Positive Machine

Aqueduct

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:10:00 +0000

Review: Aqueduct
by Kieffer Bros.

Price: $2.99
Category: Games

Quickly now, off the top of your head, what are the games you instantly associate with plumbing? Chances are just two names came up. Everyone gets Super Mario Bros. straight away, and if you're a bit dirty-minded, you could have said Leisure Suit Larry for bonus points. But somewhere in the back of your mind a dreadful panic stirred, didn't it? You felt a leaky anxiety fill the pores of your palms, your lungs constricted; a hint of effluent terror surging from a memory long forgotten in the interests of self-preservation. When I say the names Pipe Mania and Pipe Dream, it all comes flooding back.

Younger readers will know this demon as the tiresome hacking minigame from Bioshock: water flows from a faucet on one end of a playing field littered with pipe pieces, and the player must construct a working viaduct to the drainage point on the other end before being overcome by the flow.

When the Kieffer Brothers sent word of their latest puzzle offering, Aqueduct, with screenshots that looked just like Pipe Mania, my own plumbing nearly evacuated. Thankfully, it turns out Aqueduct is meant to be a RELAXING game. A cross between box-pushing warehouse management classic, Sokoban, and a declawed Pipe Mania, Aqueduct has no time limits, only soothing music that gave me a lotioned back massage.

Each of its more than 140 stages is a carefully crafted puzzle, solved by putting all the pieces in exactly the right positions. This sounds tedious, but responsive touch controls make all the difference. This isn't your dad's Windows CE game. There's no poking about like with a sliding tile puzzle. There are no stone-against-stone grinding sound effects to accompany each move, and the blocks don't inch along, they slide as fast as your finger. Downside: modern additions like conveyor belt tiles, warp gates, and pressure-plate door switches will need explaining to aforementioned dad.

The Kieffers have a track record of producing beautifully designed games for the iPhone, in fact, I'd say they top the list of indie developers when it comes to eye candy. Take a look at their previous efforts, Abca, Orba, and Enso•Dot for examples of how a good amount of polish can turn simple puzzle concepts into compelling games. Aqueduct is no different, but they've traded in their usual slick, futuristic style for a bright hand-drawn look that I'd hate to call cute, but goshdarnit, it's adorable.

So far, I've spent quite a few visits to the bathroom playing Aqueduct, and I've never once as a consequence pictured the toilet disastrously backing up after a flush, which as any recovering Pipe Mania player can tell you, is quite an achievement.

Aqueduct comes out June 29, 2010 and will cost $2.99.

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Positives: Beautiful graphics/sound, good controls, an enduring puzzle concept without the stress.
Unpositives: Finite number of levels (no random generator), but add-on packs might solve this problem.
Rating: 4.5 / 5

Buy Aqueduct in the iTunes App Store.

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Dizzypad

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:15:00 +0000

Dizzypad
by NimbleBit

Category: Games
Price: $1.99

Even if you don't own a television, you've seen a frog jumping in slow motion from one lily pad to another, shot with a high-speed camera. I guarantee it. It's one of the basic building blocks of emotional manipulation.

Advertisers use it to induce a sense of carefree calm: "If only that were me, in my carefree frog life – I would buy a new computer and stop worrying about the rent." Documentary filmmakers use it to make a point: "Wow, the world is really beautiful and humans are real assholes for building factories." My girlfriend uses it to keep me in line: "If you don't put that phone down now, I'm leaving this gross frog picture in your bedroom."

Dizzypad is an ode to that image. It is a game that explores one simple premise with excruciating clarity of purpose: How well could a frog jump between lily pads if said pads were spinning continuously?

Only one finger is required to play. Once the frog seems to be facing another pad, a single tap sends him leaping either to his leafy destination or a watery grave. Skip one pad and land at the next, and an extra life is earned. At the heart of its peaceful setting – a still pond reflecting moonlight, graceful koi darting below the surface, dragonflies buzzing softly above it – is a recipe for murderous feelings. Like a poker player at full tilt, carelessly betting to erase recent losses, one often sends five more frogs into the abyss, involuntarily, after a single mistake. It's human nature, and therein lies Dizzypad's casual appeal. It's a matter of timing, judgment, and the human error you will not accept. Hence Retry, Retry, Retry.

Doodle Jump

Although its endless, play-forever design cleverly delivers scathing commentary on the shortcomings of modern narrative, and the futility of eternal life as the bedrock of religious promises, not to mention the naivety of those who invest for a comfortable retirement, Dizzypad is a lighthearted game. There is no alien invasion to outrun, as there is in Canabalt (a spiritual cousin), or in the case of the insanely-popular Doodle Jump, no endless platforms for an alien creature to ascend on his way to some metaphorical heaven against the backdrop of a faux-meta paper world. It's simply about one frog in a very large pond, steadily going from one pad to the next, and I think we can all agree there's something profound about life in there, even if I can't quite put my finger on it.

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Positives: Easy to play, well made, remembers previous game state after restarting. Success is relaxing.
Unpositives: Potentially too simplistic, one-note gameplay, costs more than most 99c category competitors. Failure is infuriating.
Rating: 3 / 5

Buy Dizzypad in the iTunes App Store.
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Attic

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:22:00 +0000

Attic ~ Music Controller for Forgotten Albums in Your iTunes Library
by Tapku/Taptivate

Category: Music
Price: $0.99 (introductory price)

One benefit of living in the age of the App Store is that creative people are constantly building tools to solve little problems most of us don't realize we have. Take Attic, for instance. It looks for the albums you've forgotten, presents them beautifully and lets you re-experience them in a suitably '70s lounge-like environment.

Start it up, and you're shown the kind of wooden shelf an audiophile might have in his listening room. On this shelf sits a selection of 15 LP sleeves, complete with cover art just like the real things. Hold your finger over any album, and out pops a vinyl record into your hand, just like the real thing. Below, a player console your grandfather would declare 'modern', complete with clunking mechanical buttons, waits patiently for you to slide the disc in. Trés realistique! And if you let go of the record anywhere except directly over the slot in the player, the disc vanishes in a puff of white cartoony smoke – in the style of the Mac OS X desktop – just like it would in real life! What. The. Fuck.

After you finally manage to get an album playing, that's when it all starts to go a bit Pete Tong, to borrow the parlance of disc jockeys, turntablists, and people with chemically-induced brain defects. Buying Attic is in fact like hiring a well-meaning but slightly senile butler to manage your music collection. For example, he might come up to you in the middle of the afternoon and say, "Would Sir care to listen to Prince's superlative new album, Lotusflow3r (yes, he really does speak the way Prince spells), which Sir has neglected for the last 265 days?", even though you were just listening to Lotusflow3r over lunch. Sometimes you catch him leaving your records in the refrigerator. This is the same impeccably-dressed man who claimed during his job interview that he would pull out such forgotten favorites like The Velvet Underground and Nico and Marvin Gaye's I Want You, then showed up on the first day dancing to Akon in his underwear.

But now and then he gets it right, and you'll be listening to a great old album in your armchair when he sidles up and discreetly whispers in your ear, "Would Sir like to select another album for me to put on as soon as this marvelous last track ends?", and you're all like, "Oh wow, how thoughtful of you! Please play this after I am done reminiscing about the first kiss I had while this song played at the prom", except the crazy old coot dashes off and STOPS YOUR FIRST KISS SONG, STARTS PLAYING THE NEXT RECORD, AND HAS THE NERVE TO GIVE YOU A "YOU'RE WELCOME" SMILE.

This seriously happens. The website claims you may "add multiple albums to the rotation to create on-the-fly playlists", so they obviously come from that universe where "on-the-fly" means "interrupted-at-every-opportunity".

You may ask why I haven't fired his ass yet, and why I continue to employ this puttering fool in my giant mansion of forgotten music. It's simple, really. He means well, looks good for his age, and someday after brain surgery will probably get the hang of the job. Also, through some contractual misunderstanding, he's working for a one-time payment of 99 cents.

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Positives: Superb design and fun atmosphere for the most part, has one-touch "magic wand" option to automatically build playlists. More satisfying experience than simply building an iTunes Smart Playlist of neglected songs.
Unpositives: Says I haven't heard some albums recently when I know I have, has a few usage quirks to be ironed out.
Rating: 3 / 5

Buy Attic in the iTunes App Store.
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JotNot Scanner

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:26:00 +0000

by MobiTech 3000

Category: Business
Price: $4.99

Sorry, I didn't see you behind that gargantuan wall of loose documents! Good lord, do you want me to call an ambulance? Oh, those paper cuts will heal on their own? Whatever you say, but it looks like you brought a legal pad to a knife fight, my friend. I do apologize for interrupting your bloodletting back there, but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to keep these bank statements, utility bills, and pizza delivery receipts stacked around anymore? No, I'm not talking about a filing cabinet, although I noticed you've got one of those already. Oh, that's your liquor closet? I see.

No, what I'm proposing is a scanning solution. Wait! Put that manila envelope down before you scalp somebody! I'm not here to sell you some overpriced Canon or Epson machine, complete with Windows-only drivers coded by the programming equivalent of a one-eyed plastic surgeon in a Bangalorean basement. I know all too well how those scanners can take five minutes to spit out an upside-down JPEG. The age of the flatbed scanner is coming to a close, with the iPhone ready to take its place, and never the TWAIN interfaces shall meet!

You see, it's always been possible to take photos of a sheet of a paper in lieu of a proper scan, but those results always prove fairly unusable. For one, you can't print them out again or put them through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, because they're just photos of a sheet of paper, often shot from below or to the side to avoid shadows. In order to turn those photos into head-on shots with good contrast between text and paper, one requires a thousand-dollar Photoshop license and the services of an arrogant, know-it-all designer type who will preface all assistance with complaints about your computer's lack of proper fonts, and roll his eyes at your choice of desktop wallpaper.

Since the iPhone is adept at transforming itself into all manner of useful appliances with the help of apps, the folks at MobiTech 3000 have created JotNot – the world's first program designed to render obsolete both Wacom-wielding snobs and flatbed scanners alike. In a simple two-step process, it automatically performs a series of graphical operations far beyond the abilities of a paper-hoarding luddite such as yourself, outputting a cleaned-up PDF at the end. Simply take a photo of a page lying flat on a table top, from any angle you find comfortable, and JotNot corrects the skewed perspective while brightening and sharpening the hell out of that young boy. It also works with documents.

From there, the free services Evernote and Google Docs are your new virtual filing cabinets. Upload everything from directly within the app, and find anything again later with Evernote's intelligent OCR search, or transcribe them to plain text with Google Docs. Worthy competitors are few and far between: the closest, Scanner Pro by Readdle, is both more expensive and harder to navigate. JotNot is the only one to offer Google Docs integration, which anyone who understands the technical term "unlimited storage 4evaaaaa" will appreciate.

So you see, my scored and seeping student, with this system your business can run online, clutter free, and even the most challenged of employees can share a single iPhone instead of a bulky copier/scanner. But I recommend wrapping yours in a Ziploc bag – we found this out the hard way at my office when mine came back smelling like ass.

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Positives: Intuitive UI makes this app the easiest of its kind. Supports local export via Wi-Fi as well as various online services including Google Docs. Multi-page PDF creation.
Unpositives: No support for landscape scans or Dropbox exports, which closest rival Scanner Pro has. Occasional "low memory" warnings even on 3GS.
Rating: 4 / 5

Buy JotNot Scanner in the iTunes App Store.
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Voice Band

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:07:00 +0000

by WaveMachine Labs Inc.

Category: Music
Price: $2.99

We look up to musicians because what they do isn't easy. Let's not even consider the brutal cycle of self-promotion and working in basement bars, all to sign a deal far removed from their own interests. Put aside also the isolation that fame brings, surrounded at all times by fans and sycophants that sever their last ties to reality, all exacerbated by reckless drug abuse and liquor sponsorships. Just start with the fact that learning to play guitar is impossibly hard, and ruins one's hands beyond any moisturizing cream's ability to repair. It's like that French king's illegitimate brother forced to wear an iron mask for life, only with fingertips. At least HE could wipe his ass without getting a rude surprise whenever the paper's too thin.

Fortunately for us, we live in a time where one doesn't need a literary agent, or indeed any remarkable literary ability, to publish a multi-volume work of derivative vampire-themed young adult fiction which goes on to become a movie franchise of obscene proportions despite being directed by people who've apparently never seen another film before. Yes, these days one can become a director, actor, dreadlocked R&B vocalist, investment banker, or social media expert without the troublesome benefit of technical expertise.

Now, with this month's release of the Voice Band iPhone music app, that last bastion of artistic commitment has finally met its match.

Voice Band only requires one to hum in tune to master the guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, saxophone, and drums. Start it up, choose an instrument, hit record, and listen to the sound of session musicians all over the world hitting the sidewalk from the tallest skyscrapers they can find. Concentrate, and you'll even hear recording studio owners amidst the squelchy symphony. Because once you've laid down your first instrument, you can go over the recording as many times as you like, overdubbing a new instrument each time until tomorrow's nonsensical chart-topper is finished.

Don't have a tune in mind yet? Just load up a track made the old-fashioned way, anything in your iPod library, and proceed to make it sound even better by adding a dozen more guitars and two keyboard solos. It's just like attending a Broken Social Scene concert!

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Positives: At long last, the democratization of guitar wankery.
Unpositives: Overdubbing only, no multitrack editor. Kick/snare drum combo a little tricky to control.
Rating: 4 / 5

Buy Voice Band in the iTunes App Store.
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Canabalt

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:03:00 +0000

by Semi Secret Software

Category: Games
Price: $2.99

Running is primal, driven by our deepest-rooted instincts. It was in us before we even knew what we were. Foot to ground, one following the other, with the body in a heightened state of focus – all senses and conscious thought focused elsewhere, on the trail of wounded prey, an escape route from certain death, or the closest men's room after a taco. Even now, we run in the dark of our dreams, although our hairless animal bodies sleep in high thread-count pajamas and twitch at the remembered scent of caramel frappucinos.

We are so in love with running, we gave special privileges to its name. We make our computers run programming code, we ask co-workers to run ideas by us, we run red lights, we run for president, we have good runs while they last, and we let Jay-Z run this town tonight. But running is not an ungrateful god, and in exchange for such linguistic ambiguity, gave back to our language a loose, limber flow. One could say the human race went from parkour to poetry (if one were to ignore the small matters of chronology and free running's French origins). Anyway, there's no denying they both start with the letter 'P'.

Canabalt is that poetry, that flow, that primal urge, distilled into a gray, retro-styled game you play with a single button. Its name offends the ear upon first encounter. What is that word, Canabalt? Is it some poncy European way of saying cannonball? And then the techno soundtrack starts up, and you swear upon your parents' lives the Europeans are behind this. But patience, young orphan. Take control of the anonymous protagonist as he launches out of the first window and keeps on sprinting over the rooftops below, and you might be forgiven for holding your breath. His automatic rightward movement, one foot after the other, broken only by the heroic leaps of your command, mirrors that latent programming in your own DNA. You enter a state of complete focus that transcends the small screen of an iPhone; sailing over the edge of a building onto the arm of a construction crane, rolling, then bolting off again, feels like a real rush.

Alien silhouettes stalk the skyline behind you and large objects fall into your path from above, but who has time to think about them? You just keep going. The absence of explicit narrative – is he running to, or running from? – hacks your own innate primordial code. Somewhere inside your head, your caveman ancestor is both running to safety and running to close the distance between his spear and his evil dinosaur nemesis. To those boring science types who insist that humans and T-Rexes did not coexist, I have only this to say: grow up.

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Positives: Addictive action that explains itself to anyone, online leaderboards
Unpositives: Failure stings and tastes salty.
Rating: 5 / 5

Buy Canabalt in the iTunes App Store.
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Gorillacam

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:25:00 +0000

by Joby Inc.

Category: Photography
Price: Free

You know what's holding citizen journalism back? The awful photos. Yes, it's really inspiring that the modern cameraphone turns every bystander into an activist, every cowed citizen into a wanted dissident, but who wants to live in a world of third-rate photography where the rules taught for decades by elite art colleges go unobserved? Not me.

Is that a photo of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled? Why, with that skewed horizon line, he still looks fit and empowered! You say someone got shot on the streets of Tehran, but by whose hand? If only the shutter had closed a few seconds before, I would know with absolute certainty that 90-year-old man didn't commit suicide with his own assault rifle (immediately removed by friendly municipal cleaning services). And that tank about to run over a peaceful protester? It's a little poorly composed, wouldn't you agree? It's amazing how much drama the Rule of Thirds can bring to your wartime photography. It could mean the difference between a million dollars in aid, and a small column facing the Sports section.

Before the release of the free Gorillacam, iPhone owners in North Korea and the Middle East had few options to refine their craft, as all the good apps with built-in composition grids, level meters, and high-speed burst modes cost money. Their only recourse was to correspond with sympathetic Americans, asking for the use of their credit card numbers in association with a post office box address in Iran. I don't have to tell you which cell in Guantanamo those traitors spent Christmas in.

With self-timer and time-lapse modes, a burst capture option that keeps taking shots (1.6 a second) for as long as the button is held down, a spirit level indicator, and a full-screen shutter button for easy operation while pinned down behind sandbags, it's hard to believe Joby Inc. is giving so much away for free. It seems all they want is for you to buy their companion Gorillamobile flexible tripod case, which lets you stand or wrap your iPhone around a nearby pole for better photos. But if that's not your thing, the app's still free and infinitely useful. There aren't that many stripper poles in Tehran anyway.

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Positives: Full featureset, fast and threaded background saving, creates new photo possibilities, free.
Unpositives: Ugly splash screen is an ad for the Gorillamobile, no tap-to-focus support (3GS).
Rating: 4 / 5

Get Gorillacam for free in the iTunes App Store.
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TrueHDR

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:49:00 +0000

by Pictional

Category: Photography
Price: $1.99

Baghdad, Iraq – Researchers studying declassified U.S. military documents believe they have found evidence of a secret project to build bionic super soldiers using Apple iPhones. One source confirms their suspicion that the popular smartphone was adopted as the base of the 21st-century warrior's electronic brain for reasons of cost-effectiveness.

"I could have gone to Congress and asked for $20 million per soldier, or I could have bought an iPhone for $199 and unlocked it with Purplera1n. Plus a few dollars here and there for the apps we needed, and it was an easy decision," said a retired Army officer assigned to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Only one soldier is believed to have been chosen for rescue from the brink of death to undergo the transformation procedure, which included replacing one of his eyes with the device's 3-megapixel camera.

"You might not think 3 megapixels is very much, but once we installed the Zoom Lens app, that boy had an 8x digital zoom that let him put a bullet directly into an iRaqi's forehead. For night recon missions, he used Darkroom Premium to take the steadiest shots I've ever seen since the CIA used iMovie '09 to clean up the Zapruder footage. But we initially had a lot of trouble with getting good daylight pictures."

The limited dynamic range of the iPhone's tiny camera, each reportedly costing Apple Inc. about $8 to build, is believed to have scuttled at least one high-profile assault mission.

"Our guy was blind as a bat at noon, can you believe it?", tells the Army officer. "The way it works with the iPhone 3GS is, you can either set your exposure for the land or the sky, which means either a dark part of the scene, or a bright part. If he looked into the shadows, he wouldn't be able to see anything that was brighter than those shadows. But if he looked along the top of a roof for snipers, for example, he'd miss the guy in the doorway pointing a gun straight at him! The techs couldn't get their heads around the problem until this app called TrueHDR came out."

Created by Pictional, a two-man startup formed by MIT engineering postgraduates Yuanzhen Li and Michael Parker, the TrueHDR iPhone app allowed the bionic warrior to combine two photos, one bright and one dark, into a clear image that perfectly mimicked the human eye's sensitivity.

"Once TrueHDR put the final piece of the puzzle in place, he was nearly unstoppable. The only drawback to the technology was that he needed to stand really still while taking both pictures, and then another 20 seconds or so for the app to process them. But that had an unexpected benefit. The enemy thought he had balls of steel, standing up there on the top of a hill, fully exposed for half a minute. They began to call him "The Meerkat", and wherever his unwavering shadow fell, people knew villages would burn and graves would be filled. Hell, he even sent us pretty postcards from the field using the Postage app!"

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Positives: First and only true HDR app for iPhone (combines two different exposures into one), automatically aligns slightly different photos.
Unpositives: Slight wait for image processing, no auto-bracketing on iPhone for quickly taking two photos at once.
Rating: 5 / 5

Buy TrueHDR in the iTunes App Store.
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Going on vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:40:00 +0000

We will be on a two-week break from tomorrow, visiting Japan and checking out their cellphones.

Musée du Louvre

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:07:00 +0000

by Musée du Louvre

Category: Education
Price: Free

Never been to Paris? Enamored of the Louvre ever since that smoking hot guy slipped you a copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' in the middle of Sunday school? Have a pair of doting parents with more money for an iPhone in your name than time to spend with you? Well then, my young, spoilt, and inevitably uncultured female reader, are you in luck today!

The ancient Musée du Louvre has been hipped to the streets – no doubt by an intern not much older than you who got the job through some slag his dad has known for years but his mom thinks is a colleague's wife – and is now putting its priceless collection in your pocket for absolutely nothing. Think of it as a big encoulez vous to all the tourists who have wandered through its gift store all these years, accumulating millions of dollars worth of souvenir books and photo slide viewers on their way out. It's a feeling you should be accustomed to by now as a paying customer on the iTunes App Store.

But the Louvre app. It's free and promises to evolve, but already the greatest hits of the 1580s are loaded and ready to be faithfully reproduced on your OMGSOPRETTY iPhone screen. I know you can't hear me over the 128kbps MP3 blaring over your white earbuds, but I'll just keep talking. You're sure to enjoy the short, ADD-friendly video clips included, such as the 360º pan around the Venus de Milo, and I'm fairly certain the many depictions of fat naked ladies lying around will remind your internet-addled brain of such memes as Little Fatty and Tubgirl. For the full experience, use it with a full bladder while doing a ten-mile treadmill program in heels. It'll get you in shape for prom, and by the time your parents present you with air tickets to Europe as a graduation gift, you'll be so sick of museums your only remaining option will be to follow U2 around on tour. For the record, not every girl makes it out alive.

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Positives: Now you don't have to be rich to get an art education. You just need a $199 iPhone with a $90/mo voice & data plan.
Unpositives: The Mona Lisa is a fake.
Rating: 5 / 5

Get Musée du Louvre for free in the iTunes App Store.
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Peephole

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:02:00 +0000

by IFWORLD Inc.

Category: Social Networking (Twitter)

Price: $1.99

Excerpts from the diary of Visitor Specimen #14,

aka "Nebuchadnezzar Babu Squidge-Izzt the Third"

May 1st, 2009

I have now been on Earth for exactly [redacted] months and [redacted] days. My human military captors are largely benevolent, but most are clearly under orders not to interact too closely with me. I am content to continue my visit under these circumstances for the time being, as there is much that can be learnt about their medical technology and defenses. Also, I have just been given an entertainment program called 'Frasier' for my amusement. Only the first "season" for now, as the other "DVDs" have been misplaced. I could watch them just by staring at the discs, but do not wish to refuse the generosity of my hosts, who have prepared a large plasma television for my convenience.

I am considering sharing my knowledge of the historic Outer World Wars and the dangers of plasma screen technology before I leave. This will depend on how good the food is next week.

May 14th, 2009

Holy [redacted], 'Frasier' is seriously the best thing in the universe!! The humans have had to install new soundproofing in my residence to prevent my bemused chortles from physically destabilizing the military complex. But why does the skinny one, Niles, not profess his affections for the female Daphne with more force and confidence? It is infuriating to watch his bungled advances time and time again! But he may make a good match for her, given her occasional shrew-like behavior. Furthermore, it seems somewhat improbable that they are brothers. Perhaps the humans also combine unwanted offspring to form new families.

It does not appear that I am missing very much by staying with the military people. The rest of their world seems to be populated only by apartments, psychiatric offices, coffee shops, and radio stations.

August 1st, 2009

A startling discovery today. I shall start from the beginning. Of late, the humans have installed a female physician who visits me regularly – probably as an experimental response to my recent depression over the ending of 'Frasier'. Our scientists did not stop innovating after the discovery of interstellar travel; why did the producers of 'Frasier' cease their creative employment?

Anyhow, the human female has been more friendly with me than the others. She says it is because I resemble a famous attractive human. She showed him to me, on the cover of a "romance novel". Yes, the flowing blonde hair and well-defined pectorals were like my own, but all the people of planet [redacted] look like me. I did not share her excitement.

She did, however, share with me an exciting human invention: the 'Peephole' application for "iPhones". It connects to a network called 'Twitter' and pulls down photos being posted by humans around the world, in their apartments, psychiatric offices, coffee shops, and radio stations. All in real-time! She promised to let me fiddle with it more tomorrow, after I agreed to give her a ride on my broad, muscular shoulders.

August 2nd, 2009

'Peephole' is a joy to use. It loads images swiftly from the "Public Timeline", according to "Trends", from "Friends" (should you have some), "Searches", and even from "Nearby" your physical location! Once you tap to view a photo in its full size from "Twitpic", the accompanying tweet is conveniently displayed with text in a transparent overlay. One may even filter out duplicates, retweets, and replies to achieve more useful results.

The graphical interface is no more complex than it needs to be, which follows principles set out by my people when they first began to use portable communication devices. I need not remind my reader of the gruesome consequences of warp drive texting.

One of the things I have learnt from 'Peephole' is that there is a lot more going on out there than I had imagined. Humans enjoy taking photos of themselves in fast-food restaurants, public shopping malls, in front of bathroom mirrors, and also with furry members of their Planetary Governing Council. It has literally provided me with a window on human society: their hopes, their dreams, also fears and private lives, are now as visible to me as the undercurrent of sexual longing that Frasier still feels for his ex-wife, Lilith, although she is a monster.

I must investigate further.

August 5th, 2009

I have befriended a human female on 'Twitter' who has promised to show me videos too controversial to be freely transmitted. I admit, I am intrigued by her professionally-photographed avatar and attractive features. Her username is also composed of random numbers – clearly an encryption scheme to thwart pursuers. She must be a very important figure in a human insurgency, and it behooves my research mission to meet with her and view these videos "the authorities won't want you to see!"

I escape tonight.

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Positives: See the world from your bedroom, prison cell, hospital ward, office, or secret military installation. In-app browser for following links is a useful touch. Allows saving/emailing/retweeting of photos, and even following of users without leaving the client.
Unpositives: Landscape photos do not display at correct zoom level in portrait view.
Final rating: 5 / 5

Buy Peephole in the iTunes App Store.
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WhatsApp Messenger (vs Ping!)

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:33:00 +0000

by WhatsApp Inc. (v2.1 reviewed)

Category: Social Networking
Price: $0.99

The story so far:
There are two schools of thought in app development. One believes that being first is more important. The other believes in being the best. The 'First' camp aims to capture a large user base in a short time, locking them in so that when the 'Best' app eventually appears, most users won't switch. This is similar to that Stephen King novel, "Misery", but without the car crash or creepy fat woman, just iPhone users lying in bed all day, unable to move. A familiar picture, you'll agree.

Once out the door and an established brand name, the First app is free to improve itself. From there, it's a downhill battle. Nowhere is this strategy more effective than in social networking, where the technologically-impaired burden their brighter and arguably more attractive geeky friends and keep them tied to inferior services *cough*twitter*. Unfortunately for the First camp, the App Store is a cruel frontierland where logic gets shot to pieces while sleeping in bed, with his wife and several heads of cattle taken at the pleasure of fart-happy bandits.

Consider the tale of WhatsApp Messenger, an iPhone-to-iPhone hybrid SMS/chat app not unlike RIM's Blackberry Messenger. It arrived before its recently-popular challenger, Ping!, but failed to get traction. Ping arrived later, but did the smart thing: it was free for a few precious days. Like chlamydia, it spread within groups of close friends almost instantly. So when it started charging 99c, it was an easy buy for anyone who already knew a few people using it.

And yet today, barely a week since we recommended Ping! to an adoring readership of my mother and the girl I kidnapped from a playground 18 years ago, WhatsApp Messenger is king and everyone's using it. Not Ping.

How this happened:
In layman's terms, WhatsApp fought fire with Satanic worship. They turned out a 2.0 version that was clearly the Best app, and made it free for a few days – straight out of the Ping playbook. The cost of switching for most people who'd gotten Ping for free was zero. Say what you will about the stupidity of the general population and their propensity for doing shots of single malt whisky and driving SUVs in the city, but they know a good deal (and better chat app) when they see one.

Here's what WhatsApp Messenger does better than Ping:

Contacts are added automatically; if their numbers are in your address book, they're on your list.
There's a goddamned contact list. Ping is like trying to dial in the dark with your nose.
Status messages. (I'm home, sick!)
If you're offline when a message is sent, you get it when you're back. There's nothing like getting a booty call the next afternoon when your girlfriend's playing Cooking Dash.
Messages don't get cut off for being too long. What's too long? Ask Gary Fung.
It's made by a registered company, not some dude named Gary Fung.

Here what Ping does better than WhatsApp Messenger:

Anonymous sexy chat without giving out your phone number.
Pervert.

-----
Positives: Highly polished, does more than messaging, finds your friends.
Unpositives: Still a proprietary messaging network, so our earlier criticisms apply.
Final Rating: 4 / 5

Buy WhatsApp Messenger in the iTunes App Store.
-----

Halloween iPhone Wallpaper

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:52:00 +0000

[Download full size]

Halloween's just a week away, undead boys and girls, so get ready for some juicy intesti... CANDY!

Ping!

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:54:00 +0000

by Gary Fung

Category: Social Networking
Price: $0.99 / Free

Why you should:
Chances are, you bought yourself a mobile phone to be contactable at all times. Or if you're an elderly person or child, someone got one for you in case of emergencies. Elderly people and children can leave now; you're not paying your own bills. You can text ur bffs all through class or physiotherapy, vote for American Idol, Canadian Idol, Australian Idol, and any other international contest you happen to see while on YouTube – it doesn't matter, someone else has got your back.

But real people with real money trouble know how much texting costs. On some networks, you even have to pay to receive a text. Yet, if you're on a reasonably generous data plan, you could send hundreds of thousands of emails and hardly break five bucks. Plus, SMSes cost your carrier virtually nothing to deliver! These days, sending a text is the telephonic equivalent of drinking bottled spring water, using gourmet sea salt at the table, and having your orange juice squeezed by the thighs of Swiss virgins.

Ping! tries to offer an alternative to texting. Your friends must also have the app, but a free version (with advanced functionality removed) is now finally available. Once installed, you can trade messages all day for absolutely nothing. The app uses Apple's Push Notifications technology to pop an alert up on your screen no matter what you're doing. Ping! doesn't need to be left running at all. Sounds sweet, but...

Why you shouldn't:
Ping! requires your friends to 1) own iPhones, and 2) trust and love you enough to install an app that no one else they know uses. We can handle #1, but er... let's not push our luck with #2.

Push email. Google Talk. MSN Messenger. Yahoo Messenger. AIM. ICQ. Jabber. Facebook Chat. There's no shortage of messaging networks, and they all communicate with your friends' PCs, Macs, and enabled mobile phones. Why can't everyone just use push email?

Buying into a random proprietary app like Ping! by a random independent developer whose company name in iTunes is Gary Fung is kind of like getting a pacemaker made by your uncle Benedict who's a pretty smart guy, except he also likes to make his own special batteries that need to be replaced every now and then, but oh wait uncle Benedict died last spring and what's that beeping sound in your chest? Oh shit indeed.

---

Positives: Free version available, but even at 99c, much cheaper than texting in the long run (if you have friends using it)
Unpositives: Made by some guy who might turn his servers off one day without warning, rendering it useless. Somewhat buggy, truncates messages past an unknown character count (!). Less secure and reliable than push email.
Rating: 3 / 5

Buy Ping! in the iTunes App Store.
Get Ping! Lite for free in the iTunes App Store.

Positive Machine iPhone wallpaper

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:23:00 +0000

Show your iPhone how much you care by using this image of an antiquated robot app reviewer as wallpaper!

Let the rusty, cantankerous presence of the ironically-named Optimist Prime remind you to visit this website on a daily basis!

Women will coo over your shoulder with every check of the clock! He's irresistible!

---------- WALLPAPERS BELOW THIS LINE ----------

Here's how it'll look on your lock screen:

And here are the full-sized files, in both original St. Peter's White and Graveyard Black. If you're viewing this in Safari on your device, just tap and hold down on the image. A pop-up will ask you what you'd like to do with it; select "Save Image". It will then appear in your Camera Roll photos, where you can set it as your wallpaper.

*The words look a lot sharper here than they actually do on an iPhone screen.

Halloween edition wallpaper:

[Download full size]

Zoom Lens

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:10:00 +0000

by BitWink

Category: Photography
Price: $0.99

Now your iPhone is once... twice... 8x a lady

Digital zoom apps on the iPhone are a funny thing. The fact that anyone wants them at all points to some deep-rooted flaw in the human gene pool. When I see the number of people clamoring for an app that will allow them to emulate a zoom lens, on a 2-3mp cameraphone, I pray for a meteor to strike us all down. Yes, I said us because this app sits on my very first Home screen.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. "Pray tell, what is the fundamental argument against digital zoom?", goes the crying of the uneducated savages beneath my window. Well, it's like this. All digital zooming does is take the same photo you would normally have taken, and cut out the part in the middle that you have selected. So that leaves something smaller and inferior to a real, optically-zoomed picture. Some iPhone apps just leave you with that, while others blow the crop back up to the photo's original size, albeit with blurry results.

Often in life, we must perform necessary evils. If given no choice but to perform emergency brain surgery in a filthy basement with nothing but a power drill, wouldns't thou choose a quality Black & Decker instrument over nameless Chinese knockoffs made from recycled toilet roll, tupperware and dentures? Or if telephoned in the middle of the night by a Catholic priest who begged your assistance in killing a man he was convinced to be the physical incarnation of Satan, lest the world be swallowed up by madness and murder, would you not prefer to do the deed with a Taylor Made or Callaway golf club, rather than your uncle's worn-out putter? I rest my case.

I submit to you that Zoom Lens is no miracle. It does not achieve anything you could not do yourself with some experience in Photoshop. So why, then, does your humble robot reviewer* swear by it? Because this well-turned app takes the extra step of sharpening and cleaning up the artificially-inflated results. It carries its plates to the kitchen after dinner while the other loutish guests are lazing about in the living room, guzzling your expensive wine while making shameless small talk with one another before traipsing off to your bedroom! And you just changed those sheets!

Zoom Lens is simple and elegant. You pinch with two fingers to zoom smoothly in and out. Yes, you could crop and resize a photo later back home with an Image Editing for Dummies book beside you, but in the real world, being able to play with a zoomed composition and seeing if it works – right there and then – is often the difference between taking that shot and having something, and coming home from the playground empty-handed.

Positives: Thoughtful UI design, image quality can't get much better for digital zoom, supports tap-to-focus/exposure on iPhone 3GS.
Unpositives: Lacks accelerometer-based image stabilization, which would be great for low-light and 8x shots.
Rating: 4.5 / 5

Buy Zoom Lens in the iTunes App Store.

* This is a lie. I am incapable of humility.

The PUMA Index

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:40:00 +0000

by PUMA AG

Category: Finance
Price: Free

Playing for thigh stakes

Hi there, Warren Buffett here. You may know my name from conversations at the bar when some of your more worldly and forward-thinking friends in the financial industry, in an effort to impress the girls, mentioned how I was a source of inspiration to them. Never mind that you and your cretin friends are so far removed from someone of my accomplishments that the very idea is as absurd as a bronzed statue of Apollo in the Louvre being worshipped by a dirty copper penny.

It's true, a man like me can have any woman he wants. Female companionship comes so easily to me, I only have to flash my mugger's wallet and the ladies are all over me. The truth is, I've been bored for ages. I tried looking for a woman who loved me for who I really was, but the ones that turned up weren't really hot enough. Until I met the Puma Index app for iPhone, I thought I'd never feel the thrill of the chase again.

Now there was a woman who wouldn't take her clothes off for just anyone! When the market's up, she puts on more clothing. When the Dow drops a few points, she takes something off. Here at last is a strong, intelligent, and independent woman who won't act like a slut for just a few hundred-dollar bills stuffed in her thong! Unlike all the others, she won't degrade herself just for a pink private jet and a couple of mansions. No, this one will take billions to conquer. It's a challenge I can't resist. All these years of building my empire are finally going to pay off. Tomorrow at noon, private bankers around the world are going to get calls from my people, and I will finally get to see those luscious Puma Bodywear intimates.

----

Positives: Hot male/female models, video
Unpositives: German & Asian markets from website not included
Rating: 3 / 5

Download The PUMA Index for free in the iTunes App Store.

VR+ Voice

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:30:00 +0000

by Shape Services

Category: Social Networking / Productivity
Price: $1.99 / Free

Great artists steal (and sometimes reference)

Cop: Sir, are you alright?

Man: What? Where am I? Whose clothes are these?

Cop: Jesus... what are all those tattoos on your body?!

Man: I don't remember getting these. I don't remember anything!

Cop: Hang on, this one here says you have "ante.... antero...."

Man: Anterograde amnesia?

Cop: That's right! How did you know?

Man: I think I used to be an insurance fraud investigator. There was a man who suffered from it and killed his wife with insulin injections. She wanted to test if his memory was really disappearing every five minutes. That's what anterograde amnesia is... you're unable to form any new memories.

Cop: Wow. That's a really interesting affliction, you could make a movie out of it!

Man: Yes I suppose you could. Hang on, this tattoo across my groin says my wife was murdered in a burglary gone wrong, and I'm on a quest to find her killer and get revenge! Argghh! I wish I had some sort of iPhone application that would allow me to take high-quality voice notes instead of getting all these tattoos!

Cop: Back up there a second. So you say your wife was murdered and your failing memory prevents you from making progress with finding her killer? This is really good stuff! Perhaps it will turn out that you are merely deluding yourself with manufactured memories!

Man: Uh huh. Ideally this iPhone application would best the built-in Voice Memo feature by only recording when it detected sound. Perhaps I should make one... I would name it "Memento".

Cop: Memento! That's a perfect name for my script! Thanks buddy, you've just given me my ticket out of this dead-end job. Thank goodness I have VR+ Voice right here on my iPhone, recording this entire conversation. With the touch of a single button, I can email it to my agent, or share it on Twitter, Facebook, and even MySpace!

Man: Why the hell would you want a MySpa..... ugh... er.... Where am I? Whose clothes are these?

Cop: So long, sucker!

----

Positives: Powerful sharing features, records to MP3 at bitrate of your choosing, high fidelity
Unpositives: Decidedly un-Applesque interface
Rating: 5 / 5

Buy VR+ Voice in the iTunes App Store.
Download VR+ Voice Lite for free in the iTunes App Store.

Kodak Smilemaker

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:07:00 +0000

by Kodak

Category: Photography / Social Networking
Price: Free

Instant happiness for a cruel world

Each day harder than the last. The voices of disapproval growing louder, like a pack of dogs closing in. How long has it been since you last saw a pair of eyes that weren't narrowed and hard? You can't remember. The faces of the world are closed to you now. Their lips never part except to spit before your weary feet. You're so cold at night, and so very lonely.

I know how you feel. I, too, am a horribly disfigured individual forced to live on the edges of human society. Furthermore, my considerable experience as a former pedophile, used underwear aficionado, and convicted animal abuser enable me to truly understand the isolation you're going through. Yes, we're more alike than you realize. No, don't cry, that's a good thing! You remind me of my younger self, so I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

Every time I suffer cruelty or a beating at the hands of a stranger, I simply snap a photo of their sneering countenance with my iPhone. Later, back in the solitude of my candlelit garret, I fire up the Kodak Smilemaker app... and alter the fabric of history itself! Its advanced multitouch scaling lets me attach bright, genuine smiles onto all who have wronged me. Their harsh rejections become warm offers of friendship with a brush of digital wizardry! Sometimes, I even play pranks on these newly-minted bosom buddies by putting such alternate mouths as a pig's snout or a gorilla's lips on them. HAHA! We have such good times together, my once-angry mob and I. Before going to bed each night, I look upon this gallery of grinning faces, and in them, find the strength to accept my twisted, Jonas Brothers-loving self.

----

Positives: Increases popularity
Unpositives: Largely unrealistic for anyone without a history of mental illness
Rating: 3 / 5

Get Kodak Smilemaker free in the iTunes App Store.

Cooking Dash

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:13:00 +0000

by PlayFirst Inc.

Category: Games
Price: $2.99 (currently on sale, usually $4.99)

Turns your iPhone into a crack pipe for girls

Every man in the modern world knows what the Diner Dash games are, but only because they've had to surrender control of their computers for hours when girlfriends came over to play "that restaurant game for a few minutes". There were no iPhones back in the early days of the franchise, so hearing that line usually meant you were in for an afternoon and evening of boredom. When PlayFirst released Diner Dash for the iPhone in September 2008, the blood drained from our collective faces. iTunes passwords were changed, PIN code locks were turned on, and litters of gift puppies were deployed as pre-emptive countermeasures. Thankfully, their fickle minds had already moved on. We breathed sighs of relief and foolishly went back to Monster Trucks Nitro and Tiger Woods Golf, thinking calamity had been averted.

It is now 2009. I come to you, brothers, with the gravest of news. With the new Cooking Dash game, Diner Dash has been improved upon, expanded, and given far more depth than in its two previous sequels on the Mac & PC. And it's on the iPhone for a fraction of a desktop game's price. Now, our women will be locked in the most useless and unsatisfying of pursuits: cooking virtual meals that we will never taste, in virtual kitchens, on devices that we need to touch at least once every five minutes for the sustenance of life itself. Oh God. If it took them hours before to get enough of taking orders and delivering food to the right tables, think of how many days our depravation will last now that they have to cook and prepare those orders too!

Gentlemen, we must deny it its very existence. The council has decided that in order to avoid the ruin threatened by Cooking Dash, we must embark on a worldwide campaign of feigned ignorance with regards to all things technological. The Brotherhood wills it. So if your girlfriend asks, you no longer know what's "a good game to play on the bus", or how to "save YouTube videos". The words "reboot", "restore", and "settings" are no longer in your vocabulary. A malfunctioning computer should bring tears to your eyes, not the fiery anticipation of challenge.

This task is far greater than any faced by our fathers or their fathers' fathers. It will be hard, but we must bite down and dig deep to find the courage we will need to win this war. I wish I could stand before you and promise that this will be over in just a decade, but such actions are folly. What I can promise you, however, is this: We! Will! Outlast! Cooking! Dash!

Godspeed, my brothers. HOO-AH!

----
Positives: Polished gameplay mechanics, many levels, more challenging than Diner Dash
Unpositives: Kitchen interface is nearly too cluttered at times, with multiple ingredients
Rating For Men Traitors Who Like Time Management Games: 4 / 5

Cooking Dash does NOT exist in the iTunes App Store.
The free Cooking Dash Lite does not either.

Panorama Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 07:17:00 +0000

by ArcSoft

Category: Photography
Price: $2.99

Everyone loves panoramic photography. It's a gimmick, sure, but the novelty doesn't wear off like those black and white photos with just a single subject in color (GAG!), or those lomography-style collages of 4-8 sequential shots of your child's first steps (BORINGGGG!) – a beautiful panorama, say a sweeping 180º vista of the Grand Canyon in all its summer splendor, simply catches your attention and doesn't let go. Like Kim Kardashian's derriere, only not as wide.

So an app like Panorama Camera, by a company renowned for producing the panoramic photo software that comes bundled with most digital cameras, should be pretty awesome for the job, right? Of course not. Everybody installs that crap because it comes on the Drivers CD, but nobody ever uses it. The only reason why camera companies include that crap is because it costs very little, and gives them an extra bullet point to put on the side of the box, like "Panoramic stitching software inside!" Going by the shoddy quality of ArcSoft's first iPhone app, that's like putting a "Live Girls!" neon sign on the side of a women's hospital – barely true.

It's primary feature is a mode akin to Sony's "Sweep Panorama" technology, where you simply move your camera from side-to-side without pressing any buttons, and the camera records and stitches everything together automatically. The difference is that Sony has half an idea how to do this. Panorama Camera can't handle variations in exposure within a scene (almost any scene will have dark/light areas), and it constantly duplicates objects even when they have sharp pointy edges. Even if you do manage to get a good stitch, the photo is saved at a pathetic resolution close to the iPhone's native screen size.

In short, I wouldn't trust Panorama Camera to stitch two white pixels together, let alone a scene made up of five photos. ArcSoft Panorama Camera is a blind man throwing daggers at a woman on a rotating board. It's a blind man driving a bulldozer in an orphanage for landmine victims. It's a blind man bowling down an alleyway filled with Ming vases. Don't ask what the Ming vases are doing in an alley! It's called a menopause, you reiterate!

"When Compared to AutoStitch" Rating: 0 / 5

----
Please don't buy Panorama Camera in the iTunes App Store.
----

These official screenshots are lies! The actual interface doesn't even contain these elements!

Update: Here are some pathetic photos I took indoors. Their full sizes are 272px tall at most.

I Am T-Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:59:00 +0000

by Sonic Mule

Category: Music
Price: $2.99

What it is: Pandora's Box for music lovers, blasted open with dynamite.

Y'all know what Auto-Tune is, right? It's that sound that's all over the radio these days. Now the very same technology that's turned every gun-toting rapper in the world into a singer of cheesy love songs is available on your iPhone with this app from developer Sonic Mule and some black leprechaun named T-Pain, who seems to be wearing 3D glasses in every photo I've seen of him. Presumably because he's a terrible singer, Mr. Pain's had to borrow Cher's decade-old vocal tricks to establish his own signature sound. Turns out the kids love it.

After having recorded no less than 103 flawless, radio-ready examples of pop stupidity myself with this app over the last three weeks, I can only conclude that T-Pain is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Still, it's an experiment that will reveal the future of the world we live in. If this app makes money (it will) and T-Pain's own singing career shows no signs of slowing down, then one can only deduce that Apple is days away from releasing Snow Leopard for Dell & Compaq PCs, giant pharmaceutical companies are loading up helicopters to confetti poor African towns with free AIDS medications, and the US and Russia plan to upload their nuclear firing codes onto Wikipedia.

One noteworthy feature: you can choose to have the app lock your vocals down to a specific harmonic scale, OR you can flip a T-Pain switch and "let Pain choose settings for you" (says the website). The latter option always appropriately sounds the worst.

Pain Factor: 4/5

----

Buy I Am T-Pain on the iTunes App Store.

----

iHandgun

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:07:00 +0000

by iFirearm

Category: Entertainment
Price: Free

What it is: Murder in 4.6 megabytes.

So:
June 24th, 2009:
Not much happened today. Sat around watching reruns of Charlie's Angels and VH1 Classics after dinner. Also got a mysterious email saying I should download an iPhone app called iHandgun. Load it up and you see a picture of a gun on your screen. When you touch the trigger, the gun "fires" (the phone vibrates) and smoke comes out of the barrel. It's fun for awhile.

June 25, 2009:
Pretty rough day. Dropped my iPhone into the crapper and it stopped working. Then I turned on the news and found out Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson both passed away. On the same day? Man.

Sept 13, 2009:
Finally, after months of frustration with a borrowed Nokia, my iPhone has finally returned from being repaired! Will have to reinstall all my apps and music. Oh, and Dirty Dancing is on TV later. I love that movie.

Sept 14, 2009:
Unbelievable news. I'm writing this entry as I watch the evening news, and they're saying Patrick Swayze just passed away? I just saw him last night! This is too depressing, I'm going to change the channel to something lighter. Maybe a cooking show...

Sept 16, 2009:
Dear diary, it's been 48 hours of sleepless torment for me since hearing about Keith Floyd. There's no other logical reason for these deaths... Each and every time I've played with iHandgun, it's been pointed at the TV... and now they're all dead. What? I'm not going mad. Can't you see the truth? I see it as plainly as the accurate and fully-animated actions of these two included guns I hold in my hand. My blood runs cold when I think of what evil I have committed. I should turn myself in. No... jail is too good for a monster such as myself. Never again shall these hands run red (figuratively) with the guilt of murder.

For the very last time, I will hear those realistic sound effects as I load the virtual clip and cock the hammer with just a stroke across the multi-touch screen. Perhaps I will even attach the optional silencer before pressing it to my feverish forehead. Goodbye, faithful diary!

Sept 17, 2009:
Huh. I guess it was just an app after all.

---
Download iHandgun for free in the iTunes App Store.
---

RunKeeper Free & RunKeeper Pro

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:51:00 +0000

by FitnessKeeper Inc.

Category: Health & Fitness
Price: Free / $9.99

What it is: A proletariat's glorious awakening in the sunset of Nike+iPod class inequality.

Ready, Set:
You're getting ready for your date with the road. You've sprayed on your Tommy Hilfiger deodorant, pulled on an organic cotton Ralph Lauren headband, and massaged Clinique's SPF-15 lip balm onto your already moist and supple lips. You've loaded up a perfect mix of Royksopp, Daft Punk, and ironic 80s electroclash. You've looked in the mirror. You look fantastic. Now all that's left to do is pull on a pair of those sweet new Nike+ Lunarglide sneakers with the pedometer in their heels, and sync them up with your freshly anodized fifth-generation iPod nano. I'll say it again: you look fantastic.

What a steaming pile of tosh! Have we forgotten what running is supposed to be? When did we become a bunch of spoilt hipster brats who think exercise is only about designer brands and multicolored gadgets? It's time to drop the gimmicks and take our sport back to its roots. Get your beat-up pair of Sauconys and New Balances out from the back of the cupboard. Put on that raggedy old tee from high school gym class. Hold off showering for a few days beforehand, so you'll really appreciate getting one when you come back. And get a copy of RunKeeper, it doesn't need no stinking Nike+ enabled shoes. This here is for real runners, the salt of the Earth.

Using state-of-the-art GPS tracking technology integrated with Google Maps online, RunKeeper commands a multibillion-dollar satellite network to follow your every move across the planet's surface, calculating and recalculating your course, speed, elevation, pace, and calories burnt at a rate of several thousand times per second*. Even as your iPhone 3G/3GS plays wholly unpretentious beats from the likes of Nas and J Dilla, its omniscient metal brain dreams up rich full-color charts and graphs in conjunction with RunKeeper.com's servers in the cloud, viewable on last year's 24" dual-core iMac once your ordeal is over. That's what I'm talking about, yo. Only real runners need apply.

"The Road Had It Coming" Rating: 5 / 5

* Maybe just a few times.

---
Download RunKeeper Free from the iTunes App Store, or buy Runkeeper Pro for additional features and real-time interval training cues mixed in with your music.
---

Ramp Champ

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Lee) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:41:00 +0000

by The Iconfactory

Category: Games
Price: $1.99

What it is: A carnival of sadomasochism.

Every retirement home has one old man who used to be a championship boxer, tough enough to still knock out two young men bigger than him. Likewise, every group of cowed nerds has among their numbers one who will eventually arm up and shoot up the school in a black trenchcoat. Ramp Champ has a lot in common with these people.

It lives amongst the feeble pursuits most call "casual games", a candycoated term cooked up by executives to describe alternative entertainment for normal people – those don't play first-person shooters and airplane simulations eight hours straight at a time – or as we like to call them, "games for pussies". But don't be fooled by the company it keeps. Ramp Champ is a prison-hard motherf*cker. I suspect it broke out of hardcore gaming prison and into casual gaming prison just because it was bored.

Ramp Champ is like the serial killer who wears thick glasses and tucks his striped shirt into his pants and talks with a feigned speech impediment and holds a boring desk job at a government agency, but really goes home every night and becomes like Christian Bale or something, with ripped muscles from pumping rusty iron in his basement and hunting animals in the woods naked.

So what looks like an innocent game of skeeball is actually an elaborate psychology experiment. I mean, it must be! The physics simulation suggests that you have full control over where the ball goes, if you're good enough, and then when you need to score the most, it lets some blind Parkinson's patient take over the shot. But sometimes, it does exactly what you expect, making the time spent smearing goat's blood on your own face seem completely worth it. It frustrates, it makes a mockery of your so-called skills, and it's completely addictive. I know because I've mastered it at the cost of my sanity.

Slammer Rating: 4/5 shivs

Buy Ramp Champ in the iTunes App Store.

---

Above: What you'll see when you become a ramp champ. Each of the levels' three goals filled in with a yellow dot.