Kodak Smilemaker

by Kodak



Category: Photography / Social Networking
Price: Free

Instant happiness for a cruel world

Each day harder than the last. The voices of disapproval growing louder, like a pack of dogs closing in. How long has it been since you last saw a pair of eyes that weren't narrowed and hard? You can't remember. The faces of the world are closed to you now. Their lips never part except to spit before your weary feet. You're so cold at night, and so very lonely.

I know how you feel. I, too, am a horribly disfigured individual forced to live on the edges of human society. Furthermore, my considerable experience as a former pedophile, used underwear aficionado, and convicted animal abuser enable me to truly understand the isolation you're going through. Yes, we're more alike than you realize. No, don't cry, that's a good thing! You remind me of my younger self, so I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

Every time I suffer cruelty or a beating at the hands of a stranger, I simply snap a photo of their sneering countenance with my iPhone. Later, back in the solitude of my candlelit garret, I fire up the Kodak Smilemaker app... and alter the fabric of history itself! Its advanced multitouch scaling lets me attach bright, genuine smiles onto all who have wronged me. Their harsh rejections become warm offers of friendship with a brush of digital wizardry! Sometimes, I even play pranks on these newly-minted bosom buddies by putting such alternate mouths as a pig's snout or a gorilla's lips on them. HAHA! We have such good times together, my once-angry mob and I. Before going to bed each night, I look upon this gallery of grinning faces, and in them, find the strength to accept my twisted, Jonas Brothers-loving self.

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Positives: Increases popularity
Unpositives: Largely unrealistic for anyone without a history of mental illness
Rating: 3 / 5

Get Kodak Smilemaker free in the iTunes App Store.

Cooking Dash

by PlayFirst Inc.



Category: Games
Price: $2.99 (currently on sale, usually $4.99)

Turns your iPhone into a crack pipe for girls

Every man in the modern world knows what the Diner Dash games are, but only because they've had to surrender control of their computers for hours when girlfriends came over to play "that restaurant game for a few minutes". There were no iPhones back in the early days of the franchise, so hearing that line usually meant you were in for an afternoon and evening of boredom. When PlayFirst released Diner Dash for the iPhone in September 2008, the blood drained from our collective faces. iTunes passwords were changed, PIN code locks were turned on, and litters of gift puppies were deployed as pre-emptive countermeasures. Thankfully, their fickle minds had already moved on. We breathed sighs of relief and foolishly went back to Monster Trucks Nitro and Tiger Woods Golf, thinking calamity had been averted.

It is now 2009. I come to you, brothers, with the gravest of news. With the new Cooking Dash game, Diner Dash has been improved upon, expanded, and given far more depth than in its two previous sequels on the Mac & PC. And it's on the iPhone for a fraction of a desktop game's price. Now, our women will be locked in the most useless and unsatisfying of pursuits: cooking virtual meals that we will never taste, in virtual kitchens, on devices that we need to touch at least once every five minutes for the sustenance of life itself. Oh God. If it took them hours before to get enough of taking orders and delivering food to the right tables, think of how many days our depravation will last now that they have to cook and prepare those orders too!

Gentlemen, we must deny it its very existence. The council has decided that in order to avoid the ruin threatened by Cooking Dash, we must embark on a worldwide campaign of feigned ignorance with regards to all things technological. The Brotherhood wills it. So if your girlfriend asks, you no longer know what's "a good game to play on the bus", or how to "save YouTube videos". The words "reboot", "restore", and "settings" are no longer in your vocabulary. A malfunctioning computer should bring tears to your eyes, not the fiery anticipation of challenge.

This task is far greater than any faced by our fathers or their fathers' fathers. It will be hard, but we must bite down and dig deep to find the courage we will need to win this war. I wish I could stand before you and promise that this will be over in just a decade, but such actions are folly. What I can promise you, however, is this: We! Will! Outlast! Cooking! Dash!

Godspeed, my brothers. HOO-AH!

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Positives: Polished gameplay mechanics, many levels, more challenging than Diner Dash
Unpositives: Kitchen interface is nearly too cluttered at times, with multiple ingredients
Rating For Men Traitors Who Like Time Management Games: 4 / 5

Cooking Dash does NOT exist in the iTunes App Store.
The free Cooking Dash Lite does not either.

Panorama Camera

by ArcSoft



Category: Photography
Price: $2.99

Everyone loves panoramic photography. It's a gimmick, sure, but the novelty doesn't wear off like those black and white photos with just a single subject in color (GAG!), or those lomography-style collages of 4-8 sequential shots of your child's first steps (BORINGGGG!) – a beautiful panorama, say a sweeping 180º vista of the Grand Canyon in all its summer splendor, simply catches your attention and doesn't let go. Like Kim Kardashian's derriere, only not as wide.

So an app like Panorama Camera, by a company renowned for producing the panoramic photo software that comes bundled with most digital cameras, should be pretty awesome for the job, right? Of course not. Everybody installs that crap because it comes on the Drivers CD, but nobody ever uses it. The only reason why camera companies include that crap is because it costs very little, and gives them an extra bullet point to put on the side of the box, like "Panoramic stitching software inside!" Going by the shoddy quality of ArcSoft's first iPhone app, that's like putting a "Live Girls!" neon sign on the side of a women's hospital – barely true.

It's primary feature is a mode akin to Sony's "Sweep Panorama" technology, where you simply move your camera from side-to-side without pressing any buttons, and the camera records and stitches everything together automatically. The difference is that Sony has half an idea how to do this. Panorama Camera can't handle variations in exposure within a scene (almost any scene will have dark/light areas), and it constantly duplicates objects even when they have sharp pointy edges. Even if you do manage to get a good stitch, the photo is saved at a pathetic resolution close to the iPhone's native screen size.

In short, I wouldn't trust Panorama Camera to stitch two white pixels together, let alone a scene made up of five photos. ArcSoft Panorama Camera is a blind man throwing daggers at a woman on a rotating board. It's a blind man driving a bulldozer in an orphanage for landmine victims. It's a blind man bowling down an alleyway filled with Ming vases. Don't ask what the Ming vases are doing in an alley! It's called a menopause, you reiterate!

"When Compared to AutoStitch" Rating: 0 / 5

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Please don't buy Panorama Camera in the iTunes App Store.
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These official screenshots are lies! The actual interface doesn't even contain these elements!




Update: Here are some pathetic photos I took indoors. Their full sizes are 272px tall at most.

I Am T-Pain

by Sonic Mule




Category: Music
Price: $2.99


What it is: Pandora's Box for music lovers, blasted open with dynamite.

Y'all know what Auto-Tune is, right? It's that sound that's all over the radio these days. Now the very same technology that's turned every gun-toting rapper in the world into a singer of cheesy love songs is available on your iPhone with this app from developer Sonic Mule and some black leprechaun named T-Pain, who seems to be wearing 3D glasses in every photo I've seen of him. Presumably because he's a terrible singer, Mr. Pain's had to borrow Cher's decade-old vocal tricks to establish his own signature sound. Turns out the kids love it.

After having recorded no less than 103 flawless, radio-ready examples of pop stupidity myself with this app over the last three weeks, I can only conclude that T-Pain is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Still, it's an experiment that will reveal the future of the world we live in. If this app makes money (it will) and T-Pain's own singing career shows no signs of slowing down, then one can only deduce that Apple is days away from releasing Snow Leopard for Dell & Compaq PCs, giant pharmaceutical companies are loading up helicopters to confetti poor African towns with free AIDS medications, and the US and Russia plan to upload their nuclear firing codes onto Wikipedia.

One noteworthy feature: you can choose to have the app lock your vocals down to a specific harmonic scale, OR you can flip a T-Pain switch and "let Pain choose settings for you" (says the website). The latter option always appropriately sounds the worst.

Pain Factor: 4/5

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Buy I Am T-Pain on the iTunes App Store.

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iHandgun

by iFirearm



Category: Entertainment
Price: Free

What it is: Murder in 4.6 megabytes.

So:
June 24th, 2009:
Not much happened today. Sat around watching reruns of Charlie's Angels and VH1 Classics after dinner. Also got a mysterious email saying I should download an iPhone app called iHandgun. Load it up and you see a picture of a gun on your screen. When you touch the trigger, the gun "fires" (the phone vibrates) and smoke comes out of the barrel. It's fun for awhile.

June 25, 2009:
Pretty rough day. Dropped my iPhone into the crapper and it stopped working. Then I turned on the news and found out Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson both passed away. On the same day? Man.

Sept 13, 2009:
Finally, after months of frustration with a borrowed Nokia, my iPhone has finally returned from being repaired! Will have to reinstall all my apps and music. Oh, and Dirty Dancing is on TV later. I love that movie.

Sept 14, 2009:
Unbelievable news. I'm writing this entry as I watch the evening news, and they're saying Patrick Swayze just passed away? I just saw him last night! This is too depressing, I'm going to change the channel to something lighter. Maybe a cooking show...

Sept 16, 2009:
Dear diary, it's been 48 hours of sleepless torment for me since hearing about Keith Floyd. There's no other logical reason for these deaths... Each and every time I've played with iHandgun, it's been pointed at the TV... and now they're all dead. What? I'm not going mad. Can't you see the truth? I see it as plainly as the accurate and fully-animated actions of these two included guns I hold in my hand. My blood runs cold when I think of what evil I have committed. I should turn myself in. No... jail is too good for a monster such as myself. Never again shall these hands run red (figuratively) with the guilt of murder.

For the very last time, I will hear those realistic sound effects as I load the virtual clip and cock the hammer with just a stroke across the multi-touch screen. Perhaps I will even attach the optional silencer before pressing it to my feverish forehead. Goodbye, faithful diary!

Sept 17, 2009:
Huh. I guess it was just an app after all.

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Download iHandgun for free in the iTunes App Store.
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RunKeeper Free & RunKeeper Pro

by FitnessKeeper Inc.



Category: Health & Fitness
Price: Free / $9.99

What it is: A proletariat's glorious awakening in the sunset of Nike+iPod class inequality.

Ready, Set:
You're getting ready for your date with the road. You've sprayed on your Tommy Hilfiger deodorant, pulled on an organic cotton Ralph Lauren headband, and massaged Clinique's SPF-15 lip balm onto your already moist and supple lips. You've loaded up a perfect mix of Royksopp, Daft Punk, and ironic 80s electroclash. You've looked in the mirror. You look fantastic. Now all that's left to do is pull on a pair of those sweet new Nike+ Lunarglide sneakers with the pedometer in their heels, and sync them up with your freshly anodized fifth-generation iPod nano. I'll say it again: you look fantastic.

What a steaming pile of tosh! Have we forgotten what running is supposed to be? When did we become a bunch of spoilt hipster brats who think exercise is only about designer brands and multicolored gadgets? It's time to drop the gimmicks and take our sport back to its roots. Get your beat-up pair of Sauconys and New Balances out from the back of the cupboard. Put on that raggedy old tee from high school gym class. Hold off showering for a few days beforehand, so you'll really appreciate getting one when you come back. And get a copy of RunKeeper, it doesn't need no stinking Nike+ enabled shoes. This here is for real runners, the salt of the Earth.

Using state-of-the-art GPS tracking technology integrated with Google Maps online, RunKeeper commands a multibillion-dollar satellite network to follow your every move across the planet's surface, calculating and recalculating your course, speed, elevation, pace, and calories burnt at a rate of several thousand times per second*. Even as your iPhone 3G/3GS plays wholly unpretentious beats from the likes of Nas and J Dilla, its omniscient metal brain dreams up rich full-color charts and graphs in conjunction with RunKeeper.com's servers in the cloud, viewable on last year's 24" dual-core iMac once your ordeal is over. That's what I'm talking about, yo. Only real runners need apply.


"The Road Had It Coming" Rating: 5 / 5

* Maybe just a few times.

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Download RunKeeper Free from the iTunes App Store, or buy Runkeeper Pro for additional features and real-time interval training cues mixed in with your music.
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Ramp Champ

by The Iconfactory



Category: Games
Price: $1.99

What it is: A carnival of sadomasochism.

Every retirement home has one old man who used to be a championship boxer, tough enough to still knock out two young men bigger than him. Likewise, every group of cowed nerds has among their numbers one who will eventually arm up and shoot up the school in a black trenchcoat. Ramp Champ has a lot in common with these people.

It lives amongst the feeble pursuits most call "casual games", a candycoated term cooked up by executives to describe alternative entertainment for normal people – those don't play first-person shooters and airplane simulations eight hours straight at a time – or as we like to call them, "games for pussies". But don't be fooled by the company it keeps. Ramp Champ is a prison-hard motherf*cker. I suspect it broke out of hardcore gaming prison and into casual gaming prison just because it was bored.

Ramp Champ is like the serial killer who wears thick glasses and tucks his striped shirt into his pants and talks with a feigned speech impediment and holds a boring desk job at a government agency, but really goes home every night and becomes like Christian Bale or something, with ripped muscles from pumping rusty iron in his basement and hunting animals in the woods naked.

So what looks like an innocent game of skeeball is actually an elaborate psychology experiment. I mean, it must be! The physics simulation suggests that you have full control over where the ball goes, if you're good enough, and then when you need to score the most, it lets some blind Parkinson's patient take over the shot. But sometimes, it does exactly what you expect, making the time spent smearing goat's blood on your own face seem completely worth it. It frustrates, it makes a mockery of your so-called skills, and it's completely addictive. I know because I've mastered it at the cost of my sanity.

Slammer Rating: 4/5 shivs

Buy Ramp Champ in the iTunes App Store.

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Above: What you'll see when you become a ramp champ. Each of the levels' three goals filled in with a yellow dot.