Over at Gizmodo, they’re making a big stink about Apple’s decision to ban two graphic novel adaptations of famous literary works from the App Store for obscenity— namely, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Now Apple’s reversed the ban on these two graphic novels… but in the process of doing so, have ironically made themselves look far more hypocritical in their App Store censorship policies than if they’d stuck to their original decision.
As a big fan of the sport, I’ve played a lot of soccer games on the iPad – from full 3D soccer sims like Real Soccer, to little 2D 1-on-1 games. However the most addictive pick-up-and-play soccer game I’ve played so far is easily Deadball Specialist HD by Full Fat Productions Ltd, which pushes your finger flicking skills to the limit!
We’ve known for some time that the iPhone and iPod Touch are not as secure as we would like them to be — and unfortunately the same can be said about the new iPad. The lack of built-in encryption leaves our personal data on any of these devices at risk. Luckily for iPhone and iPod Touch users third party vendors are supplying apps that help fill some of these gaps in security. One such app, which was popular on the Palm OS platform, is SplashID from SplashData, Inc., which stores all your passwords, logins, and banking details.
According to a new report by Reuters citing three inside sources, everyone’s favorite television streaming service Hulu is preparing a subscription-based service that will be available on numerous non-PC devices, with the iPad and Xbox 360 prominently named.
Other than that, there’s little information, but rumors in the past have indicated that a premium Hulu service would be subscription-based and get you access to a complete library of older content, as opposed to free Hulu’s library of newer episodes and randoms.
Since Hulu hasn’t announced anything at this week’s WWDC, if the rumor is true, it’s likely that they will announce their plans for the Xbox 360 console at next week’s E3 gaming expo.
The question is: Netflix is already available for the iPad, and it already offers a lot of old television shows available for streaming. Is there room for another subscription-based service on the iPad streaming much of the same content?
A few days after Tweetie for Mac was named a winner in Ars Technica’s design awards for best Mac OS X software, Tweetie and Twitter for iPhone developer Loren Brichter has said that an iPad version is in the works… and he soon plans to get back into the update cycle for Tweetie for Mac as well.
ColorSplash for iPad by Hendrick Kueck (iTunes Link), who now operates under the name Pocket Pixels, Inc., is an app that allows you to make some very dramatic changes to your photos for its meager $1.99 price tag. The software uses a process called desaturation to convert your photos to black and white while letting you leave behind color within areas you select. The results are astounding.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review 10 Pin Shuffle Lite, Air Video, Air Video Free, Cliffed, Dubble, Escape Board (iPad), Giana Sisters, Instapaper Pro, Iron Horse, Racecar (iPad), Sky Force, and Sky Force Reloaded.
Our favorite iPhone newsreader app, the wonderfully minimal and elegant Reeder, is finally getting a long overdue iPad version.
In fact, it’s undergoing the App Store approval process as we speak… and as a first look of what to expect, Techcrunch posted some gorgeous shots of what the iPad Reeder app will look like, which merges Reeders existing muted and clean aesthetic (Instapaper for feeds is a good comparison) with functionality like pinching to quick-look at a stack of feeds:
Paper Toss for iPhone is a brilliant pick-up-and-play game that is guaranteed to kill some time when you’re waiting for your train, when your boss is out of the office, or when you’re waiting for your little ones to give up the TV. If you’re one of the 21,000,000 paper tossers out there, you’ll be pleased to know the game is now available on the iPad, including a new level and improved visuals for the larger screen. But is it worth that $2.99 price tag?
Take Smule’s Glee or I Am T-Pain popstar-forging apps, strip away the Auto-Tune (and some of the polish), stir in a little Simon Cowell and bam — you’ve got Music Idol, a dollar-app that creates a virtual American Idol community on the iPhone, complete with the ability to rate other would-be star’s performances.
The app — which has also been formatted for the iPad — gives users the ability to upload 20-second performance, then show off their talents through the app’s searchable database or post clips to the user’s Facebook page. The developer claims a 2000-member user-base (culled partly from an earlier version of the app called Riff Raters).
While the Smule apps are collaborative in nature, this one seems like more of a way to introduce the world to your unique talents — or perhaps invite a hailstorm of abuse. Either way. to prod talent in the app’s direction, the developer is giving away $10 iTunes gift cards every week.
If you believe iPads are not just for keeping the offspring entertained during car trips, there are numbers to back that up.
Half of the top ten paid iPad apps are “productivity tools,” in other words, apps that grown-ups use for work.
According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, the top two paid iPad apps in April are word processor Pages and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.
Pinball HD is the only game in the top five paid apps at spot no. 3, followed by note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. (You can download the full report here.)
Super Monkey Ball was one of the first games that introduced us to the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone & iPod Touch when it was previewed back in March 2008, along with the announcement of the App Store. As the biggest selling game on launch day, Sega set the standard for other 3D games with superb graphics, an intuitive control system and incredibly fun gameplay. Now Super Monkey Ball 2: Sakura Edition is available on the iPad, so does this super-sized version live up to the expectations we’ve come to expect from those little monkeys?
Even if the iPad did have weight sensors, this would still be a self-evidently bad app idea…. and grow exponentially worse in direct correlation to user weight density.
[via Slashgear]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5jH8GN12U&feature=player_embedded#!
Created by Stanford alums Ashkay Kothari and Ankit Gupta as part of the Launch Pad class at the Stanford Institute of Design, Pulse is an absolutely gorgeous iPad newsreader that makes RSS and Atom feeds as easy as Google search, and even more gorgeous than Google Reader Play.
If you’re dreaming of Netflix for your iPhone, good news: you’re just a jailbreak away. Hacker Knisitruck says that the existing Netflix iPad app is secretly a universal binary and can be easily ported to the iPhone with a few simple steps.
TowerMadness is one of the most popular tower defense games on the iPhone, and now makers, Limbic Software, have released a high-definition version for the iPad which boasts stunning 3D graphics, split-screen multiplayer and eight new maps. But how does this version compare to its smaller predecessor?
No, you can’t play as one of Bruce Lee’s more credible doppelgangers — the venerable Tekken series’ whip-quick Marshall Law — until Namco gets its act together and releases an iPhone version. But y’know what — nothing compares to the real thing.
Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior — which according to its press release has been given the official stamp of approval from the Bruce Lee Foundation (run by Lee’s daughter, Shannon) and even models the computer-generated Lee using motion capture from one of Lee’s students — is probably as close to Enter The Dragon as anything on the iPhone or iPad is going to get. At $5, the iPhone version’s a little on the pricey side, but the reverse is true for the iPad’s HD version — which is, oddly enough, also $5.
And if we can work up enough nerve to channel Bruce through one of our devices, you might just see a review here soon.
It’s always bugged me that I can’t change my Twitter account settings, see who I’m following/being followed by or tweak my bio on my iPhone without the pain of having to visit Twitter’s website.
Enter Tweep: it lets the power-tweeter do all that behind-the-curtain stuff, and more — fine-tune location settings, examine fellow tweeps with excruciating detail and a whole bunch of other stuff that, frankly, I’ll never mess with. About the only thing it doesn’t let the user do is tweet.
And though Tweep has actually been around for a few months now, the developer has just cut its price from $5 to free, as a promotional ploy to coincide with the app’s support of the iPad.
Update: As noted by Toolate in the comment section, it should be plain to any daft twit (meaning me) that many of the functions offered by Tweeps are actually available through Twitter’s official iPhone app (although the more obscure functions, like fine-tuning how accurately tweets report a user’s location, are not available on Twitter for iPhone).
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Baseball Fever HD, Blackjack Free HD, Break HD, Cliffed, Compression HD, JamPad, Labyrinth 2 HD, Labyrinth 2 HD Lite, Paper Football HD, Paper Football HD Premium, Pukk HD, Sir Revs-a-Lot HD, Tangle Plus Lite, Tap Blaster HD, WeatherBug Elite for iPad.
Some people are hesitant to jailbreak anything because they worry it will ruin their device. Think of jailbreaking as an addition to your device and not a substitution. Jailbreaking is the only way to unlock some awesome features on your iPad. Earlier this week I walked you through on how to jailbreak your iPad using the Spirit jailbreak. Now I will tell you why you should jailbreak your iPad.
I find my cinema display offers plenty of screen real estate for the things I do everyday, and with my MacBook Pro hooked up, having two displays is a real benefit. It’s nice to have the ability to browse through one document whilst typing up another on a separate screen, or have easy access to my music library or my Twitter feed without having to move or minimize the application I’m working on.
However, I don’t always want to be sat at my desk. I often like to get stuff done from the sofa when I’m feeling a bit lazy, or from the garden on a nice day. Now I can have two displays wherever I’m working thanks to Air Display from Avatron Software on my iPad.
Against the odds and earlier than expected, Wired magazine has debuted its interactive magazine app for the iPad. And it’s killer.
The Wired app blends the magazine’s superb editorial editorial and high production values with elements that only digital can bring – interactivity and multimedia. The stories are well-written and beautifully designed with big, gorgeous photos. Navigation is easy and intuitive and there are lots of interactive graphics and supplementary video.
“Wired magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition,” says Chris Anderson, Wired’s editor in chief. “Wired is finally, well, wired.”
Thanks to Apple’s ban on Flash, the app had some birthing troubles, and was expected later this summer. Wired has solved the Flash issue by making the app native to the iPad — it’s not an Adobe Air or Flash port. According to Anderson, it’s made with the same Adobe productions tools used to create the print magazine, so it’s (relatively) easy and quick to produce in parallel. This, of course, is crucial.
It’s not cheap — $4.99 a pop — which has already upset some reviewers on iTunes. Because the digital edition is produced in parallel and distribution costs are near zero, it should cost a lot less than print, critics reason. (The print edition costs less than a dollar with a subscription).
But the price is perhaps one of the most important things about the digital edition. Wired is trying out a new business model, one that many print publishers are praying will work. Me too. If Wired can make it profitable enough to support its editorial costs, that’s good news for everyone — publishers and readers.
Check out CultofMac.com’s quick video tour of the Wired iPad app (This video will play on the iPad, btw):
Billed as the first real tennis game on iPad, Ace Tennis HD 2010 doesn’t disappoint. Boasting gorgeous graphics, Ace Tennis HD has a great multiplayer mode, wich matches you with other players online.
Be warned — this kind of competition really brings out the John McEnroe in you — dominating other players is dangerously addictive.
When people first started playing with the iPad, a common comparison was to the interactive, tablet-like book (, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion) featured in best-selling author Neal Stephenson’s steampunk sci-fi novel A Diamond Age, so it seems like a natural fit that Stephenson will soon be coming to iPad with an app of his own.
The project’s called The Mongoliad, a wonderfully stupid title that sounds like a gag from the lost sequel to John Barth’s Sotweed Factor. But the idea is sound: Stephenson and a few fellow authors including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland will be releasing a set of serialized stories to the App Store, presenting “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative and extra-narrative stuff” that will allow readers to interact and create their own stories in the Mongoliad universe with some “pretty cool tech.”
Though details are scarce and while Stephenson’s product could be nothing more than some fancy e-books, this is worth being excited about. Stephenson’s fiction has long luxuriated in the magical possibilities of technology, and I’m eager to see if what he comes up with in code is just as future-thinking as what he creates in prose.
If you’re a fan of Flight Control HD, you’ll love Harbor Master HD for the iPad from Imangi Studios. It shares the same principles as Flight Control, although instead of planes you’ve got boats, which you must guide to their corresponding colored docks by drawing their route with your finger, ensuring the boats do not make contact with each other along the way.
The way in which Harbour Master is different to Flight Control is that once you have guided a boat to its dock, you must wait for it to unload its cargo before you can guide it back off to sea. This adds just enough complexity and challenge to the game to prevent it being too simple and boring.