1st Impressions

In celebration of the recent release of Eggbot’s Irish Adventure, we are having a contest.  The first person to purchase it from iTunes, post a review of it in the App Store that links to the review here, and emails your App Store name (so we can verify the post was from you), will receive a promo code for a free copy of TileStorm.  Again, here are the rules

1. Purchase Eggbot’s Irish Adventure

2. Write a review on the App Store that also links to the review here

3. Email me your App Store ID (you know, that part that says “By Your Name – Version 1.0 – Mar 13, 2010 at the top of your review)

This blog post has nothing to do with the iPhone.  If you are even a minor geek, you have to be aware of Google getting into everything internet. With much fanfare, followed by confusion as to how the regular Joe would use it, Google recently came out with Wave. I have invites if anyone is interested, but it’s a collaborative tool that is probably much more geared to business use than personal use. Now, Google has tackled the personal/social aspect of the internet with something that is a cross between FriendFeed and Facebook and called Google Buzz. Except, contrary to Facebook, it uses open APIs and you can control not only what feeds into it, but also send the output to other places. If you don’t know why this is important, try to get your Facebook contacts imported into your email program some time.  LOL

The ultimate goal of Buzz, which is accessed currently in Gmail and will be going other places as well, is not to have a Google version of Facebook. The goal is to use the open APIs and standards that Google is using so that this kind of status updates, comments, and publication of blogs and other things you want to share can be added to any site. Google and Gmail just becomes one of the places that would use the technology.

When you start up Buzz from your phone or desktop, it shows you all the Buzz posts from people you have chosen to “follow”. Think of this as “friends” in Facebook terms. You can see what they have shared, add comments to it, and read the comments of other people that follow them and have opined on the topic. But it is more open than Facebook. You can search Buzz for particular topics and see what public posts have been made with that content. If you don’t want your posts to be public, you can mark them as private and choose which of your contacts and/or contact groups can see it and respond to it. If I want to share some information about a family event, complete with photos and other content expected in the future (like anything created in or uploaded to Google Docs), I can set the entry as “private” and select my family group from my Google contacts as the only people that can see it or comment on it. When this is incorporated with other Google apps (like Calendar and Docs), this will be real powerful.

By default, Buzz will automatically update with any status updates you type in, any photos updates to Picasa, your YouTube posts, and anything you have shared in Google Reader (which makes that “share with Google Reader” bookmarklet very useful!). It also automatically found my Twitter account, my iPhone review blog, and, strangely enough, the feed for all new blog posts at Theologica, where I am a moderator. I’ve since changed that to the feed for my personal blog there, as well as added my FriendFeed account and my Diigo bookmarks. Every post in Buzz has a static, searchable URL (access it via the time stamp on the post) and your Buzz feed also has a RSS feed. This means that you can use something similar to TwitterFeed that will feed any of your public Buzz posts to both Twitter and Facebook so that folks that follow you there will know what you are up to.

Feeding both in and out of Buzz can cause issues though. You don’t really have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens if you post a blog in Wordpress that has a plugin to post to Twitter, and Twitter is set up to feed Facebook, and then Buzz also pulls in the blog post and the twitter post and, via TwitterFeed sends this update back to Twitter and Facebook. It’s not pretty!  Ultimately, I gave up on the trial and error, created a spreadsheet of all my “sources” and “destinations”, and drew out what would update what. I’ve pretty much got it figured out now. For those of you that are not interested and all this makes your eyes glaze over, just skip the next paragraph.

In order to fix a lot of this, I had to see what Buzz was actively pulling in and what it isn’t. Just because you give Buzz a source doesn’t mean that the connection is really live. In order to see what it is actually talking to, go to this link. It is a tool that makes Google re-crawl your Social Graph API feeds. Some of these sources don’t appear to be live yet. On others, it may require you to link to them with “rel=me” links or show that these are actually you via Google’s webmaster tools. Read this post for more about the way to do this. Anyway, in order to eliminate all the echo posts, I first disabled anything that automatically posts to Twitter and Facebook. This includes the Twitter app on Facebook and any Wordpress plugins. Once those destinations were “islands” with nothing feeding them or feeding off of them (including FriendFeed), I made Buzz my primary source.  Everything else feeds Buzz or is updated by Buzz, but not both.  Anything I want to post to Twitter or Facebook will be done from Buzz. And, since Twitter won’t be a primary source any more, I disabled the feed from that to Buzz. Using TwitterFeed, I then used my RSS feed from Buzz to feed both Twitter and Facebook (every thirty-minutes). I then made sure my blog here and my Theologica blog were properly feeding Buzz -> TwitterFeed -> Twitter & Facebook. On the sites that the Google Social Graph API isn’t pulling in yet, I put them (exclusively) into FriendFeed and had Buzz pull from that. This was pretty much a requirement in order to get my fractals posted to a separate Picasa gallery to show up since Buzz, by default, only wants to see the Picasa albums associated with my primary email address. It isn’t “live” by any means, but it eventually gets there.

Google is currently rolling Buzz out to all Gmail users. If you don’t have it yet, you should have it show up in the next day or so. Even if you don’t want to use it for status updates or sharing things with folks, it makes a great primary contact page to add in email signatures or post in places as your “web site” if you don’t have one. If you want to see what that Google/Buzz Profile page looks like, check mine out at bit.ly/mybuzz or bit.ly/DanielEaton, two short URLs I created to point to mine. That being said, Buzz is in its infancy and there are already some pretty good lists of suggestions on how to make it better. One of the issues is that any Buzz that mentions your name shows up in your Gmail box with a label of “Buzz”. If you have that issue and want to eliminate it, you can create a filter that “has the words” “is:Buzz” and automatically archive it and mark it as read. And, as your Buzz items would continue to fill your Gmail space, you may want to consider deleting those after a while if space is a concern to you. On the other hand, having your links and shared content in Gmail and/or Google reader will make a nice personal archive of stuff for you to search later. Subscribing to all the new blog posts here, for example, saves an external copy of all blog posts even if the author later deletes them.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Buzz and how I’ve set it up. If you use it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If not, I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s free and, who knows, you may just like it and kick the FaceBook habit.

PathPix is not my ordinary review here.  In fact, it is extraordinary.  I usually don’t review things other than iPhone apps, but in this case I make an exception for two reasons.  First, this PC app now has a iPhone port, and second, the game is extraordinary in every sense.  I’ll be doing a separate review of the iPhone port, but until then, here is what the PC game is all about.

PathPix, at it’s core, is a graphical logic game.  It reminds me of a cross between paint-by-number, Sudoku, and Nonograms.  Created by Kris Pixton, the game features grids of varying size filled with numbers designated with different colors.  The concept is simple.  Connect the dots so that the total number of covered squares matches the numbers indicated at the ends.  In other words, if you are dealing with a black 5, it has to connect to another black 5 with three squares in-between so that, when you add in the two ends, you get five squares total.  When you do that, you end up with a line covering the area in the color shown by the number.  Sometimes this isn’t as easy as it sounds though because you run into a brick wall, so to speak; a red line that cannot be crossed and has to be gone around.  As the puzzle nears completion, you actually start developing a picture.  Once the puzzle level is complete, the grid disappears, the colors merge together, and the full picture is revealed.  In the example posted here, it is pretty obvious that we’re creating a lighthouse.  In other cases though, I you don’t really see the pattern until the image is complete.

To help with this process of finding the single way the level can be solved, the PC version of the game has a couple of nice features.  If you hit the “/” key, it will indicate if the puzzle is correct so far.  It doesn’t indicate where the errors are though.  You are left to find those and fix them yourself.  If you need the additional help though, the “F” key will “fix” any incorrect paths by removing them and allowing you to try a different path to connect the numbers.  This comes in very handy when there are multiple blue 12’s, for example, in a single area and you are not even sure which pair of them are supposed to link up.  These options are also available from the menu.  Finally, as you near completion, you may loose track of what pairs remain to be connected.  This is real easy with the 2’s as, but default and design, the have to be right next to each other.

PathPix is one of those games that is both simple to learn, and compulsively addictive.  The “reward” you get upon completion when you see the final solution is a lot like finishing a jigsaw puzzle.  It makes you want to “just start” a new one.  Problem is that once you start it, you don’t want to put it down.  Like a jigsaw puzzle where you really need to do something else but are going to find “just one more piece first”, I found PathPix to be more addicting than any game I have played on any platform in quite a while.  I just had to have more.  Luckily, the free demo version offered, while providing hours of game play with the included 25 levels, isn’t all that there is to the game.  When purchased for $19.99, you get 26 extra puzzle packs (in addition to the 30 “regular” packs) for a total of 1,400 levels.  Some of these have grids as large as 63×43…significantly larger and more complex than the easy 12×12 grids that get you started in the game.  And new packs are made available on the web site for registered users to download for free.  An average 30×30 grid takes me about 30 minutes to complete.  This equates to roughly 700 hours of game play for $20.  That comes out to about 1.75 cents per level or less than 4 cents per hour of entertainment…a steal in any economy.

The game offers both background music and sound effects.  Both can be turned off or on, but volume adjustment isn’t an option.  The background music is MIDI files, and you can add your own from any source to have in the background as you play.  As you play through puzzle packs, the number of solved puzzles shows up next to the puzzle pack name, and as you open the pack, a thumbnail of a solved level shows up to indicate which ones have already been solved.  This makes it easy to find a particularly entertaining level that you may want to clear and replay.  The game also allows for different user profiles so that you can keep track of your own progress separately from another player on the same machine.

My selections for this game would be very few.  I’d love volume settings for the sound and music, notifications when new packs are available for download, buttons on the top for checking for and fixing errors, and, most of all, I’d love some kind of editor so that users could create and upload their own puzzle packs.  I am not sure how these levels are created to begin with, but if users were able to create these and upload them, it would be really cool.  One last suggestion would be upgraded graphics.  I can understand the need to have something that would run on OS versions going all the way back to Windows 98, but does it have to look like something from six operating systems ago?  If a “new and improved” version allowing for in-game downloads and uploads of new content is considered, some new buttons and such might make the GUI a little more 21st century.

Overall, if I were to give this game “stars” on a 5-star spread, it would definitely get 5 stars.  While I do offer some suggestions of how this almost-perfect puzzle/logic game can be improved, none of those things distract from the game play or overall enjoyment of the game.  It’s a “Must-Have” in my book!

I’ve reviewed a lot of apps here, but none have impressed me as much recently as AutoStitch Panorama.  The program really blew me away.  I expected it to do what it said it would, but was really impressed with how well it did it.  The single purpose of the program is to take a series of photos from your camera roll and “stitch” them all together into one large panorama.  In my playing around with the app, I stitched as many as 16 or 18 images together.  It didn’t matter what order I selected them in or if they were vertical or horizontal.  The program handled it all.

The final results look like something done with very expensive software on something with a lot more computing power than in iPhone.  I’ll post a small sample of one at the bottom of this review, but the full size image is 2940×736.  You can see it here. Once the image is all “stitched” together, you can save it in the combined screen resolution, and/or crop it into a nice rectangle first.

While the built-in help suggests a 30% overlap with each photo you select, I really pushed it and found it did a really good job with quite a bit less than that.  And, while it really excels with outdoor shots without a lot of movement, it also worked surprising well with “people pictures” as long as the overlap and movement was kept to a minimum.

The dark vertical area in the very center of this image (partially obscuring one of the windows) is actually a person that was standing in the middle of the room in one of the photos. I took some of the area both with and without them there, and the program actually did a surprising job of recognizing the static background and using that instead of what I was expecting to be a real “double-exposed” look.

AutoStitch Panorama is $1.99 in the app store, and definitely makes my Must-Have list. Most of my reviewed apps don’t stay on my iPhone for very long. This is a well-earned exception. If you do much photography with your iPhone, you really need to check this app out.

In the beginning, there was Aurora Feint, a really cool game that offered something really unique…a social platform that enabled game players to communicate with each other and share scores and such.  Then the developers decided to open up the technology to others, and OpenFeint was born.  Now I’ve seen several attempts to create some sort of iPhone based community before, it they usually reminded me of the old bumper sticker, “Suppose you threw a war and nobody came.”  It was like that.  Nobody was at the party.  But OpenFeint is different.  Folks showed up to the party.  And now, it seems that every week produces more games that are “OpenFeint enabled.”  So I thought I’d give some first impressions of it.

Once I went back through my library of iPhone apps and started enabling the OpenFeint capabilities, I was surprised at how many I had.  By editing the random accounts associated with my iPhone ID and consolidating all of them under one ID, all my high scores are stored under one ID.  OpenFeint also displays all my enabled games (a couple of screens worth at this point) on my profile there.  But storing high scores and comparing them to global leader boards is just the beginning of what OpenFeint will do.  By importing your Facebook and Twitter friends, it will not only show you what games they are playing, but also allow you to chat with them as well.  Chats can be in open forums or in game-specific rooms.  The OpenFeint system also utilizes Facebook-like walls, although it has significantly less information on it that would help you identify friends from their OpenFeint IDs.

From what I understand, the OpenFeint platform is free for developers to use.  This might be one reason why it is so popular.  It offers considerable functionality which doesn’t have to be created by each developer.  It isn’t just the “little developers” though.  Game powerhouses like Chillingo and Astraware are also putting it in their games.  I had to wonder about this marketing strategy of “giving away the store” though.  How does it make money?  If it doesn’t cover costs, how will it stay in business?  Turns out that the platform not only shows you what games your friends are playing (or played last), but also allows you to purchase them.  I’m sure there is some kind of profit-sharing or commissions going on there.  Also, if the game turns out to be a huge hit, developers are expected to offset some of the costs of their OpenFeint participation.

The platform is a great start at something with huge potential, but that does not mean that it cannot improve.  Besides the issue of it importing friends without really telling you who that OpenFeint ID belongs to, but it also does not seem to allow you to comment on their “wall”.  Also, the chat room feature is nice in case you want to ask strangers about a particular level in a game or something, it shows player ID’s and what game they are playing, but no time-stamp that would indicate how recent (or live) any comments are.  Another thing that is a bit frustrating is that every game that uses the platform has a different method of gaining access to it.  Sometimes these are hard to find, and once discovered, only allow for the option to add your scores to the global leaderboard or something.  There doesn’t appear to be any kind of consistency in implementation.  I’m afraid that poor developer implementation reflects on the platform itself.  I’d also love to see a stand-alone OpenFeint application that would let users create chat rooms that their friends could join that would allow for push notifications of chat requests, wall comments, and game recommendations.  Right now, OpenFeint is open to developers, but not really “open” for users.  You can see what games a friend may have played, but not when or if they are online right now.  Unless you happen to catch them playing the exact same game the same time you are, chances are that you will not be able to catch them in any kind of chat notification.  Finally, it would be nice if there was an incorporation of something more on the line of game forums in the game.  That way, in case you can’t find any live help, you could post messages or read messages in a forum type environment or send users friend requests or private messages. I’m afraid that if OpenFeint does not solidify their place as the leader in “communities” with enhancements like this, some of their recent competitors like PlayHaven or Plus+ will increasingly take market share from them.

As comprehensive as I tried to make this “review”, OpenFeint is best experienced.  There are free apps out there that implement it to one degree or another.  AppShopper.com is a great place to find them.  Just search on OpenFeint and sort on price.  The free app OpenChat gives a nice interface to OpenFeint general chat rooms, friends, and so forth if you would like to give it a try.

While I hate to give away my age, I have to admit that I have been a fan of talk radio for over 30 years. Not only is it an excellent way to stay informed to what is going on in the world around you but, unlike music which stimulates your heart or soul, talk radio stimulates your mind.

In the past (although not for the past 10 years or so) I was fortunate enough to have had jobs that gave me the ability to listen to talk radio for much of the day. Now that I am handicapped and spend most of my time at home, I am once again in the position to listen to  the radio – but unfortunately live in an area where I cannot pick up either AM or FM transmissions very easily.

That is what excited me about this program, Talk Shows on Internet Radio. With it I can easily locate and listen to my favorite talk shows at any time that they are being broadcast online. Local talk show hosts, for example, broadcast live during the morning hours but may be broadcast through syndication on other radio stations at other hours of the day.  The main screen of this program shows a list of talk radio shows with 5 30-minute time slots showing if the program you are looking for is currently playing or will be in the next couple of hours.

By selecting the talk show of your choice, you are taken to a screen in which the program is described as well as the opportunity to choose which station you which to listen to.  The reason this option is important to me is because, as anyone that listens to talk radio can tell you, this type of radio programming is very popular and therefore contains a lot of commercial breaks.  Since it is also often played during “drive time” hours, it contains lots of news, weather, and traffic updates.  By listening to a station that is in your area you increase the odds that the news and weather reports are pertinent to your area and not someplace that is 1500 miles away.

One of the nicest things about the program is that you can then listen to the streaming audio while you email, browse the web, or even play games.  It is basically a “background” app.  (To turn it off, just launch Safari and tap the “done” button.)  Another thing that impressed me greatly is the swift and supportive response I had to questions or suggestions for talk shows to add to the program. For example, I used the link within the program to email a request for a local talk show to be added to the program and the developer did so within the hour.

While I love this program, there are several features that I would like to see added to it. (while there is a free “lite” version available, future improvements will be made to the $4.99 paid version.) Some of these features include the ability to sort and edit the shows that are displayed, the ability to view a particular streaming station’s schedule, and the ability to prioritize the stations that are used to play streaming audio based on their proximity to your location.  Since the program is dependent on the radio station database maintained by RadioShowLinks.com, the ability to log into your account there and access programs directly from their site as well.  According to the developer, how best to more tightly interface with the site (including favorites) is in the works.

All in all, I would already give this application 4 stars out of 5 and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys using talk radio to keep their finger on the pulse of America.  While some detractors might criticize the $4.99 price of this app in light of the fact that the broadcast of these talk shows are free, those same people would not hesitate spending $5.00 on a radio that contained a display showing when and where they could pick up their favorite talk show.

This review written by David Eaton

The Livio Internet Radio with Pandora isn’t really iPhone related (but hey, that is what that “Other” category is for, right?), although there is a tie-in.  It allows you to play the same custom Pandora stations that you listen to on your PC and iPhone.  It’s AWESOME!  You are not limited to whatever custom Pandora stations you create and customize (on the radio, PC, and/or iPhone) and your Pandora Quick Mix, but there is a directory of internet stations that exceeds just about any other internet radio directory that I’ve seen.  Once you locate a station by genre, location, or both, you can easily add it to your list of favorites on the device.  That is a nice feature as the station options seem endless at times.  For example, there are over 800 different “Oldies” stations  The small remote also comes with five preset for favorites that you can call up with a single button press.

I’m getting ahead of myself though.  The unit got my attention because while other options allowed you to listen to your Pandora stations, this one allows you to “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” from both the unit itself as well as the remote.  Since the strength of Pandora lies in its customization, this was a must-have for any kind of Pandora radio.  Setup is very simple.  All you have to do is enter the serial number and registration number from the radio’s setup menu at the manufacturer’s site along with your Pandora account info and the “link” is made between your radio and your Pandora account.  Of course this occurs after you have either connected the radio to your internet connection with the included eithernet cable or via Wi-Fi.  If you choose the Wi-Fi option, available connections show up.  If you have a WEP key, you can enter it with the dial on the unit.  Once it is set up with your Wi-Fi info and linked to your Pandora account, a simple re-boot by unplugging the unit and re-powering it is all that is needed.

The back-lit screen displays the station name, the bitrate of the stream (if it is an internet station), the time (automatically set), and the Wi-Fi signal strength.  Status messages come up to tell you when a station is first buffering and when you give a Pandora song a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  When the unit is off, a large digital clock is displayed (as is the alarm time if you have one set).  When you turn the unit back on, it auto-starts whatever station you were listening to when you powered it off.  This includes when the alarm goes off.  It also seems to come on at the same volume level.  

The small credit-card sized remote allows you to do everything you can do from the main unit.  As I said, it also includes five presets for favorite stations.  Holding down a numbers preset button (or the general “Fav” button) will assign the current station.  It takes about ten seconds to switch from one preset station to another.  When you consider that it is switching to a different stream URL and buffering it, that isn’t bad.  You can set both Pandora and regular Internet stations to presets, but the “up” and “down” buttons on the remote both pull up your Pandora stations by default (that is unless you are already in a menu or favorites list), so unless you have tons of Pandora stations, you may want to save your station presets for the Internet stations as they can take an extra button pushes to get to.   And while you can find new stations (or create new Pandora ones) with the little remote, it is much easier to do using the knob on the front of the radio.  This knob serves dual purpose.  In regular play mode, it acts like a volume mode.  In any input mode though, you use it to scroll through available options and then select them by pushing the knob.

The unit comes with an eithernet cable, as I mentioned, so you’ve probably already figured out that it has an eithernet port.  It also comes with a headphone jack on the front, and both a line in and line out jack on the back.  The included 1/8″ to RCA adapter will allow you to us that line out to connect it to a home stereo system.  Auxiliary input is selected from the main menu just like you would Pandora or Internet Radio.  

As much as I am impressed with this radio, nothing is perfect.  For example, the online user manual tells you how to set up your Pandora stations before telling you how to connect via Wi-Fi.  It also says, in a big shaded area to get your attention, to go to “www.LivioRadio.com/Pandora” to set up the link, but that URL does not work.  The proper one is in all lower case, which is supplied in the following paragraph.  This could cause some real confusion with the non-techie.  In other words, it seems that much more thought and work went into the unit itself than in documentation.  Luckily, it is very intuitive and once you get connected, the manual is pretty much un-necessary.  One big thing missing form the user manual is the fact that the station database is an online one at Reciva.com.  By registering there and linking your radio (same way you did with Pandora setup), you can browse and listed to the same stations from you PC, as well as update your Favorites list – which immediately syncs to your radio.  Options for podcasts and streams do not currently work, but I’m hoping that is on a future firmware update.

My only other suggestions would be that the Pandora stations do not indicate if the currently playing song is already marked with a thumbs-up or not.  This leads you to not know if you need to “thumb” a song or not.  I’d also love to see a “sleep” timer option and the ability to select which favorite station you want to wake to with the alarm.  Hopefully future firmware updates (yes, it does those) will add these features.  

Overall though, I am very impressed and pleased with this radio.  If you like radio, I’d recommend it.

I don’t know if it is just me or not, but I hate going into the App Store on my iPhone because it says I have say 2 updates available, only to click on the updates screen and have it show 17, click it again and have it say all apps are up to date.  What’s up with that?  I usually have to click on the updates option 3 or 4 times until I get the same result a couple of times before I update the apps.  And even then, sometimes the recently updated app will still show up as needing an update for the next couple of iStore launches.  I generally like the iStore feature.  Apple did good with that.  Just wish they would make it work a bit better.  Maybe they could take some lessons from the developer of AppSniper.