This simple app is pretty fun. When first opened, it gives you the option to use the game sounds or to listen to your own music. This is a great option since a lot of apps shut down your music to play their own game sounds. Planes come in from all directions on the screen and you must drag and direct them to land them on the proper airstrip. After playing this a multiple times, I’ve figured out it is easiest to start out with the fast forward button on the bottom left of the screen till there are too many planes to control at the high speed. Planes and helicopters light up red if they are about to collide with another and turn white if the flight pattern is approved. Does it look like two are about to crash? No problem, redirect one of them around to land safely. They remain their original color if they are just flying around. Planes left unattended to will simply bounce of the edge of the screen till they crash or are directed to land. There are three different fields to land on in this app. For a real challenge, try playing the aircraft carrier level on fast forward!
Another fun way to play is the peer to peer method. By enabling the bluetooth on your iPhone, you can host or join a game with another user. In this mode, one person lands one color of planes. In order to land the other planes, you must send them to your partner for them to land on their screen. I really enjoyed this mode! Of course, you have to be around another person with an iPhone in order to play though.
Over all a very fun game that is super simple to play. Well worth the $0.99 in my opinion for the game. Have fun playing!
I’m not convinced that it can make you better at your job, but “Button” by Blank Software is a nice little distraction.
The premise is dead simple — a big button shows up on your screen. When it lights up, click it. That’s it. It almost sounds too dumb to be true.
The catch is that other people using the app get the same lit-up buttons at the exact same time, and you compete against them for points and prizes. Dunno if it’ll really catch on, but it’s worth a shot considering it’s free. You can get it in the App Store here.
Yelp provided a sneaky way to get augmented reality in their new app, but they might have made things worse for all of us. In a post yesterday on TechCrunch, Matt Galligan thinks that this move might make Apple look even harder at each app approval — taking longer for each one, and rejecting a higher percentage. That’s not good.
He makes some good points. Here’s his basic argument:
My concern is that Yelp has set an awful precedent by this act. Now, every app developer will likely undergo even more scrutiny. Accessing private API’s goes against the agreement every iPhone developer has to abide by when submitting applications to the App Store. By subverting this agreement through an “easter egg”, Yelp could very well cause the approval process to become more draconian. Whereas before, Apple was primarily looking for trademark violations, “correct” usage of their Human Interface Guidelines, and show-stopping bugs, they’ll now have to go over each app with fine-toothed comb to make sure no feature that is likely to be unsanctioned will be released. Now granted, this may also be seen as a big cry for openness in the App Store, but so long as the App Store approval process remains in the status quo, deceitful acts like this won’t continue to go unnoticed by them.
I’d like to say I disagree, but I can’t. I still don’t understand why Apple wanted developers to wait for 3.1 to release AR apps, but Yelp probably should have listened. It’s still a neat app to show off to friends, but now things might get a bit rougher for all of us.
I’m a huge fan of DropBox. I use it daily for personal file storage and for sharing files with others. I even made a short video a few weeks ago showing how it helped me stay more efficient during the day.
When I heard they had an app coming out, I was mildly excited. However, I just couldn’t figure out what it could that would be very useful. They’ve just written more about what’s included, and now I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
In particular, this app will:
Allow you to access you files on the go. Kind of a given, I think. However, you can stream music and movies from your DropBox to your phone. Nice!
Download files for offline viewing. If you make them “favorites”, you can view them even when you don’t have a connection. This is very much like the latest version of the Evernote app, and it works well.
Share links to files in your Dropbox. You can snap a photo on your phone, toss it in Dropbox, and then share a public link with a friend. From what I can gather, you can put these in a private folder in your DropBox, but it’ll provide a temporary link to your friends to grab it. See the screenshots below for an example.
Photo galleries
All in all, it sounds like a great little app. They submitted it roughly 10 days ago, so it should show up in the store sometime next week.
As TechCrunch says, “they’re not ESPN”, but the apps they’ve put out so far are much better. They have a very popular fantasy football league on Facebook, and an app that ties directly into it. It’s superb.
Even better is their “Sportacular” app (free version, $1.99 version). It’s somewhat similar to the ESPN ScoreCenter app, but it does so much more. It has tons of scores, stats and features, and push notifications for all kinds of events. You can get notifications on a single game, or all games from a team. From there, it gets even more granular and lets you choose to be alerted:
Pre-Game (3 hr)
Game Start
Game End
Score Change
Inning/Period End
Every 3rd Inning (baseball, of course)
This lets me do some cool things. I have it set to give me the “Game End” alerts for Atlanta Braves games. I’m a casual fan, and it’ll be nice to see final scores roll in. During football season, though, I have it set to alert me when some teams Start and End, so I can know when to look for the game on TV.
They’ve got some slick stuff going. Check out the screens below for a bit more info.
The new Yelp 3.0 app is pretty slick, with a handful of new features. The best one, however, is undocumented — a very slick augmented reality view.
We talked about augmented reality a bit with the Wikitude app a few days ago, but Yelp is the first US-based one we’ve seen. To access it on the app, shake the phone a few times and you’ll enable a feature called “the Monicle”. This will show the world through your camera, and overlay locations of nearby restaurants, bars and other businesses.
It’s really more cool than useful, but it’s fun to play with. Here’s a quick video that shows how to activate it:
I expect we’ll see many more of these types of apps in the near future, so it should be an exciting year.
In addition, they’ve snuck in a few last-minute updates. The two features that weren’t mentioned last week are landscape mode and home screen organizing. I’m really glad to see the home screen organizing make it in there, as that’s a great feature to have. Just hold down an icon on the home screen until they all start to shake (like on the iPhone home screen), drag to rearrange, then press the “done” button in the top left corner when you’re finished. It works great!
Boxcar 2.0 is now waiting in Apple’s submission queue, and the author expects it to be live sometime between September 3 and September 7. What does boxcar do?
For Twitter, it can send you push notifications of anything you want — @replies, direct message, even for all of your tweets if you want (though that’d get a bit crazy for most people).
The new version also supports Facebook, allowing you to get notifications of all Facebook alerts. The Facebook 3.0 app won’t even have that, though it’s expected for Facebook 3.1 down the road.
Finally, it also has push notifications for email. You tell your email account to forward everything to them (for notification purposes only), and it’ll keep you informed.
All in all, this should be a pretty sweet app. It’s not free, but it’s reasonably cheap ($2.99). Should be well worth it for most folks. Look for it to come out in a few weeks.
This game is as simple as it gets. Simply slide blocks up, down, left and right to reveal a path for the highlighted red block to make it through the hole and off the screen. This free version has two modes, Relax and Challenge. The only difference between the two modes are whether or not it records how many moves it took you to finish the level. A good addition to this would be to have a timed mode. This app originally started out with 400 levels but later added 200 more as a thank you and sorry for having bugs in an update. I must say, with this many levels I thought there would be more alike and feel like im playing the same level over and over again but this is not the case. Each level is a challenge. One tip for the harder levels is to move the blocks into a position which makes it harder, only to have the ability to move other blocks out of the way for the win. Overall a good free app that last longer than 15 minutes like most other free versions.
