Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Once you’ve got the foundation in place, it’s easy enough to redecorate your board game app. That’s what the developers at Skotos Tech/RPGnet have figured out with their series of games that use the MobileEuroCard platform. These apps include Money, High Society, and now, Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms. This last game is a US$3.99 universal app (Version 1.01 reviewed here), and playing it will feel quite familiar to anyone who has tried the first two games. This app shows the engine’s flexibility, since instead of playing cards to a central location, you’re playing tiles in a specific grid pattern. Most things work smoothly and easily.

This 2-4 player game has been published in German as Auf Heller und Pfennig and in English as Kingdoms, and later, it was even reworked into a movie spin-off game based on Beowulf. Yes, Knizia’s numbers game is quite flexible as far as themes go, but that’s to be expected. On your iDevice, the game plays very quickly and is entertaining for the few minutes that you’re engaged with it (especially on the iPhone). Also, anyone who is interested in multiplayer Sudoku (is that fair?) can read on for the full review.

Continue reading App Review: Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms

App Review: Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ThinkFast, LLC, a design firm in Louisville, Kentucky, has come up with a totally useful and unique iPad case that caught my attention. The Sleeve360 has a hand strap on the back with a 360° free-spinning pivot, so if you’re using your iPad in such a way that you literally need it constantly at your fingertips, it’s there. I can see where the Sleeve360 is probably going to be tremendously popular in the healthcare industry, where iPads seem to taking off like an F-22 fighter on full afterburner.

For artists who might want to move their “canvas” around, the pivot makes it possible to spin the iPad to any orientation in seconds. The strap also acts as a stand for standing the iPad on a surface in either landscape or portrait mode, and there’s even a set of little feet that pop out for when you just want have the iPad propped up a little.

The Sleeve360 will have a suggested retail price of US$49.99. The entrepreneurs at ThinkFast are still working up their packaging, but you should be able to pre-order a Sleeve360 in the very near future. There’s video on the next page where you can see the Sleeve360 in action. It’s very ZZ Top!

Thanks to Tim for the tip.

[via iPadCreative]

Continue reading Sleeve360 spinning, wearable iPad case getting closer to reality

Sleeve360 spinning, wearable iPad case getting closer to reality originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just when you thought that the frenzy over the popular iOS game Angry Birds had finally reached its peak, now comes word from the Virtual Goods Summit that the game’s publisher plans on turning the franchise into an empire.

Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka dropped the eggs spilled the beans yesterday when he mentioned that the game is going to be available on all major gaming platforms soon, not just on mobile devices. But the comment that got the most attention was that the Angry Birds sequel is in development and it won’t focus solely on the irate avians.

No, the sequel story line will be told from the point of view of the pigs, who have been the victims of the vicious attacks by the birds in Part One of this tale. Vesterbacka also confirmed that a movie and TV show are apparently in the works, and that most of Rovio’s investment at the present time is going into a Facebook game. It won’t be Angry Birds, but will take place in the same world as the ultra-popular game.

Rovio is also working on a multiplayer version of Angry Birds, all part of Vesterbacka’s plans for “Angry Birds to be bigger than Tetris.”

[via Pocket-Lint]

Angry Birds sequel will reveal pigs’ point of view originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last night, I made shrimp and andouille sausage jambalaya for dinner, a delicious mish-mash of flavors and ingredients that originated in Louisiana Creole cooking. What does that have to do with today’s TUAW TV Live show? Well, I don’t have any one topic that’s going to dominate the show today, so I’ll be giving you a little bit of iPad, a heapin’ helpin’ of Mac, a sprig of iPhone, and a dash of Apple TV. Think of it as a pre-Thanksgiving Apple feast.

Dang. Now I’m hungry.

To join in on the fun, be sure to drop by TUAW just before 5 PM ET (2 PM PT) today, and we’ll have complete instructions on how you can watch or participate in the show. Note that TUAW TV Live will not be presented on November 24th, 2010, so this will be your last chance for two weeks to enjoy the festivities and chat with other TUAW readers.

TUAW TV Live at 5 PM ET: Apple jambalaya originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After decades of bickering that’s nearly as infamous as the Beatles’ breakup, the actual deal that finally united Apple, Inc., Apple Corps and EMI was hammered out in July, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

We touched lightly on this history yesterday, but the WSJ outlined the exact route that EMI and Apple Corps navigated since this summer to reach an agreement, which was then brought to Apple. In Cupertino, Apple began quietly reserving ad space in major publications with only the reassurance that they would deliver the ads to make press time.

Meanwhile, Billboard magazine — as reported via MacRumors — revealed that much of the issue post-lawsuit wasn’t between Apple Corps and Apple, Inc,, but rather Apple Corps and EMI. Apple and Google vied to be the first to host the Beatles, with rumors of Apple paying a “substantial advance” to EMI floating around.

Regardless, Apple won the race and the Beatles now dominate the iTunes charts … though none of the albums have yet to surpass the latest Glee album on the charts. The Beatles remain exclusive to Apple until at least January of 2011, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the digital tracks on Amazon shortly after it runs out.

The ballad of the Beatles and iTunes (and EMI, too) originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Native editing for Google Docs will be available on the iOS device closest to you within the next few days — if not already.

Google issued a press release this morning, complete with a demo set to some snazzy music demonstrating the new editor in action. Google said that the it will be available on all iOS devices, plus those with Android version 2.2 and higher, within the next few days. You need iOS 3.0 or above to run the mobile Google Docs editor.

I grabbed my iPad and saw that I could already edit my documents. For basic editing of your projects on the fly, it’s not bad at all. But, it’s very basic editing at best and does not have any support for styling text or customizing spreadsheets like Documents 2 Go and Quickoffice do.

For video of Google Docs on an iPad (among other devices), click the link below.

Continue reading Now edit your Google Docs on your iOS device

Now edit your Google Docs on your iOS device originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been just over 24 hours since the release of The Beatles’ complete back catalogue on iTunes and they are already dominating the album charts in a rather unusual way. In fact, as reported by MacObserver, within 12 hours of availability The Beatles had 15 albums placed in the Top 40 best-selling albums chart and 17 albums in the Top 100. That’s a lot of albums to have in the Top 100 at any one time, let alone the Top 40.

As of this writing, the numbers are even more impressive. The Beatles now have three of the top ten albums (Abbey Road is at number seven) and 16 of the top 50.

Apple announced the release shortly before 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday morning, after a full-page takeover tease was displayed at Apple.com on Monday. Some have felt a tad let down by the announcement, following the hype and speculation that ensued after the tease appeared.

However, ifoAppleStore.com notes that Apple is making the most of the announcement in its retail stores across the U.S. and Canada. Apple staff are being issued special name tag lanyards with the slogan “The Beatles. Now on iTunes” with the Abbey Road album cover just below it. The name of the staff member is printed just below that. Also, high-profile Apple Stores are replacing their current window displays with special Beatles promotional presentations. Other stores will replace the current FaceTime display with a picture of The Beatles looking out at shoppers.

The Beatles invade iTunes charts within 12 hours originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After much waiting and speculation, Hulu Plus was released for the iPad and iPhone on a preview basis in June. Today, Hulu has opened the service up to everyone and dropped the monthly fee to US$7.99 from $9.99. Additionally, those who have been paying $9.99 will see a rebate on their next bill.

Hulu Plus on the iPad and iPhone (here’s our review) streams TV shows, movies and documentaries to the devices over Wi-Fi and 3G. It’s smart enough to pick up where you left off, should you get interrupted, on either device. While the movie selection is rather limited (most were new to me), the television library is great, offering both classic and contemporary shows, many in their full runs.

It will be interesting to see if the price drop attracts additional “cord-cutters” who are looking to escape costly cable bills and adopt services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand. As Read Write Web points out, the proliferation of cord-cutters is really a myth. A recent Nielsen study found that the majority of Internet TV viewers (84%) say that they are still watching the same amount of traditional TV as before and do not intend to cancel their current cable subscriptions.

In addition to this announcement, Hulu has stated that updates to its iOS apps are forthcoming, and that they’ve formed a new partnership with Roku.

[Via Read Write Web]

Hulu Plus launches at $7.99, refunds early adopters originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The somewhat bare shelves of the “Computers and Internet” aisle in the iBookstore have suddenly been filled up, with virtual boxes of Peachpit and Pearson tech books being unloaded today.

Pearson’s stable includes such imprints as Addison Wesley, Cisco Press, IBM Press, Que, Prentice Hall, Pearson IT Certification, and Sams. The titles are divided into sections, including Apple Gadgets & Technology, iOS Development, Internet & Web, IT Certification, Programming and Software Development, Social and Web Marketing, Software Applications, and Web Design & Creation.

Peachpit’s library includes the Apple Training Series, which is the “official” series of books used in Apple Certification training. I was pleased to see that the Apple Training Series books were discounted: the Mac OS X Support Essentials v 10.6 title that normally sells for $58.49 on the Peachpit site in paperback or for $46.79 in Adobe Reader format is now only $34.99 in the iBookstore. Peachpit books are also divided into sections, including Bestsellers, New Releases, Apple & Apple Certified, Web, Adobe, Photography, Video & Audio, and Graphic Design.

For the many techies who own iPhones or iPads, the addition of Peachpit and Pearson books to the iBookstore is going to be a godsend. Unfortunately, it’s also another reason to spend a lot of money on those technical books that you’ve been waiting to read on your iPad.

[via Macsimum News]

Peachpit and Pearson tech books now available in iBookstore originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the past two years, RIM has been left in the dust by Apple and Google in the smartphone space, and RIM’s first crack at a tablet device doesn’t arrive until sometime in 2011. Despite the wait for the arrival of the PlayBook, RIM is trying to generate interest in an attempt to get consumers to forgo the iPad this Christmas and wait for its new toy instead. One of the numerous complaints about recent BlackBerries like the Storm and Torch is slow performance, so RIM has released a new video to show that the PlayBook can give the iPad a real run for its money.

A developer from the browser group at RIM shows off the rendering speed of the PlayBook and iPad side by side, and the PlayBook certainly looks promising. Rather than a derivative of the classic BlackBerry OS, the PlayBook is running on QNX, and, like the iPad, the browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine. Whenever a company produces a demonstration like this, it will obviously choose sites that show its hardware and software in the best possible light. Nonetheless, the PlayBook appears to load and render pages significantly faster than its Apple counterpart. The PlayBook also did a good job of playing back Flash content from Adidas.com, which the iPad obviously can’t do. Both devices scored 100 on the ACID 3 compatibility test, but only the iPad showed some rendering artifacts.

If the rest of the PlayBook works as well as the browser, it may yet have potential. Click “Read More” to check out the video itself and see how each device fared in RIM’s test.

Continue reading BlackBerry PlayBook vs. iPad: The challenger looks fast so far

BlackBerry PlayBook vs. iPad: The challenger looks fast so far originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As we’ve been diving into the Microsoft Office 2011 application suite, we’ve been focusing on the new features going from 2008 to 2011, and the relative value versus alternative tools like Apple’s iWork suite. One thing we haven’t really nailed down, though, is speed. Although it’s easy to see in the first few moments of using it that Office 2011 is bringing a lot of performance optimizations to the table, exactly how much faster is it?

Enter our friends over at MacTech magazine, who have polished their stopwatches and lined up a slew of test machines to get at the raw numbers and compare Office 2011 to both Office 2008 and 2004 across the entire suite. The whole article is worth a read, but the gist is that Office 2011 is quite a lot faster everywhere you care about speed: application launches, file open/save (noted as faster with the XML formats than with the legacy .doc, .xls etc. files), key operations, and more.

In particular, Excel has gotten a serious turbo injection, with operations like fill range and charting timing out as “orders of magnitude” faster than in the previous version. MacTech suggests that Excel users who lean heavily on the charting capabilities “run, don’t walk, to get the upgrade.”

On the Mac Mojo blog, Microsoft’s own Erik Schwiebert posted an interesting look inside the development process and philosophy that drives the speed optimizations seen in Office 2011. From the user perspective, you might not think that squeezing a few milliseconds out of a particular function would lead to worthwhile improvements, but Schwiebert lays it out well and explains the cognitive science behind perceived application performance — worth a read. His video demo of Excel’s launch speed improvements is in the 2nd half of this post.

Continue reading Office 2011 puts pedal to the metal with demonstrable speed bumps

Office 2011 puts pedal to the metal with demonstrable speed bumps originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, you want people to notice your cool new iPod nano, especially when you wear it as a watch. But what if you also want them to think you’re a time traveler from 1988? According to Cult of Mac, Griffin Technology has brought back the famed “slap bracelet” in blindingly bright colors for your Quantum Leap(ing), iPod nano-owning self. For use with the newly designed 6th-gen iPod nano, the Slap is a flexible wristband made from silicone and metal which slaps shut around your wrist while holding your iPod securely in place.

Coming soon in a dizzying rainbow of colors, the Slap wristband/watchband is priced at US$24.99. Hopefully this version won’t get banned in schools like in they did in 1990.

Griffin announces iPod nano Slap wristband originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s board of directors has been running pretty lean since the departure of Google’s Eric Schmidt and the death of Jerry York, so a new director is welcome news. Today the company announced the addition of Dr. Ronald D. Sugar to the board; Sugar is the retired CEO of Northrop Grumman and previously worked at Litton Industries and TRW, Inc.

Sugar has a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree in engineering from UCLA, and considering his aerospace background there’s only one possible conclusion to draw from this appointment: Apple is making a flying car. No, no, just kidding.

Congratulations to Dr. Sugar; we wish him a long and pleasant term as an Apple director.

[via TechCrunch]

Apple’s board gains a new director: Ronald D. Sugar originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How big is iOS as a gaming platform? I wondered to myself on an idle rainy afternoon. After all, we hear a lot about how the App Store has passed eleventy gajillion downloads, or how it makes people richer than astronauts, but I wanted some context around these numbers — something to make the abstract mean something. I chose a subject close to my heart: games. And then I compiled the data that lead to the graph you see above.

iOS has nearly three times more games than the previous twenty-five years of gaming combined.

Now, I have to admit that there are some caveats to this data. The iOS count is just a scrape of the App Store’s active titles in the “games” category; there is a lot of double counting in there from demo versions of games. The same thing applies on the other side of the balance for multi-platform games — there must be at least half a dozen versions of Street Fighter 2 and Doom. I’ve ignored some smaller console platforms that were hard to obtain numbers for. I couldn’t consider games played on computers as there is little reliable data for platforms that don’t have the strong publisher control that characterizes game consoles; for example, World of Spectrum lists 9,544 games for the popular 8-bit home computer series. Clearly, including those would change the graph around completely.

That aside, I still think there is a message here, which is that the App Store is a huge force in gaming. Apple has tapped into a massive market that was previously going largely unfulfilled, and plenty of developers are making piles of cash out of it.

Of course, more software doesn’t equal better software, and if it did, we’d all be using Windows instead of OS X. I don’t think there are any iOS games in my personal top 50 games of all time list. That isn’t to say that I don’t play a lot of iOS games, or that I don’t enjoy them; for me, they just tend to be pleasant diversions rather than the sort of experience that compels me to stay up until 3AM playing just one more turn. (There’s an honorable exception for Civilization Revolution on the iPad, though.)

Continue reading The staggering size of iOS’s game collection

The staggering size of iOS’s game collection originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We’ve sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier.

There’s an entire world of docks out there — “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” our very own Doc Rock, and the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby — but the docks that make Apple fans the happiest are those that hold and charge iPhones, iPods, and iPads. There are some that act as big speakers for your iDevice, others that fill in for that old clock radio that you finally threw out the bedroom window, and some that charge more than one device at a time.

Our dock recommendations come in an assortment of types as well: basic docks that just charge or sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, speaker docks for blasting out your tunes, and docks for helping you get to sleep at night or wake up in the morning. All of the prices that are quoted are in US dollars.

This is just a sampling of the huge number of docks that are made for Apple devices. Be sure to check out TUAW coverage of many of the docks that are available.

Continue reading TUAW’s Holiday Gift Guide: Docks that rock

TUAW’s Holiday Gift Guide: Docks that rock originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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