Here’s a good idea for virally marketing apps that Apple should think about — wirelessly beaming apps to other iPhones like the Zune’s music sharing feature.
Microsoft’s Zune is mostly a me-too product, but it’s one great feature is being able to lend music to friends Zune-to-Zune via Wi-Fi. Shared tracks can be played three times, after which they must be purchased from the Zune marketplace. It’s a great idea but tragically underused because there are so few Zunes out there.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aDE5GcriHc
Even though Apple isn’t part of this year’s CES, the floor has been buzzing with news of new hardware accessories for Apple’s multitouch devices. One of the most interesting of these is the AR.Drone, a quadricopter that you can control via iPhone or iPod touch.
As you can see from the video, the four rotors that give it lift are selectively turned on and off as you move your iPhone, and via the chopper’s forward-facing camera, the game positions killer robots for you to fire rockets at through the touchscreen. There’s even multiplayer for AR dogfights. No word on pricing yet, but looks like a heck of a lot of fun to fly if you’re on the floor.
Although it’s been promised for awhile, a new update to Facebook’s popular iPhone app has hit the iTunes App Store, finally bringing push Facebook notifications to your iPhone.
As soon as you update the Facebook app to version 3.1, you’ll be given the option of turning on push notifications, which will pop up on your phone anytime someone send you a new message, writes on your wall, requests to be your friend, lurid new sexts, tags you in a photo or… jeez, whatever Facebook kiddies are doing these days… throwing vampiric llamas at each other, I guess. However, if you don’t want your iPhone chirping in your pocket every time your mother buys a new sheep in Farmville, the selective push notification options seem robust.
The 3.1 update also adds contact syncing to the mix, which adds Facebook profile pictures and links to your contacts automatically, although it seems buggy and prone to duplication right now. I’d personally recommend holding off on enabling this little feature, although it would be nice to see this functionality continue to improve, given the growing role of Facebook as a subscribable, automatically updated address book for smartphones.
There’s little reason not to grab this one, so hit the update button in the App Store now.
PocketHeat is an app that has recently been pushed to the iTunes App Store designed to keep your hands warm in the winter. For $0.99, the app will push your iPhone or iPod Touch to its maximum CPU capacity.
It’s rather mystifying that this app got through the App Store approval process, since pushing your iPhone or iPod Touch CPU to the point of meltdown seems risky, to say the least.
Still, it has given me my own killer idea: an exfoliating iPhone app that works by making a user’s handset physically explode. Any developers out there want to help me make it happen?
LAS VEGAS — The first piece of hardware to take advantage of the iPhone 3.0 OS’s much-heralded hardware interface has finally surfaced at CES. And of all things, it’s a speaker clock from Sharper Image.
You’ve probably noticed that I tend to get a little overexcited about iPhone photography apps. I got so excited about the Lego Photo app that Pete mentioned the other day, I went and made a Flickr group for it. But this post is about another little gem I’ve found, under the name Hipstamatic.
Virtually every geek has spent, at one time or another in their lives, a lot of time playing with Lego bricks. They’re basically the single greatest creativity toy ever developed. And it’s been fun to see the world of Lego make a variety of appearances on the iPhone.
The newest app from Billund, Denmark is Lego Photo, which transforms your pictures into creative brick assemblages that are the perfect way to hide just how hungover you look in all your New Year’s photos.
See? Here’s my impression of what most people will look like tomorrow morning:
See? It’s “artistic”!
Free download, so check it out here (iTunes link). /via Gizmodo
Keeping New Year’s resolutions is hard. Who has the willpower? Here’s 10 iPhone apps that might help.
When two luridly titled apps called Tits & Boobies and Pussy Lovers appeared on the App Store, it wasn’t long before Apple told the developer to cover himself, for god’s sake. The apps were quickly pulled, even though (as you might have guessed) the apps were nothing besides a couple of suggestive puns slapped on top of slideshows of birds and cats.
Business as usual: puritanical Apple does not like even the scent of pudenda acridly wafting through the App Store. However, Apple’s stated reason for pulling the apps is rather unexpected: it appears that their main complaint about the apps was there just weren’t enough breasts and vaginas in them.
Back in the day, Louis Lumière and others magically set still pictures in motion, and — voila — the motion picture was born.
Over 100 years later, unbelievably, the ability to make motion pictures still hadn’t appeared on arguably the most advanced smartphone in the world — even more absurd was the fact that phones much cheaper and less sophisticated had absolutely no problem shooting video. Yes, the 3GS has a pretty cool vidcam feature, but the Original and 3G still couldn’t shoot video.
Only now, they can.
As the Twitter revolution gains momentum (or hype, take your pick), a virtual smorgasbord of Twitter clients has presented itself at the App Store. One of the newest plates at the feast is Chirp Flow, which — like Twitterfall — streams tweets in real time. Except that where Twitterfall is a buck, Chirp Flow is free via ad-support.
Right now, Chirp Flow is pretty stripped-down and spartan, with a search box and the resulting never-ending, pause-able flow of tweets that match the search phrase. But the app’s website promises much more functionality, including clickable links and the ability to author tweets. Chirp Flow’s creator, Garrett Moon, told us the new features could be up-and-running in as little as a few weeks.
Besides being strangely mesmerized by watching tweets drift down my screen, I can totally see tweeple becoming attwicted to this app: tracking trending tweets (another function that might be added soon), planning the next Operation Chokehold…
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp29W61pwTA
Gunman seems like a keen little iPhone app. Think of it like suburban Lazer Tag, replete with a healthy dash of augmented reality, but missing the cute beeyooping space guns or the likelihood of being shot to death by a trigger happy cop.
In Gunman, two iPhone-toting players square off in a suburban deathmatch arena. First, each player identifies the shirt color of their opponent; then, using their iPhone’s built-in camera as both gun barrel and sights, they take aim and shoot at one another, shaking their iPhone to reload their virtual glocks. If the Gunman app detects that the opponent’s shirt color was in the iPhone’s crosshairs when the shot was fired, it will register a kill and vibrate the iPhone of the perforated victim.
It looks like a lot of fun, and for this holiday week only, it’s on sale over at the App Store for only $0.99. You can check out Gunman’s trailer above. Matrix techno ahoy!
[via 9to5Mac]
Those who know what the Apple Tablet actually is have had a circle of secrecy woven around them twice by Cupertino’s Mephistophelean lawyers, but with all the ballyhoo right now about a late January announcement, it’s still easy to forget we actually don’t really know the first thing about the forthcoming device. How big will it be? What will the hardware be like? Is it more like a Macbook without a keyboard, or is it just like a big iPod Touch? What operating system will the Apple Tablet even run?
It’s been assumed for awhile that the Apple Tablet will probably be more iPhone-like than Mac-like, since Apple wants another platform on which the App Store can shine. It now looks like that assumption is correct: Apple has reportedly told select developers to ready full screen version of their apps to demo on the Apple Tablet in January.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4IjeO7g6kA
If you’re not sold on the freshmen augmented reality apps available for the iPhone, this one probably won’t change your mind.
With it, you launch a simulated iPhone on your iPhone screen. Then you can zoom your virtual iPhone or spin it around and run other apps on it. The virtual “apps” aren’t real applications but the effect is suitably trippy nonetheless.
Developed by Ogmento for Orange Telecom Israel to generate interest for the iPhone launch there, it’s not available to the general public.
Useless? Pretty much. But sort of an Escher for the digital age.
Via Mashable
A word to drivers down under: make sure your license and registration are up to date.
Police in Tasmania are using iPhones to snap plates, relay the pics to a database of unregistered vehicles and unlicensed and disqualified drivers via an app developed for the department.
In just 10 days of operation, the app has outed 167 unregistered vehicles and caught 107 disqualified or unregistered drivers, the Mercury reports. Formerly, officers had to radio in the information and wait for a co-worker to check.
Within the first 10 minutes of trying it out, police pulled up alongside a car at a traffic light ran the app and found the car was unregistered. They pulled over the car, found the driver was also without a license and drugs in the car, too.
The app, designed by the Tasmania police department, is also used by motorcycle cops.
Via Mac Daily News
Emulators themselves are on fairly well-established legal ground, but the ROM files required to play all of your favorite classic video games are far sketchier. Technically, if you rip a copy of a game yourself as a backup, you’re in the clear… but since few have the technical acumen or equipment to do so, they usually resort to downloading the ROMs from warez sites.
That’s primarily the reason why Apple has traditionally kept its App Store so closed off to emulators. So expect Nescaline, an NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch, to be pulled as soon as Apple gets wind of it.
On sale for $6.99, Nescaline has a full feature list, including multitouch, light gun and save state support. It ships with five homebrew NES games, which is certainly legal. Unfortunately, its cardinal sin — at least in the eyes of Apple — is allowing users to input a URL where they can download additional ROMs. That means it’s as easy to put a warezed copy of Castlevania III on your iPhone as it is to cut-and-paste a Google search.
Expect Nescaline to be pulled quick, and if it comes back to the App Store at all, for the download feature to be neutered. Unfortunately, for right now, if you want to play emulators on your iPhone, legally owned games or not, jailbreaking is still your best bet.
Update: That didn’t take long. It’s been removed from the App Store.
You can take your business school degree and cram it up your plush Christmas stocking: iPhone games developer Tapulous, best known for their rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge, are now bringing in $1 million a month in sales.
In the laughable understatement of the year, Tapulous says they are profitable. Tap Tap Revenge has been installed on over one-third of all iPhones and iPod Touches. CEO Bart Decrem says that he experiences his company to exponentially grow as the mobile app market gets broader. “It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?'”he said.
That’s great for Tapulous and its small constabulary of employees — it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys — but they are, of course, in the minority. I suspect Tapulous just has too much momentum to stop: they launched an iPhone game early inspired by a very popular and casual-friendly genre of music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and they can ride that early success for awhile. Things are doubtlessly not so rosy for the developers trying to get their apps noticed in a sea of a hundred thousand now.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YkKmuQRayQ
Apple’s latest iPhone ad revisits that old holiday chestnut “The 12 Days of Christmas” with a lucky smartphone owner breezing through the rigors of the season with a few effortless finger scrolls.
The coolest one, the last, turns on your Christmas tree. Though Apple has added a page on iTunes of apps featured in ads, this one’s not on it. We have it on good authority that it’s Schlage LiNK, a free app (requires extra hardware, though) designed as a remote control for home door locks.
Here’s the complete holiday app line up from the ad:
– 12 cookies cooking: The Betty Crocker Mobile Cookbook [gratis]
– 11 cards a’ sending: Postman [ $2.99]
– 10 gifts for giving: My Christmas Gift List [ $0.99]
– 9 songs for singing: TabToolkit [$9.99]
– 8 bells for ringing: Holiday Bells [ $0.99]
– 7 slopes a’ skiing: Snow Reports $1.99]
– 6 games for playing: Christmas Fever [ $0.99]
– 5 gold rings: Anna Sheffield Jewelry [ gratis]
– 4 hot lattes: myStarbucks [gratis]
– 3 flights home: Flight Search [gratis]
– 2 feet of snow: Weather Pro [$3.99]
– Tree-lighting app : Schlage LiNK [gratis]
Microsoft just launched an app for its search engine Bing for iPhone.
Offered gratis on iTunes, the idea is to put a Microsoft search engine in the hands of iPhone users who have shunned Microsoft smartphones.
Capturing the iPhone market might be a way for Microsoft to bump up traffic for the “decision engine,” which currently has about 10% of the US Internet search market.
Wishful thinking? Maybe not: the first 247 reviews, 191 are five star — 77% — though some of the comments “I love this app, it’s a great Christmas present from Microsoft” set the BS-ometer spinning.
Any Bing aficionados out there planning to download the app?
I gave the web version a quick whirl when it first came out, but it didn’t blow my hair back. Haven’t bothered since.
UK newspaper The Guardian this morning launched its iPhone app.
And wow, it’s pretty damn good.
The App Store remains a bone of contention for many developers, but IUGO knew its A.D.D. game would throw multiple spanners in the works. That said, it wasn’t expecting its minigame collection with a decidedly risque bent would languish in the approvals process for months. At the end of November, it finally emerged, having been stripped of many games, but still boasting 70 quickfire challenges for iPhone gamers.
I spoke to IUGO Director of Business Development Sarah Thomson to find out about how A.D.D. came to be, and about IUGO’s struggles to get the game approved for the App Store.
Inspired (as legend goes) by a piece of pizza with a slice missing, Namco employee Tōru Iwatani first released the classic game Puck-Man to Japanese arcades almost thirty years ago. Later that year, Puck-Man came to the United States by Midway, although wisely renamed with the knowledge of just how tempting it would be to erase just a slight wedge of that first P‘s loop. The rest is history: America’s had Pac-Man fever ever since.
While the classic Pac-Man game has since been expanded into a franchise of quasi-sequels and spin-off titles, what you might not know is that original Pac-Man designer Tōru Iwatani never had any part designing the sequels until 2007, when he was invited by Namco and Microsoft to design a true sequel to his original game. The result was Pac-Man Championship Edition and it was the best Pac-Man games since Ms. Pac-Man. And now it’s available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for $3.99.
We begged. We pleaded. We begged some more. Steve Jobs finally listened — this morning, Ustream made live streaming from the iPhone a reality (pinch me!) with their Broadcasting app.
Yes, the clouds are finally parting. In the last week or so, there’s been a flurry of activity on the streaming-iPhone front: On November 30th, Fring — a VOIP app that allows users to stream one-way video to another iPhone with Fring installed (turning the iPhone into a one-way videophone) — went live at the App Store. One day later, Knocking Live Video allowed two-way video-iPhone-ing.
Now, Ustream Live Broadcaster lets the iPhone broadcast to a mass audience via the Ustream website — and it’s pretty damn cool. And free. It even works over a 3G connection (albeit a bit wonkily — a friend of mine likened it to a NASA broadcast from the shuttle). And because the iPhone’s camera is on the gadget’s backside, using the little guy to stream to a wide audience makes much more sense than does two-way videophoning with it.
So have the floodgates finally opened? And will the next iPhone, rumored to be in the works, bring major advancements in video conferencing (for instance, a camera that isn’t on its butt)?
[ via TechCrunch ]
Today, Apple launched a new RSS feed for iPhone Developers, promising updates, tips and how-to information on a range of relevant topics — from development to distribution.
The idea is to keep iPhone devs on top of the ever-shifting highways and byways of getting an app on iTunes, including:
— Tips for submitting apps to the App Store
— Current turnaround time for app reviews
— Program updates
— Development and testing techniques
With complaint sites over rejections and possible scams growing along with the astronomical app sales, something needed to be done to get better info in a timely fashion to devs.
The first few headlines look promising (see below) it remains to be seen whether the RSS will be another reality distortion field emanator…
iTunes Connect Unavailable Dec 23 – Dec 28
Adding iPhone OS 3.x Features to Your iPhone OS 2.x-compatible Apps
You Can Now Choose the Currency For Your App Store Payments
Updated iTunes Connect Developer Guide Now Posted
Via Network World
To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.