software - page 41

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2s7nydo6w

Look, it’s Rogue for iPhone, otherwise known as Rogue Touch.

Those of you of a certain age will have fond memories of Rogue, which became very popular in the early 80s. Its co-creator Glenn Wichman has written an entertaining history (sadly, his link to Rogue-related stories he’s been sent is broken) and of course, these days you can play it in a browser window.

Chronosoft’s colorful update is a world away from Rogue’s ASCII origins, and the gameplay is very different because the keyboard controls have been replaced with (somewhat hard to fathom) swipes, touches and gestures. So if you want something more authentic (and you’d rather not pay for your dungeon-exploring), you should try Gandreas Software’s version of the original, which is much more “Roguelike”. It includes a plain ASCII mode and a graphics mode, and lets you enter commands with letter-shaped finger gestures. It’s still very different, but it’s as close to the original as a keyboard-less device is going to get.

And if you still want to play the original game on your computer, you can download it from Sourceforge. See you in the dungeons.

The folks at Omni got a mysterious gift via email the other day: a script that hunts through an iPhoto database for Faces, and relationships between them.

Then it takes what it’s found and spits out an OmniGraffle document showing which people appear in photos together. The result is this weird spidery diagram.

Judging by the comments, some people have had problems getting the script (created by Armin Briegel) working. An updated version has been posted, though, so it might still be worth a try if you have OmniGraffle installed.

This is a neat little trick, so I wonder how long it will be before we get something like this functionality inside iPhoto. After all, it’s already possible to use Places as a criterion for creating Smart Folders – with any luck, a future update will add Faces to that list. Then it would be possible to create Smart Folders that contain two or more particular people.

I’m not sure which this post is more in favor of: Camino (The World’s Best Browser) or Dropbox (The World’s Best Sync Thing), so let’s just say we love both of them and get on with it.

The marvellous Mac OS X Hints has a hint for Camino/Dropbox users everywhere: how to sync Camino via Dropbox. Which makes a great deal of sense if you use Camino on more than one machine.

Camino, like Firefox and other ‘zilla-based browsers, stores all its stuff in a profile folder on your hard disk. Normally that profile is buried in your Library/Application Support folder, but you can move it to your Dropbox folder and with a tiny bit of Terminal-fu, link the one place to t’other. Camino carries on its merry way, and any changes it makes to the newly-relocated profile are invisibly and promptly synced to your other machines thanks to the incredible magic of Dropbox.

I think this is the aspect of Dropbox that makes it so much more appealing than other sync services I’ve used in the past: Dropbox doesn’t act like an application, it acts like just another folder on your system. It works with and inside the Finder, no messing about, no having to remember to do anything (like click a button marked “Sync”).

It’s just a folder. But a MAGIC folder.

Microsoft used an image of an ambling snow leopard licking its chops for the backdrop to its Live Search homepage on Thursday, prompting a few in the business and technology press to speculate why.

Among them, Ina Fried at c|net is likely furthest from the mark, with her suggestion Microsoft could have been showing a player’s tell that Live Search will be the default search engine in Safari’s tool bar when the next version of OS X launches.

Fried suggests that because Microsoft has money to spend and because it might be willing to do so in order to get the market share boost for Live Search that such a deal would bring, well, she admits the idea is a “crazy” one, but she put it out there any way.

Why it won’t happen: Apple doesn’t need the money and has almost never made it a practice to co-brand its products with services that suck.

Have you ever tried reading in the car and gotten a headache, or even sick to your stomach? For just 99¢ you can get that feeling anywhere, any time with SkyCoaster 3D on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

SkyCoaster 3D makes effective use of panoramic photography by Gavin Farrell and iPhone’s 3D rendering engine to create a fully customizable rollercoaster experience right on your mobile device. Users can tweak parameters such as height, track length, and acceleration, as well as adjust the ride’s loop-the-loop, corkscrew and downward spiral effects.

The app comes with a built-in techno soundtrack to heighten (or, if you prefer, enhance) its vertiginous effects, or a track from the device’s iPod can be used. The precise map of every ride is randomly generated, so each ride is unique.

Barf bags sold separately.

UPDATE: v1.1 of SkyCoaster 3D released early Friday and v1.1 makes it even easier to induce barfing. The track is more detailed (with links that run perpendicularly to the rails), which gives a greater sensation of speed. Also, you can look around during the ride, and even ride the roller coaster with your back facing forward.

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Flux solves a problem that I didn’t even realize I had.

It automatically adjusts your computer’s monitor brightness according to the time of day and likely lighting conditions. Most screens look fine during the morning hours, because they’re made to be BRIGHT like the day outside. But when you come back to them after dark, or even just as evening’s falling, they sear your eyes and you reach for the brightness controls.

Flux automates that. Tell it your location and the kind of lighting you normally work under, and it will do the rest. I like the way you set it up and forget about it after that – it will take care of everything without you having to think about it. My kind of software.

Well. That didn’t take long.

Just Tuesday we reported on the sad news that Apple decided a South Park iPhone app that allowed downloading of episode clips would be “potentially offensive,” and so barred it from distribution in the AppStore.

Here’s a how-to video for all the jailbreaking criminals out there who just can’t live without South Park on the iPhone.

Dude has pretty good taste in music and a very easy-going instructional manner. If you’re willing to flaunt “the law” he shows you how to download South Park episodes to your iPhone and even how to put ’em on your PC.

iPhone developer Jason Cross has the antidote to the nine thousand fart apps available on the AppStore, an ingenious application called iFreshener.

FIGHT BACK against Fart app inanity!

Simply launch iFreshener and touch the screen. Using its non-patent-pending psychosomatic virtual smell nonenzymes, iFreshener will make you and those around you feel like better smells are on the way.

Among the reasons Cross touts for spending 99¢ on his app:

* iFreshener costs less than the average name-brand non-virtual air freshener

* Non-virtual air fresheners eventually run out of air freshening chemicals. iFreshener’s virtual smell nonenzymes never run out (so long as you keep your iPhone/iPod charged).

* iFreshener won’t blind you if accidentally sprayed towards your face.

* Free updates for life are included with iFreshener.

Do you get free lifetime updates with real world non-virtual air fresheners? I think not!

Jakob Nielsen is the one of the world’s leading Web usability experts. What that actually means is that people spend a lot of time criticizing him, as he spends a lot of time criticizing them. That’s especially true because his website, Useit.com, is stripped of flashiness to the point of looking a lot like a HyperCard slide deck circa 1992 — but without any visuals.

Nielsen has finally delivered a new verdict on the mobile web (it’s been about nine years), and, to the surprise of no one, he hates it. Regular phones are “horrible,” smart phones are “bad,” and the iPhone is “impoverished.” He also says some fairly common sense things that are none-the-less often ignored, like, design a website that fits the strengths of the device that will view it.

The only really interesting line comes near the end, when he makes reference to Silicon Valley legend Alan Kay’s proclamation that the Mac was “the first computer worth criticizing.”

“Similarly, the iPhone is the first mobile Internet device worth criticizing. It’s a starting point for mobile online-services access, not an endpoint.

Although devices will get better, the big advances must come from websites. Sites (including intranets) must develop specialized designs that optimize the mobile user experience. Today, few sites have mobile versions, and those that do are usually very poorly designed, without knowledge of the special guidelines for mobile usability.”

Well said. And absolutely true.

Via Cennydd

iFart Mobile, maker of a wildly popular app for iPhone and iPod Touch, asked a court on Friday to rule that it can use the term “pull my finger” without risking trademark infringement claims by another iPhone fart app named, …wait for it, Pull My Finger.

InfoMedia, which developed iFart Mobile, filed a complaint for declaratory judgment in Colorado District Court naming rival Air-O-Matic as defendant after a lawyer from Air-O-Matic demanded $50,000 from InfoMedia for its use of the phrase, according to an InfoMedia blog post.

Apparently, Air-O-Matic first approached Apple with complaints that InfoMedia was guilty of unfair business practices and trademark infringement because it used the term “pull my finger” in a news release and YouTube promo video. Air-O-Matic also asked that iFart Mobile be removed from the iPhone App Store, but Apple told the companies to work it out among themselves, according to a report at Cnet.

Early this year, iFart Mobile was one of the more popular titles on the AppStore, where there are currently over 75 fart-themed titles on offer. The bloom may be off the rose, however, as only iFart (99¢) Mobile and the free app Atomic Fart are in the top 100 downloads of either category.

Mike Pinkerton, who has been building web browsers since before you were on the internet at all, is something of a hero of mine. He’s worked on all sorts of Mozilla and Mozilla-offshoot code, and was one of the key people behind my daily browser of choice, Camino. This man knows how to build browsers, kids.

These days he works for Google on the team that is building a Mac version of Chrome, Google’s browser of choice for the next few years.

And he’s just posted this little announcement:

“This week, everything came together and we can now load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs.”

(There’s also a screenshot at the other end of that link, which is worth seeing.)

There’s still a pile of work to do, but the news is that one of the most important aspects of Chrome – that a tab can crash without taking down the whole app – is working as expected.

Partly because I’m impressed by what I’ve seen of Chrome on Windows so far, and partly because I’ll happily install anything that Mike Pinkerton’s worked on, I’m very excited about this. Chrome for Mac might – just might – be the browser I’d be prepared to leave Camino for.

We start this week with The Belgian Constitution.

Yes, the *actual Belgian Constitution*. As in, the Constitution of the nation of Belgium. Not a joke app. The real thing. Look:

“One of the most important changes was the introduction of the Court of Arbitration whose competencies were expanded by a special law of 2003, to include Title II (Articles 8 to 32), and the Articles 170, 172 and 191 of the Constitution. The Court therefore developed into a constitutional court and in May 2007 it was formally redesignated Constitutional Court.”

See?

I think this goes some way to proving that Rule 34 applies not just to the internet, but to the App Store: if you can imagine it, there is (or there will be) an app for it.

Moving on.

More than a year ago, I was visiting my cousin in Sunnyvale. It just so happens she works at Apple, but that fact is not germane to this story, though I mention it for the sake of serendipity.

She had a little gadget called Perfect Guy or Perfect Man (I forget which) that, when you pressed a button, produced a computerized voice that said things like, “how about if we just cuddle tonight” and “we might be lost, i’ll ask for directions” and “i don’t know how to fix it” – that sort of thing.

I thought it was cute; my six year-old son couldn’t get enough of mashing the button.

Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, iPhone developer Michael Hill has released Perfect Girl, an app premised on similar lines, available now in the AppStore for 99¢.

Follow after the jump for what you can expect to hear from the Perfect Girl.

Via Gizmodo

Two stories in the iPhone developers ecosystem Thursday illustrate the challenges of navigating the path to fame and fortune on the back of a cleverly written app and its AppStore sales.

First comes news from AppCubby, whose experiment with 99¢ pricing we reported on a few weeks ago, saying, indeed, selling apps for 99¢ and depending on voluntary donations to cover the gap between success and failure is, for AppCubby anyhow, unsustainable.

Blogger/developer Erica Sadun relates how Apple’s own Department of AppStore Security is quashing some innovative developer marketing efforts and refusing to approve any app that advertises a contest or promises prizes or awards in the app itself or in its AppStore description.

Sadun uses the example of iFartMobile’s currently selling app, which advertises a $5000 prize to one lucky user for submitting a winning video of the app in action, saying Apple’s lawyers want no part of being named in potential suits against developers who may fail to deliver on contest prizes advertised through the AppStore. Developers are now being told no app using contest or sweepstakes marketing will be approved.

With the news this week there are now more than 20,000 apps on iTunes, it’s clear a lot of people out there are hoping to strike it rich panning for AppStore gold.

One can hardly blame Apple for trying to police the panhandlers, though, as Sadun points out, it can be frustrating for developers when the policing lacks transparency.

I’m one of those freaks who much prefers listening to radio than watching TV. Consequently, I like to have radios around me. I have one in my office, one in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom. I really need to get hold of one for the bathroom.

FStream and the BBC Streams web site have jointly come to my aid.

It’s not exactly Shazam for fonts, but WhatTheFont is a pretty cool new app in the AppStore that will identify or make pretty darn good suggestions for identifying almost any font you find in the wild.

Using the iPhone’s built-in camera, users can photograph the text in question (or choose an existing image from the camera’s photo albums). The app allows you to crop the image, focusing on only the important parts before uploading to the WhatTheFont web-based identification service.

After confirming which characters are used in the image, the app provides a list of possible matching fonts, which users can either e-mail a link to a MyFonts page with more info on that font, or open the page in the iPhone’s built-in Safari web browser.

iPod Touch users can even get in on the action by using any image saved from apps such as Safari and Mail.

The app is free in the AppStore.

Via MacMerc

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6BrtXI9Da4

If you’re one of the many out there who lives wild and free with a jailbroken iPhone, this is a big week for you.

First we reported on the availability of some serious porn for you, and now it appears you can have turn-by-turn voice navigation, courtesy of the dev team at xGPS.

xGPS uses Google’s map data and driving directions, adding a real-time navigation readout and a voice engine.

If you expect you might lose your data connection during the drive, you can also select a map area to download ahead of time.

Watch the ModMyi video above to learn more.

The app also supports a number of external GPS units, so 1st-gen iPhone and iPod Touch bad-boys and girls can get in on the fun too.

Via Gizmodo

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHU4ZHq15Y

Oh, the fun you’ll have with Fracture. Created by Visuamobile, it finally gives you the chance to find out what it would be like to smash your iPhone to pieces – without actually doing so.

I very nearly put this in a WTF iPhone Apps Of The Week post, but then I thought – actually, no. This might be quite entertaining, especially for the kids. My son loves smashing stuff up (I blame Power Rangers, myself) so I think he’ll get a kick out of destroying my iPhone. Over and over again.

Fracture is, as they say, “Coming soon” on the App Store.

Using Dock Spacers from Caleb PIke on Vimeo.

Here’s something I’ve not thought about before: an utility that lets you create multiple Dock configurations, each one mapped to one of your Spaces. It’s called Dock Spaces and you can get it from here.

As someone who rarely makes use of Spaces and always keeps the Dock hidden from view, this leaves me bemused at best. But I know lots of you love yer Spaceses and yer Dockses, so this one’s for you.

(Look again at the video, though: wouldn’t you find it annoying to wait for the second’s pause as each fresh Dock is spawned for each Space? I would. Blimey.)

Ecamm’s Call Recorder plug-in for Skype is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use solution for enabling voice and video call recording in Skype, well worth the $15 cost – a highly recommended plug-in for anyone with a Mac who wants to keep records of their Skype voice and video calling history.

I ran into a situation over the weekend where I had scheduled what I knew would be a long interview, something I wanted to be able to refer to later this week when I’m writing up a profile of my subject for a project I’m working on.

The thought of once again trying to cobble something together using a cassette recorder with my iPhone on speaker had finally become too much to bear: how many times in the past had a conversation been too garbled to interpret, or had I forgot to press the record button until several minutes into the conversation? Once I even did an entire interview having forgotten to put batteries in the cassette recorder, and had to face the ignominy of asking my interview subject to let me re-conduct our whole conversation the next day.

Of course, the simplest thing might be for Apple to enable (or at least approve) a comprehensive recording mechanism for iPhone calls, but since that’s not the case at present – and may or may not be grist for another post – I decided to use Skype for our call once I found Call Recorder and installed it.

Ecamm’s Call Recorder has been around for a while, but gets it right with this lightweight (2.3 MB) plug-in that installs in minutes and runs automatically within Skype – with the advantage of being highly configurable and supporting fully manual operation as well. The current version 2.3.4 also handles recording and archiving of video calls, though I’ve not yet personally done one of those.

Both sides of a voice call are recorded to separate tracks in a QuickTime movie, which can be easily converted to MP3 format and then emailed or posted to a website. Call Recorder can handle completely uncompressed recording for highest fidelity, or compress recordings at a 2:1 ratio or using AAC encoding. Video encoding can be done as JPEG, MPEG-4 or H.264.

For any journalist, podcaster, online instructor, even for business people looking to ensure accountability and corporate audit trails, Call Recorder adds easy, indispensable value to Skype on the Mac.

Last week we wrote about a kind of silly competition going on out there in Mac land between people vying for the title for running the most apps simultaneously on a Mac.

Comes now, Cult reader Jay Pan, who figures all the buzz about people running OS X on hacked netbooks should entitle him to some consideration for managing to get 80 apps going with OS X running on an Advent 4211 ( MSI Wind Clone ), with both Blender and Daz3D launched.

“I’ve been trying to determine Atom’s performances with Mac OS X for some time now, and I think this shows Atom’s netbooks are not so crippled!” he told us.

So what do you think? Is Pan’s record in the same league with the 240 apps running on a Mac Pro 8 core machine? Should the judges create a special “netbook” category for the dubious “Busy Mac” honor?

Follow after the jump for Pan’s hardware specs and list of apps running, and be sure to click on the image above for a larger view.

Twitter engineer and minimalism enthusiast Alex Payne writes with some passion on the subject of “everything buckets” – by which he means those apps into which you can throw pretty much everything.

You know the apps he means: the likes of Yojimbo, Evernote, Devonthink, and a dozen or so competitors. Database-powered shoe boxes into which you can chuck PDFs, web archives, bookmarks, plain or rich texts, anything really. And then search through the lot.

Alex thinks “everything buckets” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The proprietary databases they use might break; they add little that the OS X filesystem doesn’t offer:

“Everything Buckets are selling you a filesystem, and removing the step of creating and saving a new file within that filesystem. That’s their primary value. Whatever organization scheme they may claim to offer, you can replicate on the filesystem. I promise. Even tags (symlinks, aliases –œ look ’em up).”

I suppose he has a point, but I suspect there are many OS X users and Cult readers who will disagree with him. Yes you *can*, with a little effort, replicate most of what Yojimbo does by fiddling around with Automator actions, Smart folders, Spotlight comments and Finder windows; but let’s be honest, who has the time for all that, when Yojimbo (or any of the other apps Alex mentions) will do it all for you in an instant?

But that’s Alex’s point: the convenience of the app is what you’re trading your freedom (and particularly your *data structure*) for.

Over to you then, Cultists. Does Alex have a point? Or will he have to prise your Yojimbo archive / Devonthink database / Evernote note collection from your cold, dead hands?

Me? I’ve still got a Yojimbo bookmarklet and I’m gonna use it.

PhotoCanvas, a new image editing app from Big Canvas, Inc. could make Apple’s eventual decision to enable MMS functionality on the iPhone and iPod Touch a moot point.

While many have decried the iPhone’s inability to easily send photos and graphic images in text messaging, a relative few in the US may be aware of Big Canvas’ flagship application, PhotoShare, the free service that allows users to stay connected with their private or public networks through visual social networking.

With a few simple touches users can easily take images captured through daily life and distribute them to all PhotoShare users or to family and friends. After its release in July 2008, PhotoShare quickly became a “must-have” social networking application in Japan, where consumers are already familiar with an always-connected lifestyle, generating over a quarter million comments and photos per month.

Now PhotoCanvas joins a line-up of three other Big Canvas apps that let users personalize photos taken on the go with the iPhone and iPod Touch and, with PhotoShare, enjoy sharing them with others as easily as if they sent them in a text message.

“We are still in the very early stage of a true ‘mobile computing’ era enabled by the iPhone,” Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Big Canvas told us. “The mobile phone started as a voice communication device, and evolved into a text-based communication device with SMS (texting). This is the beginning of the ‘visual communication’ era, and the large number of photo applications on the AppStore are proof of this.”

Unlike some of the more sophisticated photo editing apps that have shown up, such as Light and Photonasis, PhotoCanvas is a simple, easy to use tool for adding backgrounds, frames, text and drawing to an image, taking the everyday and turning it into something unique for sharing with others, using a few simple taps and strokes on the iPhone’s touch interface.

Creations can be saved to the iPhone’s camera roll and uploaded on the go to a user’s PhotoShare account, where family, friends, and other PhotoShare users can comment and respond to an image, creating an interactive, visual communication experience.

“One of the great things about PhotoShare is people share images in real time – it’s like a visual version of Twitter,” Nakajima told us. “It’s clear to me that the number of users who will edit their photos on mobile phones will eventually exceed the number of PhotoShop users on PC. PhotoCanvas is the beginning of our serious attempt to participate in this innovation.”

PhotoCanvas offers a number of preset backgrounds and photo frames that can be customized with drawing and text rendered in 48 colors and two dozen font faces, all of which are accessed and applied through an easy-to-use, intuitive UI that makes good use of Apple’s mobile platform design.

Available now in the AppStore for $1.99, PhotoCanvas is a great complement to the free PhotoShare service for anyone wanting to add some flair to their visual communication on the go.

Using bookmarklets and shortcuts in Camino from Giles Turnbull on Vimeo.

Here’s something new for you: a little video demonstration of one of the tricks I’ve been using on my computer for many years. Assigning short, mnemonic text shortcuts to browser bookmarks and bookmarklets, so that I can drive them from the keyboard.

Many of you, I’m sure, will know about this trick, but some of you won’t, so I hope it’s helpful to you.

This is also my first demo video made using Screenflow, which I purchased a day or so ago and am very, very pleased with. It makes screencasts like this super simple.

Steve Jobs’ worst-case scenario is about to come true.

From the earliest days of the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple sought to assure consumers its mobile devices would not become handheld smut emporiums, and yet the adult entertainment industry began steadily chipping away at such promises almost as soon as they were made.

Comes now Variah, with a brand new mobile “gaming” app exclusively for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touch that lets users interactively touch, strip and stroke beautiful models to climax.

Apple’s mobile devices are soon enough going to be definitely NSFW, and we’re not talking anything near as tame as iBoobs, either, let me tell ya.

Variah’s UFookMe app not only offers interaction, it also scores players on foreplay technique, the number of erotic surprises they discover and the quality of climax achieved.

The first title, UFookTanya, features porn star Tanya James, a tall, blonde, girl-next-door who definitely reveals more than anything you’ll see in even the AppStore’s relatively risqué apps, such as iGirl or Wobble.

A brave new world is coming for iPhone and iPod Touch users and some of it will be clothing optional. Ҭ