Brand: MacNews

If you’ve played games online you may have suffered from lags and kicks. Hasten (http://www.nspira.com/hasten) is a new, US$5.99 status bar app for Mac OS X designed to reduce your latency to remote servers.

This helps to reduce your lag when playing online games and improve your performance by providing a smoother connection to the server. Hasten does this by optimizing your network performance to send vital data more quickly to the remote server, according to the app developers at Nspira.

Moving Art, in collaboration with Magic Window, has introduced Magic Flowers 1.0 (movingart.com/magicflowers), an app exclusively for Mac OS X.

Captured by the “master of timelapse,” Louie Schwartzberg, Magic Flowers delivers slow-moving timelapse flowers to be used as wallpapers and screen savers. It includes 42 moving flower wallpapers; 22 are built into the app and 20 are downloaded after you install the app.

Magic Flowers is compatible with OS X 10.9 or later. It costs US$4.99 and is available at the Mac App Store.

Apple is now a Promoter Member of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (https://www.bluetooth.org). Founded in 1998, it’s a not-for-profit, non-stock corporation. The SIG owns the Bluetooth trademarks and oversees development of the Bluetooth standard.

The Bluetooth SIG’s main tasks are to: publish Bluetooth specifications; administer the qualification program; protect the Bluetooth trademarks; and evangelize Bluetooth wireless technology. Promoter members get voting rights on Bluetooth corporate matters and a guaranteed seat on the board of directors.