An eighth grader from Utah has created an iPhone app that managed to knock Angry Birds Seasons from the top free apps in the Apple App store.
His app is called Bubble Ball and it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times since its launch in late December. He developed it in Lua using the Corona SDK and released it to both the iTunes app store and the Android Marketplace. It’s a pretty basic game, with simple graphics and gameplay.
There are more details over at Venturebeat - it’s a pretty amazing effort for a 14 year old and speaks volumes about his career to come.
I’ve finally found a great solution to avoid frozen hands using my iPhone this winter. Etre have released Five Point Gloves made specifically for touch-screen devices. The fingertips are made of specially designed conductive yarn so the capacitive layer on your device is activated from the conducted electrical charge in your fingertips. In other words, you can use all ten fingers and thumbs on your touch-screen device with these gloves on. No more freezing hands to answer a phone call!
They ship from the UK and they’re not available until the end of January unfortunately – winter will nearly be over by then!
I’m way too much of a horror wuss to play this app, but Papa Sangre has just been released in the app store and is getting some awesome reviews. It’s described as “the first binaural real-time, 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device”.
I see it as a game that really forces you to use your imagination as everything happens via sound.
“Sound is hugely under-rated and brings a massive amount to gaming… Sounds is often far more important than people give it credit for.“ — Paul Bennun, Director of Digital
Papa Sangre is a first person thriller, and you navigate through levels with various missions to try to bypass monsters that respond to sound.
What I find really interesting, especially in light of some projects we’ve been working on recently, is it took 73 weeks to create – that’s about a year and a half, with a core staff of 5, and an extended team of 10. The game took three times longer than the team had planned, although going through the design and development process gave a wealth of new insights. Again, I can definitely relate to this project – we’re working in such a new industry, there’s so much to be learnt with every project.
I think my choices will be a bit different to the rest of pinch/zoom – I’m not really into games, I’d still rather curl up with a book than an iPad, I love paper newspapers and magazines and I would never line up at the Apple store on release day.
So saying, these are the apps that have blown my mind, hooked me, distracted me, and I can’t live without.
My favourite part of living in London was Saturday mornings with Weekend Guardian and a cup of tea and immersing myself in it for the morning. Sadly you can only get the Guardian in the UK, so when the Guardian iPhone app was released it made my year. It has most of the content from the paper copy, and you can personalise your experience – I always go straight to my “favourites” section with my favourite sections and journalists.
I’ve just noticed they’re moving to a subscription model – I’m happy to pay a subscription for it, this is definitely an icon on the first screen of my iPhone and I can’t live without it.
I’ve already said I’m not a gamer but Angry Birds single-handedly distracted me from a 3 hour airport wait, and then a 6 hour flight. Damn those smirking pigs, I will get them in the end. Such a simple concept, and really nicely done. I do doubt their physics though…
I’m a terrible photographer – I take photos of everything but they are never very interesting as I don’t line things up or frame them, I just snap away. Quadcam allows me to take interesting photos by taking multiple shots and adding effects. I’m sure most photography purists will scoff and say I should just learn to take better photos, but anyone who has been forced to sit through me showing them photos is grateful for this app.
I’ve always hated that most newspapers don’t publish their weekend magazine online as that’s usually where the most interesting long stories are – a good article is 6-8 pages long, which does suck to read on a computer screen. Instapaper is bringing back long-form reading – I just add stories I find and then read them later on iPad when I have time to absorb them.
Yeah yeah yeah, insert facebook gripe here. I know it’s daggy but I love Facebook, and I predominately access it via mobile device. Even though I live 10,000 miles from home I still know what’s happening in my friend’s lives on a daily, and even hourly, basis. I feel connected to them, and them to me – while I’m waiting for my morning coffee I can flick through the Facebook app and feel like I’m still a part of life back home. I think that’s priceless.
It has taken a lot of lively office debate but we have managed to narrow down our choices of our top apps of 2010. In putting together our lists we’ve discovered not only the wealth of apps out there, but how many of them have transformed our lives in both small daily ways as well as big mind-changing ways, and really highlighted the difference in how we all use our mobile devices.
Proving that long-form reading is alive and well, and that we have all been craving intelligent, well written articles. We really do have the attention span to read.
Remember when you used to get into arguments over the origins of tipping, or which year that obscure band put out that obscure record? Wikipanion puts an end to all that by allowing for instant proving of points and immediate crowing over being right.
It was a hard task to narrow down our top 5 (what, no Angry Birds?), but posts from all of us will be following with more awesome apps that have changed the way we interact with our devices.
A recent report from eMarketer shows that American consumers are spending more time on mobile devices than reading newspapers and magazines combined. Time spent on mobile devices increased 28% to reach an average of 50 minutes per day.
To compare, the average time spent reading print newspapers was 30 minutes, and 20 minutes was spent reading magazines.
I’m actually surprised that the number is so high for newspaper reading – I am the biggest consumer of newspapers I know and even I wouldn’t spend 30 minutes a day reading newspapers, particularly not paper copies.
I’ve finally found a great solution to avoid frozen hands using my iPhone this winter. Etre have released 
A recent report from