Blades of Fury, PwnageTool, Newsstand, Mailbox Find, RedLaser - TiPb Picks of the Week

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:51:26 +0000

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they're iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they're fair game.

So who's on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad's Pick: Blades of Fury

If there is one game genre the iPhone is lacking in it has to be fighting games. Well, the wait is over folks, Blades of Fury is one awesome game. The best way to think of it is an amazing port of Soul Calibur; this game is really that good. The touch controls work surprisingly well and you can even play you own iPod music. What is it missing? Online multiplayer, but then again, so are many games If you like fighting games, especially using the weapons-based Soul Calibur fighting mechanic, you will love Blades of Fury! [$6.99 - iTunes link]

Chris' Pick: PwnageTool 3.1.3.

For people who have a iPhone 3Gs (like me), who has been waiting for jailbreak (like me), this is great news. While there is a PC version (yet? opinion seems to be varied as to their intent, or lack of intent, to release a new PC version of redsn0w), this is still a great step forward for those of us who have patiently been waiting for a jailbreak of 3.1. Jailbreakers can now start to experience some of the fun of the 3.1 update. [Free - Web link]

James' Pick: Newsstand

In my eternal search for the perfect Google Reader app, I find myself loving Newsstand. Reliable sync of all of my feeds and the storge of offline images make this my go to app! [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Matt's Pick: Mailbox Find

Mailbox Find is an app that tells you were the closest mailbox for either USPS (or post offices), FedEx or even UPS. With my most recent job, I was asked to drop a letter in the mailbox. Not knowing the area real well, I was able to open the app and it gave me some of the closest mail boxes in the area. It kept me from spending too much time hunting for a mailbox in the area (or driving across the city to go to the one I actually knew of. If you want to search a certain zip code for mailboxes, you can also do that. [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Rene's Pick: RedLaser

So I go to the book store with a friend, who sees many cute and wonderful and engaging books, and I see the full retail price quickly adding up in my brain like one of those old fashioned whirling cash registers. Luckily I had RedLaser's barcode scanner and product finder on my iPhone, so I whipped it out, scanned away, and proceeded to add the books up in Amazon for quite a bit less. My friend saw how much less the total was, dumped the books back on the shelves, and everyone was happy (except for the book store, no doubt). Bottom line, I've been waiting for this on the iPhone ever since I saw the Android G1 show it off almost a year ago. And it works great. [$1.99 - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You're part of team TiPb too, so what's your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us -- and everyone -- know in the comments!

Weekly Web App Review: Zinio Mobile Newsstand

Casey Chan — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:00:27 +0000

Are you an avid magazine reader? Do you look at your iPhone and think that it’d be the perfect device to read digital magazines? Well, Zinio Mobile Newsstand for the iPhone offers such digital magazines in high-resolution glory. With loads of popular magazines in tow, Zinio Mobile Newstand gives iPhone users a free look at issues that typically cost anywhere from $5 to $10.

How does it perform? Can you actually read anything?

Read on for the rest of the review!

Design/Interface

Pointing your Safari Web Broswer to www.zinio.com/iphone will display a newsstand-like interface complete with popular magazines such as US News & World Report, Men’s Health, Popular Mechanics, PC Magazine, Elle, and Car & Driver. Even some adult magazines are included such as Playboy & Penthouse. The selection has recently been bolstered by the addition of some international magazines as well.

Overall the design and interface is simple and clear. Touch the magazine you’re interested in reading and you’ll be able to read it in its entirety. There are two different ways to read the magazines and it is similar to its real-life counterpart. You can choose to flip through it page-by-page to see if anything catches your eye in a less-slick form of CoverFlow, or you can click the contents button and select an article that you may have interest in through the magazine’s digital table of contents. Either way works perfectly fine.

Usability

I found the ‘digital table of contents’ to be very useful. In a real magazine, it’s a chore to even find the table of contents. It’s become such a painstaking process sifting through seemingly thousands of advertisements to find that cover story. In Zinio, the interface is much better because by using the provided ‘contents’ button, users can easily digitally ‘jump’ to the article of interest.

I found flipping through the magazine to be less effective because the pages aren’t exactly readable from a bird’s eye view. Meaning, you’re mostly looking for headlines and pictures that attract you since the text isn’t quite yet rendered. Once you hit a page of interest, a simple tap would load up the entire page in the window. You can’t double-tap to zoom in because the page is already ‘best fit’. Zinio claims users are able to zoom in as much as 300%. To go to the next page, you can click the arrows or click on ‘Issue’ to see it in the CoverFlow-esque layout once again.

Speed-wise, Wi-Fi is slower than it usually is with other websites. Most likely due to the high-resolution shots of each page, there is a lot of data to load and render. What is surprising however, is that EDGE-speeds don’t totally inhibit the usability of Zinio Mobile Newstand. The pages load slower, to be sure, but it wasn’t as drastic a difference as some web sites usually are. Wi-Fi speed is always better, but don’t be afraid to fire up Zinio Mobile Newsstand when you aren’t near a hotspot.

Criticism

Aside from the non-rendered text in Zinio’s ‘CoverFlow’, I believe that the Newsstand portion of this web-app can be made better by notifying the user the date of each Magazine. For example, if US News & World Report just released an issue, a simple ‘New!’ or June Edition can allow users to more effectively determine which magazines to read. With magazines like Men’s Health, which seemingly look alike from month to month, it’d be a subtle but important feature to add.

Zinio would also be better served if they could create an actual application for 2.0. I found myself trying to flick the screen to move on to the next screen but remembered I was trapped in Safari and had to use the available ‘buttons’. Hopefully, Zinio can add these features and maintain the current cost of the web app, which is, FREE.

Final Thoughts

What’s great about Zinio Mobile Newsstand is that it offers real, live magazines for you to read. These aren’t webzines nor the magazine’s web sites, but the exact copy you would find on your newsstand—for free!

The high resolution shots take a while to load, to be sure, but the quality of the pages are worthwhile. Every picture is crip and the text is readable. Using both landscape and portrait mode also adds to the versatility of this web app. I would suggest everyone to point their browsers to www.zinio.com/iphone to take a look at this great web app.

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