1st Impressions

The Livio Car Internet Radio app is, in it’s simplest form, app for listening to streaming radio feeds in your car. The thing that makes this a mobile-friendly app is that you can not only set some favorite presets for one-touch activation, but that every one of the thousands if stations available has a numerical station ID that can be entered in to tune directly to it. While I could discern no pattern to the numbers, they don’t appear to have a pattern by genre or country for example, I did find it a handy feature.

Another nice feature of the app is that you can swipe on the screen to find similar stations. The comprehensive list by location and such is handy, but a single swipe is sure safer while driving.

While the app says that you can play streams in the background using Safari, I found that the app is fully iOS 4 aware, either by design or accident, and the streams continue to play fine as a background app on the iPhone 4. Developers are already working on some iOS 4 specific functionality, so I am really looking forward to seeing what the next release has to offer.

While I feel that the $4.99 price point is a bit high considering some of this apps competition, it is a quality app with excellent support and I’d have no problem recommending it to anyone.

The Jim and Frank Mysteries: The Blood River Files is a combination of a puzzle game and an adventure game. It reminds me of a cross between Myst and Return to Monkey Island. The game play is simple, the graphics and sound effects are of the highest quality (pretty much expected fir a Chillingo release), and it promises 20-hours of entertainment for the bargain price of $0.99.

The game impressed me. It was both entertaining and challenging. It allows for multiple profiles/players as well as options for turning the music and sound effects on and off. Unfortunately though, getting back to that screen to change those options is somehow beyond my grasp. Maybe that is a extra credit bonus. LOL

One unique thing in the game us the ability to fund a couple of “eureka” bucks at each location. These can be used to purchase hints or skip puzzles. They can also be purchased with in-app purchases. While I did not take advantage of that, I thought it was a really good idea.

Other than an easy way to get back to the main screen, my only other suggestion would be a free lite version with the first couple of puzzles in it. I really think that once folks try it, they will definitely want more.

Overall, this is going to be a game that stays on my iPhone 4 for a while. The hand drawn scenes and 60 puzzles make it difficult to put down and you want to see what is next.

Catagugl is a cute $0.99 game that reminds me if those Yeti and Penguin games where distance is the goal. Using a circular swinging motion demonstrated on the help video, your goal is to launch the Gugl creature as far as possible. Hitting clouds, bouncing off red balls, and deflating during flight will increase your distance. Once you set a new personal high score, you can submit it to leader boards and compare your progress with that if others.

The graphics on the game are high quality and game play mechanics something that children should be able to master with no problem. I think kids will find a lot if appeal in the game. The entertainment value for adults will likely be limited however.

I did have one issue with the game. the help video shows a build-up of your strength. I didn’t get that. I am not sure if that was due to poor game play on my part or maybe an issue with the iPhone 4…or maybe some combination of them. Either way though, this doesn’t detract from the odd sense if accomplishment one feels with setting a new high score.

Colorize is a $1.99 app that any artist with an iPhone needs in their toobox.  It is the definitive “app for that” when it comes to making subjects in a photo stand out with color (original or modified). When working with images with really sharp images, the app can easily distinguish between background and foreground.  With the aid of very intuitive pinching motions, you can zoom in and out to maximize your precision.

Upon first launching the app, you are presented with a screen to select an existing project or create a new one from a new photo or something in your photo library.  A help option is also available and I highly recommend it so that you know what the different controls do.  You can get back to this screen by choosing the “close” button in the popup window.

For best results, I’d suggest an image that didn’t have extreme light and dark areas.  The recolorize options really work well on areas that are not of extreme contrasts.  In my sample image, I could do nothing to color either my son’s black shirt or my daughter’s white one.  Faces worked real well though.

The color picking tool works very well.  Not only can you select any color from the color spectrum, but also colors from the image itself.  This is very beneficial when you are going back and re-editing something.

My sample picture doesn’t really do the program justice, so I recommend checking out the YouTube video.  In fact, the video does such a great job of showing how to use the software that I wish the developer would actually link to it as a tutorial in the app itself.   Other suggestions that I’d like to offer is the ability email completed images to someone and/or share them on Facebook.

The only issue I had with the app is probably not app related at all, but Apple related.  There seems to be a bug in the new iOS 4 that doesn’t let you view photos in your Photo app that have been added by third-party apps like this.  I’ve reported it to Apple, but they act like I’m the only one that has ever encountered this problem.  There is a work-around though.  If you launch your Camera app and select the thumbnail in the bottom left corner, it will launch your photos and will let you share them as you normally would.

All in all, I’d give this (and have) five stars.  If I were more of an artist and saw myself using this on a regular basis, it would even make my must-have list.  For the serious artists and photographers out there though, I’d highly recommend this application.  It is well worth the $1.99 price tag.

The iOS 4 update was just released and I installed it on my iPhone 3G (now for sale) to check it out.  Give yourself plenty of time for this one.  The  update takes a lot longer than a traditional backup.  The installation warned that it might take up to an hour, and they mean it.  The backup alone took 40-minutes.  It then went though a restore, a verification of the restore, and then a restore of the firmware.  This process took another 8 minutes.  Once the iPhone re-started (another couple of minutes), it had to restore everything from the backup.  One odd thing to note is that this restore message was displayed on some water-drop wallpaper that the 3G is allegedly incapable of. LOL

After the 5-minute restore of whatever it was doing, it then reset yet again and started in on the restore of all my installed apps.  I was 66-minutes into the process when the first of two post-app-install reset occurred and still had another restore of applications process to go through.  This second “Restoring iPhone Applications” process took considerably longer.  I was an hour and forty minutes into the process before that completed and it started in on my music and videos.  With about 6GB of audio books on my phone, that took a while as well.  All told, the entire process took much closer to two hours (actually over by 15 minutes) than the one hour I was warned to expect.  And, once the process finished, it did not re-connect to iTunes, the phone locked up, and I had to manually reset it.

Out of the box, I have to say that I am disappointed (but not surprised) that Apple refused to allow 3G owners to have access to wallpaper and “multitasking”.  I know the hardware is capable of it because the jailbroken phones do it.  Sure, there is a performance issue, but that should be the decision of the user, not Cupertino.  Saying that the hardware is incapable of something while it can be demonstrated to work is inexcusable.  It’s a small issue though as my days with this unit are coming to a close.

Of the other options, there are some that will have no impact on me whatsoever.  For example, the mail improvement won’t really effect me as I only use one mailbox and use a third-party Gmail app for that.  Support for iBooks is another thing that I won’t use.  I just don’t read much any more.  If they were to add better support for Audible books, that would be a different story.  While I like the ability to create playlists, the audio content on my iPhone is basically books and doesn’t change a lot so I won’t be using that too much.

What I do really like is the folders, options to search the web or Wiki from the search screen, character counts on text messages (if I can figure out how to get them to show up even when the settings option is checked), and persistent wifi connections.  The spell-check is a great improvement as well.  I can’t tell you how many times I hit one of the wrong keys in the keyboard sequence of “UIO” on the keyboard.  ”List” more often than not becomes “Lust” or “Lost” though, so the spell-check isn’t going to pick that up.  I’m also looking forward to checking out the camera options.  I can also see myself using the new ability to gift an app.  Any takers?

Here are the full features list from the Read-Me that is part of the install:

Hacker Evolution 2010 reminds me of the one time I went to a casino.  I could not figure out how the games were played and quickly lost interest.  The premise probably isn’t that complex, but it is just different enough to confuse me.

The goal of the $0.99 game is to hack the computers being shown on the screen using either a direct hack or a virus.  You start out each level with a certain number of viruses for attacks and a firewall level that reflect the strength of the servers you can hack.

The key to this process, and what is smarter than I am, is that if you don’t do these attacks in the right order and bounce your attacks off of the right servers, you run out of viruses and firewall and can’t go any further.  To make this more frustrating, there is no “restart” button on the screen.  You have to exit out to the menu and start a new game.

The game offers a couple of pages of help.  But, contributing to my confusion, the text is fairly small and I can’t read it.  I think the game would really benefit from a tutorial level that walked the user through a level.  I don’t believe the game is complicated.  I like a game that is a challenge.  The addition of a short tutorial and/or some larger text in the help section would help with the understanding though.

Overall, I’d probably give the game a score of a B.  It isn’t as addictive as other puzzle games I’ve played, but should offer multiple hours of challenge for a reasonable price.  If you want to check out the concept, Hacker Evolution Lite is a free version of a similar title from the same developers and should give you a good idea of game-play.

There has been a lot of talk of late about which is better, the iPhone 4 or the Android. The only problem with this comparison is that the folks involved in these discussions are usually compairing apples to oranges. By that I mean that they are dealing with 4 different variables : Apples IOS, the iPhone 4’s hardware specs, the Android OS, and any number of phones running on the Android OS.

What usually happens with many opinions is that someone who has drunk too much of Steve Jobs’ Kool Aid (to the point that they would chose a hand crank rotery phone so long as it has an Apple logo on it) and then get their hackles up whenever someone so much as mentions Android.  They then step up on their pedistal to preach the merits of Apple, while calling down fire & brimstone on those who break the 11th commandment by blaspheming the name of Steve Jobs and worshiping the pagan god called Android.

So…. let’s look at a few of the talking points involved in this debate.

1) When the iPhone (or iPod touch) first came out, one of the biggest selling points was the multi touch screen and the interface for accessing and opening programs. Since that time however, that hardware spec has just about become the norm. That being the case, I think that this issue is a tie between the two platforms.

2) Now let’s look at the OS. Lifehacker recently compared both the both operating systems from the viewpoint of a power user (aspects such as tetheribg, battery life, multitasking, and such) and, while close, the Android devices beat out the iPhone 4 by a score of 13 to 11 with a tie in 4 catagories.

One of the catagories in which Apple beat out Android was a little misleading, however. That catagory is Battery Life. While the battery life of the new iPhone is superior to most Android devices, you need to bear in mind that not only does battery life vary between different Android devices, but many of them are designed for easy battery replacement by the user so carrying around a spare battery is not a bad idea.

3) Another area that needs to be compared is app availability. While it had been a week or two since I looked at any statistics, the iPhone clearly has more apps available at the present. One stat I read a few weeks ago stated that the Android market place had roughly 20% as many apps as those in iTunes, but was growing much faster. I can vouch for that as I shop the iTunes app store almost on a daily basis and have noticed a drop in new iPhone apps recently as the developers are spending time converting iPhone apps over to HD apps for the iPad instead of developing fresh apps as often as they once were.

4) The final but one of the most important areas that need to be explored when comparing Apple to Android is the philosophy behind how open the access is to not just the hardware APIs but the OS itself. While some feel that the tight grip Steve Jobs has on the release of apps makes the iPhone a better device because they are tested and pretty much guarenteed to work well with existing apps, I believe that it has more to do with Apple wanting a cut from every iPhone application that is sold and not due to any concern Steve has regarding application comparability.  What started out as an emphasis on what was best for users and the user experience has turned into what is best for Apple and their hold on market share.

UPDATE: PC Magazine recently ran a new article on this topic as well.  According to the numbers shared there, and ones Steve Jobs conveniently failed to point out in his keynote, Apple shipped 8.75 million iPhones last quarter.  Google activated 9 million devices in the same time period.  Not quite the “we rule the world” picture from Steve’s slideshow.

There has been a lot of talk lately about which is better, the iPhone 4 or the Android. tYe only problem with this comparison is that the folks involved in these discussions are usually compairing apples to oranges. By that I mean that they are usually dealing with 2 out of 4 different variables: Apple’s IOS, the iPhone 4’s hardware specs, the Android OS, and any number of phones running on the Android OS.

What usually happens is that someone who has drunk too much of Steve Jobs’ Kool Aid (to the point that they would chose a hand crank rotery phone so long as it has an Apple logo on it) gets their hackles up whenever someone so much as mentions Android and then steps up on their pedistal to preach the merits of Apple while calling down fire & brimstone on those who break the 11th commandment by blaspheming the name of Steve Jobs and worshiping the pagan god called Android.

So…. let’s look at a few of the talking points involved in this debate.

1) When the iPhone (or iPod touch) first came out one of the biggest selling points was the multi touch screen and the interface for accessing and opening programs. (I have to admit that yhus was what motivated me into getting a 3G when was first teleased…) Since that time however, that hardware spec has just about become the norm. That being the case, I think that this issue is a tie.

2) Now let’s look at the OS. Lifehacker recently compared both both operating systems from the perspective of a power user (aspects such as tethering, battery life, multitasking, and such) and, while close, the Android devices beat out the iPhone 4 by a score of 13 to 11 with a tie in 4 catagories.

One of the catagories in which Apple beat out Android was a little misleading however. That catagory is Battery Life. While the battery life of the new iPhone is superior to most Android devices currently on the market, you need to bear in mind that not only does battery life vary between different Android devices, but many of them are designed for easy battery replacement by the user so carrying around a spare battery is not a bad idea.

3) Another area that needs to be compaired is app availability. While it had been a week or two since I looked at any statistics the iPhone clearly has more apps available at the present. One stat I read a few weeks ago stated that the Android market place had roughly 20% as many apps as those in iTunes but was growing much faster. I can vouch for that as I shop the iTunes app store almost on a daily basis and have noticed a drop in new iPhone apps recently as the developers are spending their time converting current iPhone apps over to HD apps for the iPad instead of developing fresh apps as often as they once were.

4)One thing that has to be considered us the fact that you can coount on a coiple if things happening on an anual bases – new TV series being released in the Fall and Apple revealing a new iPhone in June. with only one Apple iPhone model being released a year they have to really push the envelope as far as technology goes whereas HTC, Motirola, Samsung, and others are releasing new Android models almost on a monthly basis. While the iPhone 4 may arguably be the best phone on the market at the time it was announced, by the time it is actually released 3 short weeks later there are already going to be Android phones ready to compete head to head against the iPhone 4 and there are still 11 more months in which mire competitors will be released. while I pnln on upgrading to an Android phone as soon as the dust settles in another 3-4 weeks, I also look forward to seeing what else will hit the market between now and when the iPhone 5 is announced in another year.

5) The final but one of the most important areas that need to be explored when comparing Apple to Android is the philosophy behind how open the access is to not just the hardware APIs but the OS itself. While some feel that the tight grip Steve Jobs has on the release of apps makes the iPhone a better device because they are tested and pretty much guarenteed to work well with existing apps, I believe that it has mote to do with Apple wanting a cut from every iPhone application that is sold and not due to any concern Steve has regarding application comparability.

Developers of Android apps, on the other hand, can make better and more powerful apps because they can write code that can take advantage of every aspect of both the hardware and the software.

Apple, on the other hand, not only wants you to pay $200-300.00 (with a 2-year commitment to a crappy celluler carrier as well as a mandatory $30 a month for a data plan) but then they want to control everything you install on it. That is like you purchasing a computer and installing an OS made by Microsoft and not only being forced to use Internet Explorer but only being able to install software sold by Microsoft.

While there is nothing wrong with using Intermet Explorer or Micresoft Offics, Bill Gates would be in huge trouble if Windows 7 refused to allow you to install other Internet browsers such as Chrime or Firefox and then go so far as to block access to Google Docs.

the Feds already busted Microsoft for simply setting up Windiws so that Inyernet Explorer was installed as the default browser. Why then is Apple allowed to get away with activity that is much mote like a monopoly in nature. if you know the answer to that question then I would live to hear it…

Developed by G5 Entertainment, Virtual City is a city simulator is a similar mould to that of Sim City and Transport Tycoon, but without the complexity of the aforementioned games. Players can choose to play single session missions or opt for a more engaging long term campaigns across an extensive sandbox environment.

In Virtual City, players build and develop the city of their dreams, whether suburban utopia or bustling metropolis. Virtual City players begin by choosing from dozens of residential homes and industrial buildings, and the possibilities from there are limitless. As their cities grow, players can produce and transport goods, create mass-transit systems, and entertain their city’s residents with parks, cinemas, stadiums and events. In order to keep the city safe and its citizens happy and healthy, basic services like health care, public safety, waste collection and recycling must be planned and administered.

Virtual City combines a robust city-building simulation with intuitive, easy to understand controls. First-time players will have no trouble learning how to play, while more experienced gamers will find enough depth and variation to keep them enthralled for hours. Trade with neighboring cities and accomplish the construction of landmark buildings like Marina, Train Depot, and Spaceship Launch Pad. Help troubled cities get back to prosperity, deal with economic downturn, population crisis, and consequences of natural disasters. Achieve balance between key parameters of your success: Time, Income, Environment, Population, and Happiness. Play over 50 challenging levels, and unleash your inner mayor in Free Play mode on 5 large sand box maps.

Look for a full review soon and the release in the app store in the upcoming weeks.