A great mouse mat is a must for gamers, reducing wear on wrists during hours of intensive play. Many modern ones use chemical coatings or specially engineered surfaces to improve sensor accuracy or reduce drag?a boon if you?re doing repetitive motion that requires high accuracy.

(Don't mistake mouse mats for the smaller mouse pads, once an absolute necessity in the era of mechanical mice. Because optical and laser mice can work on so many different kinds of surfaces, the humble mouse pad has largely disappeared.) 

Plenty of mouse mat manufacturers exist, but few provide clarity or consistency in describing their products. For example, most don?t report how much friction you?ll encounter when using their mats with the most popular mice. To help you find the best mouse mat for your needs, we?ve tested several from a few different companies that represent a range of surface types (metal, plastic, or cloth) and usage cases (business or gaming).

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Saint?s Row?s Achilles heel was always combat. It hid this fact by peppering each game with a handful of absurd weapons, from a recliner that fired missiles to the Dubstep gun to the iconic purple dildo bat?still the weapon I most associate with the series.

But even armaments that creative couldn?t hide the fact that combat was often a by-the-book affair. Enemies were brainless, and each encounter involved simply trying to get through it as fast as possible without dying. It?s telling that most of the memorable moments in Saint?s Row had nothing to do with combat, be it the Tron-esque ?Deckers Die? mission, singing Biz Markie in a car with your friends, or an Aerosmith-backed rocket ride into space.

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Choosing a gaming keyboard is a matter of personal taste. One person could be into Cherry Browns and white backlighting. Another might favor Razer Greens and a rippling RGB glow. Gigantic wrist pads, compact shapes, numeric keypads, macro keys, volume controls?a plethora of keyboards exists because everyone wants a different mix of features.

To help you sort through the many options, we?ve sifted through the latest and greatest planks to come up with our top recommendations. All of these are mechanical keyboards, and for good reason?they?re simply more comfortable to use over the long haul. But we?re open-minded, so if we encounter an alternative that works well, you may see it appear on this list. We?ll keep updating it periodically as we test new keyboards.

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Apple is said to be spending as much as $1 billion over the course of 2018 on original TV programming. That?s a lot of TV! It?s not the $8 billion Netflix is going to spend, but it?s still a huge commitment.

What can you get for a billion dollars? Well, some simple math gives us 200 episodes at $5 million a piece (a reasonable per-episode price for high-end TV). But we?re not likely to actually see 10-20 shows with 10-20 episodes each, all costing around that much. For starters, that billion dollars has to cover a lot more than per-episode production costs.

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Just 24 hours after the public release of iOS 12, Apple has kicked out the first developer beta of iOS 12.1. It re-introduces Group FaceTime and includes a number of hints about new iPads that we may see this fall.

Updated 09/20/18: iOS 12.1 beta 1 is now available for public beta testers. 

Developers can head developer.apple.com to download the beta or add the beta profile to their devices. Non-developers who want to be part of the public beta test can head to beta.apple.com using the device on which you want to run the beta, where you can sign up and download a beta profile. If you still have the beta profile installed after upgrading to iOS 12, your device will download it automatically as a regular iOS 12 update.

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It?s not often that we see a good deal on iMacs?by and large, the deals on the big Apple desktop products tend to focus on MacBooks. Today, though, the 2017 21-inch iMac is getting some love over at B&HRemove non-product link, where it?s available for $150 off. That?s enough to bring the price to an agreeable $949, down from the usual price of $1,099.00.

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There?s nothing more disturbing than finding files on your hardware that come from an app you are sure you never installed.

Macworld reader Kevin wrote in asking about a video-management app. It?s an app he is positive he never installed on his iOS device, and he was shocked to find a folder in the iCloud Storage view in iOS (Settings > account name > iCloud > Manage Storage).

He noted that the information seemed quite personal, as it had images that seemed to represent all his network devices. I suggested this might be something related to an app he purchased and forgot, but the explanation Kevin uncovered is only slightly related.

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Realmac Software?s RapidWeaver is a WYSIWYG (?what you see is what you get?) website development application designed to do most of the heavy lifting for you. Its easy-to-modify templates make it a snap to create a modern, custom website designs though the comfort of a user interface that feels like one that came straight out of Cupertino.

WYSIWYG web apps aren?t as novel as they once were-online services like Wix offer to do the same thing for free or dirt cheap, often bundled with bargain-priced web hosting. And to be fair, even the latest version of RapidWeaver will get you only so far on its own, which is why Realmac continues to foster a community chock full of add-ons including themes, plugins, and stacks that users can purchase to accomplish more advanced tasks the host software alone can?t handle.

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