Square Enix Releases Chaos Rings for iPad

I’ve been waiting for Chaos Rings to come to the iPad ever since I saw the first iPhone version and read some enthusiastic reviews here and there on the internet. Finally, last night Apple approved the “HD” version of Chaos Rings which comes to the tablet with a bigger resolution, a higher price and…that’s it. No new features, no additional stuff - it’s just a bigger version. But still, it’s Chaos Rings.

As for the game itself:

“The story revolves around a tournament where combatants fight for their lives: the Ark Arena. Upon choosing a pair of characters, one male and one female, you will then have to fight against the other pairs. Each pair has their own story, and the truth behind the Ark Arena will not be revealed until each story is completed.”

Chaos Rings is available at $15.99 in the App Store. Check out a gameplay video below.

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An iPad, A Keg And A Custom Beer App [Video]

If you’re not into Yelp, this video will make you change your mind. The engineers over at Yelp have built a custom iPad-controlled “kegbot” which displays information about the beer, its temperature, how much beer is flowing (in real time) - it even has a history and leaderboard of people who took beer from that keg. Oh yes, because you have to swipe your ID card first and the iPad app will recognize you.

Check out the video below. I want one. [Gizmodo via Yelp]

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SyncMate for Mac

I had held off on reviewing SyncMate for some time now. Though when I finally bit the bullet, I found its unassuming looks mask an application with potential. Not only does SyncMate make syncing my Android phone to my Mac completely pretty easy, I’m able to share files with Macs and Windows PCs on my local network, dump files onto flash drives from specific folders, and keep my flash drive loaded with the latest college documents just in case.

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Safari, Other Browser Extensions Could be Dangerous

The idea here isn’t that you could install a nefarious extension; proposed is a malicious thought that a developer could gain the trust of a large user base, before updating the extension with bad code. Because Safari automatically updates, imagine the potential for wrong doing: nobody is watching.

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Fotopedia Heritage Delivers The Photographer’s Encyclopedia For Humanity

If you’ve never heard of Fotopedia, they’ve launched with the mission statement of building an encyclopedia for humanity where content is expressed through delicious photographs from all around the world. If you’ve ever browsed through photos via the iPad’s Guardian Eyewitness app or USA Today’s Day in Pictures, think of Fotopedia Heritage having a similar purpose, but with the intent of providing detailed, wiki/encyclopedia-like information along with a wealth of geo and historical data. It’s really remarkable.

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OmniFocus for iPad Reinvented My GTD Workflow

To me, GTD apps used to be worse than Twitter clients on the iPhone before Tweetie: ephemeral.

Yes, even worse than financial apps: I didn’t know how to choose one and keep rolling with it. You know - that new kid on the block could be better and has a beautiful UI. You know the drill. I was a GTD user who couldn’t manage to find an actual GTD to get going with. To better understand the situation, it’s important to specify the workflow I used to have, and the one I have now. Before the iPad came out, I organized all my tasks and projects on my Mac (whether in a desktop app or online service) and didn’t really care about achieving a cloud-based workflow. I had an iPhone (a 3GS, to be exact) but I just didn’t see it as a device to carry my GTD database around. I tried Things, iCal to-dos, Basecamp, Backpack - all sorts of productivity apps / project management tools out there. None of them survived.

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