The Free App Store Review VIII: Life, the Universe, and Everything
by Eric March on August 3, 2008 at 3:40 am
Bugger it. Last time I said that I was going to split the review up into 2 parts so you didn’t have to scroll so far, owing to the sheer volume of new apps that turned up in the App Store. I’m not going to do that this time, even though there are even more apps to plow through. 42, to be exact. (I’m sure Deep Thought had something to do with that, which can only mean that Earth is close to achieving the purpose for which it was built.) So limber up your scroll fingers, folks, and keep an eye out for Vogons. It’s going to be a long (but fun-filled) ride as we explore still yet more of the latest freebies to show up in our favourite shop. You did remember your towel, yes?
I tried to get Garrett Morris to provide interpretation for the hearing impaired in this roundup, but he was busy being old.
Developer: oeFun, Inc.
Category: Entertainment
Okay. I admit it. This is kinda cool. It has no practical function whatsoever. It’s a desktop toy that you can play around with to waste a bit of time or relieve stress or whatever you want to do with it. It exists as a 5×7 grid of OpenGL-accelerated wooden blocks which have symbols on most of their faces. (There’s a blank on each block.) You can spin individual cubes horizontally or vertically, or run your finger around the grid to spin a bunch at once. Maybe try and get all of the faces the same, or create some sort of pattern with them, just for the hell of it. Of curious note is its subtle but interesting use of the accelerometer. If you lay your device flat against a table, you can tilt the device in any direction and the perspective of the grid will shift in an almost believable simulation of real 3D. Unfortunately it only works if it’s horizontal; it responds when viewed vertically, but it shifts in the wrong directions. Hopefully the author can get that fixed. Still, this is quite a fun and very well-presented little toy, well worth checking out.
Developer: Jeff Hamilton
Category: Sports
For you sports nuts who obsessively check game stores from various leagues and matches, this one’s for you. Sportacular gives you up-to-the-minute scores for pro and college sporting events. Monitor the latest scores from the MLB, NHL, NFL, and NBA. You’ll also get the league and conference standings for these and the NCAA top 25 updated on a daily basis. You can even create your own groups to monitor your favourite players and/or create fantasy leagues. Face paint and foam finger sold separately.
Developer: Newton Japan Inc.
Category: Music
Forget More Cowbell. Newton Japan wants to give you all kinds of sounds you can throttle your device to play. Mandolins, basic drums, “Back Roads” and other sounds are available here. Just select the sound you want to hear and shake your device to play it. It includes entire snippets here, so it’s not a one-off sound, so that kind of limits its usefulness and novelty. I can’t really see Christopher Walken asking for more “Beachside steel drum.”
Developer: Seventy Nine Lines
Category: Games
Here’s your digital version of the classic wooden peg jumping game. Start off by picking a peg to remove to create an empty space, and then pick pegs to jump over other pegs to valid empty spaces in an attempt to attain the Last Peg Standing. Presentation here is quite effective — not amazingly artistic, but well done, and gameplay is as simple as the real thing: Tap to select a peg, tap again to deselect, or tap a valid empty space (represented by a “ghost” peg) to move. A fun and classic little time-wasting puzzler.
Developer: aingoppa
Category: Utilities
I don’t know what they’re talking about. I found Missing Calculator in three seconds. It’s not very good at this whole disappearance thing. Nevertheless, Missing Calculator is a programmer’s calculator, and provides the one mode that Firmware 2.0’s built-in calculator is missing. (Ohhh, now I get it…) Missing Calculator works on 64-bit integers and can display and function in decimal, hexidecimal and binary. Perform logical operations (AND, OR, NOR, XOR), bitwise calculations (byte flip, word flip, ROL, ROR), even show the ASCII representation of your current calculations. The button display is a bit crowded and plain, but it’s quite effective and very handy for coders out there who want a detatched programmer’s caculator that doesn’t take up screen real estate on their home computer while they code.
Developer: David M. Sydek
Category: Entertainment
It’s another magic 8-ball. You can put this with the three other magic 8-ball apps and the dozen or so flashlight apps you’ve collected so far. Will there be more magic 8-ball apps? “Most likely”.
Developer: MC Development
Category: Entertainment
I can has eye-fone app fur teh kittehz plz thx? LOLCats is, as you might have guessed, a LOLcat picture scrounger. Oddly, it scrounges Flickr for images tagged “lolcat” or “lolcats” and displays them in the app. Why he didn’t just provide an iPhone-formatted front-end for icanhascheezeburger.com I don’t know, but here you have it. If you need a daily dose of LOLcats to get you through your day, here’s an outlet for you, kthxbye.
Developer: Champion Gameware
Category: Entertainment
It’s … wood. A genuine picture of wood. You can knock on it if you really want to feed your superstition, but since you’ll technically be knocking on indium tin oxide-coated glass, you might be inviting bad luck to party instead of warding it off. No, this app doesn’t do anything more than display a picture of wood. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next. I envision “Throw Salt,” an application where you can shake your device to throw a virtual pinch of salt over your shoulder.
Developer: Houdah Software
Category: Games
Yep. Another Sudoku game — and a scaled down version of the full ACTSudoku at that. However, this one seems to do Sudoku up right, with an eye-catching display, support for pencil notes (of a sort; positive and negative possibilities are denoted as red and green squares on a grid), mathematically generated boards giving virtually unlimited gameplay, and an easy to play, no-brainer interface that takes the grunt work out of this game, leaving only the fun stuff. Well, fun assuming you like Sudoku, but if you do, this looks like the one to get.
Developer: JDub Studios LLC
Category: Entertainment
Your iPhone portal to all things Diggnation, Digg’s podcast. Whether you like watching the informative and sometimes amusing Diggnation podcasts or just want to laugh at Kevin Rose making more terrible predictions, Diggnation On The Go will keep you up to date with a chronological listing of all the latest Diggnation episodes.
Developer: Navigation
Category: Hans Schneider
One exclusively for the iPhone 3G, Speedbox utilizes the iPhone 3G’s AGPS to determine the speed at which you are travelling and display it on-screen. Great if your spedometer isn’t quite working, or maybe if you want to clock your rate of speed while you’re on a roller coaster or something. Also, this screenshot must have been taken while Hans was barreling down the Autobahn in his Bugatti Veryon.
Developer: Steven Troughton-Smith
Category: Navigation
Hey, look! A spedometer for the iPhone 3G! Haven’t seen that before. However, this one has a much cooler display, and it works in both portrait and landscape modes. Also, Steven is a much more careful driver. Yeah, he’s a good driver. Ten minutes to Wapner.
Developer: Igloo Games
Category: Games
Hey, this one ain’t bad, even if it’s just a 4-level demo of the full game. DizzyBee is an accelerometer-based game where the object is to free your “fruit friends” (hey, is that a gay joke?) while collecting flowers and avoiding bad dudes. All you need to do is rotate your device to move. Collect flowers as you go, gather your fruity pals together and return them to the exit portal. Baddies don’t actively pursue you, but they move and respond to gravity like you do, so you need to be careful not to inadvertently roll them into the path you’re planning on taking. The level designs, graphics and sounds are all quite good here, and it’s definitely one worth checking out.
Developer: Chudigi Software
Category: Games
Also known as Buzzword Bingo, this is a blank Bingo board with corporate buzzwords in each square. Whenever you’re at a boring meeting with a stuffed shirt who likes using buzzwords and want to spice it up a bit, yank this out and check off any square containing the buzzword he just used. Something tells me this would be much more interesting when played as a drinking game instead.
Developer: BlackBook Media Corp.
Category: Lifestyle
The BlackBook guide, in its online form, is a large database of curated reviews for various restaurants, bars, clubs, and hotels covering numerous major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, The Hamptons, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Honolulu, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington D.C. Hey! Canadian cities! Finally, someone who remembers there’s this big ol’ landmass north of New York with people and cities and everything. Nice. Nevertheless, the iPhone version of this uses the iPhone 3G’s location services to determine your location and present reviews of whatever is in your area (assuming you’re in one of the aforementioned cities.) They also have a private beta going where users who are selected for the beta program will be allowed to test out future social aspects that they are working on, including the ability to set flags to denote that you’re going to a particular place in the database, or that you’re already there, should you want to gather friends for a night out.
Developer: T. Ashley Software, LLC
Category: Business
EccoNote is a fairly simple audio note taker that you can use to take memos to yourself, record meetings, or whatever you want to use it for. Notes can be saved and given names for easy retrieval later on. This is a pretty no-frills app, and presently there’s no way to sync your recordings, but a future version plans to allow you to E-Mail notes to whomever you want.
Developer: Eniro Sverige Online AB
Category: Utilities
This ain’t Google Maps, but it will let you search their own map database (and presumably others) for business, people, phone numbers, speed cameras, subway stations, traffic information, road cameras and more. There’s not much to go on as to what sort of things are available where, so I guess you’ll just have to download it and try it for yourself.
Developer: Taptation
Category: Entertainment
A front-end for viewing Epic Fu episodes. Epic Fu is apparently some sort of web-based video podcast full of news/views/reviews/comedy/tips/tricks/zombies … kinda … things. I don’t know. I watched an episode. Or part of one, anyway. It failed to inspire me to finish writing this senten
Developer: Wet Leaf Software
Category: Entertainment
Esteem Aid is an application that displays a random message of self-affirmation designed to boost your confidence and self-esteem. Load it up and you’re presented with a message of unbridled enthusiasm that’s all about you — and if one compliment isn’t enough, shake and it’ll give you another one. But you don’t really need a piece of inanimate, impersonal software to do that, do you? No, of course you don’t, because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggonnit, people like you!
Developer: ezimba
Category: Photography
Okay. This is cool. Damn cool. Every iPhone user should have this. ezimba (which is so humble it doesn’t even consider itself a proper noun that needs capitalization) is kinda like what would happen if you took the Photoshop Filter menu, put it in its own applcation, and stuck it on the iPhone. ezimba features over 100 photo operations you can perform on any image in your photo library, including artistic effects (abstract art, sepia, charcoal, impressionist, etc.), various colourization effects, geometric effects (swirl, wave, implode, etc.), enhancements (accent, blur, soft light, brightness and contrast, sharpness, etc.), orientation and size operations (flip, rotate, transverse, etc.), transformations (melt, vignette, jigsaw, etc.) and even a “combination” section that applies various effects and overlays. But wait! There’s more! ezimba connects to its home server and downloads new effects whenever they become available, so it keeps expanding its capabilities. It even keeps an editing history so you can scroll through the changes you’ve made or return to your original image. My only complaint is that you can’t perform a fullscreen preview of your effects, so it’s hard to really gauge how your final image will look. It would be nice if you could tap on the image and have it zoom out to fullscreen so you can really see the results up close. Still, I try not to gush about applications, but not only is this one of the coolest non-game applications in the App Store, it’s free. Free! Go to the App Store and grab this. You need it. Everyone needs it.
Developer: Naoki Hiroshima
Category: Utilities
Yet another twitter app. This one serves only one purpose: To tweet captioned images. You pick a picture, add a caption, and tweet. That’s it. You can use one of several hosts for the images (Gyazickr, Flickr, Tumblr, Picassa, Gyazo) which is good I suppose. But that’s about as far as this thing goes as far as utility and features. You can’t read your incoming tweets or view your uploaded pictures; it’s just for tweeting images with captions.
Developer: PosiMotion
Category: Entertainment
It’s a kaleidoscope for your iPhone. Boot it up and rotate your device like a real kaleidoscope for some trippy visuals. You can also drag your finger along the screen. To get the full effect though, make sure you have Pink Floyd’s Echoes playing when you load this thing up. (Pharmaceuticals optional) There’s also a full version of this for a deuce that has more features, such as manual or automatic modes, zooming, and freeze mode.
Developer: Jirbo, Inc.
Category: Entertainment
Those weasely folks at Jirbo are back with another mediocre game. This time it’s yet another labyrinth game with a timer and variable-sized holes, online high score submission, whimsical graphics and stuff. Meh. This is the “lite” verison which contains only 15 levels.
Developer: NeoMedia Technologies, Inc.
Category: Productivity
The second (free) 2D barcode reader to turn up in the App Store, but I still think they’re cool. Snap a picture of a 2D bar code and NeoReader will contact its central database and deliver the goods on the product the barcode is attached to. NeoReader supports Data Matrix, QR and Aztec codes, so pretty much anything with a 2D bar code will be covered here.
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: Productivity
Upcoming will gather all of the people in your address book and list their birthdays, anniversaries, or other events you have penciled into their personal information. That’s pretty much it, really. Sorry, I’m all out of cookies, but look! Here’s Garrett Morris!
Developer: Rudolf Psenicnik
Category: Utilities
In case you’re still feeding a chronic WoW addiction and want something to feed the withdrawal symptoms while you’re trying to enjoy your weekly trip into the sunlight, Warcraft Characters lets you view basic information about in-game characters, including avatar, stats, combat information, talents, professions, and more. It can cache information it retrieves so you can view it later even if you’re offline — perfect for Touch users who aren’t always in a WiFi-enabled area.
Developer: Yan-David Erlich
Category: Entertainment
Can’t get enough dirt on your favourite navel-gazing celebrities? You need a hobby. But until there’s a 12-stepper for this kind of thing, you can download Celebrity Gossip, an aggregator that collects the latest dish from TMZ, Perez Hilton, DListed, PopSugar, and others, and presents them to you in an easy-to-digest RSS style reader. Now you can read about Amy Winehouse hoovering coke off her own saggy cleavage anywhere, any time!
Developer: David Bannach
Category: Lifestyle
ClockArt is a clock — sorta. It displays a whole bunch of random lines, one small subset of which will form the time. Part of it anyway — the hour. No minutes or seconds. You can swivel around the lines by tapping and dragging around the screen. Interesting for about the first thirty seconds. Longer if you’ve taken the necessary steps to get the full effect out of the Kaledoscope app.
Developer: AOL
Category: Entertainment
It’s a virtual fortune cookie from everyone’s favourite crap ISP, AOL. Admittedly, the graphics are pretty top-notch here, and the animation is slick. Drag the cookie around, break it open with two fingers, and a sometimes strange or amusing fortune will be revealed. You can even share your fortunes with others. I hate AOL, but this is kind of an amusing little app.
Developer: Josiah Larson
Category: Entertainment
Here’s a simple doodle app for you. It features some simplistic tools (pen, line, blob, rectangle, and oval), a basic colour picker, and the ability to flood fill (which I couldn’t get to work.) One of its unique features is the ability to set the transparency of a given colour, so you can paint semi-transparent areas for added effect. Otherwise, it’s quite simplistic — but maybe you can spice the resulting image you save up with ezimba.
Developer: Conner Wakamo
Category: Finance
If you’re looking for a simple chequebook register app, this is it. Balance will let you set a current balance from your bank account, and from then on let you add credits and debits to keep track of your expenditures and keep a close eye on your bottom line. My bottom line is usually depressing, so I tend not to keep track of it. Ignorance is bliss.
Developer: Aaron Berk
Category: Entertianment
You press the button. The button issues a James Brown-esque “Waaoooo!” You press the button. The button issues a James Brown-esque “Waaoooo!” You press the button. The button issues a James Brown-esque “Waaoooo!” You uninstall Wooo Button in defiance of the author’s description and try not to think about the time you just wasted on it.
Developer: Confluentlight
Category: Games
When I noted this article in my list to write about, it was free. Now that I’ve gotten down the list as I write the article, it is no longer free, but costs a dollar. As a result of this, I am not going to review it. I’m only keeping it here both to note its change of status, and to maintain the number of apps in this list so I don’t have to rewrite the introduction.
Developer: Klick
Category: Photography
Klick is another Flickr-interfacing app that lets you view and upload your geotagged photos to your Flickr account. This app’s main emphasis is on the fact that it can search Flicker for other geotagged photos that are in your geographical vicinity and let you browse them. You can mark your favourites for later browsing, and even create your own custom slideshows. Handy if you’re in an area you are unfamiliar with and want to see if other people have any pictures of the area that might interest you. Based on one of the screenshots, it appears that it can also display any comments made on the photos, which is also kinda nifty.
Developer: PHD Gaming
Category: Games
Here’s an educational game that actually feels more like a game than an educational tool. EDU Blaster is in the vein of a twitch shooter where you must tap things to destroy them as they appear on screen. The trick is that the objects are numbers, and the ones you tap must agree with the short mathematical equation listed at the top left, which take a “solve for x” approach, where anything that matches “x” must be blasted, as depicted in the screenshot here. The graphics are relatively simple but effective and even kids who hate math should be able to find some enjoyment out of this. Heck, even adults should enjoy it.
Developer: Bliin
Category: Social Networking
Another geo-aware social app. Find friends and services in your immediate area using the iPhone 3G’s AGPS, share geo-tagged photos, record GPS trips, create and join groups, store location-based bookmarks, realtime content, and so on. Seems decent enough and offers a few unique features over some of the other geo-social apps.
Developer: Sprikit
Category: News
A front-end for Digg that lets you browse the latest stories, browse by the 8 standard categories, view images and comments natively, send E-Mail links, open pages in Safari, and more. If you’re into Digg, this is better than a simple RSS feed.
Developer: xCube Labs
Category: Games
I like this game. I’ve played similar games on the Palm and PocketPC platforms, so it’s nice to see one turn up here, especially one that adds some new features. The object of the game is similar to SameGame/Jawbreaker: Tap on boxes that are connected to at least two other boxes of the same colour to eliminate them from the screen and bring the boxes above them down — but watch where you tap, because making an invalid move (tapping on only one or two boxes) will penalize your score. You don’t get a full screen of boxes though. Instead, they rise up from the bottom line by line in a continuous chain, so you need to stay on top of the pile to make sure no single column reaches the top, or else it’s game over. Fire Drop also adds some extras into the traditional mix: Each successive level earns you tokens which you can put towards buying powerups that will assist you in the game. You can also earn tokens by accomplishing the instructions in the Jackpot box, such as breaking a certain number of boxes with one tap. The graphics are effective, though could be a little smoother or nicer (such as the elimination animations) but functionally, the game plays very well and it can get quite addictive. Definitely worth checking out.
Developer: osXwerk.de
Category: Utilities
Not to be outdone by Erica Sadun, osXwerk.de has decided to compete in the font viewing arena by releasing almost exactly the same app. View the currently installed fonts at variable type sizes. Once again, this is really mainly for developers; the average user might want it for curiosity’s sake, but otherwise, it’s not very useful for the average Joe.
Developer: iTrans
Category: Navigation
For you New Yorkers wishing for a pocket guide to the warren that is the New York subway system, here’s your guide. It presents you with a zoomable, vector-based map of the New York subway system with the various lines colour coded and subway stops clearly marked. This is the “lite” version of the more robust full version of the app, which features directions, schedules, service advisories, and more. It’s a bit spendy at $9.99, though, especially for such a targeted app, so if you just want a nice zoomable map, this should be all you need.
Developer: Metromix.com
Category: Entertainment
Another location-aware app that will use the iPhone 3G’s AGPS to find the nearest bars, clubs, restaurants, and more. You can search for what you’re after, browse by category, see user ratings, get info on a particular establishment, and more. Like many such apps, this one’s limited to a few select cities around the US, including Atlanta GA, Baltimore MD, Chigago IL, Detroit MI, Los Angeles CA, New York NY, Orlando FL, and South Florida.
Developer: dlp Art
Category: Games
I was terribly disappointed when I downloaded this app and found that it didn’t contain any Mick Jagger whatsoever. What it did contain though was the ancient Chinese game of Go (also known as Gomoku. Check the link for game rules) It features relatively simplistic but effective presentation, and lets you play on a small 9×9, medium 13×13, or a full-sized 19×19 board. Placement and movement of pieces is simple and intuitive, and you can drag a piece back to the bowl to undo a move you have just made but haven’t committed. If you like strategic board games, this is it. Now if only someone would do up a nice Pente game.
BONUS TRIVIA: Atari, the grandfather of the video game industry, derived its name from the game of Go. Founder Nolan Bushnell was a big fan of the game, and took one of the game’s calls, “Atari!” as his company name. Atari essentially means, “your piece is in jeopardy” which is roughly the equivalent of calling “check” in the game of chess.
Wow. Would you believe we’re done here? Finished? Roger, over and out? I can’t. Neither can my fingers; they’re crying with joy at having reached the end of this arduous journey. But it’s done out of love. Love and an overabundance of geekitude. Their sacrifice is your gain. In the mean time, we’ll see y’all again in a couple of days. So long and thanks for all the fish.
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Posted in Application Related, Entertaining, Free App Store Review, Gaming Related, Round Ups, app store, iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G, iPhone Related
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August 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Haha ‘a good driver’, indeed =P
Thanks for featuring my app. Just wait till you see what I have in store ;-)
-S
August 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 am
Anytime, Steve.
I see you’ve got quite a few things on the go. Nuker? Naughty boy indeed. 
Stacks looks great — still have it on my 1.1.4 iPhone; pity it’ll never make it past Apple’s vetting process, ‘cos it’s a feature Apple should really bring to Darwin. Doom will always be aweseome, assuming Carmack blesses the license. (He seems to be busy with his own projects anyway, so who knows?) Lights Off would obviously be a hit in the App Store, especially since the only other one I see there is some crap version.
Hope to see more from you!
August 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am
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