iPhone Game Review: Babel Rising

It seems like iPhone game maker BulkyPix has released somewhere between two and three hundred titles in just the last few months (actually it’s more like six, but man can they send out some emails!). Only one of which though puts you in the sandals of a wrathful deity trying to stop peasants from building a tower to your Heavenly home.

The game is called Babel Rising, and tasks the player with stopping the completion of a tower by doing things like zapping the workers with lightning, washing them away with a tsunami, sending a rain of fireballs upon them, or a few other natural disasters. Think of it as a “tower offense” game. The ultimate goal is to delay the completion of the tower of Babel as long as possible, and gain points by killing the workers; complete with score multipliers gained by killing a bunch of them at once. The game also sports achievements, and Open Feint connectivity so you can see your friends’ scores.

All-in-all, it’s a good $.99 game. There isn’t much depth to it, seeing how there is only one level and all the powers are available to you from the very beginning. I would have really loved to see something to add to the replayability, such as early levels that start off easy with only a few powers, and becomes more challenging with greater unlockable powers. Handing the player everything right off that bat takes much of the incentive out of returning to it over and over again, and makes it feel more like a “Lite” version of a larger game.

It is fun while it lasts, though, it’s priced fairly, and even passes the girlfriend test. BulkyPix has nice line of solid games, such as the hit Hysteria Project, and this is another fun one to check out.

Now Shipping: 27″ Quad-Core iMacs

Lots of rumors have been floating around about when the top-end, 27″ quad-core iMacs would be shipping. The Apple online store has said “November” since they’ve gone on sale (Oct 20th for anyone keeping track) and forums have been feeding frenzies of Apple fanboys and photoshop pranksters. I personally think a lot of this is pure rubbish – how is it that Apple can get away with not informing their customers when our products will become available? We as consumers should be able to dictate when we are given a product, and should expect to be informed on the $2k investment being made.

Well, take it from me, they are in fact shipping. How do I know? Because mine is on its way, and will be here on Monday at the latest. For all my stalkers who think they can show up on my house and steal it from the FedEx man, back off, because I know karate. Or at least one of our writers does.

69 Free Mac Apps

Mac|Life has posted a list of 69 free Snow Leopard compatible apps for Macs. Here are 10 of my favorites, in alphabetical order:

1. Audacity: Edit and master just about any audio file. Need to make a snippet of audio quickly? This works just fine. The GUI looks like crap but it works really well.

2. Boxee: Control all the media on your mac easily with this clean interface. I use this on our TV-connected Mac Mini, and I can browse my media as well as Hulu and YouTube with my TV remote.

3. Cyberduck: A simple FTP app. I have been using this for years to upload files (and more recently, our podcasts) to the internets.

4. Dropbox: Lets you share files/folders with other users and other computers of your own over the internet with a Finder-integrated interface. The fastest and easiest way to share files with friends, once everyone has it set up.

5. Flip4Mac: Play WMV files with Quicktime.

6. Growl: Lets your apps push little notification boxes into the corner of your screen when something happens (a download completes, a new song plays on iTunes, etc).

7. Neo Office: An open-source MS Office app, runs a bit slow, but hey, it’s phuree.

8. NetNewsWire: The best RSS reader out there, syncs with Google Reader and its free (but buggy) iPhone app.

9. Quicksilver: This “Finder extender” lets you open, close and mess around with stuff without having to click anything. Once you get it down, it can really speed up your computer experience.

10. SeaShore: A simple image-editing tool. I use this to create all of our pretty post images.

My Gripes: iPhoto Folder Organization

iPhoto has a feature they call “Events”, which is basically like little photo albums. As you can see above, you can create themed events and throw your pictures into them for easy browsing.

And though this is all fine and dandy on the front-end side, your actual photo folders on your hard drive remain untouched. Which means that before importing my photos into iPhoto, I have to physically organize them into folders (which I do by year, then by general events/themes, like “2009/House”, etc), lest I just have a “Photos” folder that has a gazillion unorganized photos in it. This is a pain in the butt because if you want to add photos to an existing folder (“2009/Oliver” has seen a lot of activity recently, for instance), I have to re-import that entire folder. Luckily, you can have it skip duplicates, but remember all those photos you “deleted” through iPhoto during your last import? iPhoto doesn’t actually delete them from your hard drive, so they all just showed up again. Another gripe right there.

Basically, I wish iPhoto worked like iTunes in that iTunes will organize your music folder for you – by artist, then by album. If iPhoto did the same by year, then by event, I’d be one happy camper. Considering that Apple is all about streamlining processes across each of their applications, you’d think this would be done already.

MacBook Wheel

Apple enthusiasts may have caught word of Apple’s announcements yesterday at MacWorld, including a new 17-inch MacBook Pro and updates to iWork and iLife. But you may have missed this piece of news, courtesy of the Onion News Network:

Iphone App: Queuetastic

If you read this site then you should have an Xbox 360…

If you have a 360 then you should have Netflix…

If you have the two prerequisites above then you should have an iPhone and you should get Queuetastic.

There is no better feeling than when someone says, “Oh, man! You should rent ‘Ma Vie En Rose’! It is sooooooo good!” and you coolly pull out your iPhone, tap tap on the screen and BOOM! it’s instantly added to you queue and delivered in a few days.

This is the best app you can find for organizing/expanding your Netflix queues (both disk and instantt).

It’s got the essential buttons for searching the entire Netflix library, you can view film details/summaries and change the sort order of the films you look up.

It’s a lovely little app that does almost everything you need it to, minus open category browsing. Regardless, it’s only $0.99 and worth every penny plus a lot more.

When I Think About You iTouch Myself

Sometimes you have to take X-mas into your own hands, because only you know what you truly want, and only you are prepared to spend that kind of money on you (thanks, cheap-ass family*). So today I took a little stroll around the block to my local Apple Store (that’s right, open X-mas Day!) and picked up a brand-spanking new iPod Touch.

I know, I know, it’s not the iPhone, but T-mobile currently owns my wireless soul, and AT&T plans are too expensive anyways. Plus, I can always hold it up to my head and talk into it like it’s the iPhone, and no one will be the wiser. Finally I can get in on the iApp-madness that I’ve been so sadly missing out on. First up? Ball!

*Just kidding! Love you guys!

Back In Action

Got my lappy back from the local Apple store today; the people at the “Genius Bar” couldn’t fix it so they sent it off to some pros. The “Bar” still couldn’t tell me what was wrong with it, but the receipt says they replaced the motherboard and processor. Six day turnaround isn’t bad at all, and everything seems to be in order. Luckily, I paid for AppleCare when I bought the MacBook (it extends your warranty from one year to three) a couple years ago, so everything was free. And the cost of replacing my motherboard and processor, if I didn’t have the AppleCare plan? $890.63, plus $135 for labor.

I’m Not So Happy About This.

I restarted my MacBook yesterday and now it won’t work. Every time I start it up, it tells me I need to restart it. Two years with it and not one problem until now. I have an appointment this afternoon at a local Apple store, thank bejeezus I bought a 3-year AppleCare plan. Maybe they’ll replace it with one of those nifty new MacBooks?

We’re Getting There, People.

This is a pic from Apple’s press event today in S.F. Notice the buttons on the touch screen?

Compare to my mock up of handheld heaven:

Review: Free iPhone App – IGN Reviews

IGN.com has made a free iPhone app that lets you read their reviews without wasting time (and bandwidth) on their graphic-intense website. It has its share of shortcomings, but instant access to their back catalog is quick and easy.

Each review features a quick summary, scores for each category, the full review, and a conclusion. They load really quickly, too. You can filter your reviews by system; but unfortunately, previous-generation machines aren’t available. Also, it doesn’t allow you to access their movie, TV and music reviews, but then again IGN.com seems to really miss the mark for those categories so it may be for the better.

So if you’re sitting at a GameStop and you want to make a quick assessment of whether or not the latest Cabella’s game is worth your cash (it isn’t), this may be a time and money saver for you. I just hope they update the app sometime down the line with older systems’ reviews, “best of” lists, and video reviews.

Download it here.

Review: Free iPhone App – Restaurant Nutrition

I found this free iPhone app yesterday which is pretty neat. It lets you pull data from most restaurant chains and look at the nutritional data for their menu items. Although that’s all neat and dandy, that doesn’t warrant a threevue review – but its other features do.

In the ever-changing world of fast food, new items are added and old are removed, and this app has a quick “update” feature that keeps you up to date with their menus, without having to update the entire app. That’s efficient and helpful, so thanks. Next, you can have multiple profiles and keep a log of what you eat each day – and the app calculates how many calories you’ve eaten, etc. And finally, you can select a restaurant and press the “map” button and it’ll find the closest one for you. Not too shabby. It kinda makes me want to eat more fast food.

You can download it here.

My Faves: Best iPhone App So Far: NetNewsWire

I’ve been using an application called NetNewsWire for the past five months. It’s an RSS feed reader, which allows you to subscribe to multiple blog/RSS-based websites (like this one) and view them all at once instead of going to each individual site. It syncs with NewsGator, an online RSS reader, which means you can either read your feeds at home on your computer or online at newsgator.com and it’ll remember which feeds you have read and which you haven’t. It has a PC version called FeedDemon, too. Did I mention that this is all completely free?

If that wasn’t enough, they have released a free iPhone application that keeps me even more connected. As you can see from the picture above, it lists all the feeds you’re subscribed to (all automatically, no need to re-input anything) and lets you read them on a very sleek interface. And it syncs with the computer application and online reader, which means you can read your feeds on any one of the three interfaces and it’ll remember everything.

First Impressions – iPhone 3G (updated)

What you see above is a picture of my new, white, 16GB 3G iPhone. The iPhone itself isn’t in the box, because, well, I used it to take the picture you see above.

My brother-in-law and I got in line at 7am and didn’t walk out of the store until 11am. I didn’t count how many people were in line, but there were a couple hundred AHEAD of us, and just as many behind.

iPhone iPartay

Well folks, the eve of the 3G iPhone is upon us, and I will be at the Ala Moana Apple Store at 7am tomorrow morning to get my hands on one. I’m going for the 16GB model, but I haven’t decided on a color yet. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, really. I figure there will be a pretty large line by then, but I don’t want to wake up any earlier than that. See you there?