Dave Metzener's Weblog

I must say that I am pretty impressed with Apple’s Magic Mouse. It’s sleek, with a good 3/5 of it’s surface being available for multiple-touch functions. Being made from aluminum, it’s sturdy, solid feeling, and clicks like you would expect a mouse with real buttons.

Unlike the “Mighty Mouse”, when you click and drag with the Magic Mouse, it doesn’t feel like you are trying to hold the mouse so that the ‘whole mouse button’ doesn’t release.

Also a great feature of this mouse is that when you scroll windows by sliding you finger down or up the center of the mouse, you can tell the Mouse Preference Pane to glide just like you were flicking your finger across the iPhone/iPod touch’s screen.

There is also a great $5 shareware program called MouseWizard that adds all kinds of great functionality to the multi-touch abilities of the Magic Mouse.

MouseWizard is a great supplement to the System Preference Mouse Pane. It’s a program that can reside in the MenuBar, Dock, or both, not in System Preferences, so it won’t conflict with Apple’s Mouse Preference Pane.

The Menubar items include battery status, 3 settings entries as well as the standard application menu items.

MouseWizard lets you set tapping instead on clicking the mouse for both the right and left clicks. Two finger gestures include: Middle Click, Fourth Click, Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Swipe Left, Swipe Right, Zoom / Shrink. Three finger Click and Whole Hand Click. All can be configured to do one of many functions:

I’m currently waiting for a D-Link DBT-120 Wireless Bluetooth 2.0 USB Adapter from Amazon to hook it up to my Mac Pro. When I purchased the beast 3 1/2 years ago, I didn’t see the need to have Bluetooth and WiFi in the box. I now realize that I should have configured the order with both. A hindsight… Apple has tested their wireless keyboards and mice with the D-Link adapter which is why I ordered it rather than the many others to choose from.

Back in the days of the Mighty Mouse, I would never have suggested to anyone to use it. With the Magic Mouse, I have to say that so far, I have to problems suggesting the mouse. Mind you, I have only just started to use it, and there might still be some issues with both left and right buttons down in games. However, what I have seen so far is darn amazing and I’m very pleased I got one.

It’s been an amazing year for the AppStore this year. 1 Billion apps downloaded, over 100,000 apps approved and in the AppStore. We have seen absurd rejections, strange approvals, thousands of flashlight, fart, and semi-porn apps. The list goes on and on, but overall, Apple’s AppStore has been an amazing success. Both for Apple and the developers submitting apps.

I’d like to highlight some of the most amazing apps I have come across in the 1,126 apps I have downloaded so far. This list is a list of just that, the apps I have experience with. There are probably 10 times more apps out there that are just as good if not better. These are just ones I have found and can’t live without or enjoy playing more than my PS3/Wii/PC games.

Starting with games, there have been some amazing stuff published this year. None mark more headaches for the developer than Edge by Mobigame. Thanks to Tim Langdell, Edge has been removed from the AppStore more than any other application. Currently 3 times. It’s changed it’s name twice from Edge, to Edge by Mobigame, to Edgy and yet it’s still not in the AppStore currently. Yet, it’s one of the best games in/not in the AppStore.

I was lucky to have purchased it before the first removal. It’s truly a unique game and is very entertaining to play. The music to the game is done by Romain “Ninomojo” Gauthier, Simon Périn, Jérémie Périn, Matthieu & Richard Malot and is available for download here: http://www.mobigame.net/edge/iphone/soundtrack. You can download it for free, but donations are encuraged. I even sent them $10.

Edge by Mobigame is my “Game of the year” title, but it’s hard to have it be that since it’s not currently in the AppStore. If I had to pick another title that would qualify it would be:

Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid [$4.99] or Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid – Chapter 1 [Free] by ngmoco, inc. This amazing platformer stands right up there with Edge when it comes to unique games for the iPhone/iPod touch. Rolando 2 added depth to the first incarnation of the game making Rolando 2 truly astounding in appearance.

The free version or Chapter 1 gives you the game just like the paid version, but only the first few levels. When you are ready for more, just drop a dollar or two for the next “chapter” or $4.99 for all the chapters. A really nice way to incorporate in-app purchasing.

I played Rolando (the original version) for days and days. I haven’t finished it yet, but am pretty close. There are just tons of levels in the first version. Many hours of playtime. I started Rolando 2, played a couple of the levels, then put it aside so I could finish the first game. However, I’ve been so wrapped up with other games, I haven’t had a chance to get back to Rolando. I certainly will though. Both versions.

Other games worth mentioning are:

Space Invaders Infinity Gene [$4.99]

Soosiz [$0.99]

Flickitty [$1.99]

Mahjongg Artifacts [$2.99]

Mahjong Artifacts 2 [$2.99]

As well as countless others, but those I have played the longest and have been on my iPhone the longest.

As for non-game applications, I have found a few that I really and truly can’t live without. They sit on the first page of the Springboard for easy access:

Grocery IQ [$0.99]: This amazing application is probably the most improved since it’s release of the group I own. It was a pretty good time-saver when I first got it, but they have added barcode scanning (without the need to actually take a picture), barcode entry, list sharing, coupons, and much more. Making Grocery IQ an absolute killer app for me. Using Grocery IQ, I shave probably half an hour off my grocery shopping each week. Really! With this app, I only have to go through the aisles once. You would be surprised how efficient that makes shopping.

The fact that it’s only a dollar truly astounds me. I would easily pay a dollar or more for some of the updates they have introduced recently. Barcode scanning is really amazing. It works just like Delicious Library does with a webcam, but with the iPhone. No need to take a picture, just put the product in front of the camera putting the barcode between the arrows and beep, the product is scanned and an item appears that can be added to your list and/or favorites.

1Password Pro [$7.99] or 1Password [$4.99]: Anyone with passwords they need to remember or want to have a secure place to save credit card numbers and social security numbers would be foolish to put them anywhere other than in 1Password. There are other secure note keepers out there, but 1Password is the top of the heap.

If you use a Macintosh, using 1Password/1Password Pro with the desktop version of 1Password allows you to keep track of just about everything you do that uses passwords. Secure websites are easy to enter with 1Password on the iPhone/iPod touch. Just sync your 1Password desktop data with the iPhone/iPod touch version and you have access to everything in the palm of your hand. (Sorry for sounding like an ad, but its true.)

As I have said, I have well over 1,000 apps in iTunes right now. Most are 3 star or better (my ratings), most of the apps that are less than 3 stars are typically free or a dollar. It’s hard to know if an app is any good from the 5 screen shots that Apple supplies. Some have YouTube videos, but most I just took a chance with and was disappointed.

However, I would say a good 90% of the games I have downloaded/purchased have been well worth the purchase. Full price or on sale.

AppShopper.com is a great resource for keeping track of apps you have and want. They notify you of updates and when apps go on sale. Perfect for folks who want to buy apps when they are on sale. My list of apps are here: http://appshopper.com/user/vesperdem. Not all of them are in there, but most are. I have missed some and haven’t been able to figure out which ones they are. The list even shows my ratings.

Well, that’s my list. No huge amount of research was done to produce the list. I just posted a few of my absolute favorites. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

Good News: Mobigame has done it again with an amazing new game called Cross Fingers. Cross Fingers is a great unique game that uses tangram-style shapes and multi-touch elements to move those shapes into position to finish a level.

The premise of the game is fairly simple. Move the shapes on the screen so that the lighter colored shapes land in the dark holes. In the example to the left, moving the three shapes with white diamonds in them to the positions with the dark diamonds will solve the level.

The catch to the game is that its not always all that easy to move the shapes to their destinations. Careful thought is necessary. Often, there are obstacles in the way that require you to move them out of the way with one finger while moving the shape with the other.

In the screen shot example, the trick is to move the top shape all the way to the right, so that the middle shape can be moved to the top and into it’s resting place, then the other two shapes can be moved into their resting locations without any other obstructions.

I’ve played through the first 20 or so levels so far and I have to say, this is a joyous game to play. Mobigame seems to really know how to catch the “fun” in a game and make it work for them. Cross Fingers is a must have for anyone that enjoys tangrams and thoughtful puzzles.

Bad News: I don’t know how he’s done it, but Tim Langell has managed to get Edge by Mobigame removed from the AppStore yet again. I don’t know what the deal is with this scumbag, but someone has to put him in his place. He claims to hold the trademark on the word EDGE. Fine, but if that were the case, he wouldn’t need to keep coming up with games minutes after attacking other developers over their use of the word EDGE.

At any rate, the website ChaosEdge has the full story on the trademark dispute with Mobigame and Langell as well as many other disputes that Langdell has started with other companies. Check it out for a laugh and please, please support Mobigame by purchasing Cross Fingers. It’s only $0.99 and well worth that dollar!

I have been waiting for this game to be released ever since the first hints of its development way back to probably January of this year. ngmoco has finally released Touch Pets Dogs to the US store yesterday (Nov. 9, 2009).

Touch Pets Dogs (TPD) does not disappoint at all. Its a game for all flavors of player: Man, woman, boy, girl, young, old, etc… I mean who wouldn’t want a cute little puppy that can’t mess the family room carpet!?

ngmoco has outdone itself with this game. The amount of depth these little puppies have is outstanding. There are seven breeds of puppies to choose from when you first adopt your new pet. Labrador, Portuguese Water Dog, West Highland Terrier, German Shepherd, Jack Russel, Dachshund, and even a Robot Dog. After you find a suitable puppy from the adoption agency, the game starts by “training” the player on what to do to take care of their new bundle of furry joy. There is a lot to learn and the lessons are very unobtrusive by placing a small circled question mark near the bottom right hand side of the screen. When ever the game has something to tell you, that question mark appears.

The tutorials go over taking care of your new pet, training him/her, grooming, petting, and even dealing with the inevitable need to “go outside”.

There are 5 daily care items that need to be taken care of each time you start the game: Feeding (energy), Water, Let Out, Petting and Cleanliness. For you new pet to be happy, it will need to have all those stats at 100% or close to it. Your pet will have daily pampering goals to be met too: Shampoo, Cleanliness, Brushing, Dressing Up and Feed a Treat. All these items help your puppy to be very happy, so much so that you will start earning Puppy Bucks. PB’s are later used to purchase toys, treats, and other goodies for your new pet at the Pet Store.

Along with caring for your pet, you play with your pet to help it to gain it’s skills: Chasing, Fetching, Tricks, Catching and agility. There are daily strength training goals: Chasing, Fetching, Catching, and Agility. There is also a daily Tricks Workout with goals: Tricks, sit, raise up, lie down, and stand (probably to start with, there are other tricks that are unlocked as your new puppy gets smarter). These goals help your puppy to learn 5 careers: Crimefighting, Rescue, Celebrity, Scientist and Politician.

You can also invite friends puppies over for playdates which help improve their Socialization and Friendship stats.

You are also not limited to just one puppy. You can adopt up to 5 puppies that will all play together and interact with each other and yourself. Be warned, you will be going through your dog food quite quickly if you have more than one pet. Only two pets can be on the screen at one time.

From what I have read, if you don’t go into Touch Pets Dogs each day to take care of your pet, it won’t do nasty things like mess the family room rug. The game will automatically take your pet outside so that it can take care of it’s business. However, your pet won’t be very happy with you when you do return. So you should probably be ready for the responsibilities a new pet brings.

My only gripe is that in order to feed your pet, and believe me, they need feeding quite frequently, you will have to pay real money to purchase food for your pet above and beyond what the game will generate for you on a daily basis. Just like Eliminate Pro, also by ngmoco, your pets food is regenerated on a daily basis. I’m not sure how much food is generated daily, but probably enough to at least spend a few hours a day with your new best friend. The AppStore has several optional apps that allow you to purchase more food for your pet. 10 bowls for $0.99, 20 bowls for $1.99, 120 bowls for $9.99 and 400 bowls for $29.99. You can also purchase dog food in-app by touching your Plus+ avatar on the upper left of the game screen and then touching Puppy Master. There you can purchase either 10, 120 or 400 bowls of food. You can also convert puppy food into Puppy Bucks.

Overall, this game is a truly “must have” game for your and your families iPhone/iPod touch. Everyone will be able to enjoy playing with their new puppies and fun will be had by all.

There are literally tens if not hundreds of reviews of Snow Leopard out there in the blogosphere that are written by folks that are way more qualified to write the review than myself. However, I thought I might point out some cool changes and bug fixes to OS X that probably have slipped through the cracks of other reviews yet are truly important to folks who have seen them first hand.

First, let me say that if you are running Leopard, the upgrade to Snow Leopard is pretty much a no-brainer. It costs $29 retail, $25 at Amazon.com, or $49.99 retail for the 5 license family pack, $43.99 from Amazon.com. So the cost of the upgrade is not really an issue for most people.

This version of OS X is something that Microsoft should also be doing. It was a chance for the developers at Apple to take all the little nagging bugs and finally fix them. Also, revamp behind the scenes in order to vastly improve the performance of the OS. Some of the improvements are truly revolutionary.

The Finder program, the software that allows you to see files and folders on your computer, has been rewritten totally in Cocoa. This means that it runs in 64bit mode which means a major performance boost, almost 2 times faster. Believe me, its very noticeable when you bring up a folder with a lot of files. Scrolling that list in the Icon view mode is just as smooth as can be.

The Dock has had some big changes. One of the biggest being the ability to use Exposé by just clicking and holding the mouse button down on an icon in the Dock. If a window is minimized, or just behind other windows, Exposé will pop up, you can then click on the window you want. This also works while dragging files around. Drag a file you want to copy/move to a different folder down to the Finder Dock icon, wait a sec and Exposé pops up, then just drag the icon to the window that contains the folder you want for your destination.

One of the biggest changes to the OS that a lot of people are talking about is in the Services menu. Yep, I said Services. If your like me, you might not even know what that is, much less have ever used it. Before Snow Leopard, Services was a mess. It’s menu item is in the Application Name menubar item. So, if you are running Safari, you would pull down the Safari menubar item and the Services menu item is just below the middle of the menu. When opened in Leopard, you would get a list of near to 100 items, most of which were grayed out (not available) and the rest didn’t seem all that useful. Snow Leopard has massively improved that menu. When opened in the Menubar, the list of item visible are only items relevant to what you were doing just prior to opening the menu. Apple has also put the Services menu in the Right-Click/Ctrl-Click popup context menu and other menus (the Tasks popup menu in a finder toolbar for example) making it very convenient to access.

Thanks to the new Services system, I was able to create a very simple Automator Service item to refresh thumbnail images of files easily. I simply started up Automator.app. Choose “Service” from the template panel that appeared. Used the search bar to locate an automator action to create thumbnails by typing “thumbnail”. Dragged the “Add Thumbnail Icon to Image Files” automator action to the workflow pane in automator. Selected “image files” from the Service receives selected” popup menu and left “any application” in the other popup menu. Selected File->Save from the Menubar and gave the Services workflow a name and that was it. I now have a way of refreshing thumbnails in the Finder when I make a change to an image and want to see the new version in the files thumbnail or icon.

There are many more changes that others have reviewed to death. What I want to go over now are the bug fixes I have found that used to really burn me up when they happened.

First is in the Finder. You create a new folder after opening a folder full of files. In Leopard, as the Finder started populating the list of files with thumbnails, if you tried to rename the folder from “Untitled” to something else, you would be taken out of edit mode almost instantly as the next thumbnail is updated. Snow Leopard has fixed this so that you can change the name of a file or folder while Finder is populating thumbnails without being interrupted. That’s a big one for me. It was incredibly frustrating to have the edit box go away while trying to rename a file/folder like that.

Another fix is with a system that has dual monitors. I tend to drag icons from Safari’s address bar to keep a URL to a page on the desktop for later use. I also would drag images from web pages to the desktop. I use most of the screen for my windows, so I would use the second screen to drag the icon/image to. When I let go, the icon/image would wind up being added to someplace on the main screen, not where I dropped it. This meant that I would have to use Exposé “move all the windows off the desktop” feature (F11 for most of us) so that I could access the new icon/image and move it to the second screen where I had originally dropped it. Snow Leopard fixes this to. The icon/image is placed exactly where you drop it. Hallelujah!

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Snow Leopard isn’t without its own set of bugs. I can’t create or reply to email messages in Gmail in either Safari, FireFox or Fluid.app. I can in Opera or Mail.app, so at least I have options, but not being able to use Gmail from the two most common browsers is a problem in my book. Hopefully, this can be fixed soon. I hear that there are OS X 10.6.1 seeds being sent out as I type this, so here’s hoping.

Also, the upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as I would have hoped for either. I attempted to start the update on my MacBook first only for it to fail almost immediately. After a very quick call to Apple (really, I got someone from America within 10 seconds of being put in the queue!), I found out that my MacBook’s hard drive was damaged and needed to be repaired with Disk Utility before the upgrade process could take place. After it was repaired, it still didn’t upgrade successfully, so I just blew it away and installed Leopard, then Snow Leopard and was up and running again. My Mac Pro update when very smoothly and I was back up and running in less than an hour. So definitely make sure to run Disk Utility’s Verify on your main OS boot drive to make sure it’s clean and ready for the upgrade.

Also, I would suggest heading over to http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ and make sure that mission critical software you need is compatible with Snow Leopard. More than likely it will be, but there are some issues with Adobe’s Creative Suite that you might need to be aware of. Plus, if you are running any hardware that has proprietary software, you will need to make sure that those manufacturers have updated their software to the new OS before updating an important machine.

The fever I have right now is not the kind where my forehead is hot, nope its the kind that speeds up my weblog reading by an amazing amount. FeedAFever.com is an unusual kind of application. It doesn’t run on your desktop computer or your mobile device. Nope, it runs on your webhost. OK, I suppose it can run on your desktop computer if you are running MAMP/XAMP or running a Linux distro that can run a web application that uses Apache, PHP 4.2.3+ and MySQL 3.23+.

Fever is a web based application that takes reading your RSS feeds to a whole new experience plane. Instead of reading post after post like Google Reader or NetNewsWire or “name your favorite RSS feed reader here“, you are presented with articles that have a temperature based on a normal human body temperature of 98.6˚ degrees Fahrenheit or 37˚ Celsius.

What this means is that if you have 300 RSS feeds that you try to read regularly, odds are that 3 or 4 of them will talk about the exact same news that has come up on that day. So instead of having to slog through those multiple posts, Fever sees that they are talking about the same thing and assigns a temperature to the topic. The more sites that you normally follow that talk about it, the “hotter” the article is.

When you go to your installation of Fever to see what’s happening. You will be presented with a list of articles from hottest to coldest as shown on the left (click on the image for a larger view). As you can see, stories like “Ramp Champ” and “Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions” are mentioned my multiple blogs, each listed under the title of the article. You can pick and choose which article you want to read or read multiple articles if you wish. It’s totally up to you.

The way Fever accomplishes this is by the user assigning subscriptions to either the “Kindling” pile or the “Sparks” pile. Fever looks at all the feeds in the “Sparks” list to determine what articles seen in the “Kindling” list are being talked about the most. Even if an article isn’t seen in the Kindling list, it will be assigned a temperature based on how many blogs are linking to the article.

Along with articles displayed by temperature, you can also read your most important blogs as you had in the past by viewing the Kindling. This will give you a display just like what you are used to in your old reader. You can read them all by clicking on the “Kindling” tab, or you can click on the individual blogs/groups to drill down to specific sections.

Kindling is where you put blogs like comics or personal blogs that you want to make sure you read.

To get your feeds from your old reader into Fever, just “export” an OPML file of all your feeds and import them into Fever. Then you need to do a little work and assign blogs to the Sparks list as needed. Once you have established which blogs are Sparks and which are Kindling, you are ready to rock and roll.

Installing Fever is an absolute breeze! You start by creating an account at the feedafever.com site. This doesn’t cost you anything to start with. You download the Fever server compatibility suite (a very small zip file), extract it and upload it to your webhost. Then open your browser to the specified page. This will cause Fever to test your webhost to see if it’s compatible with Fever. After the tests are run and you check out OK, you need to enter your database information (MySQL DB info that you setup on your webhost). If the database checks out too, you will be given a compatibility confirmation code.

At this point, you can purchase Fever if you wish. It’s $30 and let me tell you its well worth every penny! You enter the code into your account at feedafever.com, and you will be sent to PayPal.com to make the purchase. After your purchase is approved, you will be sent an activation key. Head over to your installation of Fever on your webhost, enter the key. At this point, you will be taken to a login page where you enter an email address and password (not the same one you used to create your account on feedafever.com) and you will be sent to a screen where you can drag a bookmarklet for add new subscriptions as well as a button to press to let you import an OPML file you exported from your older reader.

Thats it. Fever will start pulling articles from your subscriptions and before you know it you will be off and running. There is a great demo screen cast on the feedafever.com website that explains how Fever works and demonstrates an installation and purchase.

I have to say that I was skeptical at first, but after watching the screen cast and talking to a friend that had purchased it just a week earlier, I knew this was the way to go for me.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of this web application, its probably very difficult for a “demo” installation to be created. I did find a YouTube video of someone demo-ing Fever. Give that a look after checking out the demo screen cast.

If you use Google Reader or NetNewsWire (the two ways I “used” to follow my feeds), head over to feedafever.com and check out the demo screen cast. I have a feeling you will want to grab a copy yourself.

When I first heard about Ramp Champ, I was excited about the idea of IconFactory doing a “Skee-Ball” type game. The ones that are currently out there are OK, but they have their problems. When I heard that it had been released in the AppStore for $1.99, I immediately purchased it.

Update: Just minutes after I posted this review, I found this article from one of the developers of Ramp Champ: Designing Ramp Champ. Check it out, it’s a great read!

The graphics I see are top notch, I expected nothing less from IconFactory. They have some great applications, both Mac and iPhone and some outstanding Icons and Desktop wallpaper.

The User Interface for the game is also very smooth and well designed. The game comes with 4 “ramps” to play in. You can also purchase two other ramps for the game in the In-App store, $0.99 each.

Unfortunately, this is where the happiness ends. Unlike the other Skee-Ball games I have played, this one doesn’t appear to use 3D or any kind of physics engine. It’s more like Paper Toss, in that you flick your finger on the ramp, and depending on how fast your finger moves across the surface, the ball animates up the screen to a variety of targets. The targets are more like carnival rifle range games than Skee-Ball, but that’s nothing to be unhappy about.

Nope, the part that makes “me” unhappy, is the actual “flick” part. In most Skee-Ball games, the apparent range is, lets say, 1 to 100. In Ramp Champ, its’ more like 1 to 10. It’s very difficult to hit the first tier of targets (the 4 clowns in the first screen shot here). It’s much easier to hit the third tier targets (bottles and circle targets).

I actually got quite frustrated the first couple of attempts I played. I put it down and walked away for a while. I decided to give it another chance and found I was able to achieve the first “Goal” in Clown Town. To knock down all the clowns. So it is possible to get the targets, but you might get pretty frustrated at first.

There are 3 goals to achieve in each ramp. Knock down a first set of targets. Knock down a second set of targets that appear after the first are knocked down, and achieve more than a set number of points.

Then, the big problem hit me. The game started getting very sluggish then finally crashed. I had heard others complaining about this, but figured it was just a memory issue. It usually is with most people. The old “turn off your device, then back on” is the usual cure. However, with those symptoms hit me, I immediately jumped over to iStat to check the memory situation out. Not only was there enough memory, I had have the iPhones 256MB’s of memory free. That’s unheard of. There is usually something taking up a good chunk of the devices memory.

The only thing that would leave the iphone is a state of low memory usage, is if the application prior to running iStat had used up a bunch of memory, then freed it. This way, when you look at the current state of the devices memory, it looks like there is a bunch of free memory. The devices Springboard app (the devices “desktop” for lack of a better description) was also very sluggish. This is because the OS’s memory management system is taking the memory that it had Paged Out earlier for Ramp Champ and was Paging it back in.

My guess here is that either Ramp Champ has a memory leak problem that fills up all the available memory to the point that the game appears to crash, but in reality simply shuts down because of a low-memory condition (part of the iPhone SDK), or it uses so much memory that it’s on the cusp of the low-memory condition, and something pushes it over the edge.

Either way, it’s a 1.0 game that when IconFactory and DS Media Labs comes out with it’s first update, I’m sure the game will be much better and probably won’t crash anymore.

Over all, I would suggest waiting till the first update on this one. It’s worth playing, it’s not really a Skee-Ball simulator, but its still a fun carnival type game that will keep you entertained for a short while once the kinks are ironed out.

Gameloft’s much anticipated Gangstar: West Coast Hustle was released to the AppStore today for $6.99 [AppStore Link]. There has been a lot of blog posts about this game from many iPhone/AppStore weblogs. All saying that this is the iPhones answer to the GTA franchise. Well…

I have to say that they are pretty close to correct. This game doesn’t disappoint. The game has a pretty big driving area to work with as seen in the screen shot below.

The controls for the game are pretty smooth, you have a virtual joystick on the right and a virtual button on the left when you are moving around as a person, pedals and tilting the iPhone/iPod touch to control vehicles. This can be configured in the game. However, you can’t configure the joystick to be on the right and button on the left. I’m not sure if that is an issue for lefties. I’m not a lefty, so I don’t know if they are used to using their dominant hand for buttons or if they just use what they are given.

The graphics are amazing for a game that is run on an iPhone/iPod touch with 480×320 graphics. Lets face it, it’s no GTA IV, but its a great homage to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The trees look pretty darn good. The streets have lights, street signs. There are places where you can jump your vehicle just like the jumps in GTA. Not as dramatic, but still entertaining. You can run over pedestrians, hit other vehicles and even receive some damage to your vehicle. Again, nothing like GTA, but pretty good considering.

There is a story with chapters in this game. Apparently, you are in LA taking a “Vacation” from some trouble that your character was in prior to the start of the story. You are given missions like in GTA. You have to fight rival gangs, drive around a big shot in your gang, etc… I have not got that far in the story yet. I’m pretty close to finishing up the first of 6 chapters. It’s take only an hour to get as far as I have. So, its likely to not be that many hours of game play, but there has been talk of expansion levels probably sold in game later.

Over all, this game will not disappoint and will definitely keep you entertained for at least a couple of days.

I found a great free iPhone/iPod touch application recently that displays lyrics for songs, line by line, as the song is playing. It’s called TuneWiki [free, AppStore link]. This app, like all other apps for the iPhone/iPod touch, doesn’t store the lyrics it finds in the songs being played from your music library. It’s just not allowed to do so. That limitation aside, the app takes on a unique twist to displaying lyrics. It also uses advertisements to help offset the cost of running it’s servers, so you will see ads on certain screens.

Instead of displaying the entire lyrics to a song. While the song is playing, it scrolls the lyrics, line by line, with the music as it plays. This can be accomplished by storing time stamps with each line of the lyrics. As the song plays, when the time stamps passes, the app moves to the next line in the lyrics.

If there are no time stamped lyrics for a song in it’s database, it displays a message stating that they need the users help with the song. Asking the user to tap the lyrics box to advance the lyrics as the song plays. I’m assuming that just one sample isn’t enough for this app to start moving the lyrics by itself. I have to assume that it needs samples from several users before it stores the time stamps permanently.

With the songs on my iPhone, it did an amazingly accurate job of scrolling the lyrics as the music played. There were quite a few songs it didn’t know and helping the app out was pretty easy for songs I knew well. For newer songs I didn’t know that well, tapping to let the app know to move to the next line was trickier than I thought it would be. I think I’ll leave that task to folks that know the songs better.

The application also lets you stream radio powered by SHOUTcast Radio. I was pleasantly surprised that the lyrics scrolled for streamed music as well as music stored on my iPhone. It’s not perfect though. The songs I listened to on the “radio” were a little behind what was playing at the time.

There were also times when the song stopped streaming. I’m assuming this was when the app was pulling the time stamp data for the song from it’s database. This could have just been coincidence and not related at all. However, this happened three out of four times with one song not stopping. In all cases the lyrics were about a line or two behind what was playing on the stream.

Other features of the app include the ability to watch music videos stored in YouTube. The app chooses videos that have lyrics displayed with the videos if it can. Otherwise, it just plays videos it finds.

The application also has a Community section that displays songs being played near your location as well as preselected locations. It also has a search that lets you locate a specific location.

[Top 50 Songs for this month in choosing Missouri]

[Top 50 Songs for this month in Missouri]

[Top 50 Song "Beautiful World" by Coldplay]

It also shows you the top 50 songs by location as well as Hour, Today, the Week, or the Month. This includes the entire world, and you can select down to a specific state if looking at the United States, or country for the rest of the world. In this case, it doesn’t play the song. It just looks up the lyrics with the same search engine it uses for user searches to locate the song and display it’s lyrics. you can buy the song on iTunes, comment on it, play a video if its on YouTube and “Blip” on the video as well. Blipping on a video will send a short message to Email, TuneWiki, Facebook, or Twitter, or any combination of them.

The User Interface seems a little cumbersome and is probably a web based system hidden behind the app. There is no indication of places on the screen where the user should tap. They just have to tap and hope that it’s a button as opposed to text. The only well defined buttons are the Tab Bar buttons at the bottom of the app screen: Music, Radio, Video, and Community.

If you tap 4 or 5 levels deep in a section of the app, you have to use the back button at the top of the app to return. There isn’t a way to return to the first page of a given tab. Tapping the tab should do this, but it doesn’t.

It does allow you to return to the location in the app where a song is currently playing if you navigate away from the library or radio players. This is a nice touch.

That said, I would prefer an interface that is a bit more standard. If it is web based, its not that hard to emulate the iPhone HIG (Human Interface Guidelines).

The application was also a little buggy. It crashed out a couple of times and wouldn’t start once. They might have been attributed to low memory. With all the restrictions that Apple places on apps in the AppStore for approval, not reporting that the application is about to crash due to lack of memory is one that I’m surprised isn’t enforced. I’m pretty certain that an app can state that it is about to die due to this condition since there is a “delegate method” in the SDK that is called when the app is about to die due to lack of memory.

Even with the applications flaws, it’s definitely worth checking out if you are into reading the lyrics of songs being played.

What an incredible waste of time. That’s pretty much all I can say about this Miniseries aired on ABC over the last two Sundays. This movie reminds me of one of the many really bad SyFy Saturday night movies. Let me explain…

Let me start with the science. Or the total lack there of. We start with the biggest meteor shower in over a thousand years. Ok, I can handle that. However, there is a chunk of super heavy Brown Dwarf star in the mix. Why the meteors don’t just clump together with the Brown Dwarf is not even hinted at much less explained.

This chuck of Brown Dwarf hits the Moon causing the Moon to alter it’s orbit into a very strange elliptical orbit. Instead of one of the Earth being at one of the focus points of the elipse, it’s in the dead center. Another completely impossible situation. The reason for the altered orbit was this super dense Brown Dwarf’s mass. The “scientists” finally calculated that the Moon’s orbit would decay in less just over 30 days in such a way that it would collide with the Earth.

Then there is the distance the Moon is away from the earth. In the second part of the miniseries, the government attempts to “destroy” the Brown Dwarf by firing 88 nuclear missles at it. Those missles only take about 10 minutes to get to the Moon. Now mind you, the Moon was getting so close that it’s tidal pull was strong enough to cause a negative gravity in certain areas of the Earth. This caused trains to fly into the sky, cars to also take flight, people to lift off the ground, etc… It also caused all kinds of electrical problems. The final attempt to save the Earth was to send astronauts which also seemed to take just a few hours to fly there.

More problems with this miniseries comes when they land on the Moon to attempt to push the Brown Dwarf away from the Moon (it’s currently embedded deep in a crack that was created due to the impact. I guess they don’t believe in craters and have never heard or read about how the Moon was created in the first place) by using a device that creates anti-gravity (the first piece of SF they discussed in the miniseries). They claim that the Moons gravity is now twice that of the Earth due to this Brown Drarf fragment in the Moon. So they land a new Lunar lander on the moon with no problems at all. No mention that they would have to totally reconstruct a lander that could handle the gravity change or that the amount of fuel that would need to be used to land and take back off would be way more than a normal Moon landing.

I’m sure there were more foibles in the science of the miniseries, but those were the worst. Then there was the continuity that was totally killed. Having Germany, England, Japan, and New York all be dark (night time) at the same time. The Moon always being full in the sky even though over 30 days pass in time. Showing the Moon and Earth as if the Moon was orbiting in a Geostationary orbital distance. Then other times, the Moon was at an apparent distance that was pretty much normal. Oh sure, the images were pretty, but very hard to swallow. They pretty much just picked what made the scene look good instead of what made sense.

Of course, they also had to have sound in space too. Rockets that made rocket sounds while on the Moon and in space. I realize that pretty much every movie ever made has sound in space, but still…

As far as the acting went, it was OK. I’ve seen way better, but I have seen way worse too.

Over all, I would have to recommend staying as far away from this one as possible. It’s not worth the 4 hours it takes to watch. I was really hoping for something way better than actually aired. It’s no wonder that Science Fiction has such a bad wrap when such bad SciFi like this is created.