Mac|Life iPod and iPhone RSS Feed

One Arm Battle

Susie Ochs — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:49:02 -0600

The computer is beating us by $1,000 right now, but we just hit Bop Till You Drop, so we're about to rack up a huge risk-free score.

It's you against your phone, racing to bank $5,000. You first roll a goal and then spin the slot machine's reels. When the reels stop spinning, you click on individual reels to hold those points, and then either tap the Stop button to end the turn and bank those points, or the Spin button to re-spin the reels you haven't held. So in that way, it's like a cross between a slot machine and video poker.

If the slot machine shows no points on any reels after a spin, you lose that turn. So it's a gamble after every spin: You either tap Stop and bank any points into your permanent total, or keep spinning to increase your points but risk losing the turn and not getting any points at all.

If you "sweep" the machine, or score points on all 6 reels, you usually get a bonus. Most of the goals, in fact, are to sweep the reels and get a bonus, and you can stop the turn and bank your points anytime. Other goals change things up a little, offering huge bonuses but not letting you stop.

For example, Bop Till You Drop keeps spinning the wheels until no more points can be scored, but you can't lose the turn—all the points will be banked, even when the wheels don't show any more points at the end of a spin. And the Grand Force goal will give you a 1,000-point bonus if you sweep, but you can't stop the turn so if you don't sweep you get nothing.

Tap the Pay Table button for a reminder of how that particular slot machine awards points.

The game has multiple slot machines you can play—they look the same but offer different scoring and bonuses. You start with one and then unlock eight other machines as you play. When playing, you can tap the Pay Table button to see a list of how that machine pays out. And a scrolling information bar gives you prompts on what to do if you ever get stuck or confused about if it's your turn or not.

I dug One Arm Battle. The music is cheesy, but we just turned off the sound effects and went back to listening to our iPod tunes -- if you leave the sound effects on, they'll play right over your music. It'd be nice to be able to play single-player, maybe in a timed race to a certain dollar amount. Or to play against a friend, either with two devices connected via Ad-Hoc, or by passing one device around.

The graphics aren't jaw-dropping—they reminded me of a dressed-up version of the pocket-sized casino videogames my dad used to get in his Christmas stocking and play at the breakfast table. But the gameplay is fun and has moments of real excitement, like when the computer-controlled player is up by $3,000 and you hit a huge winning streak and catch up in one turn. We did experience occasional crashes, but the game saved our progress every time, so it wasn't too annoying.

Luxor

Susie Ochs — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:17:17 -0600

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Combining elements from Zuma and Breakout, Luxor has you firing your own colored balls at advancing chains of other colored balls. You’re trying to remove balls from the chain by matching three or more of the same color. The chains move along tracks that twist and turn and double over each other, so you can’t always get a clear shot. And if you don’t clear them fast enough, they reach the end of the track--and you lose.

Luxor's marble-matching gameplay is set against an Egyptian background.

Luxor for the iPhone plays well, with 88 levels and sharp graphics and music. You can catch falling coins and power-up tokens that slow down or reverse the chains or give you more powerful ammunition. And Luxor supports the Plus+ gaming network, letting you challenge your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

See also: Bust-a-Move, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert iPhone

Zack Stern — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:16:04 -0600

You can hide the clutter on the right, but you'll often need to use those commands.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert translates a great Mac and PC game into an adequate iPhone title. Instead of designing the action around the portable device, this version feels like developers crammed in as much of the full computer game as possible. We wanted a nimble, portable, action-strategy blitz, but got a clumsy game that frustrates as much as it entertains.

Red Alert casts you as commander of either a U.S.-European alliance or Russian threat in an alternate-history battle for the world. Fanciful sci-fi units, including attack bears, zeppelin bombers, and electrified turrets create most of the excitement.

You'll occasionally need to construct buildings before battle.

The strategy unfolds from those units' specific abilities. Bombers go unchallenged unless you have fighter planes or surface-to-air guns available; and tanks roll over rocket-launcher infantry in close range but are in danger if the soldiers are perched in buildings. This depth is the best part of Red Alert, although if you just amass enough powerful tanks, for example, you can often muscle past strategic attacks.

Red Alert downplays its building construction. You'll still want to strategically place defensive turrets to keep foes out of your base, but in the story mode, most everything is built for you already. And in those situations, you'll almost never run out of money, so you don't have to create buildings that mine resources for money. The cost per unit feels irrelevant; just keep buying more to slowly chip at the enemy.

Select missions cast you as an army of one, tossing strategy aside.

While sufficient, the game controls left us wanting a mouse and keyboard. You'll tap single units to make selections, and tap an enemy to attack. Double-tap a unit, and the game will select all of the same type. A mode lets you draw a box around units, select everything on the screen, and even toggle between three collections of your own choice. But we needed more precision, getting frustrated by trying to tap a vulnerable engineer out of a cluster of tanks. And a big palette of building commands often gets in the way of on-screen action.

The game felt buggy and slow on an iPhone 3G. Especially after creating a big army, audio effects stuttered, and we had to make multiple scroll and zoom gestures to see results. Red Alert took about 35 seconds to first load, and often 30 seconds to begin a level. It crashed occasionally, too.

Bust-a-Move

Susie Ochs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:56:54 -0500

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Taito’s Bust-a-Move, also known in Japan as Puzzle Bobble, resembles the 1996 Mac puzzle game Snood. You fire colored balls at a puzzle of colored balls, trying to match three and make them disappear. The balls gradually move down the screen, and if they reach the bottom before you clear the board, you lose.

Bust 'em before they move.

Bust-a-Move has a totally forgettable story, plus bright graphics and two ways to fire the ball: with a simple tap or using a slingshot technique. We had a hard time aiming, but if you fail a level and retry it, the game inserts a dotted line to help you line up your shots better. Special pieces include cannonballs that wipe out everything in their path and exploding balls that take out an entire color at once. Plus, you can bank shots off the sides and even the top of the screen. Bluetooth connectivity lets two players battle in Versus mode (not supported by the first-gen iPod touch), and Challenge mode is a never-stopping barrage of puzzles.

See also: Luxor, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

iPhone Accused Again of Gobbling Up Bandwidth

J Keirn-Swanson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:39:39 -0500

Remember when Ralph De La Vega, AT&T's Wireless CEO, suggested that the carrier might have to figure out some way to effectively better manage the bandwidth of their 3G network?

Well, he's not the only one singing the "iPhone's hogging up the airwaves" blues. Turns out the Chairman of the FCC has that same song stuck in his head, and between the two of these men, iPhone users could be running into some stiff opposition to their unlimited access plans.

Bandwidth Use History and Projection. Source: Gigaom.com

FCC Chief Julius Genachowski in a recent ranging conversation with Business Week discussed net neutrality, broadband expansion, behavioral advertising, Google, censorship and filtering. But the comment he made that most caught our attention was this one in response to the question: How concerned are you about the available spectrum for wireless services?

Genachowski:

We've been spending time on long-term spectrum policy because the data suggest we face a spectrum gap. The demands that are being created by the [Apple] (APPL) iPhone and other mobile broadband technologies threaten to outstrip the amount of spectrum available for commercial mobile...

While Genachowski does mention smartphones in general, the only one singled out by name is the iPhone. This may be in part because he's an iPhone user or he may be obliquely referencing AT&T's complaints. Again we see the suggestion, much like De La Vega's that iPhone users are significantly cutting into the available spectrum bandwidth and that something will have to be done.

As it stands, while no one is talking about anything concrete, iPhone users would do well to keep their ears tuned to this conversation. From the sound of it, things might get interesting.

myPantone

Jon Phillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:18:56 -0500

We’ll get this right out of the way: Pantone’s foray into the App Store is a success -- myPantone is slick, clever and imminently useful. But we can’t describe the killer utility of the app without first getting into the whys and hows of Pantone itself. So, color experts, please excuse the preambling primer. We just want to get newbies up to speed so that they really understand what Pantone’s iPhone app does -- and does not -- have to offer.

The app includes nine virtual Pantone fan decks that allow you to search by name or Pantone number, or browse with finger-swipes.

There’s No “Sorta” In Perfect Color-Matching
Pantone makes color-matching systems that have become essential to the world of design -- from graphic design to clothing design to furniture design and more. Because accurate color reproduction on paper, fabrics, plastic and other surfaces can be so hit-and-miss, designers often need to work within reliable, never-changing “color spaces” to ensure that the color they want to see reproduced is actually the color that is reproduced. In practical terms, this means spec’ing the relevant elements in a computer design document with a specific Pantone color code.

Let’s say you’re designing the logo for a Fortune 500 company. Hell, let’s say the logo is for a local moving company, because companies of all ambition-levels want their logos to look consistent on letterhead, outdoor signage, T-shirts, everywhere.

When it comes time to decide on a specific logo color, you open up your Pantone swatch collection -- it may take the form of a splayed-out “fan deck” or a book of perforated paper chips -- and decide on the color you want. That color has a code. For example, 636 C for a particular variant of light blue. Now, when it comes time to have your logo printed in the real world, you define the blue in your document file as Pantone 636 C, and the reproduction service will use the precise mix of inks, pigments or whatever to achieve the exact color you specified as it appears on the medium they’re printing on. In short, the Pantone color-matching system ensures that 636 C looks the same wherever it appears, be it in your Pantone fan deck, or on a business card or billboard.

So that’s how Pantone color matching works. That’s why it’s so useful. That’s why Pantone has become the leader in color standards.

All of which leads us to a little irony intrinsic to the myPantone app: It shouldn’t be used for precise color matching. Color accuracy is not what it’s all about.

myPantone: The Color Fanatic’s New Inspirational Friend
Here’s the deal: The iPhone’s screen isn’t designed for color accuracy. It’s designed for the best possible display at a small size, low price, and modest power requirements. The upshot is that even though myPantone contains virtual fan decks of nine different Pantone color libraries, a designer could never depend on the iPhone to perfectly represent how a particular myPantone color swatch will print in a real-world situation.

In this screen you get to choose which color system you want to work in. Shoot, we get inspired just seeing the covers of the virtual fan decks! But we’re geeky that way.

Of course, this is also an issue when viewing Pantone colors on regular computer displays, because even the best displays have to be precisely calibrated for the best-possible color accuracy. But the iPhone’s innate screen color accuracy isn’t anywhere close to that of, say, a 30-inch Cinema Display, nor does the iPhone have any screen calibration control -- unless you count the Brightness slider.

But, hey -- whatever. The app is a virtual goldmine of incredibly useful tools and features, for professional designers and color-minded hobbyists alike.

For starters, the app includes nine complete virtual fan decks: Formula Guide/solid coated; Formula Guide/solid uncoated; Formula Guide/solid matte; GoeGuide/coated; GoeGuide/uncoated; Fashion+Home/cotton; Fashion+Home/paper; Pastel Formula Guide/coated; and Pastel Formula Guide/uncoated. Given that individual fan decks (the ones printed on paper) start at about $60, you can see how much value this app provides, even if you just use myPantone in a casual way, like surveying color options in a conference room with colleagues. Again, you shouldn’t use the app to make final decisions on one Pantone color versus another; it’s not a replacement for printed Pantone color guides. But myPantone can provide you with a huge head start in making color decisions, thanks to its wealth of helpful features oriented around color cataloging and inspiration.

Swatch Details Like You’ve Never Seen Before
Once you’ve chosen which virtual fan deck to use, you can opt to sort it in one of two ways: with either a Visual sort (with all colors arranged chromatically, like a rainbow, from red to violet) or a Classic sort (with colors arranged according to Pantone’s own rather scientific -- and obtuse -- numerical grouping system). This sorting feature is something that’s just plain impossible to do with a paper fan deck or chip book.

With your sort decision completed, you can finger-swipe your way through the fan deck to browse for a particular swatch. Once you find a swatch that suits your fancy, you can double-tap it for a larger-version swatch that consumes most of the screen. This larger view will also give you the color’s Pantone number code, along with the color values for RGB, L*a*b* and HTML conversion. Pro designers already know the convenience of having all this info by one’s side.

The largest swatch view possible provides a large virtual color chip – just don’t assume that what you see on the iPhone is what you’ll get on printed material.

If you want to save the particular swatch for future reference, or just want to explore more possibilities with that swatch, you can drag it into your palette collection at the bottom of the screen. The app provides slots for 10 different palettes, and each palette can contain five swatches. Even better, you can view and share your palettes in a bunch of cool ways: Email it yourself or a friend; upload it to your account on Pantone’s community website; beam it to another iPhone; or view it on an assortment of virtual wallboards. You can also tap into the iPhone’s GPS to define the location where the palette was created.

With your new favorite swatch snuggled firmly in a palette, you can tap it again to bring up its Color Details—another feature that just isn’t feasible with a real-world fan deck. Color Details shows you a medium-sized image of the swatch, along with a row of its closest color neighbors in the Pantone collection. This “color neighborhood view” is perfect for narrowing down the precise shade or hue that floating around in your mind’s eye. You also get notation on which page the swatch appears in the real-world paper fan deck, and a button that lets you record a voice memo about the color.

Hit another button under Color Details, and up pops a screen of more swatches that bear contextual relevance to the one you’ve been digging into. For example, the swatches under Cross-Reference show you analogue swatches in other Pantone color systems. Blue Coral 19-4526 TPX may not have a perfect (or even close) analogue match in every system, but this cross-referencing feature will be invaluable to pro designers nonetheless.

At the top of the screen, the Color Details feature give you the other colors that surround your swatch in the fan deck. Those swatches at the bottom of the screen are simply a collection of swatches we gathered by hand.

And then there are the Harmony groupings, which use Pantone’s own mathematical algorithms to reveal traditional color-wheel harmonies (complementary, analogous, triadic, etc) applicable to your swatch. This might be the single-best feature for folks intimidated by making color choices. Whether you want to explore “matchy-matchy” (analogous color combos, like Evergreen and True Navy) or “stark contrast” (split-complementary combos, like Evergreen and Pesto set against Oxblood Red), the Harmony choices will keep you moving around the fan deck like a free-associating fool.

The mathematically driven harmony suggestion under Color Details are great for color newbies. We just wish those crazy symbols were explained somehow.

Take a Picture, Extract a Color
So far, we’ve explained how myPantone works if you’ve already found a color you’re interested in exploring. But what if you want the app to tell you which colors to explore? Enter the color extraction tool, which is rather unceremoniously labeled Image on the app interface. Here you can either snap a photo with the iPhone’s camera, or grab a photo already in your phone, and then hit Auto-Extraction to set the magic in motion. The app will digitally dig into your image, identify its five most dominant colors, and then generate the five swatches that most closely map to those dominant colors.

Auto-extraction does a pretty fair job of identifying close Pantone matches for the colors in your photos. Just be aware that the lighting conditions in which you shoot will have a profound result on extraction accuracy (see the next set of screenshots for living proof!).

This little trick presents some interesting opportunities. For professional designers, myPantone color extraction can provide close (though not perfect) information for matching elements in a photo with colors in a Pantone library. This can come in handy when, say, you want your coverline type to be filled with whatever Pantone green most closely matches the grass in your cover photograph.

Color extraction also offers benefits to the aesthetically challenged color newbie. Let’s say you want ideas for colors that will be harmonious with your particular light-blue wall paint. You can take a close-up photo of the paint, hit auto-extract, and then receive not the single color that most closely matches the paint, but a group of colors that work with the paint in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Did Pantone intend for a single color to generate four or five complementary swatches? We don’t know (more about that in a moment). But extracting multiple colors from what is ostensibly a single color is both a positive feature (because the harmonious color palette offers inspiration) and a negative feature (because these results remind us that the color extraction function is unreliable, and highly influenced by the light conditions in which photographs are shot).

The app doesn’t include any documentation on how color extraction works, and, in fact, one of myPantone’s very few faults is a lack of documentation and help screens. Pantone’s developers designed an interface that’s pretty darned intuitive, but we still encountered a number of features that deserved more explanation than, well, zero explanation.

The big field of green you see here is not a myPantone swatch. It’s a close-up photograph of the top of a Pantone Flight Stool spec’d in 15-0146 TPX. This photo was shot in poor lighting conditions. The app’s auto-extraction tool generated four color matches from an ostensibly single color, and none of the matches are 15-0146 TPX.

Here’s a wider-angle shot of the Flight Stool – we wanted to prove to you that it was indeed spec’d (and labeled!) as 15-0146 TPX. Again, Auto-Extraction couldn’t find this specific color in the photograph. But we blame hardware limitations, not Pantone.

While we really want to see documentation, help screens, and even color-theory reference materials in a version update, we really can’t fault Pantone for the app’s lack of color accuracy, either in the way it renders colors, or in its function for extracting colors (which, by the way, uses nearly the same algorithms that are employed in Pantone’s handheld Color Cue 2 extraction device, which currently sells for $249). The Pantone app developers did a stellar job in side-stepping the iPhone’s hardware limitations, and simultaneously making the best possible use of its unique hardware opportunities.

Doug Adams Dupin

Roberto Baldwin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:20:00 -0500

Initially we all had just one Mac and one iPod. We’d dutifully sync our iPod with our Mac, and life was grand.

Then we got a MacBook, another iPod, and finally, an iPhone. Soon it was apparent that our music library was scattered across multiple machines and the idea of trying to figure out which machine had which songs became an onerous task. So we just threw them all together, resulting in tons of unwanted duplicate tracks.

Even without Foreigner, we had double vision--but that was before Dupin cleaned up the duplicates in our iTunes library.

Dupin scours your iTunes library for duplicates and helps cure you of double-track syndrome. iTunes contains a Show Duplicates feature, but it’s woefully underpowered. It works fine for a couple tracks, but music fans with larger libraries will by stymied by its extremely limited definition of “duplicate.” Dupin turbocharges the process, making it easier to find actual duplicates--as opposed to different versions of the same song. With 10 selectable criteria for defining duplicates and the ability to confine searches by playlist or specific library, there are few rogue tracks that can escape Dupin. iTunes doesn’t have to be open for the application to do its thing, and, in fact, you can continue listening to iTunes music without fear of interruption from Dupin.

Once the dupes are identified, you can set filters for the application to determine which files to keep in your iTunes library and which to purge (keeping higher-bit rate versions and tossing lower-quality copies, for example). We threw multiple songs with the same name, songs stored on different devices, and songs with varying bit rates at Dupin, and it was able to reliably separate the keepers from the unnecessary duplicates.

You can tell Dupin to simply remove the tracks from your iTunes library without deleting them, send them to the Trash, or have them deleted on the spot. We recommend hanging on to them, but we wish Dupin gave us the option to move the files to a specific folder--which would reduce the size of our Music folder while still giving us the chance to back up the duplicate files. Purged tracks that are sent to the Trash can be manually recovered, but you lose the Artist/Album folder nesting that iTunes creates, leaving an organizational nightmare.

Mozilla's Mystery App Coming Soon

J Keirn-Swanson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:22:30 -0500

While Apple retains the right to deny apps that they claim duplicate core features (the supposed excuse for the Google Voice blanket rejection), there are any number of apps that do just that. Try searching browsers in the app store for proof.

So with an announcement from Mozilla's CEO John Lilly that the open source giant plans to "release an app to the iPhone App Store in the next few weeks," that he claims will "surprise people," speculation began. Theories centered around two strong contenders.

Tech blogger Om Malik has one theory. He interviewed Lilly when the comment was made, then later discussed Weave with Lilly and Jay Sullivan, VP of Mozilla Mobile. Weave, a Firefox extension that syncs bookmarks, cookies, passwords, and other elements of your Firefox experience to multiple machines, allows you access to the same data from different locations. Malik believes Mozilla's new app will allow iPhone users to access this information while on the go. Would this app play nice with Safari? Other apps do offer an "Open in Safari" option, so that seems the least controversial route.

Others, such as Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun, suspect that Mozilla plans to present an iPhone version of Fennec, their mobile browser already supported on Windows Mobile. It's no secret that Mozilla wants to get in on the mobile game in a big way and getting on the iPhone would be a feather in the browser's cap. Tofel goes on to indulge his speculation with fantasies involving a mobile version of Flash built in to Fennec that would bring the entirety of the Web to the iPhone at last.

While the first theory would hardly qualify as a surprising move, Tofel's at least has the level of improbability to it that might qualify. Whether or not Apple approves such an app is a completely different matter. Mozilla has stated previously that Firefox won't be on the iPhone and Apple has all but declared Flash on the iPhone a non-starter. Time will tell in this matter. In this case, a few weeks. Feel free to indulge your own speculation or debunking in the comments.