Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

You really ought to see my office right now.  I’ve got paper shuffled everywhere and sticky notes from well over a year ago plastered all over my monitor, desk, wall and every other available piece of office real estate.  Needless to say, organization has never been my forte.  My boss, bless his heart, tried to help me in this area by sending me to one of those sacrosanct “Franklin Cover” classes.  I probably followed their method for a good 24 hours before I was back to my old routine, clutter and chaos.  Don’t get me wrong, I am good at what I do, but I understand that it stresses my partner’s out when they see my lack of organization at work.  The thing is, paper is not my friend.  As a lawyer the thought of throwing away an important piece of paper paralyzes me to the point where I have become a de facto hoarder of  tens of thousands of pages of loose paper, 99% of which should be either shredded or thrown away.  As a result, one of my many new year’s resolutions is to go totally digital, and that includes you: annoying yellow tangible sticky notes.

BugMe! has been described by the developer as “the quick and easy note-taker and reminder for your iPhone. You can jot notes, ideas and errands on the fly. Sharing notes is easy, by email or Twitter, or save notes as little Stickies to your iPhone Home Screen as an “in your face” reminder!”  So how does it far?  Pretty damn well, actually!

I was a bit skeptical of BugMe!, since the iPhone already has a pretty good built in alarm that allows you to set reminders for yourself.  BugMe! lets you write and save digital “sticky notes” that you can then save to your alarm with reminders.  You can write these virtual sticky notes either freehand or by typing them with the build in keyboard.  Once you write you note you can save tiny ‘icon sized’ notes to your app launcher, send it to your friends via Twitter or email, and pin your notes onto the built in virtual cork board.

The true beauty of BugMe! lies in its simplicity and function.  The virtual sticky notes look and function just like the ones that are littered around my office, but instead of having thousands of unorganized sticky notes plastered all over my office, I can now contain them in one digital space that auto-organizes them for me.  Whenever I go to the grocery store, I now simply write out my list on a BugMe! sticky note and don’t have to worry about forgetting the paper list in the car (I never forget my iPhone).

Of course, no app is perfect and BugMe! is no different.  One of the features displayed by the developer is that BugMe! allows you to save your virtual sticky note as your lock screen wallpaper so it’s the first thing you see when you power on your iPhone.  What they do not tell you is that the method used by BugMe! to set the sticky note as your wallpaper is about as efficient as our federal government.  Once you write a sticky note and decide that you want to set it as your wallpaper you will receive the following pop-up notification:

Really? Okay, that just bugs me!

Now, in defense of Electric Pocket, I do understand that the reason for the convoluted process is because of limitations, or some would say security measures, built in the iOS firmware, but it still does bug me that I have to go through so many hoops to do what seems to be a rather simple task.

Regardless of this limitation, BugMe! is still a solid app that deserves your attention especially if you are a slave to the tangible sticky note.  It offers what the default iPhone alarm/notification does, but it does it with a style and simplicity that far exceeds Apple’s calendar.

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Ski on Neon is currently #1 in the Top 25 Free section in the App Store

Yes I know… Ski on Neon is a stripped down clone of Tiny Wings. Press and hold to to make your little skier guy tuck and gain velocity while going downhill, release to let the momentum launch him uphill and into the air. So it’s not too original… but it’s fun as hell!

If you’ve never played Tiny Wings, this is a game of timing. Each time your skier goes airborne you need to try and get him to land cleanly on a downhill slope so that the forward momentum continues to build, and if you stink it up by making (or just letting) him land in a bad spot then you’re faced with the somewhat painful task of trying to regain speed with incremental jumps. If you manage to string together four good jumps in a row without hitting a hill the wrong way you’ll get a nice speed burst that temporarily turns you into an airborne comet-looking thing.

Timing your jumps, gaining massive air, and timing your landings is a pattern of gameplay that’s both fun and frustrating. This is the kind of game where certain personality types will be hitting the restart button constantly because of that nagging feeling that one bad landing can ruin an entire run.

A bunch of different gameplay modes are included with the game, and all are basically the same thing but they use different metrics for measuring success. For example, Speed Trials demands that you finish a course within a certain amount of time, while Tech Slopes combines time and altitude requirements, and Challenge Air Time rewards you for staying airborne. A multiplayer pass-n-play mode is also included which is pretty cool.

If you like Tiny Wings or just need a new casual gaming addiction, head to the App Store’s “Top 25 Free” category and grab Ski on Neon. It’s #1 as of right now so it should be easy to find.

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.

Bulbs and Wires ($0.99) by handsmade

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

Bulbs&Wires is a puzzle-solving game with a simple objective: connect all the bulbs. Each game begins with a single lit bulb that attaches to unlit bulbs via one or more wires, thus lighting those up as well. Once you have a completely bright network of bulbs, you win. At first, I thought I’d get tired of this pretty quickly but discovered there are seven levels of difficulty, ranging from not too hard to borderline insane. In the easiest mode, you have under twenty bulbs to connect. Once you get to the hardest level, it’s over a hundred.

If you like challenging yourself, this game can be pretty fun. I’ve been coming back to it when I’m bored and setting the difficulty level higher. The game awards one to three stars depending on fast you solve the puzzles. I haven’t managed to get three stars yet, so you have to have wicked fast puzzle-solving skills to manage that, I guess. One thing I would advise is to use the zoom feature on all the levels higher than the easiest, otherwise you’ll keep accidentally tapping on the wrong bulbs and that can get frustrating.

Overall, I like this game and would recommend it to puzzle-loving folk. It’s a good way to spend a few minutes when you’re bored. What kept me from giving the game a higher score was that its entertainment value, even with the many levels of difficulty, is kind of short-lived. But it was fun well it lasted! Also, I really like the retro-futuristic look of this game and want to use that font for something. It had me thinking of Aperture Science in the 50s.

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.

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.

Something else I have to complain about is that starting up Camera+ when there’s a hot photo op takes a little longer than I’d like. The other day Kim Kardashian was picking her nose about 10 feet away from me… she was practically up to her second knuckle and I missed it because it took a few seconds too long to get Camera+ going! Ok that’s a total lie but you know what I mean.

Overall this app is awesome and easily worth $1.99.

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 get a free code, we will send it to you via Facebook.

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Since On5′s first iteration a year ago with We Doodle and Charadium, I’ve been a loyal fan of their game and could absolutely not wait for its successor, Charadium 2. Charadium 2 is a fun Pictionary based game to showcase your artistic drawing ability. Pictionary has always been a fun game to play growing up and now you’re able to relive your childhood on your very own iOS device. The idea itself is amazing and so is the gameplay, especially trying to guess what your friends are able to draw. I cannot begin to explain how many times I’ve broke out laughing from sheer joy and embarrassment from my own pathetic drawings.

Charadium 2 comes with a new Ping Pong game mode which plays more like a turn based game, giving players time to play at their convenience which differs from the other two game modes that are live. The gameplay is simple, you’re given a random word from the game and your goal is to draw it the best to your ability. The better your drawings are, the easier it will be for the other players to guess. It might seem odd that you would want to help the other players by drawing well, but each correct guess scores yourself points. Once your turn is over, you’ll have a chance to guess the other players drawings with a set time limit.

The only problem I’ve run into playing this game was the amount of cheaters when playing with random players. Instead of drawing the word that’s given to them, they would instead spell the word out across the screen. There are ways of punishing the player caught cheating with the ‘warn’ button but it doesn’t seem like it does much at all. Aside from the random online jerks who ruin the game, I find playing this game with friends and family seems much more enjoyable.

Having played this game for a month, I can honestly say Charadium 2 could give any Zynga game a run for their money.

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

Gamania offers this app for free for two more days so I wanted to get the word out in time! From the looks and tutorial of Subcat, you would think this game that has you wiping away fog to find and catch sea creatures is a walk in the park – or the ocean floor. However, this game is not as it seems. A training sea is followed by four more levels. Each challenge has you catching a certain number and / or combination of types of fish and although completing the challenge has you move on to the next, the faster you accomplish the task at hand, the more stars out of three you receive.

Clown fish, jellyfish and starfish are your target but submarining cats, beware! There are black lantern fish that, when caught, make you restart the challenge. Some of those bloody things practically stalk the fish you’re trying to catch and can really make things interesting … not that I ever started yelling at my iPod. Where’d you hear that from?

The cutesy graphics catch you off guard when levels start getting difficult with fog that regenerates more quickly and fish that just don’t want to be caught. Aside from what I suspect to be a couple bugs (tapping on fish that don’t get caught and wiping away fog that gets you in trouble for tapping lantern fish) this game is pretty fun and gets challenging. By the end of the first level I wasn’t even able to get full stars on the tasks anymore. I enjoy an app with an utter disregard for its user’s ego.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are two bills that are supposed to stop the pirating of media, you know, the kind of stuff you would download through torrent sites or P2P sharing.

That’s great ‘cuz stealing music and movies is against the law… but the language in these bills is universally considered to be so broad that these new laws would make practically every website on the internet a target for one-sided, no-questions-asked censorship. The U.S. government would be able to tell your ISP to *BLOCK YOU* from visiting websites that they believe are in violation of these vague and poorly defined laws. They could also do the same to search engines like Google.

I could go on, but I’d prefer that you get more informed analysis from places like CNN, ABC News, Wikipedia, BBC, and about 2.5 million other websites. You can also learn more about SOPA/PIPA from Clint, who reviews apps right here at IAR. And while you’re at it, you can also use this handy Wikipedia page to contact your congress representatives and tell them how you feel.

If you’re too lazy to read, then just watch this hilarious but educational video from The Oatmeal:

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

Calvin R. Jules

2811 Syntax Boulevard
Las Vegas, NV 90120

Telephone (555) 888-9898
Facsimile (555) 888-9191

This is what CamCard returned:

Company Name: “Fla, Ves HAR. KEY”
Department: “Mmataiee+ Wt FW”
Department: “G# +rrqir#t#tawiq. #BW”
Phone: (Nothing extracted)
Email: (Nothing extracted)
Address: (Nothing extracted)

The font on the above business card was not an obscure font and the text was in print and of sufficient font size. Maybe it is a problem with the iPhone 3GS camera? I don’t know. But for an app that costs $7.00, I would expect the thing to work as advertised and possibly offer me a back massage to boot.

Despite the limited accuracy of CamCard’s business card photo recognition software, I do plan on keeping the app installed on my iPhone. This is, of course, how I judge the usefulness of the apps I review here as there is only one other app I still have installed on my iPhone: GoodReader.  The ability to take a picture of a business card, and then quickly edit the contents to form an accurate digital copy of that business card is something I needed. Once I edit the business card for accuracy, I can save the contact information in either the CamCard folder or Contacts folder, or both. When viewing the digital card, I have the option of sending the contact an email, calling the contact, sending the contact a text, geo-locating the business address of the contact, re-directing to the contact’s company website. The main features include the following:

• Automatically trim and enhance card image before saving into Card Holder.
• Options to save into the phone/Gmail/Exchange contact.
• Automatically recognize the language type of the card image content.
• Automatically rotate the card image.
• Batch shooting or importing card images for recognition.
• QR code generation for the contact’s content.
• QR code recognition for the contact’s content.
• Email signature recognition.
• Double-side business card image capturing.
• Search contact in Card Holder.
• Export contact as vcf or Excel file in Card Holder.
• Add note.
• Password protection.
• Support Linkedin invitation or search.
• Support business card recognition for English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese.

Finally, I can throw away that Rolodex that has been collecting dust on my desk and switch to a completely digital library of business cards. For this reason, CamCard is win, albeit a bit too pricey of win!

Available on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

What’s in a name? A tower defense game by any other name would be just as fun to play. Well, UFOlocaust is not the best of the bunch, but it’s not the most boring either. Your mission: protect the anxious, humanoid masses from alien abduction. Seems easy enough, and in some cases it is. The graphics are pretty cool, as are the visual themes. You are started off with the basics which consist of plasma-collecting machinery and offensive weapons. The more points you gather, the more weapons you can buy in the Laboratory. But there are a few facets where the game is lacking.

When it comes to maneuverability, UFOlocaust can make it somewhat difficult – to add weapons or energy reserves, you have to go back to the main munitions menu and then click back into the bank of whichever type you want. Also, the little human sprites running back and forth across the bottom of the screen get a little monotonous, to the point where a player may not really care to save them anymore. And, not to mention, a few glitchy bugs while trying to place weapons have been noticeable. UFOlocaust isn’t the best game out there, but maybe it’s just not for me.

From Priware Entertainment S.L: