Category: I-phone

Twirdie is an interesting game that’s got one of the most fascinating premises I’ve ever heard, but it unfortunately gets bogged down in an implementation that’s quite a bit less than fun. The basic idea (which you may have heard before — the game’s already been around the Web once) is that you’re playing golf, and you use Twitter search results to hit the ball. The more times a word you punch into the game has been mentioned live on Twitter in the past 60 seconds, the farther your ball goes.

The idea is interesting, and it works (though I was playing on a Wi-Fi connection — I assume 3G or even Edge Twitter searches would be much slower). But the problem is that it’s not actually fun. You don’t line up an angle or anything to actually “play” the golf course; it’s all about just getting distance. And not only is the distance random, based on your search, but if you go too short or too far, you just plain lose the shot.

In other words, the backend “live” functionality is neat, but the game attached to it is sadly disappointing. If you want to see the app in action (and maybe you’re better at guessing Twitter results than I am), it’s only US 99 cents on the App Store right now. Here’s hoping that some other developers pick up on using this “live data” from Twitter or elsewhere, and we get a more substantial game out of it.

TUAW’s Daily iPhone App: Twirdie originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that Apple and semiconductor firm Nordic have both joined the board of directors. Apple is an obvious choice; not only is the company now at the lead of the mobile device industry, but it’s also been very faithful to the standard, including Bluetooth in all of the eleventy billion iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches out there these days. [Well, other than the first-gen iPod touch anyway. –Ed]

Bluetooth says the confirmation to the board will help push a world of Bluetooth connections between mobile devices forward, bringing together “mobile phones, laptops, tablets, TVs, homes, and even cars [to] soon serve as hub devices to capture data from hundreds of millions of small sensors.” That’s an ambitious vision, to say the least, but that’s what Apple is supposed to help out with while serving on the board.

Apple joins Bluetooth SIG board of directors originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GEVEY Ultra is a new SIM interposer for iPhone 4 which unlocks iPhone 4 without dialing 112. Gevey Ultra SIM eliminated the need of dialing 112 emergency number. Gevey Ultra SIM permanently unlocks…

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All Things D is reporting that Verizon will no longer offer unlimited data plans. Which should not surprise anyone since they said they would do just that when the Verizon iPhone first came out.

Enthusiast site Droid Life reported earlier on Monday that Verizon will offer plans ranging from $30 a month for 2GB of data to $80 a month for 10GB of data, with tethering to other devices available for an additional $20, including a further 2GB of data. The site says the new plans will go into effect July 7. Verizon declined to comment on specifics of its new plans.

You can read the entire article at All Things D.

Some time ago I mentioned the free CocosBuilder scene builder for Cocos2D and the excellent premium tool LevelHelper.

I received a comment about another great tool known as CocoShop.  What sets CocoShop apart is that it is fully open source so you can see how the tool was developed, and maybe even use it as a basis for your own tool (be sure to understand the license).

It is a very good and evolving tool, and is extremely useful for laying out GUIs, and can be used for creating scenes.  This isn’t a game builder, but a time saving tool helping you place Cocos2D projects.

The Github project can be found here:
https://github.com/andrew0/cocoshop/

You can read more about the tool on the Cocos2D forum here:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/15668

Looks like a useful tool – and you can’t beat free.

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

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Recently I mentioned an excellent article on how to improve your app descriptions.  There is more to showcasing your apps than a great description of course – you need to give reasons for a potential customer to read your description.

I just read a very good list of tips from a successful iOS app developer explaining how he spruces up his screenshots, chooses his app names, what he does to visually differentiate his free and paid versions along with some tips on copywriting app descriptions.

It is always great to hear about marketing from a successfull app developer, and you can find the article here:
Spruce Up That App Store Product Page

It takes some work to implement the tips, but the end result looks great.

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

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In this article we have collected the best jQuery tutorials for June 2011.

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John Herbold, a senior product manager for Apple’s iCloud service, has updated his LinkedIn profile to show that he’s no longer with the company in Cupertino. Herbold’s LinkedIn now shows that he works for a company called HealthTeacher, and his work at Apple is in the past. He also says that working with Apple “was a great privilege. Now I get to take that experience and apply it to the enormous challenge of materially improving youth health.”

Herbold is only the latest in a growing line of big Apple executive exits, including Bertrand Serlet a little while ago, and Ron Johnson from the company’s retail division. Still, for a company as big as Apple, all of these exits are likely just more indicative of usual turnover rather than a motivated mass exodus.

Senior iCloud product manager John Herbold leaves Apple originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bad news, Verizon users. The rumors were true, and Verizon will be ending its unlimited data plan this July. According to AllThingsD, Verizon confirms it’s moving “to a more usage based model in July,” with exact details to come later on.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear what Verizon still plans to do — the company has said that its unlimited plans were always only for a temporary time, though AT&T of course grandfathered its unlimited plans in (and I’m still using one, though I can’t ever change it or add things like hotspot or tethering). It sounds like Verizon wants to shut down the plans for good, but there may still be a chance for someone on on an unlimited plan currently to keep it.

We’ll have to see. In the meantime, yes, change is in the air for affected Verizon users. With mobile bandwidth rising as quickly as it is, these companies are pushing as quickly as possible to move towards more usage-based plans.

Verizon unlimited data to end in July originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Dev Juice,

I’m having an issue with UIView animations, that I’m struggling to describe in keywords, so I can’t find anything helpful with Google. The problem is that I can’t seem to work out how to make a UIButton move relative to the bottom of the parent view, as I shrink the parent view.

I’ve managed to get the other views inside the parent to scale with an autoresize mask, but I cannot for the life of me work out how to make the bottom (or even center) of my button clip on to the bounds of the view.

Not sure if that accurately paints the picture, and I’m not sure if it’s relevant, but I’m making a widget for NotificationCenter. Hope you can help, I’m tearing my hair out.

Thanks,

Rory W.

Dear Rory,

It’s still the autoresizing mask you have to deal with, but you need to be working with the struts instead of the springs.

The Autosizing pane in Interface Builder lets you establish a fixed distance between a view and its parent’s edge. Imagine setting a view at 40 points from the top and left of the superview. Enabling the top and left struts in the inspector fixes that view at its relative position. When you use a right or bottom strut, those distances are also maintained. The view must either move or resize to stay the same distances from those sides.

The equivalents of struts in code are UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin, UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin, UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin, and UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin.

These flags allow a view to resize by expanding or shrinking in the direction of a given margin without affecting the size of any items inside. Although each of these correspond to the struts of Interface Builder’s Autosizing pane, they act in the opposite way. In IB, struts fix the margins; the flags allow flexible resizing along those margins.

Enjoy your afternoon sip of Dev Juice!

Dev Juice: Help me fix my UIView animations originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Neil Ticktin (Editor-in-Chief, MacTech Magazine and MacNews) interviews Chris McSorley of WebIS, makers of PocketInformant, at WWDC 2011. Chris was kind enough to tell us about their thoughts on the announcements on WWDC, and how it will affect their plans moving forward.

TUAW and MacTech Magazine teamed up to speak to developers at WWDC 2011 about the keynote announcements and how Apple’s new technologies will help them and their customers. We’ll bring you those videos here, MacTech.com and MacNews.com. Also, check out the free trial subscription offer for MacTech Magazine here.

WWDC Interview: WebIS originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

Why do all iPhone alarm clock apps have to simulate an old and unattractive 7-segment display? Or the old, cheap, unattractive flip-clock display? I understand the gee-wiz factor of emulating these classic displays, but aren’t we way past that point? I would love to see a simple, attractive and reliable alarm clock app for the iPhone without 7-segment or flip displays. Does such an app exist?

Thank you!

Your loving nephew,

Pete L.

My Darling Pete,

Auntie is right there with you on alarm clocks. Auntie is so over mornings. Just let her sleep in or bring the caffeine right to her, along with roses and a tasteful continental breakfast, as she rises to a well-designed iDevice app’s summons.

After receiving your letter, Auntie set out on a hunt for beautiful clocks. Thanks to many of her electronic nephews and nieces, she tracked down the following suggestions that offer alternatives to the humdrum.

Emerald Observatory (US$0.99) offers a stunning clock that’s full of astronomical information without sacrificing a clock or a daily alarm. Observatory was the single-most recommended application in Auntie’s search. The presentation includes the phase of the moon, the current time, sunrise and sunset times and much more.

Night Stand HD ($1.99) offers some handsome analog displays as well as those 7-segment and flip presentations you’re looking to skip.

Clockus ($0.99) puts a mechanical spin on 7-segment output with elements that flip and adjust to show the time.

Art Clock Van Gogh (free) provides a beautiful take on waking up. It has a criminally small audience (only nine ratings to date), and offers over 50 impressionist backgrounds.

Unfortunately, the highly recommended Pencil Clock from Paz Interactive seems to have disappeared from the store — but the screen shots that Auntie has been able to track down show that it really had a fabulous and non-traditional take on time.

Hopefully one of these apps will strike your fancy and help you transition away from the boring 7-segment/flip-clock run-of-the-mill alarm apps.

Love & hugs,

Auntie T.

Thanks to gonzopancho, NienorGT, pTracker, josh_m, Consumer_NeXT, mssres, rosskimes, zyafa, LucasTizma, jeffmc, and everyone else who tweeted suggestions…

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me find a better alarm originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ngmoco has picked up former EA developer Ben Cousins, the man behind much of that company’s free-to-play services at the EAsy division. He will establish a new studio under ngmoco called ngmoco Sweden, which will create games and content using ngmoco’s (and parent company DeNA’s) services and platforms.

At EA, Cousins was instrumental in setting up the free-to-play shooter Battlefield Heroes, as well as the more hardcore spinoff, Battlefield Play4Free, so it’s likely that in his new position at EA, he’ll be heading up some free-to-play projects more tailored to a traditional gaming audience than ngmoco’s current social and casual initiatives. Cousins also used to work at DICE, the company behind EA’s Battlefield series, which is also based in Sweden, so there could be a few employees from that developer following him across to the new division at ngmoco.

All in all, this is good news for iOS players and fans of ngmoco’s games in general. I can’t wait to see what titles come out of ngmoco Sweden first.

[via Joystiq]

Ngmoco hires Ben Cousins, creates Ngmoco Sweden originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ages ago, we posted about LogMeIn’s new file management and transfer capability. It wasn’t until this weekend that it sunk in how utterly brilliant this feature is.

Look at me. I’m a parent to a teenager. (Yes, there’s proof.) When visiting Fort Collins over the weekend, disaster struck. I’d copied over the new “9 Lives of Chloe Whatsherface” to the iPad but I’d forgotten to transfer that all-essential “Teen Wolf“.

Horrors.

LogMeIn to the rescue. With its remote disk features, it gave me total access to my home computer including the Teen Wolf episode that my EyeTV 250 had recorded for us, which I easily copied to the iPad.

You can browse your entire computer. In my case that included the external drive I use for EyeTV recordings. Just select the file you need and tell LogMeIn where to transfer it to. There’s a complete local file file hierarchy you can use within the application and it works far better than it sounds.

Once there, iOS 4’s app-to-app document sharing let me move it over to VLC (yes, I am lucky enough to have downloaded it before bad things happened) so my child could revel in, well, whatever there is to revel in with regards to Teen Wolf.

LogMeIn Ignition for iPad retails at a hefty thirty bucks, which may put you off from buying it. But if you can swing the cash, between its excellent “give me my home computer on my iPad” features and now its file transfer update, it can really deliver some power-hitting performance.

As for the Cat-versus-Dog smackdown? My teenager far preferred Chloe, even with her risible fake claws[1].

Update: Commenters ask: “Why didn’t you use Air Video”. I adore Air Video and recommend it highly. We needed her to watch in the car while on the go, on a Wi-Fi only iPad. For the record, as a quick google will show, I have been using LogMeIn on my iPad for well over a year.

TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page. Promo code requests are not guarantees of reviews.

[1] It’s never too early to start SAT prep

LogMeIn goes disk — and saves my weekend originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Final Cut Pro X (US$299) has only been available in the Mac App Store for a few hours, but that’s not keeping FCP fans from making amazing videos that showcase its features and capabilities.

As you’ll see in this 10-minute video from Matt Pearce, the new app borrows heavily from the UI of iMovie, but retains the power that Final Cut Pro is known for. In the video, Matt discusses some downloads that are available to add music clips and other features to FCPX. For your downloading pleasure, we present them to you:

Final Cut Pro X Content – over 1300 rights-free sound effects and audio effect presets

Motion 5 Content – including Motion templates, Library content, and sample media

ProApps QuickTime Codecs – recommended for all FCPX users, providing 8 different codecs

Update: One of our commenters pointed out the following information listed on the Mac App Store page for Final Cut Pro X — it can burn Blu-ray discs.

[via MacStories]

Final Cut Pro X hands-on video (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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