Plane Battle is a fun new twist of the classic Battleship game – the battle is in the skies! Try to take down all of your opponent’s planes or spaceships before s/he takes down yours.
If you pick this one up, let us know what you think! Trailer and screenshots after the break.
[$0.99 - iTunes link]
Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.
If you’re a frequent traveler and need to know how to get back to the right hotel room at night, this is a very simple, but also very handy tip. Lets set the scene, you check into another hotel on your travels, your given a plastic key card and a small piece of card with your room details printed on it.
The first thing you do when you go out later, is pick up the plastic keycard but leave the card with all the details on in your room. When you return later in the evening, exhausted from the business meeting or intoxicated from the on expenses alcohol splurge, you have forgotten your hotel room number. As it is never printed on the programmable plastic keycards your in a bit of trouble.
Read on after the break for our great solution to this dilemma!
The simple solution is to take a picture of your room number with your iPhone before you go out. When you return later, simply fire up the Photos app and there you have your room details and your all set to get that good nights sleep. No more embarrassing visits to the hotel reception to contend with. Hey I said it was simple but it is also a great tip!
Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)
Our music comes from the following sources:
Disney has released their newest interactive iPhone and iPad book, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue – A Magical Adventure. In the story, Tinker Bell is trapped on the mainland and depending on her fairy friends to help her out. The reader can contribute to and control the magic by blowing in the speaker to spread fairy dust.
If you pick this one up, let us know what you, or your child, thinks! Screenshots after the break.
[$3.99 - iTunes link]
Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.
We’ve known for a while now that iPhone 5 won’t be coming out this month, as it has for the last four years, but this fall, when iOS 5 is also scheduled to ship. Whether one delayed the other, or Verizon contracts, component shortages, engineering hours, a deliberate decision to change the launch schedule, or some combination of factors caused the delay, we may never know, but now rumors suggest new Macs are similarly on hold, this time waiting on OS X Lion before they ship.
Steve Jobs has always stressed that Apple is a software company, and has several times quoted Alan Kay’s “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware”. They make beautiful boxes out of glass and aluminum and stainless steel and plastic, but as recently as WWDC 2011, Jobs called software their “soul”.
iPhone has always been tied to major new releases of iOS (previously iPhone OS), the two launching together with precise regularity. (iPod touch has almost always coincided with an iOS x.1 release, and iPad launched with the unique-to-iPad iOS 3.2, and iPad 2 came with the more modest iOS 4.3).
New Macs, however, were seldom if ever tied to new OS X releases. Users who bought new Macs on or around OS X launches would get a free upgrade offer or a DVD in the box, or something… less than coordinated.
But MacBook Airs with ThunderBolt ports and Sandy Bridge processors might just be on hold for Lion now.
Apple hasn’t always had luck with big, coordinated releases. They — and their servers — struggled under the same-day iPhone 3G, iOS 2, MobileMe, and App Store release back in 2008. But they have kept their mobile releases in a row.
There was little chance we’d see iPhone 5 announced with WWDC as shipping in June with iOS 4.3, upgradable to iOS 5 in the fall, and if rumors of Macs waiting on Lion pan out, could Apple be moving to an even more tightly integrated hardware/software model? Could we see a day where OS X and iOS releases are coordinated so features that bridge both, like iCloud, “just work” as desktop and mobile both come on line?
iCufflinks by Adafruit from adafruit industries on Vimeo.
iCufflinks by Adafruit are a set of incredibly cool set of cufflinks in the likeness of the classic “power” icon — and they softly pulsate, just like your sleeping Mac. Classy, futuristic, slightly geeky — and they won’t stand out too badly with formalware. You can order them online for $128 a pair — a remarkably reasonable fee given how much a decent set of cufflinks will set you back, even without crazy pulsating LEDs. Unfortunately the first batch sold out, but more are expected tomorrow.
Can we have more geek gear that’s both classy and subtle without being annoying and obnoxious? Because this is definitely a step in the right direction.
[via BoingBoing]
A few interesting patent applications from Apple have recently surfaced, showing they have some bold ideas surrounding Find My iPhone, social-matching, and a way to lock the camera so we can’t make bootleg concert recordings and plaster them on YouTube (?!).
Reminder: Apple, like any big company, routinely patents just about anything and everything they dream up, and there’s no way to know when, or if, they’ll use any them in actual, shipping products. Still, it’s interesting to see what they’re working on deep inside the secret Cupertino labs…
Follow on after the break for the roundup!
First off, Apple has applied for a patent describing a much more control-oriented Find My iPhone feature with additional security and deeper system integration. Find My iPhone currently lets users remotely lock their iPhone, wipe their data, locate the iPhone on a map or send a personalized message to the device.
This is all nice, but Apple may decide to up the ante and provide much deeper control for the corporate and enterprise environment and better assistance for recovering a lost iPhone.
A second new patent application reveals that Apple has some ambitious ideas to make the process of finding friends with similar interests a lot easier. Tapping into location data, interests, books and other data stored on the iPhone will help match you up with other iPhone users with similar interests.
Social networks are a well known phenomenon, and various electronic systems to support social networking are known. Growing a social network can mean that a person needs to discover like-minded or compatible people who have similar interests or experiences to him or her. Identifying like-minded people, however, often requires a substantial amount of and time and effort because identifying new persons with common interests for friendships is difficult. For example, when two strangers meet, it may take a long and awkward conversation to discover their common interests or experiences.
Common interests and experiences of two or more users located close to each other can be identified from content, including automatically created usage data of the mobile devices. Usage data of a mobile device can be created based on activities performed on the mobile device (e.g., songs downloaded), a trajectory of the mobile device (e.g., places traveled), or other public data available from the mobile device (e.g., pictures shared).
All of this would be opt-in to help avoid privacy concerns, but the location-based services are quite interesting to say the least. As an example, if you tend to visit a specific coffee shop in your town, your iPhone could match you up with another iPhone user who also frequents that location. The idea is to make it easier to discover like-minded people and help spark up friendships that wouldn’t otherwise be as easy to start.
Lastly, Apple plans to build a system that will determine when users are trying to record or stream live video at concerts and events, and subsequently turn off camera functionality on the device. It works by using infrared sensors that can tell when people in the crowd are recording and sends a signal to the device to disable the camera. Users would still be able to send and receive text messages, calls, data etc.
That… seem a little “Big Brother” to anyone else?
[Patently Apple, MacRumors, The Sun, thanks Steven!]
