Unreal Engine 3 To Power Four Gameloft Games In 2011 And 2012

Gameloft has today announced that they have partnered with Epic Games to bring four games to mobile devices using Unreal Engine 3. The game engine will power two games this year and two aimed for release in 2012.

Unreal Engine 3, which was released late last year, was the game engine that powered the tech demo of Epic Citadel as well as Epic Games very succesful Infinity Blade.  The Unreal Development Kit is free for developers to download and try, but if used they must pay a $99 licensing fee and a 25% royalty fee after the first $50,000 in sales.

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Start the Clock! Speed-Up & Chronos Are In This Timely Giveaway

Podcasts and getting things done tend to go hand-in-hand at the office. For those who want to blaze through a podcast session, your iPhone offers the ability to speed up your talking heros for a quicker injection of information. Speed-up brings that same control to your Mac via the menubar, and it was reviewed a while ago as a podcast throttle for your Mac.

Chronos is also an app we recently reviewed, and continues our time theme by keeping track of various tasks and projects on your Mac. It’s very simple to use, and can accommodate a Mac user as a progress indicator from the dock or menubar.

We’re giving away four copies of each, and we recommend that you check out Speed-up and Chronos in the Mac App Store before clicking past to the giveaway after the break.

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QuickShot: A Custom Camera App That Automatically Uploads to Dropbox

A few days ago I reviewed DropPhox, an iPhone app that can upload photos and videos to Dropbox, also allowing you to set a specific size for uploads so you don’t have to worry about large files being transferred over 3G. DropPhox has some great features and, overall, works pretty well but in my review I mentioned the app could use some additional UI love and the possibility to upload media without tapping on a confirmation button.

QuickShot, a similar app I stumbled upon over the weekend, lets you upload photos to Dropbox but it does this with a polished interface and by completely working in the background. The developers achieved these results using a custom camera view that lists uploads right below the statusbar, without requiring you to confirm photos going off to Dropbox. You can, however, change this option in the settings. QuickShot also enables you to choose a Dropbox path, save pictures to the Camera Roll and set photo quality to low, medium and high. Medium works best for me.

Perhaps the best thing about QuickShot is its minimal and elegant UI that puts three buttons in the standard camera view, with one of them allowing you to pick photos from the iOS camera roll and send them to Dropbox. The app I reviewed, DropPhox, doesn’t have such a feature, or delicious interface.

QuickShot doesn’t do videos, but it’s a great solution for photos. Get it here at $0.99.

Twitterrific 4 Update Hides Dock Icon, Opens Links in Background

Twitterrific 4 Update

Twitterrific 4 Update

All hands on the Mac App Store! Get your update button ready for Twitterrific 4.0.1, a substantial update to the already awesome Twitter client that’s bringing loads of cool new features. Now supporting key commands for page-up & page-down, you’ll also find a “Full Metal Ollie” who’s ready to take on some of the client’s advanced features. Per your requests, you can now hide Twitterrific in the dock, open links in the background by default, and get notified of important mentions and messages through Growl.

If you don’t yet have Twitterrific, a free version is available at Twitterrific.com with ads, while a full version can be had for $9.99 on the site or on the Mac App Store.

March 2nd Liveblog: The iPad’s Second Coming

There couldn’t be a more hyped announcement than this week’s Apple Keynote at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 2nd, and we’ll be hanging out with all of you guys at a safe distance for when the fireworks misfire. Rumors will be settled, white iPads will be tossed into (non)-existence, and awkward picture moments with new cameras will be had. Plus, you can expect those heart tingling show-stoppers with a Jony Ives speech, and maybe (just maybe) a new look at the next generation of iOS. Excited yet?

Join us at 12:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (that’s the New York gamut) for an hour long pre-show where we’ll kick around iPad predictions, overdose on coffee, and potentially ruin a perfectly good stress ball before the event. As always we’ll be consolidating all of the major announcements into a streamlined feed from everyone’s favorite websites.

Bookmark this page and come back before the event starts on March 2nd for lots of fun, question answering from the audience, and maybe a guest or two.

Time Zones:

13:00 – New York, New York
10:00 – San Francisco, California
08:00 – Honolulu, Hawaii
05:00 – Sydney, Australia
03:00 – Tokyo, Japan
02:00 – Shanghai, China
23:30 – New Delhi, India
21:00 – Moscow, Russia
19:00 – Rome, Italy
18:00 – London, England

Don’t see your city? You can use this link to get your exact time. Read more

OS X Lion and the Mac App Store Distribution Dilemma

Last week, Apple released the first developer preview of Mac OS X Lion. New and improved OS aside, something set apart Lion from the previous beta releases Apple seeded in the past years: Lion needs to be downloaded through the Mac App Store. That’s right: a 3.6 GB download, available for developers in the App Store infrastructure. How did this happen? Well, the how is easily explainable: developers can log in the Dev Center, request a Lion build and a unique promo code is generated. With the promo code, developers can fire up the Mac App Store and start the OS X Lion installer download. The promo code, as an additional security measure to prevent people from sharing it, can only be used once, on a single machine.

While the method is really clever and brings a bit of fresh air to the developer community (no need to have a download in your browser, you can just leave the Mac App Store do its job), this has raised some questions on the future of Apple’s OS downloads for consumers. Namely, some people are speculating the Lion developer preview is clearly pointing to a summer 2011 featuring Mac OS X 10.7 Lion available only in digital format. Apple is killing the CD, and physical Mac OS purchases. Read more

The Pocket Stand - A Kickstarter Project

We’ll admit, we love unique ideas, especially ones that are driven toward Apple products. We’ve found another Kickstarter project to show you on MacStories, it’s called The Pocket Stand.

The Pocket Stand, by Mike Paek and Sam Chan,  is an iPad accessory, you could also call it a compact multi-tool for the minimalist. It is both a speaker amplifier and a stand that props your iPad in multiple configurations (Bonus: It also functions as a bottle opener). In the end, The Pocket Stand allows you to gain extra functionality without sacrificing the mobility inherent of the iPad. Read more

Surprise: Leaked iPhone 5 Dock Connector Looks Just Like iPhone 4 Dock Connector

Usually-reliable Taiwanese website Apple.pro [Google Translation] posted a photo of what they claim to be a leaked part of the next-generation iPhone, most specifically the 30-pin dock connector Apple has always used to let iOS devices and computers communicate and share data with each other. The most surprising part – the dock connector doesn’t show any big difference from the one Apple is currently using in the iPhone 4. Perhaps the new one is slightly narrower in the section where it connects to the device’s logic board. Apple.pro notes part number is 821-1300-02, while iPhone 4 has 821-1093-A.

On a related note, it’s interesting to notice Apple hasn’t made any changes to its dock connector after the European commission approved a new standard a few months ago that would require smartphone makers to adopt micro-USB as a universal connector for their devices. But, then again, Apple could just get away by bundling a micro-USB adapter in the iPhone 5’s retail package – something that, admittedly, would be pretty cool in our opinion.

Last, Apple.pro says the “leaked” iPhone 5 screen we saw last week is fake. Several readers pointed out that image could be easily Photoshopped, indeed. [via MacRumors]