Pocket Legends, I maintain, is one of iOS' best technical achievements. It's a full-featured MMO, in the style of the legendary World of Warcraft, available to play for free on Apple's App Store. It's huge among a certain audience (and in fact I've been told that audience is even bigger on the Android side of things), but I'm surprised that even more players haven't tried this game out and see what Spacetime Studios is working on.

Maybe this will help, though: to celebrate the game's one-year anniversary, Spacetime is opening up many of its normally premium content areas to all players for free. In a goofy video they made, developer Cinco Barnes says that all of the game's major premium areas will be open and playable to everyone until May 4.

If you haven't taken a look at this app yet, now's a great time to do so. Pocket Legends is free in a universal version, and definitely worth checking out.

Pocket Legends offers paid content for free originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Halfbrick Studios' iOS game Fruit Ninja continues to grow -- the Australian company announced that it has inked a deal to sell Fruit Ninja-flavored apparel in Hot Topic (the clothing store at the mall that's about as tacky as it gets). The deal was put together with licensing agent HAP Consulting, and there are four shirts available now (featuring slogans like "slicing fruit like a boss!" and "Fruit Ninja addict!"), with more on the way.

It's cool to see a big iOS property do well, but do they have to be that ... obvious? I'd like to see a more subtle kind of t-shirt, maybe just a few splotches in the front, or just a sliced watermelon emblem over the pocket. Maybe I'm just getting old -- I don't really want a t-shirt that's louder than, you know, my own voice.

If you don't share my concerns and want to show off a little Fruit Ninja love, the shirts can be picked up in stores, we're told, or on the website.

Fruit Ninja shirts appearing at Hot Topic originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Square is one of the coolest accessories made for the iPhone. It's a hardware/app combination that, when the hardware bit is plugged into the headphone jack on the iPhone, lets the user accept credit card payments.

Simply swipe the card through the Square device while running the Square iOS app and your customer's credit card is charged in moments. Beginning yesterday the Square Credit Card Reader became available on Apple's online store and, according to TechCrunch, it will be appearing in Apple retail stores this week; although TechCrunch says it will be the "only payments solution featured in the store," VeriFone's PAYware Mobile is already on sale there. (Interestingly, Apple uses a different mobile payments solution with the iPod touch in its retail stores.)

The Square Credit Card Reader comes in black or white and can be used with any 4th generation iPod touch, iPhone 4, or iPad. The device itself is US$9.95, but you get a $10 Square credit when you activate your free Square account. There is no monthly fee for users, as Square takes 2.75% of every sale and deposits the rest to your checking account on a daily basis. The device will accept any U.S.-issued Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover card. After a transaction is processed, you can simply email the receipt to your customer from the Square app.

I think Square is an awesome example of how devices like the iPhone are empowering people and enabling them to do what would once have been impossible (or at least a lot more cumbersome). Now any individual, not just businesses, can accept credit card payments. This is a boon to people who do things like private consulting on the side for extra cash, as they now have an easy way to accept credit card payments.

This even makes selling expensive items on Craigslist a lot easier. Now you don't have to rely on cash or being near a computer to complete a PayPal transaction when you sell off your old junk. And who knows, maybe the next time you buy a drink from your neighborhood lemonade stand, the nine-year-old behind the cardboard box will ask you "cash or credit?"

Square's mobile payment card reader now available on Apple's online store, retail stores this week originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When Apple came out with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the company unveiled a whole new version of QuickTime Player (and also jumped a couple of version numbers in the process -- going from "7" to "X," or ten). The player component of QuickTime X was much sleeker than QuickTime Player 7, but lacked a lot of the added features that version 7 had (like Play Selection Only, Loop Back and Forth, etc). While it doesn't appear that Apple has added any of those features back into QuickTime X yet, the Lion Developer Preview 2 released today sports a new QuickTime X player (version 10.1) with additional sharing options.

In the QuickTime X player that shipped with Snow Leopard (version 10.0), Apple allowed you to share your videos right from QuickTime Player to iTunes, MobileMe, or YouTube. Now, with the forthcoming player that will ship with Lion, Apple is enabling additional sharing options, including sharing with Apple's Mail.app and the websites Vimeo, Facebook, and Flickr. It's nice to see Apple improving QuickTime X and hopefully they'll eventually get around to adding back all the features of QuickTime Player 7. Until then, there's always the QuickTime Player X plug-in, which adds some functionality back to the current version of QuickTime X. You can also keep a copy of the QuickTime 7 Player, which is an optional Snow Leopard install.

[via Fairerplatform]

Lion will introduce new sharing options in QuickTime X originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday Perian updated its QuickTime plugin for the Mac. For those of you who don't know about it, Perian is a plugin allowing Mac users to view a virtually unlimited number of video codecs in QuickTime Player. Among the codecs are AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW, just to name a few.

The 1.2.2 update adds compatibility with WebM/VP8, compressed MKV files, and FFv1 lossless video formats. Perian 1.2.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later. But users of older Mac OS versions are forewarned -- this is the last version of Perian that will support PowerPC Macs or any Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 and below. Going forward, future releases of Perian will only support Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.6 or higher. Perian is a free download.

Perian QuickTime plugin updated; A must-have for every Mac originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Webby Awards are being voted on this week, and along with the usual website and advertising divisions, there's now a "Mobile and Apps" category. As you might expect, there are plenty of iOS games and apps represented on the ballots. iPhone favorites Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja are nominated for Handheld Games, and lots of our other favorite apps show up as well, including MLB At Bat 2011 and the Marvel Comics App under Tablet Entertainment apps, Flipboard under Tablet News, and Dropbox under Services.

In short, if you're an iPhone user, there's lots of good choices for you to make over there right now. Voting runs through April 28, and then the award winners will be announced on June 13. We'll keep an eye out for them and let you know who walks away with the Webbys.

Webby Awards nominate iOS games and apps originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters reports that Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces iPods, iPhones and iPads in China, is in ongoing talks to invest US $12 billion in building manufacturing facilities in Brazil.

Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president, reportedly said that this is under consideration and has said that she considers tablet computing as a viable option to inexpensively bring the Internet to the lower-middle class of Brazil (around 80 million people). However a rough translation from Digital&Midia suggests that it's a done deal and that iPads would be coming out of Brazil at the end of November. That report should be taken with a large grain of salt... we don't have a Portuguese speaker in the house, unfortunately, so we'd welcome a more direct translation.

It's easy to spot some pitfalls in Brazil for Foxconn. The manufacturer is in the business of finding the cheapest cost of production; Brazil has one of the highest import tariffs in South America, and is considered to be quite an expensive place to do business due to such factors as heavy taxes, poor labor laws and a possibly overvalued currency. So at first blush, Foxconn doing business in Brazil doesn't seem to make sense.

On the other hand, if it were to happen, import tariffs would be avoided, allowing Apple to step into the highly taxed Brazilian market at lower cost. Right now the cheapest iPad in Brazil sells for $860 while the US price of the lowest end iPad 2 is $499. If iPads were manufactured in Brazil the selling cost would drop locally and in neighboring South American countries.

So will it happen? Talks have been progressing for three months according to Aloizio Mercadente, who serves as Brazil's Science and Technology minister, and there are ongoing negotiations with other technology manufacturing companies at the same time. This leads us to question the Digital&Midia story saying that a deal has been struck. We'll be keeping an eye to the south for more news soon.

iPads to be made in Brazil? originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One thing I love about the Mac App Store is that, game-wise, it eliminates the need to insert physical media into your Mac to play games. Over the past few days I've been playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on my MacBook Pro, and without the need for a disc the game just flies, which helps make it that much more enjoyable. It also, of course, helps that Call of Duty is a heck of a great series.

TUAW has teamed up with Aspyr to give away three Mac App Store copies of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to some lucky readers. To enter the giveaway, mentally prepare yourself to take down some bad guys and then simply leave a comment below. As always, here are the rules:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment on this post.
• The comment must be left before Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Three winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Each winner will receive one Mac App Store promo code for a copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Value: US$49.99).
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

TUAW Giveaway: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for Mac originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When it comes to smartphone cases that can stand up to almost anything, OtterBox pretty much defined the market. Starting with the multi-layer Defender Series and then moving on to the more sleek Commuter Series, Colorado-based OtterBox has always made iPhone cases that can stand up to a lot of abuse. However, for some iPhone owners the rather bulky design of the previous cases left a lot to be desired.

OtterBox industrial designer Adam Wibby took his inspiration for the new Reflex Series (US$44.95) from the world of automobile design, where a "crush zone" is sacrificed to reduce the impact on the passengers within a vehicle. Taking this idea through design and testing, Wibby and the OtterBox team found that they could build very thin hardshell cases with a shock-absorbing "reflex zone" made of a more flexible silicone material.

As the design was fine-tuned, the team did a Finite Element Analysis to test the shock-absorbing properties. The analysis showed about a threefold reduction in the shock of a drop, and Wibby notes in the video accompanying this post that an iPhone in a Reflex case will actually bounce.

The Reflex case adds very little weight; my electronic postal scale showed that it weighed in at 0.9 oz (about 26 grams), which brings the total weight of iPhone 4 and Reflex case up to about 5.8 oz (about 164 grams).

Continue reading OtterBox Reflex Series case for iPhone 4: First look

OtterBox Reflex Series case for iPhone 4: First look originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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