One expects great things from an app costing double its nearest competitor (which happens to be the excellent $5 Cyclemeter). And for the most part, BiCycle — a $10 cycling app that uses the iPhone’s GPS receiver to log data — delivers. But while the app is well-designed and contains features not found elsewhere, there’re a few gaping holes that should make potential purchasers pause before taking the plunge.
For new iPhoners, the idea of gulping down unlimited swathes of data is just a magical thing of the past, spoken of with hushed tones, in the days before fear of data overages gripped the iPhone universe.
Fear not though, new iPhoner — the tools exist to keep from accidentally punching through the monthly 3G data allotment. Readers who’ve been following our Essential App series (and who live in the States) have no doubt already equipped their iPhones with AT&T’s free myWireless app, which counts and bar graphs data usage; but there’s an even more precise and powerful weapon available: DataMan
If you’ve ever participated in any kind of canvassing for a political party or for pet causes, you know what an excruciating experience it can be on every level.
From having to put on a cheesy smile as you approach busy strangers in the street to having to put all the information together back in the office, it’s just one of the most tedious tasks around, apart from, say, taking out the garbage.
The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America have gone a long way to address all of that with their thoughtfully-designed iPhone/iPAD/iPOD Touch canvassing and organizing application, which was launched earlier this month. It’s one of the best tools I’ve seen.
It doesn’t do much — no fancy vocal wizardry, just adjusts the pitch of the user’s voice up or down — but Devil Voice looks like the first instance of a real-time voice-changing app, without the need to record a user’s voice first before playback — though it can, if desired.
The app is a dollar, and comes out just in time for Halloween; see our forthcoming Halloween Guide for examples on how to duct tape it and attached speakers into a Darth Vader mask and whatnot.
Potential and current (see what I did there) Chevrolet Volt owners will be pleased to hear that the mostly electric car’s iPhone app will finally be hitting the App Store at the end of October.
The app includes a ton of interesting controls and features: Charge the Volt immediately or schedule a charge time; check charge status and battery level; display expected range; and display various data tracked while driving like how many miles were electric-only, how many were gas. That’s on top flashy functions like being able to start the car from the app and mess with the door locks.
An OnStar spokesperson told us the Volt comes with five years of free OnStar service — other cars get six months free — and that the app will be free for the iPhone (and the Droid — sorry, Blackberry). Not impressed with (mostly) electric vehicles? OnStar will be making the app (sans Volt-specific functions) available for about a dozen or so additional OnStar-equipped cars in the near future.
Cast your mind back to June; remember reading about an app that used the iPhone’s GPS to bulls-eye the user’s location on any map imported into it? Well, the developer, Fog Technologies, is back with Expo Tec, an app that starts with the same basic principle, but narrows its focus to convention-like events and adds some features to help the user through his chaos-laden convention visit.
The developer says it’s pretty easy for event planners to create “event packs” through a web interface designed for the app, which then shunts the pack to users of the app. Besides a GPS-enabled event map, the app provides event schedules, instant event updates, detailed vendor info and general event info.
Expo Tec is $4, and boasts that it’s a “fist-in-the-industry” solution. Yeah, sure, it was probably supposed to read “first-in-the-industry,” but we like the fist version better; “we’re angry as hell (about getting lost) and we’re not going to take (poor convention info) anymore!” Or something.
As if its frenetically gleeful yellow and purple icon wasn’t enough enticement to download, yesterday saw Yahoo make its free Yahoo Messenger app even more appealing with some beefy upgrades: backgrounding, voice calling and the biggie, video calling.
We tested it briefly and found the video calling works pretty well over wifi, even with a 3GS — though, obviously, the person on the other end won’t see a face unless the 3GS is turned around — with decent transmission of both voice and picture. But the app suffers from a few issues, which fellow Cultist David Martin will reveal in a full review later this week.
While voice and video calls will only work between users of the app, Yahoo also yesterday added the Skype-like ability to make voice calls (including international calls) to landlines or mobiles at low fees via a Yahoo Voice Phone Out account.
With pudgy poodles and tubby tabbies becoming the norm in the US, an iPhone app promises to help keep pet calorie counts under control.
Called CUPetHealth, the $3.99 app was developed by a team of seven computer science students at Cornell as part of a class project and vetted by the university’s veterinary experts for accuracy.
The app is meant to take the guess work out of feeding for the household’s four-legged companions. After entering the daily diet and noting several lifestyle variables to determine the appropriate number of calories each day, the app responds with “overfeeding,” “underfeeding” or “appropriate.” The app also keeps track of medication and vaccine and flea control information.
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.
People who have been desperate to turn friends into badgers – your prayers have finally, finally been answered.
Because for you, Badger Face is likely to be the best dollar you’ve ever spent on an iPhone/iPod touch application with turning-people-into-badgers functionality.
For the rest of us? Well, for the rest of us, Badger Face will make us momentarily double-take as we browse the App Store for amazing stuff. It will make us choke on our badger burgers as we read the app description. Badger Face is simultaneously the weirdest thing we have seen this week, and it is this week’s Best (Badger-Related) Thing Ever.
Who knows what will come next? The user comments suggest Dinosaur Face, but why stop there? What about Panda Face? Squirrel Face? Unicorn Face? And for A-Team fans, Face Face?
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.
in case you missed it, last month saw the debut of Golf Vision Green Analyzer, an app that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to calculate the perfect putting angle to sink a ball on the green; just measure the slope angle at the hole and at the ball by laying the iPhone on the ground, then set the green speed, and the app does its magic calculations and overlays the premium angle graphically over a still photo of your view to the hole.
Skeptical? That’s ok, the developers have just released a free version to try before considering the $5 full version. Unfortunately, the free version uses a generic photo to overlay the calculations on, and more importantly, only allows for slope measurements at one end, so results may not be as accurate as with the full version.
Foodmatic‘s fun website suggests you might want this app if you’re trying to become “the next top chef,” a suggestion we think can only lead to a rash of contestants staggering off Chef Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen with iPhones lodged in various body cavities.
That’s because the app employs a proprietary algorithm and built-in database with hundreds of ingredients to score the tastiness of ingredients the user wants to combine. The app will even suggest ingredients that compliment any already input. The app includes info on ingredients in the database and the ability to save successful (or not) concoctions.
Foodmatic is currently $1, but the app’s Store page says that’s not likely to last.
My external hard drive doesn’t get much use, except for one thing: archiving massive libraries of RAW images. The only problem with this solution is accessing the images once they’re off my computer requires finding the drive, plugging it in and trying to search through thousands of images for the one I want to show to someone.
Phooey. What a hassle. That’s what I like about Western Digital’s free new photo viewing application for iOS devices that works with its line of external hard drive like My Book World Edition, My Book Live and WD ShareSpace, which allows users to access and stream up to 285,000 images placed in a shared folder.
The app will slurp up your photos wherever you have an Internet connection. Certainly beats trying to load ten years of photos onto your iPhone through iTunes.
Seems the iPhone’s become a superb diagnostic tool through sound analysis — not only can it evaluate watermelon ripeness, but now it can also be used to measure the tension of tennis or squash racquet strings with the racquetTune app.
The $1 app sports a slick, clean interface that displays a string’s tension after a few taps; there’s also a swingweight calculator thrown in for good measure.
The Swedish developers say racquetTune has been tested at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm to good result — who knows, perhaps even by Bjorn Borg himself.
I figure there’re two ways an iOS tower-defense game set in the Star Wars universe might succeed: by being an excellent example of the genre, like TowerMadness Zero, or by immersing the player in the Star Wars universe, like Star Wars: Trench Run.
Unfortunately, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth (by THQ, who also put out Trench Run) does neither, and ends up being only slightly more pleasant than crawling into the slit belly of a dead Tauntaun.
Yes that’s right, now you can capture yourself throwing up while filming a first-person view of the rails as you fly through that new 120 mph ride at Six Flags — all with the same iPhone (so long as it’s an iPhone 4).
Flexicorder ($1) features on-the-fly switching from shooting video normally with the rear camera to shooting with the front facing camera; it also lets the user adjust video resolution.and aspect ratio. Images captured through the forward-facing camera normally appear horizontally flipped, so the app also flips the image to look as if they were shot with the rear-facing lens.
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Sega’s long-awaited return to the 2D roots of their most famous speedster rodent is coming to the App Store tomorrow, and as you can see in the trailer above, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 looks pretty faithful to the original Sonic games for the Sega Genesis… you know, before the whole franchise leapt into 3D and was marketed predominantly at furries with masturbatory echidna fantasies.
Looking pretty good, and I know loads of iPhone gamers will be excited about this, but on my part, I’ve never found running at 1000 miles per hour into an undodgable wall of spikes very fun, which seems to be the defining element of the series. I think I’ll probably give Sonic 4 a pass.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i31omgvWDTQ
Up until 1996, id software’s Doom engine was pretty much the de facto technology driving the best and most advanced PC computer games on the market, including Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen and Strife. Then id software released their next game engine, Quake, which boasted true 3D environments, and any game that still ran on Doom’s 2.5D engine was barely worth a laugh.
That was very unfortunate for HacX when it was released in 1997. The last commercial game using the Doom engine, HacX boasted some incredible enemy, weapons and level design, but was ultimately as ignored at retail (where it was passed over for flashier games running on truly 3D engines) as it has been forgotten by all but the most die-hard retro gamers.
I was delighted to hear, then, that HacX has gotten a new lease on life, as it has been ported as a free app for the iPhone and iPad. It’s still using the Doom engine, just this time it’s using the updated iPhone engine released by id software’s own lead programmer, John Carmack.
Here’s hoping that HacX can finally get some of the recognition it deserves this time around.
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?
Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.
BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.
And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.
I gave up running a long time ago, when I realized that, well, bicycles were just plain faster. But if I were to start running again, an app that figured out my pace and looked through my library for music with a beat that matched might be a pretty cool running partner.
Here’s a bit of fun for any would-be street magicians among you. Card2Phone lets you do tricks with playing cards and common American, British, European and Australian coins.
Another sign that Kindle should beware: iBooks is the most popular free application for the iPad and iPhone.
According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, iBooks has made the top ten list of free apps available on iTunes from July to September. This constant hovering in the most popular category is a ranking Distimo believes may be “influenced by the fact that Apple pushes this application to iPad users.”
Games are still less popular on the iPad than the iPhone, Distimo notes. In the Q2 version of the report, half of the top ten paid iPad apps were “productivity tools” like note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. In the Q3 report, the trend continues: there is still just one game — old school classic RealSolitaire — among the ten most popular free applications for iPad, compared to four in the Apple App Store for iPhone.
Look-Up is an augmented reality shoot-em-up for iPhone (not iPad or iPod) in a Space Invaders style. And it’s fun.
Swarms of 1950s-style flying saucers fly down at you from the sky – you point your phone back at them and hit the fire button. Zappity zap zap. I tried it this morning in my office in flooding-with-rain Wiltshire, but I suspect it would be more exciting to play when you’re outdoors in the sun, like the guys in this demo video:
