Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category
Download “Venger” For Free For A Limited Time
Venger is probably the best 3D Space Shooter currently available on the iPhone, though it’s an under represented genre. While the game mechanics are fun, the repetitive levels and boss fights may grow tiresome.
Wretched Games released their take on the 3D Shooter with Venger. The developer describes their game:
An exciting action packed 3D shooter, spread across 20 frenzied levels. Use the accelerometer to steer your spaceship through trenches, tunnels and asteroid fields. Use the touch pad to blast UFOs and turrets with your lasers, or turbo boost through timed traps. Each level ends in an epic boss battle where you must take out the boss space station defenses while blasting its defense UFOs.
Download Trism For Free
I’ve noticed a trend. There seems to be quite a few games for the iPhone that follow in the footsteps of Tetris and Bejeweled. But Trism by Demiforce, LLC, does have its unique aspects, allowing it to stand apart from these staples and create a new name for itself, namely due to its excellent utilization of the iPhone’s accelerometer.
Trism requires that you slide the trisms so that they create a combo of three of the same color. Once you do this, they are eliminated from the board and new ones slide down into their place. Here’s where the neat part comes in. You can tilt the iPhone in any direction to change the gravity so the trisms fall and fill in spaces. Open spaces in the board make it more difficult to make matches, says the tutorial, so turning the iPhone on its head can actually help you score big points! Read the rest of this entry »
Palm Calms Down Exageration Of Anti-iPhone Claim
Palm in an uncharacteristic move late yesterday submitted an SEC filing hoping to dampen expectations created by Elevation Partners founder Roger McNamee during a Bloomberg TV interview. The US document specifically singles out McNamee’s claims that the Palm Pre would convert all early iPhone users and describes them as an “exaggerated prediction” that it wants to withdraw.
Assertions that the OS roots of the BlackBerry and iPhone are 13 and 9 years old are also “inherently imprecise” and also taken back, Palm says. Read the rest of this entry »
Why iPhone Users Won’t Switch To The Pre
Palm investor Roger McNamee recently stated that when the phone contracts of the initial iPhone owners expire this summer, they’ll all be jumping ship for the Palm Pre – which should be shipping by then.
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it – If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”
First of all, this statement belies a common misconception about Apple owners – namely that their purchasing decisions are fueled by and are a function of their desire to be “cool”. While these customers undoubtedly exist, the iPhone has sold millions of units simply because its feature set leapfrogged all other competing smartphones in one fell swoop. Think about it – the iPhone was unveiled more than two years ago, and competitors are still struggling to play catchup. Apple doesn’t create hype to sell products. Rather, the ingenuity of the products themselves create the hype. Read the rest of this entry »
20 Cool Things To Do With Your iPhone
Your iPhone can make calls, access the internet, send and receive emails, and even tell you what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur, but, thanks to the App store, it can do so much more besides.
And so we decided to put together this list, highlighting those apps that can transform your iPhone into a television, a plumb line, an atomic clock and more – showing you the fun and possibly unknown uses for this, the most innovative product in Apple’s line-up.
Most will work with the iPod Touch as well – though the lack of camera and always-on internet may mean they become less useful or less convenient and all are available, either free or for a small fee, from the App Store. You can buy them through iTunes on your Mac (or PC), or download them direct to your iPhone via the App Store application that appears (so long as you’re running the 2.0 firmware or later).
So, let’s get started. Who knows what your iPhone will become next? Read the rest of this entry »
Girl Band Uses Ocarina To Cover MGMT Song
Posted by Sebastien in Applications, iPhone on March 6th, 2009
The most brilliant digital marketing strategies executed by the smartest digital teams quite often don’t come close to creating the viral boost that a little imagination, ingenuity and sense of humor can. Music Ally pointed us towards this piece of fun which features indie band The Mentalists using four iPhone apps -Ocarina, Retro Synth, miniSynth and DigiDrummer Lite – to produce a cover of MGMT’s “Kid’s”.
Crazy Tanks Review
Crazy Tanks, as its name suggests, is a crazy tank blasting game for your iPhone. It’s got solid gameplay, great 3D environment, and enough fun fare to make it worthy of its $.99 price.
It’s so easy to describe Crazy Tanks. In fact, if you tap into the Question Mark icon on the game’s main screen, a new screen would appear explaining what the game is all about. To describe the game in one sentence, it goes a little something like this – Crazy Tanks lets you drive your crazy tank by tilting your device, shoot at enemy tanks by tapping the touchscreen, collect power ups and that’s it.
Scattered through various stages on the maze-like environment are power-ups, health restore, weapon upgrades and shield. There are three types of enemies you’ll encounter – moving tanks and stationary turrets which you need to destroy before they blast you away into smithereens.
Crazy Tanks Gameplay
The game also lets you fire your tank’s missiles on a wall to have it bounced towards your targets. There are some levels where there are walls and posts in the middle that you can shoot, hoping that your tank missiles will bump towards the enemy tanks. This adds some strategy elements to the game. Although be cautious when using these walls and posts as you might hit your own tank.
Crazy Tanks Control
There are only two types of controls employed in the game. Tilting your iPhone downwards moves your tanks forward while tilting it upward moves your tank backwards. Tilting it to left and right corresponds to the same directional movement for your tank. Aside from this, you get to use the iPhone’s touch screen feature to fire at enemy tanks and turrets. Controlling your tank is pretty simple, and yet requires some accuracy at times, especially when dodging tank missiles that you fire off accidentally hitting your tank. Aside from this, the iPhone’s accelerometer was well used in the controls of this game.
Crazy Tank Graphics
This game certainly rocks in this environment. The tanks are well rendered and animated fluidly. Crazy Tank’s game environment is definitely top-notch and the level mazes are so different from each other, so you won’t get tired of cruising along the same type of mazes every time. Crazy Tanks gets our thumbs up for this game in this department.
Do You Really Use Your iPhone Applications?
Posted by Sebastien in Applications, iPhone on February 20th, 2009
Just 30 percent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media, which analyzed over 30 million downloads from Apple’s App Store. And the numbers plunge from there: after 20 days, less than 5 percent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it. The drop-off is worse for free applications.
Those are amazing numbers. It’s not a new pattern–GigaOm and TechCrunch noticed this last August–but back then, with the App Store just a month old, it was hard to know whether that usage model would last.
Now it’s clear that seven months, 15,000 applications, and 500 million downloads later, things haven’t changed. App Store activity continues to be huge; Apple has made the App Store the centerpiece of its iPhone marketing over the last few months, highlighting the breadth and depth of applications that are available on the App Store for business and entertainment.
But if most people don’t find iPhone applications very compelling, does it matter how many exist? It’s enough to wonder if the App Store is starting to get a bit saturated.
Pinch Media CEO Greg Yardley looks at it a little differently. In his view, Apple has built such an easy-to-use distribution (as well as payment processing) platform for iPhone applications that people find it very easy to move onto the next thing that catches their fancy. The lack of a “try-before-you-buy” feature means iPhone users have no choice but to take the plunge, and given that most iPhone applications are free and the ones that do cost money are very inexpensive, there’s little incentive to carefully shop around for the one application that best meets your needs.
Only about 10 percent of iPhone applications appear to retain an audience over time, and most of those are games, entertainment applications such as movie listings, and things like Facebook (”their user sessions must be off the charts,” Yardley said).
But developers are still making plenty of money from the other 90 percent, he said. As noted, people are very willing to try new iPhone applications, meaning that building a better mousetrap is still a very viable business model for the world of mobile computing. His advice for developers is to get your money up front, and charge something for your application rather than trying to depend on a free/ad-subsidized model, because the number of people viewing those ads will plummet the day after the application lands on their iPhones.
At some point, however, Apple will need to find a better way to help developers promote their applications within an ocean. “The App Store fails as a promotional mechanism. There’s only so much screen real estate” that Apple can use within the App Store window to promote applications, Yardley said, and if you don’t get on those Top 100 or Staff Favorites lists, your application languishes.
Yardley thinks there is still a great deal of opportunity for developers on the App Store, which isn’t that surprising given he makes his living by advising iPhone developers. And it’s true that if the installed base of iPhones continues to grow, there will be more and more niche opportunities to cater to the needs of high-school students and seniors, and everyone in between.
Still, how many more currency conversion (37), recipe (67), and fart-joke (30) applications do iPhone users really need, especially if they aren’t using the ones they’ve already got?
iPhone Tip: Stop Auto-Correction
Writing an email on your iPhone or iPod touch with a lot of jargon or phrases that may not be in a dictionary? Writing out a text in another language? Here’s how you can prevent the overbearing auto-correct feature from slowing you down too much.
Several sources have found that by typing out a “z,” then touching and dragging to back up the cursor behind it, they could type pretty much anything they wanted.
Typing behind the Z leaves auto-correct unable to guess what word you could possibly be forming—”cabinetz?” it asks, so it leaves you alone.
Works on any iPhone/Touch app that features spelling correction, actually. You could, of course, just turn off Auto-Correction in the Settings/General/Keyboard menu, but this method provides a quick tweak that leaves the correction for the real typos while not slowing you down for other types of work.
iPhone Developers: Here Is How To Protect Your Apps Against Piracy
Last we talked about crackulous the one-click iPhone software cracking application.Crackulous is available to the public. The software would give anyone the ability to remove the copy protection from software purchased from the Apple App Store, enabling people to share them with others.Crackulous is the most powerful cracking application ever created for the iPhone cracking community. Crackulous requires a jailbreaked iPhone because it is installed VIA Cydia.After cracking App if you wants to share them with your friends.Now RipDev introduced Kali Anti Piracy an answer to crakulous.
iPhone developer Ripdev says that its new ‘Kali Anti-Piracy’ system has been in development for some months now and today sees its official ‘beta’ launch. Ripdev acknowledges it has become trivial now for anyone to become a “cool hax0r” by cracking iPhone app DRM and distributing the results worldwide, but believes that with Kali, it has the answer.
According to Ripdev, the Kali system is a server-side service which can take any App Store application and place it inside another protection wrapper which, Ripdev claim, will prevent it from being pirated. Claimed to be fully compliant with the Apple iPhone SDK, Ripdev says that Kali-protected apps meet Apple’s approval process. The company adds that it has been protecting its own software (such as Kate, i2Reader Pro, iPref and Installer) with it for months and no-one has yet cracked any of them.
There is a one-off charge for developers to start using the system. If they sell their app for $9.99 or less it’s $100. Over $9.99 and it goes up to $300. Ripdev are also taking additional ‘royalties’ for each copy protected with Kali (in order to “keep the hackers on their toes”) of between 1% and 5% of the developer’s 70% cut.
Ripdev also has a message for would-be pirates; “Expect more and more apps to be much, much harder to crack in the near future.”