Archive for February, 2010
Draw with glow paint and battle 3D tanks: iPhone apps of the week
February 27th, 2010
This week’s apps include a unique painting app and a game that closely mimics one of the greatest classic arcade tank games of all time.
Originally posted at The Download Blog
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Griffin TuneJuice iPhone or iPod battery backup
February 27th, 2010
Griffin’s TuneJuice gives an iPhone as much as 2 hours to 3 hours and 30 minutes extra of talk time depending on the type of batteries used.
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Jet City Devices: iPhone screen repairs while you wait
February 27th, 2010
Any Apple store can replace a busted screen for you, but the price tag is a jaw-dropping $200. In Chicago and Seattle, it’ll cost you $85 and 15 minutes.
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Experts Weigh In On Apple’s Censorship
February 27th, 2010
After the recent puritan cull of 5000 near-adult apps from the app store, people have been scratching their heads over why it happened. One of the best analyses currently around is by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. His view is that it’s not about the money, and it’s not about censorship—it’s about creating a pleasant shopping environment. He argues that the sexy apps flooded the app store, blocking many legit ones, and that Apple cut them to make the store feel less skeevy. That’s why Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Victoria’s Secrets and—the recently reinstanted—Hooters apps are all allowed. They’re respectable brands. It’s a view that CrunchGear also endorses.
It’s also viewed as a worrying precedent, regardless of its intention. Brian X. Chen at Wired argues that this sort of control point over an entire platform is rather dangerous—especially with the iPad. If the iPad does become the de facto device that everyone gets their news on, what happens if a topic is printed through one of papers that people strongly object to? What happens if the complain to Apple over the written content in a magazine or newspaper? Will Apple become the editor of the world’s news? While certainly an extreme situation, it’s worth thinking about.
Plants Vs. Zombies Sells 300,000 Copies In Just 9 Days
February 27th, 2010
The extremely popular (and more than a little funny) Plants Vs Zombies game recently made its way to the iPhone, porting its well received desktop version to the mobile platform. Exceeding everyone’s expectations—even PopCap Games who made it—it sold an amazing 300,000 copies in just the nine days since launch. According to PopCap, that’s the top grossing iPhone launch ever.
Apparently users are so taken by the game that 95% of them are giving it 5/5 stars. They’ve brought in over $1 million revenue from the foliage against the undead tower defense game. Given the mammoth amount of positive publicity the game has gained, the $2.99 sticker price seems pretty reasonable. Or else you could play it free online, if you want.
Katie Boehret on the Martha Stewart Show–It’s a Good Thing.
February 27th, 2010
Martha Stewart invited our own Katie Boehret back to her show for a second time this week to share some of her favorite things from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The following is a link to Martha’s site for the video, which isn’t embeddable at this point, but we promise it’s worth the click. Katie kicks things off with Google Goggles.
Five Fun Games: Chasing the Shadow, Epic Brain Teasing, a Murder Mystery Rolled Up in a Carpet and More
February 27th, 2010
Happy Friday! It’s another week of picks, selected by Mac Games and More of fun casual games you might not have heard of. The selection includes a gripping adventure with Sherlock Holmes, a delicious sim, Mai Tai’s beach side and more.
Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Persian Carpet – Step into the shoes of the [...]
Two Voice Recognition Companies Join Forces
February 27th, 2010
Nuance, the company behind Dragon Mobile for iPhone and the Naturally Speaking range of software products, has bought MacSpeech, makers of the jaw-droppingly amazing MacSpeech Dictate and its recent new sibling, MacSpeech Scribe.
In a statement, Nuance’s Peter Mahoney said:
“Rest assured, if you currently use either product, nothing will change in the near term. In [...]
Apps of the Week, February 26th, 2010
February 26th, 2010
In this edition of Apps of the Week, we torture our Facebook friends by pasting their heads into silly animated videos, locate the best food trucks in our area, better time our daily cat naps, and set up “wifeminders” to ensure we don’t end up on the couch tomorrow night.
SuperSpeech
Price: $0.99
Prepping for a big speech at work or school? Super Speech will not only help you time your presentation, but also give you lighted warnings when your time is winding down and keep track of how many times you mutter an “ah” with the “ah counter.” Saving your roommates and spouses the headache of listening to your speech about turtle reproduction over and over again with an app? A good idea.
Meet the Oscars
Price: FREE
Yep, it’s that time of year again. If you haven’t already heard, the Oscars ceremony is coming up soon, which means you probably won’t hear the end of that one guy who did that one crazy thing at that one part of the Oscars for quite a while to come. So cozy up with this app that lists the nominees and lets you check off which movies you’ve seen and check out the ones you haven’t on IMDB.com directly through the app. We hope you like it! We hope you really really like it!
FakeSpeare
Price: $0.99
The month of March is upon us, which means that April is coming up soon, which means, yep, you guessed it: The Bard’s birthday is impending! Okay, maybe you didn’t guess that, but now you know, William Shakespeare’s big birthday bash is on April 23, which kind of makes this new app relevant, we suppose. FakeSpeare lets you create fake plays with language of the Bard, so you can think of it as a Shakespearean ad libs, of sort. The app even plays old-time music as you create your play, so you can get the full experience. Well, minus the funny costumes and tights for men, of course.
iTouch My Friends
Price: $0.99
It’s a miracle this app made it through Apple’s sex app massacre with a name like “iTouch My Friends,” but we’re pretty glad it did. No, there isn’t really any sexy time in the app, but it does let you make videos and photos of your friends in some hilarious situations by cutting and pasting their photo onto a body, in a fairly impressive way. It looks much more realistic than other apps that do much of the same thing, and the results are pretty giggle-worthy. Share your creations via Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, of course. Our favorite scenarios? The baby doing karate and making your friend throw a shoe at a teacher are pretty worthy of checking out.
Food Trucker
Price: $0.99
This EverythingiCafe writer is located in good ol’ Chicago, one of the greatest food towns on the planet. But one of the major things the Windy City has been missing? Food carts and food trucks. New York City reigns supreme for food stands, but many other cities have nice selections sprinkled throughout, so this app is perfect for those residents who like to keep track of their local food trucks. Get updates on closings and new food trucks popping up around you, and view what’s available on a map by your city. There are currently seven cities featured in the app, including Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and New York City.
StayTunedIn
Price: $0.99
Sure, this is an incredibly simple TV listings app, but that’s why we like it. View TV listings for your favorite shows each week, getting updates and alerts for when new episodes are coming up. Many similar apps aren’t updated nearly enough, which is basically like handing over a dollar for a month of work when you expected at least a year’s worth. This app? So far, so good!
PixelEx
Price: $1.99
We’re beginning to wonder if and when digital cameras will become obsolete with the abundance of cameras available on phones, and especially with the increased improvement in quality on the iPhone camera. Case in point: all of the stellar photos and art some iPhone’rs are creating with their iPhone cameras. PixelEx is a cool app more for its content, as it collects some of the best art and photos created by users with their iPhones. Check out some of the galleries, which you can view by topics and other criteria.
GuidoFy
Price: $0.99
Sick of all the Jersey Shore hubbub yet? No? Good. We found this Guidofy app that was released this week, and it’s actually pretty legit. Turn yourself into a bonifide guido with some six-pack abs, ear bling, hats, and other “guido staples” in this photo editing app. We’re thinking a “guidetteme” app would be a little more difficult (spray tans? poofs?), but we’ll be eagerly anticipating one.
Camera Agent
Price: FREE
Class up your photos or make them a little extra special for someone with some cutesy and cool frames from Camera Agent. The frames aren’t quite works of art or anything, but for a free photo editing app, it’s a nice change of pace to at least have some decent and semi-cool ones. There are also other editing tools, including a photo timer, color effects, zoom, and lightness control.
Scribe Notes
Price: $3.99
Sure, you took a ton of photos on your trip to Colorado last summer. That’s great. But who’s going to want to look through them all if they’re disorganized and that one photo of you holding that thing isn’t explained or annotated? Scribe Notes is a slick app that lets you add details like notes or maps to photos you’ve taken and collect them together into batches and groups, then send them out via e-mail. Think of it as the most efficient scrapbooking app for your iPhone. The local Scrapbook Garden store is going to be a tad upset with this, we’re thinking.
The Nap App Free
Price: FREE
This writer enjoyed a nap of her own recently that went way over the 30 minutes she allotted for such a thing. The consequences weren’t good, and I wish I had had this app at the time. Easily set a timer for your nap in this app without fumbling around with your iPhone timer or alarm clocks. Go for the 20-minute cat nap or 60-minute grizzly nap, or set and save your own custom nap time. It may sound like a silly download, but when you’re in need of a nap and need a reliable alarm, you want to make things as simple as possible, which this app does pretty well.
Wife Minder
Price: $0.99
At first we thought this was an education app teaching unruly men how to “mind” their wives and do what they say. Much to our chagrin, we found out it’s a wife reminder app that helps guys keep track of important dates with the wife to remember. Well, this is actually a lot better than an app that teaches guys to mind their wives. Set reminders for yourself that are displayed by the red-yellow-green light system, warning you of when you’re getting close to D-Day. Make notes for different dates, too, i.e. shopping lists or last-minute ideas you need to jot down. Never again feel that familiar back pain from spending a night on the couch because you forgot the anniversay of the date that you first IM’d your now wife.
iBooks Debut List Possibly Leaked
February 26th, 2010
TUAW have obtained a leaked list of books, which may be the first round of titles available for iBooks. While they haven’t released the full list, they have discussed some of the details. There are 112 titles form eight publishers, ranging in price from $14.99 down to free:
The authors include Stephen King, Timothy Ferris, Malcolm Gladwell, Dubner & Leavitt, Kennedy, Agassi, Palin and Beck. There’s bestselling fiction (The Lovely Bones), fact (A History Of Modern Britain) and autobiography (Wishful Drinking). The prices range from $14.99 (for Too Big To Fail) all the way down to the magic of free (Heat Wave). It’s an eclectic list… and it might be the first round of books to be highlighted on the iBooks app in a few weeks.
Like TUAW said, it’s a widespread hodgepodge of titles and genres, but it’s the sort of shotgun approach you’d expect to see for an opening set of titles. See anything you’d like to read?
Even if you’re not planning on looking at a single book on the iPad, you can still win one from us in April?