iPhone App Reviews

Manuscript

Michael E. | Mar 22, 2010 Productivity

User rating: (7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)

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Much like my second novel, this review is a long time coming. As I’ve mentioned before, I do a lot of writing and invariably- especially with novel writing- things tend to bleed together; plotlines and characters and settings all expand, becoming much more formidable than you initially thought.  Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint, and without discipline, even the shortest novella can balloon into an runaway epic of mammoth proportions.

When I first heard about Black Mana Studios‘ Manuscript, I knew this was one app I had to pick up and put through the paces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: $7.99

App Sale: 1Password Pro

Michael (Admin) | Nov 24, 2009 App Sale Alert, Utilities

User rating: (8 votes, average: 3.63 out of 5)

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1Password Pro is on sale for free – normally $7.99

I’ve been using Memengo’s Wallet Pro for a quite a while now, but 1Password Pro kind of makes me want to switch!

Not only does it provide a way to store your passwords, it also features an in-app browser that will automatically log you in with the login info you’ve stored in the app. It also features a dual-layer kind of security thing… to access the app you need to enter a 4-digit passcode, and you can add an additional master password to more sensitive items.

Possibly the thing I like best is that you can back up your encrypted password data locally on your computer rather than on someone else’s server.

I just installed 1Password Pro today so I haven’t really been able to run it through all the paces, but so far I really like what I see. This app at full price will cost you $8 and right now it’s zero, so if you need something like this now is the time to get it!

iTunes Link – 1Password Pro

Tags: $7.99

Eternity Time Log

Michael (Admin) | Mar 20, 2009 Productivity

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Whether you’re a ball-busting professional who bills by the hour or just a time-obsessed weirdo, Eternity Time Log could very well be your next best friend because it’s awesome at tracking what you do and for how long. In reality I don’t have much of a need for an app like this, but I’ve always wondered how many hours a day I spend wandering around my neighborhood with my dog Terry, a.k.a. The Urinator, so I worked Eternity into my routine and got a pretty clear picture of what kind of time I’ve been committing to my hairy little friend.

My routine goes like this:

• Open Eternity Time Log and push “Start” on the activity I’ve labeled Terry the Dog
• Push the home button on my iPhone and switch to iPod so I can listen to my crappy 80s music on the walk
• Lock the iPhone and forget about it until I get home and press “Stop” on Eternity’s timer

Just like the iPhone’s built-in clock/timer/stopwatch, Eternity runs in the background and lets you do whatever the hell you want while it logs your time. Listen to music, send emails, play with other apps… just go about your day as usual, and your time gets tracked. It’s flawless.

Komorian also made it possible to not only label your activities, but you can also group activities together so that you can see how long you’ve spent on the group as a whole and each activity inside the group. Example: I have an activity group called “Testing Apps” and inside that group is “Orion’s Belt” and “Money Catcher”. Eternity tells me how long I spent on each app, and also how long I spent on Testing Apps as a whole.

Other great functions are the ability to view daily/weekly/monthly reports, export the reports as a CSV file, and there’s also an option to show report percentages against the time interval (day, week, etc.) or against the total time logged. In other words, you can choose whether Eternity tells you how much of your day was spent walking The Urinator or how much of your logged time was spent on that activity. Personally I find the ‘logged time’ option to be more useful, but others who are monitoring longer activities (how much of my life do I spend sleeping?) might disagree.

I can really only think of one thing that Eternity Time Log can’t do which is log two different activities at once, and something tells me that it may not be possible. If it is, I’d be willing to bet that Komorian will make it happen.

There is one small bug in this app that I didn’t know about, but the developer knows and a fix is already in the works. This is the email I got from Marcin, the app’s creator:

There is a bug in Eternity 1.2 and 1.3 I’d like you to be aware of. Logs are not always exported correctly when you have “&” in activity names or notes. It will be fixed in the next update.

Ok then! Gotta love a developer who’s on top of things.

If $7.99 sounds steep to you, maybe you should ask yourself whether time really IS money. If the answer is no, get the lite version… but if the answer is yes, buy the app and enjoy it because it’s totally worth the asking price.

Tags: $7.99

AirFight

Michael (Admin) | Jan 13, 2009 Games

User rating: (35 votes, average: 2.97 out of 5)

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Do you force everyone you know to address you as “Maverick”? Is “Highway to the Danger Zone” your favorite song of all time? Do you frequently find yourself hopelessly lost in homoerotic volleyball fantasies?

If so, AirFight was MADE for you!

Ok ok, even if you’ve never seen Top Gun it’s still a pretty decent, albeit difficult, game.

AirFight puts you in the cockpit of a badass fighter jet and your mission is to cruise around and shoot down the bad guys. Your view of the unfriendly skies is decorated with an altimeter on the right side of the iPhone screen, an orientation-thing in the center that tells you how much you’re tilting, and sliding your thumb along the left edge controls your speed. The two circles near your right thumb are for launching missiles at a reasonable pace and firing an unlimited supply of machine gun ammo. Also included in the package is the handiest tool of all: a map that shows where your targets are.

The graphics in AirFight, particularly the plain-jane fighter jets, are nothing to get excited about, but overall this is a pretty good game if you’re into this kind of thing. Even on the easy level it’s pretty hard to lock your missiles onto a target, but it’s doable if you can figure out how and when to control your speed. Naturally, every gamer’s first instinct is to haul ass and go full throttle at all times, but with AirFight it’s generally better to be smart than fast.

Ocko AB built some nice features into this game and I have to confess that I haven’t tried the most intriguing one which is two-player mode. Apparently you can do some dogfighting with a friend which I think is awesome, but of course I’m a pathetic loser and I can’t seem to get out of the house to fire missiles at the few iPhone geeks I know.

Aside from the mediocre airplanes, my only real complaint in AirFight is that it would be way more fun if it were easier! The map totally helps, but I think the gameplay would improve drastically if there was a better way to (a) spot your targets which can be pretty hard to find in the vast airspace, and (b) lock onto them so you can blow them out of the sky. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty fun game, but more killing and less chasing is what the casual gamer in me really wants. Oh yeah, and some explosions wouldn’t hurt either! Or at least a splash when an enemy plane hits the water below. Killing is always more satisfying when the enemy’s death is visually confirmed.

$7.99 feels a little steep for this app in its current form, but I like what AirFight has so far and the two-player deal looks pretty sweet for people who, unlike me, have iPhone friends. With some better graphics and more engaging gameplay this could be a pretty awesome game so I hope Ocko keeps working to improve it.

Tags: $7.99, 3D, arcade

iBlueSky (mindmapping)

Michael (Admin) | Oct 23, 2008 Productivity

User rating: (14 votes, average: 2.79 out of 5)

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iBlueSky is a mindmapping tool. A “mindmap” is basically what you would get if your brain could throw up… you’ve got an idea in your head, you’re not sure of how to translate it to paper or some other visual medium, so you mindmap it! Start with a word or a concept, branch off from that concept with lines and circles that hold related ideas, draw more lines, more circles… and eventually your original idea starts to take shape in a big mess of words and bubbles.

Tenero Software Limited has made it really easy to move this process to the iPhone, and they’ve put in the right functionality to make it more appealing than scribbling your strokes of genius on a cocktail napkin.

In iBlueSky your ideas are divided into “branches”. If you have five ideas that are directly linked to your initial idea, that’s five branches that will all be color-coded so they’re easy to tell apart, and you can move invidivual bubbles or entire branches by dragging them around with your fingertip.

Everything you put into your mindmap is editable, and you can even copy, cut, and paste in case you realize that things need to be rearranged. It’s really a pretty sweet app for brainstorming, and when your mindmap is complete you can send it off in an email that will include the map in several different formats including PNG, PDF, and a couple of weird formats (OPML and MM) that are specific to other desktop mindmapping software programs like Freemind.

There are only two areas that I’d like to see improved, the first being the project list. Projects titles are the same as the text in the starting bubble, but I’d like to be able to edit the title in case I want it to be more descriptive. The other improvement would be in the formatting of the bubbles themselves… a return button would be good so that text could be arranged on more than one line, and it would also be nice if I could highlight certain bubbles with a fill color.

iBlueSky, overall, is a great way to map out your brilliant ideas. Inspiration can hit you at some weird times, so having an app like this on the iPhone seems like a perfect fit and a worthy use of $7.99.

Tags: $7.99

Bubble Bash

Michael (Admin) | Jul 30, 2008 Games

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

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I love this game! So far Bubble Bash is the only non-free app that I’ve downloaded and if you’re into puzzle games this one is definitely worth the $7.99 price tag. It’s basically a re-tooling of Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust a Move) but it incorporates some new gameplay elements and a unique tropical theme.

Starting with the title screen you can tell right away that Gameloft put a lot of effort into the graphics and sound. Everything about this game looks very polished - even the game menus are fancy with how they hang from the top of the screen and swing back and forth as you move your iPhone. Check the screenshots and video at the end of this review to see what I’m talking about. This developer doesn’t screw around when it comes to production values.

The new gameplay elements I mentioned before are significant enough that they make Bubble Bash a unique game in its own right, but the main object of the game (popping bubbles with like-colored bubbles) remains mostly the same for hardcore Puzzle Bobble fans. In the screenshots you’ll see the characters Kale and Malia standing on a giant skateboard that moves back and forth as you tilt your iPhone. Cool! It’s a very handy feature when you’re trying to squeeze a bubble into a tight spot. You can also turn the “Gravity” option off so your characters stay in the middle if that works better for you.

Game mode options include “Arcade Mode” which has Kale and Malia playing different types of challenges, defeating bosses, and collecting pieces of some kind of map, or you can play “Crab Fever” which is a straight-up survival challenge to see how long you can last before the bubbles completely take over the screen. Also unique to Bubble Bash are all kinds of special bubbles that carry certain properties that will either help or hurt (but mostly help) your chances of successfully clearing a level.

This game is packed with a ton of bells & whistles that I’m too lazy to explain so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that this game kicks ass. It even includes tutorials for the truly clueless!

On the negative side there are only a couple of very small things that annoy me:

1. I keep getting kicked back to my iPhone’s main screen every time I try to access the “More Games” menu selection. I’m guessing this is just a tool for plugging Gameloft’s other titles so I’m not too broken up about it.

2. Every time I tap “Main Menu” when navigating through the game’s rather large feature set, it asks me “are you sure?” Kind of unnecessary.

3. Bubble Bash’s icon changed from the stoner crab you see at the top of this review to a very generic pink ball. Bring back the crab!

That’s all I got. If addictive puzzle games aren’t your thing then this game probably won’t do much for you. Everyone else: buy it, play it, and come back here to tell me what you think ok?

Tags: $7.99, game