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Apple news and rumors provider, served for lunch

Posts Tagged ‘Games’

Apple categorizes “Apps for everything” section

September 30th, 2009

Due to difficulties in promoting high quality Apps, because of a “Race to the bottom” phenomenon in App pricing, Apple has now launched a refreshed look on their website section for “Apps for everything”. It has now been categorized in several genres, among which Apps for Cooks, Apps for Music, Apps for the Great Outdoors, Apps for Work, Apps for Students, Apps for Managing Money, Apps for Fun and Games and many more are a part. This allows Apple to promote some of the best Apps in the App Store, despite their pricing and struggle to be purchased.

So check out the expanded Apps for Everything section on Apple’s website.

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Posted in Apps, Marketing

Tags: App Store Apps Apps for Everything Best Apps Cooks Fun Games Money Music Outdoors Phenomenon Pricing Promote Race to the bottom Studens Work

Free App Review – Paper toss & iTunes Remote

September 17th, 2009

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, one of our editors gets embarrassed, and a tip for the lazy music lover.

Paper Toss

If you work in an office, you are probably familiar with the feeling of not doing anything. This feeling is called boredom and some brainiacs claim that boredom makes one smarter, and it has definitely made at least one guy smarter, when he suddenly got the idea of making a game for the iPhone where you shall throw a crumbled piece of paper into a small trash can and see how many times in a row you can hit it without missing. This itself seems quite easy, but when you add some different wind power from different angels, it becomes a bit more difficult. Since the game takes place in an office, the wind comes from a fan of course.

The game has 4 different levels and the harder you decide to play it, the distance to the trashcan will increase, and the paper ball will be even more influenced by the wind. Here at AppleLunch we take things seriously, and wanted to see whether Paper Toss is realistic or not. Watch the video below.

As you could see, paper toss in real life isn’t easy. The distance to the trash can though was corresponding to medium level in paper toss, so maybe our tester forgot to practice before shooting the video.

In the App, Paper Toss, you throw the crumbled piece of paper by sliding a finger in the direction you want to throw the ball. It’s easy and fun to compete against you friends in ‘how can get the best streak’ but it doesn’t come with a multiplayer version. The graphic is above what you can expect from a free application and the sounds are realistic too. On the negative side is the games’ gameplay, which is a bit uniform.

Get the app from iTunes App Store

3/5 STARS

iTunes Remote

This application is officially made by Apple is available for free in iTunes App Store. This Application is exceptional and truly amazing and should be on every iPhones and iPod Touches. If you are a Mac owner you probably have an Apple Remote which has the most important features; play/pause, volume up/down, forward, backward and menu. iTunes Remote from App Store has more than just that. In fact it has everything you need.

Remote shows you album cover and looks like the iPod function

Since you have an iPhone or iPod Touch (maybe both), you’re probably familiar with the iPod function in those, and iTunes Remote works exactly like the iPod function, but with more features. To describe it, you can, from your iPhone or iPod Touch play, pause, skip, shuffle, see your songs, playlists, and album art on your device as if you sat in front of your computer and it also supports Apple TV.

If you are one of those persons who has a really big mansion and have connected speakers all over the place to your Mac, and you are in the opposite site of the house, you have no need to be worried. You don’t need to go all the way upstairs to the third floor, walk all across the hall to the room which the computer running iTunes is, and skip to the next song.

iTunes remote supports the new Genius Mix feature

All you have to do is pick up your iPhone or iPod Touch from your pocket, connect it to the same Wi-Fi is the computer and then skip song (Note: You’ll need to verify your iTunes Remote in iTunes before you can use it). This also includes regular people with regular income in regular houses or apartments.

When Apple created iTunes Remote, they were in a happy mood because it supports iTunes for Microsoft Windows too, and this is just another reason that there is no reason not to download this application.

It works fantastically and you can even play the new Genius mix on iTunes through your iTunes Remote. You can also create new playlists or if iTunes or running the “iTunes DJ” playlist, you can request songs and you can also connect your friends’ iPod Touchs and iPhones to your iTunes and let them request songs too and iTunes will automatically make a queue of requested songs.

Get the app from iTunes App Store

5/5 STARS

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Posted in Apps, Products, Reviews, iPhone

Tags: App Store Apple TV Free app Games iPhone iPod Touch iTunes iTunes Remote Mac MacBook Paper toss

WebGL, OS-to-browser conversion?

September 14th, 2009

WebGL is a technology which enables internet browsers to run heavy graphical interfaces, such as 3D environments and lightning engines. The technology has not yet been integrated into any publicly available internet browser, but we have gathered information that a WebGL integration is beginning to appear in the latest WebKit sources.

WebKit is a native framework, used by e.g. Safari and Dashboard, which improves several technologies and makes them easier to use and program for the developers. That WebGL is being integrated into WebKit, may result in a OS-to-browser conversion, since we will be able to run a lot of heavy graphical applications seamlessly in our internet browser. Just imagine the possibilities… 3D games, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop, architect 3D applications and many more, could be totally converted into being run through Safari. And just to let you taste a bit of it, here is a preview of some simple 3D applications which run smoothly in Safari:

And as you can see, this technology already works and could easily replace other technologies, such as Flash and complex Javascript engines. WebKit is therefore increasingly becoming a huge threat to Adobe Flash, which is one of the most popular browser plugins ever. With WebGL, no browser plugins are required in order to process rich 3D applications.

Opera, Mozilla and Google have already shown great interest in the rising technology, and may be among the first companies to convert their otherwise OS native applications, into internet browsers.

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Posted in Technology

Tags: 3D Adobe Conversion Engines Environment Flash Games Google Google Earth Interface Internet browser Lightning Mozilla Opera Photoshop Safari WebGL WebKit

Free app review: Uno, Wikipedia & Sheep Launcher

September 3rd, 2009

This is the first Thursday iPhone and iPod Touch free app review here at AppleLunch, which is a new initiative from the editors’ side. We will start with reviews on a classic card game, a good night story and a flying sweater.

Uno – Free

The is the first free app we review for you, and you have probably heard of it. It’s called Uno – Free and is made by Gameloft. This is a kind of demo of the Uno application. Introduction speaks for itself because I’ll bet you have played Uno during your childhood.

When you open the application, it asks you if you’ll rather listen to your own music while playing or if you’ll like the in-game sounds while playing, which indicates that this is a game that you can play while traveling and listening to your own music simultaneously, which is a pretty positive thing, since it annoys me when the music stops just because I started an app. The next screen told me to type in my name, and so I did and then it told me to pick a color, and green was my choice. Now I had my profile up and running. Great. Now, let’s get started, and because it’s only a demo-version I can only choose to play ‘Quick Play’ and I’m not the very best at card games, so I chose the difficulty ‘Easy’.

I’ve played Uno many times so I thought that I knew the rules, but then a window appeared and told me that my objective was to get 250 points and I had no idea about how to count those points, so all I did was to play the game as I used to. I actually did play well and I think that I might have won the first game, if I hadn’t forgot to press the ‘Uno’ button when I only had one card left in my hand. A message appeared on the screen and said that my challenge failed, and after it disappeared the game ended. The next game went quite smooth and I managed my card so well that I didn’t have to pick up any cards from the pile and… I won the game. After a simple congratulation screen, the game told me to buy the full version of the game and the games has now ended.

My impression of the game is very positive, though it’s only a demo-version of the full game. The drag and drop functions astonished me and the animations are above mediocre. What is negative about this free app is the limitation. You can only play one mode and I got really confused when I read that my objective was to get 250 points.

Get the app from the iTunes App Store

3/5 STARS

Wikipedia Mobile

This time, no doubt. I know you are acquaintance with Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopedia. Now you can have Wikipedia in your pocket with the free Wikipedia Mobile iPhone app.

Under the application description it says: “The app is focused on being very simple and very fast”. The first I can totally agree to, but for me it took more than a minute to open the ‘Apple Inc.’ article in the app and I didn’t lost my Wi-Fi connection. This was not what I expected from so simple an app, but it can of course have been caused by heavy traffic at Wikipedia. Doubt it though

There are three buttons at the bottom-right corner and the first, which looks like a house, is a shortcut key to the home screen in the application where you can read “Today’s Featured Article” and “In the News”. Next to the home button is there a reload button and the last icon shows a clock and it’s the History section where you can see the articles you’ve last visited.

Wikipedia Mobile app need a lot of improvements before I will begin to use it. Among things that are missing in the app is the opportunity to make a list of favorite articles, or if you just want to surf for knowledge at Wikipedia, the ‘Random article’ function is missing too.

To summarize: The Wikipedia App is simple, but it isn’t fast all the time. For the iPhone, I’ll recommend the web app called ‘Wapedia’. You can find Wapedia by typing http://wapedia.mobi/ in your address line in Safari and add it to your home screen. It’s faster than the app and simple too.

Get the app from the iTunes App Store

1/5 STARS

Sheep Launcher Free!

Have you ever launched a sheep so high up in the air, that it finally hits the moon, while listening to Johan Strauss II? Probably not, but now you have the chance with the free app called Sheep Launcher Free!

The gameplay is simple: Push the red button and the sheep will be launched up in the air. Now all you have to do is to tap the sheep to get it fly higher and the game ends when you’ve reached the moon. On it’s way up to the moon, it must collect starts to increase the score and you will run into different things you can collect and prevent the cute little sheep from crashing into the ground at very high speed.

Sheep Launcher Free! is actually quite hilarious and meets the standards of free apps for the iPhone and the only missing part is a high score list for your iPhone only. The animations runs smoothly and looks funny. A brilliant game, but when you’ve reached the moon for the first time, there’s not so much fun in it anymore.

Get the app from the iTunes App Store

4/5 STARS

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Posted in Apps, Reviews

Tags: App Store Free app Games iPhone iPod Touch iTunes Johan Strauss II Review Sheep Launcher Uno Wikipedia

Coming Apple Tablet to be released in 13-15 inch models?

August 29th, 2009

According to some assumably reliable sources, a new report indicates even further expansion of the current Apple Tablet rumor. The new report suggests that Apple’s upcoming tablet will be made, not only in the anticipated 6 to 10 inches wide models, but also in models as large as 15 inches, which is pretty large for a tablet computer. It has always been of common understanding that the new tablet models will run an improved version of the iPhone OS (or smaller Mac OS X)… however, this new report believes one of the models (assumably the largest) will actually run a full Mac OS 10.6.

If it is indeed true, such a model will be normally competing with all current tablets on the market, which grows every day, and for Apple to successfully penetrate the market with a tablet computer, the model will require some high level of innovation. Tablets running Mac OS X have already been seen in industry, which means that Apple will need some additional creativity in the device, to gain respect and positive publicity. The rumor, since it is still unconfirmed, indirectly says that we are actually going to see two very different Apple Tablets, since the smaller ones may be great for playing games and writing quick notes on the fly, while the larger models will be pretty much a replacement for office Macs whose owners doesn’t need anything more than a pen or fingers to navigate and use the computer. But as said before, it is highly improbable that Apple will “just release a tablet”. If they make the larger models, they will undoubtedly guaranteed come with something which doesn’t replace their other Macs.

The new tablets have been rumored to arrive in early 2010. There is a possible announcement of them in the upcoming media even, but it remains unlikely.