review - page 8

There are various techniques one can use when dropping a horrible review for an app. You could give it a single star and move on. Or say it’s worthless. Or list a specific problem with the app hoping it gets fixed in the future. Or you could go with the all caps/rant approach.

Each method is effective in its own way, and iOS user Bmwworld knows them all. Except he sadly thinks that Google Earth is a live satellite feed of the world and is getting really pissed that his car never moves on the app, or that he can’t run outside and wave at the camera. In a storm of frustration he left the magnificent rant/review you see above in the App Store. We applaud him for his beautiful incorrectness and award him with the Best Worst Review of the Week award.

Fruitiny is a retro-style memory game for iOS, one of those games that takes about 10 seconds to learn and many hours of tapping to conquer.

Minecraft fans might be interested in Minecraft Reality, a two-dollar app that popped up in the Store last week. It lets you insert Minecraft-created 3D models into the real world, which sounds pretty cool. But it has some limitations.

I’ve stayed in some pretty nasty hotels in my time, but none of them ever quite got as bad as Bad Hotel.

Bad Hotel is bad in the sense that I wouldn’t want to stay there. Too many bad guys trying to smash it down all the time. Unusual, for hotels, but there you go.

As a game, though, Bad Hotel is fantastic. It’s brilliantly different. It doesn’t care what you think of its weirdness. It’s there to entertain, and does so with charm and wit.

Roger Dean is famous for his fantasy world artwork, which graced many a record sleeve and book cover during the 1970s and 80s. His work is iconic and instantly recognisable to a generation.

This app – Dragon’s Dream – is an unfortunate foray into iOS. It fails to do justice to Dean’s skill as an artist, and fails to offer iOS gamers an experience worth five dollars.

There are almost no iPhone 5 docks available right now, and that’s for two reasons. One is that Apple has only just let manufacturers start including the new Lightning connector in their products. The other is that the new iPhone has only been around for like five minutes.

Braeburn has managed to get around the former problem by asking you to use your own Lightning cable, and the latter by, well — who knows? By being smart and hard-working I guess.

I have been using the aluminum dock for the past week, and it turns out to be pretty neat, although it won’t be for everyone.

Ever had an idea for an app, but no way to record it? Worry no more: Pop is an ingenious free app for prototyping apps. You don’t need to know any code. All you need is a pencil and paper and an idea.

The Speck CandyShell is a dual-layer case with a patented design that aims to give you all-around protection for your iPhone 5. It combines a soft, rubber interior with a hard outer shell that offers plenty of impact resistance for those unfortunate yet inevitable drops.

The CandyShell also provides protection for your volume keys and sleep/wake button, while providing access to your headphone jack, Lightning connector, mute switch, and camera.

It costs $34.95 and comes in a plethora of color combinations, including black and slate, white and charcoal, raspberry and black, grape and malachite, and many more.

Meet Dave. Here he is. Dave Pell. He writes one of the best internet newsletters there is, and now his newsletter is an app called NextDraft.

This is Curiosity, a free iOS game from British gaming icon Peter Molyneux. The idea is that all of us – everyone playing the game – work together to peel off layers of cubelets that make up the larger revolving cube. At the center, a surprise (and a prize) awaits the person lucky enough, and determined enough, to tap on it at the end.

Only two people in the whole world know what’s at the center. Do you care what it is? Do you care enough to spend hours tapping on your iDevice to find out? No, really: hours.

Wonderful Day is a different sort of one-dollar reminders app. It’s there to remind you of the things you’d like to get done, not the things you have to do. Although it sports an attractive visual design, it suffers from a handful of crucial failings that make it less useful than it could be.

As you might have guessed, Rovio’s latest App Store release, Angry Birds Star Wars, kicks off this week’s must-have games roundup. It’s accompanied by a gorgeous action RPG called Wraithborne, a new word game from EA, and a great side-scrolling platformer called Storm the Train.

Readers of a … certain age. Will remember. The way William … Shatner. Used to talk. On Star Trek. Few of you will have … wished to make poetry that sounds. Like. That. On your iPhones. But now … you. Can. My God, Bones. My God.

Questions is a video ask-and-answer community for iOS. A bit like a video version of Quora – although where Quora encourages thoughtful discourse and discussion, Questions is all about brevity and snappiness. You only get 10 seconds to ask a question or submit an answer.

When I first heard that Angry Birds Star Wars was on its way, all I could think was: I have a bad feeling about this.

The cynic in me felt disgruntled about the repetitive nature of the Angry Birds brand, but the realist in me told the cynic to shut up, chill out, and enjoy the game.

The FlexiShield Skin from MobileFun is a translucent silicone case for iPad mini that’s designed to offer long-lasting protection, extra grip, and a slender profile that “highlights the form of your iPad mini” rather than spoiling it.

It provides impact and scratch protection to the back of your device, while still allowing you to access all of its buttons, ports, and switches. It costs $16.49, and it’s available in white, purple, and black.

No matter how long it spent waiting for approval, Google’s updated search app for iOS was worth the wait. Is it a shameless Siri-clone for web search? Yes, pretty much? Is it fast, instantly usable, and useful? Oh yes. Oh yes it certainly is.

With the launch of iOS 6, Apple debuted a new panorama mode built into the camera app that allows users to take stunning widescreen panorama photos with almost no effort. Unfortunately, these photos have made for little more than a cool demo until now, because there’s been no good way to share them.

Enter PanoPerfect, an app that’s designed specifically around sharing your panoramic photos. While it’s probably the first of its kind, its sure not short on features.

Liquid is a productivity helper for OS X. It comes in two flavors – free and paid. The idea is to speed up your information seeking workflow. You find something you need to research, and a few key presses later you’ve got some data. Or a unit conversion. Or, in the paid version, a language translation. It’s got a lot of features.

We’ve got some great new apps in this week’s must-have roundup, including Path, which finally makes its debut on the iPad; a nifty utility for monitoring the data consumed by your iPhone apps; plus a great new cooking magazine that every foodie should have installed on their iPad.

Gorgeous body; super slim profile; al-lu-minium backside; yes, we’ve been fondling Apple’s new iPad mini for hours and hours now, and on our just-recorded special edition CultCast, we report what we like, what we don’t, and our overall first impressions of Apple’s brand new much-hyped tiny tab.

But we also had to ask the question: without a retina display, is the iPad mini a worthy replacement for its larger, retina-pixeled brother?

We cover all that and more this special edition CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Here are the two things you need to know about the iPad mini. The form factor’s perfect, it’s beautifully designed, you will love holding it… but the screen’s awful and the performance is lacking, especially in graphics. Even at the price, it’s a deeply disappointing product that most people should think twice about buying right now.

The iStabilizer is a combination monopod and camera/phone tripod adapter. It’s light, it’s sturdy, it’s mostly aluminum, and it’s pretty much ideal for occasional use. And it has one fantastic function which will probably get you arrested.

How often do you want to know what sounds look like? I’m guessing not very often, unless you’re a musician. But if you do want to know what sounds look like, and you want to know it in the most stylish and good-looking way possible on iOS, you can’t go far wrong with an app called Soundbeam. It’s just beautiful.

Weather On is a weather forecasting app for iOS that is remarkable for one thing: its very obvious nods to Microsoft’s mobile operating system.

Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of square and rectangular tiles that look and behave just like the tiles you’ve seen on the latest smartphones running Windows Phone.