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.
What Is It? The Air Mouse Elite from Gyration is a wireless mouse that provides intuitive in-air motion controls that allow you to control you computer’s cursor with natural hand movements from up to 30m away. It’s ideal for anyone who regularly delivers presentations or uses a computer hooked up to their television as part of a home theatre.
It’s a camera app that goes out of its way to avoid looking like a camera. It disguises itself as an incoming phone call. You can even instruct it to activate your phone’s ringtone, so you can pretend to take the call and hold the phone to your ear.
At a press conference today, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer officially unveiled its new Windows Phone 7 operating system for mobile devices, along with nine smartphones by various manufacturers that will carry the software upon its release.
Together with Android devices, smartphones running Windows Phone 7 will be one of the biggest competitors to the iPhone 4 running iOS, so how do the new devices compare to Apple’s already massively popular iPhone?
One of our favorite iOS apps this week is Gordon Ramsay’s Cook With Me, which features 52 mouth-watering recipes, with simple to follow steps for cooking up gorgeous dishes.
Esquire‘s new magazine app for the iPad is another featured this week: see the World Trade Centre being built, complete with information on how it all will happen.
We also have an amazing new painting application for the iPad!
This week’s must-have iOS games features Sega’s latest Sonic the Hedgehog 4 that many of us have been eagerly awaiting. It’s been described as the best Sonic for iOS yet, with improved controls, smoother gameplay and a genuine Sonic feel.
Another of our favorites is Chillingo’s Cut the Rope – the addictive puzzle game that knocked Angry Birds off the top of the paid charts this week. It combines realistic physics with simple, precise touch controls to create a wonderfully challenging puzzler.
Black Pegasus is the latest Modern Combat 2 game from Gameloft, and also features in our favorites this week. Its console quality graphics together and excellent production make it one of the most impressive first-person shooters to arrive on the iPhone.
Finding a decent set of headphones or earbuds that doesn’t cost the earth has always been a challenge. You either have to sacrifice on quality to fit your budget, or re-mortgage your house to find that ‘perfect’ sound.
With a maximum budget of $300, I set out to see how much sound you can get for your money at this mid- to high-level.
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.
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.
This is the controller for Logitech's Revue Google TV box. Minimalist it is not.
SAN FRANCISCO: Google is not to be underestimated, but sitting here watching a demo of the first Google TV, I’m not sure it has mainstream appeal.
Built by Logitech and running Google’s Android software, the Logitech Revue Google TV has definite geek appeal. It does everything: the $299 box connects to satellite and cable TV, compatible DVRs and Web video, as well as other online multimedia. You can search for content using your voice and control it with a smartphone. It has apps, HD videoconferencing, and functions as a universal Harmony remote, controlling all your home theater devices. (For a detailed breakdown of how it compares to Apple TV, see here)
But there’s no way my mother will go for it.
The hardware of Logitech's Revue Google TV box looks good and capable, but search isn't a good UI paradigm for TV. There's too much crap to sift through.
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.
This week’s top iOS games features EA Sports’ latest addition to the Fifa series in Fifa 11, which delivers console quality gaming to your iPhone. Offering an outstanding visual experience on the Retina display, and improved controls that make for fluid gameplay, Fifa 11 gives other soccer games in the App Store some great competition for 2011.
BIT.TRIP BEAT HD is an arcade game from Namco that fuses Pong with interactive beats in a colorful, pixelated environment. Listen to the different beat progressions and try to survive the onslaught of spectacular retro visuals as you bounce back beats from where they came. BIT.TRIP BEAT also features an intense multiplayer mode that allows you team up with your friends.
The incredibly addictive 0.03 Seconds Pro tests your reaction time using various different puzzles over 24 challenging stages, and then rates your score out of 5 stars. The puzzles seem simple, but you’ll be tearing your hair out as you try to beat the reaction time for each level and grab a 5-star score.
We also have an awesome augmented reality game that’s probably the best yet for iOS, and a chance to win one of the games featured in this week’s post.
This week’s must-have iOS apps features a new application that allows you to have free, high quality video calls over both Wi-Fi and 3G. Tango Video Callsis free a application to download, and works on other smartphones as well as the iPhone.
PDF Expert for iPad is Readdle’s latest application that delivers the ultimate solution for all your PDF needs on your iPad. It lets you read and annotate PDF documents, highlight text and make notes. You can also edit the documents you have stored on your Dropbox, iDisk, and Google Docs accounts.
PlainText is a free text editor compatible with all of your iOS devices that uses your Dropbox account to save your work. It has a paper-like interface that provides a nice, simple feel, and it’s a great substitute to iOS’s built-in Notes app.
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:
Spirited Away is useful for people who like to focus. It just does one simple job. You’ll either love it, or be completely baffled by it.
It runs in the background, and hides all applications other than the one you’re using. That’s it.
So, if you switch to Mail halfway through working on your spreadsheet, Spirited Away hides the spreadsheet – and your chat client, your browser, your Skype window, everything else that isn’t Mail. It all just disappears.
So why would you want this? Well, removing visual clutter on screen can be helpful for people. It means you can concentrate your mind on the task at hand, and not allow it to be distracted by other stuff. It’s probably not much use if you’re just messing about, but if you want to actually get some work done, it comes into its own.
And it’s flexible enough to bend its own rules, if that’s what you want from it. If you’d like all the other application windows hidden except your iChat window, or except iTunes – well, you can tell it to leave those apps alone.
You might hate the idea of Spirited Away. You might think it’s a long way from being essential. But it’s essential to some of us, and might be essential to some of you, too.
(You’re reading the 15th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)
This is ace. This is today’s Best Thing Ever. It’s called Revinyl, and it’s a one-dollar app that turns your music collection into a quiz that you can play on your own or with friends.
In “Rediscover” mode, the app will play you short snippets from songs, and show you a selection of album art. Pick the correct album – then name the song or the artist for bonus points. All against the clock, of course.
Apple’s tiny new Apple TV packs one heck of a punch in a very small package — Netflix! Youtube! $0.99 TV shows! It’s dead easy to set up, absolutely tiny in size, and a pleasure to use. And it’s ridiculously priced at only $99.
On the other hand, iTunes’ movie selection still sucks; and the Apple TV won’t play nice with popular internet video formats like DivX or Avi.
Still, this pint-sized box is now based on iOS, and Apple may yet try to turn its “hobby” into a real business by adding apps that feature new content channels, communication tools and maybe even games. If so, this Apple TV may have a very good future. The hardware is certainly ready and it is based on the same technology as the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
If Apple opens up Apple TV to apps like it did eventually on the iPhone it could be unstoppable. Jailbreaking might just do that before Apple is ready to offer this feature.
Read the full review below so you can decide if this Apple TV is for you.
The video above is a first look at Sonos’ brand new app for the iPad, which makes for an awesome multi-room stereo system.
Paired with a couple of Sonos’ S5 players, the iPad app makes it easy to play music from your computer’s iTunes library, as well as a ton of online sources, including thousands of Internet radio stations and streaming services like Pandora and Last.fm.
Released last night, I’ve been playing with the app all morning and I’m delighted with it. I haven’t got this much kick out of audio gear for a long time. Sonos’ S5 speakers cost $400 each and sound great.
Are you an overactive iPhone user? Addicted to Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail? Is your iPhone battery not lasting as long as you would like it to? If you answer yes to any of these questions you might need emergency backup power. It doesn’t matter about your circumstances, you need a battery pack.
Just Mobile’s Gum Plus, which I tested this week, gives an iPhone over two additional full charges. I don’t have any major complaints about it and I’ll never leave home without it.
Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.
What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)
So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.
It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.
There are a few Essential Apps that handle themselves so well on the iPhone they quickly eclipse the website they evolved from; apps that, once installed on the iPhone, completely replace their browser-based ancestors.
FileMaker recently released FileMaker Go for the iPad and iPhone. I’ll be taking a look at the iPad version only today, because based on my experience with technology in the Enterprise the larger format screen that the iPad provides is the way to go. I think that version will be better received by business users since the iPhone screen is much to small to use on a regular basis or at least it is for me. It’s good in a pinch, but for real work I prefer the iPad as primary and the iPhone as backup.
FileMaker Go will not work by itself since you need to have FileMaker Pro, which is now at version 11, to create databases that you will use with the iOS app. FileMaker Go will allow you access and edit the information in the database you created with FileMaker Pro on your Mac or PC.
