All Articles in Apps

Looking for a cool retro-arcade action title from what is shaping up to be a leading game developer/publisher on the iPhone? Than look no further than Dropship ($1.99) [iTunes Link] from ngmoco:). 

Premise:

You control a “dropship”. You save humans. You pick up cargo and delivery it safely. You do this in a time limit. 

More after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

Podcaster was rejected from the App Store for duplicating the (at that point upcoming) functionality of the built in iPod app. Seems like Podstreamer (Streamcaster in the Canadian store?!), however, made it in. While the two apps might not be identical, the situation does nothing to alleviate the appearance of capricious, near-random behavior from Apple’s approval department. (Thanks benstinson for the tip!)

Next up, Daring Fireball reports that a CoverFlow-esque contacts app was rejected by Apple for using the private CoverFlow API.

The problem? According to developer Landon Fuller, they didn’t use any private APIs — they created their own Cover Flow implementation using the public APIs.

Gruber rightly notes the apparent hypocrisy in Google publicly flaunting their use of private API’s in the Google Mobile App, while Peeps is rejected for the mere (apparently wrongful) suspicion they’re using one.

Lastly, Ars Technica says Apple has added a new category to the App Store… one that allows for Pull My Finger to make its inglorious return:

“The very kind Apple Team Member told me that they didn’t want to reject it originally, but that they were sorting out how this ‘genre’ of apps were going to be handled,” he added. “She told me they’d be lifting the restriction on them, and more apps will follow that may have been previously not allowed.”

What else will this new “Entertainment” category cover? What else will it allow? Your most creative guesses welcome in the comments!

UPDATED AGAIN: Pastebud founder, Jed Schmidt, via the comments, directs us back to Technologizer (see link below) for his update on what was happening:

I’ve updated this issue over at Get Satisfaction[1], but let me just summarize what exactly was going wrong: you were inadvertently forwarding your emails not to your secret pastebud address, but to the address set as the from address for these emails, which was noreply@pastebud.com.

This happened to other folks too; instead of sending email to secret-random-string@pastebud.com, they were sending to noreply@pastebud.com. And everyone who was doing this ended up sharing the same clipboard.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we’ve fixed it, and the changed will be live by the morning.

PREVIOUS UPDATE/PRIVACY WARNING: Technologizer is showing that they’re getting other people’s clipboard data in their paste results, including complete emails:

Pastebud’s site addresses security, and says it’s “safe enough” for general use. Based on my experience so far, I think not! But I don’t know if I’m running into some bizarre quirk or doing something wrong, or if this is happening to everyone who’s trying Pastebud as I speak. I just know that I’ve come to the conclusion that using a Web service as a substitute for a feature that should be in a device’s OS may not be such a great idea after all.

This might be a temporary glitch on the server side, but it’s a very disturbing glitch and one that might just be a deal-breaker for the security and privacy concerned.

Original post after the break…

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So you’re still debating whether or not to jailbreak your iPhone? Hopefully after reading this you will have made your decision. Back in October we brought to you the first Top 5 Must-Have Jailbreak Apps, well today we bring you round two of the series. Now keep in mind, all the seasoned veterans of Jailbreaking will or should know about all the apps listed here. This article is for the sole purpose of swaying those still on the fence to the darkside…

***All of the following apps can be downloaded via Cydia on your Jailbroken iPhone.

Read on after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple Insider, quoting TouchMeme developer Krishna Vegesna, reports that Apple has made some changes to the way it displays applications in the App Store, which they break down into three areas:

– Most popular apps are now highlighted in each category page – Free apps are separated from — and hence no longer dominate — paid apps in the side bar – Tweaked the design to make it more consistent with the iPhone App Store app

Says (and quotes) Apple Insider:

While Friday’s changes may not solve all of developers’ problems, Vegesna said he believes Apple “now truly understands the software as a service model and is enhancing the [App Store] every week (in some cases, multiple times a week).”

Is it a big enough step to really help amid the onslaught of 10,000+ apps? Probably not, but it’s a step and hopefully yet another sign that Apple is willing to keep working to help developers, users, and themselves benefit from the App Store model.

If you’ve had a chance to check it out, and noticed the difference, let us know if it improved your experience and ability to find apps.

The previous attempt to make an end run around the iPhone’s lack of cut/copy and paste involved shared code called OpenClip and relied on a loophole Apple closed in iPhone OS 2.1

This latest tilt at the text editing windmill targets only 2 apps instead:

Pastebud—as the service is called—works using two bookmarks in Safari. One prepares and loads the page you are viewing, ready to select text at the touch of a finger. From there, you can copy any text you want and create a new mail message with that text in it. In addition to that, you will be able to copy and paste in the text field of a different web page.

Check out the full story and video over at Gizmodo. And then let us know if you think this is enough — for now — to satisfy your cut/copy and paste cravings?

Fans of EA’s ever popular SimCity series should be jumping with joy right about now. Later this month EA will be releasing SimCity for the iPhone on the App Store. Kotaku was able to demo the game recently and here is what they had to say:

The controls act the same way they do for Google maps. Sliding your fingers together, inward, zooms out, while sliding them apart zooms in. Touching and dragging moves your view around the map, while continuous taps cycles through the zoom levels. Placing singular objects is simple, but placing large zones or roads can be tricky to maneuver. Once you’ve selected the zone you want, you touch and drag to the appropriate length and width. However, there are times when you may find zones overlapping or roads not lining up properly. EA allows for easy corrections as you can reposition or delete unwanted blocks by the touch of a finger. I found this to be a little wonky at times the more dense an area becomes due to the increased chances of deleting the wrong block or building.

Being a unfinished demo it sounds pretty promising for fans of the series! The bugs and kinks mentioned should be fixed by the time it rolls in to the App Store, at least we are hopeful they are. Price point for this game is expected to be $9.99. We will update you when it drops!

[Via Gizmodo]

Not content to simply produce great (and great looking) software, Craig Hockenberry continues to knock it out of the park on his furbo.org blog as well, this time with an open letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs on App Store Pricing:

As an iPhone developer who’s been in the App Store since its launch, I’m starting to see a trend that concerns me: developers are lowering prices to the lowest possible level in order to get favorable placement in iTunes. This proliferation of 99¢ “ringtone apps” is affecting our product development.

This is something we’ve been following on TiPb, and something that both interests and concerns us greatly. The App Store is quite literally a killer app on the iPhone, but competition of revving up from all sides, including Android Market and the BlackBerry series of offerings.

Check out Hockenberry’s complete article, and let us know what you think Apple could do to properly incentivize developers to make the next Excel, the next Quark, the next killer app?

Or should they? Do you prefer your $0.99 apps, and don’t really care if we ever see anything more?

A week or so ago we linked to Erica Sadun’s demo of the iPhone SDK’s undocumented video out feature. Well, she’s been busy since then talking with Freeverse, the developers behind the hit Moto Chaser game for the iPhone. The result? The tech demo featured above.

Good news is that the possibilities are mind-boggling. Bad news is that we’re not there yet:

On the 2G touch, Moto Chaser can reach approximately 20 frames per second. This makes the game, in the words of Freeverse Producer Bruce Morrison, “nearly playable.” Morrison manages the Freeverse product teams and was heavily involved in developing Moto Chaser; he designed all the levels in the game. The norm for commercial games is 30fps, a point at which motion becomes as smooth and watchable as normal TV video. For reference, the current iPhone release of Moto Chaser runs at 26fps and includes many optimizations to achieve even that on the iPhone’s relatively slow processor and limited RAM memory.

Check out the rest of the article for look into how they did it, how long it took, and where they might go from here…

Merry Christmas, tiny little media-un-savvy kids: rudolf just ran down granny!

Well, that’s the story Gizmodo reports, anyway:

Yesterday’s episode of Santa Live featured the song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Apparently, children young enough to care about Santa are also young enough to have trouble understanding the jokey song about grand-matricide. Parents complained, and Majewski, already $12,000 in debt (that’s a lot of bribed commenters!) was forced to pull the app. He remains the only one baffled by his lack of success with Santa Live.

Majewski, already controversial since the discovery he was paying for good reviews via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, is likely not having a great holiday season himself now, even absent joyous vehicular homicide carols.

Did the parents over react? Should Majewski better have known better? Or did some one just get a little revenge paying parents to complain via Mechanical Turk?