Postage is a virtual postcard creator, Pac-Man is a pop culture icon, iVideoCamera is a video recorder for older iPhone owners and Kindle is the world's biggest selling e-book reader - and they're all covered in this week's iPhone App Reviews.
Postage
Postcard apps have been around on the iPhone since the App Store's launch last year, and that's no surprise - it fits right in with the 'there's an app for that' philosophy. What is surprising, however, is that most of these apps are nothing more than just downright tacky, with a limited selection and cheaply made graphics that El Jobso himself would cringe at the sight of. Postage is supposedly a shining beacon of hope for the 'e-card' category - at a higher price, they promise a beautiful range of cards, dozens of effects and much better sharing options than the rest.
Considering the app won an Apple Design Award at WWDC this year (and even just by looking at Postage's beautiful icon and gorgeous user interface) it's pretty obvious that Postage is the best of the 'e-card' apps available right now. There are more than sixty designs split into simple, holiday, frame, card, love, cutout, travel, comic, announcement, organic, letter, mum and dad and even Halloween categories, all of which are shown as soon as you open the app. If you have to exit the app, Postage remembers exactly where you were before you left, so as soon as you go in again you'll be right where you left off.
What's really special about Postage is the plethora of different styles and effects you have to choose from while you're customising your postcard. When you paste a photo in, you can make it black and white, brighten it, make it glow, add a sepia tone, change the contrast, soften, invert or add a red, green or blue filter to it. When you write on your card, you can easily select different fonts, sizes and formatting options such as centred text and colours. Finally, when you've finished putting together your postcard, you can choose to share it via Email, Facebook or Twitter - or just save it to your Camera Roll for later use.
Postage, simply put, is the first postcard app for the iPhone done right. It's fast, it's easy and it's beautiful. With Christmas less than ten days away, the developers at RogueSheep have also put out a dedicated 'Holiday' edition of the Postage app which is worth a look if you (like me) always struggle to find the right card. Though the sent 'e-cards' that Postage creates aren't as 'interactive' as some other services may promise, they're much more eye-catching and pleasing to the eye than anything else I've ever seen before.
Version reviewed: 2.2
Price: $5.99
Developer: RogueSheep
Size: 24.7MB
Category: Photography
App Store
PAC-MAN Championship Edition
Reviewed by David Kudrev
I’ve been an on-and-off fan of Pac-Man since I first saw it at the arcades in a Timezone in the Sydney CBD. It was addictive to say the least, but it can’t and won’t ever persuade me to betray one of my all-time favourites in the arcade.
Bandai Namco has recently released Pac-Man Championship Edition for the iPhone platform, which I was pretty excited about when I found out. I predicted that it would be just Pac-Man with slightly enhanced graphics. I was half-right.
So how does this version of Pac-Man differ to the classic which we all have grown up to love and idolise in gaming culture? Well, the graphics have been enhanced in certain places (lighting from ghosts, sparks coming off of Pac-Man when grinding along the edges of the maze walls.
Plenty of missions like for example, collect certain fruit before the time runs out, or eat 2-4 consecutive ghosts in a row, and so forth. There are hundreds of missions, I haven’t gone through them all yet, no doubt will be on the bus this week! I noticed also that there is an expansion pack already available with 100 extra missions, and the challenge mode getting unlocked.
The game itself feels solid, and once again with plenty of different control options from the classic two-joystick to thumbpads.
At the moment it is on an introductory special for AU$3.99, I would say is worth it, if you thought Pac-Man was and still is an entertaining game, and with this version offering new challenges to brush up on your skills, should you ever find an arcade cabinet of it near you. But for now, relive a classic title in the palm of your hands.
Version reviewed: 1.0.0
Price: $3.99
Developer: Namco Networks America
Size: 52.5MB
Category: Games
App Store
iVideoCamera
Exciting Tour of a MacBook Pro from Rémy Numa on Vimeo.
When Phil Schiller announced the iPhone 3GS at WWDC this year, there were really only four key features that separated it from the iPhone 3G: Speed, Battery and a better, video recording camera - a feature that iPhone users have been scrambling for since the original iPhone was first released. Unfortunately, we didn't all have the time or money to upgrade at release, and since Apple refused to build in the feature to older iPhones, iPhone 3G users found themselves video-camera-less (excluding jailbroken phones, but that's another story) - so it came as quite a surprise to me just yesterday when it was reported that iVideoCamera was accepted into the App Store.
Rather unsurprisingly, the $1 app comes with quite a few hefty limitations. You can't record anything over one minute, resolution is at a measly 160x213, and perhaps worst of all, you only get three frames per second of video. Yikes. Having said that, the developers are completely upfront about all of this and they claim to be working on all of the above for subsequent app updates. As you can see in the short video above, it's hard to get anything more than a glimpse of detail.
So how about sharing your video with the world? It's a fairly slow and painful process. The good news is you can send your video to the Camera Roll, giving you the same trim and playback features that 3GS owners enjoy - but with good news comes bad news, and that's that you can't share your videos with the Photos app. Instead, you're forced to you iVideoCamera's sharing functionality - which is far from world-class. Having used Vimeo to upload my 'Exciting tour of a MacBook Pro', I can't speak for the sharing using YouTube or Facebook, but Vimeo sharing hasn't (obviously) been optimised at all for the iPhone, so logging in and authorising iVideoCamera with it is difficult on the iPhone's screen. Personally, I would recommend saving videos to the Camera Roll or emailing them so that you can use the proper desktop interface on your Mac.
If you want a proper, decent and tolerable video recorder on your iPhone, it's time to upgrade to a 3GS. If you want a slightly less proper, decent and tolerable video recorder on your iPhone and you're happy to jailbreak, Cycorder is your solution. If you want a considerably less proper, decent and tolerable video recorder that does work natively on your non-jailbroken iPhone, iVideoCamera seems to be the best option for you at the moment. At $1, it's not a huge loss if you hate it anyway.
Version reviewed: 1
Price: $1.19
Developer: Laan Labs
Size: 6.4MB
Category: Photography
App Store
Kindle for iPhone
It's been available on the US iTunes Store for months now, but with the arrival of the actual Kindle in Australia comes the Kindle for iPhone app too. In this review, I'm not going to compare the reading experience to that of a real Kindle because, well, I don't have a Kindle, and it's already a given that reading on a proper e-book device is going to be far better anyway. As a free app, Kindle for iPhone essentially serves (from a marketing perspective) as an advertisement for the insanely popular reader that Amazon sells, with the added bonus of being a one-stop shop for reading on the iPhone.
Kindle for iPhone is about as basic as an e-book app can be. Even downloading and purchasing books from Amazon is done in the web browser (as opposed to an in-app purchase) because Amazon wants to keep all the profits and not be restricted by the App Store gatekeepers. It's still easy to go and get your books though, and they download within seconds to your iPhone, thanks to Whispersync. Of course, that's assuming you've already got an Amazon account and you've 'registered' your iPhone to it. Once downloaded, just tap on a book and away you go.
There are a few options that can be selected according to your individual reading preferences. Text size can be altered and if you prefer to read white text on a black background (or sepia style for that totally authentic 'real-book' feel) you can set that too. The slider down at the bottom of the screen is extremely sensitive, and I often found it to be borderline unusable - but pages load without delay unless you're skipping through them rapidly to get to a certain point. Obviously you can't copy and paste text, but using the same controls (albeit slightly touchy) you can make a quick note of a certain point of the book or highlight it for later reference.
It should not be forgotten that this is a free app, and the ability to read full books on your iPhone or iPod touch is exciting. What this app really wants to achieve is more sales of the Kindle to international customers though, and to be honest, that truly is the best device to read your Amazon e-books on in the long run. If I could recommend a nicer iPhone app for books, Classics is far sleeker - but it's held back by a limited library of books. Until Apple's I-can't-believe-it's-not-in-existence tablet makes its way out of Steve's vault and into our hands, Kindle for iPhone provides the biggest range of e-books on an Apple device, ever.
Version reviewed: 1.3
Price: Free
Developer: Amazon.com
Size: 4.2MB
Category: Books
App Store
iPhone App Reviews - Postage, Pac-Man, iVideoCamera & Kindle!