If you’re an Instapaper user on iOS — and honest to god, you really should be — there’s a sexy new update available that not only contains an impressive algorithm to automatically switch you over to black-on-white dark mode the moment the sun sets outside of your window, but also includes new sharing options, article preview on the iPhone and the ability to use an “ihttps://” prefix to launch pages.
Check out the full change list below the jump.
As a glimpse of the possible gaming future of an iOS-capable AppleTV, this is pretty tops: for the latest update of The Incident, Big Bucket Software has added the ability to hook your iPad up to your HDTV and play the game from your couch using a Bluetooth-paired iPhone as the controller.
If Apple ever introduces an App Store for the AppleTV, this is the way they’re going to do it: in the meantime, we can count on jailbreak developers implementing this sort of functionality in jailbroken AppleTV apps. I can’t wait for someone to get an emulator working on this thing already!
The Washington Post has chosen to advertise their new iPad app by portraying legendary journalist Bob Woodward as a decrepit moron completely befuddled by technology so easy to use that even 99 year olds can quickly master it.
We laughed, although we’re not sure if it’s at the Washington Post’s self-deprecation or just the stupidity of it all. Probably a bit of both.
Back in August, Doom creators id software promised to blew us all away with a demonstration of their next generation Rage engine running on the iPhone 4 at sixty frames per second. It was just a proof-of-concept, but don’t worry, there’s a game in there… and it’s going to be called Mutant Bash TV.
Last week, the Skyfire browser made headlines for two separate “firsts” on the iOS platform.
First up, Skyfire finally did what Adobe couldn’t and brought Flash to iOS, albeit non-natively. Instead, the Skyfire browser converts Flash videos to HTML5 on their own servers, then pumps the HTML5 to your iPhone or iPad instead.
Pretty neat, but I actually like Skyfire’s second accomplishment more: they managed to be the first iOS app to ever “sell out.”
Quite a trick with an infinitely copyable, digital good, but the Skyfire team had a good excuse: their app was selling like such gangbusters that the servers used to convert Flash to HTML5 on the fly couldn’t cope with demand. They’d sold out of bandwidth, not copies of the app itself.
Skyfire has spent the weekend beefing up its servers. The good news is that if you’re lucky, you should be able to buy Skyfire again soon. The bad? Skyfire’s selling the app in batches to make sure they servers don’t get overwhelmed: they’ll put the app back up on the App Store for a little while, pull it, then put it back up a few hours later.
An interesting approach to say the least. If you’re interested in giving Skyfire a spin, check out their Twitter feed for word when the next batch will go live.
How much is a good iPad app worth? According to a new report, quite a bit more than a decent iPhone app… and the margin between the two is growing every day.
Skyfire Web Browser is a full-featured web browser and the first application for iOS that converts Adobe Flash videos in to HTML5, allowing you to play them on your iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s been incredibly popular in its first week and has rocketed to the top of the paid chart in the App Store. It’s also one of our favorite apps for iOS this week.
Also on our list of must-haves is iDJ – an application from Numark that makes it simple to create seamless, synchronized playlists using you iTunes music library on your iPad. iDJ’s patented technology allows you to assemble customized soundtracks to accompany and enhance every occasion.
AppSwitch is another great app that deserves a place in our favorites this week. It has been described as “the missing app that should have been in the box,” and allows you to monitor all apps and processes running on your iOS device so you’ll always know what’s running in the background.
Check out our full list of iOS must-haves after the break!
One of the App Store’s must-have games this week is Floop – a highly entertaining physics-based puzzler in which you shoot acorns in to the mouth of a squirrel. It sounds easy, but you’ll need to practice your skill and accuracy to complete each level.
NBA Elite 11 by EA Sports is also a Cult of Mac favorite this week, and it’s also the only true 5-on-5 NBA game for iOS. Delivering authentic basketball action with graphics made to maximize your device’s Retina display, and EA’s trademark impressive gameplay.
Revolt is a dual-stick 3D shooter that boasts advanced, fast-paced gameplay, sharp 3D graphics, and killer music & sound effects – also on our list and guaranteed to blow the socks off any shoot ’em up fan!
Last month, it was widely reported that Apple had reached yet another milestone with its App Store by chalking up it’s 300,000th app. The only problem with that number? It wasn’t true: while there were 300,000 apps in the App Store, a lot of those apps were inactive, meaning Apple hadn’t quite crossed the threshold for their milestone.
Still, time heals all, and now, Apple has actually racked up its 300,000th real app thanks to the average of 5,452 iPad apps and 12,218 iPhone apps uploaded each month.
This is a pretty neat spin on the freemium model: Capcom Arcade is a free title that bundles many of Capcom’s classic arcade games — including Street Fighter II, Commando and 1942 — together in a virtual arcade. Just like in a real arcade, to play the games, you need tokens, which you can buy in-app. Otherwise, Capcom Arcade is happy to dole out free tokens every day, which you can then use for a limited number of plays.
It’s a clever little approach. Usually, freemium games use in-game virtual goods to make money, but Capcom’s turned that idea on its head by making a play of their games themselves into a virtual good to be consumed. I wonder if other classic arcade publishers with a presence in the App Store will catch on: Sega, I’m looking at you.
[via Touch Arcade]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T073m83CQk&feature=player_embedded
Evil Dead — Sam Raimi’s story of five horny college kids who go to an abandoned cabin in the woods to do their rutting and accidentally unleash an ancient, murderous evil — isn’t as well known as its sequels, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness. It’s a more serious and frightening film, and Bruce Campbell’s Ash (known in the first movie as “Ashley”) has yet to become the chainsaw-handed, catchphrase-spitting zombie killer we’d all come to know and love later in the franchise.
It also seems like a bad fit for an App Store game, but I’ve got to tell you, this trailer for the upcoming Evil Dead game has won me over. You’d think using Mii-like bobblehead avatars to tell the story that prominently features melting zombies, ankle-stabbing and tree rape would just fall apart, but instead, the trailer’s just incredibly funny and well done… not to mention loyal to the spirit of the (NSFW) original trailer, which I’ve embedded below.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhkxDIr0y2U&feature=player_embedded
The Sesame Street Workshop’s charming take on Apple’s “There’s An App For That Campaign” and featuring the so-called “iPogo” is plenty cute, but after watching the whole thing, does anyone else think that the idea of a pogo stick with knives built into the handle might not entirely be child-friendly?
If you haven’t already downloaded VLC Media Player for your iPhone and iPad, now’s the time to grab it if you want it, as it may soon be pulled from the App Store.
One of the contributors to the VLC project, Rémi Denis-Courmont, has filed a formal copyright complaint against the app, which could see it pulled by Apple very soon.
VLC Media Player is now available on the iPhone as a universal app, and firmly puts itself in to our must-have apps list for this week. Allowing you to play an impressively wide range of video codecs on your device, it’s very simple to use and it’s free!
Another must-have app this week is Task Pad. Available for both the iPhone and iPad, Task Pad is a powerful organizer and to-do list that syncs with your Mac or PC, helping you to remain productive and on top of your tasks.
Amazon’s Windowshop also makes our list this week – a new way to shop Amazon’s millions of items – with a simple and intuitive interface that makes online shopping a pleasure on the iPad.
See our full list of must-have iOS app after the break!
Featured in this week’s must-have iOS games is the much-anticipated Age of Zombies – the new game from Halfbrick Studios. The creators of Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash bring us their biggest adventure yet, which sees the return of Barry Steakfries – the tough-as-nails commando who loves nothing more than to shoot up zombies.
Also earning a place on our list of favorites this week is Gun Bros, another shoot ’em up from Glu that features non-stop 3D action as the ‘Bros’ attempt to protect the cosmos from the evil ‘T.O.O.L.’ organization, who are set out to enslave the universe.
Word Solitaire: Aurora is a unique word puzzler that puts an interesting, intellectual twist on the classic Solitaire card game, and another of our favorites this week. Instead of cards that feature numbers, you play with cards that feature letters, and you must drag and drop to arrange them in to words.
See our full list of favorites after the break!
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP1FxPtUMeM&feature=player_embedded
If you’ve been keeping around that old, dusty Sega Dreamcast just to occasionally send your ChuChus into battle against the nefarious KapuKapus, great news: Sega has just released their classic Dreamcast multiplayer puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket for iOS in both a $4.99 iPhone/iPod Touch version and a $6.99 HD version suitable for iPad.
I’ve been playing it all morning, and it’s a fantastic port of one of Sega’s best games, with the only real blemish on an otherwise superb title being the omission of online multiplayer. If you have any fond memories of Chu Chu Rocket at all, picking this up for the weekend is a no-brainer.
Below the jump: Chu Chu Rocket’s absolutely unforgettable original television advertisement.
For a brief, wonderful four hour period yesterday evening, iOS gamers were able to download iDOS, a working DOS emulator for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that not only allowed you to run vintage DOS games and applications in full Retina Display resolution and replete with sound, but could even handle Windows 3.0.
By all accounts, iDOS — which was based on the popular DosBox emulator — was amazing, and Touch Arcade reports that it happily ran everything from vintage Sierra adventure titles to Blizzard’s Warcraft II to disc-images of the multimedia horror game 7th Guest.
Don’t bother trying to download iDOS now, though: Apple quickly yanked it. No one’s really sure why, although Apple has traditionally frowned on emulators before… but 9to5Mac has a really good theory: it seems iDOS allowed users to access the entire iOS filesystem, no jailbreak required, albeit without write access.
Part of me hopes that was the problem: it seems like an easy fix to close that hole up. I’d like the opportunity to play around with iDOS. My instinct, though, is that Apple took a stronger disliking to it that will prevent it from re-entering the App Store no matter what changes the developers make.
Our most beloved of open-source video players, VLC, got a spankingly sexy iPad port last month… and now it’s been updated as a universal binary that supports the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and third/fourth gen iPod Touch.
If you’ve previously downloaded the iPad version, the update also adds the ability to delete files within VLC itself, as well as faster decoding and increased support for some of the more esoteric extensions.
Is there anything VLC doesn’t run on at this point? Besides the AppleTV, that is, which is positively twitching for a port?
VLC is a free download from the App Store. Go get it.
Remember last week’s report that said that almost one-third of all iPad owners had never downloaded an app?
We bought it — after all, the iPad is a compelling device right out of the box without ever plugging in a credit card company — but it looks like we were being overly credulous. Nielsen Group, who originally posted the numbers, has just released a huge honking update on their previous numbers… this time claiming that only 9% of iPad users have never downloaded an app.
One of our favorite applications this week is a great new photography app called Simply Postcards that lets you turn any photo into a real postcard that you can have printed with a personal message and mailed to friends and family.
Printer Pro is Readdle’s latest application for iOS, and one of the most impressive applications in our favorites this week. It allows you to wirelessly print a whole range of documents direct from your iPad, including email attachments, web pages, and iWork documents.
Also featured is a great language translator for the iPad, and the most definitive guide to Central Park for your iPhone.
This week’s must-have iOS games features a great new sports package for the iPhone that offers 5 action-packed sports games including archery, bowling, and tennis. Yoo! Sports claims to be the next generation of iOS gaming.
Reckless Racing is EA’s fantastic new dirt-road racer and another of our favorite games this week. It combines traditional top-down racing with state of the art graphic environments optimized for the Retina display.
Angry Birds Halloween also features – the ghastly special edition of one of the best-selling iOS games in the App Store.
For those of us who practically live in third-party apps, it can be hard to believe that it’s even possible to own an iPad without immediately hitting the App Store… but a new Nielsen survey says that the app-less iPad is a common occurrence.
How common? According to the Nielsen Company, who polled over five thousand owners of “connected devices,” one-third of the iPad owners surveyed have never downloaded an application at all.
The forthcoming Mac App Store is pretty exciting news, but one thing I didn’t really get a good handle on during Steve Jobs’ keynote is if apps were distinct from programs in Apple’s mind. For me, an app is a smaller bit of less fully-functioned code, easily digested, while a program affords a much more substantial suite of functionality. Would the Mac App Store just be selling tinier programs, eschewing beefier applications like Photoshop or even Apple’s own iLife and iWork suite? I wasn’t quite sure.
It seems, though, that Apple answered my question during their own presentation. During Wednesday’s “Back to Mac” event, the keen-eyed fellows over at Electric Pig spotted iPhoto, GarageBand and iMovie as being apps on sale in the Mac App Store, each for a price of $14.99.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTgarcCWZc&feature=player_embedded
Halloween’s just ten days away and two of the most popular games on the App Store are getting in the ghoulish spirit of things wit All Hallow’s Eve themed updates. Both are just skinjobs on existing titles.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt2_lZFnpbQ
There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.