iPhone apps - page 60

What it is: HippoRemote is an incredibly powerful remote control application for iPhone that enables you to control any Mac application from across the room. Though optimized for media apps like Plex Media Server or Boxee, it can do just about anything — including launching Spotlight from the keyboard.

Why it’s cool: Because it finally puts every possible thing you could do on a Mac at your fingertips. It uses Mac OS X’s built-in Screen Sharing features to provide a very responsive multi-touch trackpad that moves around with you. It also offers a keyboard including F-keys and command keys that can be viewed in Portrait or in Landscape. It’s absolutely seamless. It also includes 23 application-specific suites of buttons, so you have video controls for iTunes or Plex movies, but audio controls when you’re just listening to a song. Other apps, most notably Rowmote Pro, offer identical functionality, but this one just feels more accurate — possibly because it uses VNC Screen Sharing instead of a third-party program. I’m actually writing this on my iPhone into my Mac right now, and there’s virtually no lag. Additionally, it’s worked without a hitch. Simply fuss free, and perfect for your living room Mac mini.

Where to get it: HippoRemote sells for $5 in the App Store.

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

Under review this week: Diorama, Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble, Darkness, Nag-O-Meter Deluxe, Glypha, Rugby Zone, Otakukous and EPSN ScoreCenter. As always, all id.gd links are to the relevant App Store page.

Have a question? Aardvark Mobile is a great iPhone app that will find a real person to answer it – usually within minutes. It is a wonderfully useful app and has the potential to be an iPhone mainstay for years to come.

Aardvark Mobile is the latest addition to Aardvark: a social question and answer service that emerged from its beta phase earlier this year. Before Aardvark Mobile, users could only communicate with Aardvark through IM or email. The upshot of this was that if you needed a question answered from your iPhone, you had to go through your email or instant messaging app. In most circumstances you were better off finding an answer on your own using Google – even on an iPhone 2G.

But now Aardvark Mobile makes using Aardvark with an iPhone a cinch. So easy in fact, it makes Googling questions from your iPhone seem cumbersome and antiquated.

Roger Åberg of MacFeber.se has posted a quick unboxing video and first look at the highly-anticipated TomTom Car Kit for iPhone. The $120 accessory looks pretty solid, well-designed and sticks easily to the windshield. See the video above.

Link.

Veteran pop artist David Hockney has been demonstrating his passion for creating works on his iPhone since he started fingerpainting on one six months ago.

Turns out Hockney first got his hands on an iPhone one a year ago, when he grabbed it from Lawrence Weschler,  writer and director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

Weschler interviews Hockney about it what reads like a 1,528-word love letter to the iPhone for the New York Review of Books.

There’s been a lot on the 72-year-old’s use of the iPhone, not so much about how he gets the mini-masterpieces on touch screens.

Hockney’s technique? He doesn’t finger paint as much as thumb paint those flowers and landscapes he sends to friends daily.

Hockney limits his contact with the screen exclusively to the pad of his thumb. “The thing is,” Hockney explains, “if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb.” He goes on to note how people used to worry that computers would one day render us “all thumbs,” but it’s incredible the dexterity, the expressive range, lodged in “these not-so-simple thumbs of ours.”

Brushes is Hockney’s app for painting on the iPhone —  though a footnote to the story says the latest upgrade released in August is not to his liking and he continues to use the earlier version.

Interestingly, Hockney doesn’t think the art created is so great, once it’s off the device or a screen:

“Though it is worth noting,” he adds, “that the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper.”

When I was a kid, digital calculators were roughly the size of a brick, and had satisfyingly chunky displays. They also, in those pre-internet days, provided a means of minor technical mischief. Type in 5318008, flip your calculator upside down, and it appeared to say ‘boobies’. If you were five, this was the most hilarious and original gag in the history of the world.

In this modern and rather less innocent age, the media would have you believe that personal technology devices in the hands of children merely teach them how to joyride while murdering innocent puppies and simultaneously fashioning bombs out of string, jelly babies and bits of twig. It’s presumably for this reason that Apple considers it a good idea to warn you (Every. Single. Time.) when you download an eReader from the App Store that it—shock!—potentially enables you to view content that some people might deem objectionable.

Enter, stage right, James Thomson, creator of iPhone/iPod touch calculator PCalc. In a minor slice of design genius, he combined the two issues mentioned above and PCalc now slaps a huge ‘Censored!’ sign across ‘naughty’ words when your device is flipped, thereby ensuring fragile little minds aren’t warped beyond all recognition.

This is a smart, funny, satirical swipe at the recent trend towards over-zealous censorship. Unless you’re, say, Sajid Farooq of NBC, who, inexplicably takes Thomson’s joke seriously (and, sadly, he’s not alone) and states PCalc’s change would “make even George Orwell shudder in his grave”. I’m thinking Orwell would be more likely to laugh his CENSORED off.

PCalc is available on the App Store for $9.99/£5.99.

This article originally appeared on Revert to Saved.

The realtime city guide Buzzd has just released a slick and easy-to-use dining-and-drinking app that tells you what’s buzzing right now.

Available for free, the Buzzd iPhone/Touch app uses the company’s “buzzmeter” algorithm, which pulls in data from services like Twitter and Buzzd, to tell you what local venues are hot. Drunksourcing, it’s been called.

To drunksource venues you need to be a Buzzd member (it’s free) but the app will return hot places to eat and drink whether you’re a member or not. A quick test of my local neighborhood highlighted what looks like a pretty good list of the hot restaurants and bars around 16th and Valencia in SF’s Mission.

It’s certainly a lot easier to use than the overrated Urbanspoon app, which I’ve never really liked. Buzzd looks like a venue-finder I might actually use. Reviews are short and snappy, and the popularity of something is usually a pretty good yardstick of quality.

Plus, it’ll probably also function as a pretty good reverse warning system, alerting you to venues packed with insufferable hipsters.

Get the free Buzzd app here. Here’s a video demo:

All Power Pro is a cool battery meter for the iPhone/Touch that displays your battery level as an animated plasma engine.

The amount of plasma in the window indicates the amount of juice in your battery pack. Double-tap the screen for the actual percentage of charge. The plasma flows with gravity or tap the screen to watch little plasma explosions. It also estimates how much juice you’ve got left for talking, listening to music, or surfing the web.

Very cool idea to turn something mundane into something clever by putting a new interface on it. Here it is in action.

Available from the App Store for $0.99c.

In a sign that Apple is perhaps distancing itself from Google, the Cupertino company has bought a mapping startup.

In July, Apple bought the Los Angeles mapping startup Placebase, Seth Wientraub reports at Computerworld.

Placebase offered a sophisticated mapping application and API called Pushpin, which can create rich, detailed maps from all kinds of public and private data sets — much more than Google. See the example above, which shows gas stations and auto service shops in the L.A. area.

Steve Jobs has always said he likes to control the primary technology in his devices. Can he be preparing to move away from Google, especially its Mapping app, which is behind some of the iPhone’s primary functions and underlies new mapping features in iPhoto?

As Weintraub notes, Apple has been fighting with Google lately over the Google Voice app, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt quit Apple’s board to avoid conflicts of interest.

Is the Google/Apple rift deepening?

One of the dumbest decisions Apple made regarding iPhone and iPod touch is devices wiping all traces of an app when it’s deleted, but providing no means for saving preferences and progress. Unless you use an uninstaller to remove an app or game from your Mac, you can usually pick up where you left off after a reinstall; savvy Mac owners can also fiddle around with preferences, moving them between Macs to ensure consistency across machines in app environments or videogame progress.

iPhone and iPod touch don’t allow such things. Spend hours making headway in Peggle and then, for whatever reason, delete and reinstall Peggle (by accident, or through having a restore go wrong), and your progress is gone—you have to start again. It’s like 1980s arcade games after the plug has been pulled, or cheap, miserly Nintendo DS games that lack a battery back-up in the cartridge, erasing progress and high scores when the device is powered down. For a platform Apple’s pushing as the best solution for handheld gaming, it’s asinine that you cannot export and import videogame progress and save states.

There is a workaround, however, using the shareware app MobileSyncBrowser, but it’s not for the faint-hearted…

Europe’s Alpine glaciers are going fast — some reports have them washed away by 2050.

To stop them, some Alpine regions have tried gimmicks like heat-reflecting blankets, but the Swiss region of Jungfrau is banking on an iPhone app to raise awareness.

Developed by the University of Berne’s Institute for Climate Change, the Jungfrau Climate Guide app, also available on iTunes, shows hikers where the effects of climate change are already visible and what scientists know about the subject.

When people talk about classic gaming, they usually rattle on about really simple, playable games that are challenging but that a five-year-old could conceivably master. Such people were clearly traumatised by text adventures (now referred to using the rather loftier term ‘interactive fiction’) and have therefore removed them from memory.

These games were primarily text-based, with you solving puzzles via verb-noun parsers. As time went on, adventures gradually became increasingly complex and elaborate, with Infocom arguably leading the genre to its height.

Sadly and perhaps predictably, text adventures eventually got a thorough kicking. In the words of Richard Harris: “Graphics came along and the computer-using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together—the point ’n’ click game,” which, he argues, signalled the arrival of the post-literate society.

But via the magic of the internet, interactive fiction clings on, and apps for playing the Z-machine format are commonplace. Frotz is one of the best, and it now exists as a free iPod app. I interviewed its developer, Craig Smith, to find out what he thinks of interactive fiction and why he brought Frotz to Apple handhelds.

What it is: A simple puzzle platformer in which you play Jeremiah the Frog, a cheerful fellow trying to escape Satan’s curse by turning floor squares red and green with his hops — all to the music of brilliant indie rock outsider Daniel Johnston.

Why it’s cool: Didn’t you read the description? Ah, well. The play control is smooth and easy to pick up, the graphics are beautiful and cartoony, and the soundtrack is amazing. I’ve only been playing for five minutes, but I’ve already heard “Some Time Spent in Heaven.” Better still, Jeremiah is based on a mural Johnston painted in Austin, Texas, who cheerfully declares “Hi, How Are You?” to people on the campus of the University of Texas. But it’s a good game whether you know that or not.

Where to get it: On the App Store, of course. Link. It’s only 99 cents for a limited time.

Via FingerGaming

Apple announced today that there have been 2 billion downloads from the App Store. But how many of those were paid, and how may were free?

The mobile advertising firm Mobclix claims its app analytics shows that paid apps represent 77.3% of the App Store, while the other 22.7% of apps are free. However, far more free apps are downloaded than paid.

“For app developers, this means it’s much harder to get your paid app discovered,” the company says.

The App Ranking section of Mobclix’s website reveals some other interesting App Store tidbits.

While there are 20 categories of apps in total, for example, the two most popular categories — Games and Entertainment — account for more than a third of all apps in the store. Together, the Games and Entertainment categories make up 35% of all apps.

At the other end of the scale, the smallest five categories — Social Networking, Photography, Finance, Medical and Weather — account for only 6.2% of the App Store.

The site also lists the most popular apps in the 20 different categories.

Did you know that Pee Monkey Toilet Trainer is the most popular book on the App Store?

More here.

The number of apps downloaded from the App Store has passed a cool 2 billion, Apple said on Monday.

That’s means the App Store is growing like a weed. In late April, Apple announced the App Store hit one billion downloads, and 1.5 billion three months later in July — on the store’s first birthday.

The latest 500,000,000 mark took just two-and-a-half months to hit. That means about 6 million apps are being downloaded EVERY DAY. That’s a pretty mind-boggling number.

In addition, the number of apps is now 85,000 from 125,000 developers, Apple’s press release said.

Apple’s full press release after the jump:

At the giant Tokyo Game Show, everyone’s freaking out about Apple, the New York Times reports.

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are more worried about Apple and it’s new iPhone/iPod platform than the worst recession in decades, the Times says.

Apple’s recent foray into video games — with the iPhone, the iPod Touch and its ever-expanding online App Store — is causing as much hand-wringing among old industry players as the global economic slump, which threatens to take the steam out of year-end shopping for the second consecutive year.

The industry sees a big shift to casual gaming on cellphones and other handhelds, rather than expensive, overpowered consoles. Consumers are buying $0.99c games, rather than dropping $50 on big, blockbuster titles with multimillion dollar budgets and massive development teams. Of the 758 games debuted at the show, 168 are for cellphone platforms, the most ever.

Some game developers say Apple’s App Store is the biggest recent breakthrough in gaming, and the industry is better off trying to find new business models rather than new consoles.

“We are going to move away from a market where it’s the hardware that fights against each other,” one developer said during a presentation. “We are going to be moving to an era when different software stores fight against each other.”

AT&T’s long-awaited MMS update for the iPhone is finally ready. Just plug your iPhone into iTunes and hit the “Check for Update” button.

You should get the dialog message above, saying: “An update to your carrier settings for your iPhone is available. Would you like to download it now?”

Hit “Download and Update” and wait a few seconds. The update is done is a jiffy. Then go to your iPhone and launch the Messages app. There should be a little camera icon to the left of the text input box at the bottom. Hit it, and you’ll be able to send pictures or video with your text messages. Try it: it’s a lot of fun.

PS: Some users are reporting they have to manually reboot their iPhone after installing the carrier update.

TomTom’s Car Kit will be priced at $119.95 when it is introduced next month and will be compatible with all iPhone models, the company said in a brief statement on Friday.

Earlier this week, it looked like the Car Kit might also include the iPhone app. But TomTom’s statement now makes it clear that the Car Kit will be sold separately from TomTom’s $100 app, bringing the total price to $220 — the same as a dedicated GPS unit.

TomTom’s GPS system is getting pretty good reviews — Gizmodo gives it a B+ — although the mount kit might raise that grade if it amplifies the app’s voice instructions as promised.

TomTom’s statement reads in full:

TomTom announces today that the TomTom car kit for the iPhone will have a recommended retail price of EUR 99.99 or USD 119.95.

The TomTom car kit will be available this October and will be sold separately from the TomTom app. It will be compatible with the iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS.

All further details on the car kit will be made available soon.

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

Under review this week: Arkanoid, FlipTime 2.0, Shockwave, Squareball and Monster Pinball.

In a strange city and need to find the nearest Hooters? A new iPhone app, Bionic Eye, has got you covered.

Designed for the iPhone 3GS, Bionic Eye is an augment reality app that overlays information about nearby points of interest over the iPhone’s camera. Hold the camera up to the building in front of you, and thanks the iPhone’s GPS and compass, the screen is overlaid with little virtual signs that say what’s inside. It also includes virtual signposts showing the way to the nearest subway station or Starbucks coffee shop.

A demo of the app surfaced in July, when the app was called “Nearest Subway” and pointed to nearby subway stations.

It’s now available in the App Store for $0.99. Versions are available for the U.S., U.K., France and Tokyo. And as well as public transit, the app points to a range of POIs, including fast food restaurants, WiFi hotspots, chain hotels and Apple stores.

The app covers all US cities and doesn’t need an active WiFi or 3G internet connection. More than 100,000 POIs are contained in the app’s 2.9MByte database. However, information about subways in the U.S. is restricted to New York, Washington, and Chicago (and you buy the info from within the application).

Bionic Eye — U.S.
Bionic Eye — U.K.
Bionic Eye — France
Bionic Eye — Tokyo

Hit the jump for a video of the app in action.

Dublin launched a bike sharing scheme on Sept. 15. Sponsored by French ad giant JC Decaux, locals can pick up the bikes around town, then leave them at one of 40 stations. The first half hour is free.

The trouble? Firm Fusio thought it’d be nice to have an iPhone app, available gratis on iTunes, telling would-be cyclists which stations had bikes available and how many. The Dublinbikes app used a mashup of Google Maps and data from the official Dublinbikes Website.

JC Decaux sent a nastygram to Fusio threatening legal action, and the App was pulled Sept. 23 from iTunes.

The story sounds depressingly similar to StationStops, the app that ran into trouble with NY transport authorities by publishing available public schedules.

It may not be over yet, however: politician Paschal Donohoe, a declared iPhone user, called on Dublin City Council to intervene.

“The new bike scheme will depend on bikes being available, when and where people need them,” he said in a statement on his website.  “A new application for iPhones provided this up-to-the minute information on where the bikes were located.”

“We should be encouraging innovation for the sake of the economy, not stamping it out.”
In the meantime,  there are already a couple of mobile web alternatives to the killed bike sharing app.

Via Wap Review

Every now and again, a game comes along that makes you feel like a ham-fisted idiot, as though you’re clawing at your iPhone or iPod touchscreen with all the grace of a lobotomised monkey wearing boxing gloves. But the game is so compelling and addictive, you play on anyway, getting killed approximately every ten seconds, going ARRRGGGHH and then having another go anyway. Eventually, you realise that it’s you, not the game. The game isn’t unfair—you’re just rubbish, and you need to learn how to improve, just like in the old days with the likes of Defender.

Squareball by Finn Ericson ($1.99/£1.19, App Store link) is one such game. The concept is simple: drag the levels left or right to ensure your ever-bouncing ball doesn’t disappear into a hole or hit red tiles, and collect all the green tiles before the timer runs out. With graphics akin to Atari’s Adventure in pseudo-3D and a fab soundtrack, this game’s had me addicted and loving it and hating it in equal measure since its day of release. Today, I interviewed its creator to find out how this retro-themed mix of Pong, Breakout and simplified Super Mario-style platformer came to be.

This prototype iPhone nav system mounts on standard bike helmets to help get cyclists where they’re going.  Devised by Tokyo iPhone app developers  Ubiquitous Entertainment, it runs on an original app that in addition to using the iPhone’s compass and GPS maps can also receive push notifications from Twitter (via TwitBird Pro) or phone calls with A2DP.

The head mounted device (HMD) is retractable, and as you might expect, the screen is a little jiggly during ride. Test cyclist Sho checked out the map while stopped or at traffic lights, not while pedaling. The HMD was so light it was secured with scotch tape; in later trials the iPhone was stuck in a pocket to avoid potential tumbles from the helmet.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1AzailvJB0
As an urban biker sick of pulling out maps or trying to check Google maps on my phone, I love this idea,  though I would stick to keeping the phone in a pocket to avoid worry about someone snatching it and the perils of sudden showers.

Via Make

Google says categorically that Apple has rejected its Voice app for the iPhone. Apple denies this, saying several times that the app is still under consideration. Apple has said this in official documents submitted to a government inquiry by the FCC, and most recently today in a statement to the press.

Someone is lying. Who is it?

Well, the test is quite simple:

Apple has responded to Google’s charge that Phil Schiller rejected Google’s Voice app: “We do not agree,” says a spokesman.

Apple says it has NOT rejected the Google Voice app and continues to evaluate it. In a statement, Apple PR says:

“We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.”

Earlier today, Google unredacted its response to the FCC, claiming that Phil Schiller had personally killed the Google Voice app in a phone conversation in July.

Who’s lying?

As reader Steven points out below, a good test is whether Google’s app is available in the app store — which it is not. “Until the application does appear in the App Store, we can all say with 100% certainty that it has been denied,” he says.