iOS - page 168

If you need convincing about the power of HTML5, look no further than Biolab Disaster, a fantastically retro, shoot-em-up platformer with some fantastic gameplay. Here, go play it for a bit now, I’ll wait for you.

Fun, right? Want to play it on your iPhone now? Well, the game’s developer has it up and running on the iPhone 3GS at sixty frames per second, and it looks awesome.

The only problem? The developer seems a little unsure about whether or not Apple will let Biolab Disaster onto the App Store because it uses the JavaScriptCore Framework, which is a private API on iOS. He’s hopeful he can get around that problem by bundling his own copy of the JavaScriptCore Framework with his app, which is perfectly legal to do since it’s part of WebKit, but there’s always the chance Biolab Disaster for iPhone will be shot down.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed: Biolab Disaster on the iPhone would be the perfect pick-up-and-play platformer SHMUP.

Two and a half weeks ago, as New Zealand rolled back their clocks for Daylight Savings Time, Kiwis started noting an odd iOS bug: any recurring alarms they had set on their iPhones were going off an hour early. Curious, but then it gets curiouser: last week, when Australian had to adjust for Daylight Savings Time, it happened again.

We love the story: its like a mini-Y2K for iOS 4.1, hitting iPhone users around the world as their country enters Daylight Savings Time… and with Europe set to enter DST on October 30th, and America on November 6th, the bug is about to hit a lot more people.

So what does Apple intend to do about this? Apple Australia says they’re on it and have developed a fix that will be included as part of an upcoming software update. Since iOS 4.2 has a late November ship date, that means we’re likely to get an iterative iOS 4.1.1 update sometime before the 30th, when all of Europe starts hurling their iPhones dramatically against the wall when their alarms rob them of an hour of sleep.

Pogoplug has updated their free app over the weekend, and it now sports the ability to stream and play music in the background over either a wifi or 3G connection from a network-attached storage device running the Pogoplug engine — which currently means either a Pogoplug unit or one from Seagate.

The big advantage the Pogoplug app’s new function has over, say, the free Zumocast app (which debuted last month and does the same thing), is that the Pogoplug version doesn’t require a computer running from which to stream music. Downside? You’ll need to pop for a Pogoplug-equipped NAS unit, if you don’t already have one. The app also gains background photo uploading and fast app-switching.

Next, hopefully Pogoplug will improve the app’s movie-streaming capability, which sorely lacks the ability to convert videos on the fly to a streaming-freindly format, like Zumocast does.

It’s taken them over three years to respond to the revolutionary shift in the mobile operating system landscape posed by iOS, but Microsoft has finally done it and released a properly modern, properly app-laden and properly multi-touchable successor to the Windows Mobile series: Windows Phone 7. But what differentiates Windows Phone 7 from Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Mobile 6 and a host of even crappier mobile operating systems squirted out by Microsoft?

Quite a bit, actually, and it’s quite a bit better… but it’s still two years behind the curve of iOS.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9BETZOfwo8

Aralon: Sword and the Shadow by Galoobeth Games is an upcoming open-world role-playing game for iOS devices, and as you can see from the the trailer above, it looks about as close to Oblivion for the iPad as we’re going to get. But for a laugh, check out the original trailer for the game below the cut. Amazing what a bit of spit and polish can do in six months, isn’t it?

Halloween is Big Business in historic Salem, Massachusetts.  It’s now High Tech too.  For the 29th Haunted Happenings Celebration, the annual festival of witches, ghosts, and fall in New England, the town has created a new Haunted Happenings App for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The app features info about the Festival Calendar of Events, local attractions and museums, restaurant and retail listings, and directions on how to get to Salem (tip: plan ahead and leave time).  Users also have an opportunity to purchase tickets for some events and attractions directly from the app.

Let the Frightful Fun Commence!  [via boston.com]

One of our favorite iOS apps this week is Gordon Ramsay’s Cook With Me, which features 52 mouth-watering recipes, with simple to follow steps for cooking up gorgeous dishes.

Esquire‘s new magazine app for the iPad is another featured this week: see the World Trade Centre being built, complete with information on how it all will happen.

We also have an amazing new painting application for the iPad!

This week’s must-have iOS games features Sega’s latest Sonic the Hedgehog 4 that many of us have been eagerly awaiting. It’s been described as the best Sonic for iOS yet, with improved controls, smoother gameplay and a genuine Sonic feel.

Another of our favorites is Chillingo’s Cut the Rope – the addictive puzzle game that knocked Angry Birds off the top of the paid charts this week. It combines realistic physics with simple, precise touch controls to create a wonderfully challenging puzzler.

Black Pegasus is the latest Modern Combat 2 game from Gameloft, and also features in our favorites this week. Its console quality graphics together and excellent production make it one of the most impressive first-person shooters to arrive on the iPhone.

We also have some classic ZX Spectrum gaming!

Let’s face it — for a multi-purpose device heavily weighted toward music, the iPhone’s music-player interface is crap. Dealing with those tiny buttons crammed onto the bottom of the screen is bad enough under most conditions, worse for meaty-fingered users and infuriating when the iPhone is docked or when movement is involved.

Enter Quick-Tunes, a $1 app that replaces the iPhones native chintzy soft controls with a big, meaty, attractive buttons. It also adds cool additional functions around the main play/pause button that let the user play more songs from the same artist, genre or album.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHl6GTls6m0

Capcom’s Dead Rising series for the PC and the Xbox 360 is an acquired taste, despite the fact that it’s central conceit is the chocolate meets peanut butter of zombie games: killing the slavering, flesh-hungry dead in an American shopping mall. Now it’s coming to the iPhone later this year in Dead Rising Mobile, but can Capcom make the series work on a handheld device?

This week’s top iOS games features EA Sports’ latest addition to the Fifa series in Fifa 11, which delivers console quality gaming to your iPhone. Offering an outstanding visual experience on the Retina display, and improved controls that make for fluid gameplay, Fifa 11 gives other soccer games in the App Store some great competition for 2011.

BIT.TRIP BEAT HD is an arcade game from Namco that fuses Pong with interactive beats in a colorful, pixelated environment. Listen to the different beat progressions and try to survive the onslaught of spectacular retro visuals as you bounce back beats from where they came. BIT.TRIP BEAT also features an intense multiplayer mode that allows you team up with your friends.

The incredibly addictive 0.03 Seconds Pro tests your reaction time using various different puzzles over 24 challenging stages, and then rates your score out of 5 stars. The puzzles seem simple, but you’ll be tearing your hair out as you try to beat the reaction time for each level and grab a 5-star score.

We also have an awesome augmented reality game that’s probably the best yet for iOS, and a chance to win one of the games featured in this week’s post.

This week’s must-have iOS apps features a new application that allows you to have free, high quality video calls over both Wi-Fi and 3G. Tango Video Calls is free a application to download, and works on other smartphones as well as the iPhone.

PDF Expert for iPad is Readdle’s latest application that delivers the ultimate solution for all your PDF needs on your iPad. It lets you read and annotate PDF documents, highlight text and make notes. You can also edit the documents you have stored on your Dropbox, iDisk, and Google Docs accounts.

PlainText is a free text editor compatible with all of your iOS devices that uses your Dropbox account to save your work. It has a paper-like interface that provides a nice, simple feel, and it’s a great substitute to iOS’s built-in Notes app.

One of the reasons owners of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS have been waiting for a jailbreak for iOS 4.1 is to enable the iPhone 4’s impressive HDR functionality on their older handsets… a hack which is already available for jailbroken 3G and 3GS users on the iOS 4.1 beta through a Cydia app.

It looks pretty likely, though, that these users won’t need to jailbreak their devices to enable HDR functionality… Apple seemingly intends to add HDR in a software update coming down the line.

Sega have been working hard throughout 2010 to bring Sonic 4 to the iPhone, which they confirmed back in May would be coming to the iOS. Today they have announced an official release date of October 7th!

Sega have ported two of their Sonic the Hedgehog games to iOS to date, and these have received mixed reviews. Some people love them for bringing their favorite childhood hedgehog to their palms, while others are disappointed with them for providing slow, jumpy gameplay, and a poor control system.

I’m very much looking forward to Sonic 4, and I’m hoping these issues will be ironed out in Sega’s latest port. Touch Arcade have been lucky enough to get their hands on a nearly complete build of the game at E3 in June, and they were blown away by it.

Interestingly, the release date of Sonic 4 for iOS means that the game will be available in the App Store before it arrives on any console; it won’t arrive on the Wii until October 11th, the PlayStation 3 until October 12th, and the Xbox a day later on the 13th.

The new iPod nano’s diminutive size keeps inspiring geeks worldwide to a variety of hacks.  News today from Japan of the iSpeck’s ability to fit nicely inside the display slot on an old Sega Dreamcast VMU.

The Sega buttons do not control the iPod (yet?) but it’s safe to say this case offers good drop protection, and the headphone cord coming out the side doesn’t look as dorky as with an iWatch.

More photos and videos of the making on the vendor’s original Japanese website.  [via TUAW]

There are a few Essential Apps that handle themselves so well on the iPhone they quickly eclipse the website they evolved from; apps that, once installed on the iPhone, completely replace their browser-based ancestors.

Essentials Yelp, The Weather Channel and Twitter clearly fall into this category. But Facebook’s app is different. It doesn’t just replace — it hooks.

If you’ve been one of the many people who has expected Apple to drop Google as the default search engine in iOS due to the escalating rivalry between the iPhone and Android handsets, think again. According to Business Insider, Apple and Google have just agreed to extend the deal that makes Google search reign supreme on iOS devices.

The news comes from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who revealed the extension in a recent interview with Charlie Rose.

About a month ahead of America and Europe, New Zealand clocks fall an hour back when they switch to Daylight Savings Time on the last Sunday of September. Apparently, though, New Zealand iPads and iPhones are proving a tad overzealous when it comes to falling back this year: numerous iOS users are reporting that since yesterday’s switch, their alarms are going off an hour early. Given that Kiwis were already having to wake up an hour earlier than they were used to, that’s quite a rude awakening.

This week’s must-have iOS games include the awesome new Real Soccer from Gameloft, which features gorgeous high-definition graphics optimized for the retina display. We also have their long-awaited Gangstar sequel, Miami Vindication, and some seriously addictive gameplay in ngmoco’s We City.

Check out a few of our favorite games from the past week after the break!

This week’s must-have iOS apps include Napster’s new music streaming application that provides access to over 10 million of songs on your iOS device, Google Voice calling with GV Mobile+, and a media player that supports pretty much every codec out there!

Check out a few of our favorite apps from the past week after the break!

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAWqUtR9QIM

Are you the owner of an iPhone 3G who is disappointed that you can’t run deathmatch with friends through Apple’s new match making service, Game Center? A jailbreak and some hacking could get you up and running, if you’re feeling bold.

Over at Redmond Pie, Taimur Asad goes through the process of getting jailbreak running on an iPhone 3G… which is (coincidentally for this experiment) the only iPhone that can currently be jailbroken under iOS 4.1 right now.

Apple’s Find My iPad feature strikes again, this time a cross-country escapade with a happy ending.  It begins when Southwest traveler Curtis Cogdill left his iPad on the airplane when traveling from Sacramento, Calif., to Portland, Ore:

After some discussion as to whose fault it was, Cogdill used his iPod Touch and Apple’s Find My iPhone MobileMe app to locate the iPad. While the family was in Oregon, the iPad had taken a cross-country trip to Orlando, Fla.

“You could zoom all the way in,” Cogdill said. “You could tell it was sitting where an airplane would be sitting at the terminal.” [CNET]

But the story doesn’t end there.  The wayward iPad soon took another journey.  While tracking his iPad, Cogdill watched as his beloved iSlate left the airport and traveled to a nearby home.

Lost, then found, then stolen – what a day.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending.  A Southwest supervisor, along with the police, recovered the iPad soon after the rightful owner contacted the airline.  The family is happy with the outcome, and MobileMe likely has another lifetime subscriber.

[via CNET]

Earlier this month, a member of the Chronic Development Team announced that he had discovered an exploit that would allow any iOS device currently on the market to be jailbroken forever, no matter how Apple patched it through software. Christened “SHAtter,” the exploit is widely anticipated, not only because it will allow versions of iOS 4.0.2 and above to be jailbroken, but because the only way Apple can fix it is through hardware. Once SHAtter is released, all current iOS devices will essentially be jailbreakable forever.

Here’s a warning, though. The SHAtter jailbreak still isn’t out, which means that any website or program claiming to be capable of jailbreaking a device running iOS 4.0.2 or above is likely a scam unless it was released by the Dev Team themselves… and chances are, it’s something much worse.

According to security researcher Costin Raiu at the Kapersey Labs, there is a new exploit in the wild that is being circulated as greenpois0n, a purported iOS 4.0.2 or above jailbreaking tool. Instead of actually jailbreaking iOS devices, though, it instead steals your passwords.

It’s easy to forget after the remarkable ease of August’s JailbreakMe exploit that jailbreaking your iOS device is actually a complicated process and not one that should be conducted by amateurs. As always, remember that the only real source to trust when it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone is the iPhone Dev Team… and unless they have released a tool directly to jailbreak your device, you should stay far, far away.

Last week, Twitter announced a serious overhaul of their website. It might mean diddly to iPhone users though, who usually access Twitter through any one of a growing heap of mobile Twitter apps — all of which are equipped with a vastly superior set of features compared to Twitter’s site (at least, currently).

Now, I’ve always held that selecting a Twitter app is a highly subjective, personal process, kind of like picking out a bicycle saddle — you just sort of squish around on it for a few days and see if it feels right. Personally, I currently tend to favor HootSuite over any other Twitter app, even though I’ve installed, and sometimes use, half a dozen or so others. But one Twitter app has foisted itself to essential status: Twitter’s own official app. And it’s above the rest for one key reason, really.