The Free App Store Review XVI: Chunk the First: Late to the Party
by Eric March on September 6, 2008 at 5:09 pm
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m late. Quite late. No, the Free App Store review hasn’t disappeared, there’s just been a combination of a lot on my plate and not enough sleep to energize me to the point where I was able to deal with it all. With the contest wrapping up, changes to the site, and a few other nameless but large projects on the go, some thing have just had to take a back seat. Also, I’d managed to do 36 entries for this review when clicking on a particular link (not related to the review) crashed FireFox, and despite the fact that I’d saved my draft in ScribeFire (the blogging plugin I use) it still manage to lose everything except the first 15, so I was kinda pissed. Nonetheless, here we are again with another Free App Store Review. This one isn’t going to be as large, as I’m going to play catch-up in chunks, this being the first, wherein the first 26 apps I’ve accumulated will be run down. So let’s waste no more time with my blathering and get this party started.
Oh, and your fly is open.
Developer: Iron Square
Category: Games
I don’t normally do updates. I have enough on my plate with just this article alone to bother following every app update. However, because Iron Square’s James Farrand went to so much trouble to play E-Mail tag with me about my last review, having been suitably abashed by its shortcomings, I promised him I’d give it another chance, so I’ll just get this one out of the way first. His explanation for prior issues was that a beta version of the question database which hadn’t properly been vetted made its way into the initial demo. Now however, as his update description explains, the question database does seem to have been properly spellchecked and edited for grammar (with the exception of that “486 person computer”, the change for which didn’t make it into this release of the Lite version, but is corrected in the full version.) As atonement for their linguistic sins, Iron Square have offered up an extra 30 questions for the Lite version to give it a bit of extra longevity in the hands of freebie hunters. They’ve also added a mute toggle in-game, which is good, but they still aren’t obeying the iPhone’s mute switch state, which is not, and the game doesn’t remember its own audio toggle state between sessions, which is even less so. It means that at the very least you’ll get blasted with the title music before you have a chance to shut it off, so cover the iPhone’s speaker well if you want to play in a situation where you don’t want anyone else to know that you are. Mr. Trivia is stlll a pretty cool quiz game despite its dwindling shortcomings. It’s polished-looking, enjoyable, and big ups to Iron Square for taking the time to address concerns, but there’s still a bit of work to do before it has that mirror shine. It’s worth noting that they’ve just released Mr. Trivia Kids for a buck as well, so your little carpet surfers (or you, if you like to hang ten on the burbur) can get their trivia on, too.
Developer: Blue Ox Technologies, Ltd.
Category: Games
Concentration? With møøse? Why yes, yes it is. Apparently this is an iPhone/Touch version of a Windows game of the same name that was released around a decade ago. I don’t think I need to say much about the gameplay, excepting perhaps that this one is a little harder due to the fact that the møøse you need to match have more subtle differences, like different outfits, bows in the hair, hats, and so on. I suppose it’s a bit like a cross between concentration and Spot the Difference. Graphically it’s quite 8-bittish, with simplistic, MS-Paint-like visuals and no animations to lend a bit of eye balm to the otherwise stark presentation. There’s no sound to speak of. The $2 full version features different graphic sets, the ability to set peek time (how long the cards stay upturned), backgrounds and sound toggle. Which I guess means the full verison also has sound. Meh. If you really love møøse then you might think the $2 is worth it. Otherwise you can stick with this lite version. Just be careful around them. Møøse bites kan be pretty nasti.
Developer: Coleman Segal
Category: Education
One for the kiddies, miTables teaches your ankle biters the concept of multiplication through this simple app, which poses a question based on a particular number in the multiplication table and gives them multiple choice answers to choose from. Right now it’s all just a guessing game for the kiddies who haven’t really mastered the principles yet, but the next version (which the author suggests will not be free) will feature a real educational element that will give them hints and teach them why 4×6=24. Teaching them why Uncle Frank + (beer x 12) = jackass will be reserved for another app.
Developer: David Rahardja
Category: Utilities
Are you the sort of person who checks Woot! on a daily basis to find out what the latest deal is? Well, now you can check it a little bit easier with this little app, which will display the Woot! of the day. It displays only the most basic information — item, price, and a picture, with a link to refresh and to go to Woot!’s website. His next version is already in review and supposedly will feature a better UI and include descriptions with item views. David also appears to be planing support for shirt.woot! and wine.woot!.
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: Productivity.
This, evidently, is a 2008 Tamil calendar featuring actual scans of the daily sheets themselves. I suppose I’d have to be Sri Lankan to understand what this is, so I’ve had to rely on Wikipedia to explain that the Tamil calendar comes pre-marked with cultural, religious and agricultural events. I will admit though that I do not understand the significance of having the actual scanned pages instead of a digital app. Language barrier, perhaps? I dunno, but I guess if this has any relevance to you at all, you don’t need me to explain it.
Developer: Hudson Soft
Category: Games
Et tu, Hudson? Well, yeah, I guess so, because here it is. A Sudoku game with a splash of Hudson’s cartoony flair. There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot here to differentiate itself from the rest of the Sudoku pack, save maybe landscape support and a few helpful visual cues. Otherwise, well … it’s Sudoku. Full versions are available in two different volumes (presumably containing different puzzles) for a fairly hefty $6 apiece.
Developer: CondéNet
Category: Lifestyle
For those that love following the latest trends in haute couture. Style.com is here to give you the latest on all of the trends hot off the runways of Paris. Pick a season and a designer and then flip through photos, watch slideshows, peep at videos hoping for a “wardrobe malfunction,” or read the Style File blog. Chanel, Dior, Lagerfeld, Givenchy, Gautier, darling, names, names, names! (Can you believe I know how to spell everyone in that pop ref without looking them up? I’m afraid of what that says about me.)
Developer: Neon Surge
Category: Games
Neon Surge, the coder behind the forthcoming LED Football, are no strangers to the programming scene. The full version of SolarQuest has been available in the App Store for a bit now for $2.99, but this is the first demo that’s been available for it. It looks like a modernized version of the classic Defender, but it isn’t. In SolarQuest, you have to fly your ship around floating barriers while avoiding undulating ceiling and ground (in some levels) and collecting pickups for bonus points as you go. A radar at the top tells you generally what’s ahead of you. You have three lives and some shield to help cushion the blow if you miss some obstacles, so no instant deaths to surprise you. Graphically, this game is pretty polished. It uses OpenGL to render objects, even though it’s primarily a side-scrolling game, but that does add a bit of a sense of depth. Some gorgeous backgrounds populate the various levels, and the objects are well rendered. Controls are very simple, too. Accelerometer control up and down to control vertical thrust, and one button on your right to control lateral thrust. It’s a very well-done title, if a little simplistic in its goals — but perhaps that’s part of its charm; it looks like an involved space shooter but ends up being something of a casual game you can pick up, play for a few minutes, and put down as desired. Definitely worth the three bucks if you want the full version, and absolutely worth checking out the Lite version.
Developer: MobileAge
Category: Games
Although I’m not sure I would classify this as the best playing Shanghai game in the App Store (I’d have to give that to Moonlight Mahjong for their use of 3D in the gameplay), it’s certainly the most extensible. The full version features the ability to change board layout, choose custom tile graphics, and background images. From my counts, there are 128 tile layouts (the description says 160, but I don’t see it), 33 tileset graphics, and 66 background images to choose from — and the numbers are growing all the time. That’s pretty impressive. The demo version limits you to one “QuickSolve” layout — which, as its name suggests, is really easy to solve, and you don’t have a choice of tile layouts. You do still have access to all of the backgrounds and tileset images though, which is really cool of MobileAge not to restrict that to the full version. (Granted, with only one really easy layout to play with, it’s not a whole lot of fun ’til you purchase the full thing, which will set you back a fiver.) There’s also an innovative gameplay mode called “Windstorm,” which presents a compass in the lower left of the screen. Whichever way the compass is pointing determines how tiles can move. Up and down, and tiles can only move if they are not restricted vertically. Left and right, and it’s the standard mode of play. If it’s pointing in all directions however, you can move tiles in any of the four directions. Definitely shakes up gameplay a bit. I’d even say the full version is worth the dosh.
Developer: Johan Nordberg
Category: Utilities
Well there’s an interesting, though not entirely unexpected twist to accelerometer use: A seismometer. (That’s one of those things that measures vibrations, typically associated with earthquakes.) Run it, and it will measure seismic activity using a rolling logarhythmic scale and displays the results the same way a standard electronic seismometer does, using a virtual plotter pen and a rolling sheet of delineated graph paper. It’s more on the nature of a toy though, since it doesn’t keep a history of actvity — once it scrolls off the screen, it’s gone. It also doesn’t factor in the accelerometer’s notoriously twitchy readings even when it’s at rest — which he could do by averaging out initial readings to create a baseline calibration level to dampen the results, so even when there’s no seismic activity at all, it will still plot the twitchy readings. Still, fun to play with for a bit, and is presented very well, but it would be more practical with damping and the ability to scroll through the history, along with maybe a timeline.
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: News
A “lite” version of India News, which fetches news feeds from Indian news site The Hindu. The $1 full version features more feeds. Since there’s not much more to say about this one, here is Daler Mehndi to fill the remaining time. For those that don’t understand it, please enjoy Bufflax’s “translation.”
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: Sports
Muthu certainly has the whole India news feed market locked down. Here, he’s covering Cricket feeds, featuring live scores and related news pulled from CricInfo. Despite the lack of a “lite” qualifier, this is a scaled down version of $1 Cricket app, which covers Cricket in other countries.
Developer: SHAPE Services
Category: Social Networking
A multi-messenger app featuring the ability to communicate over AIM, iChat, MSN/Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, GoogleTalk, and MySpaceIM. It’s a nice little app, but it is cut off at the knees both by instability (which may or may not be related to Firmware 2.x’s notorious instability issues) and, through no fault of its own, its inability to communicate in the background or while your device is in standby mode. It’s fine if you’re going to stick around somewhere long enough to chat and don’t mind keeping your device on to do so, but as soon as you hop into standby mode, it will lose its connection after a few moments. One bug I did notice is that if you do come back from Standby and IM+ has jumped into offline mode, it won’t re-enter online mode — it says it can’t find the network, even though I can load other things over the network just fine. I had to exit IM+, hop on the 3G network with Safari and load something, then quit and reload IM+ before it was able to get online again. Not particularly cool. When Push Notification becomes a reality, IM+’s functionality will be of much greater use — assuming the connection bug can be worked out — but until then only grab it if you don’t mind keep the app open and active while using it.
Developer: Gigotron
Category: Music
A pretty cool little app that will give you all of the music and comedy gigs playing near you. You can select by city, genre, artist, or venue to narrow down just what you’re looking for — or have it make a random pick and discover new bands or comedians. It is currently limited to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, though the author is working on adding more cities soon, and your location isn’t determined by Location Services, so you’ll have to set your city the old fashioned way — by hand.
Developer: HappyAppy
Category: Games
An iPhone/Touch version of a similar casual Flash game where the object is to tap and hold in order grow a bubble (or in this case, a bleak, gray happy face) while avoiding bouncing red thingies. Your bubble/emo happy face will keep growing so long as you keep your finger held down, but if a red thingy touches it, it pops/cuts itself, so you have to let go before one does. It’s a pretty simple and moderately fun little game. Unfortunately mine won’t run anymore for some reason. I played it once, then it just crashed when I tried running it again later. Even after deleting it and reinstalling it, Mr. EmoFace won’t show up. I guess it learned “down the road, not across the street” after all.
Developer: Ronny Pflug
Category: Health & Fitness
I’m not djrunk. I’ve only ‘ad two … three … eight … teen be–eers, ociffer. She? This aklo … akolol … lolcolol … booze thingie says … uh … oh crap. BAC Calc is a little app that’s supposed to let you get a very rough estimate of your blood-alcohol concenration based on your gender, weight, and alcohol content of the drink (in percent) by volume. Unfortunately, it seems to be just a wee bit off. As the screenshot here suggests, a 578ml bottle of 5% beer consumed by a 60Kg male will send your BAC level into the record books — posthumously. On the plus side, if you take this app’s results at face value, you should be okay if you wait half an hour after drinking a shotglass of beer. Just imagine the beer belly you’ll save yourself.
Developer: Fervid Software
Category: Games
Alea is an utterly plain, no-frills 2d6 dice roller with simple graphics, no sound, no gimmicks, no shaking, and, the author points out, “no unpleasant bending.” I don’t know what the author is doing, but if I’m involved in a game that requires unpleasant bending, I’m either playing Twister (which uses a spinner, not dice), or I’m an unwilling participant in something entirely less enjoyable and I’m not going to be too interested in rolling any bones for a while.
Developer: Olaf Schneider
Category: Games
If the description was to be believed, I was going to be in for a potentially interesting puzzler that might be a twist on another certain game. Instead, what I got was a straightup Bejeweled clone with an ancient Egyptian theme. About the only thing that sets this one apart is the fact that you can move blocks around whatever else is going on, so even as the animation is playing for a completed group you can still move tiles around and make other groups. It’s a nice little addition, but hardly the sort of thing the average person would even notice, so generally speaking, it’s Bejeweled with heiroglyphs.
Developer: Hoofien
Category: Utilities
So many dirty jokes, so little time. But this is a family-oriented blog, more or less, and I make at least a passing attempt at keeping things clean and relatively free from blatantly offensive content, so I’m going to try very hard to avoid the obvious quips here. SnatchTest is a free version of Snatch (*nkkkh*), which is effectively the Mac answer to the most excellent Touchpad app we Windows users have enjoyed through the jailbreak scene since last February. The main difference with Snatch (*hrrgh*) is that it runs its own small Mac-based server (a free download) rather than a more common VNC application. That has the advantage of being pretty much configuration-free however, since you don’t need to configure a VNC client, which can be a little daunting for newbies. Once all set up, you can control your mouse and keyboard on your Mac running OS X Tiger (10.4) or Leopard. This lite version of Snatch (can’t … hold on … much … longer) does not include mouse scrolling or keyboard support, so if you want those, you’ll have to pony up $6 for the full version. TWUNT CAVE HOO-HA MARINA’S TRENCH FRONT BUM VAGINA.
Developer: deathraypizza
Category: Health & Fitness
Those of you who are hoping that this is an app to search for the nearest watering holes for your next pub crawl are going to be sorely disappointed. Those of you in the scientific or medical profession, or those studying to do so, however should like it. PubSearch is a simple, fast app to search millions of research papers stored in the massive PubMed database. The author states that this first version is a free app, which suggests that future versions will likely be pay, so if this is the sort of thing that interests you, it would be wise to grab it now before it’s updated. Also, this may be the most curious combination of developer name and app title that I’ve seen — at least until drunkbastard’s Alcocolics Anonymous app comes out.
Developer: Sunflat
Category: Games
Poor Papi. He was tortured so badly in PapiJump that now he’s gotten all suicidal that he’s jumped in the river in an attempt to drown himself. But no. Now you have to steer him clear of the riverbanks and keep him alive for as long as possible, which turns out to be just as impossible to do in the long run as it was for him to reach the top in his previous game, so either way he’s doomed to death and you’re just prolonging the torture, you heartless bastard. But at least you get to enjoy some VIC-20-licious graphics here.
Developer: Sunflat
Category: Games
You just love torturing Mr. Red Ball Guy, don’t you? You know stuff like this is a precursor to becoming a serial killer. Just sayin’. So anyway, this time Papi managed to get himself impaled on a stick — no doubt one that was lodged between some rocks in the river you had him barrelling down. Now your task is to keep him upright on his stick chasing after hamburgers while avoiding falling spiked balls, which once again becomes an ultimately futile task since poor Papi will inevitably end up looking like the victim of some overzealous trepanation. Graphically, you’ve got a bit of clip-art mixed with a square that’s been treated to a bit of layer perspective, a canvas texture overlay and then hit with the bevel and emboss filter. You know, just to make Papi’s misery complete. All he needs now is for Jeff Dunham to come out and make him talk.
Developer: ias
Category: Social Networking
A Twitter-like app based on the me2DAY.net social networking site. Which is in Korean. So I guess if you’re Korean this might be of interest to you. That’s all there really is to say here, except maybe that I like Korean food, and now I have a craving for some delicious tom yum kung.
Developer: Nicholas Pike
Category: Social Networking
Yet another XBox Live buddy viewer which manages to set itself apart from the other three by having a different name and icon. You know, I suspect that apps like this, which are exactly like their contemporaries, being no better and no worse, are really just ways for developers to stroke their own egos by using apps they developed instead of someone else’s, even though the others do exactly the same thing.
Developer: Trisome
Category: Travel
If you aussies have been feeling a little left out by all of those cool traffic cameras being released for various US cities, here’s a little relief — at least, for those of you who live in, or are planning on travelling to Australia’s most well-known city. Also, this description is exactly 15 times longer than the author could manage.
Developer: sw engineer
Category: Education
Another resistance calculator where you can swipe at the colour bands and watch them change. It works I suppose, but since iResist does the same thing with a lot more style, you’re probably better off sticking with that.
Okay. Time to send this edition packing and start on the next. It’s been a slice. Or a chunk. Or whatever. See you in the next one!
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Posted in Application Related, Free App Store Review, Gaming Related, Round Ups, app store, iPhone Related
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September 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
You forgot “bajingo.” Lol, Scrubs.