Steve Jobs is a Ninja!

UPDATE: Ninja Steve was approved and is live in the App Store for $.99 -> LINK

The gameplay is very simple, Ninja Steve is all about fast reflexes and accuracy. The ‘Smartbots’ fly around until they get close enough to zap you. Touch an enemy to fire a shuriken. After a while you will build up a RDF, which is like an electromagnetic shock, shake your iDevice to activate it. There are three different stages and four different ‘Smartbots’. There are 15 main levels, plus 2 extra levels.

It’s a really simple game with a few Apple-like references but it gets a little stale and repetitive after a while but for $.99, Apple fanboys can kick ‘Smartbot’ ass ninja-style!

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Remember when Steve Jobs couldn’t take his ninja stars aboard his private plane back in September? Maybe he should have used a smoke bomb to get them aboard.

Anyway, Woltz Media is developing an iOS game called Ninja Steve. It’s about a CEO named ‘Steve’ (no official affiliation with Jobs or Apple) that is also a trained ninja assassin.

Read more

Slow Down: An App That Will Make You Slow Down Your Car, With Music

This is an app I’m completely supporting, as it’s been developed and promoted by the Belgian organization OVK, Parents of Children Killed in Road Accidents. Slow Down, available for free in the App Store, will make you slow down your car by slowing down the music you’re listening to while driving.

Thanks to a combination of GPS to retrieve a road’s driving speed limit and access to the iPod library on your iPhone, Slow Down will remind you when you need to slow by slowing down a song or completely stop its playback. Simple and genius at the same time, as as I said – a concept I’m seriously rooting for.

Go download the app here. Then use it.[Engadget via OVK] Read more

Fring Update: Full-Screen Video Calling, “Dynamic Video Quality”

Fring, a popular VoIP service that allows you make regular phone calls, video calls and chat, released an update to their official iPhone client today which brings a number of new features and fixes.

First off, fring is introducing a new video calling technology called DVQ (Dynamic Video Quality) that automatically adjusts the quality of a video calling session according to your bandwidth in order to provide an always-good experience. I’m testing it on 3G and, admittedly, it works pretty well. There’s also a new video quality indicator that enables you to check on the quality of the connection in real-time. Neat. Read more

How To: Install and Run iMovie On The iPad [Tutorial]

The current version of iMovie available in the App Store can’t run on the iPad. Apple specifically built it for the iPhone, and there’s no way to install it on the tablet. iTunes returns an error when trying to do so. As you can guess though, it would be great to be able to edit and manage videos on the iPad: thanks to its larger screen, multi-touch video editing would turn out to be much more comfortable.

Luckily for us, the folks over at iPadevice (Italian) have found a way to install and run iMovie on the iPad, but a jailbroken device is required. If you happen to have a jailbroken iPad running iOS 4.2 and you’ve always wanted to run iMovie on it, check out the tutorial below. Read more

Official Google Books iOS App Goes Live

Google launched its official eBook store earlier today, and promised an official iOS app for iPhone and iPad would follow in a few hours. The app is now available for free in iTunes here.

Google Books allows you to check on Google’s 2 million book catalogue and download ebooks to read them on your iPhone and iPad. The app comes with the same page turning animations of Apple’s iBooks, but the overall interface is quite different and similar to Google’s standard color schemes. Google Books features an offline reading mode to read books when you don’t have an active internet connection (useful on WiFi iPads when on the go), possibility to search within a book and adjust a font’s size, a night reading mode.

Surprisingly enough, the app doesn’t seem to support landscape mode on the iPad. I found the scrubber at the bottom to be particularly useful to jump between chapters of a book. Last, the app lets you download 3 books for free: “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankeinstein, or, The Modern Prometeus” and “Wonderful Stories for Children”.

Check out the full changelog and more screenshots below.

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Turn Your iPhone’s Spotlight Into A Quick App Launcher | Cydia Store

ListLauncher is a new $0.99 tweak available in the Cydia Store which turns the standard iPhone Spotlight into an easy way to launch apps on your device. By default, when you move to the left side of your homescreen you’ll see a blank Spotlight page with just a search box. Once you install ListLauncher from Cydia, the Spotlight start page will become a list of all apps installed on your iPhone, but you’ll still be able to start typing to search for something.

ListLauncher simply takes over the standard Spotlight page to display a list with all your apps. Pretty useful for all those who have way too many stuff on their iPhones and would like to have a quick and easy way to retrieve apps at any time. I wish a next update will bring the possibility to jump to specific letters much like in the Contacts app.

Watch a demo video below. Read more

Steve Jobs, Romantic→

Steve Jobs, Romantic

Remember the original Apple-1 that was up for auction at Christie’s in London? An Italian businessman bought it for more than $200,000, and together with the actual computer he also got an old letter from Steve Jobs and a paper with the first Apple Logo.

The Economist snapped some pictures of both the papers.

In fact, the first Apple logo is the work of Ronald Wayne, who some refer to as Apple’s third co-founder (besides Mr Jobs and Steve Wozniak). It depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple about to fall on his head. The inscription on the logo’s border is a quote from William Wordsworth, a romantic English poet: “Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone.”  Could it be that Mr Jobs himself is a hidden romantic?

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