Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iDevice Apps , Originals Wow, there were a ton of free apps this week new to the App Store. Lots of camera utilities. Thankfully, there’s more. Why don’t you check out my list? Gibson Learn & Master Guitar Application – What a title! Gibson is known for great guitars, but a great guitar does not a great song make (not alone, anyway).  So, they’re trying to get you motivated to get better at playing that six string.  This app comes with a Chromatic Tuner with alternate tunings, a metronome to keep you on time, a chord library and some free video lessons from Steve Krenz. Plus, the app has a very appealing interface. This is a definite download for any guitar players (or wannabes) out there. Boxed FREE – A fresh take on the four color connect and remove style of games. This one has you drawing a square with all four corners landing on the same color anywhere on the screen.  Then all of the blocks in between vanish.  I like the idea. Plus, it’s OpenFeint enabled, always a good thing. Note Recorder Free – This app one-ups other audio recording apps by letting you draw notes along with the recordings. And it’s synced, so you can scrub back through your notes and listen to what was going on while you were scribbling. Your iPhone might be a bit small for this sort of task, but you can zoom in and out, and who knows, this might prove more useful on an iPad in the future

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Free apps roundup for March 5th, 2010

Section: Mac Software , Games , Reviews Category: Action Developer: Lucasarts Mac Port: Aspyr Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.8 (Leopard) or Mac OS X v10.6.2 (Snow Leopard), Intel Core 2 Duo (Dual-Core) 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 25GB + 1GB Swap File, ATI Radeon HD2600 or NVidia Geforce 8600 video card, 256MB RAM, mouse Review Computer: 2.2GHz 13” Macbook Pro, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM Network Feature: No Processor Compatibility: Intel only Price: $39.99 Availability: Out now The problem with the Jedi is that they’re hypocrites. They kill, they’re trained to kill, they carry quite possibly the greatest hand-to-hand weapon ever imagined, but we collectively pretend they’re really pacifists who kill thousands of Stormtroopers in defense. And they say they feel kinda bad about it (when asked). The Force Unleashed gets around this rather neatly by making you a Sith apprentice. Specifically, you’re Darth Vader’s apprentice, being trained by him to assassinate the Emperor. So “moral conflict” doesn’t enter into the training manual much. Force Unleashed is at its best when it’s engaged in wall-to-wall mayhem, and there’s a lot of that. Sent to assassinate three Jedi as part of your graduation, you run through an amazingly rendered world, killing everyone (and I mean everyone ) you come in contact with. No one is spared as you cackle with glee, using your lightsaber and Force powers to kill, kill, kill. The game has no upgrade mechanic beyond learning and improving new Force and lightsaber attacks, which feels about right—once you learn how to kill by shooting lighting from your hands, why would you want a blaster? And while there are hidden Jedi/Sith Holocrons (glowing boxes) to help you upgrade your skills, there are no health packs—you heal yourself by killing. Seriously. Any time you kill anything, you get health back based on how tough it was.

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Appletell reviews Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition

Apple has been criticized in the past for not doing enough to ensure that labor conditions in its supplier factories were up to international humanitarian standards. Today, it released its 2010 Supplier Responsibility report (PDF), in which it provides the details of audits it conducts at those supplier facilities, in order to gauge the degree to which violations are or aren’t taking place. This time around, the report details no less than 17 violations at its supplier facilities, and more than a few of them are fairly serious indeed. Underage worker serious, in fact. Apple’s inspectors found that 11 employees were employed prior to being of legal working age in the countries in question. According to the report, the age issue was moot at the time the audit was conducted, since the employees in question had either reached legal age by then, or were no longer employed at the supplier. Kind of convenient if you ask me that all of these violations just happened to be past offenses and required no action. Plus, I can’t imagine Apple’s audits come as a surprise to suppliers, so who knows the extent to which the violations might truly go. Besides the age violations, inspectors from Apple also found that more than 50 of its supplier’s factories forced employers to work more than 60 hours in a given week, a maximum cap set by Apple themselves

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Apple Supplier Audit Reveals Child Labor, More Violations

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. If you’re one of our more easterly readers, you’re probably getting sick of the stuff. Unless you’re a skier or a snowboarder or are inexplicably into curling. If you’re out a little further west, it’s just the thing for the slopes and you wish you were getting a little of that east coast action. And if you’re up north in Vancouver, you’ve been seeing it all the time. And in honor of the 2010 games, Mac|Life has a full slate of medals to hand out in the best writing of the week. Of course they’re all gold, silly. It’s Mac|Life, after all. Features: – 15 Awesome Google Services You Never Knew Existed – Will they stop at nothing? The constant stream of new products and services offered by the company that promises to "don’t be evil" come fast and furious with new stuff every half-second. We take a look at some of their lesser known services that just might auto-complete your life. – The Gregory Brothers Interview: Auto-Tune the News and Other Blatant Acts of Awesomeness – Seriously, need we say more

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In Case You Missed It: Feb. 21-28

If you made a Venn diagram (you know, with the overlapping circles) of people who love point-and-click adventures, people intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci, and people who don’t get carsick, everyone in the overlapping area absolutely needs to play The Secrets of Da Vinci. But anyone else might find this game’s flaws too much to take. Our biggest problem was the camera, which is frustrating because the game’s 3D environments–a faithful re-creation of the Clos Lucé, Leonardo’s final residence, as it looked in 1522–are so beautiful. They’re full of rich color and detail, right down to Leonardo’s paintings and drawings hanging from the walls. And while the simple controls let you move the camera by moving the mouse, we found ourselves getting queasy after an hour or so of playtime on even the slowest setting. Unlocking da Vinci’s celestial globe only reveals more mysteries. If that doesn’t make you flee, you’ll play as Valdo, searching Leonardo’s estate for a missing notebook on behalf of a mysterious patron. But your quest keeps you bouncing between the same handful of locations again and again to collect items needed to solve puzzles, making the gameplay feel like a slog. The puzzles, based on da Vinci’s inventions and artwork, are engaging and can usually be solved without too much frustration as long as you have the required items in your inventory–and you can find them. The inventory system is a mess; items are added to its five pages in the order you collect them, but as you use them, their empty slots are filled with the next item you pick up. Virtually every time we wanted something, we had to page through the entire inventory, mousing over each item’s icon to read its name. As you grapple with that while searching for Leonardo’s notebook, you get information from your own notes, papers you find that belonged to Leonardo, and conversations with the other two characters, Madam Babou and the caretaker Saturnin. The choices you have are affected by your morality score–if you try to deceive Babou, your “diabolic meter” rises, for example, while feeding milk to a cat raises your “angelic meter.” But you can also spend points earned by completing the puzzles to rebalance your morality, making the whole system pretty pointless

Excerpt from:
The Secrets of Da Vinci

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iDevice Apps , Originals This week is brought to you by iTunes Preview. This means that every time you click one of the links on my list, instead of a useless blank page kicking you to iTunes, you’ll first get a snapshot of the app’s page on the App Store right in your browser. A useful feature for sure. Now you can browse these apps at work. Don’t worry, I won’t tell. Directionary – Homesick?  This app will remind you which direction your favorite places on the planet are (provided you have an iDevice with a compass ie. iPhone 3GS).  It also displays how far away those destinations are in meters, which is about as useful as a distance measured in Cheerios.  I just love the simple design of this app.  Very nice. GetColorsAR – This app allows you to extract color information from the real world!  You could just take a picture and then copy the color by hand, but why!?  Just tap something on the screen of your iPhone and the app will give you a color code to the color you’ve tapped

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Free apps roundup for February 5th, 2010

Sick and tired of all the crappy wannabe television streaming devices on your iPhone and iPod Touch? FloTV has a dedicated broadcast network of high quality video that emulates broadcast television. Mophie and FloTV have teamed up together to create an attachable broadcast antenna for your mobile devices, so you can hone in on live television anywhere you are. Stay tuned for this exciting product later this year. Note: By default the video player is muted, turn up the volume before pressing play.        

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CES Video: FloTV on the iPhone & iPod touch

If you’re sick of waiting for your favorite app to endure Apple’s long, drawn out approval process, then Your App Shop is available for all the developers who need a little push in the right direction. This shop is totally legal and independant of iTunes and it does not require a hacked phone for access. Plus, the creators can do some pretty cool slight-of-hand tricks. Note: By default the video player is muted, turn up the volume before pressing play.      

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CES Video: Your App Shop – Alternative App Store for the iPhone

Section: iPod + iTunes , iPod touch , iPhone , iPhone , iPhone SDK & Apps , Originals Voice technology is the wave of the future, and behind that Wave is Nuance . They are behind nearly every implementation of voice recognition of which you are aware. They’re everywhere; from the voice systems at AT&T and Vonage, to MacSpeech, GPS units, in-car units, and so much more. I sat down with a few of the guys at Nuance to have a little chat. Basically, they gave me the lowdown on how all of this voice technology relates to Apple products.  You might already know of their Dragon apps on the iPhone.  Their dictation app allows you to jot a quick note and copy it or send it as a text or e-mail.  Then there’s their search app.  Not only will it search with your voice, but it even has a killer carousel interface for choosing your search service.  And remarkably, they’re both free, and will be for some time.  I’m sure at some point they’ll get sick of just giving it away. But that’s not all.  Nuance is behind some of the most used voice systems known.  They provide the tech for Ford’s Sync and other similar automobile systems, including Mercedes, GM and BMW.  BMW’s system even has a newer way of inputting your destination.  You don’t have to answer prompts like “Street?” or “City?” you can just speak the entire thing.  You probably won’t be surprised to hear they also provide speech technology for nearly all of the major GPS navigation companies for both speech recognition and text to speech.  Oh yes, they also do something involving voice control, but I shouldn’t say much more about that. So, what’s all this leading to?  Speech technology is one of those things that makes you feel like you’re in the future.  Perhaps someday we won’t even have to know how to type quickly because the computers might just listen to what we say.  Dare I say they’ll likely even know what we’re thinking?  Crazy.  Sadly, we aren’t there yet, but Nuance is constantly improving their technology. You can look for this technology to be coming in iPhone apps during the year.  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of additional voice features for TomTom, Magellan or even Navigon’s iPhone apps. In the meantime, just keep using the Dragon Apps, as they are a steel at the low, low price of free. Future upgrades don’t look to be getting more features just yet, but Nuance is determined to keep tweaking and improving their recognition engine, which—if you didn’t know—actually gets better the more you use it.  You might not have known this, since it doesn’t require you to create a profile, ever. Download [ Dragon Dictation ] Download [ Dragon Search ] Full Story » | Written by Jake Gaecke for Appletell . | Comment on this Article »

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CES 2010: One on one with Nuance [speech technology]

I’m really sorry. I do realize these tablet rumors are becoming tiresome, but you know, don’t you, that they’re going to get a lot worse in the coming weeks as we approach January 26 and Apple’s not-yet-officially-confirmed-but-unofficially-will-definitely-happen media event? The latest tidbits come from Fox News’ Clayton Morris and (somewhat unexpectedly given how he should know better) an ex-Apple, ex-Google China senior executive. Let’s get started… Fox’s Clayton Morris writes that he’s been talking with his very own private mole inside Apple HQ about the as-yet unconfirmed media event (first reported by the Financial Times) and has this to offer us: While nothing official has been handed down from the notoriously tight-lipped company, my source took the Financial Times report one step further by saying this event will focus on the mobility space, meaning we’ll see something related to the iPhone/Touch product line. Could this be the announcement of the mythical Apple tablet we’ve been hearing so much about? Well if it isn’t, if El Jobso doesn’t announce a tablet, if, instead, the whole event is nothing more than a high-profile sales pitch for a slightly-higher-capacity iPod shuffle, I’ll be torn between shedding bitter tears, or laughing myself sick. Maybe both. “Focus on the mobility space,” eh? How charmingly vague. You have to wonder why these “sources” are always so…unhelpful. I mean, a real, genuine, worthwhile secret mole should be leaking specific, valuable information, right? That’s what moles are supposed to do, it’s in the job description. But when it comes to Apple’s moles, this just doesn’t happen, does it?

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Rumor Has It: January Event “Confirmed,” More on the Tablet