iPhone apps - page 61

Apple’s Phil Schiller personally rejected Google’s controversial Voice app, new documents reveal.

Schiller rejected Google’s VOIP app because it “duplicated the core dialer function of the iPhone,” Google said in documents released on Friday. The documents were published by the company and the Federal Communications Commission, which is investigating Apple’s rejection of the app.

Google’s version of the story directly contradicts Apple’s version of events. According to Apple, the app hasn’t been rejected; it is still under evaluation.

But according to Google, Schiller personally told Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research, that the app had been rejected during a phone call on July 7.

“It was during this call that Mr. Schiller informed Mr. Eustace that Apple was rejecting the Google Voice application…” Google says.

Curiously, the revelations didn’t come to light until today because Google kept parts of its response to the FCC secret to protect “sensitive commercial conversations” between the two companies.It decide to relax its request after Apple published its response and groups requested the info under the Freedom of Information Act, Google explains in a blog post.

Google’s full response to the FCC’s questions about the rejected app are here (PDF).

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

This week, I review Smart Maps – Brussels, Who’s Buying, Tasks – Tick If Off, Pac-Man Remix, FortuneBall, Mr.AahH!! Lite, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, A Quest of Knights Onrush, Power Toppler, and CrunchUrl.

AT&T is bringing Multimedia Messaging to the iPhone on September 25. But if you can’t wait ten days or so, here’s how to get it now.

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. Except this article didn’t show up last week, due to me ending up in Belgium, so this time it’s a one-off, extra-special iPhone Fortnightly Digest!

APPS OF THE WEEK

TonePad Pro: Addictive grid-based musical toy. Many editing/sharing options. Ringtone exports a tad distorted. 5/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/36AZt

FlipTime: Cute clock/calendar akin to old-style airport/train station boards. Lsc. & portrait modes. No alarm. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2NJnC

Terminator: Death Valley 1: So-so ‘humanoid killer robots’ vs contemporary ‘human cannon fodder’ comic. Nice UI. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2JTvQ

Remix David Bowie – Space Oddity: Simple but limited multitrack ‘mixing’ of a famous Bowie track. 3/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2LtRo

Adrenaline: 32 basic, quickfire ‘blitz’ games. Sometimes fun but would benefit from much shorter level times. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Qryw

Leaves: Tranquil leaves-based toy. Slightly iffy 3D and physics, but calming, and fun for a short time. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/30cmL

Score-Em: Virtual scorecard app with varied graphics and relevant audio. Works fine, but throwaway in nature. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/32bBx

Gem Ninja: Mindless prod-based tile-match game. OK for a free time-waster, but not worth paying for. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/32cQy

Looptastic Electro Edition Lite: Loop remix tool. Fantastic UI, varied audio stems, and ten loops to play with. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/34Hp2

StarTime: Vibrant, bold Star Trek-like clock. Optional random sounds & can run iPod music in background. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/39xOi

Since this column didn’t happen last week, it’s only fair to highlight FlipTime, which would have been ‘app of the week’ last week. It’s one of those apps that shows you don’t need something that’s all-singing and all-dancing to make an impression. Instead, charm sometimes goes a long way. All FlipTime does is show the time and date, sporting a visual appearance like those old-fashioned flip boards you’d see at railway stations and airports. Sounds are optional and the numerals are bold enough to see at a distance. Aesthetically, it’s also the nicest iPhone clock I’ve seen.

TonePad Pro is this week’s favourite. It’s been described as iPhone musical crack elsewhere, and it does have a certain addictive quality about it. Again, it’s a simple app—this time, you toggle grid spaces to play notes in an ever-repeating loop. However, this time it’s the attention to detail that wins through, the developer having provided plenty of options for editing, saving and sharing your creations. The Pro version is ad-free and enables you to email ringtones that can then be dropped into iTunes and synchronised with your iPhone. But if you don’t care about ringtones and ads, the free version of TonePad is just as good.

Follow iPhoneTiny on Twitter, or visit iPhoneTiny.com

iTunes 9 and OS X for iPhone 3.1 brought a bunch of refinements, but one strikes me as odd: along with charts for paid apps and free apps, we now have one for ‘top grossing’ apps.

It’s pretty clear this an attempt to appease developers, increasingly annoyed at the rush to 99 cents on the App Store. But here’s the thing: will anyone care? I can’t see too many consumers rushing to see which apps have grossed the most and make buying decisions based on that. ‘Top grossing apps’ also sounds pretty ugly—not really what you’d expect from Apple.

That said, there’s definitely a need to push apps with slightly higher price-points more prominently. Higher-priced apps (and I’m talking maybe $5 and above, not the likes of $50+ sat-nav apps) enable longer development periods, often leading to richer end products.

I wonder whether the App Store should instead have taken a leaf out of the 1980s games industry—at least as it was in the UK. Around 1985, publishers started toying with ‘budget’ videogames, selling cheap, relatively throwaway titles at £1.99, with full-price games being four or five times more expensive. Such publishers typically advertised less, and developers of full-price games started to get antsy. (Sound familiar?)

The solution then was simple: the chart was split. So you had a ‘full price’ chart and a ‘budget’ chart. One might argue this would only serve to push people away from high-price apps, but it would also provide a mechanism for highlighting stuff that’s unlikely to be crap. And ‘full price’ or ‘premium’ certainly sounds a whole lot nicer than ‘top grossing’.

I’ve been a gamer since the very early 1980s, and have owned more systems than you can shake a stick at. A year ago, I happily penned an article for this very site, suggesting iPod gaming was a crock of shit. And you know what? I was dead wrong… absolutely, painfully, utterly, astonishingly wrong. The fact is, iPod is the most exciting platform for gaming we’ve seen in years.

I’ve been poking around iTunes 9 since yesterday evening (UK time), and there’s some good (app management), some bad (stability issues) and some “beaten repeatedly with an ugly stick until unconscious” ugly (most of the UI, the hideous column nav). But one thing with the App Store refresh within iTunes 9 just baffles me: the lack of wish-lists for apps.

As shown in the pic, access a song’s menu and you get to add the item to a wish-list. With an app, you can merely ‘tell a friend’. I’m sure owners of the many websites that provide wish-list functionality for the App Store are breathing a collective sigh of relief, but it strikes me a strange and inconsistent that Apple’s not enabling users to store a list of interesting apps for later purchase.

When it comes to mobile banking, iPhone users are way ahead of the curve.

While half of iPhone users already check in with their bank from their smart phone, it’ll take another five years until other kinds of cell phone owners do the same, a study said.

The 2009 Mobile-Banking and Smartphone Forecast by San Francisco-based Javelin Strategy & Research found that although half of all current cell phone owners have access to some form of mobile banking, it’s only caught on with iPhone owners. (No doubt the app plays a big part in the revolution — one US bank recently developed one to allow customers to photograph their checks and deposit them via iPhone.)

The firm expects it’ll take until 2014 for 45% of non-iPhone owners to connect with the bank via phone.

iPhones gave AT&T the highest number of mobile bankers, while Verizon Wireless has the lowest penetration for banking on-the-go among major U.S. carriers.

“Just as the iPod changed the music industry and their business models, our data shows that iPhone users are changing the banking industry by leading the way in monitoring and managing finances through mobile devices,” said Mark Schwanhausser,  a Javelin analyst.

If you have a Google Voice account, you can make free VoIP calls on your iPhone. You’ll need to sign up for an account at Gizmo.com and download the free Fring app for your iPhone, but after that you’re done. You can make free outgoing calls to (up to three minutes) and receive unlimited incoming calls through Google Voice.

Hit the jump for instructions.

Spotify’s iPhone app has just gone live on the iTunes app store. But us poor Yankees are SOL. It’s available in Europe only — for now anyway.

The app is available here for free from Apple’s App Store, but requires a premium Spotify account to work at a cost of about £9.99 (about about $16) a month.

Neither the app nor Spotify is available in the U.S., but plans are afoot to bring the highly-rated service across the pond. It is set to come to the U.S. sometime later this year, or maybe next, pending licensing agreements with the record labels, and advertising deals that support the free service.

Because Spotify’s streaming music service is such a threat to iTunes, it was possible that Apple might somehow disable the iPhone app. Apple has disapproved of apps that replicate core iPhone functions, like Google Voice. While there is no indication yet that Apple cripples threatening apps, it doesn’t approve them. Apple perhaps doesn’t see the Spotify iPhone app as a threat while it is restricted to premium customers.

But Spotify’s app doesn’t seem to have any restrictions, except one imposed on all third-party apps — it can’t run in the background.

Spotify’s streaming music service has taken the world by storm with a music library that rivals iTunes — about 6 million tracks — and an interface to match. It’s dead easy to search, build playlists, and find new artists. It’s basically iTunes in the cloud — but free (with the occasional ad).

Spotify’s iPhone app adds a very important feature: it can cache full playlists to be played offline. You can store up to 3,333 songs — that’s 10 days constant listening — and they will play when the network goes dark. The offline caching service allows tracks to be played anywhere offline: on airplanes, in subways or even when traveling overseas to avoid roaming charges.

Official screenshots of the app and a video of it in action after the jump.

The iPhone Spotlight search feature has been improved yet again.

Universal Search, a jailbreak app from Efiko Software, takes searching with Spotlight to a whole new level. With this add-on installed, Spotlight can access mobile search sites and generate location-based results all from within the Spotlight search window.

Universal Search’s smart input monitoring allows the user to enter a phone number or url directly into Spotlight and options to call, text or visit the url pop up in the results. It also searches Google Maps and mobile sites directly rather than going through a search engine’s web results.

Search sites include Wikipedia, Google Maps, Twitter, CNN, ebay, IMDb, flickr, and ESPN.

Universal Search is available for $4.99 in the Cydia Store.

The cruel but funny People of Walmart website is looking for a developer to create an iPhone app for the website.

If you’re interested in making an iPhone app to make fun of misfits — and possibly get sued for publishing their unauthorized photographs — contact People of Walmart at info@peopleofwalmart.com.

Surely you’ve seen the viral website, which publishes candid-camera style pictures of the various meth tweakers, rednecks, and other sundry weirdos that frequent the nation’s largest retailer, along with cruelly funny captions.

Just a few weeks old, the site is often down due to server overload. The developers are also looking for a new host that can cope with the traffic.

Via QuickPwn.

Now you can create tilt-shift photographs on your iPhone thanks to a new app called TiltShift Generator.

Available now for 99c (the price rises to $2.99 in two weeks), the app makes those fake miniature pictures so popular on the internet.

Created by developer Takayuki Fukatsu, the app works by selectively blurring parts of the picture to simulate a very narrow depth of field, making the subject look like a miniature.

The software can be used to create other effects, like vintage-looking photos.

If you want to try it out before plunking down your hard-earned 99c, the developer also offers a free online web app, and a free Adobe Air version. More sample pictures after the jump.

Link to TiltShift Generator on iTunes.

Developer’s website.

Starting in September, Zipcar users will be able to reserve wheels via an iPhone app.

Zipcar founder Scott Griffin takes the app for a test drive for CNN:

Griffith enters the parking lot outside his office in Cambridge, Mass., pulls out his iPhone, and taps a button on the screen. Suddenly a yellow Mini Cooper starts honking like a crazed goose.
Griffith approaches the vehicle and taps the screen again. The doors magically unlock, and under the steering wheel the key dangles from a cord. He starts up the car — nicknamed “Meneus” — and drives away at a rate of $11.25 an hour.

The Zipcar app gets works as a wireless key, getting drivers into cars, letting them lock them — and helps find the closest available garage.

The car sharing program I get around with in Milan uses an RFID card to lock and unlock doors (kind of nice if you don’t have an iPhone). Reservations over the Internet work decently, as long as you realize you need a car while sitting at your computer.
Alternatively, you can call them to see what’s available but half the time the operators don’t have key info — like the garage is closed for lunch.

The Zipcar app sounds well thought through, it’ll be interesting to see what it’s like on the ground.

Via CNN Money

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority wants to derail an independent iPhone app that publishes train schedules for violation of copyright.

Called Station Stops, the $2.99 app available on iTunes, is the work of commuter Chris Schoenfeld, who also writes the blog of the same name.

The app provides the timetable of the Metro-North Railroad for regularly-scheduled trains departing and arriving from Grand Central Station.

The MTA provides its schedules to Google Transit, but doesn’t release the data publicly.

To build his app, Schoenfeld did it the old way — by entering data manually from the published public schedule.

Schoenfeld, who has often been critical of MTA service, got a nastygram from MTA lawyers ordering him to stop presenting himself as an official service — and pay licensing fees for the schedules.

The MTA reckons the developer owes them a share of profits from the app, back pay the licensing fees. And a $5,000 non-refundable fee.

Schoenfeld’s not interested in ponying up. His sensible David versus ham-fisted Goliath story received a lot of sympathetic local news coverage — but that didn’t stop the MTA from asking Apple to take down the app on Aug. 14.

As of this writing, Station Stops is still for sale.

As one station stops blog reader, Karen Cavanaugh commented:
“I always use Station Stops to check the train schedule when I visit my daughter in Hoboken, NJ. I never think of it as an “OFFICIAL” website. I’ve been to the official website and it’s awkward.”

Via Stamford Advocate, Greater Greater Washington

If you’re lucky enough to live in Pittsburgh, you can report stuff like potholes, graffiti and other everyday annoyances straight to city hall via an iPhone app called iBurgh.

Peeved Pittsburghers first download the app, gratis on iTunes. First time users need to fill in name, phone number, email and home address — stored automatically for logging future complaints.

Users snap pics of traffic gridlock, abandoned cars or whatever.  The photos are geotagged and sent immediately to the city complaint hotline 311. Officials hope that if enough people use the app (they already get about 200 rants a day) they’ll have a cluster map of trouble areas to plan for future maintenance and repairs.

There were a few snafus as iPhone wielding citizens tried complaining via smartphone when the service debuted yesterday — a server restart was necessary at one point —  but at least one user managed to report that pothole successfully.

It’s the first app available on iTunes from a Carnegie Mellon spin-off whose other product was mobile video technology for sports events, called “yinzcam”  that let users at hockey games pick what to zoom in on with their iPhones.

Via AP

If you’ve been inspired by David Hockney’s iPhone paintings or the New Yorker cover, you know that doodling on your device can be more difficult than it looks.

At least if you want results that don’t completely suck.

Enter a blog called fingerpainted.it, headed by freelance web designer Benjamin Rabe. He and a band of 11 creatives, including prolific iPhone artist Matthew Watkins, share tips, artwork and tutorials.

The how-tos show just how much dexterity and thought go into these mini-masterpieces; Luis Peso’s demonstrative cat sketch in the above Layers app tutorial has about seven steps.

A lot of the art is done with the Brushes app, but artists use a variety of tools including Layers, Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky Lite, Photofx. The tutorials show you how to start with Kandinsky, move to Pollock and end up with something entirely different, like this vibrant iPhone work by Patricio Villarroel.

While there are plenty of places to ogle iPhone art — flickr groups especially — fingerpainted seems to give the most info on how to get from art-icapped to art.

Apple has started re-issuing promo codes for +17 apps on iTunes. It’s unclear whether the lack of promo codes for these apps — which range from adult-oriented pics to eReaders which allow unfiltered content — was a glitch in the system or a ban.

One thing’s for sure, no promo codes hurt these +17-rated apps since journalists couldn’t try them out and therefore often avoided writing about them. One sex game app developer CoM spoke to said the lack of promo codes effectively hog-tied sales of saucy apps and discouraged them from making more.

The + 17 rating is supposed to act as a filter for adult content, according to the iTunes rating system. You must be over age 17 to purchase them because they “may contain frequent and intense offensive language; frequent and intense cartoon, fantasy or realistic violence; and frequent and intense mature, horror and suggestive themes; plus sexual content, nudity, alcohol, tobacco and drugs which may not be suitable for children until the age of 17.”

Many ratings are subjective: the Cannabis app, which helps users find medicinal pot, is OK for anyone over the age of 12, and some sex dice apps are approved for players over age nine.

Via PC World

If you’ve told the kids 100 times not to interrupt while you work in the home office, maybe it’s time to download a new app that emits a high-frequency pitch that anyone under the age of 25 finds seriously annoying.

Called Kids Be Gone, it works like a teen deterrent device first used by British police to disperse unruly underage crowds by emitting a shrill tone only they can hear, 18.000 hz. (Kids and the under-30 crowd still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears plus full aural capabilities people gradually lose as they age — try the demo for a similar service after the jump).

Art students at Catholic Memorial High School in Waukesha, Wisconsin have hung out their works as iPhone wallpaper to help fund arts education.

The student art gallery, at the moment a little sparse with just 10 works, is available as wallpaper for $0.99 on iTunes. The CMHS app was created by Start Mobile, the folks behind many wallpaper apps from Shepard Fairey to Drop Dead Sexy Devils, who agreed to donate the proceeds.

“Raising the money to fully fund our school’s budgets is increasingly difficult in this challenging economy,” said Kathleen Hanlon Sampon, an art teacher at CMHS. “The added income from this innovative opportunity will help to ensure the ongoing strength of our department.”

The school’s 770 students are currently able to choose from 15 art courses per year ranging from studio arts to digital imagery.

Artist David Scott Leibowitz — whose impressionistic works for the iPhone were recently featured on CoM — teamed up with developer Andrew C. Stone for an app billed as the first mobile iPhone art gallery.

Called iCreated, the app ($.99 for the first week, $1.99 after that) comes preloaded with 18 works by Leibowitz. Other artists, like Russ Croop, who like to use the iPhone are also featured — and all of the works tell you what was used to make them, should you want to try your hand. Users can upload their own doodles to the public gallery and save or email them.

While the iCreated selection can’t trump sites like Poolga, which offers hundreds of slick wallpapers from designers and illustrators gratis, compared to some paid iPhone wallpaper apps it offers a little push to try some art of your own and share it.

So if you’ve downloaded Brushes, were inspired by the New Yorker cover, now’s the time to get busy.

Language app iLingua is keeping down prices for summer, one dictionary/phrase book will set you back $1.99 on iTunes.

The Spanish language demo looks promising: words or phrases have images to make connecting the dots easy. The woman speaks very slowly, which is good for learning, thought it may sound a little silly if you cow out and just play a phrase like, “Hey this room is way too small” to a native speaker.

Background music on a loop is distracting and makes the sounds harder to hear, not clear whether you can turn that off or it’s just a demo thing.

Available in Russian, German, Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese — would’ve loved to have this for last year’s trip to Shanghai, where trying to get a restaurant reservation from the concierge (in what seemed slow, careful English) elicited nervous laughter and frustration all around…
We’ve written about using language/dictionary iPhone apps on the job —  have you used one traveling?

After Jorge Colombo’s iPhone art was featured on the cover of the New Yorker, it seems everyone wants to get their fingers in the pie.

The Brushes app Colombo used to finger paint a late-night scene in Manhattan sold 2,700 copies when the cover debuted Monday, earning slightly over $13,000.  It usually sells around 60-70 copies a day.

“A painting app seemed like a natural fit for the iPhone,” 32-year-old Brushes developer Steve Sprang told the NYT Bits blog.  “You’re touching the screen, so it’s a natural step to want to draw on it.”

Sprang said the results dwarfed when Brushes was chosen as the app of the day on iTunes and that the app had sold 40,000 copies to date, earning him six figures.

If you’re itchy to get busy with fancy fingerwork, Sprang has knocked the price down a buck, to $3.99, in honor of the New Yorker cover.

Via Bits

One million potential iPhone developers downloaded Stanford’s dev course since it started in April. The 10-week course from the Palo Alto university’s school of engineering is offered gratis on iTunes.

Steve Demeter, the founder of Demiforce and maker of the popular Trism iPhone game, spoke to the class Monday, the SF Chronicle reported, and touched on the opportunities and growing challenges of developing for the iPhone.

Demeter earned $250,000 in the first two months of Trism but acknowledged his good luck in breaking through early and having the support of Apple, two things that most developers now can’t count on.
You can still catch the video lectures of about an hour long each are available here.

Screenshot from Steve Marmon’s May 8 lecture, courtesy Stanford, iTunes.

Via SF Chronicle

CC-licensed photo by David Paul Ohmer.

In an effort to reach out to young, tech-savvy Catholics, the Holy See will launch an iPhone app to coincide with its World Communications Day, celebrated May 24.

The Vatican app was created by Father Paolo Padrini, the priest who developed iBrevary, an app that puts morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayers on the iPhone and a Facebook application called Praybook.

“The pope is inviting us to promote a culture of dialogue, of respect and friendship, especially among young people,” Archbishop Claudio Celli told Catholic News.

The initiative to put the Pope in your pocket comes after  the Vatican youtube channel and will launch from a website (not yet live) called www.pope2you.net. So far the app lets people send and receive “virtual postcards” of Pope Benedict along with inspiring excerpts from the pope’s various speeches.  No word on whether its gratis or, like the iBreviary, will cost $.99.

Would you download the Vatican app?

Via Catholic News