Category: I-phone

Developer John Heaton found some code in the latest version of iOS that hints iChat functionality could finally be coming to the mobile operating system. The code mentions various chat services like Jabber and AIM, and while it doesn’t specifically mention iChat, there’s certainly some strings in there that aren’t yet included in any of Apple’s standard apps.

We’ve heard rumors of something like this before — the revamped iMessage in iOS 5 is essentially iChat for iOS, though it still doesn’t directly connect to the IM services mentioned in this code. Apple may not bother calling it iChat, but it’s clear that at some point, the company was at least testing more functionality on mobile.

We’ll have to see — it would be nice to have the messaging app on the iPhone send messages out to a number of different services, but obviously Apple hasn’t announced any of this just yet.

iOS code hints iChat functionality coming to mobile originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Gmail app for iPhone and iPad is now available in the App Store again. Google had pulled the Gmail app less than an hour after it was released due to broken notifications. You can…

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In the past I’ve mentioned a tutorial how to use GameKit for multiplayer gaming, and several services to help with app cross-promotion services.

What this service allows you to do is somewhat different from what we’ve seen so far.

It allows you to enable tournaments within your games with real time updates – effectively changing a single player game into a real-time multiplayer game .

The service also provides a cross game promotion, and a separate app for cross promotion.

I was going to hold off mentioning this service since it is still in beta, but since there are already some games that appear to be doing quite well I decided to mention it here.

The service is Nextpeer, and this video shows you exactly what you can do, and exactly how easy it is to use with a game in this video where they take the previously mentioned open source game Puff Puff, and turn it into a multiplayer game in 15 minutes:

You can preview Nextpeer in the free to download Word Flow and Pingo games and see what it’s all about.

You can signup for the Nextpeer beta on the official website here.

Looks like a great serivce.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Ever wonder where your city’s most revered chefs eat on their days off? What restaurant would they choose for a first date? Where is their favorite spot to grab late night grub? All of these questions were on the minds of the Chefs Feed team when they came up with the idea to get recommendations from people who actually know what they are talking about — the chefs themselves.

Hungry for more? Satisfy your craving after the jump.

The Basics

Chefs Feed is the foodie bible whose content is created by top-tier chefs. Over 100 renowned chefs from San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have pulled together a list of their favorite dishes and where to get them. The likes of Los Angeles’ Wolfgang Puck and San Francisco’s Michael Mina offer candid suggestions of their favorite eateries, which you can add to a to-do list. The app provides featured restaurants’ vital information, reviews and it will use your location to suggest restaurants in your immediate area that feature the dishes on your to-do list.

Getting Your Grub On

To get started, you can sign in with Facebook, or if you are one of the few people left in the world who doesn’t have a Facebook account, you can register for Chefs Feed directly in the app.

Chefs Feed is the foodie bible.

After you have signed in, you can choose your recommendation location — currently only San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are available but Chicago, Washington D.C., New Orleans, Seattle, Boston and Philadelphia are on the horizon for later this year.

Chefs Feed has partnered with Virgin America, who is currently featuring the Chef Feed documentary on a number of their flights.

Side note: If you want to flip between one location and another, simply tap the Profile icon on the bottom right of the screen, choose your new location and you will be brought back to the homepage with an animated Virgin America plane flying across the screen. Virgin America is currently featuring a series of short documentaries filmed by Chefs Feed featuring the chosen Chefs and their recommendations for the city that the passengers are headed to.

The Homepage

The homepage has the following features: City’s Best Chefs, Their Favorite Dishes, Feed Me Now, Live Feed and Messages.

Chefs Feed offers a list of personal recommendations from over a hundred top chefs.

The City’s Best Chefs offers a list of the chosen epicurean curators — as in the best chefs. This list is alphabetical by chef name, but the list can be filtered by name or restaurant. Once you tap on a chosen chef, a new page will open with a photo of the chef, the name of their restaurant(s), a list of favorite dishes, and vital stats (accolades, awards, etc.)

Each chef has their own page which features their recommendations, stats and photo.

Each dish has its own page which features the chef who has recommended it, the ability to rate the dish, add it to your to do list, share that you ate it and the restaurant information.

When you tap Ate It, a share option will pop up allowing you to use Facebook, Twitter or email to share your new find.

When you tap on a dish, a new page opens up naming the dish, the restaurant, and offering up candid reviews by the Chefs—like Craig Thornton of Wolvesmouth in Los Angeles says the Poutine dish at Animal (Los Angeles) is “… a punch in the face in the best way possible. Jon and Vinny’s menus are always packed with flavor. They also pack in a great music selection.”

Ratings

At the bottom of the page, you also have the choice to Ate It, Rate It or Plan It. Basically, Ate It keeps track of your epicurean adventures, while Rate It let’s you (you guessed it) rate the item, and Plan It adds the dish to your roadmap of culinary decadence. You also have the option to Map It, which is essentially a Google map pinpointing the exact location of the desired dish.

You can sort through the list of different dishes with a variety of filters.

Their Favorite Dishes is an alphabetical list of dishes and its affiliated restaurant location. You can filter by restaurant, price, if you have “completed” the dish, cuisine, neighborhood, vegetarian friendly and if the restaurant is currently open.

The Feed Me Now page offers a list of close restaurant options, and the Live Feed provides a running feed of updates from both restaurants and chefs.

Feed Me Now is a really cool feature. It uses your location to pinpoint the recommended dishes in your relative area. There is also a map view option for those who need a visual.

The Live Feed is an ongoing feed pulling content from both Twitter and Facebook from featured restaurants and chefs.

Messages features new updates from the Chefs Feed team.

Check Please

Overall, I think Chefs Feed is an ingenious app. Not only is the concept perfect for finding new locations and recommendations that aren’t from Yelp or OpenTable, but the interface is smooth and the idea of making the home screen a restaurant guest check pad is brilliant. The handwritten font is still a running trend among apps and while it may be overkill in a number of apps, I feel that it truly works for Chefs Feed.

The idea itself, is as I said, amazing. Where else will you find a compendium of prestigious chef’s dining secrets. The Feed Me dining component is also a great feature as it utilizes your location to offer suggestions of where to eat.

Essentially, this is the end all be all checklist for foodies and I highly recommend it.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Six Pack Abs in Six Weeks. The developer asks, are you looking to get a six pack?

Many people think that basic sit-ups and crunches are all you need to get a six pack; eventually they get frustrated with poor results and give up. Six Pack Abs are obtained by properly targeting your ab muscles and the fat around them with a combination of weightlifting, cardio and proper nutrition in addition to standard ab workouts.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Six Pack Abs in Six Weeks

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Simple to follow exercises
• Step by step training
• Daily and weekly guidance
• Tips and tricks
• Effective

Requirements: iOS 4.2+

Price: $0.99

Developer: BaseTech

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Six Pack Abs in Six Weeks? Have your say in our poll:

Would you like to see Six Pack Abs in Six Weeks reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

Earlier today, we interviewed Emmanuel Crouvisier of Emcro, the developer of Tagg, an app designed to easily and quickly let you tag your friends in photos on your iPhone. Today, we’ve got big news: We’re giving away 10 promo codes for Tagg to our readers!

As if that wasn’t cool enough, Emmanuel is also going to work each winner into the app and give them their own custom quote!

Of course, we’ve got a fun way to pick out who gets a copy, so hit the jump to find out how!

How To Enter

Want to win a copy of Tagg? Here’s what you do:

1. Follow @iphoneappstorm and @taggapp on Twitter.

2. Tweet out the following:

I just entered to win a copy of Tagg from @iphoneappstorm and @taggapp, and I’m getting a custom quote! #appstorm #tagg

3. Check back here to see if you’ve won!

That’s it, super easy. Now get out there and start tweeting!

It’s funny how small this world is. Take, for example, Emmanuel Crouvisier, the owner of Emcro and developer of Tagg, a new application that allows you to easily and quickly tag the pictures taken with your iPhone using facial recognition. I worked with him a few years back when we were both at a magazine in Arizona, and then I went my way and he went his, but we kept in touch. Flash to today, and not only has he built quite a few apps for other companies, but now he’s branched out on his own and developed Tagg for the iPhone, and pushing iOS 5 to the max. With the launch of his new app, we figured it might be a good time to sit down and talk about development, what he’s doing with Tagg and the future of app development. Enjoy.

What is Tagg?

Plain and simple, Tagg is an application that allows you to take a picture, then associate that person with a contact in your address book. It works just like iPhoto does as well, so it automatically picks out faces in the image, and then you can also post those pictures to Facebook or Twitter. This gets your images organized quickly and easily, with no fuss.

Tagg

The Interview

How did you get into software development?

Originally I started playing with computers way back when I was 7 or 8. At the time, it was right around the time that the Mac was coming out and playing with some old IBM that taught me some really simple command line, and started doing some basic programming back then. I was very heavily involved in the BBS scene as well, developing back in the early ’90s or something like that, and I developed my own BBS software called Fusion which was based on another software called Shockwave. Things kind of just went from there. I’ve always dabbled in various computer things, development of sorts, and then I ended up moving into iOS development once Apple released the SDK.

What was the first app you developed for iOS?

For iOS, it was the 944 app. I was working for 944 Media, and they asked me to bring the magazine to the iOS platform. Originally, it was going to be developed for the iPhone — this is before the iPad came out — and it was just a quick way to show how to get about the city, getting access to 944 photo galleries. Not necessarily to bring the magazine to the iPhone. We did a little bit of work on that, fell behind a little bit (it fell off the priority list), and then the iPad was announced and that really changed a lot of things. All of a sudden the iPad was a great new platform that made a lot of sense for magazines. As soon as that was announced we picked back up on development work on the iPhone and iPad and launched shortly after the iPad came out with the initial version of 944 Magazine on the iPad and iPhone.

How did that work out?

Generally, the app was very well received. We went out to all 10 of 944′s markets, it was a totally free app, all free content, and we had something like 7,000 users regularly downloading the app every month when the app would update.

Automatically detect faces and assign them to contacts.

The platform that we built for 944 required app updates rather than developing the server architecture to do software updates and downloads over the air. When Newsstand was released, and 944 ceased to exist [944 Media was bought out and then shut down by Sandow Media in 2011 -Ed], Newsstand changed the game for the publishing industry enormously.

Once 944 shut down, you moved on with the acquisition company to produce their iPad and iPhone content. How has Newsstand helped you with developing further applications for the iOS platform?

It’s been tremendous. Looking at the graphs, the difference in downloads right now is literally 100 times the downloads yesterday versus two weeks ago on the same day. Basically, that’s all due to Newsstand. We had a huge, huge spike on the day that iOS 5 was released, and that was across all of the applications. Right now we’ve got three apps in there that were all ready for Newsstand on launch day. Those were New Beauty magazine, Worth magazine and Vegas/Rated magazine. One of those apps made it as a Top 5 Newsstand app for the iPhone, that just about doubled the huge spike of traffic after the initial Newsstand launch, so that has helped enormously as well.

When you were at 944, you were doing some work with Facebook integration as well, right?

Absolutely. So that’s where I got into a lot of the social networking aspect of it. I got the idea after Apple had announced their face tagging in iPhoto, but when they announced it they weren’t ready to ship the product. So when I heard the announcement, it was kind of a “light bulb” moment and I realized that I could probably do the same thing using Facebook’s SDK. I dug through the documentation on there overnight, literally, and the next day started working on that. About 10 days later I had a really good working prototype, and had a lot of back and forth with the Facebook Connect guys. They were really excited about what we were building, because we were the first company using the API to do that. In essence, in about two weeks or so, we went ahead and launched that, and to date we’ve had something like 300,000 photos on the 944 website.

Is that what led you down the path for developing Tagg?

That actually came about to solve a problem I had encountered myself. At some point, I went to restore my iPhone and the backup was taking forever. I looked to see what was going on and it was because I had amassed 1,800 photos in my photo library. A lot of those were photos I had taken out and about with friends that I meant to one day connect to my computer to sync to iPhoto, find the faces, share them with Facebook and go through that whole process. Then I realized that there had to be a better way. If I could find a good way to tag the photos, it would solve the problem on the device.

Uploading and sharing images is simple.

I had that idea brewing for a while before iOS 5 was announced, and one day I was driving across country and I was watching some of the videos from WWDC. One of the videos talked about the ability to extrapolate a face from an image. I had an idea, suddenly. I could just take a picture, the app could automatically detect where the faces are, and then make the tagging process really fast, really efficient, making it a no-brainer. You basically take a picture, the app goes through the process of finding the faces, and then you can tap on the face and tag away from there.

What’s the response been like so far?

We made it into the App Store on iOS 5′s launch date which was really important, still going through some marketing efforts right now but we’ve had a few hundred sales. I’m planning a big marketing push in the next few weeks, and we have a few celebrity tie-ins to work in, too. A writer friend of mine who works for Comedy Central wrote a lot of funny bits for the app, so whenever you tag a celebrity in a picture, a funny saying will come up. That should be a good draw. We’re just working on getting the word out for the app.

What kind of advice would you give to someone looking to get into iOS development?

The most important thing is to just get started. A big struggle at first is to get your head around some of the structure meanings and some of the classes that sometimes make a lot of sense when you read them but can be 40 characters long. Xcode makes it much less painful than it could be; Apple has done a great job of supporting developers in that way, and their documentation is really good. Definitely watch the WWDC sessions, they’re fantastic. They’ve got really good example code up there. Reading a couple of books on Objective-C development would help. Just start building apps — that’s the most important thing.

If the iPhone has done anything for established game developers, it’s been to offer a place where classic titles can be ported and played not only by the original players, but also an entirely new generation (or, in some cases, generations) of gamer. Sega has done this with Shining Force, a classic strategy-RPG that follows a group of inexperienced fighters as they battle to protect their land.

Is this classic reborn on the iPhone, or is this a half-baked port that doesn’t do the original game justice? Read on to find out.

Runefaust Attacks Guardiana

The game begins when Runefaust attacks its neighboring kingdom of Guardiana. Guardiana stands as the guardians (get it?) of an ancient temple created by the Ancients, designed to make sure Dark Dragon doesn’t break free of his magical bindings. Silly naming aside, the story doesn’t break too far from typical ’90’s-era role playing game stereotypes. That isn’t to say that it isn’t well done, as there’s enough here to make you want to keep going, but there isn’t anything new done with the game.

All of the soldiers now have blue hair, which is odd.

You’re in control of the head of the Shining Force, whom you can name whatever you’d like. For simplicity’s sake I’ll call him “Max.” Max leads a ragtag group of adventurers around the continent, travelling all around in hopes of keeping Runefaust at bay and stopping Dark Dragon from being resurrected.

The king is dying, and not a single person thought to cast Heal.

The game follows a typical town-battle-town-battle storyline, which is fine as it gives you just enough respite from battles to explore towns and outfit your team without causing you to stray from the task at hand. Easter eggs can be found in each town, so there’s a definite benefit to exploring when you have the opportunity.

Characters are often fairly one-dimensional; many of them want revenge, some want to test themselves and others are simply born for battle. The enemies, on the other hand, often have conflicting emotions and express different ideologies and a weird sense of obligation to battle even if their hearts aren’t in it.

Battles

Battles are conducted via the typical strategy-RPG method of moving units around on a grid, combining RPG elements like spells and attacks with a more tactical approach and an immersive experience. I’m a fan of this style of gameplay, as it feels a bit more realistic than troops lining up into rows of three and running back and forth to attach each other. Shining Force doesn’t disappoint in this area, offering a large character roster and variety of spells and weapons.

Our hero is about to kill a dwarf with a much, much larger weapon.

Upon attacking an enemy, the screen will cut to a short, unique animation detailing how much damage was done, how much experience was earned and (if an enemy has been defeated) how much gold has been found. I found that these short scenes not only made battles more engrossing, providing a cinematic feel, but also made me feel more interested in the characters as they attacked or were attacked.

Each battle is unique from the last, pitting you against different enemies, goals or environmental concerns. Fighting in the mountains will drastically decrease your movement, while fighting inside can make it easier until you reach a bottleneck. You’ll have to tweak your strategy for each battle, making it easy to change things up and breaking any sense of monotony.

Here's one of my wizards, moving through the mountains. Two squares at a time.

Since battles are the main focus of the game, it’s important to stress how well they’re done. Conflict is challenging but, with proper care, never feels cheap. Learning how certain enemy units act and using that to your advantage is fun, and learning how to deal with different environments will keep you on your toes.

Characters

Some characters will join your Force automatically, while others will require you to do some digging. Two secret characters (a Samurai and a Ninja) exist in the game with only a single tile devoted to their joining the Force. Other characters require multiple steps to recruit, usually involving talking to them in one town and then finding them again in a different town later on. Deciding who you want to bring with you can become difficult in later portions of the game as your Force grows larger and there are many compelling characters to choose from.

And some other, not so compelling characters.

Characters will fall into different Classes. These classes can be “promoted” at any point after level 10, offering them access to more powerful weapons and spells. Promotions also change the sprites for the characters, often making them look more hardcore (though, in some cases, making them look just a bit silly). Classes can be described with a few main categories: wizards, healers, tanks, ranged attackers and movement-based classes. How you’ll play will affect your choice of how to bring, and it’s important to make note of who you’d like to have with you.

That's actually pretty depressing, Mr. Werewolf

Beyond having different classes, each character has a distinct personality. You can talk to them down in the headquarters, and there are short scenes here and there (usually when they’re about to be recruited) that give you a sense of how each character will act. This gives you just enough exposition to evoke a bit of caring, making you feel something as Mae is knocked out beyond “well, there goes my tank.”

Fun Factor

This game is a blast to play. Not only am I one of the people who played an earlier version of the game (in my case on the PC, though the game originated on the Sega Genesis) but I also believe that the game stands on its own.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of 8- or 16-bit games, and that applies here as well. To me, this game shows that game developers had it going for them in the 90’s, as there’s an excellent balance to be found. I enjoyed looking into all the nooks and crannies for new items or characters, and the characters have just enough personality to make you want to keep them alive on the field of battle.

The game follows a fairly steady difficulty curve, allowing you to experiment a bit with your characters without feeling as though you’re too underleveled. One complaint I do have is that if Max is killed the battle is over; I understand that he’s the hero (quite literally, after his promotion) but it makes it hard to level the main character up when he’s such a sissy. Besides that, I never felt as though the game were cheating me, a feeling that I’ve been getting more and more often as developers sacrifice stability for ‘challenge’.

iOS-ify me, Captain!

One fun thing about this version is that you can choose how the game is displayed. You can view a minimal version, where buttons are barely-visible overlays on top of the action, or a different version that offers a far-more compressed view. It’s up to you how you’d like to play the game, though I strongly suggest the view that allows you to utilize your iPhone’s screen.

Even the guys at Sega don't remember what the Genesis looked like. (Hint: it wasn't a handheld)

There’s the normal iOS fare here, meaning that the game will resume right where you left it after you come back from another app. This makes the need to save next to nonexistent, removing one of the main functions from the priests in the original game. This doesn’t remove any difficulty from the game (you can’t turn the system off and back on to the last quick-save, a technique I’ve used for other games) but does it make it easier to play in short bursts.

Is It the Game for Me?

Absolutely. If you like strategy-RPGs, this is one of the best available for the iPhone. It’s easy to pick up and play, there’s a decent amount of exploration, and working through battles is fun and exciting without feeling unfair.

I can’t think of any drawbacks to this port, which is rare with iOS. The game flows naturally despite the much smaller screen size, and it’s incredibly faithful to the original version. If anything, I might say that it’s too faithful, avoiding the modern age and sticking to some weird rules that were decided on decades ago.

If you can accept that, or even prefer it, Shining Force is the strategy-RPG for you on the iPhone.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Assault SOS. The developer describes Assault SOS as an app that helps keep you safe! Whether you’re walking home late at night or you’re just out jogging, this app can send a quick alarm with your location if anything happens. You can select any number of email addresses, Twitter, Facebook and even a phone number that automatically gets called.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Assault SOS

About the App

Here are the top four features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• HotButton Mode — The alarm is triggered immediately if you release a button. Useful is you’re walking through an unsafe area.
• Check-in Mode — The alarm is triggered after a specified time if you don’t check-in with the app (don’t worry, the app reminds you when). Useful if you’re out and about and don’t want to be on total alert.
• You can also toggle a sound and light alarm on the phone itself.
• Send the alarm however you prefer: Tweet it, post to your wall, email and by phone!

Requirements: iOS 4 or newer

Price: $1.99

Developer: Pennydale

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Assault SOS? Have your say in our poll:

Would you like to see Assault SOS reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

I really like these photos of Steve Jobs and the early Mac gang, taken by Norman Seeff. You may have seen one of them on the front cover of Time magazine, not to mention on the back cover of Jobs’s recent biography. It’s great how these photos show just how young and carefree Jobs and company once were, hacking away on computers that they then sold directly to other young and carefree computer users. The people in these photos aren’t corporate billionaires or marketing geniuses just yet — they’re just having fun making cool stuff.

But at the same time, I do see a little glint in Steve’s eye, a realization that by posing with his computer on his lap in front of a fireplace with a beer next to him, he’s got the opportunity to be “different” from everyone else out there. These were taken after Bill Gates’s hilarious photos, and you get the sense that Jobs already knows history is watching. Great photos for sure.

Thanks, Elizabeth!

Steve Jobs and the Mac team, photographed by Norman Seeff originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s hot, new tablet, the Kindle Fire, has been touted as a potential competitor to the iPad. Now that the tablet has launched and landed in the hands of several of our writers, it’s time to take a closer look at Amazon’s offering. You can read each of our opinions below and see if the Fire lives up to it’s pre-launch hype.

Kelly Hodgkins

When I first pulled the Kindle Fire out of the box, I fell in love with the size. I love the iPad, but sometimes it’s hard to hold the tablet for any length of time with one hand. The Kindle, though, is just perfect. It’s not a full-fledged Android tablet like the Xoom or Galaxy tab, but it does most everything I want it to do. You can listen to music, watch videos, read books and browse the web. You can install apps from the Amazon App Store and there’s a free app everyday.

It’s tightly integrated into Amazon’s ecosystem and had all my content ready and waiting right out of the box. It helps that I am a long-time Amazon customer and have used the retailer’s music store, book store and video store in the past. I’ll lose some of my Apple cred, but I must admit I have more content tied up in Amazon’s services than I do in iTunes.

It’s not the iPad, though, and wasn’t designed to be. It’s a media consumption device for Amazon’s content. It isn’t a workhorse like the iPad, which I can use to write documents, edit images and create presentations. The Kindle Fire will find a home on my coffee table ready and waiting for me to read that next chapter in a book, watch that TV show or look up information on that web site. For $199, it’s the best bargain tablet on the market.

Steve Sande

It’s obvious that Jeff Bezos had taken presentation lessons from Steve Jobs at some time in the past, because when he announced the Kindle Fire I thought it was going to be an incredible device. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve found some things that I like about the Fire, but it’s definitely not an iPad-killer, at least not in its current incarnation. Instead, I think it’s a way for Amazon to enter the tablet market with a splash, and then use the first Kindle Fire as a “gateway drug” for larger and better tablets to come. At $199, it’s an amazing device.

The Kindle Fire is small – surprisingly so. I found that specific size (a 7″ screen) to be too big to comfortably hold in one hand like I can an iPhone or iPod touch, and too small in terms of screen size to be friendly to my 54 year-old eyes. That’s kind of an uncomfortable neighborhood to be living in, and at least I only had to pay $199 to find out that a 7″ device isn’t the right size for me.

My biggest complaint at this point is the utter lack of decent software. I’m used to the awesome built-in apps and wonderful third-party apps for the iPad. When I was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot, I quickly found out that there was no way to do it that was built into the device. A search for screenshot apps showed nothing. Finally, our own Queen of the iOS App Devs, Erica Sadun, figured out a way to do it — something that a lot of people in the Android world were also trying to figure out. I’m used to being able to easily set up new email accounts with iOS Mail, which seems to take care of a lot of the details of setting up IMAP and POP accounts. Not so with the built-in email app on the Fire, which took a lot more work. I wanted to listen to some podcasts, so I looked for a way to do so on the Kindle Fire. Surprise – there’s no native way of doing it. I was fortunate enough to find a third-party app that would allegedly allow me to download and play podcasts, but after entering in the feed URLs and downloading the feeds, the device just didn’t want to play them.

I found that to be the case with many things I wanted to do with the Fire. I think Amazon is going to sell a boatload of the devices to Kindle book reader owners, and I think that things will get better as Amazon responds to early adopter feedback and has developers create apps that are designed for the Fire. But right now, it feels a bit like a work in progress.

TJ Luoma

My first reaction to the Kindle Fire was opening the box and thinking “Wow, that looks great.” My second reaction was when I took it out of the box and thought: “Wow, that’s heavy.” I had one of the previous generation Kindles, and loved the fact that it was so light and thin, you could almost forget you were holding it. The Kindle Fire isn’t like that. It might not be very heavy *objectively* but it feels heavy.

There were a few immediate frustrations, too. First, unlike all of the other Kindles, the Kindle Fire does *not* come with optional built-in 3G. “Free 3G” is included in the other Kindles primarily to download books, not surf the web. Browsing on the previous Kindles was listed as an “experimental” feature, and the experience was painful (I assume that is still true with the other Kindles). When I tried to download Watchmen (more on that in a moment), the download was painfully slow. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, when suddenly the Kindle announced that it had an OS update, and rebooted itself immediately. It’s a little surprising to see an update needed on Day 1, but worse was the fact that the Watchmen download was about 50% completed when the Kindle rebooted, and then I had to restart the download from the beginning.

Reading on the Kindle Fire is great. The screen is really bright, it’s a nice size despite the weight, and other books downloaded quickly. If the e-ink “flash” annoyed you, you’ll be glad to know that it’s not a problem with an LCD. Pages don’t “curl” like the iPad, but that’s not a feature I ever wanted or needed. Instead, pages slide out of the way when you tap or drag. If you’ve ever used a Kindle before, the move to a touchscreen Kindle is very intuitive…at least for reading books.

My wife picked it up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. There are no buttons on the front, and the button on the bottom is very small. Once she was inside a program, she couldn’t figure out how to get back out again (tap on the screen, then hit the back or home icons). Those are minor adjustments that will come with more experience. Cut/copy and paste, however, is a mess. Anyone who thinks Apple made a mistake by waiting to add copy/paste to iOS until they had a good UI should try the Kindle Fire. Trying to select text is difficult. Trying to adjust the selection is difficult. Once you get the word/sentence/paragraph highlighted, figuring out how to get it to cut/copy is difficult. It’s so bad that I actually opened the manual and searched for a section on copy/paste. There isn’t one.

In a world without an iPad, the Kindle Fire would be the best tablet device I had ever seen. But the world has now seen two generations of iPads. It’s impossible not to compare them. Yes, the Kindle Fire is less than half the price of the iPad; unfortunately, it’s less than half of the experience, too. Before someone objects to comparing version 1 of the Kindle Fire against version 2 of the iPad, let me be clear: the Kindle Fire compares unfavorably against the *first* generation iPad, and the UI compares unfavorably against the first generation of iOS.

I was sitting yesterday with my iPhone, iPad, and Kindle Fire. Someone sitting next to me pointed at the iPhone and said “I know what that is” and then pointing to the iPad “and I know what that is” then he pointed to the Kindle Fire “but what’s that?” I explained told him what it was. “Is it a big phone or a small computer?” he asked. That’s the experiential difficulty with the Kindle Fire. It’s obviously not a phone.

While there have been plenty of people who have considered trading their laptops for iPads, I don’t think many people will try the same with the Kindle Fire (for one thing, the lack of Bluetooth means you can’t connect a keyboard). The Kindle Fire is primarily a color Kindle that also has a web browser, email, and some games. The addition of the Amazon Instant video library will be a benefit to some, but again the size makes it too small to be able to set down on a desk or table and watch comfortably, but too heavy to hold for the duration of a movie.

One last word, regarding the “Silk” browser. I live behind a high latency satellite connection, and I thought Silk was going to be a huge boon for me because of that. It isn’t. In fact, it has no noticeable effect at all. On a fast DSL connection it doesn’t seem any faster than my iPhone or iPad.

Oh, and about that Watchmen book, which is available exclusively on the Kindle Fire? It’s unreadable. There’s far too much whitespace around the actual page (a side effect of its shape?) which makes the page itself too small to comfortably read, at least for my 38 year-old eyes. I had expected there would be some sort of special feature or reason why it was only available on the Kindle Fire, but if there is, I can’t figure out what. As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no reason why Watchmen isn’t available for Kindle on the iPad, where it might actually be readable.

Even more surprising, the Kindle Fire cannot play the “Kindle Edition with Audio/Video” version of Stephen King’s 11/22/63. If you want to read that, you’ll need an iOS device, or get the regular Kindle version which doesn’t have the “13-minute film, written and narrated by Stephen King and enhanced with historic footage from CBS News, that will take you back…to Kennedy era America.”

First Impressions of the Kindle Fire originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve been reading a lot of comics on the iPad lately, and while I love my iPad for a lot of reasons, I think reading comics is one of the best reasons to own an iPad. The big, beautiful screen brings comic art to life exquisitely, most apps allow you to zoom in and out of bigger pages at will, and the touch interface makes flipping a page as easy as, well, flipping a page. So I have no problem at all with free comics to download on the iPad, and that’s exactly what Operation Ajax is.

It’s a historical comic (so no superheroes, for those of you into that, unfortunately), about the CIA’s operation to cause a coup d’état in Iran in 1953. The app features full sound and motion as you’re reading through the pages, along with lots of background information about the real-life story and even some newsreel videos to check out.

And right now at launch, the app is completely free. Excellent deal, and a great way to get started in comics on the iPad if you haven’t yet. After that, I highly recommend the Comixology app for buying digital comics directly, and I’ve been using the free ComicBookLover for reading my own .CBR digital files. I’ve been reading plenty of things in iBooks, too, but the iPad really seems made for reading some great comics.

Free iPad comic tells the story of Operation Ajax originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tic Toc for Mac (US$4.99) from Overcommitted is a simple task timer that sits unobtrusively in your menu bar while you work. It’s a great option for those who must monitor time spent on a task. There are no client records, project management features or support files. Simply create a task, start the timer and get to it. Here’s how Tic Toc for Mac works.

Once installed, Tic Toc places an icon in your Mac’s menu bar. Click it to create your first task. A slip appears. Give your task a name and click Save. The task then appears in a list which shows its title, most recent modification date and time spent on it over the last day and the last week. Click Start to begin timing.

The task’s title appears next to the menu bar icon (you can turn that off). Finally, set the idle timer to watch for periods of inactivity between five minutes and one hour, so that Tic Toc won’t record time accrued while you’re away.

What’s nice is that you can maintain several timers simultaneously (you double-dipper you) and export your data to XML or CSV. From there, simply import with your favorite financial software, project manager and so on.

Tic Toc isn’t for everyone. For as much as it does, there’s a lot missing. As I said, you won’t build projects with Tic Toc or manage client information. But that’s really not the point. Those looking for a simple, reliable task timer that works as advertised ought to consider Tic Toc. At five bucks, it’s an easy investment.

Daily Mac App: Tic Toc originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Pocket Edition of Minecraft, released a little while ago exclusively on Android, has been spotted on the New Zealand App Store today, which means the title will work its way around the world and arrive on the App Store in North America this evening. The full PC version of Minecraft (which has been selling millions of copies despite only being in a public beta this whole time) is due for an official release on Friday, so this release makes a lot of sense. When it does arrive on the App Store in this country, the universal title is expected to cost US$6.99.

Unfortunately, as you might imagine, the mobile version is a little less functional than the full PC version, with not all of the many, many blocks of the full game appearing in the mobile one. There are also some blocks that appear but can’t be manipulated by the player. And there are only three blocks available on the game’s “hotbar,” rather than a full spectrum of blocks to use.

But if you’ve never played Minecraft (or are a huge Minecraft fan), the iOS version will probably be a nice sampler before the real thing. We’ll keep an eye out on the store, and give it a shout when it finally appears stateside.

Minecraft: Pocket Edition out on iOS today originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In August of 2010, tap tap tap’s Camera+ got pulled from the App Store because it implemented a feature which violated Apple’s Developer Agreement at the time. VolumeSnap allowed Camera+ users to use the “+” volume button on the iPhone as a physical shutter switch for taking photos with the iPhone. After a four-month hiatus, Camera+ came back to the App Store with a redesigned and improved interface, but VolumeSnap was nowhere to be found.

Things certainly changed over the next few months; Apple “Sherlocked” the VolumeSnap feature for iOS 5’s own Camera app. It worked exactly the same way as it did in Camera+, and I imagine tap tap tap must have been a bit peeved at Apple for a while.

Camera+ has now been updated with the VolumeSnap feature returned in all its glory, and as you can tell from the release notes, tap tap tap is pretty excited about it. The feature works just like Apple’s, um, borrowed implementation: press the “+” volume button to take a picture while you’re in the app and lining up a shot, and snap, there’s your picture. You can still use the touchscreen shutter button instead if you prefer, and tap tap tap also has instructions for disabling VolumeSnap if you decide you dislike it (though I can’t imagine why anyone would).

VolumeSnap makes an already great photography app even more useful. Though the whole saga hasn’t exactly made Apple look like the good guy, at least it eventually came to its senses and allowed this great feature through.

Camera+ updated, VolumeSnap returns at last originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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