iTunes
Track your App Addiction
Dec 30th
Yesterday one of my Twitter friends tweeted the amount he’d spent on the iTunes App Store, courtesy of a clever little Mac application called App Store Expense Monitor which gathers all your iPhone applications from your iTunes folder and provides you with the total amount of money you have spent on the App Store.
I must admit I was a little surprised to see that I’d spent a whopping £190.18. However, I do remember that in the early days of the App Store, many apps were priced at £5.99, but have happily reduced in price over the last 18 months. But it just goes to show how those 59p’s and £1.19’s soon add up.
What’s your total? (if you’re comfortable sharing in the comments, of course)
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Loading ...Rock Music. Roll Camera.
Sep 15th
After a very long 7 months, my Gadget abstinence has come to a shuddering halt thanks to the new iPod nano with video camera. I opted for the very juicy orange in the largest 16GB capacity, which cost £135. I ordered from the Apple Store online at around 1.30pm yesterday afternoon and it arrived via UPS at 3pm today. That’s probably the quickest delivery time I’ve experienced from Apple in 4 years.
I was feeling quite underwhelmed before the ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ Apple Event last Wednesday, knowing the entire event was going to be devoted to iTunes and the iPod range – something that I wasn’t too excited about. That was until the One More Thing where the new nano with video camera was announced.
I’ve been wanting the iPhone 3GS since it’s launch a couple of months ago. However, due to being tied into my existing iPhone 3G contract until March, all options to get around that were hardly attractive. Pay up the rest of my contract and upgrade/sign a new 18 month contract, or buy the Pay & Go iPhone 3GS for £440 and pop my existing SIM in. The latter was the more attractive option, but word from some 3GS upgraders was “wait until next summer for the next new iPhone”. So, the new iPod nano is my go-between – with a more attractive price-tag.
The video functionality of the nano was the selling point for me as it was the biggest thing I wanted from the 3GS. Okay, so I can’t upload directly from the iPod itself to the internet like with the 3GS, but it takes moments to sync to iTunes/iPhoto so I can quickly trim a video in QuickTime and then upload to iTunes, MobileMe or YouTube.
I am very impressed with the quality of the video on the new nano. Due to time constraints today I have been unable to capture a large amount of video, but did manage to get this up on YouTube as a test for people who asked me via Twitter. I hope to get some more footage out in natural daylight soon. My initial impressions are very positive, considering it’s such a tiny device. It seems to perform extremely well when going from light to dark conditions which is something that past (and more expensive) camcorders I’ve owned were unable to do very efficiently.
I shall be posting a more indepth review soon. I am in the middle of some major home improvements right now which has slowed my Fruit Bytes dedication down, but if you have any specific questions about the new nano or a request for a test video then please feel free to ask me in the comments or drop me an e-mail and I’ll do my best to assist.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The Apps Your iPhone Shouldn’t Be Without
Jun 19th
Today is iPhone 3GS launch day. So, you’ve probably picked up your new shiny device and are wondering what wonderful productive and time-wasting apps you can download to fill it to it’s capacity. Let me help you.
Here’s a list of some must-have apps, for every iPhone user.
Tweetie [iTunes] : If you have a twitter account then you need this. Don’t try or buy the others because like me you’ll only regret having spent more than you need to: Tweetie does it all with a beautiful and uncluttered interface. The best twitter app bar_none. Great price of £1.79 to boot. Tweetie for Mac is also available.
Shazam [iTunes] : The gem of the app store if you are a music lover. How many times has that DJ played a song on the radio and doesn’t mention who the artist is? For me Shazam is a DJ in my pocket – he knows pretty much all there is to know about every song ever made, almost! If you hear a song on the radio and don’t want to take a chance on waiting to see who’s behind it, just fire up Shazam, point it to the speakers and press Tag Now. It will listen to the song, send it, analyze it and bring you back the results with name of the artist and track. There are rare occasions where the results come back as unrecognised, but 99 times out of 100 it does it’s job. And it’s free.
QuickPigeon [iTunes] : This is a new app for me and I have yet to see whether it can be something I will use regularly, but is an awesome idea which is what gets it on my list – along with the fact it has push notifications especially for iPhone OS 3.0. Say you want to ask a friend something which requires a Yes or No answer, such as “Coffee at 1?”. You fire up QuickPigeon, ask the question, pick ‘members’ (that’s people in your address book) click on their e-mail address and then it will send that question to them via HTML e-mail and when they hit the Yes or No button then it will send that notification straight back to you, like so…
If I can get my other iPhone friends to install this (hint hint), which is absolutely free, then I could see this proving handier and much quicker than going into Mail app to ask a simple question. You can watch a video demonstrating it’s usefulness here.
Peggle [iTunes] : After reading a review of Peggle and then downloading the trial version for the Mac, it was 10 minutes in before I bought this for the iPhone. A wonderfully addictive game which just keeps you going back if you fail to get through a game. I completed the Adventure in around a week and now I’m desperate for Peggle 2. If you aren’t entirely sure what Peggle is all about, like I was, then I recommend downloading the Mac or PC version so you can get the hang of it. Peggle costs £2.99 in the app store.
Chop Sushi [iTunes] : From one addictive game to another. I’m on my second round of the Adventure stage and this game NEVER gets old. Great music, great colourful graphics and characters. Tom wrote an indepth review of this game over at tomacintosh.com, complete with screenshots. Priced at £1.79 for the full version with Lite version also now available to try it out.
Convertbot [iTunes] : Aside from this being one useful little app for converting everything from currency, length, speed, temperature and more, Converbot has a beautiful sleek interface. An app just to fire up for it’s sounds and UI. Thankfully this app has beauty and brains for just £1.19.
Paper Toss [iTunes] : if you’ve ever sat in the office bored, rolled up a piece of paper and see if you can throw it into the nearest rubbish bin then this is for you. Strangely addictive – and free.
FStream [iTunes] : Great app for listening to radio stations on your iPhone – even the BBC stations. Read my indepth review here.
IM+ [iTunes] : Now, I’m not the biggest IM-er in the world admittedly. Infact I can count on two fingers the amount of times I’ve opened iChat this year. But, it’s good to be prepared for any eventuality and IM+ is the nicest Instant Messaging app for the iPhone. I grabbed this for the sale price of £2.99 earlier in the year and at the time of writing it’s at the sale price of £3.49. This has push notifications, so is OS 3.0 compatible.
SKY News [iTunes] : I was pleased to finally see an app for SKY News for the iPhone as it’s the news channel I tend to watch. Excellent app with Top Stories, UK News, Sport, Business News and more. Also includes a video section and ‘Your Report’ so you can snap a photo of a potential newsworthy story and send it directly to SKY News from the app.
Instapaper [iTunes] : With Tweetie having Instapaper integration so I can save links my contacts have tweetes to look at another time, Instapaper Free is a great solution for me. Basically it’s saving web pages for offline reading later. Instapaper for your browser too!
So, those apps should keep you going for a little while. My faves list changes all the time with wonderful new apps being introduced regularly, but the above are with me all the time. Touch Arcade is a great resource for discovering newly released games and price drops of existing games.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Bugged by iTunes 8.1
Mar 12th
Late last night I installed iTunes 8.1 when it showed up in Software Update. Now I’m wishing I’d stayed on version 8 as a horrible pre-v8 bug has reared it’s ugly head once again.
A simple action such as clicking on a song to play will make iTunes hang, crash and then get itself into a loop where it continually re-opens as you attempt to Force Quit. Even when iTunes is happily open and you simply try to quit or shut down the Mac, it keeps on re-opening meaning it interrupts any attempt to shut down your computer. Very frustrating.
It seems there are many others experiencing the same issue if the threads over at Apple Support Discussion Forums are anything to go by. If the new features aren’t something you desperately want then I’d recommend holding off installing iTunes 8. Let’s hope Apple fix this annoying issue quickly.
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The tweetest thing
Dec 12th
When the iTunes App Store launched late June, one of the first applications I downloaded to my iPod touch with the 2.0 software update was Twitterrific [opens iTunes]. I use Twitterrific desktop app on my Mac and have always loved the clean simplicity of it. I downloaded the free version on the iPhone as there were some problems with the scrolling (not like butter) and I wanted to see what other apps would eventually come to the app store for twitter.
Since then I’ve downloaded Twinkle, Tweetsville and Tweetie [all links open iTunes]. I wasn’t too keen on Twinkle thanks to it bugging me relentlessly to broadcast my location, but also because it’s not a dedicated twitter client. So, when I was out and about I’d have random people sending me messages through Twinkle who seemed to want to “hook up” with me – people who weren’t on twitter. I decided to give that up and move back to good ol’ reliable Twitterrific.
Then the buzz was all about Tweetsville. The UI was clean and iPhone-like (although a little plain and boring in my opinion) and the search/trends was an attractive feature. But this turned out to be the most sluggish app of all, taking an age to download tweets even over wi-fi. I paid £2.39 for it and have never regretted an App Store purchase more than this. After less than a week of using Tweetsville I was removing it from my iPhone. When you mention this on twitter then you get a barrage of recommendations of another really great app, but that’s what they said about Tweetsville. However, after seeing Stephen Fry commend Tweetie recently then I thought I’d give it a go – and at just £1.79 then it’s not too bad.
Tweetie is by far the best application for twitter on the iPhone that I’ve used, although I do have one negative which I’ll mention in a moment. Downloading tweets is extremely quick on opening the application – within 2-3 seconds…and that’s over 3G! It has a very attractive iChat-like UI and boasts features such as the ability to view twitter trends and perform custom searches which is something that Twitterrific doesn’t have. You can also follow and unfollow people directly through the app which is great.
Now for the negative that stops this short of getting a 10/10 from me: the image uploading to Twitpic. Tweetie compresses the image so that it strips it’s quality and uploads it showing as being posted from twitpic (in your timeline) and the image is in landscape mode. In Twitterrific when you upload an image to twitpic it isn’t compressed and shows that it’s been posted via Twitterrific in your timeline and the image is also posted in portrait mode as intended. Here’s an example…
Image posted to twitpic through Tweetie
Image posted to twitpic through Twitterrific
Same image but horribly compressed and rotated via Tweetie. If they work on this image posting method then I will use Tweetie full-time, no question. Until then I’ll be switching between Tweetie for tweets and Twitterrific for image uploads.
Edit: Tweetie 1.1 update [available today] fixes the upload issue and now posts in portrait along with ‘from Tweetie‘ in the timeline instead of ‘from twitpic‘. See the comments for more.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...GTS World Racing
Aug 10th
Today I bought GTS World Racing from the iTunes App Store for £4.99 after seeing a demo on YouTube a few days ago from the developers of the game, which you can watch below (my thoughts after the jump)…
My favourite type of games are definitely the racing ones. I have Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart which is my absolute favourite. I also bought Cro-Mag Rally but I find that very boring and definitely not worth the £5.99, in my opinion, although I have noticed it’s been reduced to £3.49 now. So, when I saw the demo for GTS World Racing I was itching to buy it.
I have completed quite a few laps on GTS World Racing and I’ve got to say first of all that the graphics are excellent and it really looks like a quality game. Soundtrack is okay as are the sound effects. The controls are also very good – no problems at all with steering. To accelerate you simply tilt the iPhone/iPod slightly forward but not too much otherwise the screen will go red and you’ll be told “Too flat!”. To brake you tilt the device towards you. It’s very quick and easy to get the hang of, unlike Super Monkey Ball 
Now onto the tracks. This is where it falls down for me. All the tracks in every country available look pretty much the same. I picked ‘Japan’ hoping to see bright neon lights and a cityscape. All I got were mountains. It didn’t look any different to Peru, Finland or Scotland, so you pretty much feel like you’re in the same place, seeing the same things. If the surroundings were more unique for every track then it would feel much more thrilling. I hope we see some changes in future updates for that otherwise I will be quite disappointed.
Overall the game play is good. I have won every game so far, lapping my competitors on the track, although that is on the Easy setting so I may have to pump that up to Normal or Hard to ensure I don’t get bored with winning so easily all the time.
If you’re stuck between buying Cro-Mag Rally or GTS World Racing then I’d say go for GTS. However, if it’s between Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart or GTS World Racing then I’d say go for Crash. The tracks all look different, it feels more challenging and after 3-4 weeks of playing Crash I’m still nowhere near bored – definitely worthy of the £5.99 price tag.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I’m Pushy and Touchy
Jul 13th
After an agonising wait all day Friday, I was finally able to download the iPod touch 2.0 software update yesterday for £5-99 which enables me to download lovely shiny apps from the App Store in iTunes to my iPod touch, aswell as benefit from the MobileMe features.
Friday was a long and painful day as iTunes frequently informed me that the 2.0 software update was available, but as soon as I clicked on ‘learn more’ I’d get an error saying the iTunes store was unavailable. So, I went to bed in the hope that it would be fine by the morning, which it was. I have purchased three apps so far: Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart for £5-99, Super Monkey Ball which was also £5-99 and Air Hockey which was 59p. The latter is quite boring and not nearly as much fun as the air hockey tables at the amusement arcade, haha. Crash Bandicoot on the other hand is a lot of fun and the graphics are superb. I bought Super Monkey Ball on a whim but it is going to take some mastering as it’s very sensitive indeed, so I haven’t succeeded in getting very far with that.
I have downloaded just a few of the free apps so far including Twitterrific, Facebook, Exposure, iPint, NetNewsWire and Remote. I won’t link to these in iTunes as I know it’s a bit annoying to have all that pop up at you and they’re easy enough to find in the App Store. Twitterrific would be great if it didn’t repeatedly ask me if I wanted to share my location. By repeatedly I mean every single time I access the app and sometimes even if I’ve been on it for a minute or two. I’d like to see an option in preferences to disable that rather than me having to switch off Location entirely in the device Settings which I have unfortunately had to do for the time being so that this pop-up doesn’t annoy the hell out of me.
With all the fun of looking through the App Store and playing Crash Bandicoot, I haven’t played too much with the ‘push’ services in MobileMe on my iPod touch yet although I do know this updates marvellously and instantly having put a date into my Calendar which showed up on my other devices like that *clicks fingers*. MobileMe is working fine now having made the long the transition from .Mac on Wednesday night, which took a lot longer than anticipated.
So, after a rocky few days I’m glad that everything has shaped up okay and everything I wanted to get my hands on is now in my hands. Sadly the same can’t be said by many people who wanted to buy the new iPhone 3G on Friday due to o2 and the Carphone Warehouse having ridiculously low stock levels which couldn’t meet the demand. You’d think Apple+o2+CPW would have guessed that much, wouldn’t you? But, I was watching TWiT live with Leo Laporte on Friday afternoon (which was so fun + first time I’ve watched Leo) who was covering the simultaneous launch across the world and it seems the long delays and short supplies were in full effect across the pond aswell. If you missed SKY News report on the UK iPhone launch on Friday then fear not, I uploaded it here…
Am I the only one who thinks that (forced) pillow fight was a little bit lame? No wonder the guy behind looked like he was thinking “Yeah yeah, just gimme my iPhone already!”.
But back to the apps for a moment: anybody got any game suggestions, especially for driving games which I seem particularly good at? I would love to see a Sega ‘Super Hang On’ app because that was my most favourite game on the Sega MegaDrive – that would take me to retro heaven!
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