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N.O.V.A. 3 Will Use Unreal Engine, Coming Later This Year→

N.O.V.A. 3 Built On Unreal Engine, Coming Later This Year

Pocket Gamer reports an interesting tidbit about software development studio Gameloft and its first-person shooter game N.O.V.A. for iOS:

Gameloft has confirmed what we already knew down here in the Rumour Mine - it’s busy working on four games utilising Epic Games’s Unreal Engine 3. But the Paris-based publisher hasn’t revealed what those games are.

Word has it that shooter sequel N.O.V.A. 3 is among the four titles built around the engine and will be out later this year.

I’m not a huge fan of Gameloft’s console-like approach to iOS, but I think it’ll be interesting to see how a new N.O.V.A. developed with the same engine that powers Infinity Blade will fit in the iOS gaming scene. Gameloft has plenty of time to make N.O.V.A. graphically more impressive than Infinity Blade or Rage HD come the 2011 holiday season. And – we’ll see if I’m wrong – I have a feeling a brand new N.O.V.A. with stunning graphics could make for the perfect demo at a certain Apple fall event.

Also: who else thinks Infinity Blade is going to win an Apple Design Award in June? [via Steve Troughton-Smith]

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Impressive Hack Wirelessly Mirrors iPad 2 To Display

Cables suck, and if you want to kill a presentation you need to be untethered from that fifteen foot long VGA cable tethered to that overhead projector. When a client wanted to cut the cord, some ingenuity resulted in shell housing a minimum of two components and a simple usb cable. The idea revolves around the HP Wireless TV Connect and a Cooler Master Choiix Power Fort battery pack to power the transmitter used for the iPad, connected by a simple USB cable. The HP Wireless TV Connect consists of a transmitter and a receiver: the receiver is connected to the display, while the transmitter is fed power (up to two hours) using the battery. Using a wooden block for a mold, a shell was created to house the components and sit the iPad 2 on top, with enough space to connect the cord from the dock connector to the components inside. How does it work? Asides from the bulk and the two pounds added, the wireless iPad works just as you’d expect it to. We have a video after the break if you’re curious to see how it all goes down, and if you have the time and money you too could roll your own for around $275 according to the mastermind behind it all.

[Youtube (eg0voruhk) via Reddit, MacRumors Forums]

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Follows for iPhone Tracks Your Online Stats & Popularity

An interesting mix between third-party Twitter app Birdbrain and Ego for iOS, Follows is a new app for the iPhone aimed at collecting and displaying data from your social profiles on a variety of services. Currently, the app supports stats coming from Twitter, Facebook, Feedburner, MySpace, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

While Birdbrain goes really in-depth in the way it aggregates and displays Twitter data over time and Ego is more geared towards website owners with Mint and Google Analytics integration, Follows offers a lightweight approach at gathering statistics from the supported services such as view counts, followers, visits and subscribers. From the main, dark-styled dashboard, you get a quick recap of all your online profiles with a series of tabs allowing you to get a more detailed look at numbers and graphs. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. Instead, Follows wants to be an easy way to, say, see how many people follow you on Twitter or are subscribed to your RSS feeds or, again, have liked your Vimeo videos. Plus, it’s a free app.

Once authenticated with the services (you can add multiple usernames for each one of them), everything goes into the main screen. Tapping on an item will display a different single view with additional stats (for Twitter, total amount of tweets, favorites, people you’re following) and two graphs depicting your “social growth”. The system works the same for all the services integrated into Follows. The app is fast at fetching updates and the latest version (released today) fixed an issue with the app crashing as you selected dashboard items.

Follows isn’t as full-featured as Ego (especially for bloggers) or Birdbrain when it comes to Twitter, but it gets its job done. The design is elegant and minimal, and in-app purchases allow you to remove ads and unlock “custom URL tracking”. It’s a free download in the App Store.

Doodle Jump 2.0 Adds Multiplayer

Following a series of updates that added “special edition” levels, Game Center achievements and a brand new version of the app featuring movie character Hop, Doodle Jump 2.0 was released last night with a highly requested feature: WiFi multiplayer. The new Doodle Jump doesn’t have any new levels or enemies, but it comes with Game Center integration for online multiplayer. The feature only works over WiFi with your Game Center friends; you’ll have to race to the top to see who reaches the finish line first, all in pure Doodle Jump fashion while jumping on platforms and avoiding obstacles.

Doodle Jump is one of the most popular games for the iPhone, and we’re still waiting for a proper iPad 2 counterpart to land on the App Store. In the meantime, if you’ve always wanted to compete with your friends in a Doodle Jump race, you can get the update here.

First WWDC Ticket Shows Up On eBay For A Massively Inflated Price

If you missed out on snapping up a WWDC ticket, which is very likely considering the tickets sold out in less than 10 hours, but still desperately want one you could consider swallowing your pride (and emptying your wallet) by jumping on eBay. There has been at least one developer selling his extra unactivated ticket that was supposedly meant to go to a colleague who decided he couldn’t make it out this year.

But unsurprisingly the ticket is being sold at an insanely inflated price of US$3,500 – more than double the original price of $1,599. In fact that’s nearly $2,000 more.  Whether or not the story from the seller is genuine, this ticket scalping will probably attract the attention of Apple’s legal department. But it’s unlikely to stop others from at least attempting to resell their tickets, given the incredible demand for tickets – so if you are desperate you may want to keep your eye out on eBay, Cragislist and even Twitter.

[Via TUAW]

 

Official Vimeo iPhone App Now Available

Popular video service Vimeo finally released its long-awaited iPhone app in the App Store, it’s free and, from a first quick test, it seems packed with functionalities. Vimeo fans have been asking for months (years?) to have the possibility to browse videos in a native interface and upload media directly from their devices, but Vimeo delivered more than expected and it definitely appears the wait was well worth it.

Besides letting you browse Vimeo sections, your videos, likes and tags, the Vimeo app packs a full-featured video editor that allows you to record new material and edit it with transitions, titles, audio and video trimming support. The UI is quite polished and elegant, and the app feels responsive although not just as fast as Apple’s iMovie. The fact that Vimeo, however, managed to release an uploading tool that’s also a movie editor with lots of functionalities is just great. You can combine videos together and control volume levels, add music or your own recordings from the iPod library and decide whether videos should be saved to the camera roll or uploaded to Vimeo. The Project Summary panel in the video editor gives you additional details on the video you’re editing, such as the total amount of clips you’ve inserted, duration and resolution. Even pinch to zoom is supported. Furthermore, the Vimeo app gives you control over the quality of the uploads – you can send raw footage or edited videos in SD or HD off to the service’s servers. Last, uploads can be paused and resumed. I love this feature.

The “My Stuff” tab in the bottom toolbar lets you watch your video inbox, likes and watch later queue – perfect if you usually save a lot of videos for later from the desktop browser and you want to watch them on the iPhone whenever you want. Your own videos come with the stats you know and love like daily views, likes and comment, and you can also manage those videos by sending them to a specific group, channel or album. Sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Email and SMS is supported, too.

The Vimeo iPhone app looks like a real gem, and I’ll be testing it with my iPhone videos throughout the week. It’s pretty clear however that lots of work went into this app, which brings the complete Vimeo experience to the iPhone with a sweet interface and several features previously only available on the desktop web browser. You can find Vimeo for iPhone in the App Store. More screenshots below. Read more

Camera+ 2.2 Released: Adds “Clarity” Photo Enhancement Feature

MacStories-favorite alternative image processing / photo taking app Camera+ by tap tap tap was updated a few minutes ago to version 2.2 – and this update, among a series of fixes that improve the stability and performance of the app, introduces a big new photo enhancement feature called “Clarity”.

Clarity is a big step forward from the HDR technique implemented by Apple in the default Camera application for iOS: it’s a 1-tap image enhancement that will make your photos look better in most scenarios (direct sunlight, low-light) and it doesn’t have the issues that usually come with multi-exposure HDR such alignement problems. Once you take your photos in Camera+ and jump to the lightbox (which, by the way, feels faster and more responsive in 2.2), all you need to do is edit, tap “scenes” then Clarity to improve your photo’s quality. Clarity will make more details come out, balance light and dark spots when necessary and, overall, give your photo a more “realistic” feel by re-adding the details and colors that might go missing with a standard digital shot. If you’re a Camera+ owner, just try it and you’ll see.

Version 2.2 also gives a whole new meaning the “+” in the apps’ icon as, finally, there’s a new way to activate focus and exposure controls in the camera view: the two-finger gesture is still there, but you can now tap on the “+” button to split between focus and exposure controls. It’s really handy and I like it.

Camera+ 2.2 is a great update, and the app is still available at $0.99 in the App Store. Camera+ is a powerful, yet intuitive, alternative to Camera.app, and it looks like tap tap tap are really serious about adding features that outperform Apple’s own implementation in reliability and speed. Recommended.

Some examples of Clarity compared to Apple’s HDR below. Read more

TiltPad Turns Your iPhone Into A Motion Sensitive Game Controller

TiltPad, a new app to hit the App Store today lets you turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a motion sensitive game controller for the Mac. All you’ll need to do is download the iOS app and the OS X server utility and you’re all set for some motion sensitive gaming!

The app let’s you customize and configure a fair amount of settings and the app also offers you a number of buttons to use on the touch screen as well. Lastly the app can also be used as a mouse when the iPhone is vertically orientated. Be sure to jump the break to watch the entertaining, if over dramatized, promo video for the app.

If you’re intrigued you can get the app on the iPhone App Store for US$1.99, the server client is free.

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Software Developer Group Rebuts Senators Claims Over DUI Checkpoint Apps

If you recall, last week we reported on a request from four US Senators that Apple remove apps that warn and alert users of where DUI (driving under the influence) checkpoints are. Well the Association for Competitive Technology, a group of thousands of independent software developers has responded to this request by the Senators and objected to the reasoning of the claims.

Rebutting the contention that the apps are “harmful to public safety”, the group’s president, Jonathan Zuck, said that the concerns raised are actually “in conflict with the public interest on the issue of traffic safety.” Citing the National Highway Safety Administration, he goes on to say that heightened awareness of DUI checkpoints acts as a deterrent to illegal behaviour and that “several of the apps in question have received particular commendation from the law enforcement community.”

Furthermore some of the apps in question, including PhantomALERT (which is part of the A.C.T. group) and Trapster use data from the public domain - some of which is required by law to be published, this data will continue to live on regardless of whether some smartphone apps are pulled. Meanwhile, RIM last week removed PhantomALERT from it’s app store and was applauded by the Senators who issued a statement saying “Drunk drivers will soon have one less tool to evade law enforcement and endanger our friends and families. We appreciate RIM’s immediate reply and urge the other smartphone makers to quickly follow suit.” Jump the break for the A.C.T. group’s full response to the Senator’s request.

[Via Cult of Mac]

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