iPhone App Reviews

WordDigest English Dictionary, Thesaurus & Spell Checker

Swain Valasek | Mar 31, 2009 Reference

User rating: (5 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)

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Pulling a page from the book of extra-long titles, here now is WordDigest English Dictionary, Thesaurus & Spell Checker from Global Delight (blessedly shortened to just WordDigest hereafter).  Since the title is so self-descriptive of the app’s function, I’ll list the unique features straightaway, paraphrased from their website:

- Dictionary containing more than 147,000 words
- IPA pronunciations for 87,000 words (IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet…ya I didn’t know what it stood for either)
- Built-in hyperlinked thesaurus for more than 28,000 words
- Built-in hyperlinked intelligent spell checker
- Bookmark favorite words for easy recall
- History of previously searched words
- Built in web search for Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Answers.com
- Option to show the etymology (word origins) for a word. This feature requires an active Internet connection.
- Option to alter the text size

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Tags: $1.99, dictionary, spell checker, Swain Valasek, thesaurus

iFare Finder

Michael (Admin) | Mar 31, 2009 Travel

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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iFare Finder is on sale for $1.99 until the next update… regular price is $2.99

Every once in a while I feel the need to get my ass off the couch and go somewhere far, far away, and when these feelings start to stir the first thing I want to know is how much it’s gonna run me. I don’t need an exact price down to the penny, I just need a reasonably accurate ballpark figure and, for me, this is where iFare Finder comes in handy. In theory you’re supposed to be able to actually book flights by tapping links in this app (which launch the Safari browser), but it doesn’t always work out that way.

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Tags: $1.99, airfare

Putting faces to the names

Michael (Admin) | Mar 31, 2009 Website Stuff

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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After a lot of waffling, I finally posted some writer bios! There are just a few right now, but hopefully those who are missing will someday expose themselves (but not like THAT! You’re gross, and apparently so am I).

Q&F: myLanguage

Swain Valasek | Mar 30, 2009 Quick & Free, Travel

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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Tags: free, language, Swain Valasek, translator

Fashion Sense

Chrisa | Mar 30, 2009 Lifestyle, Reference

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I love Tim Gunn.  I mean it.  I have an unnatural facination with him.  I don’t stalk him, or anything, but I do have a picture of him as my wallpaper (in my defense, it’s a picture I took at the Oscars), and I am addicted to Project Runway and Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style.   So when I got word about Eighteen Twenty Consulting’s Fashion Sense, I thought it might be like having a little Tim Gunn at my fingertips and in my pocket.  Yeah…..it’s not.

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Tags: $1.99, fashion, Lifestyle, Reference

iLove Travel – Packing

Chrisa | Mar 27, 2009 Travel, Utilities

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Have you seen the movie, “As Good As It Gets” with Jack Nicholson?  It’s the one where Jack plays Melvin Udall, a writer with severe OCD, but learns to overcome some aspects of it due to the love of a Brooklyn waitress and a gay neighbor.  He got nominated for an Oscar for the part.  Anyway – I like to think there’s a little obsessive-compulsive in all of us about certain aspects of our lives.  For me, it’s travel.  I travel quite a bit for business, yes, but when I travel for leisure, it’s more stressful, because I have three teenagers to pack as well as myself.  Not to mention a husband who has a short-term memory issue that I think is chromosonal in nature.  I call it X-Y Chromosone Poisoning, and its symptoms also include not being physically capable of asking directions, and not being able to watch TV without the remote firmly grasped in his hand.  I think he passed it on to my son.

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Tags: $1.99, Travel, Utilities

Q&F: small talk

Michael (Admin) | Mar 26, 2009 Quick & Free, Social Networking

User rating: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Chat applications always have some degree of complexity to them because the makers assume you’ll want to do all kinds of crap… add friends, use emoticons, set status, go invisible, yada yada yada. And they’re right, all that fancy stuff is good and often necessary.

Frivr.com takes a drastically different approach with small talk: throw everyone into a single chat room for an anonymous free-for-all! This is a totally stripped-down chat room with no features except the ability to select your nickname and text bubble color.

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Tags: chat, free

Q&F: Nimbuzz

Michael (Admin) | Mar 26, 2009 Quick & Free, Social Networking

User rating: (7 votes, average: 3.57 out of 5)

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I haven’t gone out and tried every single chat application out there, but that’s mostly because Nimbuzz rocks and I don’t need anything else!

If you’re looking for an all-in-one chat client, try this one out. Nimbuzz supports a ton of chat and social networking platforms and it’s easy to set up if you know your login info for each of the platforms you’re using.

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Tags: chat, free

Dungeon Defense Crypt Edition

Swain Valasek | Mar 25, 2009 Games

User rating: (28 votes, average: 3.11 out of 5)

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Tags: $2.99, dungeon defense, Swain Valasek, tower defense

Wheel of Fortune

Michael (Admin) | Mar 25, 2009 Games

User rating: (10 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)

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I’m a Wheel Watcher! Practically everyone in America has seen Wheel of Fortune on TV at some point, and I’m slightly more than an occasional viewer. I remember when contestants used to spend their winnings during the show on toasters and furniture sets, I have two episodes on the DVR at this very moment, and I even have a Spin ID! I’m not proud of that last one. Suffice it to say that I know my Wheel.

Sony Pictures Television did the smart thing and made this iPhone app what it should be: a very faithful reproduction of the TV show’s elements with all the gloss you’d expect of an “officially licensed” app. Apparently Pat Sajak and Vanna White couldn’t be bothered… or paid enough?… to make an iPhone appearance, but nearly everything else is there.

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Tags: $4.99, classic, game show

HotField

Swain Valasek | Mar 22, 2009 Games

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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Perhaps the next delightfully retro gaming genre set to invade the iPhone is the classic SHMUP, or 2D shoot-em-up for the unitiated.  This is evidenced by the recent release of Sky Force Reloaded and now Hotfield from C2Matrix.  There have certainly been prior entries such as rRootage, Space Deadbeef, Sentry Alpha and Sky Thunder but IMO none have offered the complete experience of the early 90′s arcade shooters…until now.

So HotField then is a vertical scrolling shmup in the classic style and with a whole bucketful of features, to whit:

• 3 ships to choose from with lots of weapon powerups
• 6 missions with unique graphics and bosses
• some actual 3D graphics
• 5 difficulty levels
• awesome chip-tune soundtrack
• the ability to record and playback your game, awesome!
• a boss mode so you can just fight bossses if you like pain

You can control the game in 2 -ways: using a touch interface or virtual d-pad.  In my experience the d-pad was basically unplayable but I applaud the effort of its inclusion nonetheless.  So for me that leaves the touch interface which fortunately works fairly well.  Touch or drag your finger onscreen and your ship will follow; firing is thankfully automatic.  Putting a second finger on the screen and holding charges up your limited-use mega-laser and when you release it’s good night bad guys.  As expected, certain combinations of destroyed enemies release powerups that will beef up your main weapon, increase your health meter or grant a free life.  You can also pick up ‘star points’ left behind by downed enemies and when using the mega-laser (which converts enemy shots to star points), enough of which can also get you a free life.  You also have a bullet-time option, accessed with a double-touch-and-hold, which slows everything down but you for a short time.   Beyond that it’s total blast-a-thon goodness, shooting absolutely everything that moves until you reach the infamous boss fight.  Boss fights get progressively harder and all provide the now-ubiquitous ‘bullet carpet’ where you have to dodge waves of bullets that change regularly in pattern.  Also in classic fashion, bosses take forever to kill (sigh).

The game has an amusing anime-inspired story (really just banter between 2 big-eyed opponents) which plays out as you go that’s nothing deep but nonetheless entertaining.  The gameplay is well-paced and the bosses difficult, pretty much right on par with the classic shmup formula.  The graphics and sound are a dead ringer for 90′s retro shmup’s and the BGM is an excellent selection of chip tunes that definitely enhance the period feel.

However, I have some gripes.  Whereas control with the arcade shooters was spot-on, this is unfortunately where HotField falters.  In general, there are 2 schools of thought on how to handle ship control in an iPhone shmup.  First is a 1 to 1 scheme where the ship follows your finger movements instantly, like a mouse pointer for example (think rRootage).  Second is a relative scheme where the ship is a few milliseconds behind, basically intentionally trailing your finger.  HotField takes the latter stance and unfortunately the overall effect can best be described as ‘laggy’.  This is only amplified by the fact that the game very often gets bogged down in graphics rendering, slowing everything down which makes controlling the ship a chore and leads to ship damage/deaths that wouldn’t normally happen.  Also an issue with the touch interface is that your finger is very often in the way, especially if you’re fat fingered.  I wouldn’t normally fault the game for this since it’s not their fault the iPhone uses a touchscreen but the game inexplicably features enemies that come up from the bottom of the screen and this simply becomes much harder than it needs to be as a result.  Adding to this problem is an overlay status bar at the bottom of the screen that will actually cover up your ship if you move to the extreme bottom, adding even more unnecessary difficulty.

If I could only make 1 suggestion, it would be to instate a 1 to 1 control scheme, at least for the boss fights.  Since I can make as many as I want though, I also ask that the game be further optimized to reduce the render lag and fix the bottom status overlay thing.

As it is, the game has everything a classic shmup should and is lots of fun.  If the developer will pledge their support with some updates to address the issues above this game will be best of class; as is it’s still recommended because of all the other things it does right.

Version reviewed – 1.0
Reviewed on – iPhone 3G 8GB 2.2.1
Global scoreboard – yes
iTunes music support – no
Lite version available – no

Tags: $2.99, hotfield, shmup, shooter, Swain Valasek

StockAdvisor

Swain Valasek | Mar 21, 2009 Finance

User rating: (5 votes, average: 3.40 out of 5)

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On the block next is StockAdvisor from TradeOffNews and when a developer is asking $20 for an iPhone app, we sit up and listen to try and understand what that kind of outlay will get you.  As it turns out, that price covers more than just a piece of software but more on that later.  StockAdvisor is a stock investment tool that strives to simplify the process of poring over the deluge of daily data (hmm, alliteration FTW) surrounding the stock market by breaking it down into 2 easy to swallow chunks of value-add; alpha and beta opportunities.  An alpha opportunity is one that relates to a price decrease or negative market sentiment for a particular stock while a beta opportunity relates to a price increase or positive market sentiment towards a stock.  These opportunities are identified through a proprietary linguistic and analysis engine that combs through 1000′s of news sources so you don’t have to (for more detail on this check their website).  Each opportunity is further broken down into green, yellow and red to indicate the severity of the positive or negative sentiment (in that order).  So what you do is create a portfolio by entering as many stock symbols as desired.  A great dual purpose here is that this also serves as a quick and dirty version of the default Stocks app where you can see the latest market price data at a glance.  After that, the app simply goes to work being fed opportunities from TradeOffNews as long as it’s running (goes without saying that a data connection is required).  On the main data screen (where you’ll be spending all your time), all stocks are arranged in alpha order and beneath each symbol appear all opportunities in descending chronological order; newest at the top.   How many are stored per stock is one of the configurable options, the other being how often the app checks home base for new data.  Finally, you can email an alpha or beta oppportunity directly from the app, very similiar to how you send photos from the Camera Roll.

Let’s move on to the gripes and suggestions; not too many to report this time around.

Oddness:

• I was never able to add NBR (Nabors Industries Ltd) to my portfolio as the app doesn’t recognize the symbol.

Suggestions:

• Ability to reorder your portfolio as you see fit (just maybe I want to see ZMH before AMD)
• Ability to output your portfolio in a nicely formatted email would be awesome

This developer is not just sitting on its duff.  They maintain a blog about this app and have a roadmap for future improvements.  Most notable is the promise of push notification support when OS 3.0 hits which will give this app major legs.  So, getting back to the value issue mentioned at the onset, it’s important to keep in mind that $20 in the world of the app store is a monstrous price but in the big world of investment tools it simply is not.  In fact, to get any similar kind of aggregate stock info service would certainly cost you a subscription fee where as StockAdvisor is a 1-time shot with free updates (1.0.1 is in fact already submitted with 1.1 on the horizon).  Interestingly enough and notable is that they’re toying with the idea of a pro version that would do exactly that; add several more very high-profile data sources (such as Factiva and LexisNexis) to their analyses on a subscription-based model.

In the end, is this app worth $20 then?  Yes, I think it is and for the specific reason mentioned above plus IMO it’s a useful weapon to add to your investment battle chest.  Obviously it’s not for everyone and it’s important to restate common sense here in that you should never rely on one single tool to make your investment decisions; do your own research as much as possible and come to your own conclusions about what to do with your money.  StockAdvisor and any other apps like it are simply tools to help but not supplement your own stock investment decisions.

Version reviewed – 1.0.0
Reviewed on – iPhone 3G 8GB 2.2.1

Tags: $19.99, investing, stock advisor, stocks, Swain Valasek