Category: I-phone

Word Warrior is a good one. It’s a mashup of spelling games and an RPG, and while it’s a very simple affair, there’s some fun gameplay to be had here. The RPG elements are extremely streamlined (almost too much so — the gear editor is basically just a toggle between various items that you’ve collected, and the choices while leveling up are slim), but the spelling challenges actually fit right up next to the monster battling. You’re given a row of letters and a time limit to spell something out with them, and if you succeed, you smash the monster facing you and do some damage. If you can’t spell something in time, you get damage done to you; whoever stays alive wins the loot and the XP.

There are also special letters that pop up, and using those grants you a special attack. The game is actually quite hard — I feel like I have a pretty extensive vocabulary, but I was being challenged pretty well within just a few fights. The art style is simple, but it’s a lot of fun. In general, while I would like some parts of the game to be fleshed out a little more (and there are a few slow loads and weird quirks with the programming), Word Warrior is a great idea that plays well.

But you don’t have to take my word for it — through today, the game is free on the App Store (and then it will go back up to the usual price of US$1.99). Go now, download away, and enjoy!

TUAW’s Daily App: Word Warrior originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is very cool — Beautiful Modeler is a software tool used between an iPad and a MacBook above to gesturally sculpt a 3D model using the iPad’s touchscreen. As you can see, the iPad works as a controller for the app running on the MacBook, and not only is touchscreen information passed on to the 3D modeling program (I like that multitouch works as well, so you can mold five different points in the sculpture at once), but accelerometer information is also passed across, so tilting the iPad around also tilts the onscreen view.

The source code for the project is readily available on the site, and while the gesture control currently hooks up to just one kind of form modeling, technically you could hook this up to any 3D sculpting program and sculpt away. The app even outputs a special 3D format that can be connected directly into a 3D printer, so you can make a form with the iPad and the modeling app, and then turn it into a real 3D object by printing it out.

Very impressive. Even Apple probably never envisioned using the iPad as this kind of interface, but that’s what happens when you have such a relatively cheap and powerful touchscreen computer available to almost anyone.

Sculpt a 3D model using the iPad’s touchscreen and accelerometer originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In response to Ars Technica’s recent finding that running Adobe’s Flash Player on the new MacBook Air cut battery life by up to a third, Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, has come out in in defense of his company’s plugin during an interview with Fast Company. “It’s a false argument to make,” he claims. “When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses.”

That’s a nice theory, but that’s not what Ars Technica’s battery life results show. Given that multiple advertising services now fall back on HTML5 or a static ad in order to serve ads to devices which either don’t have Flash installed or don’t support it, it’s unlikely that Ars Technica’s testers were “missing out” on much content. Note that Ars Technica’s tests didn’t involve video playback at all, only some light web browsing; the only differentiating factor in their battery life results was whether website ads were running via Flash Player or not. The argument isn’t sounding so “false” anymore.

Lynch also bemoaned Apple’s stance on Flash, claiming the company is “inciting” and “condoning” attacks on the plugin. “We don’t think it’s good for the web to have aspects closed off — a blockade of certain types of expression. There’s a decade of content out there that you just can’t view on Apple’s device, and I think that’s not only hurtful to Adobe, but hurtful to everyone that created that content.”

My translation: “Apple shouldn’t be the gatekeeper of the Web’s video content. Adobe should.”

[via iPodnn]

Adobe CTO defends Flash against battery life criticism originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thanks to TUAW reader Adam, I was pointed in the direction of YouTube a few minutes ago to watch a video of a purported stun gun accessory for iPhone 3 / 3GS / 4. While I’m 99.9 percent certain that this is a spoof, the other .1 percent is wishing that the US$24.99 Stun Fone was actually available for sale. It would be so handy for those situations where someone cuts in a line ahead of me…

A little research on Amazon showed that stun guns are readily available at about this price, so setting one up to be triggered by a press of the volume buttons on an iPhone isn’t exactly out of the realm of reality. It would probably also require something other than the iPhone’s battery to charge it up.

To Jeff and his roommate, the “inventors” — if this sucker is for real, we here at TUAW will be happy to put a review unit through its paces. Just let us know.

Video (slightly NSFW) is on the next page.

Continue reading Stun Fone iPhone accessory: YouTube spoof or real product?

Stun Fone iPhone accessory: YouTube spoof or real product? originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wil Shipley is probably the premiere Mac developer — he co-founded The Omni Group, and now runs Delicious Monster, whose Delicious Library app pretty much embodies the best of this platform we love so much. Wil kindly sat down to talk with me at last week’s MacTech 2010 conference here in Los Angeles, and we chatted about what’s next for Delicious Library, what the response was like to his company’s Noogle Noggles app, and what he believes is in store for Apple’s upcoming Mac App Store.

Shipley began by saying he was a little disappointed with the way Noogle Noggles worked out — the idea was, of course, to beat Google Goggles to the App Store, and Google worked faster than he expected. “We thought we were going to beat them by two and a half months, but they beat us by a day.” Still, the app has seen a solid chunk of downloads so far. “Last I checked it was 35,000 people, and I’m like that’s a pretty good number of people for working on something for a month.”

Photo by Flickr user Inju, licensed under Creative Commons.

Continue reading MacTech 2010: Wil Shipley on Noogle Noggles, a new Delicious Library and the Mac App Store

MacTech 2010: Wil Shipley on Noogle Noggles, a new Delicious Library and the Mac App Store originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re not sure if this is good news or bad news for you Xserve enthusiasts, but given the furor over Apple discontinuing the server line, any news is probably worth hearing. Apple server product marketing manager Eric Zelenka reportedly posted a message on the Xsanity message boards saying that the Xserve announcement wouldn’t “impact the future of Xsan or server software on Mac OS X.” Seems like good news, right? Apple may not be selling the hardware, but they’ll still be working on the software.

Or are they? Just nine hours after that message was posted, it was deleted completely. Obviously, there are a few reasons for this, and while one of them is of course that he was wrong (and Apple will be discontinuing its server software lines as well), that’s not necessarily what’s happening. It’s just as valid an explanation that Zelenka simply got slapped on the wrist for speaking about official Apple business in unofficial channels, something that the Cupertino company definitely wouldn’t like. There’s also the possibility that it wasn’t Zelenka at all, and finally, it’s possible that Zelenka did make the statement, but later decided, for whatever reason, to just remove it. Maybe we’ll see the same statement made in a more formal way elsewhere.

At any rate, server admins hungry for news about the future of Mac OS X server have to take what they can get. Apple has shown in the past that it has no compunctions at all with abandoning product lines that aren’t moving, and if the Xserve was a victim of that, we’ll have to wait and see if other server products make the same cut.

[via MacNN]

Apple exec posts, retracts enterprise information originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There is no shortage of video source material available both on and off-line these days, but not all of it is playable or editable on every platform. Free tools like Handbrake (here’s our look at Handbrake 0.9.4) are great for ripping content from DVDs but the number of available output formats are limited.

Back in the day, VisualHub was the ultimate tool for converting pretty much any video codec into another. Plus, it allowed you crop, resize, adjust video quality and even stitch files together. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available.

There’s also good news. Digiarty is currently making its MacX Video Converter Pro software available for free until November 15. Video Converter Pro offers what is probably the widest codec support we’ve seen in a while including output to FLV, WMV, MPEG4, H264 and more. There are dozens of pre-defined profiles for portable devices like phones, the Sony PSP and even DVD VOB files. It lacks some of the capabilities of Visual Hub, like cropping and ability to define a maximum size for the output video and let it pick the encoding settings.

However, if you have Final Cut (express or pro) you can convert odd-ball formats into files that can be edited and then crop and set export settings. MacX Video Converter Pro is available for free until November 15, 2010.

MacX Video Converter Pro available free until November 15 originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills 90210 and her flings with Dylan, Brandon and Colin, I’ve been around the block with mail clients, both on the Mac and PC side.That said, I prefer Mail.app. While Mail.app is simple enough for less advanced users, it also contains some niceties for power users. Here are five tips to help enhance your experience in Mail.app.

Threaded/Grouping Messages

Making sense of who said what and when they said it in relation to who in an email string can be mind numbing. Thankfully, Mail.app has the ability to organize emails by thread, lumping them together by subject.

To enable this feature, select on the mail box or folder that you’d like to view messages in threaded form and then click on “Organize by Thread” from the “View” menu. Messages will then be viewed as threads on an individual folder level basis. For instance, when applied to Folder 1, in which subfolders A, B and C reside, only messages residing in Folder 1 will be threaded.

Continue reading 5 productivity tips for Mail.app

5 productivity tips for Mail.app originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Testing has shown that the iPhone 3G’s performance is much improved under iOS 4.2. Rene Ritchie at TiPb has posted a video (which you can watch after the break) of both iOS 3.0 and 4.2 (the gold master) running on an iPhone 3G. Here’s what he found.

Entering text into Apple’s Notes app was acceptably snappy. Browsing the Web was also noticeably improved, especially scrolling and load times (over Wi-Fi). Some pinch-and-zoom was a bit laggy, but definitely worlds better than iOS 4.0 on a 3G.

Apple was recently hit with a class action lawsuit from California iPhone 3G user Bianca Wofford, who claims that Apple “…knowingly and intentionally released what it called a system software ‘upgrade’ that, in fact, made hundreds of thousands of the Third Generation iPhones (sic) that were exclusively tethered to AT&T data plans ‘useless’ for their intended purpose.”

To Bianca and everyone else in her frustrating situation, we say sit tight. 4.2 is due this month.

Continue reading iOS 4.2 improves iPhone 3G performance

iOS 4.2 improves iPhone 3G performance originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has filed a patent featuring some concepts for scrollable menus and toolbars that could eventually be used in the next version of OS X, 10.7 Lion. The new patent covers all kinds of things, from extra UI elements in the OS X desktop to special iOS menus and features. But they all look like what you see above — an almost Cover Flow-like scrollable interface that boils down a series of functions or menus into a set of icons.

I like it — while the drawback seems to be that you’d have to really know what’s available in the menu and where to find it (because you only see one icon at a time, you’ll basically have to just get used to knowing what the other options are), the menu seems like a great way to put a lot of functionality easily reachable in a very small space. There are a few different “menu shapes” to help with this, too, from just one icon rotating to the foreground, to an entire wheel of icons all with different features or choices on them.

As with all Apple patents, we’ll note that these are strictly concepts, and there’s no guarantee that a feature like this will actually show up in OS X. But it’s good to see that Apple is still playing around with even very traditional UI interfaces like menus. Always nice to see innovation even in the growing-ever-older desktop space.

Apple patent reveals scrollable menus, toolbars for OS X Lion originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you find yourself making the charts for your presentations in Numbers and would like an easy way to update them, the chart updating feature in Keynote does just that. With a simple click, your chart in Keynote is updated to reflect changes made in your Numbers spreadsheet.

This feature requires that you start your workflow in Numbers. After creating a chart, copy and paste it over to a slide in Keynote.

Now, whenever you click on the chart in your Keynote presentation, a button will appear atop of it.

Clicking on the arrow with the two circles on it will update the chart with figures from Numbers. Alternatively, you can click on the “edit data” button (after clicking on the chart) and then “update all” within the data table. However, it’s important to note that you must save the Numbers file first before doing this. Otherwise, the changes won’t carry over.

Auto-updating charts with Numbers and Keynote originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TiPb recently tried out the iPhone 3G with iOS 4.2 to see how everything ran. When iOS 4 first came out many users were unsatisfied with how their 3G handset performed. Apple promised improvements with 4.1 but people were still left pretty unsatisfied. This test by TiPb looks promising for 3G users.