Category: I-phone

I’m going to see what Chillingo has to offer here at E3 later on today, but in the meantime, this recent release on the App Store is gaining some popularity (and has been featured by Apple as iPhone game of the week this week). It’s sort of a liquid physics puzzler — there’s oil coming out of a spigot at the top of each level, and you’ve got to funnel it down, using a series of platform pieces, into a waiting “mouth” somewhere on screen. Gameplay is simple but interesting as the game very slowly opens up, level by level, into more and more creative ways to find solutions.

The standard Chillingo polish is here as well — each level has the usual three star rating, a timer that tracks how fast you complete things and even a score depending on how well you do. Leaderboard and achievements are tracked with Game Center and Crystal, and there’s a fun social feature for sharing levels with friends as well.

Feed Me Oil is a fun little physics outing that doesn’t do a lot of new things, but does what it does in a polished and fun way. It’s only US$0.99, so give it a look when you want a little physics thinking to do.

TUAW’s Daily iPhone App: Feed Me Oil originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On this trip to WWDC I packed light. One backpack, a MacBook Air and a camera light. I haven’t had my Air for very long, and I’ve been trying to install only essential software on it and see what I can do without. I’ve been impressed enough with iMovie’s capabilities (once you get past what I consider to be a terrible UI), so I didn’t bother loading Final Cut Studio. I forgot, however, to whip up some “bumpers” (intro/outro) for our videos before I left. I’m used to using Apple’s Motion to handle that, but I found myself looking for an easy alternative. The solution I found was Keynote, and a grand solution it is.

I’m certain many of our intrepid readers have used this method in the past, but it was new to me. If you’ve never used Keynote, think of it as PowerPoint on a type of steroids that automatically make presentations not look like steaming piles of bullet points. With the animation and build tools available in the object inspector, I was able to drag in a couple of logos, type a little text and create a five-second intro in about five minutes. I created the whole thing in one frame, easily timed and sequenced the animations and output a QuickTime file ready to drop into iMovie. I have to say, the process was a thing of beauty.

Below is a sample of the results, created in Keynote and soundtracked in GarageBand. I won’t claim they’re genius, but it was a surprisingly elegant solution in a pinch. Even if you never use higher-end production tools, keep Keynote in mind next time you need custom titles or video intros. Combine it with some loops in GarageBand and have some stylish video ready to go in just a few minutes. You can grab Keynote in the Mac App Store as a standalone app for US$19.99.

Mac 101: Using Keynote as Motion in a bind originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The guys from Munich (actually Puchheim, near Munich) have done it again. Boinx Software has updated BoinxTV to version 1.8 and created a special new iPhone and iPad app named Orientator (free) to control 3D graphics effects in BoinxTV. Even better, Boinx developed LibOrientator, a library for iOS developers who may want to include features in their apps that enable control of BoinxTV layers.

BoinxTV is a powerful video console app for Mac OS X that provides professional TV effects and editing to humble consumers like myself. I use the app every week for TUAW TV Live, and although I haven’t yet mastered most of the BoinxTV toolset, it helps me to combine video from several cameras and other inputs, movie clips, photos, lower thirds graphics and audio into a (hopefully) professional looking video podcast.

What Orientator does is read the values for device motion, the gyroscope, accelerometer, location, magnetometer and other orientation data, and send that info over a Wi-Fi connection to BoinxTV on your Mac. While Orientator is fun for just looking at the readouts of the sensors in your iOS device (as shown above), it’s even more useful when used to control video layers in BoinxTV. For displaying apps that don’t contain the LibOrientator library and use the special BoinxTV layers, the company suggests simply velcroing an iPhone to an iPad 2 to send the orientation data to your Mac.

There’s a full description of how to use Orientator to help record iOS demos and training apps on the Boinx website, and the video below should give you a good idea of how Orientator controls special BoinxTV layers. The update to BoinxTV is available from within the application by selecting BoinxTV > Software Update.

BoinxTV adds motion magic with LibOrientator originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Notcom has released TinyUmbrella 5.00.00 which is now available for download. TinyUmbrella 5.00.00 can save iOS 5 beta SHSH blobs for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. You can download TinyUmbrella…

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i0nic, the hacker behind untethered iOS 4.3.3 jailbreak, tweeted that his untethered jailbreak that was being used on top on Limera1n exploit has been patched in iOS 5 firmware. This is what i0nic…

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Apple Rumors Italia did a side-by-side comparison of iOS 5 running on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. It looks like the 3GS version of the iPhone will run most features in iOS 5 just fine.

Crash reports can be a great way to diagnose problems within your apps – but it can be difficult to organize the reports and actually turn them into meaningful data.

I have found out about an open source project known as Quincy Kit with many useful features such as placing the crash report in a database (PHP server code included), allowing the user the option to provide their contact information, and if the crash is known you can even provide the user with feedback telling them if the crash is known and being fixed.

You can find the QuincyKit official site for QuincyKit here where you can find further details including instructions and the download:
http://quincykit.net

Looks like a very useful crash reporting solution.

 

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

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Apple has included many different user interface components within the Cocoa Touch API, but sometimes you just want to give things a customized look.  There are some great open source libraries allowing you to do just that.

I have recent found an excellent library from Sam Vermette that mimics UISegmentedControl allowing you to make some great looking switches, and easily allowing you to control the fonts, colors, shadows and more of the components.

You can check out the library and instructions on how to use it  on Github here:
https://github.com/samvermette/SVSegmentedControl

Great if you have some UISwitch’s or UISegmentedControls within your app but want things to look more suitable for your app.

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

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The latest salvo in the ongoing Lodsys patent dispute against third-party App Store developers has just been fired. According to Florian Mueller, Michigan-based company ForeSee Results “has filed a declaratory judgment suit against Lodsys’s four patents with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.” Mueller describes a declaratory judgment as “a pre-emptive strike by those who consider themselves or their customers/partners likely targets of an infringement suit.”

ForeSee counts Adidas and Best Buy among its customers, and by pre-emptively filing suit in Illinois, it hopes to protect itself against a Lodsys suit in the patent-holder-friendly Eastern District of Texas. Intriguingly, Mueller notes that ForeSee picked the Northern District of Illinois as the venue because that’s where Lodsys’s CEO (and sole employee) lives; this essentially means that Lodsys is only “formally” headquartered in East Texas, presumably because that judicial district has a history of decisively siding with patent holders.

If true, by choosing to headquarter its company in the Eastern District of Texas despite the company’s business operations actually taking place several states away, it’s just one more piece of evidence that Lodsys as a company exists solely to engage in lawsuits based on intellectual property claims. Put more simply: it’s Patent Trolling, Inc.

Mueller surmises that if ForeSee’s declaratory judgment agains Lodsys is successful, it could theoretically help the seven developers that Lodsys has sued thus far argue their case. However, the real problem is that many of these small developers may not be able to afford to defend themselves in such a suit, with their only option being to pay license fees to Lodsys whether its patents are valid or not.

Lodsys has yet to comment on the matter, but given its past history of blog posts on its site, the company will no doubt take great pains to defend its stance — one which we maintain is indefensible and amounts to gaming the US patent system in an attempt to extort money from third-party iOS developers incapable of defending themselves against its claims. Apple has yet to make any additional response beyond the response it made over two weeks ago, before Lodsys filed suit. If Apple’s measured reactions to recent crises is anything to go by, the company is no doubt carefully weighing its options before making its response in the matter.

Lodsys patents now face invalidation attack originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week TUAW and MacTech Magazine teamed up to speak to developers at WWDC about the keynote and how Apple’s new technologies will help them and their customers. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll bring you those videos here and on MacNews. Also, check out the free trial subscription offer for MacTech Magazine here.

Our first video features yours truly and the publisher of MacTech, Neil Ticktin talking about the keynote and what we’ve seen so far of Apple’s next operating systems and iCloud. Enjoy!

TUAW and MacTech Magazine at WWDC originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t raise a glass to Apple just yet. New App Store Review Guidelines explicitly ban iOS apps that identify certain DUI checkpoints. Specifically, the important passage reads:

“…apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies, or encourage and enable drunk driving, will be rejected.” Note that Apple will only reject apps that identify checkpoints whose locations are not published by local law enforcement. Also, this change is specific to DUI checkpoints and does not affect speed trap apps and the like.

It’s likely that this change is a response a recent request by U.S. Senators urging Apple to pull apps that alert drivers to the location to DUI checkpoints. The same request was also issued to Google and RIM. As of this writing, Google’s and RIM’s guidelines are unchanged.

DUI checkpoint apps no longer welcome on App Store originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the latest Developer Preview of Lion, Apple has activated the new Find My Mac feature. Like Find My iPhone, Find My Mac allows users to locate their Macs from any web browser or iOS device. As noted by 9to5 Mac, the Find My Mac setup is available through the Mail, Contacts, and Calendars setting in System Preferences. Simply click “Allow” and your Mac is ready to be tracked.

Once enabled you can use any web browser or iOS device to track your Mac. When found you can choose to play a sound or send a message, remote lock the Mac, or remote wipe the Mac. Remote locking and wiping will prevent you from locating the Mac again however. The Find My Mac feature will be free, all you need to use it will be Lion and a free iCloud membership. This feature is sure to be a bane to thieves and no doubt we’ll be hearing stories about how Find My Mac thwarted more thieves in the future.

Find My Mac kicks off with Lion originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has updated its Chrome browser to version 12. Perhaps the coolest feature of Chrome 12 is the support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS. Any websites (like this one) and web apps that use 3D CSS effects will now have those effects rendered on your page with the help of your computer’s graphics card, which should allow for faster and smoother 3D effects.

Chrome 12 also adds a host of privacy and security features. Chrome will now warn users before they download some types of malicious files. Chrome 12 also gives you more control over the data websites store on your computer, including Adobe Flash’s Local Shared Objects. Chrome 12 is a free download.

Google Chrome 12 offers safer downloads, hardware acceleration, more originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the long-standing frustrations for anyone who’s tried to edit blog posts or web documents using Mobile Safari is the absence of support for the HTML5 contentEditable attribute. The contentEditable element attribute, which began as an Internet Explorer 5.5 feature and later found its way into most modern browsers, is part of the suite of tools that makes it possible for Google Documents and other inline editors to do their rich-text WYSIWIG editing magic.

Unfortunately, up through iOS 4.3 there’s no support for the contentEditable attribute in Mobile Safari, which means that popular web editing tools either don’t work at all or have to provide severely limited iOS-specific versions. According to this thread on Hacker News, it looks like things may be changing in iOS 5; preliminary tests on the beta seem to show that the attribute is working as expected in the new version of Safari.

If this does prove out for the final builds of iOS 5 (and that’s a reasonably substantial ‘if,’ since we’re still several months away from release), we could be looking at a dramatic improvement in support for virtually all web-based rich text editing tasks on the iPad. For those of us who have struggled with this issue for a while, it’s welcome news indeed.

Thanks to Gary Poster for his question.

Will iOS 5’s Safari deliver better support for web editors? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple fans and developers apparently weren’t the only people who liked the iCloud announcement on Monday at WWDC. As reported by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Wall Street analysts are almost unanimous in their positive comments about iCloud’s effect on the financial future of Apple.

For example, Credit Suisse’s Kulbinder Garcha is quoted as saying “Although Google and Amazon are already offering cloud based offering, we believe Apple has continued to lead innovation in the services space with the introduction of its iCloud, which we believe is superior to existing cloud services from competition.”

RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky was even more enthusiastic when discussing the PC-Free capabilities of iOS 5, noting that by “‘cutting the cord’ to the PC, Apple may expand its addressable device market by 4x, addressing the ~3B handset users who have a phone — but not a PC.”

TUAW’s favorite analyst, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, also chimed in on the ability of future iOS devices to work sans PC, and commented that “Bottom line is that Apple is increasing the likelihood that consumers buy multiple Apple devices … Apple will be giving away iCloud for free (we had expected it to be priced between $25-$99 a year) … sharing non iTunes music will cost $25 a year. (As a point of reference, Amazon’s Cloud drive could cost up to $200 a year.)”

The future for Apple looks as bright as the sunlight in those architectural renderings of the proposed Cupertino campus of our favorite company.

Wall Street analysts think iCloud’s future has a silver lining originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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