Category Archives: News

iPhone apps to help you follow the Olympics

The Games of the XXX Olympiad started on Friday with grandiose opening ceremonies in London, England that included a long list of notable English figures like the Queen of England, Mr. Bean and Paul McCartney.

Now that the big kickoff celebration is over, it’s time to start the competition — and we’ve got a list of apps to help you keep track of the Olympic events on your iOS device.

NYT: Apple is considering a stake in Twitter

The New York Times is reporting that Apple might invest some of its considerable cash reserves in Twitter. After the unrewarded experiment that was Ping, Apple put a few hundred million dollars in Twitter in return for tighter cooperation between the companies and sharing Twitter’s insight into the social media world. The conversations over the past few months have been private, the NYT reports, and the two companies are not in active negotiations right now. If there were to be an investment, however, it could raise Twitter’s value to more than $10 billion.

Tim Cook acknowledged at D10 that the company needed to be more social and that it could consider killing off Ping at some point. “We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said ‘This isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into,’” he said during the conference. He pointed out that Apple doesn’t have to own a social network to be more social and used the added integration of Twitter into OS X Mountain Lion as an example of that.

iTranslate Voice HD comes to the iPad with lots of features

I’ve looked at some translation apps before, and it seems each time I review a new one I see increased capabilities and better performance. iTranslate Voice has available on the iPhone for awhile, and now it has come to the iPad in an HD edition.

Like its smaller sibling, iTranslate Voice HD can translate 31 languages both directions. Some of the 31 are variations or dialects of one language, like Spanish, that appears in Mexican, Spanish and US versions.

Daily iPhone App: 10000000 is a great, complex game with a strange name

Some games pare down a core idea to something really simple and elegant, cutting everything else away until one main bit of gameplay shines through. Canabalt is probably the perfect example of that recently — it’s just one core mechanic, done very, very well. But other games go the other direction: they add on system after system after system, and the art isn’t in cutting things away, but it’s in joining things together, juggling all kinds of balls and knives and torches, and yet still keeping the gameplay accessible and interesting. The recently released (and strangely named) 10000000 is of the second kind: It’s a game with a ton of different things going on, but its charm is that even with so much happening, you can still “get it”.

Essentially, the game is a match-3 title: You can slide various tiles around, trying to match up three or more of them together. But it’s also got a very in-depth RPG layer on top of it — your character runs across the top of the screen, fighting monsters, unlocking chests, and trying to repair your castle (earning up to 10,000,000 points, which is where the game’s name comes from). The gameplay’s balanced between what’s happening with your character at the top of the screen, and the effects of what you’re matching on the tiles below. There’s also loot, and skills, and a meta-mechanic that has you repairing doors to open up stages, and even bosses to fight as you race through timed dungeons.

Chitika: Mountain Lion accounting for 3% of web traffic

Web tracking firm Chitika has a stat that’s actually not all that surprising: Mountain Lion downloads accounted for a relatively huge percentage of web traffic this week. For all web traffic coming to and from Mac computers, Mountain Lions downloads specifically make up 3% of the total. And when you consider just how much bandwidth is being used, that means that Apple almost certainly sold plenty of copies of the new US$19.99 operating system.

Chitika also did the math, and believes that Apple users downloaded 2.11 million copies of Mountain Lion in just the first 48 hours after release. Obviously, that’s downloads, not purchases — it’s possible that users purchased the OS without downloading it. It’s also possible, however, that users were able to download the software without paying for it (through promotional or other means). But even if 90% of those downloads were legitimate purchases, Chitika calculates that Apple has picked up $38 million in revenue from Mountain Lion already.

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