Posts tagged as "iphone"
Wallace and Gromit: The W Files
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Wallace and Gromit’s first ever appearance, in the stop-motion animated short film A Grand Day Out, a series of digital comics featuring Britain’s world-famous cheese-loving inventor and Dogwarts University alumnus duo was released as native iPhone/iPod touch apps. I just downloaded and read issue no. 1, ominously titled The W Files (opening panels in above photoset). It is free for a limited time (Crikey!) and is, unsurprisingly, cleverly funny.
When strange shapes and flashing lights are seen in the night sky, there are only two paranormal investigators that can solve the problem. Sadly they aren’t available; Wallace and Gromit might as well have a crack at it. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
16 November 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/245990155
Wild Things
With Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’s film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s acclaimed storybook, Where The Wild Things Are, just days away from hitting local theaters, I thought I’d start a wild rumpus as early as now right here in my room. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to wear a wolf suit and build my own little sailboat to go to where the wild things are, because, as it turned out, there’s an app for that.
In line with the intensive marketing being done to promote the movie, Warner Bros. recently released the official, free iPhone application for Where The Wild Things Are. Tipping the scales at over 80 MB, the application may take a long time to download even with a decent Wi-Fi connection, but once it’s installed and you finally get to play around with it, you’ll find that it’s worth the long wait. The brilliantly designed app is loaded with promotional photos, theatrical trailers, and song samplers clipped from the movie soundtrack, sung by Karen O and a bunch of sprightly kids. On top of those is arguably the star of this app, a stray wild thing called Carol.
Carol is included in the app as an interactive character, and he’s a wild thing, alright. When he’s not asleep and snoring loudly during the night, his idea of a good time is throwing rocks in your direction, punching your screen, and eating up your contacts or photos, which you can select from your photo library (poor Tophercris) and hurl at him. But don’t you worry, because if you’re feeling a little mischievous yourself, you can throw rocks back at Carol or just poke him silly. All these with a simple tap or a flick of a finger on your iPhone’s screen.
A lot of iPhone apps have been released to help promote movies in a more creative and interactive way. I’ve tried a lot of these apps and so far only one of them has really tickled my fancy. Which one, you ask? Take a wild guess.
20 October 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/218188297
BoxClock
If there’s one thing I really like playing with, that is, besides my navel, it’s time.
I’m a sucker for stuff that deal with time, or rather, the amazing ways by which it is manipulated and by which its tremendous power is utilized for whatever reason. This is in part why a number of my favorite things happen to each have time at its core. My favorite movie? Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with its time-turning deus ex machina. My favorite television show? Lost, with its time-traveling penultimate season. My favorite book? The Hours, with its time-skipping storyline. My favorite song? Time After Time, obviously. Kidding.
I love playing with time. That’s the bottomline. And I particularly love playing with time on this little iPhone app called BoxClock. Nice segue, huh? And a long, fairly time-consuming one at that.
BoxClock was developed by David Wicks originally as a Web toy. Taking advantage of the iPhone platform’s multitouch and accelerometer features, he later succeeded in porting the Web app into a working iPhone app, available in the iTunes App Store for less than a dollar.
BoxClock is so named for the obvious reason that it displays boxes and for the not-so-obvious reason that it is, in fact, a clock. To read the time on this peculiar timepiece, you must correctly count the shaded bars in the background and the boxes currently displayed. The number of bars is the present hour while the number of boxes is equal to the minutes past the hour. Try the screenshot above. You should get 8:24. Got it? Awesome.
However, I doubt you’ll turn to this thing to confirm if you’re indeed running late for an important date or if it’s almost time to watch another episode of Glee on JackTV. I myself don’t find it particularly useful as a clock. But as an iPhone app per se, I find it to be quite well done.
The color scheme of the boxes and the background can be set on the app’s settings page. There you can adjust a set of sliders to come up with your color preferences. You can go plain black and white or you can just go crazy. The boxes can also be swiped and flicked around the screen. This is where the iPhone’s touch and tilt capabilities really come into play, and the resulting movements show just how meticulous the consideration of physics that went into the development of BoxClock was.
No, with all due respect to David, BoxClock is far from being my favorite iPhone app. It is, however, my current favorite weapon in killing time, with its time-telling gradient bars and gravitating boxes.
5 October 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/205064479
Rain Check
I told myself I’d have dinner at my apartment tonight, but something about those giant golden arches at the intersection of Boni Avenue and Barangka Drive as seen from behind the driver of the tricycle that I rode on my way home made me change my mind. It was raining quite hard and I was feeling unusually yet pleasantly cold. It was a little wet inside my sneakers and the back of my favorite white Casual Friday shirt looked as if I worked up a sweat in it. In other words, the weather was just the way I liked it. So with my automatic open/close umbrella on hand, my trusty mailman bag over my shoulder, and my old pals, Chris and Caleb, in my ear canals, I went inside McDonald’s, thereby setting out to do what was essentially the cherry on top of another almost perfect day.
People-watching in a fast food restaurant on a rainy night proved to be quite a treat. The first persons that caught my attention were a preschooler and her nanny who I stood behind in line. The little munchkin was wearing a ladybug-inspired raincoat, and to say that he looked cute in it is an understatement. He was beaming at me as I attempted to take a picture of him using Hedwig. But just as I was about to click and capture his smile, her nanny, unaware that I’d taken an instant liking to her pint-sized charge, tugged at one of the wings of his coat and teased him with something she took out from the bag of food she just ordered. I lost the kid to a cheeseburger.
After buying a value meal and two McFlurrys, I settled into a seat by the glass window and went on with my hobby. Across my table was another child accompanied by her parents. She looked frustrated. She probably wanted the Hello Kitty toys on display but her parents wouldn’t let her have any. She was just about ready to tear up when her dad offered her some fries. She saved her tears for later, when she’d eaten all her food and remember that she wanted the Hello Kitty toys on display.
I abandoned the family of three to find two persons who, like me, were eating by their lonesome. They both looked happy, though, with every bite the teenage boy took from his burger and with every twirl the old lady made on her spaghetti noodles. I’d like to think I was just as happy chewing bits and tasting hints of Oreo from my sundae.
Outside, a trio of giddy schoolgirls began writing with their fingers on the fogged up glass window. One of them traced a vertical line, then drew a circle above it. The one on the middle wrote four letters. The last girl produced an umlauted U. Then, below the words, i love ü, they took turns forming the name, Patrick. Whoever this Patrick was, he’s one lucky guy.
I hailed another tricycle to take me to my apartment building. Inside the sidecar was a missing person poster. The piece of paper said the man pictured had been missing for over a week. Looking at his photo and reading his description, I wondered how a heavyset guy with braces, dreadlocks and tattoos could have gone astray. I glimpsed at the driver’s face as he steered the vehicle. The resemblance between him and the guy on the poster was evident. I asked him if he knew the guy. He just shrugged. It made me shrug, too. I guess I’ll never know.
4 September 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/179739010
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Facebook 3.0
Today was a big day for Facebook users with iPhone handsets (or iPhone users with Facebook accounts, whichever works) as the past 24 hours or so brought with it the release of the much-talked about and much-awaited major update to the Facebook iPhone application. As promised by app developer Joe Hewitt, the latest version of the official iPhone client of Zuckerberg and company’s social networking and online marketing brainchild, Facebook 3.0, came packed with a slew of features that make this, hands down, the best version yet.
- See your upcoming Events and RSVP
- See your friends’ birthdays
- See Pages and post updates and photos to Pages you administer
- Write Notes and read your friends’ Notes
- Upload videos from an iPhone 3GS
- Upload photos to any album
- Complete photo management (create albums, delete albums, delete photos, delete photo tags)
- Change your Profile Picture
- Zoom into photos
- Like posts and photos
- See the same News Feed as the Facebook website
- Visit links in a built-in web browser
- See all of your friends’ friends and Pages
- See mutual friends
- Easily search for people and Pages
- Make friend requests
- Become a fan of Pages
- Quickly call or text your friends
- Create shortcuts to your favorite friends and Pages
- Friends sorted by first or last name according to your settings
- Chat friends sorted alphabetically
Take it from me. This version really is the best yet, both interface- and functionality-wise. I’ve been using it all day, and I must say that having the power to do the abovementioned tasks and functions on the palm of my hand, literally, now makes the iPhone app almost as powerful as the full site itself. The app suffers from intermittent display bugs and functionality hiccups, but it being fresh off the App Store’s grill, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and hope that an update to boost its stability, among other welcome improvements, will be issued soon. For now, though, I’m thoroughly enjoying the current Facebook-on-iPhone experience and celebrating the fact that those darned quizzes and games I’ve been ranting about did not make it on the above list.
28 August 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/173903588
© 2009-2010
Written by Aldrin Calimlim
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