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Ever been listening to a song on your iPhone or iPod and wondered what the lyrics were to that last line? Happens to me a lot. While very poetic and talented Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder aren’t always the easiest to understand. Remember that hilarious Adam Sandler skit on Saturday Night Live where he sang Evenflow? What made it so funny was his jibberish sounded exactly like the song! Anyway, there have been apps before that would display lyrics, but most either didn’t have a large database of songs or were not polished enough to be simple to use. That has changed with the release of free app called musiXmatch. The app has lyrics for more than 5.4 million songs and its own built in music player that will display the words while the song plays (see the photo). The large database of songs and how easily and quickly it installs, no computer required, really makes this a killer app! Continue Reading…

Air Playit, iPhoGame Dev, inc. Free, is a cool app that makes it really easy to access the media on your computer by installing a small server on your machine. This allows you stream all your music, movies and TV shows to your iPhone, iPod or iPad on either wi-fi or 3G! That’s right, stream your computer’s media to your iDevice even if you are hundreds of miles away. Setting up this app is little more involved than most so I did the following video to show how. It really is just three steps. Download the app, download the server software to your computer from http://www.airplayit.com and login to your router to get the IP address and forward one port. If you want to keep the files on your iDevice the app has a download and convert feature that allow this as well. It’s really not that hard. Just watch the video and give up converting video files and plugging your iDevice into your computer for good!

Onavo, Onavo Mobile Ltd, is a free app that helps you understand, manage and reduce your data usage. While it does the first two well, I was disappointed on how much data it saved me. The idea is simple enough. Install and launch the app where it connects your iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPad to its cloud based server. Then all your data is run through this server which compresses the data before sending it your iDevice. The company cutely calls their server The Magical Shrinking Machine! While this app likely won’t save you as much as they claim, I still highly recommend you give it whirl to see your own data patterns. Continue Reading…

Snowboard Hero, FISHLABS $4.99, is a slick game with natural controls that is easy to pickup and play. The game features eight different tracks with multiple runs in one of three settings: piste, halfpipe or open alpine area. There are six characters to unlock and play. Each character’s skills (agility, speed, boost, and jumps) can be improved by buying new boards. You can also customize your pants and jackets. As you progress you unlock new harder tricks that score more points. Finishing multiple tricks in the same jump scores bigger points while repeating the same trick more than once earns less points.

There are five styles of gameplay. Slalom where you have to go through gates without missing many, Speed Run where you have to get down the hill as fast as you can, Freestyle where you have to score as many points as possible from doing tricks, Freestyle Race where you have to score a certain number of points from tricks and beat your opponent to the finish line and Gate Time Bonus where you have to make it down the hill in a limited time with bonus gates adding additional seconds.

Riding rails and doing tricks in the air is pretty fun. The graphics and audio in the game are super high quality. That said, I really can’t recommend this at $4.99, but if you see the price drop one day you might want to pick it up.

Super Stickman Golf, Jordan Schidlowsky $0.99, is a different type of golf game. Most like EA’s Tiger Woods golf, try to be as realistic as possible. As the name implies, however, Super Stickman is more like a putt putt video game than actual real holes. Most of the 261 holes are a physics based challenge with more than one way to go. They range from par 3 to par 10. You can easily go two or three under on a single hole if you play it right. Many holes also have targets in the air that if you hit will take additional strokes off. I scored a zero on a Par 3 yesterday. What really makes this game fun are the 6 Super Clubs. These can make your ball sticky, freeze water hazards or stop the ball in mid air. All this is necessary because there are some crazy holes to have to navigate through. You unlock additional holes and Super Clubs as you play each nine hole course under par. Some courses include Mars, The Woods, The Clouds and The Cliffs. You can see here in the picture I’m playing the Woods course. After droping down to the correct branch, I can try and finish the hole our use the freeze ball and go for the -3 strokes off just above the water hazard. Again, with the freeze ball this is no issue. Unlike many games you aren’t playing this for the audio or graphics. They are 64 bit or worse. Despite this the game play is natural and addicting. The app offers mutilplayer support either online or local. This app can be played on iPod, iPad or iPhone and should provide you with hours of fun.

Back on November 1, 2010 I reviewed an app called Square which lets you accept credit card payments on your iPhone, iPod or iPad. Even though the company is extremely well funded, the app is free and transaction fees low I concluded it was doomed for failure. You can see my thoughts and video of how the app works here. The well funded part remains. It caught my eye last week when Square announced it had raised another $100 million that put a valuation on the company at over $1 billion! Wow. They were already advertising like mad. Heck I see their ads on this website almost daily. Could I have been wrong about Square? Continue Reading…

Why do I keep downloading word games when I’m soooo bad at them?? Oh well, Zynga, the makers of the hugely popular app Words With Friends earlier this month released Hanging With Friends. The game is similar to the classic hangman, with a twist. First you build a word to send to your opponent to play hangman with. You are given 12 letters to make the word and it has to be four to eight letters in length (see photo to the left). Then you send it and they try and guess before creating a word to send back which you play hangman on. When you get a new word you can hit replay and see which letters your opponent picked in trying to guess your word and whether or not they got it right. Not interested, then just start playing hangman and attempt to get their word. Each character is hanging by five balloons. Miss five words and you lose. Continue Reading…

Chillingo Ltd. has done it again. The makers of Cut the Rope have released another physics based puzzle game called Feed Me Oil, $0.99. Like Cut the Rope the object of the game is to feed weird creatures (this time they want to eat oil). You are given different objects to place on the board before turning on a pipe to release the oil. If you placed them correctly the oil runs into the mouth of the creature and you advance to the next board. The first few boards are simple and involve placing blocks and windmills. However, as you advance you are given magnets, fans and more to try and beat the increasingly difficult levels. If you get stuck no problem, there is a hint button to help you move along. If you look at the picture you can see a board I used right as the oil comes out of the pipe. From there two windmills spin it up in the air where it drops on the other side to where a fan blows it into the creatures mouth. It’s quite difficult to visualize and I’m using the help button often. Feed Me Oil spent numerous days as the number one paid app in the App Store, but has since dropped out of the Top 25. It’s with good reason as it’s quality, but I don’t like this as much as Cut the Rope. It may grow on me after time, but there is something not quite as addicting.

Remember antennagate? When the iPhone 4 was released there was tons of press about weak signals and dropped calls from covering the bottom corner of the iPhone. Apple gave free bumpers to everyone to “solve” this problem. I wrote back then that it wasn’t a big deal at all and that the biggest problem with the iPhone 4 was the proximity sensor. This would cause your cheek to accidentally press the mute button, hold button or hangup a call by mistake. For me it was the mute button, at least once per week. Apple claimed iOS 4.1 fixed the proximity sensor and while I agree it got better, I still accidentally mute a call every so often. If you are having this problem there is a fix that works 100% brought to you by the jailbreak community of course. CallLock, $0.99 from BigBoss, locks your iPhone screen during a call preventing you from accidentally hitting any buttons. Set it to automatic and within about 5 seconds from making or answering a call the iPhone screen locks. Now there is one minor drawback. If you want to access the keyboard, speaker, mute buttons etc. you have to slide to unlock and make that screen available again. Also, to end the call you have to slide to unlock and then press end. There is a manual setting you can choose to enable the call lock only on selected calls. Like maybe when talking to your boss so you don’t hang up on him/her. There is a similar app in Cydia called Dialer Shield that pretty much does the same thing for $1.49. Take your pick.

If you like skee ball then a free app called Ramp Champ, The Iconfactory, might interest you. Slide your finger to toss the ball up the ramp and knock over the various items to score points. The best thing about this app are the variety of board themes and how visually attractive they are. Clown Town is a classic theme, Breakwater Bay is an underwater theme of course and Space Swarm reminds me of playing Space Invaders. The audio on the app is nice as well as it definitely has a carnival feel. The downside of the app for me is that it’s too hard. Each board presents you with tasks to complete (like knock down all the fish). This requires taking out multiple pins with one ball. While I can do this it has to be done multiple times in each nine ball game. I guess this could be seen as a positive as the time required to win this game is quite a lot which if you like it is a great thing. However, I just get frustrated and move on to another game.