Entries Categorized as 'Entertainment'
August 2, 2009
Interactive digital toys have been a staple of pretty well every operating system since the days when computers were capable of presenting something compelling enough to make people want to play it. Heck, even before that the demo scene effectively presented largely non-interactive toys that showed pretty and technically impressive visuals and sound. That’s why there are a lot of them around these days. Fluid Motion Painter could probably fall into a similar category as Spawn Illuminati, in that it’s artistic in an abstract sort of way, in the realm of fluid dynamics instead of particles.
It may be a little bit unfair to compare the two though because they’re actually…
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July 25, 2009
Yeah, there are plenty of entertainment apps that simulate a real world activity. Beer, lighters and cigarettes seem to be the three most popular ones (I hesitate to consider what that says about us), so iSmoke can be filed under that category. It’s probably the only one designed by a woman though, which marks it as somewhat unusual, both given the male-dominated software development industry and the propensity for smoking to be considered predominantly a male pastime.
iSmoke has been around since last year, but has been through numerous revisions since then, with the most recent having been released just over a week ago. It is a simple interactive smoke simulator…
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July 20, 2009
What happens when a developer gets bored? Well, if he feels like coding and has no specific ideas in mine, he might decide to bring some old school demo scene effects to the iPhone just for kicks.
That’s what Mobile1UP have done with Effektz, and they’re no strangers to the demo scene. Years back, under their parent company Mobile Wizardry (who, speaking of retro, developed the Palm version of Atari Retro, which featured a number of classic Atari 2600 games), Aaron and Co. organized a Palm demo competition back in 2002 for Palm developers who wanted to stretch their coding and creative legs on the Palm v- and m-series platform (primarily aimed at the…
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July 7, 2009
Here’s one sent to me by the developer’s via their PR firm, who were charged with handing out the codes. Coincidentally, the firm is named Talon PR, but the two are not related.
Yes, it’s collection-of-jokes app. Yes, you could swing a dead cat and hit thirty of them with enough momentum left over to clock Perez Hilton’s masculinity. Fact is, even newbie developers could cobble together a jokes app in a couple of days and shove it onto the App Store. In the rank-and-file of jokes apps however, iLaugh probably stands as an example of how they’re done right — to a degree, anyway.
To start with, iLaugh features an enormous…
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July 6, 2009
Apparently, Advice Dog is an internet meme that managed to completely pass under my radar. Fancying myself rather savvy on the tubes and ripe for a new Meme of the Month, that can only mean that it originated with the /b/tards on 4chan and was too stupid even for Farkers to pick up. Sure enough, a little legwork over to the Urban Dictionary, and then over to the Encyclopedia Dramatica confirmed my suspicions.
For the questionable benefit of those who share my ignorance, Advice Dog is a golden lab or somesuch originally named Boba Fett whose cute adolescent puppy picture was co-opted by pasting his head on to a rainbow…
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July 1, 2009
Last November, I reviewed KDR’s lite version of 3D Fireworks, and deemed it good — for what I could see of it anyway, which wasn’t much because it was hobbled from every side with a 10 firework limit, only one firework at a time and so on. Most of it I was cool with for a lite version, but the effective time limit pushed me over the edge for some reason.
But that was a lifetime ago in App Store time, and things change, including 3D Fireworks, because KDR have now upgraded it to such a marked degree that it now deserves its own sequel designation as a…
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June 26, 2009
Ever come across one of those things that’s difficult to classify, impossible to quantify, frustratingly hard to describe, and yet remains oddly compelling, and the reasons that it is are tantalizingly elusive? That’s about as close as I can come up summing up Emergence, despite the fact that this says absolutely nothing about it.
Emergence defies any one specific description except to say that it’s kind of a toy, kind of a music composition tool, kind of an interactive art generator, kind of a mood enhancer/complementer, kind of … a bunch of things. The top-level idea here — and this is as far as I can condense…
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June 6, 2009
A little prank app you can pull on friends, Field Agent Fingerprint App (or the silly abbreviation FAFA if you prefer) will “scan” your unsuspecting victim’s fingerprint with a virtual green scanning laser when he places it on the scanner box, ask for your “field agent badge number”, and then, depending on how you play it, will either pull up a random terrorist-like match, their own personal information, or nothing at all.
Yeah, sort of silly, but I was kind of surprised at the depth of configuration this little app has. Once the fingerprint is “scanned,” the badge number you enter, in part, determines what information will come up…
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May 29, 2009
Since I seem to be working the retro angle this week, let’s move on to something I think any old-schooler will recognize — even if it’s wearing a wig, dark sunglasses and a Castro beard.
It’s called Saucelifter, and before we continue, get it out of your system: LADLE, LADLE, LADLE. We cool now? Good. Yes, I made the same joke when it came out, and even I wasn’t the first, so I just wanted to get that out the way so we can get to the proper review. As its name suggests, it’s a take on Brøderbund’s classic Choplifter, only with a flying saucer — whence its savory name comes. For the…
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May 15, 2009
I’ve said before that I rather like SplashData’s apps, and I do, although I haven’t used a wide range of them. SplashNotes Outliner is one of those things that I hadn’t used before and really hadn’t even given much thought to, but now that I’ve had a chance to play with it, I rather like it.
SplashNotes Outliner is one of the last of SplashData’s apps to make the transition to the iPhone platform (the other I’ll be reviewing tomorrow), which makes their application library complete on the iPhone now. SplashNotes Outliner is essentially a list maker for whatever purposes you’d need a list maker for: Presentation sections, a list of talking…
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May 12, 2009
Platformers are a sadly under-served genre on the App Store, and I like platformers. This here isn’t quite a platformer in the Mario tradition, but it features running and jumping, so it qualifies.
Slippy Feet is a cute name for a cute little platformer in which you, an apparently OCD penguin named Slippy, must collect snowflakes. Yellow snowflakes. Apparently his mama didn’t teach him so good, or maybe liked yellow snowflakes herself, which may or may not account for his OCD. Just the same, Slippy likes snowflakes and wants to collect them all, so you must guide him across the ice floes of the frozen Antarctic to do just that, and…
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May 7, 2009
I didn’t know where to put this. Is it a utilitarian clock or a vintage game? It’s both! Sorta. So I’m putting it in Entertainment, because that’s sort of what it boils down to anyway.
Obviously, you can see from the screenies alone that this is a clock that plays itself a game of the classic Breakout. I’ve seen physical hardware versions of something exactly like this — and of course, Fossil had their retro Atari game watches. The desktop clock one was pretty cool and fully animated. Fossil’s had limited animation. (I had the Centipede version. It was cool, but I was disappointed by the limited, looped nature of the animations.) None…
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