When I was growing up my Dad would always read me stories at night before bed. I believe this played a major role in my love for reading even to this day. Now that  I have two boys of my own I have made it a point to read to them every night before bed. We have a decent sized collection of books to read but it seams like I just rotate reading the same five books. This is where FrogDogMedia LLC comes in with their iStory Time line of children’s books.

I was able to review the “How To Train Your Dragon” book. The book is based off the movie with the same name. The story follows the viking teenager Hiccup as he tries to make it in the world of brawn and muscle. Being a small lad he uses his brain power to invent tools to help him in the ways of dragon fighting. This puts him face to face with a dragon whom he befriends. Let the drama ensue. I wont go into any more of the story but be warned this book goes through the whole movie so if your worried about spoilers you might want to wait.

The pictures are right out of the movie which makes sense because it is an animated film. The voice over work was great too, the narrator had a nice soothing voice that worked well with the book. It even had some of Hiccups dialogue from the movie. As the book is being read the words are at the bottom of the screen turning from white to green so the youngsters can follow along. The story is roughly eight and a half minutes long, a bit longer than the books we read currently but my son was enthralled throughout the whole book. He enjoyed the book so much when he woke up the next morning he was searching my pockets for my iPhone so he could watch the book again.

This book is currently .99 as a promotion celebrating the movie being released on 3/26. There is no indication what it will go up too but I would guess 2.99 based on the pricing of other books by FrogDogMedia. They have 29 books in total mostly selling for .99 and if they are anything like this book my son will love them.

iTunes Link – How To Train Your Dragon- Kids Books

Version 2.1.3

Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS 3.1.3

Classics is on sale for free – normally $2.99

Classics is an extremely impressive book library for your iPod Touch and iPhone.

Classics is streamlined, quick, and doesn’t lag, unlike many other book apps. The library to choose from is pretty unique, ranging from The Call of the Wild to The Art of War, and the selection is pretty beefy, clocking in about 20 full-length works.

The books are a joy to flip through, and the app has a set of rather neat features (bookmarks, reading multiple books at once) that set it apart from other mobile bookshelves.

Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu created an impressive app that’s already a favorite in the app store, and is a fantastic deal right now.

Edit: Almost forgot this link again, but I caught myself. I’m learning.

iTunes Link – Classics

Just in case you haven’t heard that the the world is ending in 2012, let me explain it for you. The Mayans developed a calendar in approximately 3000 BC which will end in 2012. Of course as any logical person must conclude, the only reason that the calendar would end is because the world will too, or something like that. This is the basis for the storyline of Apotheosis 2012, of which I was able to read the first chapter.

Before I get into the storyline, let me first address the functioning of the app. The creators have drawn and designed the comic book to fit the screen of an iPhone, which means there is no scrolling to see the whole page or expanding text. A simple swipe or tap advances the story, much like every other book or app out there. Unlike a standard comic book, however, Apotheosis does not change the entire image with each swipe. Often the text may change while the image remains the same, and sometimes parts of the image may change as well. I believe this is what the creators are referring to when they mention the iPop-up feature.

Beyond this, the app is pretty bare-bones. There is no table of contents or any button at all, but since the story is fairly brief it isn’t really necessary. On a whim I counted the total number of taps/swipes to navigate through the complete story and came up with 70. I finished the whole comic in less than 10 minutes.

As for the storyline itself, I was not impressed. Please keep in mind that I am not usually a book reviewer, so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt.

My biggest gripe against the story in Apotheosis is that it was just too confusing for me. As writers and filmmakers will sometimes do, the writer drops the reader into the middle of the storyline without any knowledge of the preceding events. When done well this is a great storytelling technique that builds the readers curiosity, but in Apotheosis I was left confused rather than curious. The only character I know anything about is the main character, and about all I know is her name and that she has some kind of power. Most of the time readers need a character to identify with as they experience the story, but with so little information I wasn’t sure who she was.

As I read the story I couldn’t help but feel like the comic was some sort of tract for the new age religion. There was a lot of time spent talking about how mankind would evolve, reach enlightenment, end duality, and so on. There are a lot of people who will find these subjects interesting (I know, I live in California), but those who aren’t interested will find the lengthy discourse tedious.

Lastly, I just have to get this off my chest. The Catholic Church is the bad guy again? Really? You couldn’t try and come up with something that hasn’t been beaten to death by both good and bad writers alike for the last decade or two? I don’t really care much about the church itself, but it really does get tiring seeing the same stereotypes pop up. At least there seems to be some other villain at work as well, perhaps he/she/it will be more interesting.

As usual a majority will have to decide if this is the kind of story that interests them. If you enjoy comics about this type of subject matter, then you will likely enjoy this app. If you like it, it doesn’t really matter what I think anyway.

iTunes Link: Apotheosis 2012 Vol #1:A Preface to Destiny
Version 1.7
Reviewed on: iPod Touch (2nd gen) OS 3.1.2

Hey good idea! I hadn't thought about using Spotlight Search this way

I just posted an update for this app yesterday for Intelligenti Publishing’s recent expansion of Tips & Tricks that includes OS3.0 and iPhone 3GS.

Normally I’m not a big fan of ebooks, but this is one that you really can’t go wrong with. There’s a lot of great info here that you might be surprised you don’t already know, and if this app keeps getting updated with every new iPhone firmware release and every new iPhone version… well, it’s pretty easy to do the math! $1 is a pittance.

iTunes Link – Tips & Tricks – iPhone Secrets
Intelligenti Publishing website

* Today is iPhone App Reviews.net’s birthday *

Earlier this summer I gave everyone a run-through of Tips & Tricks – iPhone Secrets, an iPhone cheatsheet of sorts. It lays out a whole mess of iPhone functionality that a lot of casual users are clueless on and a few things that even the most hardcore iPhone nerds probably don’t know.

Since then we’ve seen the release of the iPhone 3GS and the release of OS3.0, so naturally the folks at Intelligenti Publishing got to work and nearly doubled the number of geeky iPhone secrets from 38 to 70. They were even nice enough to label the tips with little icons that tell you if you’re looking at something that’s improved in 3.0, done differently in 3.0, or completely new in the latest iPhone firmware.

And for all the people who are broke as f (like me!), there’s also an icon that tells you if a certain function is 3GS only. Great idea – the last thing you want is to start beating your head against a wall as you look for features that your antiquated 3G just doesn’t have.

Intelligenti seems very committed to keeping Tips & Tricks up to date, plus it’s still only a buck (!) even after adding all that new content, so if you buy this app for yourself it could turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving as the iPhone continues to evolve.

iTunes Link
Version 3.0
Reviewed on my crappy old iPhone 3G OS3.0

I think I’m a pretty hardcore iPhone user – I mean, I run several iPhone-related websites for crying out loud! – so when flipping through this ebook I wasn’t really expecting to learn anything new. I figured it would tell you how to do a screenshot, how to save battery life by shutting off 3G, yadda yadda yadda. Tips & Tricks  - iPhone Secrets does cover all of the most basic things that most of us already know, but I was pretty surprised to find several items that were genuinely new to me.

Truth is you could probably find all the info contained in this app by googling and reading your iPhone owner’s manual, but (a) you probably have better things to do with your life than spend hours to save $.99, and (b) you’ve probably lost or tossed your owner’s manual by now.

I can’t really go and list all of the “secrets” compiled by Intelligenti Publishing because that would be kind of mean… they did, after all, go to the trouble of creating this app… but I’ll tell you about a few things that I, a self-proclaimed iPhone geek, learned from this app:

• How to force-quit a crashed app without doing a full restart (yeah, I shoulda known this one!)
• How to make the iPhone erase all data if you lose it and the new “owner” can’t figure out your passcode (assuming you’re using the passcode feature)
• How to zoom out of maps without pinching
• How to use punctuation faster, ie: without tapping into the punctuation screen and then tapping out of it again

And here are some things I already knew that I believe may still be New Information to a lot of more casual users:

• How to delete emails without opening each one or tapping “edit”
• Faster ways to type .com/.net/.org./.edu website addresses in Safari’s address bar
• How to preview a link URL in Safari without actually opening the link
• How to start Safari on a blank page
• How to save images in Safari to the camera roll
• How to scroll through app icon screens without swiping

In all there are 38 “tips & tricks” contained in this app, and my guess would be that even the lightest iPhone user will know at least 10 or 15 of them already. Heavy users like me probably already know upwards of 30+, but if this app were converted into a quiz I think it would be pretty hard for even the biggest nerds to get a perfect score. Plus, some of the items aren’t so much secret as just common sense, like how to maximize battery life if you’re making calls vs. how to maximize battery for listening to music.

The app itself is very functional and provides a slider for jumping to specific pages, plus there’s an index for jumping to different chapters. The only problem I encountered with this app is that it froze up a few times but luckily I’d already gone over the force-quit-an-app tip.

Intelligenti definitely needs to address the crashing issue, but outside of adding more pages there’s not a ton they could do to improve iPhone Secrets. Each page is easy to understand and the necessary diagrams are there when needed, and if you’re an iPhone noob then I think this app will really come in handy. Hardcore users could probably take it or leave it, but for only a buck it may be worth looking at.

I just got done writing about an app called Ballerina, so now I need to overcompensate with something far more manly: Dark Horse Comics’ Terminator comic book!

The Terminator: Death Valley was just released in the App Store yesterday and if waiting for Terminator: Salvation to hit movie theaters is killing you, this is your chance to get a little robot fix to tide you over for the next couple of weeks. As an iPhone app it does just about everything right… you can jump to any of the 87 pages in this first installment, you can change the page transitions as you swipe from screen to screen, and you can auto-play the story if you’re not in the mood to swipe. The one thing you can’t do is zoom in on the artwork… not a big deal for me, but I was kind of thinking that would be built in. Hmm.

As far as the story is concerned… I don’t want to give too much away… the plot has not one, but two, big angry Terminators running around Death Valley, California in search of John Connor so they can give him a new dirt bike and take him out for ice cream. Or maybe they’re just gonna shoot him in the face? Robots can be so unpredictable. Anyway, what I’ve read so far has been great and there’s action aplenty across multiple storylines.

If you’re a fan of Dark Horse Comics or a rabid Terminator junkie, get this app and be prepared to buy three more installments because it’s a four-part series. Each $.99 installment is roughly 80-100 pages of the kind of quality artwork you’d expect from a publisher like Dark Horse, and you don’t even need to seal it in plastic when you’re done!

If you’re a fan, get it. If you’re not a fan but you like the idea of robots killing stuff, get it. If you think there’s already too much violence in the world and just want everyone to get along, get Ballerina.

AppEngines has put forth a book in iPhone/Touch format titled Credit Secrets Investigated by Tony D’Andrea. This is an $8.99 application. At it’s core it is a book. The author’s website has the same verbage as is posted in the AppStore description. On the website the book is $29. 

Eight chapters cover:

1. General Credit
2. Credit Reports
3. Credit Cards
4. Financial Institutions
5. What You Can Do If You Are Too Far In Debt
6. Collection Agencies
7. Bankruptcy
8. Investing

As an application, it’s sole function is to present the pages of the book. Page movement is as simple as a flick in the direction you want to go or a touch on the screen to make the page turn in the reading direction. A setting change can be done by touching the upper left hand corner. You can change from black text on white background to white text on black background. You can enlarge or shrink the text with typical pinching gestures. Moving around in the chapters can be done by touching the upper right hand corner. A page with the major divisions will appear. From there you can scroll up or down to the place you want to go. 

That’s it. 

Content

This is not an exciting application or topic. What you are paying for is the content, words on the page; not the bells and whistles of the application itself.

I have 12 years in financial services. The information in this book is nothing new to me. I had to step back from my experiences to see if this book would have an appeal to someone looking for financial help. 

My conclusion: for $8.99, I don’t think so. I have no problem with the information, it’s standard fare. At best this is an okay reference guide. However, I’d rather spend my $8.99 on a couple productivity apps, a game or two, and put the rest toward paying down my debt… if I had any. The rest of the information can be found on the web for free.