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Are you a fan of Instagram? I often find myself taking snaps with the app, adding some special effects, and then posting them for close friends and complete strangers to enjoy. Now the folks at Tiny Hearts, the developers of the fun Pocket Zoo app I reviewed last year, have come up with Instamatch — a US$1.99 universal iOS app (on sale for $0.99 for a limited time) released today that turns those awesome Instagram photos into a fun and challenging matching game.

Instamatch is a variation on the old “Concentration” matching game that has contestants matching similar Instagram photos. There are several ways to play — you can either select photos from your own Instagram account, in which case you match two identical copies of photos until all photos are matched, or from a selection of photos of Nature, Food, Animals, Cities, or World Wonders. With the latter, you match similar photos of the same subject, like two different photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s also a search mode, so you can find and match photos of just about any subject under the sun.

To get a high score, you need to match all of the photo pairs as quickly as possible. It’s also helpful to be lucky enough to match two photos without looking at them first — the combos give you extra points that really add up.

On the iPhone, the game can be played with one or two players, and there are three levels of difficulty — Easy, with 12 photo cards; Normal, with 20 cards; and Hard, with 20 moving cards. For the iPad, up to four players can vie for the high score, and the Normal and Hard difficulty levels jump up to 30 cards. In multiplayer game play, the players take turns in succession so that a sharp-eyed player can watch for clues and then rack up extra points. There’s Game Center support built into the app for shouting out your bragging rights for high Instamatch scores.

I find Instamatch to be a fun time-killer. Individual games don’t take that long, so it’s the perfect game to play while you’re waiting in a line and need to waste some time. An internet connection is required in order to grab the Instagram photos, so this isn’t a game that you’d be able to play on an airplane unless it’s equipped with Wi-Fi. The multiplayer game, especially on the iPad with 30 cards, throws a bit of strategy into play.

The user interface is easy to understand and is beautifully designed, both of which add value to Instamatch. Especially at the 99¢ introductory price, Instamatch is a gotta-buy app for game lovers of any age.

Instamatch turns Instagram into an engaging iOS game originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In September of 2011, Google introduced its Flight Search service. The service provides information on upcoming flights to specific destinations, providing schedule, price, and airline information. Now Flight Search has become iOS-friendly, perfect for those who want to check on flight availability and pricing on the go.

What Google did is to make Flight Search fit the Safari browser on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The features of Flight Search include searching, discover by location, filtering results by price, flight time, airline, and calendar view.

One little trick I found is that you can use Siri to call up Flight Search. Just tell Siri to “Google flights between Denver and Las Vegas” (or whatever two points you’re interested in flying between), and one of the top results that Siri will produce is a Flight Search listing. It’s a fast way to get a first pass at flight schedules and pricing while keeping up your personal relationship with Siri.

Google makes Flight Search iOS (and Siri) friendly originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the aftermath of the passing of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, there have been a number of posts in the blogosphere pointing out specific videos that were captured at various points in his life. Now Chill’s Scott Hurff has created a huge collection of just about every Steve Jobs video available.

The collection of 81 videos (by my count) covers interviews with Jobs from 1980 through 2011, was curated by Hurff, who is the Director of User Experience for Chill. Some of the highlights include a series of videos showing Jobs during his tenure at NeXT, a compendium of new product announcements by Jobs, the classic 2005 Standford commencement address, and the famous Jobs – Gates interview with Walt Mossberg.

If you’re looking for a single source for Steve Jobs memories, this Chill collection is a great place to look.

Fantastic collection of Steve Jobs videos originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For baseball fans, there’s no happier day than Super Bowl Sunday, since we know that means that in a few weeks catchers and pitchers will be reporting for early Spring Training. Well, the pitchers and catchers are warming up and now another sign of spring has appeared — news about pricing of Major League Baseball’s MLB At Bat 12 app for iPad and iPhone for MLB TV subscribers.

If you subscribed to MLB TV in the past or plan on subscribing to a year full of baseball games, you’re in luck — MLB At Bat ’12 will be available for free. That’s a nice little bonus, since the MLB TV subscription plan costs US$124.99 for the 2,430 game baseball season ($119.99 if you subscribed last year). In the past, subscribers had to pay for the iPad and iPhone apps separately, which could add about $30 to the tab for baseball fans.

The apps will be available on February 29, 2012 so that you’re able to start watching streaming video of games on your iPad or iPhone as the Spring Training season begins. There’s no word, however, on what content (if any) the free apps will provide for baseball fans who don’t want to pay the MLB TV subscription fee.

MLB simplifies iPhone, iPad app pricing for MLB TV subscribers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mike Daisey is making headlines with The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stirring monologue about his love of Apple and disappointment with working conditions in Apple’s supplier factories. Daisey’s monologue details his trip to China and his time with workers from Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant. If you want to read the monologue yourself, you can now do so at Mike Daisey’s website.

The well-known storyteller released the text of his performance under an open license which lets you not only download the piece, but perform the work yourself. Daisey writes that his work “may be performed by anyone, anywhere, royalty free.”

The text is moving, but it doesn’t compare to a live show which infuses energy and emotion into the words. Our own Mike Rose attended one of Daisey’s performances, and you can read about his impressions in an earlier post. Now that the text is available to the public, I look forward to derivative works which capture a different aspect of this stirring account.

[Via The Verge]

Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” available under an open license originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple will open an Apple Store in Amsterdam on March 3, bringing the number of countries with an Apple Store up to 12. It will occupy two levels of the historic and beautiful Hirsch Building in Amsterdam city center. Rumors of the store’s construction started in November of 2010.

The store’s windows have been covered with orange (orange is the national Dutch color) barricades for the past few weeks, with three stacked apples inspired by the Amsterdam coat of arms.

If you attend the opening, please send us your photos and stories, we’d love to check them out.

Amsterdam Apple Store to open March 3 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple started selling albums from The Beatles last year and now the company has released a set of ringtones taken from the band’s most popular albums. The selections span a wide range of titles including early titles like A Hard Day’s Night and later tracks like the 1970 chart-topper Let It Be.

You can buy the ringtones from the iTunes app using your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Each ringtone is US$1.29 or you can grab the 1 collection for $12.99 which has 27 ringtones from the band’s twelve studio albums and 22 singles.

[Via ipodnn]

iTunes offers first Beatles ringtones originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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No doubt you watched Nightline’s special edition about Shenzhen’s Foxconn factory where workers assemble iPhones, iPads and Macs. If you missed it, you can watch it online at ABC’s website (US only). As we noted last night, the documentary showed a rather clean Foxconn factory filled with young, Chinese workers.

Missing from the show, says Debby Sze Wan Chan of Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), were the underage workers who Foxconn hid during the Fair Labor Association (FLA) inspection.

Speaking to AppleInsider, Chan said “All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments.” She claims two workers in the Zhenghou plant told her Foxconn was “prepared for the inspection.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by FLA president Auret van Heerden who said he expects Foxconn to put on a show. Despite Foxconn’s careful presentation, van Heerden asserts the FLA’s bottom-up interviews could uncover any issues in the factory. It’s worthy to note that Apple is a member of the FLA, paid US$250,000 to join the group and funded this latest round of inspections.

Though Apple works with the FLA, Chan claims she has received a cold shoulder from the company. No one within Apple has responded to her requests; supposedly the company even refused to receive reports, documentaries and petition cards from her when she traveled to Apple’s California headquarters. A security guard who escorted her out of the building at One Infinite Loop took the paperwork and promised to deliver the items to someone in charge, but she has not heard back from Apple.

Speaking at a recent Goldman Sachs technology conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook told the audience that Apple is working to address underage labor, safety issues, and excessive overtime at its contract factories. Chan, though, doubts Apple has “any commitments to do so.”

Factory workers claim Foxconn hid underage employees prior to inspection originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MobileMe is scheduled to be shut down in June 2012, and Apple has begun encouraging users to transition to iCloud. Email messages are going out this week that promote iCloud’s services and provide a big ‘ol blue button for customers to click and begin the migration process.

iCloud offers most of the services MobileMe customers are used to (keychain sync and iDisk are absent, for example) and, according to CEO Tim Cook, is the foundation for the company’s future.

It’s only February, so stragglers have some time, but not much. It’s definitely time to start thinking about making the move.

Apple encourages MobileMe customers to transition to iCloud originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ziggurat is a fascinating little iPhone game. It’s technically a shooter, but the controls are unlike any shooter I’ve ever seen. The idea is that the human race is almost over, and one lone figher stands atop a pyramid, under attack from robots on all sides. Playing as this solitary fighter, you must destory the incoming robots.

The game offers two methods of firing the weapon: “Precision Mode” and “Slingshot Mode.” Precision Mode has you drag a finger across the bottom of the screen to calculate the firing angle, and then tap to charge and fire. In Slingshot Mode, which is easier but less interesting, you simply drag off of the middle of the screen to both aim and charge, as if using an imaginary slingshot on top of the ziggurat.

The enemies vary in size and movement styles, keeping things interesting. Given that every game eventually ends in failure, there’s a surprising amount of variety here. The graphics are in a well-done pixel style, and the chiptune music sets a post-apocalyptic mood (with a frightening 8-bit scream when the last human gives up the ghost).

Ziggurat’s an interesting bite of a game on the App Store. It’s worth the 99 cents just to see how it all works. I don’t know that these weird controls would work on any other game for as long, but all of the polish and extra style go a long way in this case.

Daily iPad App: Ziggurat adds new controls to the shooter tradition originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ShopBot is a sort of an electronic saw, a special setup designed to do some computer-aided cutting and carving work on big planks of board. It’s quite useful for woodworking or making things like skateboards or surfboards. Odds are that you don’t have one, but nevertheless, just such a device was used to make the plank above, a very basic but still elegant iPhone-powered boombox. I think this is a great idea, though it might be a little more hard to do than a lot of DIY projects.

Fortunately, you don’t really need a ShopBot to make a boombox similar to this one. You could still follow these instructions, substituting a body created in some other way for the ShopBot board, and use the iPhone dock connector, speaker, and battery pack to serve as the various innards. You can buy plenty of docks that do exactly the same thing, but I like the idea of making one as a DIY project; you can probably build something that matches your own tastes and does practically everything any dock off the shelf will do for you.

Maybe this will spark some ideas out there. If you do think of (and make) something cool, definitely let us know.

DIY iPhone boombox built with a ShopBot originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Update: You can now watch this full episode on ABC.com. (US only, of course)

I just finished watching the ABC Nightline report cleverly named iFactory: Inside Apple. ABC’s Bill Weir was given unprecedented access to Foxconn, where iPhones, iPads and Macs are assembled. If you’ve been following this saga for a while, there wasn’t that much new here. It was good to see ABC provide some context as to why people go to work at Foxconn, and the report provided some background on working conditions at the plant.

Weir starts off touching upon the Apple mythos, then goes straight into how our iDevices are made. For example, it takes 141 steps to make an iPhone. Something that surprised him: Apple products are largely made by hand. Weir points to a tiny iPad camera module, noting that with two 12-hour shifts each day Foxconn can crank out 300,000 of those in a day. According to ABC it takes 5 days and over 300 hands to assemble an iPad, but they aren’t made by robots, they are made by people. Mostly young people. “No one looked over 30,” observed Weir.

In fact, Weir was there on a day when thousands of young people lined up to apply for work at Foxconn. What was remarkable was that the only requirement seemed to be a valid national ID card. But, as Weir points out again and again, the demand for Apple products is so high that Foxconn can’t keep up. They hire en masse and train people for days before putting them to work. Workers at Foxconn tend to be quite young, around 18, and they will often come from impoverished rural areas for the work. This actually has a positive benefit to the people left behind in the villages who told ABC that they felt life was better without the young people around. “More of everything,” noted one villager. I have to imagine the generation gap was at play here somewhat, as family ties would still find some people missing their grandkids. But the opportunity at Foxconn is what causes workers to flock to the factories.

As for working conditions, I saw very little that was shocking. The only exception was the nets, placed around dorms and other buildings with high floors, which are designed to make potential suicide victims think twice before jumping. Those you don’t see many places. Of course, the suicides at Foxconn are partly what drew so much attention to the factory. Louis Woo, a Foxconn executive, explained how Tim Cook flew to China to help organize counseling for people to prevent further suicides.

Otherwise, the Foxconn areas shown in the report looked far nicer than any American factory I’ve been in (and I’ve been in a few). People complained about a lot of the same stuff you find anywhere — pay, food, hours. But then, workers do work a 12 hour shift. And they stay in dorms with seven other people in a room that makes my college dorm look grandiose by comparison. Still, this isn’t unusual in a country with the single largest population on the planet by far.

Weir did show footage of workers napping at their stations, saying that if one ate their meal fast enough, they could catch a quick nap. Foxconn workers have two one-hour breaks to eat, but the executive who led Weir around the factory explained the naps after meals are, in fact, a Chinese tradition.

Foxconn offers workers what looked like a very pleasant Internet cafe, recreational facilities (a soccer field was shown) and some education, like English classes. ABC gave no percentages on how many workers use these amenities, but it was pointed out that most people are there to simply work.

Then there were the inspections by the Fair Labor Association. The head of that organization explained that he expected Foxconn to put on a show, but that they will conduct “bottom up” interviews to ensure working conditions are decent.

I won’t spoil the rest, but ABC fairly points out that several other companies contract Foxconn, and Apple takes heat because they are so visible. While the report didn’t have any huge revelations (they were denied an interview with Tim Cook), I think it painted a fair picture of where our Apple gear comes from. Looking at the Apple lines at Foxconn, I feel a little better knowing they are probably enjoying some of the best working conditions in China.

ABC’s iFactory report shows life at Foxconn originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Japanese Mac site Macotakara notes that the Japanese version of iTunes has been updated with a “Purchased” tab via iTunes in the Cloud, which also suggests that Apple is about to launch an official version of iTunes Match in Japan.

iCloud has been up and running in Japan for some time, but only for sharing books and information across apps. iTunes in the Cloud will allow Apple’s Japanese users to access purchased songs from the iTunes Store on any of their devices, and iTunes Match will allow users to “match” their music to iTunes Store for additional functionality.

iTunes in the Cloud has reportedly already gone live in Japan, and it seems like Apple is on the brink of releasing iTunes Match in Japan. That could possibly mean that other new international markets aren’t far behind.

Apple reportedly readying iTunes Match for Japan originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t usually cover every single update that arrives on the App Store, simply because there are so many apps out there and so many developers working hard all the time. But a number of very popular apps have updated recently, so here’s a few big apps with lots of new content to see.

The official Twitter app has been updated, specifically the iPhone version. The update allows you to use swipes to gesture around the app, copy and paste the links and text in actual tweets, and many other performance improvements and polishes. It’s not a huge update, but it’s worth downloading when it shows up in your iTunes or App Store update screen (though let me tell you, if you haven’t experienced Tweetbot yet, you’re missing out on a great alternative to the official app).

Cut the Rope Experiments has gotten its Bath Time update, with 25 new levels, a new playable character, new achievements, and a new leaderboard to play with. It’s a solid and highly anticipated update.

Zach Gage’s great SpellTower word game is getting a big update, which will include both a new multiplayer option and a few other game modes. Multiplayer will work across different iOS devices, too, so you can play with an iPad against players on iPhone, or vice versa.

SpellCraft: School of Magic is getting updated to version 1.1 later this week (never mind — it’s out right now). It’s a big update for the freemium title that adds lots of new customization options and spells, a healing spell that players can actually grow and craft (so they don’t need to use or buy potions all the time), and a new plant that translates directly into gold. There are also some performance improvements and bug fixes included as well.

That’s four great apps made even better by their developers. If you’ve purchased them in the past, download away.

Twitter app, Cut the Rope, SpellTower, SpellCraft School of Magic all updated originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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News network KTVZ has confirmed with Apple that the company plans to build another big data center on a 160-acre section of land just outside of Crook County, Oregon. The land that the data center will be built on cost Apple US$5.6 million. Until February 15, the paperwork that solidified the deal was hidden from public eyes, with Apple only being referred to as “Project Maverick.” A piece of paper filed earlier this month identified Apple’s address as “1 Infinite Loop,” and Apple has now confirmed that it’s going to be developing the land.

Apple’s other data center in North Carolina has gotten a lot of press, but this new one isn’t quite so surprising. We can expect it’ll be used for Apple’s extensive App Store traffic, plus various iCloud services and things like iTunes Match. Building in Oregon is smart as well; land is cheaper there than almost anywhere else along the West Coast (Facebook happens to have a data center nearby as well), and the proximity to big tech cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle will set Apple up well for future Internet-based services. While $5.6 million may sound like a lot, it’s a drop in the bucket for both the cost of the data center and compared to Apple’s considerable (to say the least) cash holdings.

Apple also confirmed that this data center will be a “green” facility (as it’s come under fire from environmental concerns for its data centers in the past), but given that plans probably aren’t finalized yet, we’ll have to wait and see what that means.

[via Mac Rumors]

Apple to build second data center in Oregon originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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