Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store

The game does have a lot of extras and addons, including a dojo mode for training and Bluetooth multiplayer. And while the game's eight characters offers up a pretty slim selection compared to the current console titles, these are definitely classic Capcom characters, and all of the old moves you'll remember still work. Save for the controls, nothing about this game is half-done -- it's definitely a premium port of a premium game. But as a true fighting game experience, this one comes up short. Buy it if you want, to see the spectacle of Street Fighter squeezed into Apple's touchscreen, an achievement in and of itself. But don't buy it expecting an ideal Capcom-style showdown that you'll be able to pull up time and time again -- for that, save your quarters for the arcades.

Stay tuned -- we did get to talk with the Japanese producer of the game about what he thinks of the iPhone, the iPad, and the challenges he had to overcome by squeezing this one on to Apple's handheld. That interview is coming up later today right here on TUAW.

TUAWGDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store

The game does have a lot of extras and addons, including a dojo mode for training and Bluetooth multiplayer. And while the game's eight characters offers up a pretty slim selection compared to the current console titles, these are definitely classic Capcom characters, and all of the old moves you'll remember still work. Save for the controls, nothing about this game is half-done -- it's definitely a premium port of a premium game. But as a true fighting game experience, this one comes up short. Buy it if you want, to see the spectacle of Street Fighter squeezed into Apple's touchscreen, an achievement in and of itself. But don't buy it expecting an ideal Capcom-style showdown that you'll be able to pull up time and time again -- for that, save your quarters for the arcades.

Stay tuned -- we did get to talk with the Japanese producer of the game about what he thinks of the iPhone, the iPad, and the challenges he had to overcome by squeezing this one on to Apple's handheld. That interview is coming up later today right here on TUAW.

TUAWGDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software

Apple subsidiary FileMaker has been busy; the flagship database app grows by another leap today with the release of version 11. We were lucky enough to get a pre-release demo at Macworld Expo in February and were duly impressed. As someone who's been using FileMaker since version 6, I'm thrilled with some of the additions to this update; let's get to it.

Launch

Right off the bat, the introduction screen is new (after the splash screen "wobbles" into view). It's wider with more options, like a link to the online resource center. There you'll find video tutorials, starter solutions (more on that later) and access to consultants. They're all extremely useful and aimed at users and developers alike.

Charts

The big news starts with built-in support for charts. For years, developers and users have employed plug-ins and other 3rd-party solutions to get charting done, or they simply exported data to Excel. Now those extra efforts may be a thing of the past.

As you would imagine, adding a chart is super easy. While in layout mode, use the new chart tool to drag out a charting area. From there, the setup screen appears.

This is a real pleasure to use. You can select between a bar graph (horizontal or vertical), line chart, area or pie. Give your chart a name, or base its name on a field or calculation. Likewise, the X and Y axis can be labeled with your own titles or a field or calculation. If you've got more than one Y axis variable (for example, number of occurrences and procedure duration) adding each is as simple as a click. Finally, you can pull data from a found set, the current record only, or from related records -- which is awesome.

Now it gets fun. Click "Format Chart" to style all aspects of your chart. Select your color palette (options are presented as cute color samples), fonts, backgrounds and axis labels plus scale minimums and maximums. It's full-featured and nearly everything I wanted when I was stuck routinely exporting data to Excel just to make charts with version 6. In my testing this was simple and effective.

The only thing missing for me is a scatter plot option, but a line chart could do the job in a pinch.

Gallery: FileMaker 11

Snapshot Link

Another feature I'm excited about is the snapshot link. Let's say you've got to share a subset of your data with a colleague, like sales figures generated from the state of California, for example. First, perform a find for invoices with "CA" in the state field, then set the sort order and layout that you want. Then, select "Snapshot Link" from the File menu to produce a snapshot of that found set as a new file, including the sort order and layout that you chose.

From there, you can email the resulting file to your colleague and s/he will see the very same found set of records, sort order and layout on their machine running FileMaker 11 (assuming they have access to the same original database). But wait, there's more! If either of you edit those records, the change will be reflected on the other's machine. Awesome, right? Yes it is.

Recurring Import

Here's another welcome new feature. Recurring Import lets you designate a .csv file or Excel spreadsheet as a target data source that will be imported each time a given database is opened. To set it up, use the import function as you typically do. But, just before you click OK, select the "Setup as recurring import" option. From then on, any changes made to that file will be sent to that database (read only) whenever that database is opened. FileMaker even creates a layout and script for you (of course, you can tweak either).

You say you don't want to re-launch the database just to update that layout? No problem. Just click the "Update" button to grab the latest data on the fly.

Back in the day, I managed a huge Excel spreadsheet of thousands of incident reports that had to remain in Excel for legacy support. We had an elaborate and time-consuming method of pushing that data into FileMaker. This would have been a lifesaver.

Quick Reports

Here's one that developers will appreciate. Quick Reports is a new way to make on-the-fly reporting incredibly easy. In fact, you don't even have to leave browse mode.

Quick Reports treats your data as if it were a spreadsheet. That's clever, as many users are coming from spreadsheets (or still tied to them), and it's a concept they're comfortable with. You can add fields and records by clicking a column or row, and even change a field's type (number, text, time, container ... even calculation or summary) right then and there.

The best part is that you can create a report with grouped data from browse mode. No more setting up the subsummaries, fiddling with layouts, etc. Just add a break field to automatically generate the summaries, add a subtotal type and you've built a grouped report in table view. That's awesome.

There's even more to this incredible release. Quick Find is like Spotlight for your database. Again, back in the day we wrote elaborate search scripts that aren't necessary anymore. Quick Find is always available and searches all of the fields in the current layout for your search term. It also automatically saves recent searches for quick access in the future as a drop-down list.

The Inspector acts much like its counterpart in some of the iLife apps. Familiar functions like alignments, positioning (front, back, etc.) and text properties have moved to the Inspector. Remember when they were in that left-hand sidebar? Me, too.

Additionally, along with the 30+ bundled starter solution databases for common home and business needs, there's a new invoice starter solution. For basic client and billing management, it may do the job for some small businesses that otherwise would have pushed towards a narrower invoicing solution.

I know this is an epic post, but it's only the beginning of what's new in this release. As a long-time customer, I'm excited about it -- even more so than when we made the leap from version 6 to version 7. If you use Filemaker in your day-to-day work, you'll absolutely want to check out this update.

A single license of Filemaker Pro 11 costs US$299. Upgrades from Filemaker Pro 10 and 9 are available at $179. Additionally, those using version 8.5 and 8 are eligible for upgrade pricing until September 23, 2010.

TUAWFileMaker 11 now available with charting, reporting improvements originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Apple Corporate, Multimedia, Software, Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs and the iPad both appeared on TV during last night's Academy Awards, but they weren't the extent of Apple's presence.

Cnet reports this morning that the majority of the "Documentary Feature" and "Documentary Short" nominees -- 9 out of 10 in fact -- were made using Final Cut Studio, Apple's professional video editing package. Cnet spoke with some of the filmmakers, including Dan Wilken, online editor of "Food, Inc," who sung the suite's praises. "...[switching to Final Cut Studio] made the most sense economically and allowed us to do everything we needed."

Final Cut isn't the only professional editing software available but it is the most popular; market research firm SCRI International claim is has a near 50% market share among nonlinear editors.

With this in mind we get an even clearer picture of Steve's motivation for showing up. Certainly to have fun and experience the show, cheer on Up and other Disney offerings and keep his company and products in the minds of a very lucrative market.

TUAWFinal Cut dominant among Oscar documentary nominees originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Apple

The latest MacHeist countdown has finished and, after a few tense moments as they got their ducks in a row last night, the new bundle is ready for sale.

This year's "nano bundle" includes the following apps at an incredible discount:

1. MacJournal
2. RipIt
3. Clips
4. CoverScout
5. Flow
6. Tales of Monkey Island
7. Rapidweaver

That's more than US$260 worth of software for a mere twenty bucks. Note that Tales of Monkey Island and Rapidweaver are the "Unlock Apps." That is to say, they'll become available once certain sales milestones have been reached; Monkey Island will go on sale once 50,000 bundles have been sold, and Rapidweaver after that.

I tend to buy software as I need it or as I realize that I've been using it for a while without sending off some cash to the developer. When participating in these "event" sales, I tend to forget that I ever downloaded the stuff, often being surprised at finding the software thus acquired in my /Applications folder. Your mileage will, of course, vary. For some of you out there in reader-land, this bundle may turn out to be the best thing since, I dunno, sliced bread or Wheatabix or citizen band radios or whatever, for you.

So if you're a bundle kind of person, Woo Hoo! The stuff is here (or at least, nearly here.) Here's hoping there are some goodies for you, this go 'round that will enhance your day-to-day Mac use and bring some joy into your software life.

Via our Christina W., whom we miss

TUAWMacheist arrives. Again. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, iPad

Would you like to add a second line to your iPhone? Perhaps you'd like to add a business number to the phone, but your existing phone is currently tied to your personal mobile number. You could always carry a second phone, but that's an expensive proposition, particularly if you're an iPhone addict.

VoIP provider Toktumi has a solution that may work out well for you. They're now selling an app called Line2 (US$0.99) that mimics many of the capabilities of the standard Phone app, complete with a form of visual voice mail. Purchasing the app provides you with one month of free VoIP service. After that point, each month's continued service costs $14.95 for unlimited calls within the US and Canada. The service is purchased in-app, and was a point of confusion for me -- the app listing in the iTunes store shows a "Top In App Purchase" at a cost of $19.99 for a month. Toktumi's website and the promotional video (above) do show the lower monthly rate.

While many VoIP solutions require a Wi-Fi connection to work, Line2 works over both 3G and Wi-Fi. The app has many of the features you might want in a business phone, including call waiting and call transfer, the ability to create conference calls with up to 20 participants, and even integration with Toktumi's hosted PBX service.

For small businesses that want to present a more professional image to callers, Line2 might be just the right solution. Toktumi notes that the app also works with both the iPod touch (Wi-Fi only) and iPad (Wi-Fi or 3G).

TUAWLine2 adds a second line to your iPhone for $15 a month originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Apple TV

Boxee recently released a brand new version of their beta software, but unfortunately, that build didn't happen to work on the Apple TV. That's now been fixed, however, and you can now get the USB flash drive creator app that will give you a patchstick to install the latest version on that Apple box hooked up to your television. Here's a quick FAQ on the whole process if you need a little help with it, but it sounds pretty straightforward: set up the patchstick, power up the AppleTV with patchstick installed, and enjoy. And even if you have alpha currently installed, you can just put the stick in and upgrade to the beta, no worries.

That's some very impressive and quick work by a bunch of people who aren't obligated to do this at all (there are a few XBMC devs on the team as well, and the patchstick will allow you to install XBMC also, if you'd like).

TUAWBoxee back on Apple TV originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Developer

The brilliant minds at Panic noticed that something interesting was happening with PDF files created by Adobe Illustrator. Like many developers, Panic uses Adobe Illustrator to create icons and other image resources for their applications. The resulting PDF files, which were relatively "big-boned" (a politically-correct way of saying "fat"), would magically shrink in size when they were run through Apple's Mac OS X PDF processing. Apple's method is used when you save a PDF from Preview, which explains why most of the time those files are fairly small in size.

Being the intelligent chaps that they are, the Panic engineers decided to look into the cause of this. What did they find? "Will started digging into the files and brother, you won't believe what he found. Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we'd specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc."

Apparently just opening the obese PDFs in Preview and then saving them would shrink the file sizes dramatically. Rather than force their staff to go through this process each time they found a large Illustrator PDF, Panic did what most developers would do and wrote an application to automate the process. Devs can simply take a big batch of files, like the contents of an application's Resources folder, drop 'em onto ShrinkIt (download link), and watch the file sizes magically shrink. According to Panic, ShrinkIt can reduce an app bundle size by 4 megabytes.

While ShrinkIt is a Panic-internal utility, the company has made it available to the world for free. Please note that ShrinkIt is primarily made for shrinking simple vector-resource PDFs, and probably won't work well on press-ready PDFs.

TUAWPanic's free ShrinkIt turns humongous Illustrator PDFs into tiny ones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Software, Video

Last year we reviewed Storyist, the software for writers. It's a great app that lets you manage all aspects of a writing project, like plot points, research, characters and more. Once you're done writing, you can export to many popular file formats, as well as prepare your document for an editor, for use as a screenplay or even digital distribution.

I sat down with Steve Shepard at our Macworld booth to discuss the app, how to get the most out of it, his experiences at the show and finally whether or not he's got any plans for the iPad. Check out the video above to see our conversation.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Steve Shepard of Storyist originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: UNIX / BSD, iPhone

My iPhone is the camera that i use more than any other, but there's one thing that has consistently annoyed me about it. Apple uses an EXIF tag to rotate images. This can be a problem when you share images with others. Safari will rotate the image correctly, but no other browser will.

Adding to the trouble is that Mail.app and the Finder will also "auto-correct" the rotation, so it can be hard to tell which images need to be "fixed" and which don't.

You could use the '/usr/bin/sips' program (sips --rotate 90 picture.jpg) if you knew which pictures need to be corrected, and which direction they need to be rotated (clockwise or counter-clockwise). But I wanted something that would, as they say, "just work."

(I also wanted something I could use on my webserver, which runs Linux, but that's really a side issue.)

My attempts to find a solution on Google were fruitless, so I asked on Twitter. Michael Baltaks pointed me to jhead, which describes itself as a "Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool" which includes the source code as well as pre-built binaries for OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and even Windows.

To fix a picture named "image.jpg" just type "jhead -autorot image.jpg" and you will see "Modified: image.jpg". You can fix all JPGs in the current folder using "jhead -autorot *.jpg" and it will only change the images which have the EXIF tag.

Note: You might be tempted to use the "-norot" argument, which will "zero out" the rotation tag, but it will not have the desired effect, and (even worse) once you have used the "-norot" you can't use "-autorot" -- trust me, I learned that one the hard way.

TUAWFix iPhone EXIF rotation from the command line originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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