Category: I-phone

Now we are on to rumors about what the iPhone 4 will cost on Verizon. If these rumors are true Motorola is in for one heck of a price war with the Droid Pro.

The white iPhone 4 is not longer in Apple’s online store. Is Apple finally throwing in the towel on this one? More importantly, does anyone actually care?

The addicting game, Cut the Rope, has sold an astonishing 2 million copies in its first three weeks.

Just in time for Halloween, the best iPhone 4 costume ever!

Finally, a bug has been found that will allow anyone to bypass the lock screen and view your photos. Only affects the iPhone4 and 3GS with iOS 4.1.

Earlier this week we were lucky enough to interview Josh Guest of b2cloud.  Josh was very generous and provided Mobile Orchard with several promo codes to give to our readers. If you are interested in getting a promo code for this app please leave a comment and we will give these codes away until they are gone.

For more information on MorningReport you can check out Mobile Orchard’s review.

We’re back with another week’s worth of wonderful games for you! Some truly stand-out titles this time around, so make sure to take a look and give them a try.

Know of some great upcoming games? We want to hear about them!

Angry Birds Halloween

Angry Birds Halloween

Let us pretend for a moment that this is not Angry Birds and that it is not amazing by default. What we are left with is still an excellent, finely-tuned game that excels on the strength of its gameplay and not its branding.

As with the main title, Angry Birds Halloween is a wonderful and addictive game that pits your birds against the aggravating pigs that keep stealing your eggs. As before, you fling the birds against the pigs’ structures to bring them toppling down. Essentially this is little more than a set of 45 extra levels wrapped up in a cute Halloween theme, but who’s going to complain about 45 new levels of Angry Birds?

If you’ve gotten through all the original levels and are craving more, then look no further: this is it. Trick or treat.

Price: $0.99
Developer: Rovio Mobile Ltd.
Download: App Store

Trade Nations

Trade Nations

Folks who enjoyed We City will be particularly drawn to Trade Nations. Clearly riding on the successes of previous titles in the genre, Trade Nations nevertheless sets itself apart with a gorgeous art style and the ability to assign jobs to your little citizens, giving them a greater purpose than just wandering aimlessly.

As you’d expect, connecting to friends and trading resources and land is a big part of the intended gameplay, since solo play can be a very slow and unsatisfying crawl. Either way, Trade Nations is a great game for patient people who enjoy seeing the fruits of their labour pay off slowly but surely in the form of a gorgeous, bustling town with diverse buildings and activities.

If you’ve got some friends and are feeling like We City is a little too modern for you, then I highly encourage you to give Trade Nations a whirl. It’s free, after all.

Price: Free
Developer: Amplified Games Inc. / jujuPlay
Download: App Store

AstroWings

AstroWings

Here comes one of the nicest space shooters on the App Store. AstroWings is a conflicted little beastie with great graphics and audio (catchy music!) marred by some rather sloppy in-game text. Whether it’s a poor translation job or just a set of rushed mistakes, the awkward instructions and spelling errors “tirpple tap!” are unfortunate.

Thankfully, they really can’t do too much to detract from what is truly an excellent shooter. You control a very well armed spaceship (you can choose between 3 types) and must defend against an onslaught of enemies using a number of upgradeable weapons. Even on the easiest difficulty, you will find yourself sorely challenged, and once you ramp up in levels or difficulty settings you will find yourself hard pressed to overcome the obstacles.

It’s an old-school game through and through, with a spirit of intensity and challenge that forces you to pay attention and be coordinated. Could use a bit of polish on the text end of things and it’s not for casual gamers, but anyone out for an addictive, tough, and gorgeous game with lots of replay value should really take a look at AstroWings.

Price: $1.99
Developer: LIVEZEN Corp.
Download: App Store

Red Balls of Goo

Red Balls of Goo

Clearly modeled on the aesthetic of World of Goo, Red Balls of Goo is actually a completely different type of game that presents a challenging set of levels beneath its cute art design.

Your task, as the little red ball, is to roll around through the platform levels collecting the other balls and not falling off the edges. It seems pretty easy at first glance, but you may find that the simple left/right controls respond a bit strangely. It’s nothing major but it take some getting used to. There’s not much more to it than this basic platforming mechanic, which one the one hand makes it seem shallow and on the other establishes Red Balls of Goo as a great little time-passer.

If you’re into this kind of art style and would like to give it a roll in a platforming setting then Red Balls of Goo is your friend. There are lots of levels to keep you occupied and the game will no doubt offer more in coming updates…hopefully along with a tweak for the controls.

Price: $0.99
Developer: Utopian Games
Download: App Store

Cut The Rope

Cut The Rope

We’ve saved the best for last this week: if you haven’t already grabbed Cut The Rope then go do so now. For real. Chillingo’s mighty team of talented app wizards has put out one of the most innovative and adorable puzzlers in recent memory.

Presented through gorgeous animations and a bright and attractive art style, Cut The Rope begins with a strange package arriving at your doorstep. Inside, you find a lovable little monster that craves candies. Your job is to cut the various ropes that suspend the candies such that they fall, swing, float, bounce, or otherwise make their way into the creature’s mouth.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics and physics tricks on display in this game, and everything looks and runs so smoothly that it’s hard to put down once you’ve started. Without reservation, this is one of the easiest apps to recommend and you should do yourselves a favour and play it.

Price: $0.99
Developer: Chillingo Ltd.
Download: App Store

What Have You Been Playing?

While we’ve been flinging birds, building towns, shooting aliens, collecting goo, and feeding candies to monsters, what have you been doing this week? Feed us some feedback and tell us all about your fresh app store game experiences in the comments!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Help Call. The developer describes Help Call thusly: “Travel the world with peace of mind. Help Call is designed to help you in times of emergency. Helping you to quickly place emergency calls from your current world location.”

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

HelpCall

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• 126 Countries Supported! Correct and up-to-date international Police, Fire Department and Ambulance Phone Numbers.
• Shake for Emergency. If you can’t see or can’t touch the screen of your iPhone, shake your iPhone and call your selected emergency number.
• Help Call automatically uses the correct emergency numbers from your current country location.
• Help Call comes in 5 languages and more coming soon! English, French, German, Spanish, Polish
• Retina Display Ready! Help Call looks and feels great on your iPhone 4.

Requirements: iPhone

Price: 0.99

Developer: Full Screen

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Help Call? Have your say in our poll:

Would you like to see Help Call reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?Market Research

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and that means that I have dozens of bookmarks on various browsers, which can take me a long time to prowl through. One easy way to get through all of the sites is to use an RSS feed reader to comb through the text.

So how do you get those feeds onto your iPad? One option is PRO RSS FeedReader, a simple way to access all of your text with the convenience of Apple’s favorite tablet. But better yet, it does Twitter, too. Let’s take a moment and see what makes PRO RSS FeedReader the app to have.

Finding the Feeds

When it comes to RSS feeds, the first place to start is your favorite website. Fire up PRO RSS FeedReader and click on the plus symbol just above the feeds column. Here you can choose between a Google search, Twitter name, or even just browse the web to find your source. If you start with browsing, just click on the orange RSS button to the right of the address once the site has loaded up and the app does the rest from there. Now the site is captured in your feed and you won’t have to hunt for it again.

Stats, feeds, and more, all on your homescreen.

This works with Twitter feeds as well, which is a great way to get all of your reading done at once. Click on the plus symbol again, then go to Twitter User and enter the username of the person you wish to follow. Now their feed shows up alongside the rest in the bunch, and their name is in the left hand column as well.

Sorting the Feeds

Another great feature about PRO RSS FeedReader is the ability to sort your feeds. Let’s say that you’re a particularly anal retentive person (like myself, frankly), and you don’t want your Twitter users lumped in with your RSS feeds, but do want them in the same program. What do you do?

PRO RSS FeedReader makes it simple get through your RSS feeds quickly

Simple answer, really, just organize them by folders. Create a new folder and click the edit button on the bottom of the Feeds column. Move your feeds wherever you like, creating organizational nirvana within the program. It’s nice to put things into a perfect little spot, and it helps immensely when your RSS feeder is a few hundred webpages strong.

Viewing Your Feeds

Once everything is found, listed, and organized, you can feel free to flip through your feeds. Each article is listed on the right side of the screen, with brief descriptions of each article. Tap on a piece to read the entire article through the convenience of the app itself.

Each article can be opened up directly, as well as in the original website, all through the PRO RSS FeedReader app.

The thing is, some RSS feeds are better than others, and sometimes you don’t get the whole picture by just clicking through your articles. In that case, click on the Original Article button to pull up the PRO RSS FeedReader browser and read it there instead. Now the entire piece is handy, images and all, ready for you to check out.

As an added bonus, there’s a search feature as well. This comes in handy when you know there’s a certain article out there, you just can’t remember the full name or where it was originally published. Tap on the magnifying glass button and type in the title or content term you want to look for, and then enter. The app does all the work and finds every feed with that information in it, and does it quickly, too.

The Verdict

There are many different RSS readers out there on the iPad market, so it’s easy to get lost in the sea of competing apps. PRO RSS FeedReader is one of the better ones, but it does have a few drawbacks. For one, it can be tedious to install all of your feeds manually, because there is no way to download your feeds in mass from another program such as Google Reader (the developer assures us this feature will be here soon). It’s also a bit tricky to navigate through your first time using the program, because it’s not quite as intuitive as would be first expected. But once you’ve played around with it for five minutes, the program becomes second nature and you’ll wonder how you functioned without it.

Even with those minor flaws, this is still a great App. Overall, I give it an 8 out of 10, with just a few minor points taken off for the inconvenience factor on initial setup. Otherwise, it’s a great way to get through your daily Twitter and RSS feed without breaking the bank.

As Steve walked out on stage to face the crowd in the most recent Apple event, I was quite excited to hear what he had to say. I had no idea what to expect from Lion and didn’t want to even venture too many guesses so that there would be more awe than disappointment at the new features.

However, as Jobs began to discuss the premise of Lion, the gears in my head started to spin. He explained that Apple had learned quite a bit about both hardware and software while developing their line of iOS devices. Several new technologies had arisen that were so amazingly successful that they couldn’t wait to bring them “back to the Mac.”

Back To The Mac

No Multi-Touch Mac This Time

Obviously, at this point everyone watching nearly gnawed off their own fingers waiting for Jobs to pull out a multi-touch Mac. Unfortunately, at several points throughout the day Apple employees made it a point to say that their touch-screen laptop prototypes simply weren’t working due to arm fatigue. In my opinion, the fact that multi-touch surfaces “want to be horizontal” as Jobs said, still leaves plenty of room for the swiveling iMac patent we’ve seen before, but I digress.

The point became clear: to incorporate technologies and lessons learned from the iPhone and iPad back into the current age-old Mac format. David Appleyard thoroughly outlined these new features in a follow-up article on Mac.AppStorm: more gestures via Magic Mouse/Trackpad, a home screen app launching system (Launchpad) and full-screen apps.

How would you interpret this image?

These are definitely great ideas and I can’t wait to see them incorporated into OS X. However, as I stared at that chart depicting technologies flowing from the iPad back to the Mac, I pictured the marriage of OS X and iOS to be much more complete. I looked over at my iPad and wondered what OS X would be like if this were one of my main input devices. What if some Mac applications and even OS X itself contained iOS counterparts that weren’t separate apps which occasionally synced, but were actually another aspect or view of the same app? Think Nintendo DS meets OS X.

How It Should Work

To see what I mean by all this abstract talk, let’s imagine a typical day in my futuristic iOS dream. You sit down in front of your iMac (the same non-multi-touch version you have now) and you launch Mail. A coworker has asked that you send him the latest draft of the project you’re working on. You keep the Mail window up on your Mac and launch a new Finder window on your iPad. It’s not a VNC-powered second monitor trick but an actual custom iPad remote interface to the Finder on your Mac. You find the file you want and swipe-toss it over to your iMac screen where it pops up in your Mail message.

Wouldn’t it be great if your iPad were an adaptive input device?

Next, you tap the Safari shortcut on your Lion-iOS hybrid app and up comes Safari on your iMac. You scroll through Twitter for a while, command-clicking on several links to open them in different tabs in the background. You look down at your iPad where you now see a visual preview of all the tabs open in the background on your Mac. You swipe around and select one that looks interesting and your iMac brings it to the front.

Finally, you hop over to Adobe Photoshop to finish that website mockup. Your iPad then becomes a context-sensitive menu of options that has been ingenuously built to improve your productivity. At first it shows a big beautiful toolbar and a redesigned layers palette, both of which are much easier to use on a dedicated screen. As you grab a brush on your iMac and start painting, your iPad screen shifts to display all of the features normally found in the brushes palette, now reworked to be finger friendly.

My imaginary iPad Mac setup in Photoshop

The point that I’m trying to make is that there is a ton of untapped potential for using the iPhone and iPad as an input device that feels decades beyond even the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. The infrastructure is already in place for the system to work just fine for anyone using a plain old mouse, Apple would merely be rewarding users who purchased iOS devices with some added bonuses.

Obviously, this would not merely fall into the realm of Apple. Third party developers would also have to get on board. It wouldn’t be ideal to constantly switch iPad apps so I picture one central remote app that supports downloadable third-party plugins.

Will This Ever Exist!?

Unfortunately, this is all a dream, though it could be a leaping off point for any developers that don’t want to wait for Apple to come up with a similar system.

Currently, HippoRemote Pro and Remote Buddy Ajax Remote are about as close as you can get. Both of these apps bring a lot of innovation to the table for controlling your Mac from an iOS device. Neither quite hits on the idea of rich, fully adaptive interfaces (most of the time they’re basically customized trackpads) but they’re a good glimpse into what it would be like to use your iOS devices in a way that actually integrates with your Mac workflow.

Leave a comment below and tell us about your ultimate vision of OS X Lion integrating with iOS. What great features would you take from the iPad or iPhone and incorporate them into OS X?

CSS3 Machine is an awesome new way to create beautiful, cross-browser CSS3 styles on your iPad using visual controls instead of hard-coding.

The workflow for the app can be a little tricky to figure out so today we’ll walk you through a typical project so you can decide if it’s something you could use in your own web building ventures.

What Is CSS3 Machine?

In case you’re not familiar with web development, CSS is the code developers use to style web pages. The latest iteration, CSS3, brings about tons of new features that were previously only possible through the use of inserting images rather than using raw code.

Some of the new features in CSS3 can be quite cumbersome to code by hand, especially when you try to make sure multiple browsers are supported. For this reason, a number of tools have sprung up to help developers work with CSS3 in a friendlier, more visual manner.

CSS3 Machine is just such a tool and makes its home on the iPad. With CSS3 Machine, developers can use sliders and other WYSIWYG controls to set CSS3 properties and generate clean, cross-browser-compatible code.

Getting Connected

The first time you fire up CSS3 Machine, you’ll see the screen below informing you that you can see a preview of the stylesheet you are creating on your Mac by going to Safari and entering “http://” plus the name of your iPad, plus “.local”.

Connecting to CSS3 On Your Mac

Keep in mind that this won’t be a visual preview of the rendered output but rather the actual code that is being generated that you can copy and paste into your text editor of choice (a live preview would be a nice addition).

A sample of the CSS output

It’s really nice to be able to access the code you’re creating immediately without the hassle of email or file sharing.

Creating A New Stylesheet

The first step in using CSS3 Machine is to open a stylesheet by tapping the “My Stylesheets” button at the top left. You can choose to either open one of the samples or start your own. We’ll choose to start our own by hitting the little plus at the bottom of the stylesheets window.

Adding a new stylesheet

To start off your CSS3 experiment, you decide on one of four HTML starter options: Container & Content, Letter Forms, Cards or Custom. Container & Content sets up a basic header and paragraph for you to work with, Letter Forms allows you to work by focusing on a single word and Cards allows you to style a pre-built set of playing cards.

The custom option allows you to set up your own templates. You can do this right inside the iPad or use iTunes File Sharing to import one that you have created on your Mac.

Since I just want to play with some text, I chose the Letter Forms option.

Adding Selectors

After you select the Letter Forms option, you should be given a basic preview of some Helvetica text that spells out “CSS3.” This preview will update later as you begin tweaking CSS properties.

The main interface and preview

Making sure the “Styles” option is selected at the bottom, tap on the plus button at the top of the menu on the left to add a new selector to work with. Here you can apply a name, tag, class or ID just like you would if you were coding by hand.

Once you fill in this information, the selector should appear in your list.

Adding Properties

Now that you have a selector, go to it and hit the plus button again to add a property. You have a number of CSS3 options to choose from here including: Basic CSS, Border Radius, Box Reflect, Box Shadow, Gradient, Perspective, Text Shadow, Text Stroke and Transform.

Adding a property.

Simply tap on any of these to see the controls and options for that property. We’ll start off with some basic CSS.

Adding Basic CSS

The basic style options give you a few standard properties to work with: text color, background color, font size, margin and padding.

Basic CSS

You can tweak each of these to your liking and the preview at the bottom will update dynamically.

Basic CSS with updated preview

If you want to change something that is not in the list, such as font-family, simply add it to the “Additional CSS” area at the bottom.

Adding custom CSS

More Styles

Now that we have the basic styles set for our button, let’s finish it off with some nice CSS3. The first thing I’ll want to add is some rounded corners via the border-radius property.

Border Radius

All we have to do now is repeat the same step and continue adding any CSS3 properties we want. Each property comes with its own easy to use set of controls that will update your preview and you can go back and tweak your settings at any time.

Our button really starts to look nice once we add a gradient, box-shadow, text-shadow and a few other finishing touches.

Finished button

Animations

Another great feature of CSS3 Machine is the ability to build CSS animations with ease. By setting keyframes and selecting the properties to animate, you can create some really complex effects in only a few seconds.

Adding an animation

Amazing Tool or Novelty?

CSS3 Machine has plenty of both pros and cons. It’s a beautiful app that is well designed and quite fun to play with. It’s a really nice way to see and interact with CSS properties and I will enjoy using it to experiment with new ideas in the future. I particularly like that it adds code for Webkit, Mozilla, and even Opera so that browser support is thorough.

However, the workflow is admittedly a little wonky and hard to figure out. An in-app tutorial or some noticeable stepping stones would go a long way. I would consider rethinking the flow of necessary actions to something more intuitive and beginner friendly. Keep the advanced features but make it so that an eight-year-old could pick up the app and build something cool.

Further, I definitely feel that the basic CSS section needs to be more robust. CSS3 is nice, but mostly when used in conjunction with CSS properties from previous versions as well. The ability to easily change fonts, add borders, etc. would be really nice. It would also be nice to have a quick-access code view in the app, similar to what you see in Safari but actually editable.

The biggest issue that needs to be addressed is merely stability. I honestly lost count of how many times the app crashed on me during the review process. $6.99 isn’t too much to pay for an awesome CSS3 app, but the investment merits stability.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you’re a web developer with an iPad and a desire to interact with CSS3 in a more visual manner, CSS3 Machine is definitely worth a download. It’s a really strong start to a tool that can be both fun and useful and I’m excited to see where the developer takes it in the future.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of CSS3 machine. Were you satisfied with your purchase? Is it good enough to use in a professional context? We want to hear all your thoughts and suggestions!

Today we bring you the first post in a new series of free wallpaper packs for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

These photographic backgrounds are exclusive to iPhone.Appstorm and have in fact been captured by yours truly. They look beautiful on both the lock screen and home screen and have been sized to the appropriate resolution for your device.

A preview of one of the images on an iPad

Theme: The Garden

This first set is the result of a nice stroll around my backyard. The five images included can be seen below:

The images in AppStorm Wallpaper Pack #1

Download

Click the appropriate link below to start your download. If you use the images for anything other than a wallpaper, just be sure to link back to this post!

Download iPhone Wallpaper Pack: Click Here
Download iPad Wallpaper Pack: Click Here

To make sure you don’t miss our next free pack, subscribe to iPhone.AppStorm via email, RSS, or Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Today we presents collection of interesting Illustrator tutorials of October 2010.

read more

Over the weekend TUAW is going to be featuring in-depth reviews of the new iLife ’11 suite — or at least the three apps that were updated. As most of you know by now, iWeb and iDVD didn’t receive an update at all. In light of that, we’ve compiled a list of several alternatives to iDVD and iWeb that you may want to try out. From a purely consumer standpoint, I don’t think any of these apps offer the ease of use that Apple has so successfully built into iWeb and iDVD, but given that iDVD seems all but abandoned — as should the MacBook optical drive be — and the future is uncertain for iWeb, it’s always nice to know you have some alternatives.

iDVD alternatives:

SmallDVD
SmallDVD is a simple utility that lets you take any video files and add them to a DVD image ISO which can then be burned onto a DVD using Disc Utility. SmallDVD doesn’t have many features, but it will appeal to those of you who want to create very simple DVDs with static background menus. It also has the added benefit of only creating the ISO file which can then be shared to DropBox or iDisk, and then downloaded and viewed on another computer using only the ISO — no optical drive needed. SmallDVD is a free download.

Continue reading After iLife ’11: Alternatives to iDVD and iWeb

After iLife ’11: Alternatives to iDVD and iWeb originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has released EFI Firmware Update 1.5 for the Mac Pro. The update is recommended for all Mac Pro (Mid 2010) models and addresses an issue that prevented the firmware password prompt from being displayed as well as another issue that prevented the Boot Picker from being presented if Ethernet is connected to a network without DHCP.

The update requires Mac OS X 10.6.4 and is a 1.96MB download via Software Update. It is also available for download here. You can read Apple’s knowledge base article about the EFI firmware updates here.

Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5 released originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The guys at Boinx Software have done it again, this time with a product for the iPad. PhotoBox, a free app, is the first iPad app for the company, which is primarily known for its Boinx TV and FotoMagico applications for Mac OS X and the You Gotta See This iPhone photo collage app.

What’s PhotoBox all about? The idea is that it’s an on-site photographer’s assistant, allowing you to analyze photos that have been moved to the iPad through the Camera Connection Kit or a wireless connection. The analysis can consist of checking the exposure of a photo against defined limits, allowing digital photographers to make sure that parts of a picture aren’t over- or under-exposed. It’s also useful for checking out the focus on an image, and can even do video-out to a projector for a much larger view of the image.

Boinx is soliciting feedback as well as ideas for what the app should contain in the future. Boinx wants to turn PhotoBox into a much more complete photographer’s tool and then charge for it in the App Store.

As-is, the app has limited functionality. You can add photos to the app’s browser from the Photo Library, and then view them in full-screen and 1:1 modes to check overall composition and focus. With the exposure mask tools, underexposed portions of a photo are highlighted in blue, while overexposed bits show up in red. While that’s useful for checking exposure in the field, it’s not enough to make this an app you’d want to buy.

If you’re a professional digital photographer or dedicated amateur, download a copy of PhotoBox and give it a try, and then tell Boinx what you’d like to have added to the app. Several screen shots are available in the gallery below.

First Look: Boinx PhotoBox app for iPad originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users.

For those with modest text-editing needs, Apple’s TextEdit is a great choice. Did you know that it’s got an autocomplete option? David Mendels points out how it works at Mac OS X Hints.

As you’re typing a long word, hit the escape key. A popup window will appear with a list of guesses. Use the arrow keys to find the word you want and hit enter to select. To shorten the list, keep typing. To abandon the list entirely, hit escape again to put it away.

That’s a nice little tip! Thanks, David.

[Via Minimal Mac]

Mac 101: Autocomplete words in TextEdit originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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