Yes! I love this game franchise. Currently the only way to have a GTA experience on the iPhone is to play one of it’s clones such as Gangsta: West Coast Hustle which launched last week. Wow what horrible timing, because Rockstar just announced that the real GTA is coming to the iPhone, GTA Chinatown Wars which launched on the Nintendo DS last year is being ported to the iPhone and PSP. This is glorious news.
There is a lot of curiosity surrounding the price of this game. The same game on the Nintendo DS is $35. iPhone games typically cost $1 to $5, maybe $10 for a AAA title such as Doom Resurrection. Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, sold Civilization Revolution at $9.99 then quickly dropped the price to $4.99. If GTA launches at too high a price they may be forced to lower the price if consumers rebel. If it’s anything near the price of the DS game it will be a disaster, it’ll probably be much cheaper in which case DS owners will whine about it. But it’s their fault for not having an iPhone.
There are other apps that let you print wirelessly from an iPhone, but they cost money. If you have an HP printer get the free iPrint app. It automatically detected my network printer over Wi-Fi, I chose a picture and clicked print, it was super easy. It automatically used my photo tray to produce a nice 4×6. If you don’t have a network printer you can share the printer from a computer. I used it to print out a photo of me and my good buddy Kevin Rose with pleasing results.
simon | Software, Tech | Friday, August 28th, 2009
Augmented reality wasn’t supposed to be available until OS 3.1, but that hasn’t stopped Yelp from sneaking this feature into the new version of Yelp. When 3.1 comes out developers will be able to utilize an API for overlaying GPS information on the video camera output, which should bring about a bevy of AR apps, and hopefully one for the DC metro system.
Yelp is an app which let’s your search for nearby restaurants and other businesses and read reviews. You can imagine how useful AR would be in conveying this information, if you can’t check out these videos. You will need a 3GS because AR depends the magnetometer for a compass bearing.
AR is included as an Easter Egg, you have to shake the iPhone three times to activate it. It is speculated that this is why Yelp was approved by the app store, though I’m not sure why it would be rejected for including this feature (if they want to write there own AR function instead of waiting for Apple what is wrong with that?)
Once activated you will have a ‘monocle’ button. It’s pretty cool as a proof of concept, it gives you a good idea of where restaurants are around you, nearby restaurants have larger icons than distant ones. The small text is a bit hard to read, and the icons are cluttered with too much information (the number of reviews is unnecessary). You can only choose display restaurants, bars, or everything. It would be extremely useful to be able to choose other categories such as gas stations. Trying to use Yelp on the highway is impractical, because you are moving so fast display is constantly refreshing new nearby icons.
I’m not sure if I would use this more than the two dimensional map, but I will use it to make 3G owners jealous, and it’s fun to live in the future.
I’ve been running it for a couple days now on my laptop and I am very happy with it. Besides the UI improvements, I am most happy about the recording, editing, and conversion features of Quicktime X. Apple is essentially giving Quicktime Pro to everyone for free, which used to cost $30, instead you get a whole new OS.
So I guess Google gets their ideas from Batman now. It makes sense Batman has a lot of good ideas, like dressing like a bat and wearing a nomex survival suit that can stop a bullet as long as it’s not a straight shot.
Batman had the idea first, in The Dark Knight he used everyone’s cell phones to assemble real time data on the Joker’s location in Gotham City. Yay crowdsourcing. Now Google is doing something similar, using people’s mobile phones to track their speed and aggregate the data to provide traffic data for city streets, in addition to the traffic data they purchase from INRIX. The amount of traffic data in major cities is impressive, it’s nice to see street level traffic data instead of just the highways.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.
Worried about privacy? Read this article. Many iPhone apps report your location and demographics back to the developer. The Palm Pre’s Web OS reports users’ locations back to Palm daily. Scary huh?
I use Google Maps on my iPhone frequently when I drive, so your welcome Google, and everyone who uses the traffic layer, I’m helping you out big time.
simon | Photography | Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Check out my retina. The dark spot is my iris, the bright spot is my optic nerve, all those blood vessels are helping me see stuff. Please don’t replicate a bionic eyeball using this image and access the secure wing of Black Mesa.
Subscribe to my feed (RSS)
