Among our favorites game this week is a great new simulator from Kairosoft Co. called Game Dev Story that puts you in charge of your own game company, with the aim of creating a multi-million dollar hit!
We’ve also featured the brand new Dextergame for iPad – an awesome adventure game with stunning HD graphics that fans of the show will love!
We also have the latest game in the Scene It? series, Clickgamer’s new addictive bow & arrow game, and one of the most enjoyable golf games in the App Store yet! Check out the rest of our favorites after the break…
Yahoo Messenger is a popular chat client with millions of users. It is available on most popular desktop and mobile platforms. So this week when I read fellow Cultist, Eli Milchman’s, news post about the big app upgrade that brought video calling over 3G or Wi-Fi I was excited about trying it out. However, that excitement quickly died off after Eli and I started to test it out. Needless to say today there is one less Yahoo Messenger user than there was before.
That user is me and you can find out why by reading the rest of my review.
As New York Times reporter Kate Zernike notes in her new book “Boiling Mad,” a good portion of the Tea Party movement is composed of youthful, tech-savvy hipsters — so it really shouldn’t be surprising that the movement has its own iPhone/iPad app.
The app features top news of interest to members of the movement, polemics from 11 conservative bloggers, Tea Party videos, and wouldn’t be complete with a feature called “Outrage of the Day.”
We can now easily jailbreak the iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1 using Geohot’s Limera1n along with the easy How To written by fellow Cultist Sayam Aggarwal. Once you’ve completed the jailbreak your iPhone 4 can be customized in many ways. However, more importantly you have the ability to add features via apps that Apple doesn’t endorse. You won’t see these apps in the regular iTunes App Store on your iPhone 4. Instead you’ll have to download or purchase these apps like Frash, an app that puts Adobe’s Flash player on your iPhone 4, from the Cydia store instead.
Today, I will show you how to add Flash playback to your jailbroken iPhone 4 in three easy steps using an app called Frash by Comex.
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.
We wrap up the week with two iMac deals and an app for making international phone calls. Up first is a number of Core 2 Duo iMacs, starting at $680 for a 2.16GHz desktop machine. Next is i-Hoot, an app for your iPhone which permits pay-as-you-go international dialing. Finally is a 27-inch iMac with quad i7 processors running at 2.8GHz. The package also includes three years of AppleCare all for $1,699.
Along the way, we’ll also take a look at a number of other items and apps for your iPhone or iPod. Like always, details on these and many more deals can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
It’s just a clever little piece of marketing for a band that’s not half bad — and the back story is that they had their real-life instruments stolen — but here’s Brooklyn band Atomic Tom rocking the NYC Subway with a bunch of iPhones.
Can’t wait to see the band that tries this with some Windows 7 phones.
Apple’s App Store is a textbook case of the way Capitalism is supposed to work, according to one developer, who quit his day job when he realized all he needs to earn a living is a laptop and an Internet connection.
Getting information out of anyone who works at Apple can be more difficult than getting truth out of a politician, but every now and then someone pipes up with a personal revelation that sheds light on what it’s like to work with the 2nd largest company in the U.S.A. today.
A case in point is Dylan Ginsburg, developer of River of News, a $3 Google Reader app for the iPad, whose software has enjoyed what he describes as “modest” success since its release in August. Ginsburg pulled back the curtain just a bit in a blog post he wrote because “no one talks about what they make on the App Store.” If Ginsburg’s experience is typical of developers whose apps enjoy even middling success, it’s not just the big hitters in the App Store line-up who stand to gain from developing software for Apple’s mobile devices.
Developing River of News has been the most rewarding “work” of my life. It’s not even close. My sleeping is all screwed up because I keep thinking about how I can make my software better.
That’s right, “my software,” Ginsburg wrote. “What a great thing to be able to say. I’ve gotten such tremendous satisfaction from creating something that people use and like.”
It’s early in the game yet, and River of News could well be supplanted by a new flavor of the month at any time, but Ginsburg felt he has enough of the big picture in focus to have quit his corporate software job — the one at which he earned twice as much as he’s been making so far with River of News — and is a confirmed believer in the App Store business model. “The genius is they created an ecosystem that benefits them, the developer, and the customer [it’s what] you are supposed to get from capitalism.”
Whether you are an employee wanting to use your iPad on the road or a company looking to integrate the Apple tablet into your workspace, AT&T says it has you covered. The exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier announced Friday it will offer plans to sell the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G to business customers.
“iPad is a great fit for our enterprise customers across a wide range of industries who are looking for ways to increase business productivity and offer greater flexibility,” said Michael Antieri, President, Advanced Enterprise Solutions, AT&T Solutions. The iPad provides “businesses with the tools they need to accelerate mobility-led productivity,” he adds.
Alone, the iPhone’s functions are pretty cool; then someone comes along, combines two (or more) of them and bam — vigorously ups the wow-factor.
Today that someone is TomTom, who has just updated its popular turn-by-turn GPS app (we’ve linked to the North American version, coz that’s where we’re based) to include a “navigate-to-photo” feature that lets users enter a destination simply by tapping on any geo-tagged photo on their iPhone.
The update also includes new optimized accuracy for the iPhone 4 and is currently available only for their North American and European versions.
The elusive white iPhone 4 that many of you wish you could get your hands on was recently spotted in New York. The folks over at Pocket-lint managed to catch up to a guy who was seen holding and using a white iPhone 4, which currently, is just as hard to spot as a Yeti in a snow storm.
How this guy happened to get a hold of his white iPhone 4 isn’t clear, but there are several ways this could have happened. He may have gotten it from someone at Apple that he knows, he may work at Apple, or this could be a clever iPhone 4 makeover.
Normally, Apple is able to deliver Rolls-Royce earnings numbers when Wall Street is predicting just Cadillac financial figures. Shortages in the Cupertino, Calif. company’s two most popular products – the iPad and iPhone 4 – could prevent Apple from reporting its usual 15 percent premium on expectations, one analyst cautions.
Wall Street consensus if for Apple to report Monday earnings-per-share of $4.03 on $18.76 billion in revenue for the three-month quarter ended September. However, for Apple to deliver its usual 15 percent above-expected earnings, the company would need to report $4.08 per share on $18.8 billion in revenue, something Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster doesn’t foresee.
Comment of the Week comes from @Ron regarding our interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs. Going against the common wisdom that ex-CEO John Sculley was bad for Apple, @Ron has a different take on Sculley, who I feel has been unfairly demonized for his decade-long stint at Apple’s helm.
Great article. I worked with John occasionally in his last years at Apple. I didn’t realize at the time how burnt out he was, but it make sense now in retrospect. He was shy and seemed withdrawn.
John was a great CEO for the first few years. It’s easy to forget that Steve left Apple in complete disarray – it’s safe to say that he hadn’t developed his management or relationships skills at that point. Sculley held things together and got the place to run as a business. It’s only later when his lack of product vision caught up with him.
For Serious Ocean Mariners and Starfleet Captains of the Mind, Norwegian chair manufacturer NorSap has just unveiled a new concept iChair. Designed to offer strength and flexibility for helmsmen during long sea voyages, this Enterprise-worthy throne comes complete with two iPad docks – so you can navigate and goof off at the same time – cushioned forearm rests and an (optional) heated footrest!
Looks a bit like a cross between a dentist’s chair and Captain Pike’s wheelchair. I’d pilot this for a while.
Steve Jobs’ hypnotic cadence and idiosyncratic showmanship is obviously well-known enough to be channeled by international comedians looking for a laugh: over in Hong Kong, the Mass Transit Railway has just launched a new app, and they did so by hiring their own Chinese Fake Steve Jobs in the form of Law Kar-Ying to reveal it on stage. Law seems to have studied the man he was emulating quite well: he gets everything right, from the gulps of bottled water to the Levis and turtleneck. Hilarious.
The introduction of the first iPod back in 2001 officially signaled the beginning of Apple’s millennial renaissance, transforming the company from a computer manufacturer so niche that they were the butt of Michael Dell’s jokes to the biggest company in tech. See an overview of how it all happened after the jump.
Next week on October 20th, we can take it pretty much for granted that Apple is going to unveil the next iteration of OS X, 10.7 codenamed ‘Lion’, along with their annual October MacBook refreshes. What about iLife ’11, though, which we’ve been seeing burbling up for months now in the form of Idiot’s Guides and instruction manuals on Amazon and the like? Can we expect that to be announced as well?
It’s looking good. Apparently, retail employees of Apple’s stores are running low on their supplies of the last iLife software suite, with no new stock due to come in. This is in addition to seeing prices drop on Amazon: an inventory clear out that usually serves as precursor to a new iLife launch.
What’s new in iLife ’11? Hard to say for sure, but rumor has it that iDVD may go the way of the iDodo and the whole suite may have been rewritten from the ground up for 64-bit. There’s also rumors about beefier iOS integration and maybe even FaceTime support. We’ll all know next Wednesday.
Usually when we see an iPhone like this, it’s the handset of some Saudi Arabian oil prince or B-list rapper whose definition of class is synonymous with champagne fused with gold flakes, and whom has duly paid Swarovski some forty or fifty grand to dip his iPhone 4 into some horse glue and then roll it in their overpriced crushings of glass.
This handset is actually different, though. Instead of paying $40,000 for a Swarovski iPhone 4, two Australian businessmen paid customizer Stuart Hugheseight million dollars to plate their iPhone 4s in gold and then encrust them in over five hundred diamonds totaling over 100 karats.
Yesterday, Skype 5.0 dropped onto the PC for Windows users, bringing Facebook integration and group video calling into the mix. That update is not yet available for the Mac, but according to a post on Skype’s official blog, a new version of the popular VoIP application is coming to OS X soon.
I’m worried, though. In the blog post, Skype alarmingly mentions a “complete overhaul, both in terms of the way it looks, and in terms of functionality.”
Look, Skype isn’t a very well designed app by Mac standards, I agree… but have you ever seen the absolutely unidentifiable puddle of mashed up design elements that comprises the Windows interface? If you’ve got a minute, I’ve got an anecdote that might help describe it if you haven’t.
Chipmaker AMD hasn’t been doing well lately. Last year, they chalked up a third quarter loss of nearly $128 million. This year was scarcely any better at $118 million. At least this quarter, though, they have an excuse: the iPad’s killing notebook sales, even according to their own CEO.
Apple’s finally seen fit to make their MobileMe Calendar web app an official product after a long period in beta. It’s now available to all comers, and will allow you to check or update your MobileMe calendar from any computer or Apple device, as well as share calendars with friends and colleagues, or send out invitations to events to your droogies.
The iPad seems a fairly small canvas, but it’s not much smaller than the Mona Lisa, upon which was painted the enigmatic face of history’s most beloved transvestite. Why not sling it up on an easel, then, and do some painting with Remote Palette… easily one of the neatest painting apps we’ve seen lately, largely through its fun cross-device universal functionality.
