Michael (Admin) | Feb 8, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Speedway 2012 ($1.99) by Caps Off Available on iPhone & iPod Touch Imagine you’ve got a motorcycle and you have a chance to race it around a dirt track. Sounds good, right? Now imagine that your bike can only make left turns. Uh… WTF? And welcome to Speedway 2012. I understand why Caps Off decided to make this game’s motorcycles a left-turn-only deal. It makes for a simple control scheme, and it also allows for four different people to put four different fingers on a single device and race against each other. That’s all cool and whatnot, but this thing really takes some getting used to. Tap once to get your bike going, and from then on you tap and hold to make your left turns. It’s easy in theory, but after smashing into the wall 50,000 times it’s really gonna piss you off. Speedway 2012′s production values are pretty good and I like the idea of multiple players on the same device, but I’ll be gosh darned if this game isn’t so frustrating that it feels more like casual torture than casual gaming. Can’t I at least bounce off the wall instead of having the race end instantly when I crash? When playing vs. the computer, crashing is so common that if you manage to finish the race at all there’s a good chance you’ll win by default. Even the computer isn’t too good at avoiding the walls. To be fair I played this game on my iPhone which, given the scale of the graphics, is a pretty small screen. I’m sure this game would play differently on an iPad, but I’m guessing it would still be hard to finish races. Read More
Michael (Admin) | Feb 3, 2012 User rating: ( votes, average: out of 5) Loading ... BirdieBoy (Free) by Jonas Bager Available on iPhone & iPod Touch I confess. The only reason I gave this app a try is because the icon is so dumb it’s funny! A badly drawn bird and a crying kid with a bird sitting on his head… it screams campy. The game itself could be described as a little campy, but mostly it’s just dumb. Tilt your device left and right to make BirdieBoy move, and your goal is to catch the badly drawn birds that are falling out of a nest, onto a trampoline, and hopefully into the basket on poor BirdieBoy’s head. There are eggs that occasionally fall from the sky, but as far as I can tell they only result in “slow” or “+1″ which gives you a bonus life. Lives, marked by the BirdieBoy heads at the top of the screen, are lost when you fail to catch a bird. As a casual game it’s not very original, but I do like the crying kid and the terrible artwork for their sheer camp value, and the campiness is further supported by the Atari 2600-era background music and sound effects. Should you buy BirdieBoy? YES, but only if you’re a blood relative of BirdieBoy or a close personal friend of Jonas Bager. Read More
Michael (Admin) | Jan 31, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Camera+ ($1.99) by tap tap tap Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad I’ll keep this short: Camera+ is probably the best all-around camera app you’re gonna find in the App Store. I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but if you’ve never used it you should definitely give it a look. I used to have apps like ToyCamera, Lomo Camera, and numerous others on my iPhone but Camera+ has replaced them all! Those other apps are great for certain things, but this one is basically the Swiss Army Knife of camera apps. All the retro filters and other functions like flash, crop, flip, and borders are awesome, but honestly the thing I like best is that Camera+ doesn’t automatically add every crappy pic I take to that stupid Photostream. My understanding is that the ability to delete items from Photostream will be getting easier in a future iOS update… currently you have to turn Photostream off and then back on in order to delete individual pics… but frankly I’d rather just not have every dadgum photo added to this thing. Yeah, I said DADGUM. Ok, enough bitching about Photostream. The Camera+ features I use most often are the Flash filter which just brightens pics up, and I’m also a big fan of the FX Effects selections which range from black & white to depth of field to all kinds of Lomo-ish looks. Additional filters are available with an in-app purchase. Numerous borders are also included, some of which allow you to add a caption. This is cool, but it would be even cooler if Camera+ would let you add a caption or speech bubble to any photo without having to use a specific frame. Read More
Tanya Dracolakis | Jan 23, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... My Bird World ($2.99) by Five Ravens Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad After downloading apps that promise to teach something and finding their formats neither fun nor particularly memorable, I thought I’d had it with anything containing “educational” in the description. But, it’s 2012. Why not get crazy? There have been 2 or 3 instances in the last month where a friend and I were strolling outdoors and wondered what kind of bird we were looking at. So when I saw Five Ravens’ app up for review, I figured it was a sign. Cue My Bird World. There are 20 types of birds ready for you to win them (by way of fun games), put them in one of the available habitats and feed them. It’s almost like a bird Tamagotchi, except you have to jump through a few extra hoops to get your pet and feed it. Not that I mind. Games include tried-and-true favorites such as memory, quizzes and speed games. There is a lite version available for free, so if you test it out and are craving more aviary adventures, there’s an iPhone version and HD for the iPad. Not to mention, the realistic bird noises can really drive a house cat nuts. This app is a pleasant, game-filled educational experience for all ages. And unlike trying to learn French, the bird skills you learn could actually come in handy. You know, so during the next picnic you can swear at that pesky, winged thing stealing your lunch by name. From Five Ravens:Leave a comment below and you could get this app for FREE… preference will be given to those who *promise* to post an honest review in iTunes! If you are selected to Read More
Clint | Jan 18, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... CamCard (business card reader) ($6.99) by Intsig Information Co., Ltd. Available on iPhone only When I am not writing reviews for IAR, on a completely voluntary and uncompensated basis mind you, I am in my office, or in court, or meeting clients in my daily struggle to keep the bills paid, my kids expensive private-school tuition up to date, and my wife happy. As a practicing attorney I am handed hundreds of business cards every year and I never know what to do with them. Herein lies the benefit of CamCard! CamCard is a business card reader for the iPhone that allows you to take all those pesky paper business cards and convert them to digital form. According to Intsig Information Co., Ltd., CamCard is able to capture business card images with your iPhone-based camera, recognize the card image content, and then automatically organize and extract the person’s first name, last name, company name, work phone number, email address, physical address and company/contact website url. If only it were truly that easy! Using an iPhone 3GS I was able to take pictures of all my business cards and, with limited success, CamCard did actually recognize some of the information correctly. I would say that my success rate was about 50%. CamCard does provide a fairly easy and streamlined editing tool that allows you to quickly correct the information contained in the business card, but, to be honest, at a price of $7.00 I was hoping for a success rate more along the lines of 90%. To give you an example, I took a picture of a brand new business card that had the following information (names changed to protect anonymity): Bates, Jules, Firn & Smith, L.L.P. Attorneys at Law Read More
tdracolakis | Jan 16, 2012 User rating: ( votes, average: out of 5) Loading ... Countdown™ ($0.99) by Bas du Pre Available on iPhone & iPod Touch Countdown™ is a new app that … counts down to things. Why confuse prospective consumers with punny names that do nothing more than mislead and force a reading of the app description? It’s great that the developer mentioned further features are in the woodworks for next month. As for now, Countdown is a fairly adequate 1.0, but perhaps not yet worth the 99 cents. After downloading the app, you open Countdown to find a streamlined UI consisting of two buttons and a blank space where countdowns will eventually end up. The “+” button adds countdowns and selecting “Edit” updates preexisting ones. The best feature includes the ability to add a photo to the countdown item – either extracted from the internet as you input text or uploaded from the device. Once the photo-customized item is created the option of sharing on Facebook appears, which is great. However, there is no option for Twitter, Tumblr or any other social media application. Interactive features such as photo customization and sharing online show potential that will hopefully be actualized for Countdown’s next version. From Bas du Pre:Leave a comment below and you could get this app for FREE… preference will be given to those who *promise* to post an honest review in iTunes! If you are selected to get a free code, we will send it to you via Facebook. Read More
Michael (Admin) | Jan 16, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Magic101 ($free) by Angelo Oddo Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad Somewhere in the deep recesses of this thing I call a brain, I like to imagine a world where I’m surrounded by adoring women who ooooh and aaaah as I wow them with amazing magic tricks peppered with bits of irresistable charisma… and then I wake up and realize that I’m about as charismatic as a canker sore.. but for whatever reason I still want to learn how to do magic! Magic101 is a collection of videos that teach you how to pull off 12 beginner-level magic tricks. Each trick comes with a written explanation, a video that shows the trick being performed, and another video that explains how the trick is done. More magic tricks can be bought through the “magic store” where most tricks cost $.99. Most people are smart enough to realize that you can learn plenty of magic tricks by watching other people’s videos at this crazy website… what’s it called… oh yeah, YOUTUBE. But if you’re serious about mastering certain tricks, and if repetition is the key to mastery, then it might really be beneficial to have a magic teacher in your pocket (and hopefully a deck of cards) so you can work on perfecting your craft whenever, wherever. Magic101 does a pretty good job of explaining the tricks, but in the sales department I’m pretty disappointed that there isn’t a video demo of each trick being performed. How am I supposed to know if I want to buy a trick if I can’t see it being done first? The absence of this see-how-it’s-done video will almost certainly drive me to look up the trick on Youtube where not only will I Read More
Tony Mei | Jan 14, 2012 User rating: ( votes, average: out of 5) Loading ... Hatchi ($0.99) by Portable Pixels Available on iPhone & iPod Touch Tamagochi were cheap, electronic toys popular in the 90′s. It’s basically a battery-powered keychain pet game. To prevent your little pixel based buddy from dying, you have to feed, bathe, and play with the thing constantly. If you know what I’m talking about, you’re probably feeling nostalgic and/or bitter right now. I know I was obsessed with my little critter. Once, I forgot to take him on vacation and cried the entire car ride (RIP Flippy). Tamagochi is some serious stuff. Hatchi bills itself as the app store’s first Tamagochi emulator. That’s right- you can relive the joys and pains of your childhood for only $0.99. The artwork is the same retro black pixels. Everything is done by pushing a button. You can only ‘lose’ if you don’t check on your creature frequently. The app can send notifications, in case I feel like being woken up at 3AM being told Henry is bored or hungry or smelly. In that way, it’s like owning your own pet. You either love Hatchi or you don’t. It’s neat and quirky- great for showing off to friends. But in the game play sense, there isn’t much here. Check back in, press a few buttons to feed, bathe, play with, and read to your pet. It’s feels like playing Sims on a graphing calculator. After a few days, your monster evolves to new forms. If there’s no nostalgic connection between you and Tamagochi, Hatchi would offer much. Hatchi’s description says that monsters take different attributes depending on how you treat them. I didn’t notice this, unless Henry transformed into a smelly, perpetually starving monster when I wasn’t looking. Oops. Read More
Tony Mei | Jan 13, 2012 User rating: ( votes, average: out of 5) Loading ... Me Red: The Ultimate Adventure ($0.99) by Playcompass Entertainment Available on iPhone & iPod Touch iOS action games are a dime a dozen. I can only take so many $0.99 rehashes of tired concepts before I throw my iPhone into a lake and start beating people with a large ax. By all accounts, I should hate Me Red, but somehow, I don’t. So what makes Me Red unique and why am I hopelessly addicted? Me Red: The Ultimate Adventure is a runner or platform jumping game. You control an endlessly running red blob. Jump with your left thumb, attack with your right. Watch out for enemies. If you die, too bad, start over. There are dozens of games like this languishing in the dark recesses of the app store, each with varying levels of suck. But Me Red stands out. Start up the app and you’re thrown into a cute, quirky introduction. The graphics and soundtrack are bright, colorful, and happy- perfect contrast to my dark New England winter. Controls are responsive; animation is smooth. Everything is structured and polished. For a game by an indie developer, Me Red is seriously impressive. It’s looks are on par, if not better than, some of the top action games in the Apple app store. Some award-winning plot development right here Jump to avoid chasms and use your attack to temporarily transform into a fireball, knocking away enemies. Collect blocks to gain a powerful super attack that makes you invulnerable. After running for a while, you enter advance to new levels with a different theme. There’s a nice variety of enemies in Me Red, enough to keep you on your toes. After each round, you gain experience points. This Read More
Michael (Admin) | Jan 12, 2012 User rating: (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Photogenda ($1.99) by AwakeningIdeas Available on iPhone only A whole mess of these replace-your-contacts apps have marched through my inbox over the past couple of years, but I’ve ignored them all because I didn’t really want one… until now. Maybe it’s my old age catching up with me, or the fact that I’m super popular and have to sift through billions of contacts in order to find my drinking buddies, but for whatever reason I suddenly feel the need to have shortcuts to certain phone numbers. Photogenda does this by showing me the photos associated with contacts instead of the typical line-by-line list that Apple’s default iOS provides. Show names or don’t show them, it’s the pics that count. If your contact doesn’t have a photo then Photogenda asks you to specify gender and then spits out a generic icon in place of the absent photo. Sounds good right? Yeah it is… mostly. My first go-round with Photogenda was flawless. I tapped a big “+” symbol to add a contact and Photogenda did its job. That “+” symbol was on the “main” screen where your contacts’ photos would normally live, but then I got fancy and tried adding contacts through the Preferences page where you can see all of your groups and, theoretically, add contacts to individual groups. That didn’t go so well. Somehow my contacts all got filed under “All” instead of the group “Idiots” where I wanted them, and I wound up having to delete and then re-add them under the proper group. Strangely this process worked ok the second time around. But! After creating two different groups, and then trying to use the big “+” symbol again, I noticed that my contacts weren’t being added Read More
