Google’s social team has had a lot of love for iOS lately: Just days after rolling out a revamped iPhone app for Google+, the company now released an iOS app for its social activity service Schemer. The app mimics Schemer’s Android app in form and functionality, allowing users to tell the world what they’re plans are – and then join with friends for group activities. Schemer has been an interesting initiative for Google. The service launched under the radar a few months back, then opened up to the public in April. Schemer is using a separate branding, but it’s tied closely to Google+, using your Google+ contacts to devise collective schemes. One has to wonder if Schemer could eventually become one of many apps running on top of Google+. Loading Picture 1 of 5 Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. Read More
Hope you’ve got a screen protector…Sesame Street has a new iOS app, “Potty Time with Elmo,” that is aimed at kids and parents going through the potty-training process. The app, from Sesame Workshop and Publications International, is based on the bestselling book of the same title. For kids, there’s “a story with Elmo about the rewards of learning to use the toilet,” songs, stickers and a virtual rewards chart. Parents can “track their child’s potty progress” and get potty-training tips. “Potty Time with Elmo” is $0.99 for now and will increase to $2.99 after May 29. Elmo faces competition from other potty-training apps, but none of them are hosted by the little furry red monster. Read More
Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least. Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint ($0.99, Universal) is not anything like playing a game of pool. Remember back to the time you first stepped up to a billiard table, grabbed the nearest pool ball, and sent it sailing across the table crashing into the other balls. That is a more accurate depiction of the fun that is Magnetic Billiards Blueprint. The graphics are simple 2D renditions of pool balls on a billiards table. Everything is sketched out as if it were an actual blueprint. Game play takes a little getting used to — even though there is a very well articulated tutorial, you have to try and fail a few times before you really get the hang of things. Striking each pool ball is easy enough to master as interaction is similar to other pool games on touch devices. Tap the ball you want to hit, drag and pull in the opposite direction, then let go. However, where to aim, what to hit, and how to win is another matter entirely. Each ball has a colored pattern on it. The goal is to join all of the similarly colored balls on the table together. The challenge is that you cannot hit an opposite color ball first. You must hit the same color ball first. There is also a point system where you score higher by bouncing off of the bumpers and “buzzing” other balls. Buzzing refers to coming very close to an opposite color ball, without actually hitting it. As each of the similarly colored balls hit each other, Read More
Time is the most naked manifestation of our irrelevance and perhaps that is why I am fascinated by all means of time-telling. Sundials, hour glasses, watches, clocks and now in the age of iPhone, time-watching apps. In the past I have written about the Nooka app for the iPhone. Today, I got a handful of new apps that are worth checking out: 1. Time in words — Qlocktwo It is a very minimal clock for iPhone and iPad. It costs 99 cents but I like the idea of the simple black screen telling me what time it is. Built by creative design agency Biegert & Funk, who have also created similar watches and clocks. Download from the iTunes store. (via Ultralink) 2. Uniqlo Wake Up It is so wonderful and delightful and meets my very simple requirement from an app: high emotional quotient. It is bright, cheery and it comes with alarm tones that mimic the weather, time and day of the week. It is intelligent and fun. It works both on Android and iOS and is free, thanks to Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing brand, whose clothes I will never fit into. As an aside, this is a perfect brand extension vehicle and what brand-advertising should be in the future. The alarm music, which is automatically created based on the weather, time, and day of the week, was co-written by 51st annual Grammy nominee Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) and Yoko Kanno, who is active in songwriting across a wide range of genres including video games and anime (COWBOY BEBOP, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Macross). The app allows users to share a record of their awakening – specifically, the time, weather, and temperature at the moment they stopped the alarm – via social media (Facebook, Twitter, RenRen, Weibo). In addition, the “wake up Read More
“The iPad is not the saviour of magazines,” concedes Mark Wood. But for special-interest consumer magazine publisher Future – which on Wednesday launched its latest multimedia title, Total Music – it could prove era-defining at the least. Future flooded iTunes Newsstand with 65 titles in October and, by January, had clocked up 430,000 individual sales from 10 million free magazine downloads. “We can claim to be to be leading publisher on iPad, worldwide,” Wood tells paidContent. Now Wood’s group plans to make more of those editions interactive, and to start selling to rivals the very tools it is using to make them. #1. What are the latest numbers for your tablet magazines? “We’ve moved on (since January). In March, we were at over 12 million container app downloads, had five million people signed up for marketing messages, which is a lot, and way past half a million sales. “We saw a big spike when iPad 3 was launched – the more devices that are launched, the more we will see people prepared to pay for content.” Future reached a milestone in Q4 2011 when digital revenue gains made up for print declines for the first time. Next stop, digital revenue fully overtaking print? “We’re heading that way, yes,” Wood reckons, though it is some way off. #2. Some observers say sceptically that early tablet magazine sales were just novelty spikes. Is iPad a gift that can keep on giving? “If you take our T3 magazine, sales of its editions have carried on climbing. It is still the top-selling magazine on Newsstand; we’re not seeing any change in that pattern. “Overall, it demonstrates people are prepared to pay for content.” “The more magazines which go on Newsstand, the harder it gets to find stuff. iTunes introduced simple navigation but the navigation is getting Read More
On the heels of a $70 million million funding round, Evernote has acquired bestselling iPad handwriting app Penultimate for an undisclosed sum, the company announced on its blog. Penultimate creator Ben Zotto is joining Evernote to run its app development team, and will “lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms.” Penultimate, which costs $0.99, will remain a separate application “and will get many much-requested Evernote-y improvements including full search and synchronization.” Apple lists Penultimate as its #4 most-downloaded paid iPad app. Evernote, which launched in 2008 and has 30 million users (up from 12.5 million less than a year ago) acquired image-sharing app Skitch last year and has raised over $166 million in funding. Valued at $1 billion in last week’s funding round, the company is preparing for an IPO as soon as the end of this year. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. Read More
Rui Viana isn’t a full-time app developer and he hasn’t learned how to use Apple’s iOS software development kit. Yet last week his newly released iPad game, Cargo-Bot, managed to become of the top 10 most downloaded iPad apps in the U.S., with more than 200,000 downloads in over a week. By day he works as a programmer on Wall Street. In his free time, Viana built Cargo-Bot not with a traditional computer and the iOS SDK, but with an iPad using another iPad app called Codea, and the result was the first iOS game available in the App Store actually created on the iOS platform. I spoke with Viana about how he rather accidentally became an iPad app maker and about how the shift in computing — and now programming — continues its march from desktop to mobile. [Note: This Q&A is edited and condensed from two separate interviews.] Q: Why did you go this route with Codea rather than the traditional iOS developer route? I work in a programming language that’s similar to C. Apple’s [SDK uses] a version of C but the APIs that are in there are complex. I could understand if I spent a little time [but] Codea took a day to pick it up. I haven’t built other games. This is the first time I did anything on the iPad. The thing for me that I think is really cool is it’s a different way to interact with users that you can’t get anywhere else. I always felt Apple’s API and structure for programming was pretty hard to understand. When the Codea guys had this I was really excited. Q: How long did it take you to make Cargo-Bot? I picked [Codea] up one night and really liked it, so I started doing a bunch of Read More
Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least. Lunar Racer (Free, Universal) is a side-scrolling 2D racing game set in space. Your lunar race car is customized to drive on the various moons within our solar system. So what’s the catch? In this racing game you don’t even steer! The big difference between racing here on earth and racing on the moon is that the moon has a much lower gravitational force. This allows races on the moon to take place just as much above ground as on it. And that is how you win races — by balancing the amount of time you spend launching your racer into orbit, and how much time you spend grounded on the surface. In your lunar racer there are two controls: One you use to control your boost, and the other controls your gravity field. The first will propel you faster and faster into space, and the other will bring you right back down to the surface. As for acceleration, as soon as you are dropped off on the moon, your lunar racer automatically starts racing. There is no gas pedal, there are no breaks, and you don’t even have to steer. One full trip around the moon is a lap. Giving your racer a boost of nitro just before hitting a crater, you can launch yourself into low orbit. Once your racer is space-borne, you have to control the pitch of your racer by tilting the device back and forth. This control not only prevents you from crashing, but also enables you to perform forward and backward Read More
Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom. Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook. In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that any time a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking Website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes. Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s Website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for roughly 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors). “Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine Read More
Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least. I Dig It ($0.99, iPhone) and I Dig It HD ($$6.99, iPad) adds an element of strategy to the classic arcade game Dig Dug. Here you manage a digging machine that sets out into a variety of different locations to mine for various minerals and other artifacts — only this time it is up to you to enhance your digger and keep it operational as you go. The overarching strategy element of the game is that the digging machine you operate is not very reliable. The deeper you go, the hotter it gets and your digging machine may overheat. If you are not careful as you maneuver around the mine, your hull may get damaged beyond repair. In the ocean environment, not only can you run out of air, but it just may be the pressure of the deep that will end your campaign. Not to mention the fact that you also need to keep your machine well stocked with fuel. The digging machine is controlled by a simple virtual joystick: Up, down, left and right. There are obstacles that can get in your way, but they are easily removed with dynamite. What adds an element of planning to the overall strategy of maintaining a well equipped digging machine is that you need to continuously maintain a quick exit to the surface. So sometimes just going straight for the gold will mean you run out of fuel and are stranded at the bottom of the mine. To make things a little easier, the digging machine can be upgraded by Read More
