If you've been reading this column for any length of time, it should come as no surprise that I decided to buy an iPad last week. After reviewing the iWork apps on the iPad Apple loaned us for review purposes, I found that I could use it for both work and play. Now that I've had it for a week, I'm extremely happy with my purchase.

To me, buying the iPad was a pretty easy decision knowing that I would already be reviewing iPad apps for iPad Atlas, and (as I wrote in an earlier post) I had already decided that once app developers had some time to develop for the new device, the app possibilities were endless. But another writer here at CNET didn't have such an easy time deciding to get Apple's latest device. David Carnoy wrote a three-part series in which he weighs all the pros and cons and takes a trip to the Apple store to see the iPad for himself. Check out his entertaining decision-making process here.

This week's iPhone apps include a family oriented organizer and a 2D arcade game that's an excellent time waster.

Cozi Family Organizer ($1.99) lets you access your calendar, journal, and Todo lists from the Cozi.com Web site. The idea behind Cozi.com was to create a place where you could map out your busy family schedule, keep appointments, and make your family life easier. On the site you have access to Living Simply articles about family life and tools to help you maintain your home, plan meals and grocery shopping, and much more. The iPhone app ties the experience together giving you access to Todo lists, grocery lists, and a helpful scheduling system to keep track of appointments for all your family members while away from your desktop computer.

The Cozi Family Organizer does a great job helping moms and dads keep track of day-to-day life with their families and offers useful tools to make even complex schedules much more manageable. A color-coding system lets you assign colors to each family member making it easy to see at-a-glance what the day's schedule will look like. The app lets you add new appointments on the go and create and edit your grocery and todo lists. Overall, with an intuitive interface and useful tools to keep track of your busy schedule, Cozi Family Organizer is a great addition to iPhone owners who know how hard it can be to manage the needs and schedules of an entire family.

StarCannon (99 cents for this weekend only) is a remake of classic arcade shooters of the past, with 2D shoot-'em-up action and challenging boss fights. The graphics are smooth even on my older iPhone 3G. The controls are mostly effective, but can sometimes feel sluggish using a touch-to-move system rather than a onscreen joypad. Your ship fires automatically as long as you are touching the screen so you can play the game using only one finger or your thumb.

You can acquire three different weapons as you play and, just like top-down arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon lets you upgrade each weapon with more streams of bullets and higher fire power. To help you when the game gets really chaotic, you have an option to slow down the action for a short time. Some aliens drop purple tokens that fill up your bonus bar. Once it's completely full, simply hit the button in the lower right to slow down the action, giving you more time to rain down destruction with your weapon of choice. Even if you're out of bonus energy, you have one more option with the devastating Super Bomb that will take out every enemy on screen. In true arcade shooter tradition, at the end of every level, you'll need to take on a powerful boss alien and even in the early levels, I found it to be very challenging.

Overall, if you like the arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon offers cool weapons, upgrades to make you even more powerful and wave-after-wave of shoot-'em-up fun.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you still on the fence about the iPad? Is there a better organizer app to manage the complex schedules of a family? What do you think of StarCannon? Let me know in the comments!

Microsoft said Friday that it has wrapped up development work on the next version of the Office family, including Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010.

The products were "released to manufacturing," which is the final engineering step. The products are slated to be available for businesses next month and Microsoft is holding a launch event on May 12 in New York.

"RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone," vice president Takeshi Numoto said in a blog posting. "It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products."

The Office suite, in all its many flavors, will hit store shelves in June and Microsoft is planning a separate Gotham event to mark that occasion. Microsoft is also taking preorders for Office on its online store. Already Microsoft has been promising those buying Office 2007 a free upgrade to Office 2010.

Redmond is also planning to allow PC makers to load a slimmed down Office Starter that users will get for free on new computers.

Among the biggest changes in the new version of Office is the fact that Microsoft will release separate browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Businesses will be able to host the Office Web Apps on a SharePoint server, while consumers will be able to get free access as part of Windows Live.

On the desktop side, Microsoft is adding the first 64-bit version of Office as well as other changes including video editing in PowerPoint, photo editing in Word, and an improved "paste preview" function.

Microsoft noted Friday that more than 7.5 million people have been using the beta version of Office 2010.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Microsoft is testing a new "Fix it Center"--an online and PC-based tool for helping users solve their Windows technical problems.

While a fair amount of diagnostics are built into Windows 7, the free Fix it Center aims to expand on these and also bring similar capabilities to Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The service, which went into beta on Thursday, consists of both a Windows download and an online service.

"Fix it Center finds and fixes many common PC and device problems automatically," Microsoft said on its Web site. "It also helps prevent new problems by proactively checking for known issues and installing updates. Fix it Center helps to consolidate the many steps of diagnosing and repairing a problem into an automated tool that does the work for you."

While the service has around 300 fixes built-in, Microsoft said it can also be useful even if it can't solve an issue on its own.

"If Fix it Center cannot solve a specific issue, customers can still access phone, email or chat support with a Microsoft Support professional who can access their Fix it Center account and get details about the hardware, the problem, and the solutions they have already tried, to ensure faster problem resolution," Microsoft said.

The service works with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, although for XP it requires customers to be using at least Service Pack 3 (or Service Pack 2 of the 64-bit version of Windows XP Professional). It also works with Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2) and Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft is also aiming to make it attractive for small businesses, by allowing a single account to be used for multiple PCs.

The service builds on the "Fix it" brand that Microsoft established as a means for automating Windows problem-solving tasks. Starting in December 2008, Microsoft launched an option on some of its help desk articles that allowed a user to click on a button and have a series of problem-solving steps taken automatically.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

How does one print from a cloud-based OS like Google's Chrome when you can't install a local printer driver? Google is getting closer toward the answer.

The company is in the midst of developing a Google Cloud Print system that would allow Chrome OS users to send documents from any device to their own local printers or to other shared printers. Rather than depend on local print drivers, Cloud Print would receive and manage print jobs on Google's end and send them back to a printer.

Now it's making some resources available to developers. In a Chromium Blog post Thursday, Google Group Product Manager Mike Jazayeri said:

Google Cloud Print is still under development, but today we are making code and documentation public as part of the open-source Chromium and Chromium OS projects. While we are still in the early days of this project, we want to be as transparent as possible about all aspects of our design and engage the community in identifying the right set of open standards to make cloud-based printing ubiquitous.

"Our goal is to build a printing experience that enables any app (Web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world," the company states on the Google Cloud Print page.

Conventional installed operating systems like Windows, Mac OS, and Linux require drivers to manage and print documents. But Chrome OS needs to take a different approach.

"Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system--from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices--simply isn't feasible," Jazayeri said.

The project is still in development mode, so final details have yet to be worked out. Google's Cloud Print page explains that the ideal solution would be to use cloud-aware printers that don't need a PC to communicate. But since there are no such devices as of yet, Google has been working on a way to use legacy, PC-dependent printers. In this scenario, a piece of software called a proxy would be installed as part of Chrome OS. The proxy would register your printer with Cloud Print, handle the print jobs, and then alert you on the status of each job.

Of course, this means you would need to be online in order to print from a PC, tablet, or smartphone running Chrome OS. But that is the nature of working in the cloud.

Announced late last year, Chrome OS is to due to debut on Netbooks by year's end.

Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Here's something you don't see very often: a freebie for Macs. But Digiarty Software is showing the love by offering the WinX DVD Ripper for Mac, normally $35.95, absolutely free. No strings attached.

If the WinX name sounds familiar, it's because the company has offered a few Windows-only freebies in the past--most notably the Windows version of the same app (sorry, but that offer's long gone).

DVD Ripper can copy copy-protected movies to your hard drive and convert them to any number of popular formats, including FLV, MOV, and MP4. In other words, it's a great tool for making your DVDs watchable on your iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.

It can also extract MP3s from DVDs, a feature I've used for pulling the tracks off the kids' "Schoolhouse Rock" collection. (Oh, come on, like you don't sing along to "Conjunction Junction.")

I'm not a Mac user, so I have no firsthand experience with this version of the software. (If you do, give a shout-out in the comments.) But I've used its Windows counterpart, and it works like a charm.

To get the program, just hit the WinX DVD Ripper for Mac product page before May 1, click the green Free Download button, and use the provided registration code when it asks for it. (Bonus: Unlike many aforementioned Giveaway of the Day-sponsored DVD rippers, this one should work for life. In other words, the registration code isn't DRM-ed to a specific date.)

Bonus deal: Frys.com has a dual-core Acer 15.6-inch laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium for $349.99, plus $8 for shipping (and sales tax in some states). Amazingly, this is a new system, not a refurb. Consequently, it'll probably sell out very, very quickly.

Originally posted at The Cheapskate