Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, App Store

Gameloft isn't the only company having a sale this week -- Capcom has also put most of its iPhone titles on sale for Comic-Con: You can pick up the great Phoenix Wright for just $2.99, Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Dark Void Zero and Mega Man 2 for just 99 cents, or Street Fighter IV for $6.99.

Good set of deals to choose from there. I think that big EA sale a while back set a precedent for price drops like this -- a nice discount on a game quite a few people have been waiting to play can definitely send it catapulting into the top lists on the App Store. Phoenix Wright is definitely worth $3 if you've never played it before, so that title specifically should really benefit from a sale like this.

TUAWCapcom iPhone games on sale originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone, App Review

Sure, you'd love to be able to check and answer your email while you're driving. But fortunately for the rest of us, many countries, states, and municipalities have made the act of reading and tapping out emails on your iPhone while driving illegal. Hands Free Software has come up with a solution that not only reads your incoming mail to you, but allows you to reply to those emails through voice.

Text'nDrive Pro for iPhone (US$19.99) works with a single email account, scanning its inbox to see if any new messages have arrived. If there's something new, it reads the message to you and then lets you reply to it if you wish. After receiving a review version of the application from Hands Free, I installed it on my iPhone 4 and then promptly got into my car and drove away. Within a minute or two, I heard a rather loud and obviously computerized male voice that I knew was not my wife speaking. Sure enough, Text'nDrive Pro had received a new email in my MobileMe inbox and proceeded to read it to me.

While I was able to ascertain what the voice was saying from the speaker of my iPhone, Text'nDrive Pro does work with all Bluetooth headsets and hands-free kits, so you can customize the way that you listen to the spoken emails and prompts to your preferences.

TUAWTUAW review: Email while driving with Text'nDrive Pro for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Mac 101

Here's a neat trick if you want to zoom in on an image while using Quick Look. Hold down the Option key while your mouse is hovered over the image, and it will change to a magnifying glass. Once you've zoomed in, drag the cursor, use the scroll wheel, or two fingers on a trackpad to move around the image. Press Option-Shift, and then click on the picture to zoom out.

To see this tip in action, check out the brief video above. Nothing too complicated, but definitely a fun and easy way, built directly into the OS, to browse around and inspect a picture file without opening a much heftier app like Photoshop.

[Via Mac OS X Hints]

TUAWMac 101: Zoom in and out while in Quick Look originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The global leading developer of network- and multimedia-centric computer products, LaCie has announced the launch of its new ultra-rugged USB thumb key that is crafted to deliver industrial-strength, ultimate protection for your important, precious data, named as LaCie XtremKey, which the company claims as the world’s most adventurous USB flash drive, encased in a super [...]

• LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive
• LaCie Rugged Safe Shockproof External HDD With Fingerprint Access And 128-bit AES Encryption
• LaCie Rugged
• LaCie Rikiki Ultra-Compact 2.5″ Mobile Hard Drive With USB Boost Software
• Key-Shape LaCie iamaKey for Absent Minded People

Filed under: iPhone

Lots of folks are happy that the new iPhone 4 has an improved camera, coming at us at a snazzy 5MP, a whole two more than its predecessor. But, alas, it's still just a camera in a phone, with a teeny-tiny lens with no manual focus or zooming options. But ... what if you could put an adjustable lens over that teeny-tiny lens to get what you want?

A fella over at iPhoneDSLR.com has been working on a prototype housing for the iPhone that allows for attaching Canon EF lenses. Y'know, those big honkin' ones you see on the Canon DSLR cameras. Basically -- in theory, at least -- the iPhone lens focuses through the SLR lens, and you can manually focus and zoom the Canon lens as needed.

Definitely a neat idea, though, if you follow what he's doing, he's hitting a couple of snags. One major one being that the iPhone camera is unable to focus on the image projected by the Canon lens. Though the inventor of the housing admits he's by no means a professional photographer, I'm definitely interested in seeing if he can get the help he needs to get this to work well enough to go to market.

TUAWAn iPhone DSLR prototype housing hits snags originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone

I just got off the phone with Victor Agreda, a call I made on my iPhone 4 using a third-party rebranded AT&T SIM. As you can see from the screen shot above, I wasn't using a standard iPhone SIM. Instead, I placed my call via a $10 Best Buy SIM, which displays as O2 in the US.

How did that happen? After all, a standard SIM doesn't fit in the iPhone 4. I used a Noosy SIM cutter provided by MicroSIMCutter to resize the card to microSIM proportions.

TUAWCut a standard SIM down to iPhone 4/iPad size originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone

I've spoken of my Trailguru love in the past. It's a simple GPS application that has, unfortunately, seemed to drop off the radar at least as far as software updates are concerned. I know its creator is still on the scene -- because I can track his bike runs on the trailguru.com website -- but the iPhone application languishes. That's a big shame, because I have friends on trailguru.com and I have localized months and months of progress there. The site isn't polished or perfect, but I really do like using it.

Today, however, I discovered something fabulous. I learned that Runmeter -- an otherwise excellent application without a cobranded website -- can export its trails to gpx files and e-mail them off. Why is that so exciting?

Well, it means that I can use the Runmeter app on my iPhone 4 -- running in the background using iOS "multitasking" -- and then later send my results up to the Trailguru site via my desktop system. I e-mail them to myself and then use the Trailguru webpage to load the gpx files.

TUAWFrankenguru: Exporting Runmeter data to Trailguru originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

Evernote announced a new extension to their platform today, Trunk. It's essentially an App Store for Evernote, highlighting applications, hardware and platforms created by third parties which integrate with Evernote in various ways. Trunk offers easy access to new tech for users, as well as a means for third-party developers to capitalize on their work.

Evernote has been a shining example of making good on the "Freemium" business model, where you offer a basic service for free and provide an upgrade path to paid plans (in Evernote's case, a $5 per month Premium plan). It's a very common business model on the 'net, but not everyone manages to turn a profit on it to the extent that Evernote has. The announcement of the Evernote Trunk includes the promise of an App-Store-esque model for developers to make money and share in profits.

Among the developers featured on the Trunk and in today's press conference were Egretlist, Voice2Note, SAP StreamWork and social application Seesmic. The latest version of the Evernote Mac client has a button in the top toolbar for Trunk, where you can see services, mobile and desktop apps and hardware which can be added to Evernote to expand its functionality. Some services are free, some are premium. Voice2Note, for example, adds search to voice notes and the ability to add notes via your phone. 5 transcriptions per month are free, but you pay about $30 a year for unlimited transcriptions plus the ability to tag notes by adding "tag with..." to the end of an audio note.

Social notebooks from the likes of BlackBook and Make Magazine are now available through Trunk as well. Evernote also mentions potential future enhancements such suggestions (similar to SpringPad, I assume) and semantic analysis.

Notable, but not part of any press coverage today, is a change in the tag display of the new Mac client. Selecting View > Show Unassigned Tags will trim the visible tags in the sidebar down to just tags related to the current search or selected note. It's a major improvement to usability and one I'd been hoping would show up for quite some time.

Evernote is a free service which can be upgraded to transfer 500MB per month and store any type of file for $5US per month or $45US per year. The desktop client for Mac is free, and so are the iPhone and iPad versions (the iPad app is especially cool). Take a look, and check out the Trunk to see what functionality you might want to add to Evernote.

TUAWAnnouncing Trunk, an app store for Evernote originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Developer, iPhone

Unity CEO David Helgason gave a talk at the Develop conference, going on this week in Brighton, England, and had some harsh words for Steve Jobs on supporting iPhone gaming. Jobs previously said that using "middleware" like Unity to develop iPhone games "produces sub-standard apps," but Helgason fires back that Jobs "doesn't understand the economics of game development fundamentally." Most developers, Helgason seems to be saying, can't be jack-of-all-trades with their code -- they need libraries like Unity to do some of the lifting, especially on smaller-scale platforms like the App Store.

Stuart Dredge at Mobile Entertainment is doing a great job of covering all of the other iPhone gaming news coming out of Develop as well -- he's got talks by the developers of Ngmoco's Godfinger, Rolando's Simon Oliver, and Ideaworks Game Studio, the company that brought World at War: Zombies to the iPhone for Activision (that last talk sounds similar to the one we saw earlier this year at GDC).

If there's a theme among everything developers are saying, it's probably that they're finding flexibility a must on the App Store -- while an app may be developed with one feature or pay model in mind, things often have to change quickly during development or even after the app goes live. Lots of interesting things to read in there if you're interested in iPhone game development.

TUAWUnity CEO disses Jobs on gaming originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Bad Apple

If you were looking for a message thread on Apple's support forums pointing to Consumer Reports' article 'not recommending' the iPhone 4, it's not there any more. Apple's support forum moderators deleted the thread. Bing cached it.

If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?

I'm not prone to hysterics or a subscriber to conspiracy theories, but it's fairly hard to imagine any good way to interpret this. Every post that I saw listed in a Google search of Apple's discussion boards lead to the same result: "Error: you do not have permission to view the requested forum or category."

Sadly, this isn't the first time we've heard about Apple deleting discussion board threads on topics which are unflattering to Apple's products. It's closer to the fiftieth time. In fact, we've heard so many reports about this happening that it seems safe to call this standard operating procedure for Apple's discussion boards. That's not to say that there are no negative threads on the discussion boards, but the ones that are there are the ones that Apple's moderators have decided to leave active.

It's hard to imagine what Apple hopes to gain by doing this. Instead of having one negative news story, now we have two: not only did Consumer Reports come out and say they don't recommend the iPhone 4, but now Apple seems to be trying to prevent people from talking about it on their support board.

Want some overwrought comparisons to Orwell's 1984? Apple seems to be begging for it.

Thanks to reader Paul Richards for pointing this out.

TUAWApple drops Consumer Reports/iPhone 4 discussion threads down memory hole originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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