Touching Up VI: EverNote Beta, FreeVerse Games, Trism, Twitxr…

by Eric March on April 26, 2008 at 11:05 pm

News piles up pretty quickly these days. Fortunately I’ve got another stack of it here for you, and this time I’ve roped up some EverNote Beta invites, uShow Beta registration, a shiny iPhone, a preview of Freeverse’s upcoming games, a mouthful of Grub on the Go, updates to iPhone Video Recorder and StreetFlow, and the releases of Twitxr, Installer to App Store, and Trism.

Evernote Beta Invites
For those who are unaware, Evernote is a service where you can store all of your daily notes and pictures. Take any notes, any pictures, and store them in your Evernote account. That in and of itself is pretty handy — but the real interesting thing about Evernote is that not only are all of your stored notes searchable, any images you take with text in them are also searchable. Evernote employs optical character recognition (OCR) to scan any images you upload for text and transcribes them to make them searchable. That means that you could take a picture of a piece of paper with printing on it, or a sign or poster, upload it to your EverNote account, and it be able to find it with a simple text search. How cool is that? Evernote is currently in beta by invite only — but they will be doling out the invites soon. Sign up for the invite list here and you could be using your iPhone or Touch to take notes instead of that old paper stuff.
(via Just Another iPhone Blog)

Freeverse Gives Up Some Screenies
At some point, a video preview of Freeverse’s upcoming AppStore game WingNuts Racing, but it disappeared as fast as it came. So, we’re left with a few screenshots to tide us over until the real articles turn up. The quintet of screenies on your right show a little bit of what we can expect from Flick Sports (including soccer, baseball, and bowling), and the OpenGL-es game Wingnuts MotoRacer. The games look pretty decent — relatively simple with decent graphics that look like the sort you can probably expect to pick up from the App Store for about half a sawbuck apiece. Now. let’s see if we can dig up that video…
(via Just Another iPhone Blog)

iPhone Video Recorder 1.1.6 Update
The commercial iPhone Video Recorder application has had an update to version 1.1.6. There’s not really much to see here — a few new quality options, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same old same old. If iPhone Video Recorder turned your crank with version 1.1.4, then you might appreciate this update. If not, then there’s not much there to change your mind.
(via Apple iPhone School)

uShow Beta Registration Open
Since we’re on the topic of video recording, registrations for the beta of uShow are now open. uShow is another video recorder, though its quality and performance are as yet undetermined, as is its ability to record sound, so there’s no telling whether it will give iPhone Video Recorder a run for its money. Nevertheless, beta registrations are now open for the app, so if you want to find out, head over and check it out.
(via Apple iPhone School)

Twitxr Debuts, Murders Language
Just how do you pronounce that, anyway? Twit-zer? Twit-sir? Twit? However it’s pronounced, Twitxr is an early beta of yet another social networking/micro-blogging/picture sharing client for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and is intended to let you update Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and other such sites from within one app. On the surface it sounds decent enough, if a little bland, but functionally it seems like it has a way to go before it’s good enough for prime time. If you’re serious about your social networking apps, then you can grab it from the Big Boss repo (http://thebigboss.org/repo.xml). Sorry folks, no screenshots, as I’m just not up on the whole social networking thing.
(via Just Another iPhone Blog)

More iPhone Bling
We’ve seen iPhones swaddled in Swarovskis and clad in black-and-gold — but maybe you just want something simpler, understated, yet still costs more than most people’s bi-weekly salaries. iPhone bling kings Goldstriker have that, too. The entire front bezel of the 16gb iPhone is clad in 24ct gold polished to a high mirror finish, while the Apple logo on the back gets a spot of fine gold. It can be yours for one lump sum of ₤599.95 (approx. US $1,189) — but I’m sure you can just write a cheque.
(via Apple iPhone Blog)

Installer to App Store
Well, this is a whole sack of useless — but if you are really, really desperate to have the App Store on your springboard, or just want to fool your friends and make your enemies envious, this little app will rename Installer to App Store. That’s it. Really. And there’s no way I can pad this section of Touching Up any further to make it look interesting, so I’m just going to tell you that it’s on the Dav Team repo: http://davteam.com/repo.xml
(via Apple iPhone School)

StreetFlow Forrages for Food
So, you’re cruisin’ and you’re getting hungry. What’s around where you can sit and nosh? Just whip out your iPhone and open StreetFlow 0.8. It’s probably the easiest thing in the world to use. Utilizing the FindMe feature that is a part of GoogleMaps, StreetFlow will locate your present whereabouts, then present you with a list of restaurants in the area, rated for your convenience, in an easy-to-digest list ordered by proximity. You can even read other patrons’ comments, and add your own comments, even attach pictures to them. (You must be registered to leave comments, but if you’ve already registered with Collage or Wallpaper, then you can use the same login and password.) There is also a search feature, just in case you’re looking for a particular type of food. It works quite well, but it doesn’t find every restaurant in the area — I found at least a dozen that I know of that weren’t listed, so whatever listing service it uses obviously doesn’t have a complete list yet. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool. StreetFlow is available on the iApp-a-Day source (http://www.iappaday.com/install/)
(via Apple iPhone School)

Grub on the Go Forrages for…Food
No, we didn’t just do this. Not precisely, anyway. Grub on the Go does have the same goal as StreetFlow — to find you a place to feed your face — but it is done up as a web app, and you can just tell it what you’re craving and where you’re located and off it will go to give you a list of places to go that have what you want. Unfortunately, Grub on the Go only seems to work for US locations — it said Toronto was a bad location. I mean, it can get a little rough and tumble in places, but it’s really a nice city, so it can just keep its opinions to its damn self. If you’re in the States though, you can check it out at http://grubonthego.com.
(via iPhone Freak)

Trism Demo Released
You may recall a couple of months back a piece I did on Trism. It’s a match-3 game in the tradition of Bejeweled, but with triangles and gravity and stuff. At the time it was still in development and not available to the general public. Well, Demiforce have finally released a prototype demo of this game, and I have to say, this is a hell of a lot of fun. The use of the accelerometer definitely shakes up the traditional mode of play, and playing a Bejeweled-like with triangles forces you to approach the gameplay differently. There are naturally bonuses for multiple simultaneous trisms, as well as chain reactions, and there are a lot of nice little graphical notions included — it’ll even flip the score bar upside-down when you flip the device. Trism will eventually be released through the App Store for $4.99, but the demo is available now on the ModMyiFone source (http://modmyifone.com/installer.xml).
(via Apple iPhone School)