Entertainment Electronics Blog

The developers of the Flashlight XS app ($0.99) claim their app offers a performance breakthrough, turning an iPhone’s light on instantly. This is predicated on “taking advantage of iOS 5 improvements and tuning to the latest hardware.”

I offered to give it a try based on the passionate excitement of the developer’s pitch letter. If a dev can get that excited about a flashlight app, then I wanted in.

First, I downloaded a handful of free flashlight apps and launched them. They all did what they promised, enabling the onboard LED for instant flash light access (there is some sample code in my latest cookbook if you want to roll your own.)

Then I tested out Flashlight XS. Like the other apps, it switched on the LED.

Did it do so noticeably faster or better? Er, no. Did it provide a “10x improvement in launch time”? No, again.

The latency was pretty much exactly the same as every other flashlight app I tried.

As to the app’s merits, I think it has a pretty icon.

If you’re looking for a Flashlight app, you may want to consider any of the free alternatives available on the App Store.

TUAW gives Flashlight XS a sad thumbs down down for promises beyond what it can deliver — the light does turn on, but no faster than the myriad of similar free apps we’ve used. It’s our considered opinion that the developers might not want to charge to do the exact same thing free apps do.

Flashlight XS claims instant-on technology originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like ThinkGeek and Ion Audio were holding out on us when we visited the companies’ booth at CES earlier this year. (See update below) In addition to the three new devices already announced for the iCade lineup by Ion (that allows you to use various controls for iOS games across Bluetooth), there’s now another one from ThinkGeek only, strangely called the 8-bitty. The 8-bitty is an NES-style (though four buttons, instead of only two) block controller that’s completely wireless: Just pair it up with your iOS device and have at it.

It’s hardly ergonomical, but that’s not really the point with this, obviously. There are also two buttons at the top to use as triggers, so this is really an old school controller designed for new-school use. And just like all of Ion and ThinkGeek’s other iCade stuff, this will be compatible with any games designed to use it — all it does is acts as a Bluetooth keyboard, so any games designed to use certain keys to do certain things will be able to use this.

Seems like a good idea, and given iCade’s success in the past, this one will probably sell just as well. It’s supposed to be available “later on this year,” and ThinkGeek has listed the 8-bitty at $24.99, so we’ll keep a look out and let you know when you can grab one.

Update: ThinkGeek’s reps email to say that while the other iCade devices are being manufactured in conjunction with Ion Audio, the 8-bitty is not. It’s still using the iCade name, but this product is all ThinkGeek. Good to know.

via Engadget

ThinkGeek announces 8-bitty wireless controller for iPad, iPhone originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple is asking for a preliminary injunction to block US sales of the Galaxy Nexus, according to the Wall Street Journal. The current suit, filed in San Jose’s federal district court on Wednesday of this past week, accuses Samsung’s phone of infringing on four Apple patents.

The patents in question include “unified search,” slide-to-unlock, data tapping (data detectors) and word completion technologies. FOSS Patents refers to them as the “Four Horsemen” of patent claims; the site also suggests that this action against the flagship Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 Android device is attacking core features of “stock Android.” The data detector patent (which identifies appointment dates, phone numbers or addresses and makes them clickable/actionable links) was already ruled valid by the ITC, but Google kept it in Ice Cream Sandwich without seeking a license from Apple.

Apple is also pursuing action against Motorola in Germany; more here. The German suit is intended to block Motorola’s attempts (and presumably Moto buyer Google’s intents) to enforce high licensing fees on essential wireless patents it already licensed to Qualcomm, which makes the wireless 3G chips in the iPhone. Motorola asked Qualcomm to terminate Apple’s licenses as of February 10, 2011.

Hat tip Apple 2.0

WSJ: Apple seeks injunction to block sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Romance is almost in the air (even, if you’re as single as I am, though you might not care), and that means what every holiday seems to mean around the App Store: More sales! With all these great deals on apps, you can either enjoy one with your sweetie, or use them to distract you from your lonely, solo existence.

• Match-3-alike Ablazed is free right now, as the recently re-released Hand of Greed (which has been re-released a few times now right?).
• Sega has quite a few of its titles on sale for just 99 cents, including most of the Sonic titles, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Altered Beast and Gunstar Heroes.
• EA (surprised? Us either) has lots of titles on sale too, including Scrabble, Risk, Spy Mouse, and The Sims.
• Telltale has Back to the Future Episode 1 up for free, and the rest of them up for just $2.99.
• Crescent Moon also has a solid sale on, including the beautiful Gears puzzle platformer, Pocket RPG for iPhone (no HD sale, unfortunately), and Evertales.
• Match 3 title Treasures of Montezuma 3 is on sale for iPhone for 99 cents, and the iPad version is $2.99.
• Vito Technology’s “Walk” apps are all on sale for the holiday.
• Fantasy Sky HD is free.
• The ad-free version of Zynga’s Hanging with Friends is just a buck. Careful with playing it on an airplane, though.
• WoW-alike Order and Chaos Online is also just a buck. Comes with a free three month subscription, but you’ll have to pay after that.
• TanZen for iPhone is free — but the iPad version is not.
• Loud Crow Interactive is putting one of its apps on sale every day up and through Valentine’s Day — you have to follow them on Twitter to know which one, however.

We might see even more as the holiday gets closer, so stay tuned.

Valentine’s Day app sales underway: Treasures of Montezuma, Hanging with Friends, Order and Chaos Online originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The pocket version of Ticket to Ride by Days of Wonder is among the best board game adaptations for the iPhone, and it’s just gotten better with asynchronous multiplayer support. Now you can start a game with friends through Game Center, and take turns back and forth across the Internet. The experience is similar to popular multiplayer games like Words with Friends and Hero Academy.

This free update also expands the game’s local multiplayer mode, so that users on the same Bluetooth or Wi-Fi network can play across devices. Ticket to Ride for the iPhone and iPod touch is available for US$1.99 in the App Store, while the iPad version is priced at $6.99.

Days of Wonder notes that Ticket to Ride has been extremely popular. It has sold over 350,000 copies, and a new online game is begun every four seconds on average. The game is definitely excellent, and the success is well-deserved.

Ticket to Ride Pocket adds asynchronous multiplayer originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gizmodo has raised awareness a serious problem regarding an iMessage bug that, under the wrong circumstances, might result in your messages being seen by others, or you seeing someone else’s messages. It’s not a new issue; Ars Technica reported on it in December with stolen iPhones, and the problem is an ongoing one.

The behavior is most likely linked to Apple retaining the UDID of older phones in its database. The theory is that when a new UDID from a replacement device is linked to an Apple ID, the old identifier is not being removed. In the scenario Gizmodo discusses, the phone involved is owned by a minor who’s now seeing iMessages that an Apple retail employee is sending to friends and loved ones — all without the employee being aware. Gizmodo believes that when the minor’s iPhone was taken to the Apple Store for repair, the employee swapped his SIM card — not a standard practice — with the phone being repaired, which is enough to cause the issue.

As underscored by the previous reports, this is a serious problem. But Gizmodo, apparently not having learned its lesson from a couple years ago, decided to make its point about this security flaw by plastering the Apple retail employee’s iMessages on its site.

Gizmodo boasts that it’s found a plethora of information on the employee, dubbed “Wiz,” including his home address, Facebook, email, where he exercises and the Apple Store where he works. “We know enough about this guy to stalk him, blackmail him, and harass him, using nothing more than what we’ve picked up,” writer Sam Biddle brags. The site has posted screenshots of Wiz’s iMessages, which involve attempts at getting a date, discussing Apple’s first quarter financial results, photos alone and with friends, and more.

While Gizmodo has made its point, it does so in a way that outs an employee who was just doing his job by repairing the kid’s phone — and he probably had no idea that this was happening until his photos and iMessages began to be plastered all over the Internet today. While the employee’s name and face were blurred out, enough identifying details remain that it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who he is. If Gizmodo can find him, so can anyone smart enough to do a bit of digging on Google.

What Gizmodo has done is sensationalistic and in extremely poor taste, even drawing criticism from content partner MSNBC, which chastised the site for posting the iMessage images. The sensationalism only serves to draw attention away from the bigger issue of people’s information being compromised. Gizmodo could have gone about this in a different manner. Exposing the employee’s private life to this degree was not necessary to make the point that something is seriously wrong with iMessage.

iPhone bug opens up stranger’s life to the world originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don Lee, CEO of Nomad Brush, was kind enough to meet with us for a few minutes on the floor of Macworld | iWorld 2012 last week to chat about his creation, which is one of the nicer brushes available for virtual painting on Apple’s devices. Nomad’s got a few different makes and models for various uses, but Lee says his goal for them is all the same: To provide a “good bridge between analog and digital painting.” The brushes all do that — they’re solid brushes that respond well to the iPad’s screen.

But what they don’t do is what all brushes and styluses can’t yet do, and that’s invoke pressure sensitive information onto Apple’s glass screen. Lee says that it’s actually a choice on Apple’s part. He says that the software can determine the size of a touch on the screen — in other words, if your finger touches it only slightly, that’s a smaller screen space than if your finger (or a capacitive brush) is completely pressed up against the glass. But Apple doesn’t allow developers to take advantage of that information with their apps. “If they were to let that open,” says Lee, he’d obviously be able to sell more useful brushes, but until then, brushes are basically finger substitutes, not the full tools they could be.

Now developers, being developers, have come up with lots of little tricks to get around this lack of pressure information. The app Zen Brush, which Lee says makes a nice example for his brushes, actually uses the speed of your finger swipe (along with “projected” virtual ink on the screen) to make a more realistic representation of how the brush would interact with an actual page.

Nomad doesn’t have its own app, but Lee says the company “would love to talk to some developers” about possibly making an app built to work with its brushes. In the meantime, of course, they work just fine with almost any drawing app.

As for the brushes themselves, Lee says the biggest difference between them is basically just the size of the tips — some are wider and better used at painting bigger strokes, and some are better for closeup work (only in the feeling, of course — again, the size of the brush’s contact on iOS’ surface doesn’t really matter, and all of the various brush settings have to be worked on in the actual software). But one thing Nomad is thinking about doing that customers have asked about is creating brushes with interchangeable tips, so that users can customize their handles with whatever brush they’d like to use.

There are a few different choices in terms of brush styli for the iPad and iPhone, but Nomad seems like a good option, and it was interesting to talk to Lee, who’s actually an architect by trade. All of Nomad’s brushes are available on its website now.

Nomad brushes with wide strokes at Macworld | iWorld 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Magic Window was one of the first apps on the App Store when the store launched. It is a simple idea, but wonderfully executed and now available for the Mac as well as iOS. Magic Window is time-lapse photography — for iOS it serves as a relaxing “picture window” and on the Mac it can play on your desktop. Plus, by adding a projector (in the video below it is connected to an iPhone) you could have an enormous wall of a sunset slowly changing over time.

There’s really a bit more to Magic Window than mere novelty, including weather (supporting micro-climates as you find here in San Francisco), sleep timers and an efficient use of your processor. Check out the demo below by Josh from Jetson Creative, the smart folks behind this wonderful app.

See beautiful time lapse images with Magic Window on your Mac, iPad or iPhone originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Valve has released Steam Mobile for iOS, a free app for the iPhone. According to Valve, “With the free Steam app for iOS, you can participate in the Steam community wherever you go. Chat with your Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, read the latest gaming news and stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales.”

That’s the promise of the app, anyway; Steam Mobile has launched in “limited beta,” meaning you first need to input an activation key on your PC or Mac. Entering your username and password into the Steam Mobile app is apparently enough to “express interest” in the beta, but for now that’s pretty much all the app does until you receive an activation key.

It’s interesting that this app was approved; Apple has traditionally frowned on apps that require users to register for access in this manner, so it’s odd to see Valve granted an exception.

Also worth noting is that Steam Mobile will not serve as a front end to Steam selling games for the iPhone. All Steam Mobile will allow you to do is access the community and buy games for your Mac or PC from your iPhone.

Valve debuts free Steam Mobile iPhone app originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon may tout its 4G LTE network, but its quarterly earnings show that customers want the iPhone and are choosing the 3G phone over its 4G counterparts. It’s not just a small number either; about 55 percent of all smartphones sold in the quarter were iPhones.

The carrier announced that it sold 4.3 million iPhones during the final quarter of 2011. This figure accounts for more than half the 7.7 million smartphones the carrier sold and more than doubles the 1.6 million LTE smartphones the carrier sold in the last three months of the year. It’s also 2 million more than the 2.3 million 4G LTE devices the carrier sold (1.6 M smartphones and 700,000 LTE devices), which is impressive when you consider that it’s the iPhone 4 and 4S versus the 20 LTE devices in Verizon’s lineup.

In its aggressive ad campaign, Samsung may dangle its 4G smartphones in front of Apple fans like a carrot, but these quarterly figures show that customers are just not buying that message.

iPhone accounted for more than half of all smartphones sold by Verizon Wireless in Q4 2011 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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