iPhone apps - page 50

The Touch Pad App is in my opinion, Edovia’s best application for your mobile Mac devices and now the iPad. For those of you who use a Mac Mini for your home entertainment and digital storage set up in your living room or bedroom, you must get this application. Basically, it turns your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad into a touch pad similar to the one on the Macbook. It can also act as an Apple remote. There have been some glitches and movements that didn’t work like the touch pads on the Macbooks, but Edovia just came out with their latest version of the app (3.1), and they cleaned up a lot of those issues. Still, this is a great app to have, and guess what, we’re giving it away for FREE today!

We’re doing something a little different today. In order to get this app, you gotta be on your “A” game with your Cult of Mac knowledge. We’re going to ask you trivia from articles published since last Tuesday (April 13th). Make note that the app codes we’re giving away are only good for the United States version of iTunes. Sorry to all of our international readers, but when we get sent promo codes, they’re usually always the U.S. version. We’ll try to ask for some international codes in the future.

1. Become a fan of our Facebook page if you aren’t already.
2. Throughout the day, we’ll post a trivia question, and the first person that answers correctly will win one of the Touch Pad app codes. We have six codes to give away, so we’ll be doing six different trivia questions.
3. To redeem the app code, you can do so through iTunes or directly no the device you want to install it on. For instance, on the iPhone, you can go to the “App Store” app, scroll down, and tap on the “Redeem” button, then type the code in that we provide you and it will automatically download on your phone.

This is a $3.99 app, and if you’re like me, I hate paying for anything over a $1, so have some fun with this one, make sure you’re up to speed on what was going on with Cult of Mac last week, and keep refreshing our Facebook page every now and then today. Good luck!

Looking for something to play this weekend? The amazing rogue-like RPG, Sword of Fargoal for the iPhone and iPod Touch is free to download for today only. I bought it for $4.99 a month ago, and it was worth every penny.

Fargoal going free is serendipitous, since this is an especially good time to grab the game: a new patch adding a chunk of new content is imminent, and the developers have been firmly committed to not just expanding the existing game, but evolving it in fresh new ways as well.

Above: Mark Fiore’s “Learn to Speak Teabag” cartoon, which Apple considers too objectionable for the App Store.

Thanks to a stink in the press, Apple has called Pultizer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore and asked him to resubmit his rejected app, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Apple initially rejected Fiore’s political satire app because it ridiculed public figures, which is against the App Store rules.

First came iPhone apps for iMussolini then Che Guevara, now there’s an app for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Just like the other ones, iFranco is a compendium of speeches, messages, videos and audio El Caudillo made during his 36-year reign.

It also appears that, like the others, the $0.99 app was approved from a non-US iTunes store but is available in the US.

Political caricaturist Mark Fiore was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning to ever be awarded to a web-only cartoonist, so obviously he’s got some artistic and editorial merit… but not in Apple’s eyes.

Word from the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that Fiore submitted his iPhone app, NewsToons, back in December, but was rejected for “ridiculing public figures.”

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvdYhlbjRc

Utterly fantastic. Joypad is an iPhone app that operates as a virtual, touch-controlled gaming pad for emulators on your Mac. All you do is run a free helper program under OS X, launch the iPhone app and you’re ready to crush some Koopas. It seems to work pretty well, and at $2, is cheaper than even the most remedial USB pad you can find. You may not be able to play emulated games on your iPhone, but that’s not to say you can’t control them.

[via Gadget Lab]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ksSDAc9ns

There’s no shortage of ways to kill zombies on the iPhone. Blast them in the head with a shotgun, gobble them up with a venus flytrap, or hit them with a car. Even so, Meridian Digital Entertainment’s Smash TV like, Alive 4-Ever, was one of the more satisfying ways to blow apart fetid corpse flesh around… and the upcoming sequel, Alive 4-Ever Returns, while out-stupiding the naming paradigm of its predecessor, looks even better with its new graphics engine, zombies, skills, power-ups, weapons and environmental effects. It should be available later this month.

Mobile Safari’s method of handling multiple pages groks well with the iPhone’s small touchscreen, but on the iPad, it seems slow and cumbersome when there’s plenty of real estate for desktop Safari’s standard method of navigating between open websites: tabs.

Atomic Web Browser ($0.99, Free) brings tabs back to the iPhone OS. Better, it does so elegantly even on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The tweet-world is in a tizzy after news last week that Twitter snapped up both the Tweetie desktop client and iPhone app, as a first step to re-releasing the $3 app as Twitter’s free, official iPhone client.

While iPhone twittaholics might be pretty pumped about the move — the Cult’s Pete Mortensen has said Tweetie 2 is not just the best Twitter app, but “the best iPhone app, period” — Twitter app developers are less jazzed.

In fact, Mashable says there seemed to be a lot of nervousness and uncertainty at an investment panel Wednesday during day one of Chirp, the first Twitter developers conference, in San Francisco — the problem being that Twitter has apparently been leaving developers in the dark with regard to its plans, as last week’s sudden and unexpected acquisition illustrates.

[via Mashable]

Just a day after Apple approved it,  the Opera Mini Web Browser app is topping free downloads on iTunes stores around the world. At this writing, it is number one of the top ten free iTunes downloads in all 22 iTunes stores — from Japan to Sweden,  Australia to Austria.

In the 20 days it took to get a thumbs up from Apple, expectations were high, and as our reviewer Giles Turnbull discovered, mostly met: it’s a fast workhorse that plows through downloads even with spotty connections. On the downside, Giles found the zoom controls a little stiff and the overview display somewhat basic.

So, users of the Opera mini-browser: does it warrant the first-place spot or are the massive downloads just a fad?

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ7_MOs9ffw

One of the great things about the App Store is how it’s leveled the game development playing field: for the first time since the late 80s, a single developer coding in his bedroom can be competitive both graphically and presentationally with larger developers.

Case in point: Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue, an action game that literally came out of nowhere and is to helicopters what Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was to cars. Not only does it feature intuitive controls, a huge, detailed 3D city and frenetic blow-em-all-up action, but Brainphant even programmed in stereoscopic 3D glasses support. You know, like James Cameron used.

At $4.99, Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue is looking like a strong contender for my weekend time sink. If you need more convincing, check out Touch Arcade’s spot-on review.

While the Emoji keyboard is not new to the iPhone, it seemed as if it was disabled in iPhone OS 4.0 .

For those of you developers big into the Emoji keyboard, here is how to regain the Emoji keyboard while still using iPhone OS 4.0 :

I’ve been messing around with Opera Mini as much as I can today, and here’s what I make of it so far.

First thing: it’s fast. Most of the time, you get your complete web page downloaded and readable quicker than you would using Safari.

It also does a great job of downloading over crummy network connections. I spent most of the afternoon on a beach, at the bottom of a cliff that blocks out all but one bar of my phone network signal. 3G? Forget it. Even so, I was able to read about the new MacBook Pros, and even go browsing on apple.com to check out details, using Opera Mini.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gew68Qj5kxw

Atomic Antelope’s Alice in Wonderland app for the iPad is certainly plenty frabjous — and makes a strange case for the iPad as the twenty-first century’s digital successor to the pop-up book — but what I really want to see is how the iPad changes the reading game when it comes to drier books.

As beautiful as this adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is, it’s also an easy approach. But how will people use the iPad’s capability to expand upon the text of a book like Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan or Nabokov’s Ada, or Adror, or Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or other less playful and anarchic works? I can’t wait to see.

Pilgrims trekking Italy to ogle the the Shroud of Turin, on public display for the first time in a decade, now have iPhone apps to help them see more.

Last time thousands of visitors flocked to peek at the yellowed cloth said to depict the face of Jesus, the best mobile option was probably some lame WAP browser.

This time around, iPhone apps can help negotiate the challenges of Italian travel — opening hours, monuments off the grid — with the flick of a finger.

iSindone (“sindone” is Italian for holy shroud) costs $0.99, and offers opening times, directions for getting there and info on the cathedral. There’s also a hi-res image of the shroud, rumored to be a medieval fake, which may give you a better look than the quick drive-by visitors get of the real thing.

Instant Turin, gratis for the next two weeks in honor of the shroud unveiling, promises to steer you clear of restaurants with dreaded tourist menus and get you to the Mole on time.

The official app,  also called Sindone, hasn’t been released yet. Registering on the web site will give you details when it launches,  we’re going to hope before the shroud display ends May 23.

And, if you need to walk off the chocolate and Barolo, try the sprawling gardens of  Venaria Reale outside Turin — just remember to get bus times and hours handy or printed out or you will risk getting stranded.

Last week, I wrote about an upcoming bullet hell SHMUP from Cave called ESPGALUDA II due to hit the App Store last Saturday. As promised, it did, and at a special low introductory price of $4.99 to boot.

Unfortunately, though, ESPGALUDA II came with some big problems.

For one, it would only run on the iPhone 3Gs or iPad. Even worse? Due to a developer error, third generation iPod Touches like mine were inexplicably incapable of running the game, even though the hardware supports it. This put iPod Touch owners in a nasty position: they either dropped five bucks on the ESPGALUDA II app now and hoped an update came along soon to fix the install problem, or waited for the fix and risk paying an extra four bucks for the game later.

If you’re a SHMUP-loving iPod Touch 3rd Gen owner, though, don’t despair. There’s an easy way to get ESPGALUDA II running on your device right now. Just follow the instructions below.

Introduced way back in iPhone OS 2.2, the “Rate on Delete” feature was a great example of how even Apple sometimes get it wrong.

The intention, of course, was to prompt users to actually rate the apps on their iPhone in a non-intrusive way, but if you never deleted an app, you were never prompted to rate it. Combined with the fact that people deleting apps tend not to care much for them and you had a system that promoted app reviews but with a slant to the negative.

Now MacRumors is reporting that Apple has fixed its mistake and removed Rate on Delete from OS 4.0

I’m not sure this is the right tack. You still want user ratings, it’s just the current system skews towards bad ratings. Why not supplement Rate on Delete with a one-time Rate prompt the fifth time you open an app? That would cover all the bases.

Even in the age of blogs, this has got to go down as a first for corporate PR. Adobe is telling Apple to “go screw yourself” over the new iPhone developer’s license that appears to ban apps made with Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone programming tools.

Writing on the Flash Blog, Lee Brimelow, Adobe’s Flash Platform Evangelist, writes:

What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5. This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D. […] Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.

Note: this is an earlier version of the post copied by Via 9to5Mac.com before someone at Adobe ordered edits.

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 Action Hero, AutoStitch Panorama, Battleship, BDD • Büro Destruct Designer, Blackjack 21, Dropbox, Moodagent, Polyhedra, Run!, and Type Drawing.

A tipster has been playing around with the iPhone 4.0 OS beta, and sent us the following report and screenshots.

Boy, Steve Jobs doesn’t mess around, does he. Not content with his Google throwdown, he’s challenging the entire telecommunications industry with the iPhone’s new Background VoIP.

The iPad, as we all know, does not have a camera. But one developer has come up with an ingenious way of getting round that minor inconvenience, and turning the iPad into a photography device.

All you need to make it work is an iPhone.

It’s a small change, but a nice one: Apple has just modified the App Store to make it easier to browse for iPhone and iPad apps, and distinguish universal binaries from iPhone-only apps.

It’s a simple change. Previously, iPhone and iPad apps were combined on one page, with only the Top Charts section offering the option between switching between iPhone and iPad view.

Now if you go to the App Store in iTunes, you’ll now see a couple of small tabs at the top of the page that allow you to switch between iPhone and iPad app browsing. Universal binaries will be listed under both headings, but non-universal apps will be exclusively listed under the iPhone heading… pixel doubling just does not an iPad app make.

[via TUAW]

With the big news that Apple lifted restrictions on 3G VoIP calls in February and rumors that Skype might allow such calls in the near future, it’s no wonder that splashes from the opening salvos in the VoIP app wars can be seen around the App Store.

The latest combatant to enter the arena is Goober, who launched their iPhone app about two weeks ago (though the service has been around for computers since 2006). And while we’re still waiting for Skype to release a 3G-capable app, Goober’s is already here.

Even though Amazon’s hardware Kindle reader will be toast at 9AM Saturday morning, Amazon has just released its Kindle app for the iPad.

The app is free and available for download from the App Store.