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"Is there a word for someone who blocks themselves from accessing everything work-related, leaving them only with Twitter?" That's the question I asked shortly after blocking myself from everything Ars in an attempt to test out SelfControl, a simplistic (if not strict) distraction-blocking app for the Mac. Created by developer Steve Lambert for free under the GPL, SelfControl blocks a list of domains for a specified period of time in order to help you focus—presumably on work. The app works with websites, e-mail servers, and, as I discovered, even IRC servers and the like.
Unlike apps like WriteRoom—a word processor that visually blocks you from seeing anything in the background—and Freedom—an app that blocks all Internet access for 8 hours at a time—SelfControl lets you specify exactly what you want blocked through a blacklist while allowing everything else. So, while you'll be able to see your IRC buddies chatting away in the background (if you didn't block it), you can still access the things you need to get things done.
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iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who recently released the AMBER Alert for iPhone app, has a new app designed to help keep deleted data from being recovered from your iPhone. Called iErase, the app "zeros" all the free space on your iPhone and makes sure trashed files stay, well, trashed.
The iPhone, like most computing devices, doesn't actually remove files from you iPhone when you delete them. The bits are all there; the file system merely marks the space that the file was using as available. "The iPhone retains data better than most laptops because its solid state disk is designed to minimize writes," Zdziarski told Ars. "As a result, deleted photos, e-mail, keyboard caches, and other personal data are likely to stay on the device for a very long period of time. All of this information is available to someone who steals or 'borrows' our device."
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If flying a paper airplane to catch floating paperclips sounds like an appealing way to waste some time, then Paper Pilot for the iPhone is the game for you. In this first-person flier, you maneuver your aircraft through a variety of rooms, trying to catch each waiting paperclip. Catch it and it explodes for your pleasure. This reduces the outstanding clip count, and moves you closer to completing the current level.
Controlling the plane is both easier and harder than you might think. All you have to do is tilt your iPhone. Despite this, I found it difficult to plan my flight path so the plane would go exactly where I wanted it to. You must adjust for the angle of approach, your speed, and so forth. Hitting objects that are floating in 3D space is a lot more difficult than, say, running your car into a nearby light post. Paper Pilot lets you control your speed as well as your angles. Stroke the screen upwards to increase your velocity or downwards to reduce it. Slower airplanes are easier to handle with more time to react to upcoming objects.
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There's nothing worse than getting home from the grocery store and suddenly realizing you forgot something you needed. For those of us who aren't accustomed to making lists, it happens frequently. Paper and pen are so passé, though. Groceries, an iPhone/iPod touch app from Sophiestication Software, aims to remedy the problem by easily allowing users to make grocery lists using a huge database of name brand and generic products. We have been waiting since the App Store launched for this one, and it has finally been released. Was it worth the wait?
With Groceries, you can create and save multiple lists, which is useful if you do your shopping at more than one grocery store. Adding groceries to an existing list is a pleasure. The database of American items is gigantic with 11,259 items, while the German database is even larger with over 15,000 items. When all is said and done, the SQL database for the items is 2.6 MB—not huge, but when you consider it's all text, that's pretty big. Still, there are no real performance issues in the application, and scrolling is very smooth.
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Imagine a game where you're the sadistic god of a very small island. You can create animated people at will and then torture them to your heart's content. Feed them to sharks, strike them with lightning bolts, throw them into a nearby volcano (it's actually an acquired skill) and, if you feel especially generous, feed them by cracking coconuts on their heads. Pocket God lets you explore your wrathful side in tormenting innocent virtual people.
If that were all there was to Pocket God, we would sum up the application by saying: "cute for five minutes, possibly worth the one-dollar price, no good long-term gameplay." However, there's far more to the whole Pocket God experience, and that's due to the designers behind the product.
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The third-generation iPod shuffle is here, and not a soul saw it coming. (These days, that's a rarity.) Apple's new buttonless wonder has been making waves and ruffling feathers in the days since its introduction, so we took some time with it to really see whether the hype—and the hate—was warranted.
Unlike the 2G shuffle, which came in a variety of colors, the third-gen iPod shuffle now comes in only two "colors" (if you can even call them that)—black and silver. This is sure to disappoint color enthusiasts and parents who love giving shuffles as stocking stuffers, but we wouldn't be surprised to see colors return to the shuffle line in time. More importantly, however, the new shuffle now comes with 4GB of storage space for the same price ($79) as the 2G shuffle's 1GB. That's half of an iPhone 3G, or a low-end 4G iPod nano.
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A year and 5 months after releasing iWork '08, Apple finally updated its productivity suite to version '09. Keynote 5.0, Pages 4.0, and Numbers 2.0 all sport some refinements, but this time around iWork isn't joined by a new family member. Apple touts an enhanced template chooser and more ways to share for all three applications. Apart from that, Pages gains a full screen view, dynamic outlines, mail merge with Numbers, and MathType and Endnote for including mathematical equations and bibliographies. For Numbers, it's easy formulas, formula list view, table categories, and advanced charts. Keynote gains magic move, more transitions, chart animations, and Keynote remote. Finally, there is iwork.com.
In this review, I'll be looking primarily at what's new in this latest version vs. iWork '08. So if you're unfamiliar with iWork, please read our Work '08 review first for background information that isn't replicated here. And although Microsoft Office is popular among Mac users, this review compares iWork mainly against its former self. Hopefully by the end of the review you'll know whether you should upgrade to iWork '09.
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The awkwardly-named 10 Balls 7 Cups provides a virtual skee ball experience on the iPhone. Like its real-world counterpart, you try to amass points by rolling balls up an inclined platform and bouncing them into a series of cups. Cups that are smaller and harder to reach offer higher point scores than the ones that are larger and closer.
If you've played skee ball at a carnival (or even at a Chuck E Cheese), you know pretty much everything you need to know. 10 Balls 7 Cups even lets you collect tickets so you can buy virtual prizes. These range from t-shirts and whistles to tanks and sports cars. The program keeps track of your loot so you can enjoy each of these non-existent prizes over time.
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Cooking Mama is one of those love it or loathe it phenomena. It's a cooking simulator that I believe debuted on the Nintendo DS before making its way over to the Wii and, now, onto the iPhone. Cooking Mama is built on working your way through series of minigames all centered around cooking tasks. You may debone a chicken or stir a sauce, chop onions or knead dough. Each minigame involves following a particular interaction pattern, which is introduced to you by Mama. Do well at these tasks and you earn Mama's praise and advance along your recipe. (Do poorly and Mama will growl at you, but she will cover your tracks and fix your errors so you can progress. Thank you Mama!)
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This may seem like somewhat of a stretch, but I'm going to go ahead with the analogy anyway: GarageBand is the multi-function printer in the third-floor office that is iLife '09. With the addition of yet another feature, the '09 iteration of Apple's music-making app has become the ugly, multi-purpose mess that is today's printing, scanning, copying, and faxing behemoth. While such devices are handy and save space, they all suffer from the same inherent problem: they are all, at best, average at every one of their functions.
So it is with GarageBand: it's unwieldy, ugly, and lacking the functionality that any serious user needs or wants. It tries to be a combination of Apple's own Logic, Sibelius or Finale music notation software, Practic Musica, and Band-in-a-Box in one cheap package—and in one unified interface.
Some may say I'm being too critical of the application: "It's meant for consumers, and meant to be easy to use. It's not supposed to have the same features as pro apps." That may be the case, but does that preclude it from critical analysis? Let's take a look.
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I decided to take a look at ColorSplash, a new iPhone photo editing utility, in honor of Holi, the Spring festival of colors. ColorSplash works by desaturating images and letting you restore just parts of the colors by drawing them in with your finger. As the image shown here demonstrates, this can be extremely effective visually, allowing one part of the image to pop. Unfortunately, this is a little easier said than done with ColorSplash, despite a good application suite. The iPhone and your finger just aren't the best tools for the kind of precision work that proper colorizing demands. I'm not saying that the program wasn't fun to work with—it was—but my results, even with careful application, came nowhere near the quality of the demo images, such as this man with the umbrella.
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You know Oregon Trail, don't you? It's the classic computer game developed way back in the 1970s that taught students about 19th century pioneer life. Kids learned what it took to bring a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri along the trail that snaked its way west into Oregon territory, passing through Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming onto Utah and Idaho. You had to feed your party by hunting, carry supplies, manage cash, and so forth. The game made you think and reason. You couldn't win just by being a passive participant.
1848 has just met 2009, as the iPhone version of Oregon Trail went live on the App Store yesterday. Retailing for six bucks, Oregon Trail combines westward-moving hardship with brightly designed graphics and iPhone-based touch interactions. The game retains the challenges and decision making exercises you remember, but sprinkles in new side missions and customization options.
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Chillingo's Zen Bound made a minor splash when it hit the App Store a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't until this weekend that I had the chance to really sit down and get a sense of what all the buzz what about. Let's just say it's not really what you expect from an iPhone game. Zen Bound offers an immersive experience where users interact directly with three-dimensional on-screen objects. You basically wrap rope around 3D figures by twisting the object on the screen. When you've covered enough surface area with that rope, you gain points and may proceed to the next level. Zen Bound is based on Zen Bondage, which was developed as a demo a few years ago.
When I say immersive, I refer to both the interface and the sound. As the program itself reminds you on each launch, the game's 3D aural effects were built for headphone use. These 3D sounds are designed to move around your head, adding an extra layer of effect to the well-realized iPhone touch interface, which includes dragging, twisting and accelerometer control of the on-screen object.
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iWeb occupies a strange place among its iLife brethren. As a truly WYSIWYG, theme-based web design tool, iWeb enables the creation of gorgeous sites in record time, and it is the go-to, well-integrated app for presenting your iLife to the internet. But iWeb has suffered a fair share of criticism since its introduction in 2006 for being too handicapped and limiting. It offers virtually no access to the actual HTML it creates and, in previous versions, was really only useful for publishing to Apple's MobileMe (previously known as .Mac) web service.
iWeb '09 brings a handful of new features and improvements, but it clearly received much less of Apple's attention than the other members of the iLife '09 suite (except for, of course, iDVD, which Apple has pretty much stopped updating). Unlike iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand, iWeb got neither keynote stage time nor banner space at Macworld Expo 2009, and some of iWeb's worst drawbacks and basic annoyances persist in what is now technically a 3.0 offering. Still, can Apple—a hardware and software company—tackle the Web any better with this latest update?
Note: This article is the second in our iLife '09 review series. The first installment was published last week, and covered iMovie and iPhoto. The next installment will cover GarageBand, and will debut a week from today.
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Shivering Kittens is an iPhone game that you will absolutely need to download if you are a puzzle game type of person—especially if you want to truly understand how it works. We'll do our best to explain this addictive and challenging game here, but if you're anything like me, you probably won't fully understand it until you have played it a couple of times. That said, you'll probably be glad you did. There is both a "Lite" version, which is free, as well as a paid version, which costs $2.99. This review is about the paid version, though most of the comments also apply to the Lite version.
Ignoring the kittens for a brief moment, the premise of the game looks like Tetris, but it's not. If anything, we might compare it more directly with Bejeweled or even Lumens on the PSP. There are falling blocks composed of different kinds of block pieces that need to be arranged in such a way that similar types of pieces are touching in order to eliminate them and keep yourself safe from the line at the top of the screen. Here's where the kittens come in.
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