Do you like to play games on your iOS device in your free time, or maybe in your not-so-free time? I’m sure we’re all guilty of playing a game or two when we should be doing other things, like paying attention in class or working. I know I am, anyway.

You’re probably already aware of the most popular multi-player games, especially the “With Friends” games such as: Words with Friends, Hanging with Friends, Scramble with Friends, Chess with Friends, etc. Because of that, I don’t want to focus on the well-known multi-player games that everyone already knows and loves.

Instead, I want to point out some multi-player games that you may not have heard of, but are really fun to play. Whether playing games on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad is a guilty pleasure of yours, or just something you do to pass the time, you’re sure to enjoy a few or all of these multi-player games.

Recommended Reading: 20 Retro Video Games You Can Play on iPhone

Puzzle Games

Pirates Life 2: The Lost Chapters

Create your own pirate and go head-to-head with up to 3 of your friends through Game Center. You’ll have to take down ships and cities and play mini-games in order to earn gold pieces. You can then use your gold to repair or buy new ships, upgrade your weapons, buy accessories for your pirates, and more.[Free]

TraceWord

If you are a fan of word search puzzles, you’ll love TraceWord. In this multi-player version of the classic word search game, you can play with up to 10 players at once. There are three levels of difficulty to choose from. The goal of the game is to find the words on the board before your opponents do. [Free]

Describe IT

Are you good at describing words? Are you good at guessing words? With Describe IT, you have to be good at both! You must use clues and your wit to describe words to your friends. The fewer clues you use and the faster you guess, the more coins you’ll earn. You can then use coins to buy power-ups. You can challenge your friends via Facebook, username, or email, but you must upgrade in order to play multi-player games. [Free]

Skywords

Skywords is like your typical Scrabble or Words with Friends type game, but with a twist: you can stack letters on top of each other. The height of a stack will positively affect your score – the higher the stack, the higher your score. You can play online with your friends or random opponents. You can also play locally via pass and play, with up to 4 players. [Free; Upgrade: $1.99]

InstaMino

What do you get when you mix Instagram photos with Domino? You get InstaMino, a game that lets you play dominoes with popular Instagram photos by yourself, with a friend, or with anyone else (via Game Center). You can see all of your played domino tiles; no zooming or scrolling necessary. You can also swipe out your photo set and get new ones if you don’t like the set given to you. [Free or Upgrade for $1.99]

Real Tic Tac Toe

Who doesn’t love a good game of Tic Tac Toe? This game dates all the way back to the mid-1800′s and never seems to get old. With this version for the iPhone, you can play in one-player mode, two-player mode (via Bluetooth), or multi-player mode (via Game Center). In the free version you can play 3×3 and 4×4 boards; if you decide to upgrade, you can play 5×5 and 6×6 boards as well. [Free or Upgrade for $0.99]

Hangman Pro

It’s a two-player game where you take turns guessing a word. Each time you miss a letter a piece is added to the stickman figure, and the first one to hang their stickman loses. In Hangman Pro, you can play in multi-player mode in real-time via Game Center. There are two difficulty levels to choose from: easy and hard. You can of course unlock achievements and view leaderboards through Game Center as well. [Free; Upgrade for $0.99]

W.E.L.D.E.R. Wars

W.E.L.D.E.R. is one of my personal favorites. It’s a unique word game in which you have to weld letters together in order to create words. You will need to use power-ups, multiplier tiles, and clever combos in order to score higher than your opponents. Play against your friends in Game Center or even random opponents; you can even invite your friends from Facebook and Twitter to play. [Free or Upgrade for $2.99]

Reversi 3D

Reversi is a well-known board strategy game, where you must have more pawns on the board than your opponent. In this turn-based game there are 3 difficulty levels, and you can play with friends or random opponents. If you’re just learning, there’s an in-game tutorial that you can follow; it will help you to improve your skills so that you can eventually master the game. [Free; Upgrade for $0.99]

Action Games

Road Warrior Racing

Road Warrior is a combat racing game with impressive graphics. You get to race against friends and other online players, while destroying them with your guns. The more victories you achieve, the closer you get to being able to race against bosses. When you race against and beat a boss, you’ll earn a new car. So it’s a constant cycle of racing and winning, all while unlocking badges and more. [Free]

Slingshot Trials

If you love racing games, you’ll love Slingshot Trials. It gives you a taste of the full version, Slingshot Racing, with 8 free action-packed levels. You’ll have to use your "grappling hook to slingshot around corners." You can use a jump or speed boost to maneuver many obstacles. You can also play with up to 4 players at once, which makes it great fun for the entire family. [Free; Upgrade for $0.99]

Burn the Ants

Burn the Ants is sure to give you a laugh or two as you play, just look at the poor little ants running as you burn them! Basically, you get to compete in an ant-killing contest with your friends or other players from around the world. You get to use multiple weapons like fire, ice, electricity, lasers and ninja stars. You can also unlock achievements and view leaderboards in the Game Center [Free]

Disc Drivin’ Free

Disc Drivin’ is a turn-based racing game that uses 3D physics. You can race against your friends and use special powers (like boosts, bombs and oil slicks) to avoid hazards. You will be driving an actual "disc," which you can customize as you’d like. Play with up to 4 players online or locally with up to 8 players, using pass and play. [Free; Upgrade for $1.99]

Dooms Knight Lite

If you can get past the creepy app icon, you’ll love Dooms Knight. In this doom-themed game you’ll travel to Mars where you’ll go through 36 levels of demonic enemies. You must protect yourself using your fists, pistols, shotguns, saws and more. Cooperate with friends in the multi-player mode – two heads are better than one. Dooms Knight may not have the best graphics, but the creativity is definitely there. [Free; Upgrade for $0.99]

Apollo Ape

Apollo Ape is a cute little game about flying monkeys! You launch monkeys into space by swinging on vines. Time your swings to gain momentum or rocket boosts to make your monkey go higher. Battle friends to see who the real monkey flying master is. [Free; Upgrade for $0.99]

Multi 5 Pack

Multi 5 Pack provides you with not 1 but 5 multi-player games: Space shooter, Pong, Tanks with Destructible Terrain, Football, and Arkanoid. They’re all simple little games with mediocre graphics, but they’re also great for passing time. [$0.99]

Monster Mutt Rescue

In this game you get to "rescue a rare Monster Mutt by raising and training your very own Mutt from a baby to an adult." Make sure to nurture and play with your Mutt; you can even design its room and make it unique. As it grows and reaches multiple age levels, you’ll unlock more games to play. You can also play multi-player games online with friends and other players, and help them care for their Mutts. [Free]

What is your favorite multi-player game for iOS?

More people are surfing the Internet via mobile devices these days, thus a few things on websites need to be adjusted to fit in those smaller screen sizes. This also includes Web Navigation.

The icon below, if you may, is the most popular icon to represent “mobile menu/navigation”.

In this post, we’ll take a look at several ways to add the icon and which way is easiest.

Recommended Reading: Designing A Winning Navigation Menu: Ideas and Inspirations

Using Bitmap Image

Everyone knows how to do it by way of the Bitmap image. We can simply create this icon in Photoshop, save it to image (probably in PNG or JPG format) and then assign it through background-image in CSS.

However, bitmap images lack scalability. In particular, when we have to enlarge the image, it may turn blurry or pixelated. With the availabiity of high-resolution devices in the market these days, image scalability is one essential factor you can’t afford to overlook.

Bootstrap Way

This is how Bootstrap, a front-end development framework, displays the “navigation icon” in smaller screen sizes. It uses three <span> elements:

 <button type="button" class="btn btn-navbar" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".nav-collapse"> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> </button> 

Although the desired icon may be achieved through styling, having extra markup for only displaying this tiny icon is considered redundant (especially if we comply to “best practices”).

So, let’s find a better way that require less markup.

Using Font Icon

Another way to take is by using font icons. Several fonts provide this icon in their set, such as Font Awesome and EnTypo. To display the icon, we simply add the respective character, as demonstrated in this post.

Some advantages of displaying icon with fonts are that the icon is easy to alter through CSS and is resolution-independent. On the other hand, it also has some disadvantages: the file could be very large depending on how many characters are saved, and we need at least four different file formats to cover browser compatibility which is a lot of work to display just one icon.

“Trigram for Heaven”

Surprisingly, there is an HTML character called Trigram for Heaven. This is (probably) the best way I can find. Simply put this HTML character (☰) and you should get this icon on your webpage.

We can then alter it with CSS, such as changing the color or resizing it without losing the sharpness and also linking to external sources. Furthermore, you can dive into this library to find more HTML special characters.

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Marcus Austin. Marcus has over 25 years of experience in tech and the business sector. He currently works for Firebrand Training as a Technical Author.

There are Cloud solutions for practically everything you can think of, but Cloud isn’t right for every problem and in some areas, Cloud is definitely not the right solution. 2013 brought with it the certainty that the Cloud is not a fad. It’s passed the hype tests, and we’ve kicked the tires.

If we were to plot the Cloud on IT analysts Gartner’s Hype cycle of technology, we’d have to pin it somewhere between the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and the ‘Plateau of Productivity.’ However that’s not to say that Cloud should be accepted with open arms. In short, the Cloud is not the answer to every question, but it is the answer to quite a lot of questions.

Recommended Reading: Cloud Hosting: How Does it Really Work?

Cloud, get it right or pay the price

One of the advantages of joining the move to the Cloud in the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ stage is that thankfully many businesses have already gone ahead and triggered the potential traps and pitfalls (which we can now avoid).

It’s that moment when the guy from Sales (with no clue about IT) gives (or gets) unauthorized access to sensitive information in a Dropbox account, or signs himself up to Salesforce’s Cloud-based CRM to handle his sales enquiries… without telling IT.

The result: sensitive information is now in the Cloud with no organizational oversight and is susceptible to unauthorized exposure. The best solution is to get your teams up to speed on Cloud security, and to make sure that they’re using the right sort of Cloud applications, i.e. the ones that are written for businesses not consumers, before someone outside of the business spots the weaknesses.

Restoring Cloud backups can cause problems

Surely that’s the whole point of Cloud – everything gets backed up by people who know their way around a copy of Tivoli Storage Manager or EMC’s NetWorker. Well that’s true, but what happens when your Cloud provider goes belly up? Where is your data and who has access to it?

If you can’t backup your data directly from the Cloud, then make sure there’s something written down in the Service Level Agreement (SLA), that says who owns the data, and what happens to it should everything go wrong.

Additionally, if like many businesses you’re using the Cloud as place to backup your data, then make sure you can recover your data. You’d be surprised just how many businesses can’t restore their data. A recent survey by Symantec on Cloud storage found that nearly a half of all enterprises (47%) had lost data in the Cloud and had to restore their information from backups with a staggering two-thirds of those organizations failing to recover data.

Do you know where your data is stored?

If your answer to the question ‘Where’s your data stored?’ is something along the lines of ‘it’s in the Cloud,’ then go to the back of the class now. There are a number of issues when it comes to storing data with a third-party, and compliance is one of the big ones.

Fines for not knowing where your data is kept and how it is managed can be in the millions of dollars. In the UK the Financial Services Agency (FSA) fined insurance business Zurich £2,275,000 (US$3,444,00) for failing to have adequate systems and controls in place to prevent the loss of customers’ confidential information.

Additionally the Information Commisioners Office (ICO) has the ability to levy fines of up to £500,000 (US$757,000) for breaches of the UK’s Data Protection act, and recently fined Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited £250,000 (US$379,000) following a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.

Data Jurisdiction

If the data you are storing in the Cloud has any personal information, or any financial information, such as credit card data, then keep it in the country of origin, or face the consequences of a heavy fine. If in doubt keep it on the premises in a private Cloud. If you are unsure of the laws then Forrester have published an interactive map of privacy and data protection laws for the majority of the major countries in the World.

Being efficient with your data

The main benefit of the Cloud is you only pay for what you use, but if you’re not vigilant then you can end up paying for data that you don’t use anymore and people who no longer work for you.  It’s simple to setup an account on a Cloud service and then to add more users as they join in. Unfortunately it’s also easy to forget to delete the account when those users leave.

Likewise it’s also simple to keep throwing data at the Cloud. The Cloud just keeps on soaking it up and unlike a server-based solution it never spits back a message saying ‘your mailbox is almost full.’

So sooner or later you’ll find that you have 200 versions of the same email, 20 versions of the same PowerPoint presentation, and 30 copies of that amusing 50MB video. It all add up and you will continue paying for every single byte to be securely stored and backed up.

To avoid this you either need to deduplicate your data before you send it to the Cloud using something like Opendedup, or a Cloud service like Asigra that deduplicates data as part of the service.

Be firm but be flexible

The reason Cloud has been able to grow so fast, is all down to plastic. If the IT department isn’t playing ball, and has assessed a project to the bottom of the pile, with a delivery date sometime in 2015, then the answer for many users is to go native and buy a Cloud solution on the company card.

However you can guarantee that your rogue IT buyer will never ask any of the questions your IT department would have asked when they choose an enterprise solution, nor will they have thought about all of the consequences if anything goes wrong? While burning the credit cards sound like a good solution, a better solution is to have some flexibility and help from the IT department and to educate employees to the potential problems of the credit card Cloud solution.

Conclusion

Finally, as we said at the start, Cloud is no longer a fad, but nor is it the answer to everything. So make sure that when you look for a Cloud solution you should always keep the potential pitfalls in mind and don’t be blinded by the headline benefits.