Less than three years after the launch of Apple’s handset, Final Fantasy, the role-playing classic that practically defined its genre, has arrived for the iPhone. And with the exception of a few tweaks that could be made, has arrived in fine style. A port of the original game, Final Fantasy places you in the role of the Light Warriors, four youths prophesied to vanquish evil throughout the land by lighting the four elemental orbs they carry in order to restore peace to the land. Like the original, you’ll fight monsters in random encounters, work on leveling up, buy or find new weapons and armor, learn new spells and complete quests to advance the storyline. Even if the idea of playing Final Fantasy on the iPhone is a bit strange, Square-Enix ported it well. The touchscreen controls are responsive, the graphics are crisp and inviting and top-notch music makes the most out of the iPhone’s speaker as well as a nearby pair of headphones. Start the game, name your characters and it’s easy to dive into the initial quests, gain experience points and begin enjoying the title for what it’s worth. Still, there are some rough edges to work out. The game’s frame rate, though fairly consistent, can become jerky at times. Occasional crashes to the iPhone’s home screen make you glad the save function works as well as it does

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Final Fantasy

Where Final Fantasy I defined the role-playing genre for the late 80s/early 90s, Final Fantasy II took the core idea and experimented with what could be done with it. That being the case, the classic sequel has come to the iPhone and iPod touch in outstanding form with only a few wrinkles to iron out. Like Final Fantasy I, Final Fantasy II puts you in control of a group of four young heroes whose parents were killed during an army invasion by the nearby empire of Palamecia. Upon waking from the battle, three of the four heroes join the rebellion in an effort to find the fourth, the story heading in a new direction from there. Final Fantasy II’s battle and play system picks up where the original left off. In lieu of a traditional role-playing system in which your characters gain experience points towards the next level, Final Fantasy II builds upon this, a character’s skills growing depending on what weapons or tactics they used. Love to use dual axes for your fighter character? Keep this up and this branch of their fighting abilities will grow while other fighting styles will remain at their previous levels. Where Square-Enix got it right, they really got it right. Great graphics meet terrific sound and music that makes the most of the iPhone’s speaker or your headphones. A good storyline injects multiple twists and turns, smooth controls, the save feature is reliable and a focused combat system pushes you to learn your enemies’ weaknesses quickly, then use whatever spells or items your party has in its possession to cripple them in order to survive.

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Final Fantasy II

A MacBook is one beautiful slice of technology, and it deserves only the most stylish accessories. With its graceful curves, the BookArc stand from TwelveSouth sleekly holds and displays your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air while also reducing its footprint on your desk to only 10×4 inches. Most laptop stands we’ve tested are built to raise your open notebook’s screen up to eye level for a more ergonomic experience. But Mac laptops have that ingenious “lid-closed” mode, which lets you connect an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, then close the lid and wake the Mac back up by tapping a key. This setup can actually speed up your Mac too. With the lid closed, all of your graphics card’s video memory is used for the external display, instead of being split between the external and the notebook display. In fact, we attached our 2.4GHz MacBook Pro to a 23-inch Cinema Display and tested this with graphics-intensive Photoshop CS4. Our Photoshop Actions test was 22 percent faster with the Mac’s lid closed versus using the open laptop as an extended display. But aside from those speed gains, the well-made BookArc simply looks great on our desk. It even inspired us to de-clutter the rest of our workspace, which–if you consider how many products move through here in a given week–can be classified as a minor miracle. It comes with three silicone cushions to fit a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or slim MacBook Air, and the rubber feet keep the whole BookArc from sliding around. Occasionally, the act of sticking our MacBook Pro in the slot would dislodge the cushion a bit, so we had to straighten it with one hand while holding the ’Book with the other, but that’s a minor quibble since it didn’t happen very often

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TwelveSouth BookArc

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac. This time, we review 4×4 Jam, A Doodle Fly, Business Card Reader, Gorillacam, Magnetic Joe, Magnetic Joe 2, Neocell Fighters Evolution, Noise.io LE, Rasta Monkey, Samurai: Way of the Warrior, and Ultimate Video

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iPhone apps weekly digest: The day Mr Mediocre came to town and got smashed in the face by Gorillacam

Last year I signed up for a landline phone for my office. I wish I hadn’t for two reasons: 1. No one calls me. 2. Toktumi’s Line2 iPhone app, which adds a second, distinct number to my iPhone. With a service like Line2, there’s no need for a physical phone at my place of work. I give my

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One iPhone, Two Different Numbers, Courtesy Of Toktumi’s Line2 App [Review]

Apparently, you can secure venture-capital funding and launch a successful business all from an iPhone.   Case Study: Amos Winbush Occupation: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, CyberSynchs Gear: iPhone 3GS loaded with Citibank (to keep track of startup finances), Facebook (to keep track of CyberSynchs’ fan page and connect with fellow entrepreneurs), and Twitter (to stay abreast of business news and keep followers informed) Who knew that Pret A Manger at East 17th and Broadway could be such a locus of wheeling and dealing? Listen, we know you love your MacBook. And we love ours. But consider what a hassle it can be when you’re working on the road. A MacBook has to be painstakingly removed from a messenger bag or backpack and plugged in regularly for power (good luck with finding that A/C adapter). And you can’t really use it unless you’re sitting down. And you have to manually connect to whatever Wi-Fi hotspot you can find. And then there are the interminable delays while you boot and launch applications. Plus your MacBook apparatus weighs you down mightily–five pounds or more, and that’s on a good day. Yet for most professionals–especially at the executive level–getting work done without a computer is foolhardy at best, impossible at worst. The notebook is a necessary evil that represents a basic cost of doing business when you aren’t anchored to a desk. Amos Winbush took that conventional wisdom and slapped it in the face. When he launched CyberSynchs, a company that makes data-synchronization software, in 2008, he did it with little more than the iPhone in his pocket

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Wireless Workflow, Emphatically Redefined

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iDevice Apps Today, Navigon announced another App Store first with MyRegion, a guidance app with in-app map purchases in the U.S. MyRegions has all of the great features from the North American version of MobileNavigator that made it the best navigation app on the App Store. But what makes MyRegion different is that you can buy the maps that you need, when you need them, from inside of the app. Navigon’s MyRegion splits North America into 4 regions: Eastern, Central and Western U.S. and Canada. If you’re planning on doing most of your driving in one or two of these regions, then the MyRegion app is a great choice. If instead you are on the border of two of these regions, or if you drive very long distances, then you are better off sticking with Navigon’s MobileNavigator for North America. Both are great choices with tons of features. MyRegion actually gets one of the Mobile Navigator 1.5 features early: MyRoutes. This feature offers more flexibility in navigation by presenting you with more than one route when you enter a destination. MobileNavigator users will have to wait a little longer for this update to hit the app store later this spring. Navigon currently has introductory pricing on all of this goodness. The app and first region are $5 off at $24.99, and each additional region is $2 off at $12.99. Plus, you can get Traffic Live (real time traffic data) for just $19.99 ($5 off). I have to hand it to Navigon once again; they’re ahead of the pack as usual, showing other guidance app companies what they need to do next

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Buy only the maps you need with Navigon’s MyRegion GPS

Task management apps exploded with the introduction of the iPhone App Store, and leading the pack was Cultured Code’s Things , which earned an Editor’s Choice award from us back in late 2008. The iPhone version of Things had been adapted from the previous Mac iteration, and though it successfully distilled the essence of the popular program into a portable package, Cultured Code had to significantly simplify the way Things worked to fit it on the iPhone/iPod touch screen. But now, with the iPad and its glossy 9.7-inch screen on the horizon, Cultured Code is closing in on a version of Things that’ll find the happy middle ground between the two versions, pairing a touch interface like that of the iPhone with the screen real estate of a much larger device. "We have the desire to show users more information. Now with the iPad, we have much more screen space available, so now the information can be displayed again," says Werner Jainek, co-owner of Cultured Code and developer of Things for iPad. "We think it’s a huge advantage with the bigger screen." Jainek says getting the iPad project off the ground initially was a snap, since the shared OS between the two devices allowed them to reuse much of the core code from the iPhone version. This has allowed Cultured Code to focus on refining the user interface to take full advantage of the large iPad screen, which eliminates the need to drill in and out of menus as you would on the iPhone. As such, Things users will be able to pop between multiple lists with ease, utilize the new popover windows (which you’ll be seeing a lot of within iPad apps), and even access additional navigational controls when using the iPad in landscape orientation. Without actual iPad units in their hands during development, Jainek admits the biggest challenge has been developing an intuitive user interface, though it’s not for a lack of trying. "It’s pretty hard to actually see how Apple has designed user interfaces for its applications," he admits. "We have mined them all — we have looked at every screenshot in very much detail to figure out exactly how they did it." "We really don’t want to make any mistakes, and [want to] follow in the path that Apple has led," Jainek continues. "Not having a real device to play with is a limiting factor, definitely. For example, the iWork apps — I would be very interested to see how they solved certain problems, UI-wise, so that we can actually copy that for our application, or at least be inspired by it and see what we can come up with." However, despite having to work from screenshots and secondhand impressions, Cultured Code says they were greatly inspired by what Apple showed of its own iPad apps, especially with the Calendar and Contacts, which Jainek says use "real-world metaphors in [the] user interface." "Apple really put forth that paradigm that what you’re looking at are really objects behind a piece of glass that you’re manipulating with your finger," explains Jainek.

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Cultured Code Talks About Bringing Things to the iPad

Task management apps exploded with the introduction of the iPhone App Store, and leading the pack was Cultured Code’s Things , which earned an Editor’s Choice award from us back in late 2008. The iPhone version of Things had been adapted from the previous Mac iteration, and though it successfully distilled the essence of the popular program into a portable package, Cultured Code had to significantly simplify the way Things worked to fit it on the iPhone/iPod touch screen. But now, with the iPad and its glossy 9.7-inch screen on the horizon, Cultured Code is closing in on a version of Things that’ll find the happy middle ground between the two versions, pairing a touch interface like that of the iPhone with the screen real estate of a much larger device. "We have the desire to show users more information. Now with the iPad, we have much more screen space available, so now the information can be displayed again," says Werner Jainek, co-owner of Cultured Code and developer of Things for iPad. "We think it’s a huge advantage with the bigger screen." Jainek says getting the iPad project off the ground initially was a snap, since the shared OS between the two devices allowed them to reuse much of the core code from the iPhone version. This has allowed Cultured Code to focus on refining the user interface to take full advantage of the large iPad screen, which eliminates the need to drill in and out of menus as you would on the iPhone. As such, Things users will be able to pop between multiple lists with ease, utilize the new popover windows (which you’ll be seeing a lot of within iPad apps), and even access additional navigational controls when using the iPad in landscape orientation. Without actual iPad units in their hands during development, Jainek admits the biggest challenge has been developing an intuitive user interface, though it’s not for a lack of trying. "It’s pretty hard to actually see how Apple has designed user interfaces for its applications," he admits. "We have mined them all — we have looked at every screenshot in very much detail to figure out exactly how they did it." "We really don’t want to make any mistakes, and [want to] follow in the path that Apple has led," Jainek continues. "Not having a real device to play with is a limiting factor, definitely.

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Cultured Code Talks About Bringing Things to the iPad

The recent spike in sales of vinyl and turntables brings a warm glow to our hearts. We love our technology, but vinyl is just a beautiful format. Having said that, vinyl records aren’t perfect. They’re bulky, fragile, and easily scratched, and those milk crates filled with your block-rocking jams can get heavy. Fortunately, DJ software is a rock-solid alternative for amateurs and pros, and one of our favorites, djay (5 out of 5 stars, Jan/10), just got a sweet dedicated hardware controller, the Vestax Spin. Because algoriddim (djay’s developer) and Vestax worked together to make the Spin the go-to controller for djay, you’re ready to bring the beats in djay as soon as you plug in the controller. The Spin controls nearly all of djay’s onscreen options in an all-in-one hardware package. Rather than unintuitively pressing keys on your MacBook and clicking away at onscreen turntables, this hardware controller aims to replicate the feel of rocking the wheels of steel. The “turntables” are two metal jog wheels with glowing lights underneath them. They’re touch-sensitive, and if you’ve ever bumped a turntable with your coat sleeve, you’ll realize how helpful it is that Spin only responds to your fingers. The mechanisms are smooth, and for every two turns of the physical jog wheel, the onscreen turntable spins once

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Vestax Spin