Category: I-phone

Kickin’ Momma is Hothead Games’ latest iOS title, and it pretty blatantly borrows some gameplay setups from Popcap’s popular Peggle. That’s actually ok from a gaming standpoint, though, because the game is executed very well, and there’s just enough newness here to really enjoy the proceedings. The idea is that “Momma” kicks her little spawn off into a little series of circular pegs, and your goal in each level is to pick up as many little red gems as possible. Hothead uses a Chillingo-style rating system for each of the 36 levels, and there are other little mechanics that pop up later on, like explosive and multiplier pegs to hit.

There’s a whole lot of sparkle and flair to the game’s design, with lots of particles kicking around and flashy graphics to enjoy. You can earn accessories for Mama as you play, and there’s full Game Center integration for both leaderboards and achievements.

Kickin’ Momma is a great game with a lot of style, and while yes, it does re-use some ideas from Peggle specifically (though Peggle is kind of based on Plinko from the Price is Right, no?), there’s enough care and work put into this one that it’s well worth the purchase. You can buy a standard iPhone version for US 99 cents, or a universal HD version for both the iPhone’s Retina Display and the iPad for $1.99.

Daily iPhone App: Kickin Momma originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has released Facebook Messenger for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Facebook Messenger for iOS is a standalone messenger app. You can download Facebook Messenger for iPhone, iPad, iPod…

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Walmart launches VUDU, its subscription free, video-on-demand movie streaming service, for the iPad as a WebApp. VUDU, which claims to be “a leading subscription-free, video-on-demand movie service”…

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I’ve mentioned some excellent libraries on this site, and this is one that has tremendous versatility.  I’ve known about this library for quite awhile, and when I saw an update being pushed out yesterday I realized that I had neglected to mention it.

This library provides you with the capability to easily display a collection of images similar to NSCollectionView on the mac, and was designed to be programmed in a similar fashion to a UITableView for ease of use.

Included with this library are 3 excellent examples demonstrating how it can be used to quickly create a springboard, a set of images expanding from a single point, and a scrollable grid of images.

The library is AQGridView from Jim Dovey.

You can find the Github repository here:
https://github.com/AlanQuatermain/AQGridView

If you want to display a collection of images in your app you should definitely check it out.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Previously I posted about creating a magazine style text reader using Core Text.  From the response to that article I can see that there is a good amount of interest in building reading apps on the iPad.

The Flipboard app is an excellent magazine style reader for iPad.  With the beautiful middle of the page flipping, and easy to read articles setup really gives it an immersive quality.

I’ve come across an open source library that aims to create an iPad reader similar to Flipboard, and provides similar  transitions, and easy article reading as Flipboard.  Here’s a quick video demonstrating the open source project in action in the iPad simulator:

The project is FlipView from Raw Engineering and you can find the project on Github here:
https://github.com/raweng/FlipView

You can check out Flipboard on iTunes (it’s free – a great reader).

With the help of FlipView and the magazien reader tutorial mentioned at the start you should be well on your way to building a top quality reader.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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John is currently working on moving 71Squared to a new host. This will significantly improve the speed of the site and give us more flexibility and control as well. We are aiming for this to be done with little to no disruption to the website, but as with everything like this gremlins can creep in […]

How would you like to snap a photo on your iPhone and have it automatically backed up online, and accessible from your computer or iPad?

With cloud storage, you can automatically backup your iPhone photos and sync them among your devices.

With SugarSync (the program I use) and/or Dropbox, your important files are all linked up between your iPhone, your computer, and an online “cloud” storage account that can be accessed from anywhere.

One of my favorite uses for SugarSync is a tweak that lets me auto upload iPhone photos to SugarSync, so that my Camera Roll is backed up almost immediately after I take a photo.

Whether you use SugarSync or Dropbox, this guide will show you how to automatically upload your Camera Roll photos to your cloud storage account, which can then be accessed from your iPhone, iPad or any computer.

Note this is not a perfect solution, since you need to open an iPhone app to initiate the syncing process, but this tutorial will explain how to make the photo backup process as seamless as possible.

This solution is much better than the SugarSync iPhone app feature which requires you to manually upload your photos or take photos from within the SugarSync app in order for them to be stored.

These instructions explain how to use the CameraSync app to upload photos to Dropbox, and then (optionally) to store these photos in SugarSync. Both solutions require a Dropbox account. Get a free Dropbox account here (my referral link).

Then, optionally, get a free SugarSync account here (referral link). Why SugarSync? I use SugarSync because they offer 5GB of storage instead of Dropbox’s 2GB, and SugarSync is a better cloud storage service and file manager overall, in my opinion.

Dropbox: Automatically Upload Mobile Photos

To automatically* upload mobile photos to Dropbox, you will need:
*Remember, this solution is almost automatic. You need to open an app (and that’s it) to prompt the photo syncing.

1. A free Dropbox account
2. CameraSync ($1.99 in the App Store, as of this writing)
3. Optional: A free SugarSync account, if you would like to use SugarSync.
4. For those who jailbreak iPhone: Optionally, you may install the Backgrounder app so that you need only to open the CameraSync app one time and it will continue to run in the background.

Syncing Photos to Dropbox

Once you sign up for Dropbox and install it on your computer, create a new folder in your Dropbox » Photos folder. I called this folder iPhone Photos.

From there, I downloaded the CameraSync app from the App Store and linked it to my Dropbox account. Note, you can also sync your photos to other cloud services, such as Flickr, Amazon S3 Bucket, Box.net, or an FTP server.

Once you’ve added your Dropbox account, tap the account name (e.g. Dropbox) in the CameraSync Settings page, then tap Edit Account.

Sign in and choose a folder to sync to (e.g. the iPhone Photos folder you previously created.)

Now, every time you open the CameraSync app, it will begin to sync up your iPhone Camera Roll to your Dropbox account.

Auto Sync Mobile Photos to SugarSync

If you use SugarSync as your main cloud storage solution, then all you have to do is add your Dropbox » Photos » iPhone Photos folder to SugarSync and it will be backed up there after it is backed up in Dropbox.

Jailbreak

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, then you can download Backgrounder from Cydia and add CameraSync as an Override (with Backgrounding method set to Backgrounder) so that it is always running in the background.

How to Automatically Upload iPhone Photos to SugarSync & Dropbox is a post from Apple iPhone Review.

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In response to some recent mean-spirited comments left on this blog, I have decided to write this Comment Policy to clarify basic etiquette that I expect from commenters at AppleiPhoneReview.com.

To be clear, most commenters are courteous and helpful, but these rules are intended for those few bad apples who offer no value to the conversation.

I reserve the right to edit or delete your comment if you disobey any of the following community guidelines. Breaking any of these rules more than once may get your IP address(es) banned from the comments section, at my discretion.

Thank you to the majority of commenters on this site who are kind in their replies.

Mandatory Community Guidelines

1. No insults. You have a right to express disagreement with an article on this site or with a comment, but express yourself in a civil manner. You probably wouldn’t call someone you disagree with “an idiot” (or worse) to their face, so don’t do it on this blog.

2. If you represent a company or institution of any kind, then you must disclose your affiliation in the comments. It is acceptable to talk about your commercial product or service on this site, as long as you are honest about who you work for.

3. Add value to the conversation. If your comment is simply a valueless statement such as “I love iPhone,” then it is not worth posting. Please either make an insightful comment, ask a question, or help someone by answering theirs.

In the coming days, I will be removing and/or editing past comments that do not follow these guidelines. Thanks for your patience as I deal with the occasional mean or dishonest commenter.

Updated Comment Policy & Community Guidelines is a post from Apple iPhone Review.

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Cablevision has released the Optimum app for iPhone and iPod touch. The app allows Cablevision subscribers to stream live TV to an iPhones or iPod touch while in their home. What’s cooler than streaming live TV is that the app even lets you watch your On Demand movies and shows on your iPod touch and iPhone.

The app also lets you use either device as a remote control for your cable box, allowing you to schedule DVR recordings of shows right from your iPhone or iPod. The Optimum app follows Cablevision’s release of Optimum for iPad back in April. Both apps are a free download and require users to be a Cablevision subscriber.

Cablevision brings live TV streaming to iPhone and iPod touch originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On today’s episode of The Daily Lawsuit: law firm Hagens Berman has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple and five of the major book publishing houses. The suit claims Apple and these publishers have conspired to raise prices on ebooks.

According to the suit, Amazon’s loss-leading pricing for ebooks, designed to drive sales of its Kindle e-reader device, may have led to consumers having an established expectation of low ebook pricing. Allegedly, Apple and the major publishers named in the suit have colluded to raise ebook prices significantly over Amazon’s lower prices under the so-called agency model.

Under the agency model, ebooks are sold directly to consumers (rather than being sold to retailers as under the old model), with retailers splitting revenues from sales. In the case of Apple’s iBookstore, Apple’s cut is the same as for most of its other online services: 30 percent.

The suit alleges that Apple’s pushing of the agency model has meant that competitors like Amazon are now unable to price ebooks lower than Apple’s set prices, which has resulted in driving the price of ebooks higher than ever before — in some cases, electronic media is more expensive than traditional printed copies. We’ve looked at iBookstore pricing before, but the situation in 2010 didn’t seem to reflect what’s described in this suit. The price of ebooks certainly isn’t higher than the cost of printed copies in many non-US countries, either; in New Zealand, I could buy three ebooks off the US iBookstore for the cost of one trade paperback from a brick-and-mortar retailer. That pricing situation is the same or worse in the UK and Australia.

According to Hagens Berman, “The lawsuit seeks damages for the purchase of e-books, an injunction against pricing e-books with the agency model and forfeiture of the illegal profits received by the defendants as a result of their anticompetitive conduct, which could total tens of millions of dollars.” Well, good luck with that; from what we’ve been seeing so far, the iBookstore hasn’t exactly been a smashing success.

Apple involved in class-action lawsuit over ebook pricing originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When you consider that there are four different versions of iPhones out there (original, 3G, 3GS, and 4), and all of them have sold a ton of units, it’s clear that there are a whole lot of used iPhones around. That’s probably why, as GigaOm reports, iPhone resellers are very excited for another new version of the iPhone. Reseller site Gazelle says that just minutes after the announcement of the latest iPhone 4, over 10,000 old iPhones flowed in. If an iPhone 5 is announced soon, Gazelle plans to see another big bump in items for sale.

While resales go up a lot when a new iPhone update is announced, the time in between isn’t nearly as successful. Over 32,000 iPhones were traded on Gazelle last year, but this year there have only been 18,000 trades. A new iPhone would boost that number, especially since we already know consumers are hungering to buy it, no matter what the new features.

Meanwhile, resellers will have to wait. We’ve heard plenty of rumors, but there’s no official announcement yet of a new iPhone 5 — or even a new iPad, which would certainly inspire plenty of resales on that device as well.

iPhone resellers eagerly await iPhone 5 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Usually, tipsters looking to prank us with a faked shot of an unreleased Apple product will send us something like the fake iPod classic we saw a few months ago. You know, the classic Blurrycam shot, where it’s obvious that A) the tipster has no idea how to use his camera’s focus, and B) also has no idea how to use Photoshop.

But today’s subject went above and beyond. First off, he didn’t stop at sending us a single image of a faked iPhone 5 — he sent us a full-fledged video. The purported story behind this video is that Apple fouled up somehow and managed to accidentally include a hidden link to the iPhone 5 on its Swiss website. Ludicrous? Absolutely. But if you suspend disbelief for a bit and watch anyway, the video shows our tipster navigating through this secret site, flicking through galleries of a quite convincing-looking iPhone 5 and even a comprehensive tech specs page. The whole thing looks like a lot of effort went into it, with near-professional quality renders of the supposed iPhone 5. Frankly, it’s the best fake I’ve ever seen — and it was good enough to hoodwink some other sites that have posted it as a legitimate leak.

A good fake, however, remains a fake; there are several clues to the faux-ness throughout the video, and they aren’t exactly hard to find. First off, check out the URL in the address bar during the opening split second of the video.

Busted.

Rather than a standard http:// address, the video kicks off with a file:// prefix — meaning the browsing wasn’t of a website hosted on a server, but instead a collection of local files on Peter’s desktop. This is an immediate tipoff that the whole thing is fake. All our tipster had to do was edit out this one second of video, and he might not have burnt all his credibility from the word “Go.” (And I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that the first person to send this video to us was named Peter.)

Any other clues this video might be fake? Oh yeah. There’s the random string of characters between www.apple.com/chde and iphone5 in the URL — the current Swiss site for the iPhone 4 is a simple www.apple.com/chde/iphone. There’s clumsy typesetting on the iPhone 5 logo. The “hero” images don’t autoscroll the way they do on Apple’s real site. The gallery’s background is grey instead of black. Screenshots of the phone show “No Service” in the status bar — a great way to advertise a mobile phone, right? The time in the status bar reads 8:07 AM rather than Apple’s traditional 9:41. Battery percentage is showing, too, which Apple doesn’t show off in its product shots.

The forehead-slapping “duh” moment comes in when you see that all of the apps in the gallery shots have English names… on a Swiss site. Oops.

The iPhone 5. iPhone without the phone. This changes everything.

Peter really went overboard on his tech specs page, with what looks to be carefully-calculated dimensions for an iPhone 5 with a 4.2-inch touchscreen at 275 ppi. The camera has been upgraded to 8 megapixels and 1080p video, and capacity is bumped to 32 or 64 GB. In all, it’s a laundry list based off all the rumors we’ve heard so far, but it falls flat on at least one detail. The tech specs on Peter’s page list iTunes 9.2 as the minimum required version for the iPhone 5, and we know full well that iTunes 10.5 will be the earliest version of iTunes that iOS 5 will support. Also, he’s missing photos and descriptions of the top and bottom ends of the supposed iPhone 5; I guess he just forgot those?

The thing is, I actually like Peter’s renders of the iPhone 5 — I’d be neither surprised nor sad if the device looks similar to them — but trying to pass this off as a “leak” is what’s prompted me to poke fun at him. If he’d sent us these pics and said something like, “Hey, check out my iPhone 5 renders, do you think they’re pretty close?” we might have taken him more seriously. But trying to put one over on us (and the rest of the Apple-centric web) this way gets you inducted into the Blurrycam Hall of Shame. We hope that publishing this rundown means our more easily misled readers will stop sending us his video as a tip.

Blurrycam Theatre Presents: The i(have too much free time)Phone 5 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since the debut of the iPad last year the TUAW blogger team has seen just about every type of iPad stand, from a cardboard tape roll with a slot on the cheap end of the spectrum to the heavy and somewhat expensive Stabile PRO stand on the opposite end. Now a new entrant, Bracketron (which sounds vaguely like it should be an NCAA basketball bracket picker app) has come out with an inexpensive and very functional iPad stand called the iTilt.

The US$19.95 iTilt isn’t the most beautiful iPad stand I’ve ever seen, but it does what it’s supposed to do: hold up an iPad in a variety of positions so you can use it. You can use the iTilt with just about any case installed on your iPad or iPad 2, so if you’ve purchased that $260 Vaja iVolution Top Crystal case with the embedded Swarovski crystals, you still have a stand that will work for you.

The stand is dead simple in design, and strangely enough it resembles this LEGO-based iPad stand.There’s a fold-out plastic piece with grooves cut into it that sits flat on the table, and a hinged metal piece fits into the grooves to adjust the angle of the stand. To carry it in a backpack for school or a briefcase for the office, it folds flat.

The iTilt isn’t fancy, but it gets the job done. I’ll take inexpensive functionality over pricey glitz any day. You can pick up an iTilt at an amazing array of retailers, including Best Buy, Target, and most office supply stores.

Bracketron iTilt: An inexpensive iPad stand that gets the job done originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CNN reports that newspaper and broadcast company Tribune wants to build a tablet for subscribers to access properties like the Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun. The tablet will be based on Android and offered for free or at a heavily subsidized price.

Tribune hasn’t made a lot of great decisions in the past couple of years, and this smells like another bad one. Some of the very customers that would be interested in Tribune’s potential hardware offering likely have a tablet already, and the odds are good that the tablet they have is an iPad. Does Tribune expect people to carry around two tablets, one for reading a Tribune paper and one for everything else? Or maybe the Tribune tablet will just be a branded Android tablet… but last time I looked those aren’t selling too well. By the way, how is the RIM PlayBook doing? Or the Crunchpad? Enjoying those Microsoft tablets?

Distributing a newspaper through the App Store may not be a palatable option for publishers because of the high toll Apple takes, but trying to produce your own hardware when so many others have failed seems a heck of a lot riskier. I think competition is great, and Apple needs some. But the grim reality is that, so far at least, no one has produced a tablet that matches the experience and price of the iPad.

We’ve seen magazines and newspapers try to meet the digital challenge a number of ways. The New York Times lost a lot of subscribers when it put up a pay-wall, but it has had some modest success by still letting non-subscribers get access to limited amounts of news. The Daily from News Corp. appears to be a failure so far, but there is still a lot of room to experiment with what works and what doesn’t. And note that all of those experiments are running on the iPad, not dedicated, poorly-selling hardware.

I’d put Tribune building its own tablet in the latter category, but maybe I’m short sighted and naive. What do you think about the Tribune plan?

Report: Tribune wants to build its own tablet originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Patently Apple reports that Apple has been granted almost 20 patents covering various software and hardware implementations. The site has singled out three of these patents as the most intriguing of the bunch.

The first patent, Integrated Touch Screen, “relates to touch sensing circuitry integrated into the display pixel stackup (i.e., the stacked material layers forming the display pixels) of a display, such as an LCD display,” according to Apple’s description. The upshot of this patent is thinner and brighter displays that require less power to drive them; additionally, the displays will require fewer parts and manufacturing steps, potentially bringing down both their cost and the difficulty of manufacture.

It’s unclear if the technology described in this patent has been implemented in Apple’s products already or not. The iPhone 4’s touchscreen is remarkably brighter, thinner, and more “integrated” than that on the iPhone 3GS, so it’s possible Apple has already started using the technology described in this patent. Of interest, diagrams from the patent show a touchscreen implementation on a notebook computer, indicating that Apple has at least explored the possibility of a touchscreen Mac.

The second granted patent, Voicemail Manager for Portable Multifunction Device, essentially describes the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail feature. As Patently Apple points out, this function which iPhone users take for granted today replaces the cumbersome hierarchical menu-style interfaces of preceding phones, which often made checking voicemail a frustrating experience. Apple filed for this patent over four years ago, almost at the same time as the original iPhone’s launch.

The third patent, Component Retention Mechanism for a Tower Computer, sounds awfully similar to the modular hard drive bays in the Mac Pro. The patent expands upon this modularity by describing retention mechanisms for PCI cards. Most Macs aren’t well-known for being easily customized, but the Mac Pro is definitely an exception to that rule.

The remaining recently-granted patents are far more esoteric than the three described above, but if you can wrap your head around them, Patently Apple has handy links to all of them.

Apple granted touchscreen, voicemail, and several other patents originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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