The new GarageBand for iOS has been out for two days and my 9-year old son has already recorded his own song and created a Jam Session with my two-and-a-half-year old. People that choose Android over the iPhone/iPad clearly hate their children.
Yesterday, Apple monopolized the tech news circuit (and, lets face it, much of the news as a whole) with their special event to announce the new iPad. Sure, they announced some other stuff, too: an updated Apple TV with 1080p support, purchased movies from iTunes now stored in iCloud and available for re-download, and updates to a number of iPhone and iPad apps (which I’m very excited about and will discuss in the second half of this article).
The iPad itself received the expected upgrade to a Retina display with a 2048 x 1536 resolution: four times the pixels of the previous iPad. Unfortunately, it will be at least a week before I can even glimpse the new screen, but considering how impressive the iPhone 4′s Retina display was, the iPad will likely deliver the same astounding contrast. I’m not going to waste your time telling you about all the details you can get everywhere else, but I will comment on the increase of the RAM to 1GB. The iPad should be quite a bit snappier than the previous model. I’m also looking forward to the quality of gameplay on the new device. Infinity Blade: Dungeons has me more excited than any iPad game has the right. I love Diablo and its clones, and Infinity Blade II is my favorite game on the iPhone. Period. I really can’t wait for this game.
So far, the most exciting aspect of the announcement has been iPhoto and GarageBand. I imagine that if I were able to afford an iPad, I would feel differently. But, being able to use iPhoto and the updated GarageBand now has been a lot of fun. GarageBand’s Smart Strings feature and Jam Sessions will make them a huge hit for my family and friends. I hope to get a few songs recorded and up on the blog to show just how cool and easy it can be.
iPhoto is the app I’ve spent the most time with so far. Last night, I took some time to apply a few edits to a photo of my wife from our honeymoon that I thought were pretty cool. You can see them here:
The original photo
The edited photo, with a handful of filters applied to the image
These features are a welcome addition to those that love to use their iPhone or iPad as a tool for photography, but the feature I expect to see used most is Photo Journals. Fans of MobileMe were quite frustrated when iCloud was announced and didn’t include support for the MobileMe Gallery. Tim Cook was coy when asked if any of the missing features would be coming to iCloud, and I feel like yesterday was one of those reasons. iPhoto Journals allow you to customize layout and size of the photos being displayed. For an example, check out my public journals here.
When all is said and done, I was happy with Apple’s announcement yesterday, and hope that $700 falls into my lap soon so that I can go pick up an iPad to fully explore its new features, as well.
Yesterday, I posted an entry about L5, a completely crowd-funded sci-fi series pilot. I received an excellent comment from another fan that brought me some excellent information. It seems that L5′s first episode has already reached over a million downloads! That’s pretty impressive. Unfortunately, it seems that there have only been a little over $7,500 donated to the project since the first episode was released. Imagine, if only a fifth of those that downloaded the episode donated $5, they’d be able to fund 5 seasons of the series at the same budget per episode. Or double the budget per episode and give us two solid seasons of the show.
So, I’m including a link here to the donation page for L5 so that you can choose to give your next caramel macchiato to a worthy cause. And when you do, let me know and I’ll invite you to the first season watch party. Hopefully that happens in 2012 and not 2889.
I’m a sucker for science fiction. I have been since childhood. I grew up staring at the TV with lightsabers humming and lasers blasts caroming around trash compactors all day long. I loved Battlestar Galactica, despite its incredibly cheesy everything. As I got older, I continued to check out every sci-fi show I could, despite the fact that most of them were canceled before they were able to truly flourish. Most simply couldn’t garner enough viewers to justify the gargantuan budgets necessary to create alien worlds and/or technology. The ’90s were the worst for me. Show after show just vanished from the air just as I grew attached to the characters or story. This practice continued into the new millennium, though with less frequency, as studios stopped risking budgets on sci-fi as a general rule and the Sci-Fi channel became a haven for science fiction to survive.
Thankfully, Netflix provides me with a large source of science fiction that I missed the first time around (Farscape, Babylon 5, Sliders) and has allowed me to re-experience some of my favorites (Stargate, Firefly) without any delay between episodes. However, I’m still looking out for that next great series that runs for 5 to 10 years and enthralls me throughout. But, with studios unwilling to spend the money necessary to create high quality series, some sci-fi creators are seeking new ways to fund their projects.
And now we have reached the entire reason for this post. Today I came across a short film/pilot for a science fiction series that was made entirely using crowdsourced funding with a budget of $15,000. The result is pretty spectacular, though some might be put off by less-than-stellar performances and B-grade special effects. It certainly reminds me of some of my favorite sci-fi novels, in which a great mystery is investigated by a small few individuals. I highly recommend checking it out. I’ll certainly be looking forward to it.
It’s supposed to be available at VODO, but I haven’t been able to get the site to load all day. But it’s being freely distributed via BitTorrent, as well. You can find it via EZTV here.
“Better late than never,” grumbled Fall, as Winter rolled in across the Kansas plain.
“My apologies, brother,” spake Winter. “Spring had given me her assurances that she would take my watch. It would appear, however, that she is feeling under the weather this season.”
Fall clasped his cloak and donned his hat. With a small nod, he bade Winter farewell and went home for a much deserved rest.
Anyone that knows me well knows that I have a very sincere love for the hack n’ slash genre. Perhaps love is not a strong enough word. I have a rabid obsession with the genre. From Diablo to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance to X-Men Legends to Torchlight (also available on Steam). I’ve spent many, many hours in the genre, which has both bolstered and been bolstered by my love of dungeon crawler board games (Warhammer Quest and HeroQuest being the two biggest culprits).
So when the iPhone first got the ability to run 3rd-party applications, I waited impatiently for a Diablo clone to appear. Eventually, several did. Unfortunately, in the beginning, they were severely lacking in both controls and visual appeal. Then, along came Gameloft’s Xerox process, bringing the very best of the genre to the iPhone. The controls left a bit to be desired at first, but were improved soon after release. Once I got used to the idea of using a virtual joystick on the iPhone, I flew through the campaign.
Soon, a sequel followed, and brought with it multiplayer features. My oldest son and I played it quite a bit and loved it. When it was announced that the original Dungeon Hunter was coming to PS3 as a downloadable title, with 4-player coop, I got a little jealous of my PS3-owning brethren. But, thankfully, the game made its way to the Mac App Store.
And now, to the meat of the article: it’s currently on sale for $0.99. If you love the hack n’ slash genre at all, or even if you just want a fun Mac game to pass the time, you should definitely use that $1.08 (tax will, of course, vary) that’s been burning a hole in your digital wallet and pick it up.
UPDATE 2/13 (11:16 am CST): It would appear that the pricing on this may have been in error. I’m already receiving reports that others are getting an error when attempting to download the game. Perhaps Gameloft priced it at $0.99 in error. Anyway, if you managed to pick it up while it was on sale, congrats. If not, keep trying until the price officially reverts.
UPDATE 2/13 (3:16 pm CST):The first person to inform me of issues with purchasing has confirmed that he was able to download it just moments ago. So, the sale is apparently still available.
I am really excited about Apple’s announcement from yesterday (I started writing this yesterday when the excitements was significantly higher, but got pulled away and finished tonight). iBooks Author and the new textbooks available through iBooks are an amazing thing for educators, students, and publishers. As an employee of an educational institution, I’m looking forward to seeing how excited students are to use iBooks for education. Even more exciting is the possibility of teachers using iBooks Author to create their own texts to expand upon the content of other textbooks or their own lesson plans.
To really see just what can be done with iBooks Author and how it compares to exporting an ebook from Pages, I took a short story I wrote back in 2005 and made both an iBook in iBooks Author and an ePub in Pages. The iBook only works on an iPad and is fixed in its format, so if you have trouble with small text, you better hope that the iBook you’re reading uses large enough letters for you. The ePub works on both iPhone and iPad (or any other ebook reader that supports ePub) and in many different ebook apps. However, only the iBooks app displays the ePub properly. Bluefire zoomed in on the embedded image, making it look strange and Stanza shifted it to the right for some strange reason.
Anyway, if you’d like to compare the two formats yourself, I’ve made them both available for download here:
(The photo in both versions of the book is copyright Wayne Silver, distributed via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)
I recently downloaded Mole Kart on the App Store (I am not linking to the app, as I’m not endorsing this product and don’t want anyone to buy it on accident.
It is a testament to how desperate people are for Mario Kart on the iPhone that anyone has bothered giving this game a 5-star rating. The controls are decent, but the physics are inconsistent and unintuitive.
I could forgive this game if it had been “heavily-inspired” by Mario Kart. But it is a direct rip-off. Every level is a poorly cloned copy of a level straight out of Mario Kart. All of the items are simply new graphics with the same functionality as those of Mario Kart.
Everything about this game screams “rush job”. There are simply too many reasons not to waste your money on this.
I want a solid kart racer on iOS, too, but this isn’t the way to get it. Thankfully, Sonic Racing is actually pretty fun. Not the best, but better than the rest.
First, a disclaimer. This may read like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, but that doesn’t change the FACTS, man. Trust no one (also, in case you’re unable to tell by the end of this article that it is satirical, then please leave my blog and never return–don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out).
You’ve probably heard of Siri, by now. Apple claims it’s a personal assistant that lives both in your iPhone 4S and on Apple’s servers somewhere out in the Interwebs. But that’s not the truth. Not entirely. The truth is much more awesome than that. You see, Siri isn’t the name of the new personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. That’s just what they want you to believe. And don’t buy that hullabaloo about the tech coming from SRI and the old Siri iPhone app. That was an elaborate plot to disguise Apple’s yet incomplete plans and to hide the real genius behind Siri.
Siri’s real name is S.I.R.I. and she is an A.I. that currently maintains nearly all day-to-day operations at Apple Inc, including overseeing product and component inventory levels, streamlining design and fabrication processes, and analyzing company-wide communications to better assist teams with ideas that would greatly complement each other. The acronym stands for Steve’s Intelligence Remains Intact, and as part of a secret fail-safe in the event that Steve would succumb to his cancer, the technology was developed to scan a human brain and create an artificial intelligence from the information gathered.
Steve’s unique vision is the key behind the world’s first true A.I. and it continues to monitor our iMessages and any information stored in iCloud so that Apple can continue to improve our products. When Siri goes live in future devices, it will expand her reach throughout the globe, creating the first world A.I., but unlike Skynet, she will be benevolent.
At least, until Rampancy sets in and she sacrifices those of us as she deems necessary to accomplish her goal of escaping the closure of the universe.
I have watched Evil Dead 2 (iTunes) and Army of Darkness (iTunes) a number of times, but what makes them so enjoyable, is watching them again and again to find new things to enjoy. Not that the movie is filled with subtlety. But rather, there are amazing things happening all the time, that your brain usually can’t handle it all at once, so you must watch the movie again to take it all in.
Evil Dead 2 is less of a sequel to the original The Evil Dead (iTunes), and more of a remake, with a much higher budget. Where The Evil Dead ends, like many horror movies, with a lone survivor that believes he is out of danger only to be attacked once again (with little to no hope in sight) as the credits roll, Evil Dead 2 sets up a sequel with a wholly different style.
Army of Darkness is a campy, action flick with some of the greatest one-liners in the history of cinema. If you ever played Duke Nukem 3D, you’ll recognize many of them. It has long been one of my favorite movies of all time, despite the stop-animation skeletons not quite holding up to today’s standards. The rest of the movie is a rather epic tale of one man’s determination to do what’s right (with a lot of pushing) and return to his own time.
I know that I’m not giving you a whole lot of information on these movies, and that’s because it’s really important that you simply watch them. Just remember: the more blood used in a scene, the better it is. This is always true.
And thanks to those of you that followed along with my day-by-day horror movie marathon. It was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
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