Paper Toss for iPhone is a brilliant pick-up-and-play game that is guaranteed to kill some time when you’re waiting for your train, when your boss is out of the office, or when you’re waiting for your little ones to give up the TV. If you’re one of the 21,000,000 paper tossers out there, you’ll be pleased to know the game is now available on the iPad, including a new level and improved visuals for the larger screen. But is it worth that $2.99 price tag?
A faux marble stand in hardwood from Old Time Computers.
The iPad has already gone beyond kid-appeaser — a recent study reported that the most downloaded apps are for adults using the device at work.
So if you want to give the iPad a permanent place in your office, you might want something to prop it up with that doesn’t involve pencils and rubber bands.
Here are our top five picks for iPad stands that deserve a place next to that sleek perpetual calendar and won’t look like some random piece of junk when your iPad is elsewhere.
1. Old Time Computers Marble finish stand. For that banker desk look, try this handcrafted stand in hardwood with a marble finish. It comes with a USB cable and audio jack, available for $59.00 on Etsy. The same artisan has some terrific wooden stands in the same vein — including a combo iPad/iPhone dock charger — as well as antique-looking external keyboards with a steampunk aesthetic.
Apps that use GPS to peg a user’s location on a map are nothing new — but an app that works with the user’s own maps — of say a college campus, airport terminals or the sprawling San Diego Zoo — now that’s a prettyneat trick.
Snap + Map by FogTechnologies is a $2 app that lets you does exactly that, by superimposing your GPS location onto a user-defined map — either downloaded in the form of a pdf or from a picture taken with the iPhone’s camera. The app calibrates the iPhone’s GPS receiver with the map by asking you to enter your current location, then move a short distance and enter it again. Of course, much of this app’s usefulness depends on the iPhone’s somewhat spotty GPS capabilities.
Brilliant idea though — especially for ephemeral locations like Burning Man, where I can totally envision this app saving my life during my next visit; possibly quite literally.
Take Smule’s Glee or I Am T-Pain popstar-forging apps, strip away the Auto-Tune (and some of the polish), stir in a little Simon Cowell and bam — you’ve got Music Idol, a dollar-app that creates a virtual American Idol community on the iPhone, complete with the ability to rate other would-be star’s performances.
The app — which has also been formatted for the iPad — gives users the ability to upload 20-second performance, then show off their talents through the app’s searchable database or post clips to the user’s Facebook page. The developer claims a 2000-member user-base (culled partly from an earlier version of the app called Riff Raters).
While the Smule apps are collaborative in nature, this one seems like more of a way to introduce the world to your unique talents — or perhaps invite a hailstorm of abuse. Either way. to prod talent in the app’s direction, the developer is giving away $10 iTunes gift cards every week.
Maker of diabolically intricate pixel-art extrordinaire, the phenomenal eBoy has just released his first iPhone App. Called FixPix, it’s a simple, slightly nauseating but completely addictive puzzle game: you use your iPhone’s accelerometer to tilt cut-out portions of an image back and forth until they perfectly line up, bringing you to the next stage. You can grab it now for only $2.
Every few months, Mac security firm Intego pops up, waves their arms hysterically around and screams that the OS X sky is falling, having identified new malware in the wild. Rinse, repeat.
Their latest report is no different: Intego has identified 30 screensavers developed by a company called 7art and one app called Mishinc FLV to MP3 that are infected with a spyware program called OSX/OpinionSpy.
Less than a week after its long overdue update allowing VoIP calls over the iPhone’s 3G connection, nearly five million people have already downloaded the latest update to the popular Skype App from iTunes.
Of course, that’s five million people who are going to go absolutely bonkers when Skype starts inexplicably charging for 3G calls at the beginning of next year.
According to Skype, they are charging to make sure they can maintain quality on Skype-to-Skype calls, but I can’t help but wonder if the long delay in bringing 3G calls to Skype was a roadblock placed by AT&T, who — rightly — see a 3G capable Skype as a threat ti their minutes business… especially once iPhone OS 4.0 comes around and enables VoIP multi-trasking.
One runs the biggest tech company in the world, the other is a global leader in fighting poverty.
This is a guest commentary by Shawn Ahmed, a anti-poverty campaigner. It was originally published here.
Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s biggest tech company. As someone who used to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, I can’t believe what I’m about to say: this is a bad thing for the world.
Today is a MacBook and MacBook Pro bonanza. Our top three picks include new MacBook Pros, starting at $1,099, along with a $759 2.26GHz MacBook and a 2.88GHz MacBook Pro for $1,899.
We’ll also check out a $929 unibody MacBook Pro, the latest crop of App Store freebies (including the multiplayer action game “Finger vs. Finger”) and deals on iPod shuffles and others.
As always, details on these and many other items are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.
If you believe iPads are not just for keeping the offspring entertained during car trips, there are numbers to back that up.
Half of the top ten paid iPad apps are “productivity tools,” in other words, apps that grown-ups use for work.
According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, the top two paid iPad apps in April are word processor Pages and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.
Pinball HD is the only game in the top five paid apps at spot no. 3, followed by note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. (You can download the full report here.)