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 Azkend HD, Dizzypad HD, GTA: Chinatown Wars, LetsTans 8-in-1, Plants vs. Zombies HD, Scrabble for iPad, Scrabble Tile Rack, and The Catching.
Last year, we were pretty impressed by UpNext’s 3D mapping app for the iPhone, which rendered landmarks like the Empire State Building in 3D — which is, of course, cool; but it was only available for NYC, there was no iPad version (because there was no iPad — wow) and it cost a whopping $3.
Now, UpNext 3D Cities has a new name and is available for a bunch of new cities (San Francisco, Boston, DC and Austin, home of SXSW), it’s been tweaked to play well on the iPad and its price has been reduced by $3 — yes, it’s free.
But the pretty, 3D-rendered buildings are just icing on the cake — check out the cool way the app graphically illustrates where to find Asian restaurants through a sorta infrared-vision trick toward the end of the above clip, or the way it overlays public transportation routes. And if that’s not enough, they’ve added the ability to see what’s trending and where your friends be at in Foursquare.
Veteran pop artist David Hockney, who has been fingerpainting daily on his iPhone, has now started sketching on an iPad.
It seems he may be ready to ditch the phone for the digital sketch pad:
“The iPad is far more subtle, in fact it really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million,” Hockney told The Standard. “It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.
Hockney, 72, has been using Apple devices to create art since 2009, favoring the Brushes app, which is what he uses on the iPad, too.
“What makes the iPad better than the iPhone is its larger size. The iPhone was more about the relationship between the hand and the ear whereas this is all about the hand and the eye and makes for far better co-ordination.”
We’ve done a few stories on iPhone art, if you’re ready to trade the iPhone for the iPad — or not — we’d like to hear from you.
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 AlphaBattle, Chop Chop Runner, Compression, ESPN Pinball on iPad, Mini Golf Wacky Worlds Free, Opera Mini, Parcel Panic, and Pinball HD.
Over 1 million iPads have been sold since it first came out almost a month ago, and we’re guessing that many of our readers have one, am I right? If you don’t, sorry to rub it in your face, but we’ll be giving away 4 iPad apps today as part of our ongoing Monday Giveaway series. We want to thank Brian from Appular for putting this app bundle together. If you’re an iPhone or iPad app developer, make sure you consider Appular for all of your marketing efforts. First, let’s go through how to enter to win the apps:
We’ve done the status tagging thing in the past, and some of you have had issues with it. So, I’ve taken the precious time out of my day to put together a short demonstration on how to do it. Remember, the privacy settings of the status message must be set to “Everyone” or else the status tag won’t show up on our page, and we’ll have no idea that you tagged us.
Less than a month since its release, there are nearly 5,000 apps available for the iPad, most are games but there are some important early sellers in the medical and finance titles.
Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, tallied some 4,870 applications for Apple’s magical tablet to date. (You can download the full report here.)
Games dominate iPad apps, with 32% of the total at 1,577 titles so far, Entertainment and books trail far behind, together they total about half as many apps with 455 and 396 titles, respectively.
When Jobs announced the iPad, declared the netbook to be dead and claimed that the iPad was a decent productivity machine, I was cynical. Lustful for an iPad I was, but as a blogger, the ability to type in one window while referencing a source in another is invaluable. Simply put, my netbook allowed me to do that, but the iPad didn’t… and until it did, there was little chance I’d ever do serious work on it.
I should have taken account the ingenuity of app developers though. Desktop for the iPad essentially allows you to split screen your iPad. You can specify what functionality you want each split screen panel to have, but for my purposes, I could browse a page in Safari on one side of the screen while using the “Email Composer” on the right side to type in text.
What a perfectly elegant little solution, especially for just $0.99.
Scott Beale of Laughing Squid snapped this spiffy wooden stand cradling an iPad cash register at soon-to-be opened San Francisco coffee house Sightglass.
The iPad will ring up those double-ristretti with Square, an app with a peripheral credit card swiper (see the built-in one on the bottom of this wooden stand) that turns the iPhone and iPad into cash registers, accepting cash or credit card payments. Square can calculate sales tax, accept touchscreen finger signatures and then generate email or SMS receipts.
No word on who crafted the fab stand, yet, though.
Via Laughing Squid
Think you can do a better job running a 3G network than AT&T. Here’s your chance to prove it: Telecom Tycoon HD is a mobile broadband network sim for the iPad that allows you to roll-out a 2G, 3G and LTE network across a virtual city.
Political caricaturist Mark Fiore was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning to ever be awarded to a web-only cartoonist, so obviously he’s got some artistic and editorial merit… but not in Apple’s eyes.
Word from the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that Fiore submitted his iPhone app, NewsToons, back in December, but was rejected for “ridiculing public figures.”
Mobile Safari’s method of handling multiple pages groks well with the iPhone’s small touchscreen, but on the iPad, it seems slow and cumbersome when there’s plenty of real estate for desktop Safari’s standard method of navigating between open websites: tabs.
Atomic Web Browser ($0.99, Free) brings tabs back to the iPhone OS. Better, it does so elegantly even on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gew68Qj5kxw
Atomic Antelope’s Alice in Wonderland app for the iPad is certainly plenty frabjous — and makes a strange case for the iPad as the twenty-first century’s digital successor to the pop-up book — but what I really want to see is how the iPad changes the reading game when it comes to drier books.
As beautiful as this adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is, it’s also an easy approach. But how will people use the iPad’s capability to expand upon the text of a book like Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan or Nabokov’s Ada, or Adror, or Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or other less playful and anarchic works? I can’t wait to see.
Update: This article is not intended for the Irony challenged.
So I’m a hypocrite. After swearing that there was no way I’d ever own a tablet with a phone operating system, I broke down and got one. At this price point, I don’t see how I couldn’t. The wife couldn’t be happier, one needs just look at my bathroom above to see why. Gone are the endless stacks of magazines and books. Gone, is the image of her husband stuck behind his desk, nose in the computer (now, I’m on the couch, nose in the iPad, but at least being in the same room gives the impression of being engaged with the family).
Follow me after the jump for my impressions after week one.
The iPhone’s stripped down version of Safari lacks many of the features of its more well-endowed OSX brother — for instance, Mobile Safari won’t do tabs, or let users make in-page word searches. And iPad’s Mobile Safari won’t perform those tricks either.
A couple of months ago, we reviewed Vais Salikhov’s Find In Page, a $1 app that patched the latter hole, making in page searches possible on the iPhone. Version 2.0 was just released yesterday, making it fully compatible with the iPad.
Find In Page is probably even more of a must-have item on the iPad than it is on the iPhone, since the iPad is such a surf-board that Safari will probably get used much more heavily than on the iPhone. Although, maybe a few hours worth of patience are in order here — it’s entirely possible the tweaks revealed within the next few hours or so might contain this same little fix.
The iPad, as we all know, does not have a camera. But one developer has come up with an ingenious way of getting round that minor inconvenience, and turning the iPad into a photography device.
All you need to make it work is an iPhone.
Before you can even get your hands on one, Northern Film & Media is offering £40,000 (about $64,500) for iPad application ideas from developers in England’s North East.
Dev teams — which can include some members from out of the area — have until February 24 to come up with revenue-generating ideas that don’t duplicate the device’s standard app functions, aren’t kissing cousins of iPhone apps and are launchable by summer, 2010.
They’re putting up the cash in the hopes that locals will make a mark on the iPad:
“The iPod changed the way we thought about music. The iPhone transformed our attitudes to mobile phones, and opened our minds to all the things they could do other than call people” Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film & Media said in the presser. “What does the iPad transform? You decide. Newspaper and magazine reading? Gaming? Writing and painting?”
The location requirement is fairly strict but may be skirtable: the app must “be developed by teams where at least 70% of the team’s talent have their base in and 50% of the budget is spent in the North East.”
Complete info and application download here.
