Category: I-phone

A big update for id games’ Rage: Mutant Bash TV (available in SD and HD versions for $0.99 and $1.99; the latter being for iPhone 4 and iPad) has appeared on iTunes overnight. As John Carmack noted in our recent interview with him, it adds a number of new features that arguably should have been there from day one — namely Game Center achievements and scoreboards. As the game is fundamentally an on-rails shooter with a strong score attack aesthetic, social leaderboards will certainly make for a more compelling experience.

That’s not all the update contains, however. The previously unofficial TV out support has been upgraded to a supported feature, allowing you to cable your iOS device to a bigger screen. A new “museum mode” removes the monsters and lets you play through the levels at your own pace, presumably so you can show your friends the graphics whilst exclaiming “it’s on a phone!!” A mirror mode flips the game left-to-right so you can eek out a little more fresh gameplay out of the three rather short levels.

Most intriguing, however, is the addition of gyroscope controls if you have an iPhone 4. As with the recent Star Wars: Falcon Gunner, this adds an aiming mode based on moving your iPhone around as if it were a window onto the game space. This offers a new and potentially compelling way to control iOS shooters, not to mention a definitely compelling way to look stupid if you play it in public.

With Rage vying with Epic’s Infinity Blade in the iTunes charts, it’s just like the late 90s Quake-versus-Unreal competition all over again… except this time they are both getting crushed by Electronic Arts.

Rage v1.11 update adds Game Center, gyroscope controls and TV support originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 10:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You probably already have plenty of iOS games to play, given how many crazy good releases we’ve seen in the past week or so. But there’s always room for one more, right? Ash was chosen as our Daily App a while back — it’s an iOS game that hearkens back to the classic 16-bit RPGs of my youth, the old Final Fantasy games on SNES and Phantasy Star on the Sega Genesis. It’s currently US$2.99 on the App Store, but apparently you’ve all been very nice this year, because SRRN Games has passed along ten promo codes to get the game for free. We’re giving those to ten lucky commenters.

Hit the “Read more” link below to see the official rules, and enter by leaving a comment on this post.

Continue reading TUAW Giveaway: Ash, classic-style RPG for iOS

TUAW Giveaway: Ash, classic-style RPG for iOS originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thanks to the iPad and TouchOSC, robot Hikari can now be controlled by our favorite tablet device. The system for control on the iPad is powered by TouchOSC, a remote control application that sends commands to an external device using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol. These commands are sent to a Max patch running on a Windows-based PC. Commands are then relayed directly to the PC-connected robot.

In the YouTube video after the break, owner Darkback2 uses this system to make Hikari walk and stand up from both a face-up and a face-down position. You should watch out, though, as the iPad controller can also be used to make Hikari attack, an action that fits in nicely with the video’s drum-heavy theme music. For those that are wondering, … no, robot Hikari does not dance.

Thanks Bob for sending this in!

Continue reading Found Footage: An iPad-controlled robot that attacks

Found Footage: An iPad-controlled robot that attacks originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to 9to5 Mac, retail copies of iWork ’09 are running low at Apple Retail Stores. As one Apple retail employee told 9to5, “There is no iWork on the shelves, no iWork in stock and none on the way.” That alone is a pretty good sign Apple’s office suite is about to be updated, but there’s even more. As you can see from the image to the right, type in “iWork” in the search field on Apple.com and the site will autocomplete “iWork ’11.” Signs really don’t get clearer than that.

So why January 6th? Because that’s the official launch date of the Mac App Store and it’s unlikely that Apple would launch a Mac App Store without having a few new, shiny Apple-branded apps that appeal to a lot of people to kick things off. Plus ever since Apple previewed the Mac App Store back in October, the iWork apps have featured in all the official mock-ups of the store front.

iWork ’09, the latest version of the software suite, was released on January 6, 2009. Nice coincidence, huh?

All signs point to January 6th launch of iWork ’11 originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As we previously reported, EA dropped prices on most of its iOS apps this week, and that sale sent shockwaves through the App Store’s holiday season. We’ve seen tons of awesome new apps hit the store in the past few weeks, but if you look at the Top Paid apps right now, most of them are older EA favorites. EA currently has six of the top 10 apps on the store (with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 leading the way — a big name title released for just 99 cents), and it’s peppered throughout the rest of the top 50 as well. The biggest recent release on the list is probably Infinity Blade, which, despite extremely solid reviews and lots of press about its release, is currently down at number 16.

In short, EA has kicked off a price war, and there’s a time limit on this one. Apple is freezing the charts on December 23rd, which means that any games in the top 200 at that time will remain there over the all-important Christmas holiday, the point at which we’ve seen the biggest jumps in App Store sales (due to all the new hardware out there under the tree).

At least one big publisher has already responded in kind — Gamevil has announced a price drop on many of its apps, including the just-released Illusia and Nom, although it couldn’t make it down to the 99 cent price that EA is offering. I would say look out for more big sales in the next few days. Companies have had a lot of success with App Store sales in the past, and as we get closer to that holiday freeze and the ensuing burst of sales, they’re much more likely to start pulling out the big guns.

EA’s App Store price war originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RetinaAppIcons is a jailbreak tweak that automatically converts those ugly low resolution App Store apps icons to High resolution for your Retina Display. RetinaAppIcons requires no user interaction and takes care of all the dirty work for you.

Complete list of RetinaAppsIcons features after the jump…

Features

• Works with 99.9% of all AppStore Apps
• Automatically generates high-quality App Icons
• For iPhone 4 / iPod Touch with Retina Display
• For iPad Screen
• For all the different sized Icons (Spotlight Search,…)
• Works automatically in background without user interaction
• Updates Icons on Respring or after installing new App

Download RetinaAppsIcons

You can purchase and download RetinaAppIcons for $0.99 from the Cydia Store via BigBoss repo.

You can follow us on Twitter, Join us at Facebook, and also Subscribed to RSS Feed to receive latest updates.

Also checkout:

• Download iTunes 10.1.1
• SBSwitcher – Put SBSettings Toggles in The App Switcher (Multitasking bar)
• Enable Widescreen (720p) Photos on the iPod Touch 4G with HD Photographer

mSpot Music app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch puts your iTunes music library in the cloud and lets you stream it from there. Apple is rumored to release an official iTunes cloud solution to stream music anywhere at anytime. While iTunes is still not in the cloud officially, mSpot Music comes as an unofficial cloud iTunes solution.

How to

1. Go to www.mSpot.com and put your iTunes collection from your PC/Mac into your own personal music locker on the Internet. Once you’ve uploaded your music “into the Cloud” – you can access it anytime, anywhere from your iPhone or any PC/Mac.
2. Download the mSpot Music app for your iPhone.

All your online music will magically be there already! Throw away your USB cord and say goodbye to manual syncing – mSpot does it all auto-magically for you.

Benefits

No work. No Cables. Stream your music, without using phone storage. Get song lyrics on your phone – along with all your playlists and cover art from iTunes.

Download mSpot Music

You can download mSpot Music from the App Store for free. [iTunes Link]

mSpot can store 2GB of your music in the cloud for free. For those with larger music collections, mSpot offers a paid plan of 40GB for $3.99 a month.

You can follow us on Twitter, Join us at Facebook, and also Subscribed to RSS Feed to receive latest updates.

Also checkout:

• Download iTunes 10.1.1
• SBSwitcher – Put SBSettings Toggles in The App Switcher (Multitasking bar)
• Enable Widescreen (720p) Photos on the iPod Touch 4G with HD Photographer

Apple World Wide Developers Conference

Popularly known as “WWDC”, this is Apple’s official developer conference. If you live around the area this is a must attend. All the cutting-edge programming topics are taught here. WWDC is the Mac daddy of all iPhone conferences.

360|iDev

360|iDev is the premiere iPhone, iPod touch developer conference in the world. Every year prior to the show they have a call for papers, if you want to make a debut as a conference speaker.

iPhone Dev Camp

iPhoneDevCamp is the brainchild of Raven and Dom. The event format is “unconference” or Barcamp-style, featuring content from the participants themselves. There are satellite events held all over the country. The next one is this August.

Game Developers Conference

Popularly know to all as GDC – this conference is for all game developers, and there’s an increasing number of mobile app game developers. If you’re a game developer or want to be one, this is the one game developer conference to go to. When the boom in the mobile sector happened they branced out and now have a separate 3 day event called GDC Mobile, that contains separate tracks and events related purely to the mobile gaming space.

Stack Overflow Dev Days

This is more of a general developer conference and is not just for iPhone developers. The good part aobut this conference is that it’s in multiple venues and dates, and it will set you back by only $99.

A quick guide on how to setup drush on a local development environment using MAMP. Drush is a command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal, designed to make life easier when working with Drupal. Check out http://drush.ws/ the homepage for the drush project. Step 1 Firstly, we need to download drush, which you can […]

This is one of the many benefits of using drush when working with Drupal. I opened up a project that I was working on locally and had the warning that some of my modules required an upgrade, not only that Drupal core had gone from 6.19 to 6.20. Now, normally this used to mean I […]

A quick tutorial on how to setup MAMP to be able to run multiple virtual hosts on you local machine. We use this setup at work and I also use it on my Macbook to run multiple virtual hosts locally. You can download the latest version of MAMP from here: http://www.mamp.info/en/downloads Once you have MAMP […]

This post is part of the iPhone Q & A series, where I address iPhone-related questions that readers email me. I am not able to get to all questions, but I will occasionally answer one and post it here.

Casey writes:

What to do if my iPhone freezes? I was just switching between facebook & safari with the double-click trick, and my iPhone screen got stuck/froze. I would just take out the battery with my old phone when it froze, but that’s not possible with this phone. Do you know what I should do? I’m not good with technology. Thanks.

Sometimes the iPhone gets a little worked up and freezes up. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it is not obvious what to do. Since iPhone’s battery is not removable, you can’t simply take the battery out and put it back in.

It’s not clear what makes the iPhone freeze, although it’s likely overuse of RAM, due to running too many apps at once. My Macbook has never frozen in the year I’ve owned it, but with the iPhone’s small size, it’s no surprise that it sometimes has a little trouble handling heavy workloads.

What to Do if Your iPhone Freezes

Simply restart your iPhone by holding the home button and the sleep/wake button at the top of the phone simultaneously. After several seconds, the phone will restart and display the silver Apple logo. That’s it. Now you know what to do if your iPhone freezes.

Feel free to email your questions via the contact form.

What to Do If Your iPhone Freezes [iPhone Q & A] is a post from Apple iPhone Review.

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Social gaming network OpenFeint has had its own app for a while now, offering up news and information for players playing games with the technology built-in. But the app recently underwent a re-branding of sorts — it’s now called Game Channel (not to be, or possibly to be, confused with Game Center), and is now built around a Groupon-style model. The app has offered up a Free App of the Day for a while now, but in addition to the freebies, it now also has a feature called “Fire Sale,” in which players can “vote” for certain games to go on sale.

It’ll be interesting to see how that works — one of the biggest issues developers are facing on the App Store is simply getting their app discovered by players, and this seems like yet another outlet for OpenFeint-enabled games to find their customers. The app also helps with discoverability in other ways as well: you can see what your friends are playing, and track leaderboards and all of OpenFeint’s other stats right there.

It’s tough to actually call this an attack on Game Center, since Game Center isn’t really in competition — it’s already installed on every mobile iOS device anyway. But Game Channel does look like a little innovation from OpenFeint in terms of getting its apps out there. If you haven’t picked up the app now called Game Channel, it’s a free download from the App Store.

OpenFeint’s promotional app now called Game Channel originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When demand for an electronic product goes through the roof, you can be sure that suppliers will start talking. Taiwan-based Digitimes is reporting that demand for all-in-one computers like the iMac has been climbing lately. That’s a little odd in this current economy, since all-in-one devices tend to be more expensive than traditional “box and monitor” PCs.

Of all of the suppliers of all-in-one personal computers, Apple’s iMac is leading the pack with about 40% of sales for 2010. Updated iMacs, which currently feature Intel’s powerful Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs, were responsible for a huge year-over-year increase in sales of desktop Macs in 2009, and the addition of faster RAM and processors in 2010 has kept demand for the product quite high.

It’s expected that industry-wide, about 10 million all-in-one PCs will be sold in 2010, climbing to between 12 and 14 million in 2011. Purchases of all-in-ones are particularly popular in the enterprise market, a space where Apple has traditionally lagged but is now seeing increased attention.

Don’t expect Apple to follow the lead of competitor HP, which outfits its all-in-one PCs with touch screens. Apple CEO Steve Jobs expressed his distaste for touch screens on desktop computers during the “Back to the Mac” event on October 20, 2010, noting that multi-touch gestures are much easier through existing user interface devices such as the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad.

[via AppleInsider]

Apple’s iMac spurs demand for all-in-one PCs originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Some more scuttlebutt out of the Japan’s Nikkei Daily suggests Apple may be investing in a Sharp-owned LCD facility. The Japanese LCD facility was built in 2004 for the production of television LCDs. It has recently been re-purposed for small to mid-size LCDs after Sharp sold off its TV production equipment. Sharp is reportedly expanding this plant to meet increasing demand for mobile-sized LCDs. Construction is expected to begin in 2011 and the plant should be ready for production in 2012. This build-out will cost about 100 billion yen ($1.2 billion) and Apple is allegedly shouldering the lion’s share of this cost.

This rumor should sound familiar as earlier speculation suggested Apple was investing in a Toshiba-built LCD facility in Japan. According to this earlier report, Apple was investing US$1 billion into the plant, which would be used to produce high-resolution retina displays. Apple failed to comment on this story, but Toshiba vehemently denied Apple had invested in this plant.

For the end consumer, it does not matter whose money is involved in building these plants. Additional manufacturing facilities will help ensure LCD production meets or even outstrips demand. If this buzz pans out, LCD shortages may be a thing of the past.

[Via Engadget]

Sharp spends $1.2 billion on LCD production plant, Apple alleged client originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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