Reviews - page 159

The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?

After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review ToyPlanes, GOALS! Pro, Bejeweled 2, Jungle Crash Land and Boulder Dash Vol 1.

The dev channel version of Google Chrome for Mac has been updated with a long-awaited new feature: a bookmark manager.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

We take pictures to remember our own lives better and tell stories about the people who matter most to us. In older days, we had photo albums. These days, we have gigantic digital libraries on our computers, and a lot of the time it’s pretty disorganized. Sure, the most important photos are grouped into albums and what-not, but little else is. The meaning behind the pictures isn’t obvious.

Apple has taken steps to address this in iPhoto 09, adding in face detection and the ability to take people in pictures for searching by participant and searching by geography via GPS data, but these elements aren’t well-intertwined — and it does a bad job of considering the long view. That’s where MemoryMiner, a very nice piece of shareware from GroupSmarts, steps in.

Tyler Hall, the developer behind Nottingham is quite clear: he loved Notational Velocity so much, he wanted to make a version of his own.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Orbital 1.2, Commodore 64, DinoMixer, Green Fingers and Doodle Golf.

I like electronic notebooks, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying out all the different ones on offer. The latest newcomer is myRichTexts and from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’m quite impressed.

I’m not going to use the word “iPhone killer” to describe the Nexus One, such phrasing is trite at best. Not to mention that the only thing that’s going to kill the iPhone will be Apple, and then, only when iPhone 4 or whatever comes out.

That said, of the current crop of pretenders the Nexus One seems to be something special. Follow us after the jump for our first impressions after 48 hours.

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.

With four overindulged kids ages nine through 13, it’s hard to find presents to keep them entertained for more than ten minutes.

UCreate Music, made by Mattel, is a battery-powered, music-making system that allows kids to mix their own music. The little plastic box rips samples from your iPod or Mac and was on several hot Holiday toy lists. Perfect for that left-over Christmas gift card, the Kahney kids have been testing it out.

MacSpeech Dictate is dictation software for the Mac that helps you enhance your productivity by simply dictating rather than typing. It is based on Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine, which ensures highly accurate speech recognition capabilities. In fact, the company claims it to be about 95% accurate. Although the lack of a Beta version makes it hard to believe but surprisingly, it’s very true.

Recently, I had a chance to test version 1.5 of this for myself and from my experience, it works really well. It’s not just a simple application, but a full-fledged dictation solution for any Mac user, especially for a writer or a journalist.

One of the features I loved from the first moment I saw it in Windows 7 was Snap, the one that lets you instantly resize any document window by dragging it to one side of your screen.

Irradiated Software makes a Mac utility that does a similar job. It’s called Sizeup, and I find it pretty useful. But it’s keyboard-controlled, not mouse-controlled, and you have to remember some new shortcuts to get the most from it. How about a mouse-controlled alternative?

Enter Cinch, a new app from the Sizeup developers.

This was supposed to be my Nook review. I ordered two way back in early November. I was supposed to be telling you all about the Nook’s awesome-touchiness, fast page turning, loaning books to friends and even giving a short primer on how you can check out books from your local library and read them on your Nook, something Amazon’s Kindle could never do with its proprietary formats.

But I’m not, because it ain’t here.

It isn’t here, despite being assured it would arrive by Dec 12th, then reassured it would get here by the 18th–and then further assured when it didn’t ship Monday, that BN.com was gonna ship it super-expedited-over-night-air to make it on time.

It isn’t here and it isn’t gonna be on Friday.

Of course they did ship yesterday, if you call strapping it to the back of a turtle and pointing him in the direction of my house shipping it.

I am assured by BN customer service it will get here Monday, just one business day after their revised, revised again, and yes we really mean it this time, promised date –unfortunately that will be one day too long; since me and my little ones will be heading off to Grandmas house Sunday.

Barnes & Noble, you totally Grinched my Christmas, and I wrote this just for you:

(sung to Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie”)

It came into this world as a prospect
Look into its screen
You can see the covers of your books
Loan ‘em to your friends
Read ‘em in the store
Every page you turn makes you want it even more

But Hey I think about the day
Barnes & Noble ran away with my pay
When it came delivery day
Now it’s stuck in transit in that truck
And I’m just a sucker with a lump of coal

Hey, like a chump… Hey, like a chump… Hey, like a chump

[Chorus]
I did it all for the Nookie
C’mon
The Nookie
C’mon
So you can take that bookie
And stick it up your, yeah!!
Stick it up your, yeah!!
Stick it up your, yeah!!

Why did it take so long?
Why did I wait so long, huh?
To ship it out? but you didn’t
And I’m not the only one underneath the sun who didn’t get it

So Apple has allowed into the Store a third-party video recording application for plain old 2G and 3G iPhones; but honestly, don’t get your hopes up too high.

iVideoCamera by Laan Labs suffers some serious limitations: it only records three frames a second, it can only record for a minute at most, and resolution is just 160×213. It’s little more than a series of stills stitched together into something vaguely resembling moving pictures.

UK newspaper The Guardian this morning launched its iPhone app.

And wow, it’s pretty damn good.

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.

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.

As Christmas approaches, you might be thinking of buying a pocket sized video recorder for your loved one. But which one should you get? A Flip? An iPod Nano?

How about none of the above? When I asked my Twitter followers the same question, they were unanimous: “Get a Kodak Zi8“, they said.

So what’s so good about it?

In a sea of bulky, boxy waterproof cameras that do little to encourage stashing them in a pocket and bringing along for the ride, the Pentax Optio WS80 is a refreshing change — it’s tiny, and practically begs to be stuck in a pocket and brought on the next romp. But that scaled-down size is at least in part responsible for scaled-down performance.

Quite new on the App Store is Launchball, a physics game that might look familiar to you if you’ve ever played the London Science Museum‘s online version.

The Museum has ported the web-based Flash game to the iPhone, with some help from Bright AI, and the result is lots of fun.

Epson should have called the Artisan all-in-one the “Intern” instead — it works that hard to please. It’s up on all the latest technology, surprises with nifty tricks; and while it isn’t exactly cheap, for what it does it’s a bargain. And unlike that sloppy, kind of half-working old printer with coffee-stained teeth you hired ages ago, Epson’s new beauty is snappily dressed, fast and reliable.

I’m probably not anything like the target demographic of the Harry Potter: Spells iPhone game. Even so, a chance at reviewing an app that leverages the iPhone’s motion sensing abilities to let me turn my friends to stone was too good to pass up.

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. has taken an ambitious idea and executed it without much thought to gameplay.

Today’s Best Thing Ever is Lo-mob, a gorgeous new photo effects app for iPhone.

The emphasis is on decidedly retro-looking shots. There are 28 (count ’em) different effects on offer, ranging from 35mm format film to a variety of instant camera prints.

Lo-mob will take photos from your Camera Roll or let you snap fresh ones. It then takes a few seconds to generate preview thumbnails of all the different effects, and shows you a list. Pick from the list to see a full-size version (you’ll need to wait a few more seconds to see it).

Lo-mob isn’t the fastest app around, and could do with some tweaks to make it easier and faster to use. (Such as: flick left and right to move from one effect to the next; a “save all” feature to save full-size versions of all the effects; and a favorites feature so you can remove the effects you don’t plan on using.)

But those are minor niggles. I really love this app and haven’t been able to stop playing with it. There are a lot of effects apps on the App Store, but none of them have yet managed to offer anything very different (CameraBag remains the best of the bunch). Lo-mob does offer something different, and deserves a place alongside CameraBag on your iPhone.

To give you an idea of what it can do, I’ve taken screenshots of all the different effects.

Here’s the original photo:

These are the “Classic Vintage” effects: