Blacksmithgames.com is in good mood this year and offers free applications every day from december 1th until december 22nd. But wait, if it’s an advent calendar, why doesn’t it count to 24?
There is of course a reason, and it is that they will announce “other great surprises” these two days. What they are, can we just wait and see, since this is one of those advent calendars where you cannot just open all flaps at once, like those with chocolate.
When the App Store was announced back in July 2008, one of the main titles of applications to the iPhone and iPod Touch was Super Monkey Ball, a game developed by SEGA and it became an enormous commercial success. The game was priced $9.99 and it sat the standard of pricing, when it comes to games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, SEGA announces Super Monkey Ball 2 for iPhone!
Super Monkey Ball uses the accelerometer to control a monkey in a ball, and the objective is to control the monkey in the ball to collect as many bananas as you can, and make it’s way to a magic port before the time runs out. This concept is continued in the upcoming Super Monkey Ball 2 that has 115 new challenging levels, and now you can also play multiplayer via WiFi. SEGA notes that they have received criticism on the sensitivity of the control system in Super Monkey Ball, so that is also improved in the new version and should be more precise than its relief.
Super Monkey Ball 2 is expected to be released in time for the holidays, and no price has been announced yet.
Watch the video below to see a preview of Super Monkey Ball 2
Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will test if we’re sober enough to drive, and afterwards some magic.
The free application “Fit to Drive” is developed by Designit A/S in cooperation with Healthmate.
Fit to Drive is an application that maybe will prevent car accidents caused by drunk driving and save lives, and we salutes the initiative! Let’s start the review. When you enter the application, you will start in the main menu. Here you can see six different options: a per mille calculator, a pupil polygraph, a “are you fit to drive?” test, a highscore list of the before mentioned test, an information button and a disclaimer. Let’s just say that all the fun is in the three topmost options.
Let’s take a look at the per mille calculator. When you tap the option, you will be asked to select your consumption. There are four different types of drinks with different alcohol percentages, and you are asked to show how many of each type of drinks you have drunken. When it is done, tap next and now you shall enter your gender and weight, and then again tap next. In the next screen that appears, you shall select the starting time, and your location (country) and then tap next, and you will be shown what you are allowed to do, and what you certainly shall not do. As bonus, you can see what time you’re sober at, and if you swipe left, you can see how many calories you have gained, and how far you have to run to burn the amount of calories.
The next option in the main menu gave us a bit of a laugh, because if you’re in a pub and have had a few pints, you rarely brings a mirror with you, and in the second option “Pupil Polygraph”, you are asked to select your pupil size. We agreed that you have to ask a friend to select the pupil size for you, and a sober friend would be the best option to choose. Anyway, by choosing the size of ones pupil size, you can get an indication to if he or she is sober to drive, and if his or her reactions are normal he or she might not be affected by any kinds of drugs.
The third option in the main menu though, is my personal favorite. It’s a small test with a few questions that are easy to answer correct and some assignments that are easy to complete in sober condition. When you have completed the 10 assignments, you’ll get your result if you can drive by yourself or you should let someone else drive for you, and let’s just make clear that THE TEST IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY – DON’T DRIVE UNLESS YOU ARE TOTALLY SURE THAT YOU ARE SOBER and the application can’t tell you if you’re affected by drugs or alcohol.
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The application is free, and even if you haven’t had a few drinks, it’s still interesting to see if you can pass the “Are You Fit To Drive?” test. I admit that I have failed a couple of times in sober condition, and I think that I’m sober right now, while I’m writing this review (had a few glasses of wine last night). This application is worth a try for everyone and we recommends you to download it at App Store by clicking the link below.
4/5 STARS
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“Guess My Age” is developed by mugamme.com and is of course free.
The app description says: “Amaze yourself. Than amaze your friends.” Well, we admit that we’re not that amazed by this application, but we think that some might find it amazing, until they’ve realized that it’s pure math.
What the application does, is to tell your age, but if you don’t know your own age, it can’t tell you how old you are, so it’s actually quite useless. It’s like “Give me your address, and I will tell you where you live”, but in a more mathematical way.
When you enter the app, 50 numbers are shown, and topmost is a question: “Is there any number that matches your age?”. If there is, tap yes, and if not, tap no. Afterwards the exact same question is asked, but the numbers aren’t the same as before. This happens seven times total, and if you haven’t misread, the application will tell you how old you are.
Amazed? No, not really. Nor were we, but if you show this application to some younger people, they might think it’s pure magic.
2/5 STARS
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Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will decide what to see next time in the cinema, and brighten up someone’s path.
Trailers International is developed by xTeo who has also made a similar application, named Trailers.
Alright, let’s get started. The first screen that appears, is a list of movies, which I had no clue about when I downloaded the free app (a joke, laugh, laugh) and I decided of course to take a closer look at it. I wasn’t familiar with any of the titles that I was given, but that might be caused by my eager to see movies in the cinema.
Finally I found an interesting title that I wanted to know more about: “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” it is called. I noticed in the list that the movie features George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey and will be released December 03 2009. I tapped the movie cover, and suddenly the movie trailer started to play, actually in pretty nice quality.
The movie trailer has a length of 2:23 and it was really funny. It might be one of those movies that I will watch in cinema. Next, I tapped the info right next to the movie cover, and I was shown more details about the movie, and four buttons: “Imdb”, which leads to Imdb’s info page about the movie, a star shaped button, which will add the movie to “my favorites,” “Movie Site” which led m to a yellow page (might be some kind of error), and finally the button called “Trailer 1,” which will start playing the trailer of tapped.
Lowest on the screen is a navigation bar. The leftmost button shows you a resume of the movie, if tapped. The left-arrow button leads to the movie before “The Men Who Stare at Goats” on the list, which appeared when the application started up, and the mirrored button leads to the next. The play button plays the trailer (yes, it’s basically the application’s core function) and the last button is a “refer a friend” button, from which you can send out an e-mail about the movie. The two navigation buttons though, are more or less superfluous, because if you swipe the screen left or right, you will get to the next and the previous movie title.
We will now get back to the movie list, because we aren’t finish with the application at all. It has extremely many functions. As I mentioned before, it is possible to create a favorite list of movie trailers and that you can find in the top by tapping the “Favorites” button.
In the button of the screen is a button called “Dates” and it sorts the whole list after by release dates of the movies, starting with the next release day of a movie. The next button gives you a search function so that you can search if you want information on a specific movie release you can type the title in the search bar.
The next button is maybe the second most interesting feature in the application. It is the “Downloads” page, and yes, you CAN download the movie trailers if you want! To download a movie trailer, head back to the trailer list, and tap the download button, which is the round button with a down arrow. Afterwards a notification badge appears in at the “Downloads” button. Tap it, and tap “Start” to download the trailers. After this you can turn off your WiFi and/or EDGE/3G and still see the entire trailer that you have downloaded. Brilliant feature, if you want to show a trailer to a friend or a family member, that has no connectable WiFi connection.
Right next to the “Downloads” button is a “More” button that you might be familiar with from many other iPhone applications, for example the iPod application. In the “More” section, you can choose to sort the movie trailers by actors, directors, genres, studios or you can even shuffle them if you want some random trailers.
This review is soon coming to an end, but we want to mention some more stuff before deciding how good it is. In the upper left corner you can see the British flag. If you tap it, you can choose between ten different countries in Europe. Since we live in Denmark, it’s obvious to chose Denmark from the list, and then we will get release dates in Denmark and Danish movies too on the list.
The very last thing from the application we want to show is the “Movie cover” screen. To activate it, just tilt your iPhone or iPod Touch to horizontal and now you can navigate through movie titles by swiping left or right.
You might probably have guessed already that this application is worth to be more than a free application. It is one of the best free applications that we have ever tested and to movie enthusiasts, it is a must-have. It has so many features and possibilities, and I can’t see a single argument why it should not be top-rated.
5/5 STARS
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Flashlight is developed by John Haney Software, inspired from his daughter and wife.
This is the first review ever, where I had to turn of the light in order to make a true review of an application. This is because the application actually is meant to be a flashlight, that you can use in situations where you can’t see nothing, because… well, it’s dark and only the fewest of people have nightvision.
So, I turned off the light, the TV, my computer screen, my MacBook display, my backlit keyboard and everything else that produced some kind of light, and that gave me some trouble finding back to my seat, but I made it without getting seriously hurt, and now I wanted to light up my room with my iPhone.
… But it disappointed me. The application didn’t produce enough light so I could see the other end of the room, which is only a few meters, but then it came to me that I could change the brightness in the iPhone’s settings. I changed it to the brightest, and reopened the application, and now the application lightened up my entire room, and I could easily stand up and walk around, without trampling in to something.
The standard color in flashlight i white, but you can change it to the color you want, and even black is an opportunity. You can also swipe your finger up or down to brighten or darken the light, and if you want to go to the settings menu, just tap and hold in the middle of the screen and release when you’re told to.
Green light, go!
In Settings you can navigate to “Special Effects” and turn that on, but remember to read the warning note, which tells you about seizure. The special effects includes S.O.S. morse code, trippy, deep trippy, Smooth, Yin-yang, 6-sided and chasers, and you can see some of them below.
The application is generally below middle in creativity and it surfers from limits in brightness. If it is dark and you want a flashlight, but doesn’t have one, it makes almost the same level of flash if you just opens the Settings on the iPhone and turns up the brightness. You doesn’t need an application to light up for you.
2/5 STARS
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Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will travel through space in a rocket, checking up on the internet speed to compare what is fastest.
The NASA application is developed by NASA themselves. The application’s purpose is among others to educate about space, and that is why it is an educational application, but it doesn’t mean that we shall keep our sticky fingers away from it, because it is free and we want to get to the moon.
The first screen that appears, is the well known NASA logo, and afterwards you’ll get a list of NASA mission, not the secret missions though. If you click on a mission, you’ll see when the mission was completed, and if the mission isn’t completed yet, a timer will tell for how long the mission has been ran, and if the mission hasn’t even started yet, a countdown will show you when the mission begins.
Besides the missions, that I personally find interesting, there’s also a section of images. If you enter the image section, you can choose “NASA IOTD” or “APOD” images. I have no clue of whatever those means, but the second section is not even close to look like an iPod. The two sections totals more than 6,500 images that you can save to your camera roll, so there’s enough occupation for the next couple of hours.
There is also a video section, which I find more interesting than the image section. Yesterday (October 28th) NASA launched the Ares I-X and the launch was of course recorded, and you can actually watch the rocket launch in the NASA application in HD (it says)!
The last section in the NASA application is called “Updates” and it’s just a basically RSS reader, reading feeds from NASA.
The application in total is interesting and if you like space missions and have dreams of becoming an astronaut, this is a must-have application for you. If you haven’t those kinds of dreams, the application is interesting too, and it can give you information on a boring afternoon, but don’t expect a big laugh at any time with this application, which is most interesting if you are connected to the internet.
4/5 STARS
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Speed test is another small utility, that some might find totally useless and unnecessary. This application is developed by Ookla and is basically the same as if you go to www.speedtest.net on your computer.
If you haven’t guessed it yet, Speed Test shows you have fast your current download and upload speed are, on the internet connection that you’re connected to. Before running the test, it’s recommended to tap the “Settings” bar, and change the server to one geographically nearby. In here you can also see your internal and external IP addresses, and you can also select if you’ll rather have your speeds shown in kbps, Mbps or kB/s.
Let us start the test, by tapping the “Speed test” bar, and then the red big red button, called “Begin Test.” After just a few seconds, the application has determined your internet speed, and my internet speed is, as you can see below, currently 3.83/3.67 Mbps.
If you are in a situation and thinks that your internet speed is slower than it use to be, you can tap the “Results” button, and see a history of your Speed Test results.
This application does what it promises and it works without any problems, of what we have experienced so far. Another positive impression is that the application does not come with any annoying advertisements.
4/5 STARS
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Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will bring back foghorns to sport events and then take a look at ourselves. No, actually we won’t do the last part, but at least we’ll try. Oh dear god, how naive are we?
iHorn is a free application, developed by DS Enterprise and was released in April 2009.
iHorn is not an application with many bright features. In fact, all you can do is to make a noise, but this can actually make a lot of fun, but it requires imagination.
Just consider this situation: You are sitting in your living room, watching a boring soccer game, and you have visits from your friends. After 80 minutes without scoring, all your friends are almost fallen asleep, and then you pick up your iPhone from your pocket. There is nothing strange about picking an iPhone up from your pocket, unless you don’t have an iPhone, but you pick up your iPhone from your pocket and navigates to iHorn, turns up the volume to maximum, and then blows the horn. THAT would make any soccer game more interesting, and you will get attention from your friends, and depending on their mood they’ll find you funny…… or maybe just annoying, but at least you’ll have fun with the situation.
iHorn can be used in any kinds of situation (unless you have used it so much, that your battery is empty) and it comes with 7 different horns (V2.32) and if you don’t want your horn to run out of air, you can activate the “unlimited air” function, and blow until you fall asleep.
It is the meaning of this application that if you shake your iPhone when you’re empty of air it should fill itself up, but I have now shaken my iPhone for a minute and not the tinniest piece of air has come into my horn, and it disappoints me. Another negative point, is the conspicuous banner at the top of the screen, that keeps changing every 10 seconds, and if you tap them you’ll get another screen.
iHorn is easy to use, and all you have to do if you want to give someone a turn, is to tap the top of the horn, and besides it’s a simple application, it can actually make a lot of fun in the right moments.
4/5 STARS
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According to the developers, this picture is a mirror. Oh dear god I look gray today.
Well, to be honest I had no big expectations to this application, which is created by U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc.
The application is supposed to make a mirror out of your iPhone display, but if U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc. succeeded creating such an app, they would be at least billionaires.
When you open the application, you’ll be shown a light gray screen with a banner at the top. If you expect more from this application, you’ll get disappointed. We’ll, you can switch the background color to dark gray, white or black, but none of the opportunities gives a you mirror. The best mirror on the iPhone is at the back, the small Apple logo exactly.
The Mirror Mirror application offers you four different colors, as I told you before, and now I’ll give you the best color of them all, and the winner is………… The “lock” button. Yes, if you turn off the display, you’ll get the best mirror. My guess is that it is created as a navigation application trial, which they’ve provided with an AdMob banner to generate some money on iPhone user’s simplicity.
This application scores the lowest possible rating, which is one star. While reviewing this application, I considered reforming the rating system to contain much lower rating than one star, but I will not let this application influence AppleLunch. It’s simply not worth it. Sorry, U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., but you just managed to make my day worse.
1/5 STARS
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Apple has announced iPhone developers that free applications can also take advantage of ‘in app purchasing’ now, a feature that previously was allowed for paid apps only. This will help developers a lot, for instance they can now release a game with less levels and the possibility to purchase the rest of the levels, which will lower the number of “lite versions” of games in the free app section.
Apple’s note to developers reads:
In App Purchase is being rapidly adopted by developers in their paid apps. Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.
You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.
‘In app purchasing’ came with the iPhone 3.0 update last summer, and allowed users to buy extra possibilities in applications, such as new levels in games, or some extra furniture in The Sims 3 for iPhone. For more details, Apple suggest to go to App Store Resource Center for more details how to implement In App Purchases to free apps.
Remember to read our featured article, “Hey, let’s get an app store” and get an insight to App Store’s success.
Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will test our stupidity and make popcorns.
How you ever wondered how stupid you are, and wanted to compare your stupidity to others? If you have, then you are probably low on self-esteem or just a very strange and wondering person.
Today’s first free application review is a small intelligence test, called “Stupidmeter, test your intelligence” and this is the first review where we won’t dig into every tiny detail of an app, because we aren’t spoilers. And if we gives you all the answers, you will not find out how stupid you are 
Well, let’s get this review started. When you open the app, an opening screen appears, but disappears less than a second later, and you will now find yourself with the main menu. Here you have three options, the “Start” button, the “Share” button and an “about” button, consisting of five dots in different sizes.
If you tap the “about” button, you will get some very interesting information about the app, that actually ruins the whole joy of it, so don’t push it if you want to get the most joy out of the app. Depending on your test result, you can always read it later.
Let’s tap the Start button. Now you get a simple question that anyone can answer right, but the app developers have chosen to give you four different answer choices. The first question is: “Some month have 31 days. How many have 28?” The choices are 12, 1, 6 or 2. Since this isn’t a key, we’ll only give you a hint: February has 28 days every year, but every fourth year it has 29.
As we said, easy question and you’ve probably answered it correctly. Me myself, that have reviewed this application found out, that I’m not stupid, since I answered every questions right, as you can see in the picture below.
The app can’t tell you if you are stupid or smart of course. It is for entertainment purposes only, and you can’t get into any MENSA kind of education if you answers every question right. The questions aren’t made up by the developers, and can be found many places on the internet. When I tested this application for the first time, it was like I’ve tried it many times before and it didn’t gave me any kind of excitement, but worse apps have been seen.
2/5 STARS
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The second review of today’s Thursday Free App Reviews is another free entertainment app. This is called “Popcorn Game” and it’s another lite version of a game that I personally won’t buy.
The game is developed by Playrun, Co and it’s about making popcorns. To be more concrete, you have to produce as many popcorn balls as possible within 50 seconds. When you get into the game, you’ll see corns falling down from the top, and to pop them you must tap on them, but be aware, because if you tap on a black corn, you lose five seconds of your remaining time.
Every single pop gives you 10 points and if you tap a smiley face, it gives you 20 points, but have you ever seen a smiley popcorn? The smiley popcorns aren’t supposed to be in this application and they makes it just worse. During my test of the app, I experienced that it didn’t always register when I tapped at the corns, even if I tapped them several times. This just indicates that there a room for lots of improvements in the application, even though it’s a free application.
The official app description says: “Pop Pop Pop! Don’t you love the sound?” Well, I can’t disagree, but in my opinion the app doesn’t deliver that sound when I pop the corns. I haven’t tried the full version that is available for $0.99 and I probably never will, but I don’t think you will get sound improvements in it. Popcorn app will also get two stars out of possible 5 stars, because we appreciate that the company delivers applications that aren’t just something you can create by yourself within an hour.
2/5 STARS
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Reports have been coming in surrounding a possible iPhone App release from Apple, which will bring FM radio to the device. Sources claim that it will work as the iPod App in many ways, such as the ability to listen to music/radio while browsing Safari or using other applications. We are not yet sure if the App will be integrated into the currently existing iPod App, or if it will be launched as a stand-alone application.
One of the features which have been mostly discussed, is song tagging, which allows you to tag a song in the radio so that it can later be traced and purchased in the iTunes Store. In many ways, this rumored FM radio capability for the iPhone, seems to be very much like the one in the iPod Nano, though it will probably take advantage of iPhone’s unique functions as well.
Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we finally found out who made that stupid songs that keeps playing in the radio, and gives a hint to rob a bank.
If you have had an iPhone for quite a long time, you are probably familiar with the free application, made by Shazam Entertainment Ltd., called Shazam.
You are probably familiar with the following situation: You are sitting in your car in a traffic jam, listening to the radio and there is this song, that you have listened to a couple of times, but you have no idea who has made it, nor what it is called. Shazam provides a solution for you.
Shazam is an application with a unique technology that identifies tunes anywhere, using only the mobile phone. After you have opened the application, all you have to do is to tap the “Tag Now” button in the upper right corner, and 15 seconds later it tells you what song that you are currently listening to.
When Shazam has tagged the song, it shows you some information about the song; who has made it, what label it is from and the album of the song too. Shazam also gives you a link to iTunes Store so that you can buy the song right away, or if the music video is available on YouTube, Shazam gives you a link to it.
If you are using Twitter, you can tweet that you have used Shazam to discover a song, but you have to live with a link to other Shazam tags on Tiwtter.
If it’s available, you can also read a biography of the band that has made the discovered song and you can also see a list of discs they has made in the discography section. Finally, it’s also possible to take a photo and attach it to the tagged song, or pick a photo from your iPhone library.
Shazam is without any doubts a must-have application for your iPhone. You will sometimes get into situations where you really need to know the name of a song that you are listening to, and if you doesn’t have any connection to a wireless network, you can record the song in Shazam, and when you come home or some other place with connection to the internet, you can open Shazam and the application will now connect to its servers and find the name of the song that you have recorded.
Shazam is FREE and available on iTunes App Store, and if you have an iPhone, then download it! If you only have an iPod Touch you need a microphone to record tunes.
Get the app from iTunes App Store
5/5 STARS
This application seems fun to some people, who might be very bored in their spare time. On the iTunes App Store, there are tons of applications with the same function as Shotgun Free and hopefully one or two are also better than this.
After you have opened the application, you gets a menu screen with three opportunities; well written instructions, a list of achievements and the button that we missed in our BlackJack Free preview, the “launch shotgun” button.
How to use the application? Well, after you have launched the shotgun, you need to load it before you can shoot. You loads the shotgun by holding your iPhone or iPod Touch in vertical, and then you rapidly takes your iPhone 20 centimeters down, and if you do it correctly, you will hear a loading sound, like on real guns.
Now the gun is “half cocked,” but you’ll need to cock it completely so move it just as rapidly 20 centimeters up, and now you’re ready to fire, which you do by turning the iPhone into horizontal mode, (and now remember to aim at your target! ) and tilting it up rapidly.
If you tap the achievement button, a list of several goals will appear on your screen so that you can use the application to complete the achievement list. That, we hasn’t done because the application is too monotonous to spend even two minutes of using.
We will only give this application 2 stars because it’s very boring after short time, and you can’t choose between additional guns. The instructions though are well created and easy to understand, and the implementation of an achievements list was a good idea, but we don’t think that anyone wants to complete the whole list. If you have, then please contact us and tell us how you found the motivation
Get the app at iTunes App Store
2/5 STARS
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