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Real Racing 2: Coming On December 16th At $9.99, We Can’t Wait

A few minutes ago Firemint announced the full details behind Real Racing 2, the sequel to the popular racing game that came out on the iPhone and iPad earlier this year. The game is coming next Thursday, on December 16th, and it will be available for $9.99 in the App Store.

Real Racing 2 will feature 30 officially licensed cars with a new career mode that will grant you over 10 hours of gameplay, a 16 player online gaming (no other iOS game did this before, I think), 5 game modes and 15 different locations. There will be Game Center integration and you will be able to see vehicle damage in real time (finally), 5 different camera angles and several control modes.

Real Racing 2 basically looks like a huge sequel, and a must-have for iOS users. The online multiplayer sounds fantastic, and the screenshots posted by Firemint are simply delicious.

Check out a trailer below. Read more

Apple Engineer Re-Builds 2,000 Year Old Computer With Lego

If you’re looking for the perfect way to begin your geek weekend, look no further than the video below. If the screenshot we posted above doesn’t tell you much about what you’re going to see, here’s the gist: an Apple engineer, Andrew Carol, has recreated a 2,000 year old Greek mechanism – widely regarded as the world’s first “computer” – using his 1,500 Lego Technic blocks.

The computer goes by the name of Antikythera Mechanism, and it’s an ancient computer made of mechanical parts Greeks used to calculate “with unprecedented accuracy” astronomical positions and celestial events. Now the Antikythera Mechanism is working again, only in Lego pieces.

If you want the full details on how the mechanism works arithmetically, or you simply want to geek out over the Lego heaven Carol has built, the video is embedded right after the break.

Amazing. [via Engadget] Read more

Google Docs Desktop Editing Comes To The iPad

Great news for Google Docs users and iPad owners this evening: Google has announced that they have extended compatibility of the Docs desktop editor to include support for iPad. If you’re running an iPad, you can now switch from the mobile version to the desktop one with just a tap.

The desktop editor is the Google Docs you know and love, allowing you to modify fonts and alignments, paragraphs and font styles. It’s the usual Google Docs, running on a tablet.

As simple as it sounds, Google just made a great move towards ensuring millions of iPad users out there a desktop-class Docs experience without the need of a dedicated mobile client. Google announced a Docs Viewer in June, and released a mobile version for iOS and Android users with editing enabled a few weeks ago.

Once again, Mobile Safari wins.

Helping Developers, For Free→

Helping Developers, For Free

Robert Scoble on how he helped the Flipboard developers in the early stages of the app:

Why do I do it for free? Because I love this stuff and want the best possible apps to use myself. Flipboard without Twitter list support would have been totally worthless for me. It isn’t obvious that Twitter list support is important. After all, how many people use Twitter lists. But for Flipboard it was a must have.

I’m passionate about seeing things early and work hard at adding value back to entrepreneurs for that honor.

See, it’s not about the “cool factor” of having access to stuff other people don’t know about. Maybe it’s that, too. I don’t want to call this a “mission” but, really – for some it’s just about helping people build better, innovative products.

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No In-App Purchases and Game Center In The Mac App Store

Looks like the Mac App Store is going to be quite different from the iOS model we’ve gotten used to in these past two years. Yesterday we broke the news that developers won’t be able to generate promo codes for Mac apps sold though the new Store (even if they’ve gone international for all users), today 9to5mac reports that in-app purchases and Game Center won’t find their way to Jobs’ latest reinvention of the Mac software environment, either.

Mark Gurman notes:

Apple has informed App Store developers that two major iOS app store features will not make their way ‘back to the mac.’

Note: In app purchases are not available for Mac OS X apps.

Note: Game Center is not available for Mac OS X apps.

As we wrote yesterday, Apple is clearly aiming at a simple purchase experience similar to the iOS App Store, but with less features than the mobile counterpart. Perhaps they don’t want Mac users to feel overwhelmed with new functionalities such as in-app purchases? Maybe they didn’t have time to implement them by the 2011 opening?

Still, we think Game Center on the desktop would be great. And terrible for our productivity.

Favorites: My Phone App Replacement

Every time I post screenshots of my iPhone homescreen here on MacStories, I get comments and emails asking me about “that blue icon” next to Captio in my dock. Since I wasn’t able to reply to all those comments and emails and I love to talk about apps that change my workflow, I want to clear the air on this app and write about it.

The app is called “Favorites”, it’s been around for a while in the App Store and it’s developed by Matt Legend Gemmell over at Instinctive Code. It’s a very straightforward app that lets you create shortcuts for your favorite contacts and tap on them to initiate a phone call. Think of it as a homescreen for your contacts. Read more

iFiles: Now With S3 Support, AirPrint and Text Editing In The Cloud

iFiles is one of my all-time favorite iOS apps for iPhone and iPad. I use it on a daily basis to get files in the devices and out of them, thanks to the app’s powerful sharing capabilities that allow it to get recognized on your local network as a web server. Plus, as I wrote in my review, iFiles was meant for a cloud-based workflow, for all those users who daily play around with items stored on Google Docs, Flickr, Rackspace, and so forth.

The latest 1.8 update, which showed up in iTunes a few minutes ago and I’ve installed on my iPhone, doesn’t come with a huge set of new features – but the ones that are there make this app a must-have, again. Read more

MoneyTron: Innovative Financial App for iPhone

I remember I installed MoneyTron on my iPhone back in August. Back then I thought it was cool, I gave it a brief spin and decided I would review it on MacStories in a few weeks. Weeks passed, we launched a new MacStories, iOS 4’s folders started getting crowded and I forgot about MoneyTron.

Now I think it’s time to talk about MoneyTron, which is a sexy little gem of a financial app. As you may remember, I’m not exactly into this kind of apps: mostly because I’m looking for something simple yet capable of adapting to my complex setup. It’s not easy to find an app that can do that. Most iPhone apps are geared towards simplicity but they don’t take into account (no pun intended) that when it’s about managing finances, simplicity is overrated. Sometimes you need the powerful tools to  get ahold of your transactions and keep everything clear.

MoneyTron offers a variety of innovative features I haven’t seen in any other financial apps for iPhone. Read more

10 Surefire Ways To Screw Up Your iPhone App→

10 Surefire Ways To Screw Up Your iPhone App

So you want to build the next smash hit iPhone app? Extraordinary design is key to getting the attention of users and of Apple, so if an app exudes a stench of mediocrity, Apple won’t feature it and app shoppers probably won’t download it (even if they do, they won’t share it with others).

See the screenshot above? Guess which developer screwed up.

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