Streaming Music for your iPhone

• Developer: Sam Abadir
• Version: 1.2
• Cost:Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

With respect to streaming music itself, Flycast offers two modes.  The standard mode, “quick play” aims to conserve battery life and reduce skipping by using an extended buffering system.  However, you can turn off Flycast and launch the radio via Safari.  The benefit of streaming the station from Safari is that you can then stream the music in the background and launch other apps. Beautiful.

The only thing with Flycast (and any other streaming software) is that you’d want to be within wifi or 3G range - otherwise EDGE simply cannot keep up with the stream.  Otherwise as long as you have a good charge on the battery you should have hours of entertainment.

App Review Score: 4.0 out of 5.

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Great Graphics, Great Interface, Great Dice App

• Category: Entertainment
• Developer: FullPowerTechnologies
• Version: 1.1
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

Dice apps are another one of those apps on the iStore that are a dime a dozen.  Let’s face it - there’s only so much variation you can add to a dice app.  Most are simple random number generators, some provide different types of dice for the pen-and-paper RPG games (d4s to d20s).  So far my favorite of the dice apps is MotionX Dice.

First off, the graphics on this app is beautiful.  MotionX has spent the time to ensure the look and feel of the dice looks like real dice, and there’s even types of dice to choose from.  In the setup screens, you can choose up to 9 different dice appearances, the number of dice you want to roll, as well as the background of the “table”.  You can also turn on and off the sound and vibrate functions of the app.

To roll the dice, simply shake the iPhone as if it was a dice container.  The dice are animated so that they bounce off each other and the wall before they finally settle down.  There’s also 6 slots on the bottom of your screen to store and “lock” dice so that they are no longer rolled.  The implementation is smooth and intuitive.

Conclusion
This is really a great implementation of the dice app. Visually, the app has beautiful graphics and smooth animation - it really does looks like real dice rolling on a table. The shake method to roll the dice is intuitive, and the app has a lot of customizable features which typically do not exist in apps as simple as dice apps. Throw in different sized dice, and this app would be perfect.

App Score Review: 4.5 out of 5

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Ripe or Rotten Tomatoes?

• Category: Entertainment
• Developer: Cyrus Najmabadi
• Version: 1.4
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I found ourselves with some free time after dropping off our baby boy at my parents, and decided to catch a movie.  I pulled out my iPhone and loaded the local theatre chain’s website in Safari.  Finding a movie using the website was not a pleasant experience.  I had to drill down 3 menus starting from country to get down to my location, and then hit another page to find the showtimes for “Tropic Thunder”.  Even with 3G turned on this took more than a few minute to do.

Needless to say, after I got home I immediately started looking for apps that would speed up that process.  With that I started playing with two apps - Showtimes (review coming) and “Now Playing”.  Both apps take advantage of your GPS to find the theatres nearest your current location and provides showtime information.

The nice thing about the app being reviewed here - “Now Playing”, is that it integrates a number of features that makes a single-source for movie decision-making.  Besides finding the nearest theatre and displaying showtimes of the movies played, there, Now Playing adds a number of value-added features.  Now playing includes the movie synopsis, but more importantly, allows you to view the movies reviews from Rotten Tomatoes which I love.  Rotten Tomatoes is what I use before I decide seeing a movie anyways, so this integrated feature is perfect for me.

In addition to the movie reviews, even provides links to movie trailers.  I think this is a great feature if you are in a wi-fi network when deciding whether to see a movie or not.  The only thing is when I selected “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, the trailer that I got was the one for Sex and the City.  Luckily most of the links with the other movies were correct.

Thumbs Up or Down?

Thumbs Up.  I love apps that do more than the standard and provide you with features that make it the complete package.  For me, the integration with Rotten Tomatoes does it for me; if I just want to watch a movie with nothing in particular in mind, checking the tomato score and reading a couple of reviews makes those decisions so much easier.

App Review Score: 5.0 out or 5

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A Guaranteed Bestseller.

• Category: Entertainment
• Developer: Lexcycle
• Version: 1.2
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

With all the media options available – iTunes music, Youtube videos, podcasts, and the Internet – the iPhone is the ultimate portable media center. However, it took me no more than a day since picking up my iPhone to realize that it was perfect for one more type of media – books. With its large display and touch-screen capability, the iPhone seemed a natural fit for reading ebooks; and after a quick search on the app store, I found that it was.

There is no shortage of e-book readers on the iTunes App Store, but in terms of complete package, one stands alone: Stanza. This app is as close to perfect as they come. Stanza starts with a fairly standard interface: a menu where you can navigate the downloaded books by title, author, or subject. Click on a downloaded book, and Stanza loads the text in about 3 seconds, continuing where you left off.

Controls within Stanza is intuitive and easy to use. Pages can be turned simply by tapping on the left or right edge of the phone, or my favorite way of swiping left and right (just like turning a book). Tap on the middle of the screen brings up a menu allowing you to navigate to chapters or go back to the main menu.

All of these features described – which I really like – just makes Stanza a good ebook reader. What makes Stanza truly excellent is the features that it has in addition to the reading function. First off, Stanza comes with an incredible array of options to customize the app. Stanza allows you to customize pretty much everything. Starting from Stanza’s appearance, you can control the font type, size and color, line spacing, margin width, and background. Then you can control how Stanza works: what left and right tap does, auto-hide menu, auto-load last book, auto-dim, auto-rotation lock, etc. The level of customization is amazing; allowing you to shape the reading experience to the way you like it.

Furthermore, Stanza also makes available a desktop app (available for Apple computers; a beta version of Stanza for Windows users was also recently released). The desktop app allows you to load ebooks in pretty much every format out there – from the new ePub format to e-Reader format to your standard html, word docs, and .rtfs. Once loaded, you can turn on the “share” feature and load the books onto your iPhone. For me, this made Stanza an instant library. I have close to a hundred books that I had on my old Palm Pilot, which were gathering e-dust. Stanza’s app made all of these books available again, and I’ve been happily re-reading books ever since.

Conclusion

With its intuitive controls, excellent array of customizable features, and support for a large number of formats through its desktop app, Stanza is a clear winner. Stanza’s on the first page of my home page and its going to be there to stay.

App Score: 5.0 out of 5.

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