Posts with tag apple

It's no secret that Macs, and especially Mac notebooks, run pretty hot while playing WoW. However, in the wake of patch 5.0.4, a lot of Mac users are reporting dangerously high temperatures, and worried players have flooded the Mac Technical Support forum.

A player named Growltiger believes he/she has found what's causing the problem, and has even devised a fix that's seemed to work really well for the people who've tried it. Blizzard's acknowledged this and is working on patching the issue as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I thought that, in addition to including Growltiger's solution here, it might be a good idea to run an article on how to fix and prevent heat problems with Macs. We write for a pretty computer-savvy audience here at WoW Insider, and odds are good you'll find some people in the comment section who really know their stuff. I won't claim to be one of them, but I hope some of the things that have worked for me will also work for you.

Even if you're a novice computer user, you should find a few tips here. However, if you're one of the players looking to implement Growltiger's fix, fair warning: It's not for the faint of heart.

EveryAir is a really cool app for iOS devices that acts as a remote desktop -- but the reason why we like it is because it lets you play World of Warcraft on your iOS device. That's right! Play WoW on your iPad or even your iPhone, with minimal latency. We interviewed the app's creators (dedicated WoW fans themselves) a few months ago, and they were kind enough to give us a lot of coupon codes to get EveryAir for free on the App Store.

And now they're doing it again! WoW Insider is happy to give our readers the chance to win one of 50 copies of EveryAir. And all you have to do is leave a comment on this post before Sunday, Feb. 13 at 11:59 p.m. EST. This contest is valid for readers from the United States and Canada (excluding Quebec). You must be 18 years of age or older to enter. And make sure your email address is up to date, because that's how we'll contact you if you're a winner!

See the full giveaway rules.

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

Ahhhh ... An evening curled up on the couch in front of a roaring fire, a glass of wine in one hand and World of Warcraft on the iPad at your fingertips. Wait -- you can't really play WoW on an iPad ... can you? In fact, you can. Allow us to introduce you to everyAir, a new app for the Apple iPad developed by two experienced WoW players and app developers. With group-friendly frame rates and performance plus robust development that's even poised to bring a similar release to the iPhone, everyAir brings the iPad touch to World of Warcraft.

Behind everyAir is the work of two dedicated WoW players, Joe Bertolami and Nicolas Lazareff of pandaelf. We visited with Bertolami, who currently plays an ICC-raiding DK and likes to dual-box with the iPad to keep the pace cranked up, to touch base about the touchscreen approach of playing WoW on an iPad. We'll talk with him after the break about the app and just how effectively it puts the iPad/WoW combo through its paces -- plus, don't miss your chance to win a coupon to download a free copy of the everyAir app for iPad, right here at WoW Insider just a little later on today!

The newest version of the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory has been released on iTunes, featuring a 3-D model viewer for all characters, activity feeds similar to the ones on the web version of the armory, and optimizations for Apple's iOS 4.0.

Included in the update is a cool feature called screenshot mode, allowing you to take cool pictures of your characters in front of lots of backdrops, including the racial capital cities. The screenshot mode will even remove all of the interface elements from the phone, giving you a clean shot.

This update could be laying the groundwork for the newly revealed mobile guild chat service available through the armory app, potentially unlocked in the near future for subscribers to Blizzard's Remote Auction House service. Hopefully, more light will be shed on this functionality in the near future. Until then, get updating, because these new features are pretty neat. Previously, I would have had to bookmark the armory's RSS feed for my characters and open them in Safari on the iPhone, but with the new activity feeds built right into the armory app, things have gotten a lot less clunky.

If you like The Guild comic book and would like to read it on your Apple device, there is now an app for that. Dark Horse Comics has released an app on iTunes that allows you to read issue #1 electronically for less than a buck. If you prefer your comic books in paper form (or want both), issue #2 is available in stores now. You have your choice of two covers, one drawn by Kristin Donaldson and the other drawn by Matthew Stawicki.

The comic chronicles the origins of The Knights of Good from The Guild web series and is written by Felicia Day herself. The artist is Jim Rugg, who was also one of the artists in the Dr. Horrible comic.

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Like The Guild? We do, too! We've got all the episodes of season 3 posted: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and the season finale. We've also chatted with all of the folks at BlizzCon, including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, and Jeff Lewis and Michele Boyd. And as if that wasn't enough Guild, here's the liveblog of their panel, and the guys were nice enough to stop by our meetup as well. Stay tuned for more Guild here on WoW.com!

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Hallow's End is almost upon us, and Blizzard has once again announced their annual pumpkin carving contest. This is always a hoot -- I was only ever able to do the usual jack-o-lantern (once I did a Batman symbol, but it never really worked out), but there are always some real professionals in the mix on these contests, as you can see in the gallery below. Basically, carve a pumpkin featuring something Blizzard-related, showing "high levels of originality, craftsmanship, and possibly humor," light it up with a candle or other source, and then submit a picture over on the site by two weeks from today, Wednesday, October 28th.

And some nice prizes this year: the top five submissions will all pick up a nice 32gb iPod touch, apparently supplied by none other than Apple (and of course you'll be able to run those Blizzard mobile apps if you win). Good luck to everyone who enters -- go grab your knife and the biggest "gourd-like squash" you can find and get to carving!

After getting yanked off of Apple's App Store a little while back, Blizzard's Mobile Authenticator app is now back in business, and ready for a free download. Version 1.0.2 is out now [iTunes link] and the description says it contains UI improvements with a streamlined and enhanced interface.

Unfortunately, the issue that originally got the app pulled off the store hasn't actually been fixed: the official blurb is now saying that you should definitely remove the authenticator from your account before you upgrade, and then re-apply it again to your account after you've upgraded (and presumably gotten a new key installed). If you install this new version of the app and then try to access your account, it won't work (and you'll have to call Blizzard support at 1-949-955-1382 to help them remove the old authenticator).

Small hassle to go through, however, to have an account protected against hacking. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch and haven't picked up this application yet, now's the time to do so for sure.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in, especially Eric!]

This is one of the stranger World of Warcraft mentions out there -- WorldofWar.net spotted a posting on overclock.net that shows a Microsoft presentation to Best Buy employees mentioning our favorite game. Apparently WoW is a selling point for Windows 7, specifically when comparing the OS to Linux. If Best Buy wants to sell operating systems that play "the games your customers want (e.g. World of Warcraft)," then Windows is supposed to be the way to go.

Interesting. Then again, World of Warcraft is a big game, so you can't blame Microsoft for jumping on its popularity while trying to sell OSes. But it's a little misleading -- of course Blizzard has supported Apple's OS X on the disc from day one, and while they don't officially support running the game on Linux, it's certainly possible to do. If you really are going to buy a new OS, playing WoW might not be the best criteria to base your purchase choice on.

We've received a lot of reports of Mac users having problems with the login servers this afternoon, and the Tech Support forums certainly lend some weight to those reports. The thread isn't a 26+ page behemoth yet, but it's only getting started. We don't know how widespread the issue is quite yet, but it seems significant enough.

Blizzard representatives are on the case, and while they haven't fixed the exact problem, they have found a workaround: This is only happening with the World of Warcraft specific login servers, and thus it's only happening to World of Warcraft specific logins. If you merge your World of Warcraft account into a Battle.net account, you will be able to log in.

It's no fix, but if you're desperate enough to play and haven't yet merged your account over, now is a pretty good time to do it. Personally, I'm not sure why you wouldn't do it anyway, but that's just my preference talking. If this login issue gets worse before it gets better, we'll be sure to let you know.

Update: This issue appears to be cleared up, but please let us (and Blizzard of course) know if that's not the case!

According to a new Battle.net support page, there will be a new Blizzard Authenticator app for your mobile phone which will generate a code just like the physical authenticator does. The authenticator app will act just like the physical authenticators currently available. The page is sparse on exactly what phones and mobile devices will be supported, but it does mention that it works with the iPod Touch and iPhone.

According to the webpage, you only need a WiFi connection once to activate the authenticator application, and after that you're all set.

This comes right after the transition of the EU World of Warcraft account management to the new Battle.net account management. The US transition is reportedly done, although there has been no official world from Blizzard yet (however all their webpages have already changed over).

The app is not available for download yet via Blizzard or from the Apple store. But we'll let you know the second it goes up!

You can read the full FAQ after the break, or check out the Blizzard Support article.

A few places are reporting, including our sister site Massively, that a company named Vollee has brought their mobile phone version of Second Life live and online. As you can see in the video on the website, it works, though it's not exactly an ideal way to play the game. They don't go into details on how it works, obviously, but my guess would be some kind of java browser emulation of a real client.

Why are we talking about Second Life on WoW Insider? Because odds are that some kind of mobile WoW app is not far behind. Vollee would certainly love to be the ones to do it (they even say that you can enter "World of Second Life" on their website), but unlike Blizzplanet, I really don't think they will be -- odds are that any mobile app won't be a full client, but rather will be a chat or AH app of some kind ("BattleChat" has already been mentioned by Blizzard), and it'll likely be designed by Blizzard themselves.

But there's no question that there's a huge frontier for this sort of thing. Within the next month, Apple is set to release the iPhone's "App Store" (a distribution platform for mobile applications and games), and we have to imagine that a mobile announcement or even a release from Blizzard will come soon after that.

If you're like me, you probably geek out at every bit of news that leaks out from the Wrath of the Lich King Alpha. Granted, there really aren't supposed to be any, but we fanboys take whatever we can. The curious thing is, what's the big deal? It's a game that was announced almost a year ago and doesn't look like it will come out anytime soon. Furthermore, the biggest things about the expansion such as the Death Knight hero class and Inscription profession has already been revealed.

But every little thing stokes the fires of anticipation -- at least for me -- and even silly things like icons of items make my stupidly grin. Never mind that Blizzard has put a tight lid on everything, or at least tried, but it's kind of like Apple trying to put a lid on the iPhone before it came out. Everyone knew it was coming even though Apple wanted to keep it a secret, but in the end, people snapped it up anyway. Wrath of the Lich King is kind of like that. We scrape and claw for every little bit of information, from spells to screenshots to images of possible armor sets.

It's a huge deal for me because as much as I still enjoy playing the game now, I'm really hungry for something more. The only thing I'll ever see in Sunwell Plateau is Kil'jaeden's 'welcome' doormat. Maybe. So while the Alpha might be scraps as far as information goes, I'm devouring every bit of information like a famished man. How about you? Are you excited about information leaking from the Alpha? Does it whet your appetite for Wrath of the Lich King? What information are you most concerned about?

Elad Shahar, a student at University of Massachusetts Lowell, has developed a web interface that will allow you to search the Armory on your iPhone or iPod touch's MobileSafari. He's released a new version today, polished to the point where he's looking for people to help him test the application and to offer ideas and suggestions.

iArmory lets you do the searches you'd expect -- by player or guild -- and serves up results in a clean, Apple-like format that's designed especially for the iPhone's screen. The one catch is that the Armory has been stripped of its images, including items, tooltips, and fancy borders. What you get is a simple text display of the information you searched for. You can see images of the interface on Elad's website, Omen of Clarity.

So, if you are, you know, hip enough to own an iPhone or an iPod touch (which I'm, uh, not), and you are reading this post (which means you probably play WoW), then get your Armory-lovin' self over to Omen of Clarity's contact page and volunteer your services as a tester. Git, I said!

Here's another user-made iPhone theme featuring the icons from World of Warcraft, made and sent to us by Nasum of Garithos, Hordeside. We covered one of these almost a year ago when the iPhone first came out, but this one is apparently made from scratch, and features the new iTunes store as well as an icon for the Installer.app (man, today is just a Mac gear day on WoW Insider, isn't it? I feel like I'm blogging for TUAW).

Hopefully, when the official iPhone app store drops in June, we'll see some non-jailbreak uses of this stuff -- right now, to use either one of these themes on the phone, you have to hack into the firmware and go places Apple doesn't officially want you to go. But those WoW icons definitely work great for all kinds of things: even Blizzard officially put them to OS use in a downloadable theme for XP. There are so many WoW icons floating around that they're a natural (if not exactly legal) fit for almost any use -- here's hoping that in June, Apple's SDK will turn out at least one theming program, and we'll be able to do this stuff without hacking away at the iPhone.

Update: Nasum (whose name we spelled wrong originally, sorry about that) says the theme is now in Installer.app, if you'd like to install it yourself.

Ever since a few WoW patches ago, many of us Mac users have been, honestly, suffering with much lower framerates than we should be seeing, given the hardware we're on. Fortunately, it looks like the just-released 10.5.2 system update will give a lot of help in that department, along with many other system fixes. Tipster Jason went from 27.5 FPS to between 45 and 60 FPS on his iMac after installing 10.5.2 and the Leopard Graphics Update (which also just came out today and requires 10.5.2), and our own Adam Holisky went from 30 to 50 FPS on his own first-gen Intel iMac. I didn't have the presence of mind to test my WoW before updating, but it's certainly running silky smooth now on my MacBook Pro. Go now, good Leopard-using readers, and run your Software Updates (always a good idea to back up before major updates, though). Those of you who have updated, are you seeing performance benefits?