Cover Up is a new $0.99 iPhone app that masks embarrassing bathroom noises with other bathroom sounds, like running water, a hand dryer or blow dryer.
Trying to mask the sound of a giant anal raspberry is like spraying deodorant to mask a pooey smell: it never really works. But it may be useful if you’re known to the person in the next stall.
Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an iPhone game, and a quite nicely produced one, at that. It might, in fact, be the bloodiest game to ever come to the platform, if that’s your thing. Seriously — you get measured on the number of successful decapitations per level.
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
There are iPhone-controlled cars and beds — now one company plans to integrate iPhones/iPods in its wheelchairs for a new kind of accessibility.
Dynamic Controls developed a system to connect an iPhone or iPod Touch to the wheelchair system via Bluetooth; it mounts on an adjustable arm and has a recharger, too.
In addition to music and all the other stuff you can do with an iPod/iPhone that might come in handy — compass reading, maps — it has an app that can be used for some controls on the chair, showing chair information in real time, including speed, and a diagnostics feature for when things go awry.
“We recognized the iPhone has revolutionized the way people communicate and saw the opportunity to develop this solution for wheelchair users, taking full advantage of Apple’s ‘Works with iPod / Made for iPhone’ developer program,” Charlotte Walshe, CEO of Dynamic Controls, said in a press release.
Lee Kwok, a wheel chair user in Christchurch, New Zealand was also quoted in the presser, saying says he thinks it will be fantastic to be able to buy an off-the-shelf product that has so many features for powered wheelchair users: “Having access to mainstream technology via a wheelchair is a huge advantage.”
The new feature is expected to launch in April, 2010.
Eighteen-year-old English entrepreneur Ed Nash has come up with a 99-cent iPhone app that claims to use Fibonacci’s golden ratio to scientifically determine whether or not a face is aesthetically pleasing. Just snap a photo of the hapless subject, adjust the anchor points, hit the button and viola, instant decision.
Fit or Fugly’s App Store page suggests you use it “to break the ice at dinner parties.” Sure. But we’re going to suggest “the ice” isn’t the only thing that’ll get broken when your iPhone decides the girl sitting next to you is “fugly.”
Top-selling titles include Friday Night Lights, iSpy Game, iReferee, Pet Peeves (a social network for griping pictured above), iSexyRef2, Pro Rodeo Fan, Sit Up Counter and Shake 2 Count.
CoM had a quick word with owner Brice Milliorn about the sale, what’s next for him and how he sees the future of apps.
CoM: Was JBMJBM sold?
BM: No, I have not sold company or apps yet. I am in talks with one guy about buying me out via stock, but it doesn’t look promising.
CoM: What plans to you have to sell it now?
BM: No plans to sell again, just going to continue doing what I am doing and do more freelance work as well.
CoM: What changes would you like to see in Apple’s app store?
BM: I don’t have a problem with Apple, you follow their guidelines you get things approved, simple as that. The few items that I have had issue with them, they called explained, I fixed and it got approved. I even wrote the number down and called the guy back a few times when I was having issues and within a few hours it was fixed.
CoM: Where do you think the future of app development is headed?
BM: I think the future of the iPhone is opening it up to Verizon. That will be another huge influx of potential app buyers and I look forward to this happening.
I also believe all this hype on the Droid and all those other handsets that will ultimately never get to the level of the iPhone. The only company to match the iPhone and better it is Apple itself.
Never one to rest on its laurels, Apple is piling on following its record Q3 with a big push for the holidays. Today, it launched its opening salvo for the season with “Gift” (above) and “Song” (after the jump). The former, in typical fashion, starts with something immediately relevant (using the Target app to get gift recommendations) before going off on tangents (photo editing, “Monopoly,” Zipcar?).
“Song,” meanwhile pretty much just goes full-on for the “There’s an app for that” mantra, touching on real estate, The Sims, Facebook, and Shazam. And honestly, in both cases, it’s pretty effective. There are more than 100,000 apps, after all, even if there’s no Google Voice. The campaign works because it’s welcoming and says you can find what you want to do easily. (via MacRumors)
Unfortunately, that selling point is actually pretty different from the real experience of using the App Store. Once you hit 100,000, discoverability becomes the killer app, not any single product within. This isn’t that big a problem yet (except for developers), but it will become an increasing one over time. What good are 100,000 apps when I struggle to use more than 10 on a daily basis?
Consider this: iTunes offers more than 10 million songs, but lots of users have several thousands of songs (I have nearly 5,000 and add more every year). Assuming that the average for a power user is around 2,000 songs per user, that rounds out to there being 5,000 songs to every one that most people download.
With apps, by contrast, there are 100,000, but I would guess most power users carry fewer than 30 on them at any given time (I’m actually closer to 20 beyond the initial set). That’s 3,300 apps per one download, a ratio that starts to get really dramatic as the app store grows toward a million choices but people install no more of them. It’s already pretty rough trying to break through as an obscure band on iTunes — it could get much worse as the ratio grows increasingly unfavorable for apps.
Fortunately, problems tend to highlight opportunities to innovate. Everyone knows that a more robust Springboard app is needed to help us sort through our many apps to find the one we want when we want it. Apple could also come up with new forms of App Store search to better surface apps better suited to you (imagine if Genius for Apps worked!), or it could take note of developers whose work you’ve enjoyed previously and recommend those. Moreover, Apple could even offer different ways to market oneself on the App Store. We’re used to bundling on the desktop side; why shouldn’t there by an iPhoneHeist next year to bring together rock stars with rising contenders on the fastest-growing platform ever?
The growth of the iPhone has been fascinating. OS 1.0 was about defining a new kind of mobile experience. OS 2.0 was about opening the platform to true development and making it more than just a product. OS 3.0 has been about fixing the most-requested problems, including MMS, copy-and-paste, and tethering (not that AT&T has implemented the latter). OS 4.0, it seems to be, would be an excellent time to figure out how one might actually benefit from owning a couple hundred different apps.
You know how the new amazing new augmented reality concept, in apps like Bionic Eye and Urban Spoon, have you blindly following the screen’s marker and bumping into people? Or the side of buildings? No? Fine, maybe it’s just me.
Point is, it’s usually easier to navigate to the nearest Starbucks with a map rather than AR.
But using AR to predict the future — hey, now that’s a cool idea. Sun Seeker does exactly that, estimating where the sun will be in the future. hold the iPhone up the sky, and an overlay displays the sun’s current position (usually not too difficult to find, even without AR) and its predicted path overhead.
If you’re not into AR, the app has a more conventional screen that provides a top-down overview.
Who will use this? Like the app’s iTunes Store page says, Sun Seeker is probably a great boon for pilots, architects, photographers and the like. Or residents of London or San Francisco. Sometimes it’s just good to know the sun is still there.
MagicHour is a world clock app with great information presentation.
In one screen, the app displays a wealth of info about time, daylight stages and moon phases in different cities. Edward Tufte would cream his pants. All world clocks should be like this.
LocFinder is an augmented reality app that boasts it will always let you see which direction is home or find your car, even if you’re halfway across the world.
LocFinder costs $0.99 on iTunes and while isn’t the first augmented reality app to tackle parking lot amnesia — we recently wrote about Car Finder — it sounds like a compass on steroids.
It has a bevy of features that may end those ping-pong SMS messages to set up a meeting, make stopping to ask for directions a non-issue even when you’re lost in Paris — or let you know exactly how far away you are from Cupertino at all times.
The entertainment category is loaded with charming applications.
There’s a lot to like about the iPhone’s App Store. The more than 100,000 programs within its occasionally strict boundaries offer a bevy of experience riches unmatched in the mobile computing space. But it’s also frustrating. Great apps get postponed or blocked altogether, while great ones like Skype have key features removed.
All of this is nothing new. Mac bloggers talk about this all the time. But I think I’ve also pinpointed exactly why such minor complaints are so painful. It’s called the Entertainment Category of the App Store.
For those unfamiliar with its seedy contents, the Entertainment Category is sort of a catch-all for all kinds of applications that don’t have a good home elsewhere in the App Store. Here’s a chart I made to illustrate the problem:
Yes, despite the fact that the entertainment category does include some legit apps, some of which are great (Pocket God, Emoji, and Movies spring to mind), it is, for the most part, a giant blue Pac-Man of lame softcore porn devouring all in its path. And it’s impossible to find anything actually entertaining there. Which is a disaster. It’s a disincentive to develop something good (who can compete against Naughty Hotties?), and that means that it inevitably gets worse over time.
Transport in Switzerland not only runs on time, but you can buy tickets with your iPhone.
The latest version of the SBB mobile app lets travelers buy e-tickets for trains and all public transport, so you can get off the train in Lugano and catch a bus for Mendrisio without missing a beat.
Users first register with the railway company site to buy tickets via credit card for trains and buses, including day and bike passes.
The app, offered gratis on iTunes, comes in German, French, Italian and English. It also offers timetables, a “take me home” GPS function and has a crowd predictor so you know when to stop in a cafe and wait for the next one.
Another game yanked from the App Store due to a dodgy trademark claim
Tim Langdell’s back, and this time he’s mad(der than a bag of spanners). Today, Nalin Sharma’s Killer Edge Racing is the victim. The short version: like with Mobigame’s Edge, Langdell claims Nalin’s game is riffing off Edge’s ‘famous’ marks; additionally, Pocket Gamer reports that Langdell’s moved to register Killer Edge Racing and Killer Edge Racers, despite Killer Edge having its roots back in 2005, way before Edge Games claimed to be working on a racing game of its own. (It’s since released Racers—and the word ‘released’ is used here in its loosest possible sense—see ChaosEdge for the full story. But given that Racers is a redressed PC game from a liquidated company and is ‘released’ on home-burned DVDR and is not on iPhone, there’s no possibility of confusion.)
Of course, Apple will continue to hide behind the DMCA in these cases, saying it’s doing what it’s doing for legal reasons. But as this case and the one regarding StoneLoops! of Jurassica show, Apple’s going to start looking foolish if it doesn’t implement some kind of robust background check and a longer process of investigation/arbitration/settlement prior to yanking a game. A dispute policy is utterly essential, but the one currently in place is clearly open to abuse.
Here’s hoping Sharma manages to get his game back on the App Store without compromising the brand he’s been using for five years, and that EA’s case with Langdell next year reaches a conclusion that satisfies the indie developers regularly under fire from his trolling actions (oh, and the 15-year-old girls on DeviantArt he steals artwork from to advertise his games that don’t actually exist).
“My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it’s a roller coaster ride,” he told web site Kotaku. “At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts,” Carmack said. “They’re not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else.”
However, the popularity of gaming on the iPhone has forced Apple to think different(ly).
And, now that former collaborator Graeme Devine has gone to work for the iPhone Game Technologies division, iPhone games may get the respect they deserve.
Carmack calls Devine his “man on the inside…a real developer and I understand everything he is saying.”
Via Kotaku
Pssst: If you want to get in on the iPhone app business, there’s one for sale on eBay.
The starting bid for JBMJBM, LLC. — an app factory with 87 approved ones so far — is $100,000 and ends Saturday, Nov. 14
Top-selling titles include Friday Night Lights, iSpy Game, iReferee, iSexyRef (pictured above, which helps muddled sports fans remember the rules), iSexyRef2, Pro Rodeo Fan, Sit Up Counter and Shake 2 Count.
Buy the developer out and you get 87 applications currently listed on iTunes plus all application assets which include source code files, website files and all collateral.
![Urban Spoon](http://ax.itunes.apple.com/images/badgeitunes61x15dark.gif" /></a>){kind=link}
