Which weighs more? An iPad filled with media and apps, or an iPad with no media or apps installed?
It sounds like a trick question — the digital age equivalent of “What weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of rocks?”
But surprisingly, an iPad without anything installed on it does weigh less than an iPad that is full.
I’m a big fan of physics-based puzzles, but the trouble is most of them relate to altering an object’s trajectory as it falls rather than manipulating things.
Drei by Etter Studio GmbH does away with falling oranges and rolling balls and offers instead increasingly difficult building block puzzles that require you to balance objects, shapes, and negotiate with other players.
ZeptoLab released Pudding Monsters, its first iOS title since its success with Cut the Rope, back in December. But it hasn’t finished its original physics-based puzzler just yet. The company just released an update on iOS that introduces a brand new box of content with 25 new levels.
Announced in early May, Amazing Alex is Rovio’s first venture away from Angry Birds since the title became a huge hit on iOS many moons ago. Based on the company’s previous success in the mobile gaming space, we’re all itching to see how its next release turns out, but the new teaser trailer Rovio released today gives us very little to go on.
In addition to the 20-second clip, however, the Finnish firm has also announced some more details about the physics-based puzzler.
Celebrity physicist Brian Cox is famous in the U.K. for making physics accessible to the public through bestselling books and several popular TV series. Now he brings elements of both to a gorgeous new iPad app: Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe ($6.99).
Featuring amazing animations and lush, high-production video, the app will sweep you back in time to witness the Big Bang, and then look ahead to the universe’s end, when the last black dwarfs will fizzle away to entropy.
As Prof. Cox points out: while the universe evolves momentarily from order to chaos, now is a precious window of time when life is briefly possible, for us to be able to contemplate the universe…
We’re two weeks away from launch day, the day Angry Birds boldly goes where no bird has gone before. I’m of course talking about Angry Birds Space, Rovio’s next Angry Bird iteration which looks to turn the series upside down. To prepare us for the challenges of launching a projectile in a weightless environment while compensating for the gravity fields of neighboring planetary bodies, NASA astronaut Dan Pettit gives us a quick physics lesson while aboard the International Space Station.
So the 25 billionth download from the iOS App Store was none other than Where’s My Water? Free. It brought its owner a shiny $10,000 iTunes gift card and worldwide fame for 15 minutes. But will it bring you anything? The short answer is probably: no.
Seriously: Imagine your kids being able to play around with all the wonders of physics — without the fear they might slice off a finger (or two), or burn their eyebrows off.
That’s the basic idea behind the brilliant Xperica HD for the iPad, a physics sandbox that lets high-school kids (or anyone, really) make sense of physics through playing with interactive experiments. The first four modules are free, with $4 netting the remaining half-dozen set of physics experiments.
While the first set is all about physics, the developer told us they’ll soon have experiment sets in other spheres of science (like chemistry) available soon, with some modules in each sphere being released for free — and that they might make all the modules free at some point (which might make one hesitant to buy the extra modules, we think, but there ya go).
