Reviews - page 150

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.

Sparrow is a new email client for OS X, which takes a fresh approach to displaying and managing email.

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 Calls is 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.

Essentials Yelp, The Weather Channel and Twitter clearly fall into this category. But Facebook’s app is different. It doesn’t just replace — it hooks.

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.

This week’s must-have iOS games include the awesome new Real Soccer from Gameloft, which features gorgeous high-definition graphics optimized for the retina display. We also have their long-awaited Gangstar sequel, Miami Vindication, and some seriously addictive gameplay in ngmoco’s We City.

Check out a few of our favorite games from the past week after the break!

This week’s must-have iOS apps include Napster’s new music streaming application that provides access to over 10 million of songs on your iOS device, Google Voice calling with GV Mobile+, and a media player that supports pretty much every codec out there!

Check out a few of our favorite apps from the past week after the break!

Case maker Sena designs premium handcrafted cases for leather junkies, myself included. Their cases are all of superior quality and come in plenty of designs to choose from, which makes it a no-brainer choice if you are looking for something classy to protect your iDevice. The $69.99 Sarach Flip Leather is no exception.

What’s Good?: The case itself is a piece of art. As you would expect, a lot of thought has been put into the styling of the case.

The Wallee is both a hard case for iPad as well as a simple and efficient wall mounting solution. It allows you to use your iPad throughout your home. It’s one of the best solutions out there, and delivers both on style and functionality. The Wallee is a gadget that is so well-engineered that I often forget about it. It has just blended its way into my everyday life – just like the iPad itself.

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Last week, Twitter announced a serious overhaul of their website. It might mean diddly to iPhone users though, who usually access Twitter through any one of a growing heap of mobile Twitter apps — all of which are equipped with a vastly superior set of features compared to Twitter’s site (at least, currently).

Now, I’ve always held that selecting a Twitter app is a highly subjective, personal process, kind of like picking out a bicycle saddle — you just sort of squish around on it for a few days and see if it feels right. Personally, I currently tend to favor HootSuite over any other Twitter app, even though I’ve installed, and sometimes use, half a dozen or so others. But one Twitter app has foisted itself to essential status: Twitter’s own official app. And it’s above the rest for one key reason, really.

We all like our eyes. What a shame we subject them to such an endless onslaught of photons from computer screens all day long.

F.lux is an app designed to make your eyes feel a little more comfortable while working on a computer.

This week’s must-have iOS games include the newest addition to the The Sims series with some fantastic new features, guns galore in the latest Time Crisis arcade shooter, and Gameloft’s impressive Prince of Persia game in HD on the iPad.

Check out a few of our favorite games from the past week after the break!

Turn your videos in to cartoons, share you favorite books, movies & TV shows with friends, and make notes with the best interactive notepad in the world; all with apps featured in this week’s must-have iOS apps.

Check out a few of our favorites from the past week after the break!

The iPad is a beautiful device and a well-constructed case is a must have. The ‘Happy Cover’ from design house Atelier Kurth aims to meet our case needs, all the while delivering retro style that sets it apart from the masses.

Today’s Best Thing Ever is also my favorite new appquisition of the week, and it’s called the Accidental News Explorer, and it was built by Brendan Dawes

It’s news, but not as we know it. For a start, there’s no list of headlines. Just a search box.