iPhone Article Zone

The Sticky Strap ~ A Stand that Loves to Suck

Sometimes the most creative and useful inventions can just be so simple, the Sticky Strap is one of them. If the late Billy Mays were here to sell it he’d probably start his pitch with something like “it wraps, it hangs, it sticks, and it sits! It’s the iPhone stand that works in almost every situation but still manages to fit in your pocket!”

Honestly the first time I saw the Sticky Strap I don’t know what the heck I was looking at. The bizarrely unique stand, designed by aprodukt, is made of 2 double sided suction cups, a nylon strap, and a red plastic hook on the end. Trying to explain how to use it would be a nightmare, it’s just easier to watch this video.

What the video doesn’t show is how durable the Sticky Strap really is. It’s 100% water proof, can be folded in half, mashed up into a ball, short of taking a hammer to the red plastic hook I can’t ever imagine breaking the thing, making it tougher than others like the iBend. Being able to fit in your pocket makes it more portable than something like the Gorillamobile while still retaining some of its versatility. The video does show some of its uses but don’t think that the Sticky Strap limited to those alone. One of the additional uses I found is its ability to hang around poles or wires the red hook couldn’t fit around by sticking one end through the other. If you’re creative with it I have no doubt you could find dozens of other uses for it also.

It’s not to say that the Sticky Strap is limitless, quite the opposite, and aprodukt’s list of “Do’s and DON’TS” is liable to scare anyone a little bit but the basic message is use common sense. If you don’t think sticking your iPhone to a cold surface over a fish tank is a good idea, then don’t do it. The biggest drawback of this design is that it can’t stick to just any surface, it has to be a very smooth and clean surface. While that sounds obvious it’s important to note that includes your iPhone or more specifically the case you may be using on your phone. I tested it with 5 different cases, all three of the hard cases worked just fine but the two silicone soft cases couldn’t be used at all. Taking the case off for use may not be the end of the world but it could certainly become annoying after a few uses. However, for less than $10 the Sticky Strap worth buying for quick on the go use. For only $3 more, aprodukt also offers a kit which includes a 3 pack of protective stickers and a polishing cloth which usually run about $15 through other competitors.

NewsAlert

If you want news custom-tailored to your liking, you should look at NewsAlert. This news app delivers news based solely on your specified keywords, presumably saving you the trouble of wading through RSS feeds. For the most part, it’s a solid experience, and the app pulls from a wide array of sources to make it worth your while.

The first thing you’ll want to do is pick some keywords. The app suggests keeping tabs on your favorite bands or your hometown as well as traditional keywords (i.e., “education”). These keywords then appear as list items in the main view. Whenever NewsAlert finds a new article relating to one of your keywords, you receive a push notification. The app tracks all of the articles that come in, and then you can view them based on the tag. You get 10 keywords to use, with more available via in-app purchase.

The viewer itself is nothing special—like most in-app web browsers, it’s slower than Safari and some of the screen space is wasted by the app itself. Pinch-to-zoom is also a bit jerky. I wish that opening articles in Safari could be selected as the default action (it’s still there, but it takes a few button taps.)

For the most part, getting news articles based on keywords is a good experience. It’s not perfect, however; too often, I get duplicate articles when major events happen. I don’t need to read the results from the latest Maryland basketball game ten times…in fact, I wish I could filter sports results out of my “Maryland” keyword altogether, but that’s not an option. Still, the app does turn up some interesting articles. I wouldn’t rely on it as my sole source of news, but as an addition to my daily routine, it works. It also works particularly well if you’re tracking an artist rather than a general keyword, because then you’re more likely to get interesting interviews or news about albums or tours.

It’s ultimately your call whether or not a simple dollar is worth getting keyword-specific news. The app is well-built, so no complaints there. For me, this is more of a novelty app than a real news source—I’ll stick with my old-fashioned RSS, because I like reading from specific sites. But if you’re the type who needs news on a specific topic from a variety of sources, NewsAlert won’t disappoint. It all depends on your individual needs.

[Sponsor] DreamWalk

Thanks to DreamWalk for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

If you have been waiting for your iPhone and your real life to collide, the time has come. Sure, we’ve had some augmented reality and social gaming apps come out in the past year, but none have put anything solid in my hands. On March 1, DreamWalk will become the first app of its kind, using the iPhone as a treasure map of sorts to put you on a quest to win real world prizes. Sometimes when I wake up I feel like a pirate, but never have I come so close!

We had a chance to talk to Joseph Russell, CEO of DreamWalk about this app. [ Read More ]

DreamWalk is available now, for free, in the App Store. [ Download ]

The Hero

Much like going to the movies, there are two ways of going into a new game. You can either go in thinking that it is going to be fantastic, or you can go in with no expectations at all. Rarely do high expectations pay off, but when they do, it makes for the best experience possible. Unfortunately, my expectations for The Hero were through the roof after seeing what I called at the time “the best app trailer ever”.

Much like the trailer showed off, The Hero is a superhero action game where you, The Hero, protect the world from the very Dr. Robotnik-like Dr. Hubbub and his band of evil militants. The game basically amounts to you flying around the screen while running into all the bad guys and potential disasters that you see. There are no punching or kicking moves, although you are given a few superpowers along the way… the majority of the time it is just up to your ability to ram into targets. The enemies, as expected, vary greatly from the stationary bombs to slow moving, high hit point tanks, to high flying satellites with laser beams. There are no real hit points in the game, only a “fame” bar, tracking how much the people adore you. Every time you get hit, hurt civilians, or let babies fall out of windows (seriously), your fame drops, but it can be regained by high-fiving supporters and killing bad guys. Once your fame meter runs all the way down, you lose.

The game really works on a number of levels, mostly being the graphics. There is something extremely satisfying about seeing a game on your iPhone that looks like it could just as easily be on XBLA. On my iPhone 3G, there were no slowdowns of any kind, and apparently on the 3GS you can enable a better graphics mode that runs at 60fps. I can’t imagine the game looking any better than it already does, but I’d love to see it try. The other winner here are the controls, which are almost simple to a fault. The Hero is controlled with a floating virtual joystick that works no matter where your thumb is on the screen. For the first hour or so the controls were spectacular, but I noticed after awhile that all the quick moving on the glass screen was giving my thumb a blister. Never being the kid that complained about thumb blisters, I played through the annoyance, but it was quite annoying.

My real gripe with The Hero is the story. After watching the trailer a few times, I was really excited about learning the story behind The Hero. I was hoping that the game would be an epic, taking you from the heyday to the point that he is in the video… depressed and smoking. I wasn’t expecting anything amazing, but I was hoping for a humorous Raging Bull-like downfall story. Instead I got a few screen before each level of a doting police chief and a press girl that seemed like a sexed up version of Moneypenny. On its own, the story isn’t awful, but my expectations were far too high for what I ended up getting.

While I certainly enjoyed playing all 15 levels of The Hero, I didn’t finish the game with the excitement that I wanted to. Unfortunately, this was a case there the trailer was so good that it actually took away from the overall experience. With the campaign mode and the survival modes afterwards, I’d expect a few hours of gameplay… certainly enough to warrant a purchase. Just don’t expect the app to be nearly as good as the trailer.

The Graveyard

I recently picked up Heavy Rain, for the PS3, and played it through in one setting. After being locked to the television for 8 hours straight, my wife had to come peel me from my chair. The game was an amazing experience, and really expanded my interest in cinematic gaming experiences. When I saw The Graveyard out for iDevices, I jumped at the chance to once again experience this style of play.

I believe it’s silly to assume that you’ll find a similar scope in a PS3 game that you will in an iDevice game, but I was surprised at how fast my gaming experience ended in The Graveyard. My best comparison would be assigning Heavy Rain a full motion picture length, and The Graveyard being a YouTube video. There isn’t anything wrong with YouTube videos; they just usually aren’t all that long.

Length aside, The Graveyard provides an extremely powerful message, though I think that message will be lost on a lot of people, especially the younger crowd. The game boils down to a look back on the life of an elderly woman, as she passes through the graveyard of people who have come and gone before her. At the end of the long stretch of graveyard is a bench that the elderly woman sits on to rest.

The goal of the game, for lack of a better term, is to slowly walk this woman through the long corridor of the graveyard and sit her down on the bench. Once there, the real message of the game begins.
Control wise, the game plays fairly rough. My first play through found me moving from side to side, not truly understanding how to get the woman to move straight down the path. After getting to the bench, I wasn’t sure how to sit down. I checked out the instructions by pressing the bottom right hand corner. They explained how to sit down, but when I tried to close the window in the same manner I opened it, I was tossed to an internet site. I closed out and restarted the game, and had to make the slow walk once again.

I’m having trouble really coming to a conclusion on if to recommend this game. At $1.99 it doesn’t provide a LOT of gaming potential. As an art form, it’s an amazing experience. It’s an easy recommend based on its merits to artists. It’s visually appealing; the impressive graphics matched with the soft black and white environment make it great to look at. I keep coming back to the short game play for the price, however.

My recommendation for the reader would be to try out the free version if you appreciate various forms of art. If you have a very powerful experience, grab the full version to support the developer. The only difference between the two, according to the developer, is that death is a possibility in the full version. Not the best marketing plan, but I am a big advocate for supporting developers who create a worthwhile product.

If the hidden messages and deep meanings behind song and art really don’t fit your fancy, The Graveyard is not for you. You would be better to try the free version if your curiosity is still peaked. That said, my own personal opinion is that it was a beautiful display of how game and cinema can be joined together for a fully interactive experience. I hope more developers follow suit with this approach.

iPhone Game Development: Bringing the Best of the Exciting Games to Your iPhone

Apple iPhone is no doubt one of coolest gadgets to be launched in the last decade. It has indeed redefined the definition of a mobile phone. Much more than a mere talking device an iPhone enables its users to surf the web, communicate online, download music and video files and play them, take snaps and much more. And all these features can be activated on a touchscreen interface. Apart from these features, an iPhone is also a great gaming device. It comes with many preloaded games which can excite you and test your gaming skills. Since Apple supports third party applications development, many games applications are developed by companies and freelancers all over the world. And the development of 3G games has made the prospect of mobile phone gaming even more interesting. In iPhone 3Gs games development, 3D touch screen processor and accelerometer have made the game even more fascinating.

Apple issues a SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) to third party game developers to support them with essential tools and general guidelines to help them in iPhone game programming. New games are added regularly and are available for download from the App Store. The developers use the most advanced tools to convert innovative ideas into exciting games. Many games are developed in different genres such as puzzles and mind games, action games, adventure games, speed games etc. No doubt, iPhone games can take on PC games and game consoles. iPhone game development may also be outsourced to cut down development cost.

Readdle Docs

Rarely do you find such a versatile, functional app in the App Store. Readdle Docs is pretty much the only document storage/reader app you’ll ever need—the viewer is clean and functional, grabbing documents from a variety of sources is easy, and you can’t beat the interface or the vast array of features. Readers take note: if you ever need to handle documents on your iPhone, Readdle Docs is the reigning champ.

Importing Your Files
The first step with any file management app, importing files can be a headache depending on the range of choices available. With Readdle, you’ve got a lot of options. You can import files from a MobileMe iDisk account (either yours, or a public one), Google Docs, Dropbox , Box.net, or filesanywhere. Readdle also gives you a free 512 MB online storage account with your purchase of the app. Files can be downloaded from any of these sources, or you can connect your iPod as a wireless drive and transfer files straight from your computer. You can also use the built-in browser to download files from the web. It’s all quick and easy. No complaints here!

File Types
Readdle supports PDFs, Microsoft Office, and Apple iWork file types, as well as image files. Again, pretty much what you’d expect; if you need a non-supported document format, just print it out as a PDF. (I recommend the free doPDF utility.)

The Viewer
This is where Readdle really shines. I’ve tested the viewer fairly rigorously—I’ve read three novels on it so far—and it performs consistently and well. One tap brings up the interface, which otherwise stays invisible and out of your way. Here, you have the option to lock the screen orientation (a godsend!), add or jump to a bookmark, scroll through, or—if it’s a plain .txt file—make changes to the text. The reader handles large files fairly well. From time to time the app would freeze for a second or two, but scrolling through my ebooks was mostly a pleasant experience. The “BookReader settings” aren’t as varied as you’ll find in other, more specialized apps (there’s no inverting font and background colors, for example) but you can still change the font and its size. All formatting was perfectly preserved, and I really can’t fault the viewer for anything except the occasional lag.

It’s All About the Details
All the nice touches are here, too; for example, the app automatically opens to the last document and close to where you stopped. Many of the awesome features aren’t immediately obvious. For example, you can forward any email with attachments to a special address and have those attachments show up in your Readdle storage account. You can password-protect your files, and save entire webpages for offline reading. The interface is easy on the eyes, even if the icons don’t quite look native. Readdle is a mature app, and it shows.

Overall
I’ve used numerous document viewers on my iPod, but none of them are quite perfect. Readdle isn’t flawless, but it’s so incredibly close that I can’t imagine using anything else. For me, the Dropbox integration seals it as an amazingly easy method of keeping all my documents close at hand; your mileage may vary depending on what sorts of files you need to carry and how large they are. Still, if you ever need a document viewer or file manager app, Readdle is my number-one recommendation. It’s a complete, complex workhorse of an app with a broad feature list, good performance, and a solid interface. What more do you want? For $4.99, Readdle Docs is an easy recommendation.

GeeTasks

Procrastination is probably my biggest problem. I mean, it’s easy for me to think about the things I’ve got to do…but actually doing them is another story. I’ve used a lot of different to-do apps to try and cure me of my laziness, but it’s too easy to waste time organizing you list of to-do’s instead of getting things done. GeeTasks takes a different approach, utilizing Google’s bare-bones Tasks pane from gmail. What GeeTasks lacks in features, it makes up for with ease-of-use and simplicity.

If you’re a gmail user, you may have seen the Tasks link that resides just under “Contacts” in the gmail interface. Clicking on this brings up the Tasks pop-up, which is a minimizable overlay that provides a simple to-do list. I’ve taken to using this instead of more complicated iPhone apps or websites, because I’m always in gmail. Having my to-do list constantly staring at me is the perfect way to stop procrastinating! That’s what I tell myself, anyway. The only flaw with this method is that I can’t take my Tasks offline, or even onto another platform.

GeeTasks fills that void. It’s simple, and the service it provides isn’t a huge one: it lets you download your gmail Tasks, as well as create new ones for later syncing. When you create a task, you can add notes, set a due date (which will be synced with Google Calendar), and place it in a pre-existing list from Google Tasks. The app also has a badge pop-up showing you how many tasks you have outstanding, and you can “purge” your list of completed items or sort it by date. The only feature “missing” is the ability to create a new list, which is a confusing ommission. It’s not as though I like managing multiple lists (this is a simple app!), but it’s a native feature to Tasks.

Of course, if by “missing” you mean “standard in other apps,” then you’ll find quite a few things gone. There are no tags, custom backgrounds, repeating tasks, or syncing with services like Outlook or iCal. But then, wasn’t the whole point of this simplicity?

As for the user interface, it does a delightful job of getting out of your way while still providing functionality. While it doesn’t quite have the look of a native app, GeeTasks still sports a clean, sensible aesthetic. Little touches like showing red checkboxes instead of green for unsynced tasks go a long way towards making it as user-friendly as possible. Landscape mode is also fully supported, which is another good feature.

So, is GeeTasks the to-do app for you? That depends. It’s nothing fancy—indeed, few apps are quite as simple. It won’t work if you’re a power user. But if you’re a person like me, who just needs to be bothered into getting her tasks done, the simplicity of GeeTasks will force you to stop procrastinating and simply get to it. After all, isn’t that what we all need?

Tekken Coming for iPhone and iPod Touch!

Putting an end to past/previous speculation, PocketGamer confirmed today that Tekken is coming to the iPhone and iPod touch, stating a source close to Namco, speaking to them anonymously, told them the game is far along in development and looking good.

To paraphrase, “The game is being finished up and it plays rather nicely.”

They’re not sure if this iPhone version was developed “from scratch” or if it’s a “touch-enabled port of Tekken 6 as developed for PSP.” They believe the latter seems more likely, which they believe is wise, given how well-crafted the PSP version is.

Multiplayer has not been confirmed, but hey expect head-to-head bouts to be of the local variety.

With competitor Capcom having just announced Street Fighter IV for iPhone, Namco’s move with Tekken is a logical one.

Although it was previously reported that both games would be shown at next week’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), PocketGamer.co.uk has since confirmed Tekken won’t be shown during the GDC.

“We are NOT showing anything at GDC with regards to Tekken. We will be previewing new stuff, but it will NOT involve the Tekken brand whatsoever.” Emphasis is theirs.

The company didn’t confirm or deny the game’s existence, just that it has no plans to show Tekken next week.

FreeAppCalendar.com is Live!

Who doesn’t love free apps? Thanks to FreeAppCalendar.com, iPhone and iPod touch owners can visit the site and find great games and apps for FREE, every day! In addition, site visitors will have the opportunity to vote for which games and apps they want to see become free the following week. This allows the site’s visitors to control which games and apps will be featured on the main app calendar each week.

FreeAppCalendar,com, created by Mind Juice Media Inc., is dedicated to providing independent developers with a powerful way to promote their games and apps to hundreds of thousands of people in a very short period of time. The developers benefit from greatly increased exposure for their apps and the public benefits by receiving free games and apps featured on the site! Everybody wins!

Every week, site visitors can browse through the available list of apps on the site and vote on which game or app they would most like to get for free the following week. When voting is closed, the 7 apps with the most votes are chosen to be featured for free the following week.

This is a great opportunity for developers and app lovers! Please help the site grow by telling all your friends about freeAppCalendar.com, by following them on Twitter, and by becoming a Facebook Fan! Go to freeAppCalendar.com for more details!

Related Free App Sites:

http://www.greatappaday.com/
http://freegameoftheday.com/
http://www.freeappaday.com/