Tiger Woods Golf for the iPhone/iPod Touch

I heard recently that Electronic Arts had come out with a Tiger Woods golf for the iPhone/Touch. Here is a good review of Tiger Woods golf for the iPhone.

Discovery Channel App for iPhone

TechCrunch has a review of a new Discovery Channel App for the iPhone. It looks to be focused on Discovery Channel fan boys and girls, with links to schedules, news, and video snippets from various shows. If you want to view a full episode of a show, you still have to purchase it from the iTunes Store.

AC-103 Spectre: iSniper from above

AC-103 is a AC-103 gunner simulation that costs you 99 cents because it is on sale at the moment

This is a fun game that got better when the new update that makes the controls much easier than before. You are a gunner upon a AC-103 Spectre gunship as u fly on mission that involve blowing up tanks, trucks, and foot solders with 25, 40, and 105mm shells. The night vision/infra-red interface makes it a cool looking game and a overall pretty cool app. The only downside is a rare glitch that doesn't end your mission when you win and then the time runs out giving you a mission failure.

I give this a 4 out of 5

Apple Support Fixed My Phone

After a couple of calls to Apple Support, a solution was found for my problem. Thanks to Kimberly and Barbara from Apple for the help. To fix your phone do the following:

1. Open up iTunes and take a screen shot of all your applications. You could write them down instead, but I found the screen shot a lot easier.
2. Delete all the 3rd party applications on your iPhone
3. Delete all the 3rd party applications in iTunes
4. Exit iTunes
5. Empty your Trash. Do a soft reset of your iPhone. (Just for good measure)
6. Restart iTunes
7. Download all your applications
8. Resync your iPhone

If you have purchased applications, don't worry. You won't get charged again. The iTunes store remembers what you have purchased before.

I know its a bit of a pain, but it worked for me. Apparently the 3.0.1 update somehow mangled the application files.

Hopefully this post will help the next poor soul that has this problem.

3.0.1 Broke My iPhone

Well I updated the firmware on my iPhone to 3.0.1 this morning. And much to my dismay, none of the downloaded apps work any more. All the built in applications works just fine. However, when you launch any 3rd party application it crashes. Basically, no 3rd party applications launch any more.

First I Googled the problem and found this discussion on the Apple support forums. So I have tried:

• Authorize and deauthorize the computer
• Delete and reinstall an application
• Reset the iPhone
• Delete all the applications on the iPhone
• Delete an app from iPhone and iTunes. Then download the application again and reinstall.

None of this seemed to work so I called the AT&T support number and got iPhone support. The nice support person suggested the deleting all the applications and reinstalling them option. If that doesn't work, restore the iPhone from scratch.

I am trying the install from scratch option at the moment. Tried the delete all the applications from the phone option and that didn't work. I will keep you updated on my progress finding a fix.

It is pretty ironic that after I start a web log devoted to iPhone apps, my iPhone can no longer run any apps. lol.

Update: Apple Support found a solution for me.

iNap@work

This iPhone app is just too funny! The app will allow you to make "productivity" sounds while are you taking a nap. Found the link via digg.

BBC News App

The BBCReader for the iPhone provides news and information from the BBC. This is not an official BBC application, but gets the news from the BBC Site. When you start up the app, there are 3 tabs at the top of the screen. Notice the little arrow I'm highlighting, this allows you to pick which information you want to appear on the currently selected tab.

Once you click on button, you get this control, which allows you to select the information you want displayed on the tab.

Here is the what the tab I configured for the BBC coverage of soccer looks like. Nice summaries of each article. If you click on a story, you are shown a snapshot of the Web page that the story comes from.

Finally, what sets this app apart and what the negative nimrods on the iTunes store seem to miss is the ability of the app to cache stories. It downloads and caches the story for you. Click on the info button and you can configure the application to read the stories offline. Very nice if you want to read your news on a plane.

One the whole a very nice app. I give it a 4 out of 5.

Sports Tap

Sports Tap is a free sports score application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The main focus of this application is, of course, showing game scores. The application does this quite well and is very comprehensive. It includes coverage of baseball, football, soccer, car racing, tennis, hockey and golf. Soccer coverage is the best for any sports application that I have seen to date. The app includes scoring for the English, Itallian, Spanish, German, French, Scottish, Dutch, Brazilian, Argentinian, Mexican, and American soccer leagues. A must have app if you are a soccer fan.

In addition to scores, the app also includes news headlines, standings and stats for the sport you have selected. The information is up to date and the stories current and relevant.

The app also includes some customzation features that allows out identify our favorite teams. This puts your teams scores at the top of the page for the selected sport. Here are some samples of what the news screens look like:



All in all, this is a great app for the sports fan. I give it a:
5 out of 5

Fox Sports App

I'm planning to take a pass through the available sports score apps for the iPhone/iPod. The apps can differ quite a bit. Sometimes, they provide only scores, sometimes news, and often both.

The FoxSports App is free on the iTunes store (Looked for a website describing it, can't find one). As far as sports news apps go, it fits in the full featured category. When the app starts, you are shown a list of 4 of the top sports stories of the day.

Clicking on the Home button at the top of the page, allows you to drill down into specific sports. At the bottom of the page are additional buttons for videos and scores. Selecting a story displays a text version of the story in portrait mode. Clicking on the News button takes you back to the main page.

Clicking on the Videos button pulls up a list of videos for the day from Fox. The videos are for an assortment of stories and play in landscape mode. The picture tends to be a little pixelated over the 3G network, but are very clear over wifi.

Selecting a specific sport from the Home button provides you news for that specific sport. In addition, a number of new buttons appear at the bottom of the page: scores, teams, standings, and stats. All are pretty self explanatory. The teams option lets you for only news stories about a specific team. All the options work pretty well and are useful.

Sports categories covered include NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Nascar, NCAA Football, NCAA Basketball, NCAA Women's Basketball, Golf, Tennis, and WNBA. No coverage for soccer is a big oversight in my opinion.

Performance is pretty good. Only the stories for the page you see are you loaded. So each time you change categories, a call is made to the sever to fetch more data. This works pretty good and stories generally load fast. However, the stories are not cached. So if you are on airplane or otherwise without a network connection, you are out of luck.

So to sum up, the Fox Sports Apps is a good general sports news application for the iPhone. Well designed with good performance. My only objection being the lack of coverage for soccer.

4 out of 5

Zombieville

Zombieville is a platformer shooter that costs you $1.99.

This is a great game that is definitely worth two dollars. You are some old guy running through levels of brain-eating zombies. With a variety of weapons from shotguns, to chainguns, to lasers you must blow your way through wave after wave. The controls are very easy to use. This game only involves tapping the screen and does not involve movement of the iPod.

I give this a 5 out of 5

Yahoo! App for iPhone/Touch - News

This app is a iPhone front end to Yahoo! services. I have only been using the app for a few days so there is a lot I haven't discovered yet. So let me focus on what I have used.

The app comes with a really cool interface to Yahoo! News. Basically it show the top news headlines, business, entertainment, and sports. All presented sequentially from the top of the page. Each category has options that allow you to drill down further into any topic you want. And at the bottom of the page is a more complete topical listing of news categories which you can select from. So if you like Yahoo! News, you will love this app.

As I see it there are two really cool things about the app.

1. The app is really fast. This is because the app does not try to download everything every time it connects to the Net. Each category page has a refresh button at the top of the page. Tap the button if you want to get the latest stories for that category, only that category is downloaded. Thusly, updates are quick and easy.
2. All the stories are in an easy to read iPhone format. You don't have to wait for a Web browser to load and render the page. Instead, you click a story and boom its there. Very nice.

So anyway, that's it for now. More to come on this app as I understand it better. Also, I expect to write about some other news oriented apps soon.

iPhone Apps for Sports News (Part I)

Yesteday I was at my niece's soccer game I tried checking the score of the Nuggets game. Well doing that on a web site, or even most of the mobile optimized websites, can be a bit clunky. So this morning, I thought I should check and see if there were any iPhone apps for showing scores. Boy was I suprised! There are several choices and evern a few apps by the sports leagues themselves

NBA Game Time

This official app from the NBA shows the scores for today's games. In addition, it provides live scores and stats for games in progress. Nice little box scores by team. It also includes the current schedule and standings. Really nice.

mlb.com lite

Similar to the NBA app, but it provides less stats. It still shows the live scores and schedules, who's hitting, pitching, and who is on base. However, it does not provide a box score.

However, they do provide a paid version of the application that provides a lot more detailed information. Stuff like live pitch locations, pitch by pitch commentary, etc... It looks really cool.