Chris Herbert

730 posts on MacStories since September 2010

Vector & pixel trafficker for Seymour Midwest LLC, regular MacStories contributor, Hip-Hop junkie all day long; Apple addict circa 1976.

herbert@macstories.net

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Steve Jobs is a Ninja!

UPDATE: Ninja Steve was approved and is live in the App Store for $.99 -> LINK

The gameplay is very simple, Ninja Steve is all about fast reflexes and accuracy. The ‘Smartbots’ fly around until they get close enough to zap you. Touch an enemy to fire a shuriken. After a while you will build up a RDF, which is like an electromagnetic shock, shake your iDevice to activate it. There are three different stages and four different ‘Smartbots’. There are 15 main levels, plus 2 extra levels.

It’s a really simple game with a few Apple-like references but it gets a little stale and repetitive after a while but for $.99, Apple fanboys can kick ‘Smartbot’ ass ninja-style!

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Remember when Steve Jobs couldn’t take his ninja stars aboard his private plane back in September? Maybe he should have used a smoke bomb to get them aboard.

Anyway, Woltz Media is developing an iOS game called Ninja Steve. It’s about a CEO named ‘Steve’ (no official affiliation with Jobs or Apple) that is also a trained ninja assassin.

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A New Meaning to the word ‘iLife’

Coach Eric Cooper Sr. never thought he would need to save one of his player’s lives, nor did he think an iPhone app would assist him in doing so.

The LA Times reported that Xavier Jones, a player on Coach Cooper’s basketball team, collapsed during practice after his heart stopped beating from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle becomes hardened, making it more difficult for it to pump blood. Coach Cooper and an assistant coach rushed out to see what the problem was. After checking and not detecting a heartbeat, Cooper pulled out his iPhone and launched Phone Aid, which gave them detailed instructions on how to perform CPR to get his heart started again. Read more

Primo Power Core - A Battery Pack For All

PhoneSuit has just released a new accessory that works for any of your iDevices called the Primo Power Core Battery Back. The Primo Power Core is a “personal, portable, pocket-sized power plant”. It has an impressive 8200mAh capacity battery in a small, lightweight package and enough power to fully charge most mobile devices multiple times on a single charge. The Primo Power Core features automatic amp-switching technology so that your iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Classic, Nano or other competing devices are charging at the fastest rates possible. Plug it in to extend movie watching, music or podcast listening, surfing the web, or playing video games.

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iFan - For Those Hot Summer Nights

Not everyone has the iPhone 4, with its improved lithium-polymer battery that lets you work longer, play longer … you get the point. I charge my phone every night and even throughout the daytime to keep it alive. Designer Tjeerd Veenhoven has created the iFan - a piece of hardware / case made from molded soft rubber with a fan on top that recharges your iPhone via windpower. Wrap it around your iPhone and run like the wind; or maybe the bike mount concept appeals to you more.

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OpenFeint X: Sell New Content Without Updates

After Apple released Game Center, OpenFeint’s survival plan was to provide even more services on top of the Game Center functionality, now OpenFeint X hopes to cash in on this. It’s a service that allows iOS developers (plus other mobile platforms) to add over-the-air purchasable content to their games on top of Apple’s already popular in-app purchasing. OpenFeint X works outside of Apple’s store, and allows devs to quickly add in-app content without going through Apple’s approval system. Only a few devs have worked with it so far, but it’s new and more will surely follow soon, especially after their “Million Dollar Challenge” announcement.

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iPads Being Used for U.S. Marine Recruiting

… This is for fighting, this is for fun!” Sorry, I was feeling inspired by the movie Full Metal Jacket.

Military Times has reported that the U.S. Marine Corps is testing out the use of iPads in recruiting. The blog reported that Maj. Gen. Robert Milstead, the commander of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, said the Corps is doing well in recruitment, but (like everyone else these days) it faces a shrinking advertising budget. So they jumped on the ‘iPads in Public’ bandwagon. That’s where the iPads come in. Read more