Doodle Jump Closes Hollywood Deal, Movie Tie-In Version Now Available

Back in January we reported Lima Sky, the developers of popular iPhone game Doodle Jump, closed a deal with Hollywood studio Universal to develop a special version of Doodle Jump featuring the main character from the upcoming animation movie Hop, from the creators of Despicable Me.

The movie tie-in is now available in the App Store, and it’s a free universal app for iPhone and iPad. In 25 levels featuring the usual disappearing and breakable platforms, you’ll have to control E.B., the Easter Bunny’s son, in his quest to become the best jumper before taking over “family’s business” and becoming the Easter Bunny himself. Sounds like a terrible plot but at least the app is free and the cute little monsters from the classic Doodle Jump seem to be there, too.

If you like the idea of Doodle Jump mixed with a Hollywood movie about a bunny (perhaps your kids will), the app can be downloaded here.

The Daily Launching in the UK by June 2011

Are you iPad owners still using the over-hyped and very criticized iPad newspaper, The Daily? Well, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is going to launch The Daily in the UK by June 2011. You can read MacStories’ thoughts on The Daily here.

Jonathan Miller, the chief digital officer at News Corporation, said “Western Europe is up first in not too long from now,” saying that a launch will be in the first half of 2011.

The European version of The Daily is dependant on the geographical roll-out of Apple’s subscription model, which is only US based right now.

Mr. Miller said that charging for The Daily in the US will begin next week. “We will charge for it but we haven’t started yet. We have our beginning moment of truth next week when we start to ask people to get out their wallets,” he said.

The Daily, which will be begin charging next week in the US, is aimed at a younger, mobile audience. He added that there are hundreds of thousands of people reading The Daily, I think that number will drop significantly once the trial period ends this week.

It does skew younger. If you follow what’s happening with news consumption around the world, it’s aging. And younger people as a generalisation are not consuming news at least in the ways they used to. So we want to make a product that has broad appeal and that means it has liveliness to it, its very graphic and is very pictoral - a lot of video on it, all media in the same place. It is skewing much younger than newspapers.

For anyone that doesn’t already know, The Daily brings users more than 100 pages of daily content, including news, opinion and sports. It also has video, 360 degree photography, 3D technology, interactive charts and read-later functionality all built into the app. If you’re interested in checking it out or subscribing, here’s a direct link.

[via The Telegraph]

Google Adds A Bar to Gmail iOS Webapp

Fear not, Google didn’t add a #dickbar to Gmail for iPhone. What the Gmail did is actually pretty smart: to better communicate the status of their inboxes to iPhone users, Google recently tweaked the Gmail webapp for iOS devices to include a “connection bar” that displays information for outgoing and sent mail, internet connection, and so forth. It doesn’t appear all the time, it only shows up when a certain activity is triggered – like an email you’re sending from your phone.

It also appears when your phone is offline, back online and sending, and then again when it finishes sending all messages.

You can see the connection bar in action by visiting mail.google.com from your iPhone or iPod touch now, running iOS 4 or later. If you don’t see it, try clearing Safari’s cache in the Settings app. Too bad Retina Display support in the Gmail webapp is still nowhere to be seen.

Pano for iPhone Adds Tap-to-Focus

Pano, the popular application to take panoramic shots with your iPhone, has been updated to include support for tap-to-focus and exposure points. Even though the developers of Pano are promising a huge update is coming soon (perhaps with iPad 2 support and a revamped user interface?), this new version is worth mentioning as it adds a functionality requested by several Pano users in the past. As you take your pano shots, you can tap on screen to set the squares for exposure and focus. It works like in Camera+ or the default Camera app, and it’s a great addition to Pano.

Many users still prefer Pano to most recent alternatives like Occipital’s 360 to take panoramic photographs with their iPhones. While Occipital’s app lets you create your pano shot by just waving the iPhone around, Pano works by snapping a series of pictures and then blending them together in the processing section.

Pano is available at $1.99 in the App Store.

HazeOver Lets You Concentrate By Fading Inactive Apps

Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on a Mac and get things done. With all those open windows – the Twitter client, the browser, music from iTunes, Google Reader – it’s easy to get lost in the information stream and distractions and lose focus on what you were doing. HazeOver, a free Mac app by Maxim Ananov, wants to provide a solution to this problem by offering a simple way to eliminate the visual clutter: fading the background application windows you’re not looking at.

The idea is very simple: the app in the foreground stays untouched, the inactive windows are slightly dimmed to create an effect that will let you concentrate on a single app. So say I have to get an article done in the browser but tweets keep coming in the background through the Twitter app, chances are I won’t look at it like I always do because HazeOver generates this “dimmed background” that will help me stay focused on Chrome.

I don’t know how well the system will work for you, but the app certainly behaves as advertised. Once installed and opened, it will automatically fade inactive windows as an app comes in the foreground. But what if you’re that kind of user who keeps multiple apps running side-by-side for multitasking? You might be out of luck due to HazeOver’s lack of customization settings.

Still, the app is a free download and you can try it out here. Check out the demo video below. Read more

Labelbox Prettifies Your Photos, For Free

Labelbox, a free iPhone app by Stepcase, has been quickly climbing up the App Store charts lately thanks to a neat functionality that enables you to apply colored tapes to your photos to make them prettier, and share them online with your friends.

Labelbox is free, but doesn’t have any sort of ads and comes with a polished interface to edit your photos. Once you’ve loaded a photo from the camera roll, or shot a new one directly within the app, you’ll be able to swipe on it to apply a “tape” that can also contains a written description with a custom font. So, say you want to add some style to your photos or a few words to better describe the subject, Labelbox has got you covered. You can choose from a variety of colored tapes (some are really cute), and even mix them to create a “frame” to place around your photo. To remove a tape you simply have to tap & hold, but you can shake your iPhone to clear the whole screen.

You can share your photo creations to Twitter, Facebook and tumblr through the Step.ly network. The best results are achieved when you combine the filters offered by an app like Instagram with the colored tapes of Labelbox.

The app is a free download in the App Store.

Spout Brings Kinetic Typography to Twitter, Facebook and RSS

Spout, a new app for the iPhone and iPad by collect3, aims at bringing the beauty of kinetic typography (animations made exclusively of words with different font faces, colors, and sizes) to your favorite social networks and news sources. Spout, available at $0.99 in the App Store, works exceptionally well to visualize news and status updates as typographic animations running smoothly and incredibly fast on screen. Seriously, this thing displays tweets and messages like in those typography videos you might have seen before on the Internet. It’s just so cool.

But is it useful, too? Not so much. The effect is really neat, but Spout isn’t anything more than a beautiful visualizer with few interactivity options. Sure, you can login with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts to stay on top of tweets, status updates and RSS entries, but there isn’t much you can do to play with the information displayed by the app. You can load a specific Twitter user or search, enter multiple accounts and choose to display real names or usernames for tweets – but as far as “productivity” goes the only thing you can do is load a tweet in a popup and then forward it to Safari. I can see, though, how the developers built Spout to be an interesting typographic experiment, rather than another client Twitter might not even like. Spout will look great on your desk and it makes for a great demo to your friends, but don’t expect to use this as a replacement for Twitterrific or the official Twitter iOS app.

That said, Spout has beautiful animations and works just as advertised. For $0.99, you should give it a try.

White CDMA iPhone Spotted in iTunes, Bigger Icon Found in OS X Lion

In spite of Phil Schiller’s semi-official confirmation that the white iPhone is real and coming this Spring (and it’s a beauty), people keep finding references to the mythical white unit that was announced last year and never shipped.

Interestingly enough, a MacRumors reader found an icon in the iTunes 10.2 resources that suggests a CDMA version of the white iPhone 4 will be released as well, as iTunes contains two different graphic files for the GSM model and CDMA. Speculation in the past months simply pointed to the white iPhone as a GSM unit, but since the release of the Verizon iPhone many wondered whether the white iPhone could be also released in CDMA flavor. An icon found in iTunes is no proof of Apple’s plans for the white iPhone, and could be the result of a designer thinking ahead and preparing graphic files “just in case”.

One MacRumors reader did some poking around in iTunes 10.2 resource files and discovered an icon for the white CDMA iPhone 4 that would be displayed in the Summary window within iTunes when the device is connected. The image is distinct from the original white iPhone 4 icon and clearly shows the antenna break on the top right side of the CDMA version that is not present in the GSM version.

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