Do we need another Words with Friends or Scrabble? I don’t know about you, but if I have a chance to unhinge the competition because I’m smart and fast, or if I have the opportunity to find the hidden Ali Baba, be warned that I’m going to juggle some really long words if I can. Sure, I might add those two letters to your eight as a cheap way to get some bonus points, but think about it! Corners are often havens for power-plays. Kalimat changes pace from traditional word games by offering some original gameplay in the form of Remix mode and Jeopardy-style rewards where you could land on those ever useful bonus points (which could change the tide of the game). Don’t get too comfortable: Remix mode prevents your opponent from checking answers on Google (Boo!) by rewarding players for thinking on your toes. The faster you get a word out, the more you’ll be rewarded. With OpenFeint integration it’s really easy to create an anonymous online identity so you can get paired with new players wanting to duel you for word cred (read up on those dictionaries), and you can trash talk or make friends with the built in chat tool. Available for $2.99 in the App Store, we’re giving away five copies of Kalimat to our lucky readers looking to stretch their brains over the latest word craze. Check past the break for the rules.
Kalimat, The Refreshed Word Game We’re Giving Away
Penultimate 3.0 Comes With A Paper Shop For Notebook Templates
Penultimate, the popular handwriting app for iPad that’s been sitting in top-selling App Store productivity list for months, was updated earlier today to version 3.0, a major new version that extends the app’s notebook capabilities by embedding a completely new Paper Shop that, through in-app purchases, allows you to customize the look of Penultimate’s pages to your needs.
After playing around with the Paper Shop for a bit, it seems obvious to me that this was the next step for the Cocoa Box Design developers: as they saw people using Penultimate in the most variegate ways (a blank page and an iPad opens to a world of possibilities), they decided to offer alternative page designs that can turn Penultimate into a music annotation tool (staff papers, tablatures, chord charts), a task manager, a game board (tic-tac-toe papers, hangman, dots and boxes) or a professional writing utility. All these papers are available at different prices in the Paper Shop, which is also powered by a delicious design and attention to detail.
On top of that, Penultimate 3.0 can also import your own custom image for a personalized page design. For instance, I imported some of David Seah’s productivity tools as .png files and they were correctly recognized and converted by Penultimate to native app pages, retaining the original structure of the documents. The importing process works with storyboards, language learning grid papers, design docs – you name it. As long as the image is clear and in high-res, Penultimate will turn it into a custom page file that you can sketch and draw on. Terrific.
Penultimate 3.0 is a great update to the most popular and powerful handwriting app for iPad. Get it here.
Planetary: Your iPad’s Music Library Becomes A Galaxy
In what might be the coolest music experiment that has landed on the iPad to date, company Bloom Studio released earlier today Planetary, a new way to explore your iPad’s music library. Bloom Studio promises to deliver “playful, explorable, visually compelling views on personally relevant information from services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and iTunes”, and Planetary is the realization of this mission statement: not only it’s based on the crazy concept of turning your iPad music library into a galaxy, it also works exceptionally well. Since I got my eyes on the teaser website a few days ago, I was looking forward to trying the actual product and see whether it could really bring a different way of exploring music to the tablet: now that I’m using the app, available for free, I have to say Planetary is one of those apps you have to try for yourself, rather than watching in some YouTube demo videos.
So here’s the gist: your music is a galaxy, artists are stars, albums are planets. In the 3D view of Planetary, no two planets are the same as the graphics are generated automatically off an album cover from the iPod app. Similarly, songs are moons: the more you listen to a song, the bigger the moon grows. And there’s more: each moon orbits at a speed related to the song’s length. Indeed, crazy stuff that doesn’t really make any sense until you try it. But on the other hand, it’s clear Bloom Studio set out to create an interesting experiment based on data visualization that merges files synced to your iPad, music, and space. I’m sure Buzz Aldrin would be proud.
While Planetary features some standard music controls like play / pause and back / forward, the key area of the app is support for multitouch gestures: you can pinch the galaxy to zoom on a star, pan and rotate a planet to check out all moons and orbits – overall, do all sorts of zooming and viewing to enjoy the pleasure of having your music available in the form of a galaxy. Like I said above, you just have to try it and see how it works with your music.
At the price of free, Planetary needs to be downloaded now and experienced with a rich iPod library synced to your iPad. Personal recommendation: for greater results, try to sync some Explosions In The Sky.
Review: Driver Feedback App Evaluates Your Driving Performances
Following recent news of Apple building a crowdsourced traffic service to launch in the next few years, it’ll be interesting to see whether competitors and third-party developers will start playing around with more car-oriented and traffic-based services for iOS devices. Insurance company State Farm – which I had never heard of before, but it turns out they’re pretty huge in the United States – released a new iPhone app a few days ago that’s aimed at monitoring your driving performances and giving you a score based on various factors like braking, acceleration and cornering. The concept is really simple: the worse you drive (severe acceleration or braking, for example), the lower score you get at the end of the test. How does the app keep track of all this? Again, simple: it uses a mix of Google Maps, iPhone accelerometer and GPS data to see where you’re going, and how you’re driving. I took the app for a spin tonight to see whether or not it would really work with the awful road that connects San Martino al Cimino to my town, Viterbo.
The app starts up with a screen that asks you to create a new user profile, although everything stays locally and it’s not sent to State Farm’s servers. You can create as many profiles as you want for all members of your family who drive and would like to try Driver Feedback. Once a profile is ready, the app will also ask you to place the iPhone on a flat surface in your car but not on the dashboard, so you won’t be distracted and the iPhone’s accelerometer can work properly to register brakes and stops. Tonight I decided to drive a little faster than I usually do (75 km/h on average instead of the usual 60 km/h on the aforementioned terrible road) to see if Driver Feedback could really give me a bad score once I arrived at my destination. Once you’re ready to go, all you have to do in Driver Feedback is wait for a sound effect (a countdown related to the iPhone being placed on a flat surface, luckily I have one in my VW Polo) and start driving.
It usually takes me less than 10 minutes to drive from San Martino to Viterbo. As I decided to drive relatively worse tonight (of course, without putting anyone to risk) to evaluate the app’s functionalities, I didn’t consider that it was raining, badly. So it turned out to be a pretty awful 7-minute car trip that I honestly won’t repeat ever again. And the app did notice after I was done: I got a 50/100 score with multiple severe acceleration and braking points, and lots of suggestions to improve my driving in the future. Driver Feedback can even keep a log of all your trips and it allows you to check out data points on a Google Map, too. In the Alerts tab, the app explains what you did wrong and why you should improve your driving style, whilst the main screen offers an option to share scores via email or text. The UI is minimal, and elegant.
From what I’ve seen so far, Driver Feedback is a well-realized product that might really help you fine-tune the way you drive. I’d like to see more factors being considered in the future (such as traffic, or weather conditions), but as it stands now State Farm’s Driver Feedback is a cool app for drivers, and a useful product to remind everyone that good driving can save gas, and lives. Go download the app here. Read more
Company Promises To Automate Your Home Using iPads
How great would it be to control everything in our homes using only iOS devices? I’ve always dreamed to fire up my Espresso machine remotely using an iPhone app, or being able to close all my windows from an iPad with live webcam feeds. I know, crazy futuristic stuff that current home automation techniques haven’t fully addressed yet, especially when it comes to security concerns and reliability. But ask Solstice Multimedia about it: the Denver-based company with a decade-long experience in telecommunications and residential services thinks that turning your house into a full-featured iPad-controlled system is totally possible. They even promote a 3,400-square- foot model home with two iPads built-in at $718,000. Okay.
Price of the model home itself aside, the iOS-based system relies on a dual-iPad setup that will cost you roughly $5,000. Optional audio, video and security equipment will take the cost to $60,000 – that’s a whole lot of equipment, right? I assume so. Apparently the system’s “brain” is built into the home’s “mechanical room” with WiFi connection to the 2 iPads, but a third device can be used to control everything without having to touch a screen on your wall. So, basically, the iPad is the engine, and mechanical parts take care of lights, motorized blinds, cameras, and other stuff. The Denver Post reports:
A model home in the Overlook neighborhood in Lone Tree’s Heritage Hills is equipped with two built- in iPads that can control all of the electronic systems in the home, including lights, motorized shades, music and television systems, baby monitors and closed-circuit cameras.
“The iPad has brought the entry-level price point down significantly, because an 8-inch in-wall touch screen before cost upwards of $3,000 or more,” Deatherage said. “Now we can get a $500 iPad and still provide most of the functionality that an in-wall touch panel can give.
I’m pretty sure Apple won’t release an iHome anytime soon, so if you’re willing to automate your living room using iPhones and iPads this might be your best chance yet. Go take a look on Solstice Multimedia’s website. [via Cult of Mac]
Caffeinated RSS Reader for Mac Finally Out As Beta
Back in December 2009, I was browsing Ember looking for some cool new apps to cover on MacStories. As I browsed the online gallery to find interesting projects worth a mention on the site, I stumbled upon the first screenshots of a new RSS reader for Mac, Caffeinated. The app looked elegant and super-slick, and as you may remember from my initial coverage of the private alpha version, it was also a fast way to access Google Reader from the desktop. But since then, the app disappeared from our radars and lots of things changed in RSS app landscape: Reeder for Mac was released as beta, Google Reader clients for iOS started proliferating implementing features that weren’t previously possible on the desktop. Caffeinated, however, wasn’t dead at all: it was being rebuilt from the ground up, and that was a long process looking back at my first article. As promised by the developer a few weeks ago, a first beta of Caffeinated is finally available today.
From a design perspective, not much has changed since my initial coverage. The app still looks as slick as ever with minimal sidebars and iOS-like scrolling and cells, but it’s the underlying engine that went under a massive re-construction. The app is way faster than I remembered, perhaps not as fast as the current Reeder for Mac beta but definitely snappy and promising. The app takes less than a second to start up with a neat opening animation, subscriptions can be manually refreshed with a keyboard shortcut but there’s no way to set automatic reload times yet. In fact, this first beta of Caffeinated is so limited there’s no access to the Preferences yet, and sharing options haven’t been implemented. As the developer writes:
Caffeinated was built for speed and customisability. The app is theme-able, the API exists but I have yet to write documentation or build in appropriate preferences, if you are interested in themeing with this beta, just give me a shout and I can walk you through it – its really not that difficult.
This is mainly a usable taster of what is to come…so be patient ( I know you have already! ) but it will be worth the wait in the end.
Overall, this first beta of Caffeinated – quite possibly one of the most anticipated Mac apps of 2010, before some users lost hope and began to think the project went the way of the dodo – is pretty buggy and clearly unfinished, but it’s a sign of interesting things to come in the (hopefully) near future. If you want to take Caffeinated for a spin, go download beta 1 here.
Kickstarter: Hive - An iPhone Amplifier + Screen Magnifier
Mark this Kickstarter project as another original concept. The Hive, by Jake Waitzman of Screendoor Studio, requires no electronics or power, and amplifies the iPhone 4’s onboard speaker in both landscape and portrait orientation. It does this by channeling the sound into a concave chamber that projects upward and outward toward the listener’s ears (much like Griffin’s AirCurve). What makes it a lot different than the AirCurve and other docks is the fresnel lens. It stands parallel to the iPhone’s screen at a set distance of 4 inches, providing crystal clear 2X magnification.
Promo videos can be seen after the break. Read more
#MacStoriesDeals - Monday
Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!
Things Cloud Sync Beta Goes Live
Years in the making, Cultured Code finally flipped the switch on the initial beta of Cloud Sync for Things, the popular GTD application for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Things, featured several times by Apple in the past and winner of a Design Award in 2009, was long criticized for the lack of over-the-air sync for tasks and projects across desktop and mobile devices, something that was implemented by other GTD-oriented applications like OmniFocus and Wunderlist with decent results in the past few years. Cultured Code, however, decided to wait before making a public announcement about their OTA sync plans; then, back in December, they revealed that, yes, they were working on a sync service for Things (which counts thousands of users worldwide), but it would take longer than expected due to the extremely unique nature of the product. And today, Cultured Code is letting registered beta users try the first version of Things Cloud Sync, although with some limitations.
We’re not able to test the actual implementation of sync right now, but details can be gathered from the developers’ blog and official sync page. This first version of cloud sync for Things will only work Mac-to-Mac, as the iOS clients haven’t been updated to test the functionality yet. The initial rollout of cloud sync is meant to test the reliability and scalability of the service, which, unlike most OTA sync tools out there, doesn’t want you to manually trigger a sync session but it’s aimed at constantly transmitting changes to the cloud – think of a continuous client for GTD. As Cultured Code explains, this is all based on a database system that makes sure current beta users can run the limited Things 1.5 version without corrupting their existing personal Things database. As explained in “State of Sync, Part III”:
Things will sync frequently. While there will be a way to initiate sync manually there should hardly be any reason for doing so. Every change you make is transmitted to the cloud almost instantly. No matter when you quit the app, your data is safe with the server already. Whenever you open Things, switch applications, or wake your computer from sleep, Things will check back with the server to see if there are any updates to pull.
Things will always connect to the server using an encrypted connection. Not only during log-in, as many web sites do, but for every connection. This means that your to-dos will never be sent in the clear.
The current beta of Things 1.5 can be downloaded here, but Cloud Sync is exclusive to users who signed up to Cultured Code’s list months ago and are receiving an activation email today. To stay up to date with Things sync development, follow Cultured Code’s blog here.