse you, Dr. Doofenshmirtz! I'm calling in Agent P.

What cool new games have you spotted (or played) this week? Tell us all about 'em in the comments.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Can a Web-based Twitter client do a better job than its downloadable stablemate? With Seesmic, it appears so. The new update to Seesmic Web does some handy thing that Seesmic's two download apps, for AIR and Windows, don't do.

Seesmic Web has a robust contact manager. You can see your followers and followees and people in your lists, drag users from one list to another, drag users from a time line into a list, or easily follow or unfollow users. You also get nice stats on people.

If you use Seesmic to reply to tweets, you can also see the conversation thread easily. Google Buzz and Friendfeed still handle conversations better, however. You also get some Tweetmeme-powered stats on links in Tweets, plus a quick excerpt of the text on the destination page, so you can get idea of where the link goes.

There are a few things that desktop client Twitter apps can do that Seesmic Web doesn't. For example, while Seesmic Web will let you upload an image (which then gets posted on a picture host), the AIR app of Seesmic will let you snap an image directly from your Web cam. The desktop clients also support multiple Twitter accounts; Seesmic Web is a single-account service. And competitor Tweetdeck, it should be noted, supports Facebook accounts in addition to Twitter.

Seesmic Web also doesn't give you a visual or audio cue when there are new tweets mentioning you. So narcissists or product marketers should stick to client apps. But it does put new tweets up on the screen without requiring a re-load, and it highlights them in yellow (which eventually fades out, Huffington Post-style).

Seesmic Web is a very attractive, highly functional, and very fluid Twitter client, even stacked up against pure downloadable apps. It's worth taking for a spin. The new version of Seesmic Web should be live later today.

Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

Apple got a lot of things right in iPhoto '09, and in the latest version of its higher-end, $200 Aperture software it's tried to replicate that same success. But did it work?

The short answer is yes. What might be more surprising to an iPhoto user is how similarly easy to use these features are in Aperture, despite being far more powerful.

Some of the carryovers include facial recognition, geotagging, and integration with third-party sites like Flickr, Facebook, and the company's MobileMe subscription service. Out of that bunch, facial recognition and geotagging are likely to be the most familiar. Where things get interesting are the extra features Apple has added to both of these, and a handful of other tools that can be found within iPhoto. Read on to get the details.

Faces (facial recognition)

Facial recognition was one of the big selling points of iPhoto, and it's now a part of Aperture 3. The two pieces of software use the same algorithm to find faces inside of your photos. If you read our hands-on with this technology from last year, you'll know that it's quite good at what it does, although like most all facial recognition tools, it has trouble with photos where your subjects are turned to the side, or wearing sunglasses.

One of the main areas where Aperture 3 improves over iPhoto's facial recognition tools is in the filtering. Aperture users can filter faces they've matched by the album, which is aimed at professional photographers who may work with the same model across different shoots, and who want to sort those shots quickly. This can also speed up the name-tagging workflow, since a photographer will only be dealing with the face matches from that particular set of photos.

Another improvement over iPhoto's face tagging workflow is that the app now offers up recommendations for people you haven't tagged yet. It does this right below the corkboard of what people you have already indicated as knowing. It orders the unnamed people in the order of how often they appear in that particular set, making it simpler to see who shows up the most.

Many of the workflows in tagging multiple shots of the same person remain unchanged. Users can, for example, approve or reject several face recommendations at a time. It also lets you go back and remove shots you may have accidentally approved.

Places (geo-tagging)

Places, more than the Faces feature, has seen the most advancement in its migration from iPhoto to Aperture. There are lots of location-based goodies that Aperture users get that iPhoto users are missing out on, the biggest being GPS tracker log support. This lets you take a log from GPS tracking hardware such as Garmin's Oregon series mapping handhelds, and apply that geo metadata to a string of photos. This means you can apply hundreds of geotags (if you took that many shots), with complete automation.

To do this, users first need to upload the log into Aperture. Then they can select a set of photos to attach it to. What's interesting here is that Aperture doesn't automatically assign that information. As it's been explained to me, the reasoning behind this is because the clock on a user's camera might be off by minutes, hours, or even years. So the simplest way to make it work is to have users pick where that trip begins with--then the rest of the photos are synced up based on the shot time in their metadata.

Of course a more perfect system than this is to actually buy a camera with built-in GPS, or to hook up a GPS receiver. But this at least gives users a nice way to make up for it if they like using their older hardware.

Apple has also thrown in a way to import geo data from the iPhone, so say you're out taking pictures with your point-and-shoot or SLR, you can also snap a shot on your iPhone. Aperture can create a point on the map for each photo you take. It's even smart enough to not actually import those test shots into your library--just the geo metadata.

In practice though, using your iPhone still involves a fair bit of manual labor. Unlike the GPS paths system, where you just tell it where to begin, with the iPhone data you have to manually drag each photo, or set of photos to that GPS way point. This is even if they're within a few seconds of you taking that shot with your real camera. The idea behind this is less about the automation, as much as being able to use your phone as a reference point for where you were shooting.

Other goodies include being able to view both the maps and the geotagged photos in a split interface. In iPhoto you're limited to just viewing the map or the geotagged photos at a time. Aperture users can also go back into the map and adjust a photo's location. This completely overrides whatever GPS metadata that shot has, letting you drag it to within a few dozen feet of where the photo was taken. Aperture even beats out iPhoto's maximum map zoom level by a long shot, as well as throwing in a "road" map layer from Google Maps, just like the one you see when looking up directions from maps.google.com.

And one more bit of niceness on Aperture's handling of geodata, is that each time you add location data to a photo, it adds that data into Aperture's search index. It does this for countries, states, and specific points of interest. Users are also able to search from an index of these from right within the app in order to apply them to photos. If you've ever used the geo-tagging helper on Flickr, the idea is quite similar here.

Slideshows

Slideshows are not, in fact, new to Aperture, but now offer significantly more features for power users. Like iPhoto, Aperture now supports video clips, which users can include alongside photos. This works the same way it does in iPhoto, although Aperture users are able to strip out the audio from a video clip and play it in the background of other photos.

Aperture also lets users re-order how photos will appear, as well as how long each shot gets on-screen. What's really neat about this, is that you can pick a baseline time for each transition that applies to all the photos (which is the same as iPhoto), as well as be able to give some photos more or less time. Aperture users can even time these transitions down to keyboard clicks, which is useful for syncing it up with music from iTunes.

Other features which made it over from iPhoto include slideshow themes. Aperture comes with all the same ones that are in iPhoto, as well as two new ones. The big thing here is that users can actually go in and change the settings of these themes now, to tweak things like the theme colors and what kind of transition each shot gets. It's almost like putting together slides in Apple's Keynote presentation software. At the same time, it includes a handful of photo editing-centric presets that let users toggle on photo filters like black and white, and sepia. Normally you'd have to go in and make these kind of adjustments within the photos. This way you can just toggle that effect on for the slideshow only.

Many of the slideshow export settings between iPhoto and Aperture are the same, although Aperture makes some of the HD options more apparent. For instance, 1080p is an option, even if your laptop's monitor isn't that large, whereas in iPhoto you have to go in and tweak the custom settings to enable it. Aperture also shows users how big the exported file will be, which can be important if you're trying to fit it within the confines of an e-mail attachment, or video host with a hard limit.

Integration with third-party sites

Much of the integration with external sites like Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe--which was introduced as part of iLife '09--remains the same in Aperture. Both programs let you set up specific folders on these sites where photos from your Aperture or iPhoto libraries can be synced. And Aperture, just like iPhoto, is set by default to not share the location information from those photos without an OK from the user first.

The one big difference in Aperture's case, is that the number of third-party photo book makers you can send your work to is much broader. Publishers can now create their own Aperture-specific printing plug-ins that can properly format photos to meet the right specifications. Apple did this mostly to please professional photographers who wanted to do the book layout within Aperture, then send off their work to custom publishing houses. iPhoto users may never need such a feature, but it lets people who like using Apple's creation tools break out of having to print through them too.

Conclusions

To be fair, this comparison skips over many of the editing and library management tools that Aperture does a better job at than iPhoto--but that's always been the case between these two programs. I've also left off comparisons to competitor Lightroom from Adobe, which is currently testing its own third iteration in beta. These are the kinds of comparisons better left for a rated review, which CNET will have soon.

If anything is clear from my week with the software, the upgrade from iPhoto is worth it for the geotagging features alone. If that's a feature you find yourself using regularly in iPhoto, Aperture makes it considerably more powerful. This is especially true given the fact that you can so easily import geodata from external devices, then turn it into tags, along with being able to go in and manually drag the photo to somewhere else on the map.

As for the facial recognition, if you like it in iPhoto, it's almost identical. However the option to sort faces by album makes it an attractive feature to people with large photo libraries. And for professional photographers who work with the same few models, there's no doubt this can speed up photo sorting.

What may end up being more interesting, is to see what Apple includes in the next version of its iPhoto software, which is already a month past its usual release date. Given the early-February release of Aperture 3, it's likely Apple is finally making Aperture the new feature king, which should have always been the case.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

You would think a 20-year-old operating system would let you copy and paste more than one item at a time. While the clipboards in Office 2003 and 2007 can store up to 24 text snippets and graphics for later reuse, no such multisave option is built into Windows itself.

Thank goodness software developers have stepped into the breach by providing free programs that extend the Windows clipboard, allowing you to copy dozens of items and paste any of them with a single click or keyboard shortcut.

Maximize your clipboard options in Office 2003 and 2007
As soon as you copy two items in any Office application, the Clipboard pane opens on the right side of the screen. You can also open the Office Clipboard by choosing the Clipboard option in the Home group of Office 2007's ribbon and by clicking Edit > Office Clipboard in Office 2003 apps.

Another way to open the Clipboard in most Office apps is by selecting an item and pressing Ctrl+C twice. This is one of the five settings available by clicking the Options button at the bottom of the Clipboard.

The Office Clipboard stores up to 24 separate items. Once that limit is reached, you'll need to delete one or more Clipboard entries to save a new one, or click the Clear All button at the top of the pane to empty the Clipboard entirely.

For an overview of the Clipboard options in Office 2007, see the article Copy and paste multiple items by using the Office Clipboard on the Microsoft Office Online site. The equivalent information for Office 2003 is presented in Office Clipboard on the same site.

Bringing multiple copy and paste to Windows
If you're like me, you find yourself spending much less of your workday in Office and much more of it in a browser and other non-Office applications. For instance, I frequently have to place a link to a Web page into a document or blog post. This requires that I copy and paste both the page's URL and the title or other descriptive text from the page I'm linking to.

Since the Windows clipboard is a one-and-done affair, adding such a link requires two trips to the page in question. After putting up with these multiple round trips for years, I decided to look for a clipboard enhancer. I found two freebies that provide more copy-and-paste options than you can shake a mouse at.

Simple, straightforward approach to multiple copy and paste
M8 Software's M8 Free Clipboard places an icon in the taskbar's Notification Area near the clock. Click it to view a list of your clipboard entries. You can also assign a key combination in the program's Options dialog to open the clipboard list via the keyboard.

Items are added to the list automatically as you copy. By default, a tone sounds each time an item is added, but you can turn the sound cue off by clicking Tools > Options. Hovering the mouse over an item shows it in a pop-up preview window.

To paste an item in the list, simply place the cursor where you want the saved text or graphic to appear and select the item in the M8 Free Clipboard window. You can also paste them by pressing the keyboard combination you selected to open the program and then the letter that appears to the left of the item. You activate these options via the program's Options dialog.

When you shut down Windows, the contents of the clipboard are erased. But with M8 Free Clipboard, your saved items are waiting for you when you restart Windows. You get even more options by upgrading to M8 Software's $20 Spartan Multi Clipboard, which lets you save your clips in libraries and comes in portable and U3 versions.

The .NET approach to extending the clipboard
There are more similarities than differences between M8 Free Clipboard and SundryTools' free PasteCopy.NET utility, but the differences are noteworthy. First, as the program's name implies, PasteCopy.NET relies on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. Also, you open PasteCopy.NET by clicking the desktop shortcut, Start menu item, or icon the program's installer places in the Quick Launch toolbar. You're given the choice of shortcuts to add during the installation

PasteCopy.NET also distinguishes itself by supporting several different languages, which you select as part of the program's installation. Like M8 Free Clipboard, PasteCopy.NET saves dozens of text entries and images, but unlike M8 Free Clipboard, you add an item by selecting it in the list, placing the cursor where you want it to appear in the target document, and pressing Ctrl+V or choosing Edit > Paste. I prefer M8 Free Clipboard's automatic placement of the saved item when you select it in the program's window.

I also prefer M8 Free Clipboard's preview window to the smaller, scrunched preview that appears at the bottom of PasteCopy.NET's main window when you select an item. PasteCopy.NET's Settings dialog has a Preview tab that lists options for customizing the size of the preview, but when I tested the program, the preview area wouldn't stay resized even after I enlarged the window manually.

PasteCopy.NET does offer some features not available in M8 Free Clipboard, including the ability to convert .rtf files to text and .html files to either text or .rtf. You can also print your list of saved items, save it as an .rtf file, and create categories of saved items. Unfortunately, PasteCopy.NET has an unfinished feel. For example, some areas of the program's window went blank after I resized the preview window. And as I noted above, the preview reverted to its original squeezed size as soon as I returned the cursor to the main window.

While both M8 Free Clipboard and PasteCopy.NET are great improvements over the meager clipboard built into Windows, I prefer M8 Free Clipboard for its simplicity and unobtrusiveness.

Originally posted at Workers' Edge