The wonderful role-playing game that is Bastion kicks off this week’s must-have games roundup, accompanied by Blast-A-Way, an awesome new puzzle game from Illusion Labs; Dragon Island Blue, the closest you’ll get to Pokemon on iOS right now; and Granny Smith, a platform game that features a granny on rollerscates. Need I say more?
Aleratec’s Charge-Glo dock cable has a very simple yet very neat gimmick: like the MagSafe charger you have for your MacBook, it sports an LED in the plug, and this LED changes color to show charging status. No more tapping at your iPhone’s home button to see if it has done charging.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a fantastic text editor called Drafts, which has quickly become my favorite on iOS. We’ve also included a great alternative music app called Ecoute; the latest Facebook app, which has been rewritten from the ground up; and a third-party web browser that prides itself on being super speedy.
We’ve seen lots of leaked parts for the upcoming iPhone, and even some cases for the rumored iPad Mini, but not a peep has been heard about a redesigned iPod Touch, until now. Pictures of new cases claiming to be designed for the new iPod Touch hit the web this morning, and they reveal that the fifth-generation might undergo some serious design changes when it hits the market later this year.
The cases show that the body of the 5th-gen iPod Touch might be less tapered than the current version, and it also features a mysterious hole on the back of the device that we’re not sure about.
Headlining this week’s must-have iOS games roundup is an awesome new platformer called Mikey Shorts, which offers its own unique style of play focused on speed. We also have The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which makes its App Store debut for the second time; VOTE!!!, the latest title from Infinity Blade creators Chair Entertainment; and a great space-age building game from Gameloft.
Apple retail stores are now installing special dock connectors to prevent iOS devices from being stolen. They look just like the regular USB cable that ships with every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but they feature a nifty anti-left lock that prevents them from being removed from the device — essentially tethering the unit to the table.
Gameloft’s Order & Chaos Online is widely believed to be the closest alternative to Warcraft on iOS. It’s a popular game, and there’s no doubt it would be even more popular if it weren’t for the monthly fee Gameloft charged to pay it. Thankfully, in the game’s latest update, Gameloft has finally scrapped the subscription fee and made the role-playing game free to play online after purchasing.
Hey, everyone, it’s Back To School time, and students everywhere will need to take part in a time honored tradition – taking notes. IRIS, originally an OCR software company, announced today the availability of two new digital note taking pens that will take handwritten notes and turn them into editable text. The IRISNotes2 Express and Executive pens will fit different needs and budgets, but should prove a boon to anyone – especially students – who need to take fast notes and then get them into a digital format.
It sure is great to be able to see the first few lines of emails as they come in on the iPhone, but it’s equally helpful to see more subject headers on the screen at one time. The more emails I can see at once, the more I can ignore, focusing more closely on emails that look promising.
iOS allows you to change the number of emails up on the screen at one time with a simple trip to the Settings app on your iPhone and iPod touch. It’ll even work on your iPad, but that may not be as important as it is on a much smaller screen.
Skype has updated its official iOS app today, finally introducing the ability to send and receive photographs on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The update also brings visual improvements across the app, fixes bugs affecting Bluetooth, and more.
Finnish gaming company Kukouri Mobile Entertainment created and developed Tiny Troopers, which was picked up by Chillingo, one of the larger and more successful iOS publishing company, itself owned now by Electronic Arts (EA). Tiny Troopers was released to iPhone and iPad as a universal app at the beginning of June, updated a month later, and then given a price drop mid-July.
Today, excitingly, it’s available for pre-order on Mac via Iceberg Interactive, an up-and-coming publisher of Mac, Linux, and PC games. Iceberg Interactive may best be known for Oil Rush, a real-time naval strategy game for all three computer platforms.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new update to Instagram — the world’s most popular photo sharing service — that introduces an improved user interface and new features. We’ve also got a new Food Network app that every foodie should have, the official WWE app for wrestling fans, and a great educational app for the iPad that promises to teach your little ones how to write capital letters quickly and efficiently.
Kicking off this week’s must-have games roundup is a new game from Zynga that will blow your mind. It’s called Horn, and it’s a third-person action game with incredible, console-quality visuals and great gameplay. That’s accompanied by Mad Skills BMX from the creators of Mad Skills Motocross; Jack Lumber, the first game from the SEGA Alliance; Cafeteria Nipponica from Kairosoft, and more. Look out for the awesome new platformer from Ravenous Games, creators of the award-winning League of Evil.
Here in the US, if you’re in the military or work in aviation, you might actually use what most of the rest of the world thinks of as standard, 24-hour time. While it will confuse all your US-living friends and relatives when they ask for the time and you show them your iOS device’s lock screen, that’s their issue, right? You, at least, will have the joy of knowing that you are fully prepared for the type of time tracking that most people around the globe use.
The default iOS clock in the US is a 12-hour clock, with AM and PM appended to the numbers to denote morning or evening. The other, more standard way of representing the time is with the 24-hour clock, in which any time after 12:00 is the logical 13:00, 14:00, and so on. It’s really easy to set on your iPhone or other iOS device.
As we mentioned in yesterday’s tip, sometimes you need to just clear out some space from your iPhone or iPad to make room for new photos as they come in, whether you’re taking them on the device itself or using PhotoStream. As one commenter mentioned yesterday, all these different sources of photos tend to make the number of them add up.
But what if you just want to dump a bunch of photos at once, say, while you’re away from the computer? Turns out, it’s just as easy as pie. Or cake. Whatever.
With Nintendo adamant it’ll never bring its games to iOS, the only way to enjoy your favorite titles on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is to jailbreak your device and download an emulator. But that’s no longer the case. You can now enjoy more than 100 NES and Game Boy games in your iPhone’s web browser.
Photos take up a lot of space on our iOS devices. It’s important to many of us with the lower end iPhones to leave enough room on the device to capture new photos, let alone apps and music and books.
With the advent of Photostream, it’s easy to have the photos we take on our iPhone show up on our Macs or iPads, so deleting them from the iPhone makes a lot of sense and is much less of a scary proposition. Here’s how.
It seems like Apple’s sixth-generation iPhone will be the first iOS device to boast a brand new, mini dock connector when it launches this fall. But there have been rumors that claim Apple will refresh all its iOS devices to make the new connector a standard across its entire lineup.
Not only does this seem highly unlikely, but there’s one reason why it’s an impossibility: Apple’s supply chain just couldn’t handle a refresh that big.
The BBC has updated its iOS today, finally delivering high-resolutions visuals for the third-generation iPad. It also introduces “improved video performance,” better accessibility with VoiceOver controls, and more.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a brand new Twitter client called Slices, which claims to be the world’s first Twitter app that allows you to break your timeline into individual streams, follow live events, browse Twitter by category, and more. We also have a “magical” app called Cardiio that accurately monitors your heart rate simply by looking at your face; the best blogging app for iPad yet called Pages; and more.
Heading up this week’s must-have iOS games roundup is a brand new Ghostbusters game that promises to be the best augmented reality game in the App Store. We also have a great online strategy game in the form of Tiny War XD, Activision’s legendary Pitfall!, and more.
Don’t you hate it when you start to download a song file, or a podcast, or an app and it just sits there, mocking you? When the little progress bar just refuses to move, no matter how you scream at the front of your magical iOS device? Yeah, me, too.
One way to fix this problem with apps is to tap the icon to stop the download, and then tap it again to resume the download. If that doesn’t work (and it won’t with a media download), then you’re not out of luck. There is another way.
Turborilla, the developers behind Mad Skills Motocross — of the best side-scrolling racing games on iOS — has released its first teaser trailer for Mad Skills BMX, which is coming to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on August 16. The clip shows off the upcoming title’s gameplay, and offers a hilarious little cartoon alongside it.
Remember the 1982 Activision classic Pitfall! from the Atari 2600? It’s probably been a while since you played it, but that’s about to change. The jungle-crawler has been revamped and relaunched on iOS — 30 years after its first debut — promising thrilling new environments and twists on the classic gameplay that will “appeal to fans of all generations.”
Back in May we told you about FreedomPop’s 4G sled for the iPhone that came with 500MB of free data, and today a similar add-on has been announced for the iPod touch. FreedomPop’s $99 sled brings 3G/4G data to the third and fourth generation iPod touch, effectively turning the device into an iPhone without the phone.
The iPod touch add-on is identical to the iPhone model, the only difference is that the iPod touch version draws power from the device itself while the other relies on its own battery.