Though PopCap’s peggle was a massive hit on the PC, the game seems like it was made for Apple’s go-go devices — both the click-wheel of the traditional iPods and the touch screen of the iPhone are perfectly suited for the fine art of blasting silver balls at colorful pegs. Guided by a menagerie of silly animal heroes, each with their own special powers that are imbued on your cannon, every stage of Peggle offers a smile. This is simply a wonderful game your iPhone should not be without.

Have you missed the Peggle revolution up to now? If so, here’s the rundown: it’s like pachinko, but better. You control a cannon loaded up with 10 silver balls. Below it is a field of pegs and bricks. To complete the stage, you must hit every orange peg or brick. The orange pegs, however, are surrounded by a sea of blue pegs that are worth points but send your ball careening off into another direction. If you have a good eye for physics and geometry, you can pretty much plan the trajectory of the ball as it rockets and ricochets around the screen. Although, from time to time, chance does rear up and take control.

There’s more. A bucket slides across the bottom of the screen. If you drop the ball in the bucket, you get to reuse it. There are special purple pegs worth extra points, but the real prizes are the green pegs. These activate the special powers of the Peggle heroes, such as fireballs, being able to see the long trajectory of the ball on-screen in advance of your shot, and multi-ball.

Up to this point, Peggle is awesome. However, when you close in on the final orange peg, Peggle goes thermal. The action slows down. The camera gets real close to the peg. When you hit it, the game bursts into a rapturous rendition of “Ode to Joy.” Now, the ball flies off and any pegs it hits are worth mucho extra points. The bottom of the screen is replaced by a series of pits, each worth different amount of points. This moment of the game, with rainbows, fireworks, and classical music blaring is still one of my favorite experiences in gaming. It’s one of those rare things I wish I could experience for the first time again. But even though I have played hundreds of games of Peggle, it still never ceases to entertain.

There are two ways to control Peggle on the iPhone. There is a wheel on the right side of the screen that guarantees precise shots. Directly above it is the fire button. You can also use your finger on the field of pegs to direct the cannon, but I certainly recommend using the wheel. I am grateful PopCap did not try to use tilt or shake in any way. You can also zoom in on spots by double-tapping the screen. This lets you make surgical strikes on the field. By far, this is one of my favorite features on this iPhone port because if used just right, you can really nail those bonus-filled long shots.

Peggle on the iPhone features additional challenge stages you can play once you have finished the 55 stages in main story mode. There are 40 challenge stages that are extremely, well, challenging to complete — but you will definitely want to do so. PopCap also included a two-player duel mode that lets you wither play versus the computer or another friend. This is not online multiplayer. This is on the same device. However, it’s still a lot of fun to attack the pegs with another player.

PopCap added a new trophy room with iPhone-exclusive achievements. That’s very cool. But it does not make up for what I think is a curious and unfortunate missing feature: leaderboards. This is the kind of game that makes you want to brag and what better way to do so than some sort of global leaderboard. I hope something like this shows up in an update.

Peggle was reviewed with version 1.0.
Closing Comments
Peggle was an awesome game on the PC and original line of iPods — and this new iPhone edition is truly spectacular. The controls work flawlessly. The $4.99 price is right. There are almost 100 stages in addition to a multiplayer mode. If you have not played Peggle yet, there is no better place to start than here. And if you have played it on other screens, well, this new edition will renew your love for the game. Download it today.

The Sexy Ladies of SHOW (1.0) Wapslap Category: Entertainment Price: $0.99 Cracker: kidmoneys Application Description: The Sexy Ladies of SHOW brings you the incredibly beautiful women from the pages of SHOW magazine. Sit back and watch as the hottest women from around the world show you their sensuous curves and voluptuous assets. This enticing slideshow will have you coming back for more! Features Include: ? Automatic panning through dozens of sexy images ? Sit back, relax, and enjoy the SHOW! ? Ability to save each photo in your iPhone photo album ? Share the hottest girls with your friends! ? Ability to pause on your favorite girl for a closer look ? Zoom in on her top ?assets!? ? View a variety of categories ? something for everyone! ? From Luscious Latinas to Got Back! The Sexy Ladies of SHOW will definitely heat things up! Be sure to keep checking back for updates, and in the meantime?enjoy! Full info on Appulous

WeatherBug Elite by AWS Convergence Technologies is an amazing weather app. By using your current location (or another location that you choose), it can give you just about anything you want to know about the current or upcoming weather. Like many of the other weather or time apps, you can input several different cities in which you wish to track the weather. Each city that you input will bring up a list of weather stations that you can choose to use to track the weather. Most of these stations are at local schools or airports. Once you choose a weather station, the app will display current weather information such as temperature, daily highs and lows, humidity, dew point, wind speed and direction, and wind chill. It will also let you know if there are currently any weather alerts for that area.
At the bottom of the screen there are 5 different icons that take you to different information. The Conditions page is the first page that you see on any location and gives you the current conditions as described above. The second icon takes you to the Forecast page where you can view an hourly or 7-day forecast. The third icon is the Maps icon. This icon pulls up current radar maps of the area you have pulled up. You can zoom in on the map, change the opacity of the precipitation shown on the map, and even overlay the map with new types of information. The app can overlay on the map things such as temperature, pressure, and wind speed among other things. The Video icon takes you to the WeatherBug video entitled Rachel’s WeatherCast. This video is a short two minutes and gives the weather highlights for the US, including weather news stories and an overview of the forecast. The final icon links you to pictures from weather stations in the area. You can view them either as still shots of the current conditions or as a series of shots taken throughout the day played back as a slide show.
In using WeatherBug Elite, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of information that I was able to obtain very quickly about the weather in any area of the country. The user interface is very simple and the information is well-organized and easy to find. WeatherBug Elite is a very useful app for anyone.

Are you curious about the world around you? How do people in other communities see their nation and the world? This application provides a simple directory of almost 4000 newspapers with online editions in well over 100 countries around the world. Browse, explore, and support local news.

there is nothing more to say about these iPhone apps because they are news what can we say about them?

Easy Gossip says it all

It’s never been easier to connect your computer up to your television or have your computer form the centre of your home media system but the problem of actually controlling it can still be a problem without buying a dedicated remote. Air Mouse Pro (AMP) aims to solve this problem by giving you full control of your computer through your iPhone. Before you can begin, a helper app needs to be installed. Available for both Mac and PC and a Linux version in the works, almost everyone can get in on the action. At 10MB, I felt the Mac helper app was a little on the large side and having to install yet another app that loads at start up was a little off putting. Despite this, installation was painless and, most importantly, configuration free. The helper app connected with my iPhone without any help at all.

AMP gives two choices in how you control your system. The first is via a touch-pad-style interface where you drag your fingers around the screen in the same way you would on a notebook. In the touch-pad mode, you have access to a full keyboard, or you can tap to switch to function keys as well as dedicated keys for Firefox and iTunes. These dedicated keys work as you’d expect and make using your computer via AMP much easier. Other useful features worth noting here are the ability to go landscape and make the touch-pad fullscreen (a shake of the phone brings up a landscape keyboard) and you can shake the iPhone to hide the keyboard/function keys and have it fullscreen but in portrait mode.

The touch-pad mode similarly works as you’d expect but I did find it a little inaccurate at times. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it does, I just found sometimes I was struggling to get the mouse where I wanted it (small buttons are the main culprit here.) In a similar fashion, the support for multi-touch scrolling is no where near as smooth as that built into Apple’s notebooks, it tends to jump and I found if you placed your fingers too close together, the gesture would be ignored.

The second mode is through the use of the accelerometer. The basic concept is that you press and hold the button in the middle of the mouse buttons and then tilt the phone in the direction you wish to move the mouse. In theory, it’s a great idea but in practice, it’s nigh on useless due to it being so inaccurate. The only way I found I could slightly use it was to hold the iPhone level before I held the button but then I still found myself flicking the phone in every which way, trying to get the cursor where I wanted it to go. As with the previous mode, a shake of the phone hides the keyboard but there is no landscape mode at all. 


For light browsing and playing your music from a distance, Air Mouse Pro does its job nicely. It’s dead simple to use and the way most of the features are implemented is intuitive (such as shaking to hide/show the keyboard and such.) Having to use a helper app was a bit of a downer, especially as it was quite big, so it’d be good to see the developers try and shrink the helper app down a bit. Similarly, the accelerometer control system needs work to make it useful, some sort of calibration through the helper app (to take into account the screen resolution and such) could be something worth considering. At $5.99 it’s not the cheapest app you’re ever going to purchase, but it does work well and I would recommend it to those seeking this type of application.

If you’re not familiar with the hobby/sport/addiction that is geocaching, the concept is very simple — people go out and hide caches in the great outdoors, use a GPS receiver to find the coordinates of the hide, then post the cache on the Geocaching.com Web site. Cachers go to the Web site, search for caches that are near their present location, and then use their GPS receivers to find the approximate location of the cache. Once they’re done bushwhacking and find the cache, they sign the logbook, take and place trade items, and then log the find on the Web site.

A week after I acquired my iPhone 3G, I wrote a post talking about how to use the built-in GPS receiver and Mobile Safari to “do” geocaching. While the method works well, I was waiting and hoping for a much better way to geocache with the iPhone 3G. With the recent release of Geocaching for iPhone, it’s time to see if that better way is finally here. Read on for more details!

To give Geocaching a workout, I decided to try the app while I was on a business trip in Sacramento, California last week. I love to go geocaching in cities that I’m visiting, since it’s a great break from doing work and I usually get to know some more about the city and its history.

The application icon for the app is your first indication that this is the official Geocaching.com app, as it uses the four-color Geocaching logo. Launching the app shows you a nice trail scene as well as the standard Geocaching.com disclaimer, and you’re asked if you wish to let the app find your location (see below left). Since you’re usually going to be going out of your way to find local caches, you’ll most likely give the app the OK to get the location from your iPhone’s GPS. The next screen (below right) provides fields for searching for caches by postal code, address, or the special Geocaching.com GC code. You can also tap the “Search for Nearby Geocaches” button to find the nearest caches to your location.

A list of geocaches near your current location appears on your screen (see below left). The current version (1.1.1) of the app now gives you a filtered list that does not show any caches that you’ve already found. To do this, you need to set your Geocaching.com user name and password in the app settings page (see below right).

The list shows a surprising amount of information for each cache. The icon on the left side of the search results indicates the type of cache, most being “traditional” caches with a little plastic container icon. The difficulty and terrain are listed as a number from 1 to 5, with a 5/5 being the most difficult type of cache to find, in mountainous or dangerous terrain.

Groundspeak, the company that runs Geocaching.com, assigns each cache a unique code beginning with the letters GC. That code is important as a unique key for the cache, so it’s included in the list. Finally, the distance and direction to the cache is listed.

Tapping on a cache entry in the list opens up a detail page (see screenshot below). This page shows the latitude and longitude of the cache and the same difficulty and terrain information, along with links to a description, recent logs, and a hint. The description will tell you something about the cache or historical information about the area in which the cache is hidden. The logs will show when and how people found the cache, sometimes including spoiler information that make it obvious where the cache is hidden. Hints are sometimes riddles that make it easier to find the cache, if you can figure out the correct answer to the riddle.

Tapping the Map button takes you out of the Geocaching app and opens Google Maps. A red pin indicates where the cache is located, and the traditional blue pin and pulsating circle show your present location. I often use the Directions feature of Google Maps to find out how to drive or to a location near a cache.I find it annoying that I am taken out of the Geocaching app and have to launch it again to get back to the cache information. It would be preferable if the app used its own browser.

The Navigate button opens a compass screen with a red pointer aimed at the cache location. Your current heading, the distance to the cache, your ground speed, and the accuracy of the GPS location are all displayed on the screen. The pointer can be helpful in triangulating the position of the cache, as GPS accuracy can sometimes be off and by walking around, you can get a better idea of where the cache is actually hidden.

How does this all work in practice?

If you’re in a city or in a wooded area, you can pretty much forget about getting an accurate location. Where I was looking for the cache in Sacramento, there were both tall buildings and trees that were in the process of dropping their leaves. According to the Geocaching app, the best accuracy I was getting was about 156 feet! I decided to try again with a cache located in an area with a much less obstructed view of the GPS satellite constellation.

The second cache was near my home in Colorado. The leaves have dropped here, and the sky view is unimpeded by tall buildings. I used the navigate mode to get a red arrow pointer showing me how to get to the cache, and it did an excellent job of getting me to within about 20 feet of the cache (see screenshot below). However, the arrow was confusing me as it was whipping around the points of the compass, so I switched to the Google Maps view. Here I was able to see two pins — a flashing blue one that indicated my location, with a blue ring around it indicating the possible area I was in — and a red one for the location. With the Google Maps aerial view enabled, I could even see the trees near the cache location.

If you’re not sure if the area where you’re caching has a good view of the sky, I suggest trying a simple test — walk around the area with Google Maps pulled up. If your “blue pin” is consistently keeping up with your walk, your accuracy is probably pretty good. If it is the blue pin is a block away and just sitting in one place, or if it jumps around the map, then you’re out of luck and should either use a much more accurate GPS receiver or find another location to do your caching.

One more thing that Geocaching for iPhone can do is let you find the status of Trackable Items (see below). These are specially tagged items such as geocoins and travel bugs that are left in caches for others to grab and move to other caches.

This version of Geocaching is limited in what it can accomplish. I’d love to be able to claim my caches when I find them, instead of having to go back to my computer to log into Geocaching.com and do the deed. It would be cool to be able to use the iPhone’s camera to add photos to the cache log on the Geocaching website.

Should a hard-core geocacher give up his or her dedicated GPS receiver and move to an iPhone? No. I don’t think the accuracy of the GPS location is as good as some of the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) enabled GPS receivers that you can buy from Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. With most “real” GPS receivers, I find myself being able to find caches much faster. I think the iPhone is getting me in the general area, but not with enough accuracy to rmake my hunt much easier.

Between my comments about what Geocaching for iPhone needs and about the accuracy of the iPhone GPS, you might think that I’m totally dismissing the iPhone and this app as a geocaching solution. I’m not. I feel that it’s a good solution, and it can only get better as the app is updated with new features and the iPhone gets even better location accuracy in the future.

I’d love to hear what other iPhone-toting geocachers are using as their favorite geocaching tool. Is it an iPhone with Geocaching for iPhone or another app, or do you prefer to use a separate GPS receiver. Leave a comment below.

I don’t usually write reviews of products I haven’t tried (in fact, I’m frequently annoyed by those who do), but iTrans stubborn refusal to lower the price on their NYC product has been sticking in my craw a bit, and I have to throw my $.02 in the ring with others who have exhorted them to do so. I have to say that iTrans seems to be a little confused on the psychology and science of setting price points for software. Consider just these 3 factors:
1. Similar Products in the iTrans portfolio: iTrans makes this product for several other cities, but none of them are as expensive as the NYC version. Are they banking on the “everything is more expensive in NYC” mentality? Well, that would be downright silly (and I’m sure they know that New Yorkers reject that sentiment outright, and will actively push back when they encounter it). The fact is, we look at it and say “Why do the DC people get theirs for $5? I’m certainly not paying twice as much as them!“ Instead, I would guess that their argument is that the NYC version is more complex and demanded more development cost and resources on their end. While this may be true, we all know that the profit margin on software is pretty close to 100%, since there are no manufacturing or ongoing distribution costs. Lower the cost to compete with your other products, and you’ll make up the initial dev costs in sales volume pretty quickly. This is basic lemonade-stand economics.
2. Competition: There are other products competing with yours in the AppStore, and while they may not currently be as good as yours, the more people buy them (because they are cheaper), the more money they will have to sink in to development and they will quickly become better than yours - and sink you.
3. Market: Look at where people are spending their money in the AppStore. Do a quick sort by “most popular” in any category and you’ll see that most people are downloading apps that range in price between free and $4.99, with rare exceptions. The more the store becomes flooded with apps, the more this is going to drive these prices down even further. Most of the best apps I have on my iPhone were actually *free*, and released as part of a value-added strategy - extensions of larger, richer web based products. If iTrans doesn’t get on the boat soon, it won’t be long before HopStop or some similar company comes along with a better, cheaper product and deals the final, fatal blow.

Like many people, I have a music library that’s way too large to fit on my iPhone. (Yo, Apple! Can we please get a 64GB model already?) Fortunately, I can still listen to every track I own thanks to Simplify Music 2.0 (formerly Simplify Media).
The app streams tunes from your PC by way of a music-server program that’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Download it, install it, then choose the folders you want it to scan, monitor, and queue. (Alas, the program can’t stream DRM-protected iTunes purchases, so it’s time to move everything to iTunes Plus.)
The desktop software costs nothing. The Simplify Music iPhone app has an introductory price of $2.99, but the developer plans to bump it to $5.99 in a few weeks.
Once everything’s installed and configured, just leave your system running and hit the road. When you run the app, you’ll be able to browse your entire desktop music library by album, artist, genre, or song. Tap what you want and presto: the music plays, complete with album art and even song lyrics (which is so cool, it single-handedly justifies the cost of the app).
Want even more variety? Get some buddies on board: you can stream music from friends’ music libraries in addition to your own.
Version 2.0 adds some nifty amenities, including a search function (something the iPhone itself doesn’t have–yet), an add-to-favorites option for building an on-the-fly playlist, and a “scrub bar” for easy backward/forward scanning.
As you might expect, a Wi-Fi connection produces the best sound quality, though 3G runs it a close second when you have four or five bars. Even over EDGE, Simplify Music delivered surprisingly good sound, about on par with FM radio.
Though the app was sometimes annoyingly slow to connect to my PC, for the most part it worked like a charm. And much as I’m loathe to leave my system running 24-7, I’m now hopelessly addicted to having access to all my music.
Simplify Music makes that a reality, meaning I’ll probably think twice about springing for a new iPhone just to get more memory. With the money I save, I’ll be able to buy a lot more tunes.

DigiDrummer for the Apple iPhone, allows users to create and save their very own drum beats using their fingers as the drumsticks. I’ll let you know if it’s really worth your time or if it’s just a gimmick.
Rating

There are a couple of drum machines out there for the Apple iPhone, but so far the best one I’ve come across is DigiDrummer from Magnus Larsson. Think of this application as a drum set that you have at your fingertips, literally.

Digidrummer has at least 23 drum sounds built in to it, and probably updates more than any application I have with new drum sounds. So let’s get down to a little more in depth look at how DigiDrummer works.

When you open the application, you will see eight pads before you. Each one is named in conjunction with its respective drum. For example, you have a tom 1, tom 2, crash, ride, kick, snare and so on. All of the main components of a drumset are here. It is up to you to figure out exactly how you want to play the drums. The combination of fingers to use is completely up to you.

Digidrummer’s controls are very responsive, and very rarely do you get a skipped sound. Now this will all be based on how well you develop a finger skill for playing the drums. It will take some getting used to, but once you are able to throw together a pattern, you can find the best finger combination that fits you.

A really cool feature that DigiDrummer incorporated into it, is the ability to record the beats you play and save them to your phone. As a bonus, once you have them saved, you can select the overdub button. What this allows you to do is actually record a beat over the one you have already saved. It provides you the ability to make more complex drum beats that would be probably be impossible to pull off on a single take. It is a very simple task to apply as well. Simply go into setting and adjust the overdubbing to the on position and you’re set to go.

Except for a few skin selectors and on off switches, there aren’t too many settings to mess with. The only other option you can toy with is the drum roll pace. This will determine how fast or slow a drum roll will sound when you perform one. The drum roll pace can range between one and nine.

One of the nicest things about DigiDrummer, is the sound quality. Obviously, you can adjust the volume up and down with the button on the side of the iPhone, but the sound of each drum is solid. Each drum beat has its own unique sound, from electronic drums to your basic acoustic; and they all sound like their actual counterparts.

The only thing that would’ve been nice to see is the addition of a metronome. It’s nice to create your own beat, but if it’s not on time, then it kind of takes away from your creation. Perhaps it will be something that will be thrown into an update down the road, but for now, you will have to make your beats without it.

So you may be asking yourself, who exactly is this application for? Or, I have no idea how to play drums, will it show me? No, DigiDrummer won’t show you really any basics of how to play drums, it’s simply a drum pad, all of the creation and methods are up to you. That doesn’t mean somebody who has never played drums, can’t enjoy this. I have little to no drum talent, and still I find this a cool thing to mess around with. Another cool feature is the ability to play a song on your iPod, and then open up DigiDrummer and play along with it. That is a good way to build timing and even a little strategy. Also, if you’re not very creative, you can use this method to just jam out on.

DigiDrummer, is an extremely solid application for the iPhone. You get a wide variety of drum sounds, great responsiveness from the touch pads, and solid sound quality. The fact that you can record and save your custom drum beats is a nice little touch (no pun intended). It doesn’t give you much more than simply a fun time killer by playing drums, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at a bench and started tapping my fingers to a drum beat. Now I have an application I can actually record that drum beat to.

Digidrummer is a paid application, and runs for about $1.99. It can be purchased from the iTunes application store.