Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ($18 Nintendo DS; $10 iPhone) places players in the shoes of young Triad member Huang Lee as he navigates Liberty City in search of vengeance for his father’s killing, as well as a large cash inheritance. Featuring rampages, an in-game economic system, wi-fi connectivity for stat tracking, and more, it’s a must-have title for anyone wanting GTA action on the go.
The iPhone’s application capabilities continue to astound us. We’ve seen on-the-fly multitrack recording already in our a cappella review of Sonoma’s 4Track app, but this one takes it to a whole new level. Voice band is a multitrack recording app that lets you build up the sound of a full band, including guitars, bass, drums, sax, synths and vocals, using only your voice as an input. The demo video after the jump shows just how simple this process is, and how astoundingly good the results are. Amazing stuff.
LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals, recently issued a major upgrade to its iPhone app. It’s darn gorgeous.
The app’s user interface mimics the large, bubbly buttons of the iPhone’s home screen. Each button directs you to a different part of LinkedIn: status updates, profiles, connections, inbox and so on. The app is fast and smooth, although it encountered a bug that also appears on the LinkedIn website: connection invitations that never seem to go away, even after you approve or reject them.
The most interesting addition to the LinkedIn app is a feature called “In Person.” It enables LinkedIn iPhone users to swap contact information by simply bumping their phones together; the connection is made over Bluetooth. It’s very similar to an iPhone app called Bump, which does practically the same thing.
The LinkedIn app’s massive makeover is similar to the one Facebook received with its 3.0 update. Frankly, I think the Facebook and LinkedIn iPhone apps have better UIs than their actual websites. LinkedIn.com and Facebook.com, in my opinion, are pretty rough to navigate. Both iPhone apps make the user experience far more pleasant, though they don’t completely replace usage of the actual website. (You probably wouldn’t wish to fill out your LinkedIn profile with the iPhone app, for example, lest you believe employers won’t care about touchscreen-induced typos.)
The WakeMate is a smart wrist band that monitors your sleep and gives you a gentle nudge to wake up. Unlike normal alarm clocks which just blast you into consciousness the WakeMate is supposed to leave you bright and refreshed when you wake up. It even works with naps. You program the WakeMate to wake you within a 20 minute window and it will find the right spot.
The WakeMate uses a science called actigraphy to analyze your sleep. Actigraphy uses an actigraph (the WakeMate unit) placed on a subject’s wrist to monitor the motion. The motion data is then analyzed to determine sleep patterns and circadian rhythms of the subject. For more information, you can download a paper on actigraphy here.
It works with all bluetooth phones apparently and it’s not available just yet but it will be US$49.99.
So much art at auction, so few digital doppelgangers to bid on it for you. Artfact Live — the live auction bidding site for works from houses like Christie’s, Bonham’s, and so many others — may have a solution that doesn’t involve cloning. Instead, it has created an app that keeps you in real-time auction action for more than 100,000 items of fine and decorative arts, collectibles, estates, and more.
If you’re unsure of what to bid on or how much to bid, there’s the Artfact database. Have your eye on that LeComte coming up for auction in Paris but need to know a bit more, the database will reveal its provenance, history, what it’s worth and why. On the other hand, if you know the LeComte you’re after but it hasn’t come up for sale yet, you can enter it in the Auction Advisor and Artfact will alert you when that stingy collector decides to relinquish it.
Additionally, the widget lets you place anonymous absentee bids before the auction if you cannot participate, and if you’ll be notified if you’re outbid before the auction begins. You can also search auctions to see what a particular work or complementary works have gone for. It’s not as cool as cloning, sure, but you can spare yourself the ethical considerations and you won’t ever have to worry about your clone bidding on that purple glass rooster behind your back…
Sure, it’s not quite as elegant as a little cube jutting out of one corner of the iPhone à la Square, but it looks like the Payware Mobile could certainly double as a pretty sturdy case should it drop. More importantly, the backing of VeriFone means this mobile payment peripheral has some pretty important backing and should be able to hit the ground running. That magical date should be January 15th of next year, free on a 2-year Payware Connect contract, and pre-orders are now live on the website for those who want to join in on the phone. Just one word of advice: when you hand the iPhone over for someone to sign as proof of purchase, make sure you’re able to outrun the chap. Just in case.
The iPhone presents a unique opportunity for accessory makers. Never before has a tripod maker, for example, been able to actually reach inside a camera and tweak its software. But that’s exactly what Joby has done with Gorillacam, an iPhone app which lets you get the most out of not just Joby’s iPhone tripod but any tripod on which the phone may happen to be perched.
The functions are skewed towards tripod-mounted pictures, of course, and you get such smart additions as a bubble level at the top of the screen, grid lines, a press-anywhere shutter release and auto-save to let you keep shooting instead of waiting for a save between snaps.
As this is a tripod application, you also get an easy to adjust self-timer, a burst-mode (three shots) and best, a time-lapse function which will take pictures at intervals of anywhere between one second and two minutes.
I wish that this kind of thing could be done to real cameras. My Nikon DSLR, for example, could do with some easier to use software, especially if it was as nice-looking as Joby’s application.
Gorillacam is free, presumably as a great advertisement for Joby’s hardware, so you can go grab it even if you don’t own a GorillaPod.
The iPhone’s touchscreen is pleasant to tap, but writing a long message gets tiring. A speech recognition app called Dragon Dictation addresses that by transcribing your speech into text, which can then be copied into an e-mail or text message.
The app’s interface is dead simple. Launch the app, hit the record button and start talking. Dragon Dictation immediately sends your speech to software developer Nuance’s server, whose algorithm analyzes your speech. After the app spits out text, you can tap any inaccurate words and hit delete, then choose to send the text via e-mail or SMS. You can also store transcribed messages into your clipboard.
Normally whingeing gets you nowhere, but in a heartening turn of events, a developer’s late-night email shot off to Steve Jobs yielded some surprising results.
Apple didn’t approve of the use of a private API in Pointy Heads Software’s Knocking Live Video app, which allows iPhone users to stream live video to each other over 3G and Wi-Fi. After pleading to Steve Jobs to reconsider their verdict, Apple got back to developer Brian Meehan the next morning, promising that his request was being taken seriously.
Three hours later, with the order reportedly coming “directly from the top,” the Knocking Live Video was available on the App Store, where you can download it for free now. Until Apple sticks a forward-facing camera on the iPhone, it’s not ideal for video chat, but as Jesus pointed out in his rant yesterday, Apple’s likely biding its time until it can smell the video chat competition.
Cooking a big turkey is a fine science. You need to take the size of the bird into account and figure out what you want the thing to look and taste like when you are finished.
When the variables are properly controlled, it is possible to ensure fairly uniform results. If you know the temperature of the oven and the weight of the bird, then when to baste and how long to cook the thing for are simple calculations; having an app to do all of that ta