Category Archives: Reviews: Software

Game Dev Story for iOS review

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Shaun

With so many games available for iOS, it can be extremely difficult to find a classic title among the myriad of great, good, bad and terrible games that are currently flooding iTunes.

Game Dev Story is one of the great games in the App Store and possibly the greatest strategy game so far. It encompasses so many aspects of game play that others succeed in, but most only succeed in one aspect rather than bringing them all together to create an experience that offers short bursts of excitement within a long and interesting scenario that makes you feel as if you really are achieving something.

Game Dev Story ironically puts you in charge of a game development company as you try to make money and ultimately be as successful as possible. I mention irony because the title has no doubt made a ton of money for Kairosoft and deservedly so. They are living the life of a player who unlocks the key to winning the game they developed in the first place. When you first start it does feel like a bit of a mystery as to how you will make money, but the many factors come at you from a variety of places as you progress and there are times when it is difficult to juggle so many things at once. From advertising to staff development to training to licences to the intricacies of the game development itself it can feel muddling. Then you have to consider trade shows, hiring and firing people, buying larger premises and the list goes on and on. In contrast to the serious parts of running a business, the graphics are pure Game Boy and they bring with them oodles of personality and fun.

The music, animations and general interface suggest a kids game, but adults are better suited to play it, at least in the early stages. For people like me who are impatient and a little stupid the longevity is immense because I am still playing it for long periods of time every day. Never have I played a game that has kept me playing it for over 2 hours late at night until I fell asleep with iPhone in hand. However, those of you who take the time early on to understand everything that is happening may find the challenge lacking if you build up lots of funds. The scenarios can be too alike if you don’t have to worry about the company finances and the true game play comes when you are desperately trying to stay afloat.

For most people this is a superb iOS game, but for some it may prove to be a two week wonder.

Available from the App Store for £2.99.

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Short Takes: iThoughtsHD

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Shaun

Short Takes are brief reviews of iPhone and iPad Apps that have caught my fancy. I’ll give a brief description and tell you why I like them. I’m not going to give ratings. I would rate all of the Apps I’m reviewing a 4 or 5 out of 5. They are stable and well made, at least in my opinion, provide good value, again, in my opinion, and get good developer support.

iThoughtsHD

iThoughtsHD is a mind mapping tool. If you want the details of mind mapping, check out Wikipedia. And follow some of the links because there are lots of approaches. The basic idea is to record your thoughts on something, for example, a project you need to do. And not just the thoughts, but their inter-relationships. Mind maps usually look like a bunch of interconnected ovals with text in them. They are grouped around a central theme. The ovals relate to each other usually in a hierarchical fashion.

Let’s say that you have a project that you have to map out. You know you have lots of things to do but you’re not quite sure how they relate to each other or in what order you need to do them. And there are all sorts of little things that really aren’t attached to anything yet. You could write it all down on paper, many, many times. Or you could use an outliner and move items up and down and in and out. Or you could use a mind mapping tool and get a more visual view of what you need to do. If it were on an iPad, you could move things from place to place by touch and drag.

I admit that I liked the idea of mind mapping from the first time I saw it. However, there was no way I’d plan something using a mind map on paper. And the computer programs at the time were clumsy and impersonal. So I filed the idea away and forgot about it.

Then one day, I saw an article about mind mapping on one of the iPad Web sites I peruse. Maybe this could finally be useful for my way of working. There were a few “lite” versions I tried and while the basics were okay, something was lacking. Maybe it was ease of use, maybe it was power, or maybe the interface didn’t suit me.

In my delving into mind mapping tools on the iPad, one App was always at the top – iThoughtsHD. However, there was no free version to try out, and the price at the time was $7.99Cdn (now $9.99Cdn). So I read as much as I could about it. I read the Web site and the developer’s blog, from which I learned that there’s been a constant flow of new versions and upgrades. There’s also an iPhone version. In fact that’s where iThoughts started. There are also a few mind mapping sites where iThoughtsHD also came out on top.

Everything I read was positive, so I took a leap of faith and purchased it. If I say so myself, it was a very smart move.

iThoughtsHD makes it easy. It’s quite intuitive. Touch the + to create a new map. Set the basic parameters using the options gear. Global options are in the Settings App. Double tap to attach a new topic to the current selected topic. Or use the buttons to create a child or a sibling. Touch a topic to select it. Double touch an existing topic to edit the text. The i(nfo) button lets you customize a topic’s appearance and add an icon or a note.

There are options to align topics or to keep everything aligned automatically. Touch and drag to move topics around. Or touch, hold, and drag to move topics from one parent topic to another.

There are lots of other tools to make the maps meaningful. You can add callouts and group a set of topics. You can also show relationships between different topics outside of the usual hierarchy, so that the map can take on a networked structure rather than just a hierarchy.

You can export as a PDF or export and import in many other mind map application formats so that you can use the maps on your Mac or PC. I’ve tried this using Freemind on my Mac and it worked flawlessly.

I mentioned up front that any of the Apps I review will have good developer support. Craig Scott, the creator of iThoughtsHD, is one of the best. He is very responsive and very open to ideas.

I’ve used iThoughtsHD on 3 projects so far, 2 at work. It saved me considerable time. In fact there was one project where I needed to map out a sequence of events. Using iThoughtsHD, I was able to see that the same groupings of events occurred from different points in the sequence. I doubt it would have been as obvious using an outliner or paper.

If you need this sort of tool, get the best. In my humble opinion that’s iThoughtsHD.

Bob

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TumbleVision HD for iPad Review

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Shaun

When I was young a shop close to my house sold Kaleidoscopes. It was with wonder that I spent hours holding one to my eye and turning it to produce a variety of shapes, patterns and colours which you could say were the Pixar animation equivalent for children born in the 1970’s. I really, really wanted one for Christmas, but alas it did not arrive and I had to make do with something else that did not live as long in my memory as the humble Kaleidoscope that continued to fill my mind.

This Christmas is different though because TumbleVision HD has arrived for the iPad and I am once again staring into a myriad of colours and swimming shapes which enchant me as much today as they did all of those years ago. It simulates a Kaleidoscope almost perfectly and comes with a range of patterns built in for you to start playing with. You can speed up the animation or slow it down and also stop it whenever you want to using the three large buttons at the top. Over to the left is a button to hide or show the background, of which I prefer to hide it to let the show shine through and over to the right is a settings icon which lets you mute the sound or buy extra packs of designs.

There are 5 packs which each contain 3 designs; you can buy each pack for £1.19 or buy individual designs for £0.59 each which gives you more than enough options to experiment with. Besides using the buttons to move the animations, you can also use your finger in a more natural way to spin them around and once it is revolving at the speed you want, you can leave it propped up on your coffee table to create a unique and interesting centre piece. Stick some music on in the background, hide the surround and it also becomes an innovative visual show to compliment whatever music you are playing.
This app does not astound with its complexity and that is ultimately why it is so lovely. You pay nothing for the first 3 packs and it just works as it should, and crucially recreates the Kaleidoscope feeling perfectly. On top of that you get to watch some special images within each Kaleidoscope- the first one includes floating angels, the next one butterflies and the third mosaic patterns. The paid-for designs include all sorts of themes that will keep you coming back for more, to concentrate on or to just enjoy.

TumbleVision HD is beautifully designed, is a treat to set up and use and is much more than a mere novelty. I truly am I child again and this is a nice early Christmas present for me. HIGHLY recommended.

Available for free from the App Store.

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yReader for iOS Review

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Shaun

There are a whole heap of decent RSS readers for the iPhone and boy, I should know, having tried about 99% of them over the past 2 and a bit years. If you read around the web you’d believe that very few were contenders aside from Reeder which is good, no doubt about it, and which I have been using on and off for over a year now yet I always seem to be looking for something else as although it ticks most of the boxes, I don’t know, there’s just something about it that doesn’t quite do it for me.

Anyway, my seemingly never-ending quest for the worlds greatest RSS reader continues and shows no signs of ever being sated.

The other week I stumbled across yReader. This is a pretty new application and its arrival has been somewhat less than heralded. When I’m looking at RSS readers I am looking for quite a few essential features.

Numero uno – it must have an offline mode so that I can download my feeds in the morning at home via wifi and then read them when out and about later without having a wifi connection.

Numero dos – when reading the feeds without a wifi connection the feeds, and in particular the images, must appear in the posts straight away. I find that when using Reeder, there is always an irritating second or two delay before in-line images re-appear.

Numero tres – the option to increase the font size is always appreciated because I’m nearly 50 and the old peepers ain’t quite as good as they were when I was 21

Numero quattro  – I like the ability to move through posts by swiping left and right on the screen

Numero cinco – Google Reader syncing is an essential

You’ll be shocked to learn, no doubt, that yReader delivers on all of the above. It downloads for offline reading very quickly, quicker than Reeder, images appear immediately when reading without a wifi connection, the font size is customisable, you can swipe to read through posts and last but not least, it syncs very well with Google Reader. Another nice bonus is the full screen reading mode achieved by a simple double tap on the screen. In addition, tapping and holding on an image pops up a menu offering the ability to save the picture to your camera roll….why can I never seem to be able to do this in Reeder? You’ve also got the useful facility of being able to save posts to the usual suspects, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote…

Downsides are few but there are too many taps required to get you back to the home page once you start delving into your Google Reader folders and the icon is a bit iffy, it reminds me of something a bit too redolent of GMTV for some reason…this is just a surprisingly nice little RSS reader application with a clean UI and feature set that should satisfy most power users yet at the same time is easy enough for the casual user to get their head and fingers around.

Murray

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Short Takes: Trainyard and Blue Block

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Shaun

Short Takes are brief reviews of iPhone and iPad Apps that have caught my fancy. I’ll give a brief description and tell you why I like them. I’m not going to give ratings. I would rate all of the Apps a 4 or 5 out of 5. They are stable, are well made, at least in my opinion, provide good value, again, in my opinion, and get good developer support.

Puzzle Games

I confess, I’m addicted to puzzle games. And if I can get through a puzzle in 5 to 10 minutes and still feel challenged, so much the better. I’ll get hung up on one particular game for a week or so and then switch. The ones I like best are those that don’t have a time limit and force you to use your brain rather than reflexes. So while Angry Birds is a lot of fun, there are lots of games I’d rather play instead. So first up for Short Takes are a couple of puzzlers.

Trainyard

Being a patriotic Canadian I’ll look at Trainyard for the iPhone first, created by fellow Canadian, Matt Rix. In Trainyard, you have one or more stations where trains leave from, and one or more stations where trains must arrive at. Your job is to lay track between the stations using your finger. Simple you say. But of course there’s more. There are colours involved. Only trains of a particular colour leave a station and only trains of a particular colour may arrive at a station. Anything else and CRASH!

Sometimes you have obstacles. Sometimes you have to make tracks cross each other, without crashing trains. Sometimes, there are more trains leaving than arriving, so you have to merge trains. And sometimes the trains leaving are a different colour than those arriving, so not only do you have to merge trains, but in the right combination.

There are in-game tutorials showing you all the game mechanics. And the first few levels of each group are really training sessions to make sure you’ve got it before making you rack your brain on the real puzzles. The basic game structure is to lay down your track and then start the trains to see what happens. You can adjust the speed of the trains. Slow them down if you need to see exactly where they’re going, or speed them up if the puzzle is very simple.

One thing that I really like about Trainyard is that very often there’s an “aha!” moment. While the tutorials give you all the mechanics, you still have to figure out how they work in the context of the puzzles.

Trainyard is an iPhone game but plays perfectly well on an iPad. The graphics are basic but clean. Trainyard is currently $2.99Cdn in the App Store and includes 150 puzzles.

The puzzles are grouped by city, Canadian of course, and once you unlock a city, you can try any puzzle within that city.

But there’s more. To ensure that you don’t waste you money on something you don’t like, there’s the free Trainyard Express with 60 puzzles. Unlike most “lite” versions, the puzzles in Express are unique. So between the two, there are over 200 puzzles.

Blue Block

Within my puzzle addiction is another addiction – to parking lot or sliding block games. You know the ones where your car or block is in the middle of a parking lot and you have to move the cars or blocks around in order to get yours out. I’ve tried almost a dozen but the one I like best is Blue Block for the iPhone by Martin Demers.

As the name implies, you have to rescue a blue block from a 6×6 grid. Blue Block keeps track of the number of moves you make and also shows the minimum number of moves possible, so there’s something to shoot for. Blue Block also has a number of themes, including wood and stone.

Some parking lot games give you a few hundred or even a few thousand puzzles. Blue Block gives you all of the possible puzzles for a 6 by 6 grid that can be solved. That’s 39,963 puzzles grouped into Kids, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, and Crazy packs. Within a pack, when you solve a puzzle, the next one is unlocked.

What I really like about Blue Block is that the game mechanics and layout are very clean and easy to use so you can concentrate on solving the puzzle.

Blue Block is $0.99Cdn in the App Store. There’s also a free version with over 2500 puzzles, so you can try it out. And if you’re really masochistic, there’s Blue Block Double for $0.99Cdn with 4465 puzzles with, you guessed it, 2 blue blocks. There’s also a free version of that. While all of these play well on the iPad, there is an iPad-only version that contains all of the single and double block puzzles for the usual price of between $2.99 and $4.99 depending on when you catch it. But it’s marked down to $0.99Cdn for the holidays. There’s a free iPad version as well. The iPad version has the same puzzles as the iPhone version, but the graphics are crisper.

Bob

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Drop7 for iPhone and Android: addiction included

Posted on December 9, 2010 by sidthebad

I have a new game addiction to share with you for the iOS devices as well as Android. It’s called Drop7 and like all classic games is devilishly simple but challenging. It very much has that “one more turn” addiction. The developer describes it as “Tetris meets Sudoku in this original, addictive puzzle game.”

Essentially you need to drop numbers (between 1 and 7) onto the board. Numbers will disappear (and score points) if the number equals the number of discs in the row or column.

For example in the image attached we’re dropping a 6. If we drop that on top of the 7 it would disappear as there would now be 6 discs in that column. Alternatively if we drop it on top of the 5 on the left of the screen, it won’;t disappear but the two 5′s below it will as there are now 5 discs in their column. Hopefully this makes some sense. It’s simple yet complex at the same time.

Highly highly recommended. For the record, my high score is 262,144. If you download it, let me know what you think.

Sid

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Windows Phone 7 review

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Shaun

Last week I spent some time looking at the LG Optimus 7 hardware and concluded that it was an extremely capable performer, albeit one that does not excel on the personality front. It delivers in terms of battery power, screen clarity and build quality and only the camera let it down slightly. Today is the turn of the onboard operating system- Windows Phone.

My first experience with Windows Phone was highly positive- I was completely blown away by what appeared to be another iPhone moment and it really did impress in the first 30 minutes of use. After my first glorious few minutes with Windows Phone I settled down with the Optimus 7 and started to dig beneath the surface. It is highly intuitive and creates an excellent first impression- the flat interface and live tiles stand out unlike any other mobile operating system and the differentiation against Android, iOS and the others is just enough to give it a personality of its own.

The smooth interaction stands out more than anything and is the first OS I have used that matches iOS in this regard. Touches and swipes are responded to immediately and Microsoft’s insistence on specific hardware requirments offers the reassurance that any Windows Phone should be able to cope with the OS quite happily.

I have little else to say about the interface apart from the fact that it is beautifully implemented and that it works as well as any system I have seen on a smartphone, and this offers plenty of potential for the future.

The interface carries through to the core apps such as calendar, messaging and the rest, but at times this can almost be too simplistic. In a similar way to how the iOS calendar is too bare bones, the feeling is repeated in some of the core functions here. Contacts is just brilliant and the Facebook integration is a marvel of cross feeding data, the calendar retains a beautifully simple flatness that offers a clear overview of what is happening, but does suffer from being over simplistic for those who require serious organisation.

Despite the interface and navigation being exceptional in Windows Phone 7, it currently feels like a smartphone OS that is not finished. It is capable of managing all of the core functions a user needs and succeeds in this area, with some good quality third party apps and games available already, but it does feel incredibly locked down. iOS is locked down, but there are a multitude of third party apps available to increase the flexibility of the OS and hopefully Windows Phone will continue to develop in a similar fashion. It seems to me as if Microsoft is looking to follow the path laid down by Apple in terms of locking down the OS, but is maybe hoping that gradual updates and a series of well-made apps will follow. This is a bit of a gamble in a market so crowded, but I believe that it will find a place over the next 12 months. Whether that place is at the forefront of the industry remains to be seen.

Windows Phone is currently a difficult platform to review completely because it sits somewhere between a full smartphone OS and a setup like Bada, but shows a glimpse that it will evolve into something much more powerful, hopefully somewhere between iOS and Android. This isn’t a deep delve into the workings of the OS, but more a general opinion of how it performs and overall it is a very positive experience.

Despite all of the pleasantness it needs to differentiate itself from iOS more and the close down system shouldn’t last forever. It has a feel that is as good as iOS, but needs to offer more flexibility to truly catch on. It does the job already, but more development is needed to compete with the big boys.

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KissOnTheFly for iPhone review

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Shaun

Social networking is of course hugely popular at the moment and particularly amongst mobile users. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and all of the others have benefited from the quick growth in smartphone ownership, but there are some who feel that they either lack emotion (Twitter) or that they are too complex to quickly express what you are thinking (Facebook). KissOnTheFly is designed to get around the problem by letting you send an animated kiss to anyone at all. If the recipient does not also own the app you can send them a kiss via email, Facebook, Twitter or save the kiss as a photo in your camera roll for use later in an MMS.

The process is also easy to handle and adds a special piece of interactivity into the equation; you tap ‘Send Kiss’, choose the delivery method, select the group of kisses and then the individual kiss within the group. Add a personal message, contact details and then simply blow into the microphone to send the kiss. It is all very simple and even a grumpy 40 year-old such as myself appreciated the interaction and emotional elements within the interface and navigation.

Within the app there are four options; Kiss List, My Kiss, Send Kiss and Downloaded Messages. The Kiss List lets you preview each of the kisses of which there are many included broken into separate groups; Tasty, Wild Ones, Zodiac, Love, Secrets and Wish. These cover the vast majority of reasons you will need to send a kiss and should offer enough longevity within the app for you to send a variety of kisses to your friends and loved ones. There are secret kisses as well which you will have to find for yourself- don’t expect any help from me…

My Kiss shows your received kisses which sounds quite basic, but is actually a small highlight. If you are feeling down for a moment simply open your list of kisses and open the special ones to give you a lift. My wife sat down with my 6 year-old daughter and they sent me a kiss- just the tonic when the day at work has been a bad one.

Send Kiss is the heart of the app and this is where you choose the type of kiss, the recipient and actually send off your messages to others.

You may view KissOnTheFly as a mere novelty app and I fully understand that, but the presentation, emotional design and entire implementation is simply divine. The fact that it could become a new way of communicating with the ones you love the most is an added bonus, and the main aim of the app. It succeeds in its true aim and has captured me when I didn’t expect it to. There are thousands of apps on the app store that are £0.59 / $0.99 and many are really not good at all, but this one is much more fun than I expected and I really do like it. Recommended.

More details and a download link are at www.kissonthefly.com.

KissOnTheFly is currently advertising on PDA-247, but this does not affect my reviews. If it is bad I say it’s bad, good and I say it’s good. This one is good.

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CMC Markets for iPhone Review

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Shaun

Monitoring the financial market is difficult at the best of times, but being able to do so wherever you are can mean the difference between profit and loss. CMC Markets is a new spread betting app that is designed to help you do exactly this by letting you take the latest information with you. It also offers real-time news, streaming prices and as much up-to-date information as possible to let you trade with the most precise information to hand.

You can read more in the initial press release ‘CMC markets in the news’, but a first look at the app suggests that it is professionally made and beautifully presented. The online service is presented in a similar manner to the iPhone app, but is of course able to display more information on screen at any one time. The fact that the iPhone app follows the same design traits is particularly useful when trading while on the move because familiarity will enable you to focus on the transaction and not fiddling with the software.

Of course the app is tied to CMC Markets Spread Betting, but the service appears to be complete and offers many of the features you will require to dip your toe in. Financial trading of any kind has to be considered against the risks and I am not recommending any particular service, but I am most impressed with the way this iPhone app has been developed and it is yet another string to an ever growing bow of apps. It is definitely worth a look if you are involved in this type of trading or are considering it for the first time.

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Trip Boss travel manager for iPhone review

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Shaun

Trip Boss was originally released on Palm OS and helped me a great deal on various business and pleasure trips. Since Palm OS died quite some time ago there have been few replacements available to me, despite a myriad of apps available on the iPhone platform. There are many travel apps out there, but many prefer to concentrate on looks and navigation over pure functionality. Has Trip Boss kept its Mojo in the move to iOS?

The feature list is extensive so I will highlight the main ones below-

✔ Log and Track Expenses in over 50 different expense categories, including mileage, or add your own
✔ Set different Budgets for each trip–business or personal–save Budget Templates
Set a vacation budget or a project budget for your business travel.
✔ Real Time Currency Rates–expenses logged using each day’s rate, log in multiple currencies
✔ Tip/split Calculator–calculate a quick tip or while entering meal expenses
✔ Currency Calculator–perform quick calculations on the go.
Expenses automatically converted into home currency
✔ Fuel Economy – conveniently keep track of fuel economy as you enter fuel expenses
✔ Beautifully designed interface with custom backgrounds and graphics, designed for retina display
✔ Multitasking support on iOS4

As you can see, the emphasis has been placed on ensuring as many aspects of a trip are covered as possible and bringing all of these together into one app can lead to confusion and a sterile app feel, but Trip Boss is neither. The subtle implementation of background images work a treat and bring a touch of fun to a subject which is otherwise all rather serious. The images do not override the foreground, but they draw you in to the experience and it surprises me how such a simple trick can work so well.

Trip Boss is all about financial recording and planning when away from home and it balances the focus between business and pleasure perfectly. It is not an app you will use every day, but for those who travel regularly, and even for those who do not, it has the potential to save you lots of money. When away from home it is all too easy to waste money and having an app that keeps you on track is not a bad thing at all.

The app is split into five sections:-

Trips- here you can input basic trip information such as departure and return dates, descriptions and travellers plus the related expense report.

You can also add your budget which is nicely presented in tablature form and extremely easy to read. Finally, there is a simple logging page to input each expense as they happen.

Budgets- this page takes you to an overview of the budgets for each trip and is especially useful for comparing how much you have spent each time you travel.

Expenses- this is a ‘come together’ view showing all of your expenses for all of your trips.

Tip/Split Calculator- effectively an app within an app. Some developers charge for this functionality alone, but it is neatly tucked away within Trip Boss for when you need it.

Currency Converter- the currencies are updated automatically online so you can be sure that the rates are accurate. You set your home currency and then use the small search box to get any rate you like. This is useful for before and during a trip and is beautifully implemented.

Within the settings menu you can choose a default time zone, fuel units and all sorts of other parameters which are pertinent to you. Even tax percentages are included alongside the expected date and time formats.

One other aspect I liked was the Travel Data icon at the bottom which lets you store people, places and clients and to also set up budget templates. This makes managing expenses much easier in future and with practice you will be managing everything you need in seconds.

When you consider than you can capture photo receipts and utilise the current location feature to record your expenses to the finest level there really is nothing missing here.

Conclusion

Apps like Trip Boss rarely get the attention they deserve because they are not developed by well known companies and do not overdo the reliance on Mac-like interfaces. However, this app is almost perfect for those who travel a lot on business and it has made the transition to iOS very successfully. Indeed, it is much easier to use than it ever was on Palm OS and is now just about perfect for anyone who travels, no mater how often.

Available from the App Store for £2.99.

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Soulver for iPad: mini review

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Shaun

I mentioned an iPad app called Soulver the other day which I described as “a plain text editor combined with a spreadsheet/calculator”. I realize now that this didn’t properly convey what this app is all about. Probably the best way to demonstrate what it does is to show you, so here are a few screenshots which should be self explanatory.

It’s a beautifully designed app which is just fantastic for quick calculations, worksheets, quotes, and sketching out budgets and estimates. Simply type out lists of items, figures and sums – just as if you were jotting them down on a piece of paper – and Soulver pulls out all the numbers and does the calculations.

Projects can be saved and filed for future reference, reuse or editing – if you’re a contractor or service provider of any kind, I can’t think of a quicker way of sketching out some figures with a client and then emailing them instantly.

For those of you with iPhones, there’s an iPhone version as well. Both are great, but it’s the iPad version that really rocks.

Simply brilliant. Trevor.

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Week Calendar for iPhone Review

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Shaun

iCal on your iPhone

This little gem of an app really shows how Apple’s own Calendar app on the iPhone should have been done.

The iPhone’s built-in calendar is a little basic. I find it useful only for getting a quick overview of my day and for entering appointments on the fly, but as a planning tool it is hopeless. For that, I need to run back to my desktop computer to get the big picture and to move events around with ease.

Apps like Pocket Informant have tried to improve on this by adding features and views that the built-in calendar lacks, such as a week view. Unfortunately, PI and its ilk often suffer from feature bloat and messy and crowded interfaces – a carry over from other platforms, you might say – and they are barely more useful than the built-in app for time-planning purposes.

My preference is for simple apps that do a few things extremely well. Enter Week Calendar, the first calendar app I have used on any smartphone/PDA that not only provides me with a fantastic overview of my time-commitments but which also allows me to manage those commitments almost as effectively as I can on the desktop.

I cannot stress this enough. I find this little $1.99 app more useful than any of the smartphone/PDA calendars I have used previously, and that includes Psion, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry.

So, what makes it so special?

Well, first of all the interface is clean and uncluttered, just like iCal, with discreet, subdued icons that do not distract the eye. Want an even cleaner view? Just tap once on the screen and the header and footer controls just fade away leaving you with nothing but a glorious overview of what’s on your plate for the week. Double tap on a particular day, and the view expands to show just that day’s appointments.

Touch gestures are put to good use elsewhere, too. Tapping on an event triggers a popover showing the event in greater detail; swiping left/right moves to the previous/next day or week; and tapping and holding on an empty time slot allows you to create an event for that particular slot.

There are plenty of options for controlling how the app looks and behaves, everything from setting default reminders and calendars to determining which day to use for the start of the week and how many hours to display on the screen. And, of course, the app works well in both portrait and landscape modes.

But the killer feature for me is the addition of drag and drop. Tapping and holding on any event makes it and every other event on the screen start to jiggle, just like the apps on the home screen do when you need to move them around. Suddenly, I can drag and drop events around the screen just like I can on the desktop version of iCal. And that, my friends, is a complete game changer as far as I’m concerned.

Want to plan out the rest of your week, assigning blocks of time to particular activities? No problem. Need to adjust your plan to incorporate an unexpected event? A doddle. Have a meeting that needs to be pushed back to later in the day? Just drag it to to the appropriate time and boom it’s done. Events can be dragged in 15 minute increments, so it’s easy to build in little buffers between appointments rather than just have them back-to-back and on-the-hour. In short, it’s a surprisingly similar experience to using a program like iCal on the desktop. The only thing missing at the moment is the ability to search through your appointments directly within the app, but that is no biggie – Spotlight or the built-in Calendar can handle that, because Week Calendar uses the same data and sync services as the built-in app.

If your days are fluid and your plans change frequently, this app is a godsend. I only wish it were also available on my iPad.

Trevor

Available from the App Store for £1.19 / $1.99.

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The Times Online review

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Shaun

The Times app for the iPad has had a rocky first few months with many people complaining about crashes and problems downloading the newspaper each day. I was lucky and had no performance issues (makes a change for me) and quickly found myself absorbed in the content every day. It proved to me that a newspaper could work on a digital device and I only stopped reading it when I stopped owning an iPad.

Desktop View

The iPhone 4 took over all of my mobile computing needs and because of that the iPad became a luxury I didn’t need anymore, a situation that few of you have found yourself in apparently. The problem was that I still wanted my fix of The Times and so decided to give the online edition a try. The real price is £2 per week for full access, but you can try it out for £1 for the first 30 days to see what you think. This, to me, seems like a generous way to let the customer decide if it is right for them.

Without doubt the desktop experience is the best and The Times offers a similar feel to the iPad edition i.e. it is like a newspaper. It is the first service that has kept me staring at my Mac screen for over an hour and really does impress by the speed and clarity with which the content is presented. Whether you like the content or not, it is clear from the front page that the design has been carefully thought out to bring the newspaper feel to the big screen.

Mobile View

My real reason for testing it was to see how well the mobile version worked and I have to give it a thumbs up, just. I have of course been testing it on an iPhone 4 which has one of the better browsers on the market and one of the best screens, but I am presuming it will work just as well under Android (maybe better?) and on a larger screened Symbian device or BlackBerry Torch. Navigation is not too bad considering the desktop formatting remains on the mobile version and the text is very clear in landscape. Sadly it is a little too small in portrait, but the key moment was when I found myself absorbed in the paper even on the iPhone.

It is not perfect, no newspaper app ever will be on a smartphone, but the developers have just about managed to create a newspaper experience that works well enough on the iPhone to keep me coming back every day. I would like to see the ability to download the daily editions, but this is an online service only so that is unlikely to ever happen. In the absence of a dedicated Times app for any smartphone this is the next best thing and it works for me. Will I renew my subscription after the first 30 days? Oh yes…

More information on The Times online edition are available here.

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Quoridor for iPhone/iPad review

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Shaun

There are many games in the App Store that maybe do not gain the attention they deserve. With so many big developers providing games that have resulted from $100,000’s of investment, it is easy to forget that often the board games are the ones that will keep you coming back for more time and again and force you to think harder than you would with an arcade romp.

Quoridor is the game I am looking at today and it has surprised me by bringing a whole new classic gaming experience to my life. Mirko Marchesi produced the original game in Italy in 1995 as Pinko Pallino and the year after sold it to Gigamic who distributes it worlwide as Quoridor which happened to become the worldwide game of the year.

The game play feels like a mixture of chess, checkers and other simple board games, but comes together to offer more than one way to beat your opponent, many more. It is also much more challenging than games where you have pieces and the opponent has pieces; you have to think on multiple levels in terms of defence and attack and I struggled in the first few games. On my eight game I finally beat the computer opponent on the easiest level. Chess has always been difficult for me and so I would align the difficulty of this game closer to chess than checkers. The following video offers a idea of what the game is like to play-

There are 3 views to choose from in the game; overhead which offers the classic way to play and one that I found myself using the most, 3D from the side which gives a more general picture and close-up which takes you to the heart of the action. Even though I didn’t use the 3D views often I found them useful for helping me get my thought processes going and they are beneficial. On the overhead view you can also zoom in by pressing the icon while in that view, but again the main view was enough for me to see what is happening at any one time.

You take a turn by choosing whether you want to put a fence down or move your pawn. It is likely that when you first play you will be following your opponent, and also likely that the winning line feels a long, long way away. Indeed it is at the start and it was not unusual for me to scratch my head for a minute or so on each move as each game progressed. This is my first time playing the game and one that has made me wish I had found it many years ago- the more I play, the better I get and I am really starting to get into the tactics now.

Some development is still required to make Quoridor for iPhone the perfect transition to this platform such as game state saving when you leave the game, but the developer has told me that this is being worked on. There may also be some changes to the gesturing within the game in the future which would be a bonus; the method used to place fences and move pawns works better than I expected, but a more natural approach involved multi-touch swivelling of fences would be a nice to have.

Quoridor has opened my eyes to a completely new game and it is one that I have been playing a lot so far. It is already one of my most played iPhone games and once a couple of quirks are ironed out it will be a home run winner for sure.

Available from the App Store for £1.79 / $2.99

More information about the game is here.

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iOS 4.1 review

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Shaun

I managed to grab the final version of iOS 4.1 today and thought I would lay down my thoughts in case you are going to upgrade today. Here is what I have discovered so far-

HDR Photography

A most unexpected, but welcome addition to iOS. It is a bit hit and miss and should work better in landscape or distant shots in bright sunlight, but it’s nice to have the option to save an HDR and normal image and choose which one to keep. Even better, you can simply turn it off if you don’t need it. Simple and unobtrusive.

Below are some scaled photos using HDR- HDR photos are on the right-

I think the first two photos benefit from HDR, but I’m not so sure about the last one.

Proximity Sensor

Fixed! I have only tested it on 5 calls so far, but as yet I have yet to cut a call off or press the screen accidentally. Only yesterday I was still doing this on almost every call.

Game Center

It is amazingly ugly for an Apple invention and one that I haven’t, obviously, been able to test properly so far. Maybe once more friends and games are online things will change, but for now OpenFeint is still the king in this area.

General Performance

No difference as far as I can tell on an iPhone 4.

There are many other smaller enhancements such as FaceTime by email initiation, spell check disabling, FaceTime in phone favourites and 99c TV episode rentals if you live in the US. Until Apple sorts the later, the rest of the world will have to wait. It’s a similar story for the new Apple TV until things change.

All in all, it is a worthwhile update and the HDR facility is a nice touch even if it is available via various apps for just over £1. The fix to the proximity sensor is necessary and will make a huge difference to my iPhone usage (too far too long though) and the extra touches are small, but potentially useful as time goes by. So far it has proved to be stable and so I have no complaints.

Some of the features have been implemented before they are fully functional which is unusual by Apple standards. Ping is not likely to compete with the big social networks, the cheap TV rentals could be some time off for those of us outside the US and those in the US who like shows that are currently not signed up. You could say that Apple has jumped the gun and that it is arrogantly presuming that everyone will just follow every initiative it comes up with wether it is workable or not at the time of release, but I tend to see these things as take them or leave them. If they work one day I will be happy and if they don’t, I have alternatives to choose from.

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