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iPhone/iPad App Recommendations & Reviews

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Flight Control HD is on sale ($4.99 -> $0.99).

Infinity Blade is on sale ($5.99 -> $2.99). I kept playing through a bit more, and ended up beating the game in a couple days. Or, at least I beat the game to the extent that they had released so far. Apparently they added another free expansion today to go along with the sale price. I've reached the conclusion that it's not an RPG at all, but it might be about as good of a button masher as you'll find on the iPad.

Editions is a new iPad magazine/news aggregator from AOL. It's naturally comparable to Flipboard, but there are key difference. In Editions, instead of specifying individual feeds to subscribe to, you instead subscribe to sections (i.e. Top News, Local News, Sports, etc.) and it aggregates a new collection of stories for you daily. By opening each story, you have the ability to "train" the app to promote or avoid topics or providers. For instance, in my first edition last night I told it to avoid content from FOX News, Huffington Post, ESPN, BleacherReport and stories about the Cincinnati Bengals and Lady Gaga. I told it to promote content from CNN, NPR, Cincinnati.com, Sports Illustrated, TUAW, TechCrunch & Engadget. It's not bad so far, and a nice compliment to the other reading I do.

My main gripe (and this extends to Flipboard to a certain extent) is the lack of reformatting of the actual stories into magazine style. Flipboard does this with some feeds, and Editions does it with even fewer. I understand that these content sources are businesses driven by pageviews, and that pageviews are not generated when I read the content after reformatting. However, I find the magazine format more pleasing and more readable in many instances, and if I wanted to read these sites through my browser I would have already been doing so.

Anyway, Editions is worth checking out.
 
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+1 on Editions. Great app. It's replaced The Daily on my iPad since my trial subscription to that ended. Surprisingly Editions also isn't redundant with Flipboard. Those two and Pulse cover everything I need for news.

Bought a Wacom Bamboo stylus and the Penultimate app this weekend. I may never write on paper at my office again.

Also, if anyone is interested in a highly rated portable BlueTooth speaker, the Monster iClarity HD is 41% off at Amazon right now. There are fewer than a dozen left. It's a bargain at $70, especially since it makes a great speaker phone/conference phone with BT compatible smartphones. Plus you get a $10 Amazon credit for digital downloads, so that's basically a free album with the purchase.
 
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Dryden;1965803; said:
+1 on Editions. Great app. It's replaced The Daily on my iPad since my trial subscription to that ended. Surprisingly Editions also isn't redundant with Flipboard. Those two and Pulse cover everything I need for news.
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Two more observations on Editions:

The first is something I'm confident they'll fix - stories showing up in the wrong sections. I'm finding some music stories in the tech section, sports stories in the music section, etc. These aren't stories that have overlapping topics - they are just in the wrong spot.

The second I'm not so confident they'll fix. As I mentioned in my initial post on Editions, I asked the app to avoid content from Huffington Post. Granted, "avoid" is the term that they use in the app, and I imagine that's intentional on their part as opposed to "blocking". However, pretty much everything else that I've trained it to avoid has failed to reappear. This app and the Huffington Post are both AOL properties, and I'll be disappointed if the app ignores my requests to avoid affiliated content.

Dryden;1965803; said:
Bought a Wacom Bamboo stylus and the Penultimate app this weekend. I may never write on paper at my office again.
Click to expand...

How is Penultimate? Does it have a hand rest feature or anything to avoid stray input? At the time I was looking for an app I had heard that it didn't have any such feature, so I had eliminated it. However, I had also heard that it features the smoothest "ink" of any such app on the store. I've been using Notes Plus and I too have ditched my paper notepad at work.
 
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jlb1705;1965830; said:
How is Penultimate? Does it have a hand rest feature or anything to avoid stray input?
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It does have a wrist detect, but it still needs some work. It has a habit of wiping out my pen strokes if I roll my wrist without stopping the pen first. That's not a big deal for me, I'll just leave the wrist detect feature off and not rest my hand on the screen (less smudges that way anyway).

For $1.99 it does what I need it to do. I already paid the additional .99 for the in-app purchase of the "Time & Task" paper styles too, which includes 13 additional ruled paper styles (daytimer, todo, memo, ledger, invoice, etc ...).

If there are two things I'd like to see it's a zoom-input box like Notes Plus for finer writing and the ability to mix paper styles within a notebook. The lack of these features won't keep me from using it though.

I also like that the dev(s) are very responsive and open about feature developments:

http://blog.cocoabox.com/
 
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fanaticbuckeye;1971654; said:
Is this the one that will be able to play on the TV via Apple TV with the iPad as the remote?
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Yep - and it's going to be dual-screen, not just mirrored. That part looks pretty sweet. Might have to get an Apple TV if more games start taking advantage of that feature in iOS 5.

It's still pretty good as a standalone game on the regular iPad screen too though.
 
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jlb1705;1971666; said:
Yep - and it's going to be dual-screen, not just mirrored. That part looks pretty sweet. Might have to get an Apple TV if more games start taking advantage of that feature in iOS 5.

It's still pretty good as a standalone game on the regular iPad screen too though.
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Just bought it, mainly for the dual presence gaming. Should be cool. Thanks for the heads up.

As for the AppleTV, I say get it despite the gaming. I use handbrake to rip the DVD and MetaZ to apply the metatags to put all of my DVD's on a pc. We use it all the time. The iTunes interface makes it so simple, and we use the music when we entertain.
 
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fanaticbuckeye;1971716; said:
Just bought it, mainly for the dual presence gaming. Should be cool. Thanks for the heads up.

As for the AppleTV, I say get it despite the gaming. I use handbrake to rip the DVD and MetaZ to apply the metatags to put all of my DVD's on a pc. We use it all the time. The iTunes interface makes it so simple, and we use the music when we entertain.
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I'm definitely planning on getting one for the music capabilities alone. Any other features will be a bonus.
 
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Firemint (makers of Flight Control, Real Racing 1 & 2) have released their newest game today, SPY Mouse. I'm a pretty big fan of Firemint and the games I mentioned above, and this new one looks promising.

The game is $0.99, but it is not universal and does not have a separate 'HD' version for iPad yet. Neither Firemint nor their new parent company/publisher EA have a history of doing universal apps, so I'll probably pick this one up for my phone and wait patiently for an HD version.

This game is also going to participate in the Starbucks Pick of the Week program. Starting Tuesday and while supplies last you can pick up a card with a promo code to get the game for free when you visit a Starbucks location.

Gameplay trailer here:
http://toucharcade.com/2011/08/24/s...-it-for-free-at-starbucks-starting-next-week/
 
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Labor Day weekend - a ton of games are going on sale. Now is the time to buy.

Also - One of my favorite games, Trainyard, just received a major update. It is now Universal, and it looks sharp on the iPad screen. It also add Engineer Mode, which is a puzzle editor. You can create your own puzzles and share them, as well as try to solve others' puzzles. It transforms Trainyard into a crowdsourced game, which should provide for almost infinite content.

I've mentioned Trainyard in this thread before, and I hope you support it. It has been created and maintained by a single indie developer, but in spite of that it's a highly polished product. He's very open about his decisions and the work he's doing and it's interesting to follow. He also maintains a couple websites - trainyard.ca includes his blog for the game and crowdsourced solutions for when you get stuck. Struct.ca is his developer's blog, where he shares a lot of insights on game design, coding and construction.

Anyway, just buy the game. Or, if you just want to give it a try, get the lite version - Trainyard Express. The puzzles in the lite version are different from the full version, so I play them both.
 
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jlb1705;1979151; said:
Also - One of my favorite games, Trainyard, just received a major update. It is now Universal, and it looks sharp on the iPad screen. It also add Engineer Mode, which is a puzzle editor. You can create your own puzzles and share them, as well as try to solve others' puzzles. It transforms Trainyard into a crowdsourced game, which should provide for almost infinite content.

I've mentioned Trainyard in this thread before, and I hope you support it. It has been created and maintained by a single indie developer, but in spite of that it's a highly polished product. He's very open about his decisions and the work he's doing and it's interesting to follow. He also maintains a couple websites - trainyard.ca includes his blog for the game and crowdsourced solutions for when you get stuck. Struct.ca is his developer's blog, where he shares a lot of insights on game design, coding and construction.

Anyway, just buy the game. Or, if you just want to give it a try, get the lite version - Trainyard Express. The puzzles in the lite version are different from the full version, so I play them both.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the recommendation - trainyard is an awesome puzzle game - I love it!!
 
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