Find a friend and pass your iPhone or iPad as you play this highly addicting game of dots and lines!
Download today on the App Store
Launching today is the game I built during the Super Bowl. It is a pass-and-play game. Super simple. Draw lines, pass device, make boxes. Once no more lines can be drawn, the one with the most boxes wins. Go download it now for $1.99!
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The frequency in which I whip out my calculator apparently (as per my quick office poll) is abhorrent. But I do. My grocery shopping involves a tight budget ($30/week) and a calculator tallying up the total as I walk through the aisles. For the longest time Calcbot was my go to. But it has slowly become dated. So when Numerical came out last year, it became my standard. Well, today Tapbots has gone and updated Calcbot to 2.0 and brought with it a brand new interface!
Along with the new interface comes Convertions, clearly replacing Convertbot from back in the day, and Themes. Two $0.99 In-App Purchase theme packs (including 4 themes each) are available right now along with a Calcbot Pro purchase that unlocks one more theme along with Unit Convertions, Unlimited History Tap, and Custom Constants. The Pro upgrade is $1.99.
For me at least, it’s goodbye Numerical and welcome back Calcbot! Glad to see you back!
Download Calcbot on the App Store!
@swb1192 @RJMcCollam we’ve been trying to release an update for calcbot for 2 years and if Twitter kills our app we are out of business.
— Mark Jardine (@markjardine) February 19, 2015The Tapbots team seems to be getting a lot of slack for updating Calcbot and not Tweetbot for Mac or iPad. So much so that Mark Jardine, the designer of Tapbots, tweeted the above response. From prior posts, we know that Tapbots had Calcbot almost ready to launch right before iOS 7 was announced. The redesign of iOS 7 caused them to scrap Calcbot. Tweetbot, their most popular app, got updated next for iOS 7 and was a major overhaul visually to meet the new standard. Tapbots is, as per screenshots shared a couple weeks back, working on an update to Tweetbot for Yosemite. A two man team can only do so much and ultimately, as a business, must make money to survive. With Twitter being more and more hostile towards third-party developers over the last few years, the likelihood of Tweetbot dying one day is huge. So, personally, I’m glad they are diversifying. I love them too much to see them go out of business.
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The beauty of the backgrounds, running the course of the day, lighting the landscape is absolutely incredible. This game shows what the iPhone is capable of without focusing on it. Snow and rain fall, lightening and shooting stars flash across your screen, as you become one with the mountain. Fiery embers and smoke rise into the air as you blaze by. The animation is truly stunning.
It is the simplicity of games like these that hook mobile gamers. Alto’s Adventure reminds me of Tiny Wings a few years ago. Beautiful graphics is what sells these games, not game play. But even with very simple gameplay, the game has a lot of great elements. Capture the llamas— which are points; the llamas are points—, collect coins, and chain tricks to get a higher and higher score. But watch out for the elders. They don’t like your youthful antics.
As you complete 180 goals, you will unlock 6 characters. Maya is the flipper. Paz is slow to start, but builds up big speed. Izel is the gadget junkie, trailing fire behind her board. Felipe is a llama. On a snowboard. Go with it. And then the elder, Tupa, channels the energy of the mountain.
Use your points to expand the magnet and hover gadgets and buy the wing suit. Yes, the wing suit. Not only do you snowboard with llamas, but you can fly too.
To say that I have played this game for hours is an understatement. Last week my daughter, a six month old that sleeps soundly through the night, woke up screaming at 3 am. My wife and I were up for 2 hours trying to get her back down. For the second half of that time, I was playing Alto. At 4 in the morning.
Beautiful games are few and far between. This is something special and unique. The team behind Alto’s Adventure has been working on it for two years. You can see the earliest experimentations on Harry Nesbitt’s blog as he tooled around with the Unity engine and on his Dribbble account as he worked through llama animations. The passion of the design and development team just bleeds through every pixel. Their two years are worth it, in my book.
Alto’s Adventure is available today for $1.99 on the App Store. Two bucks. No In-App Purchases. Just two bucks. Go. Play for hours now and make sure you tweet your high scores!
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This upcoming game from Snowman reminds me of Tiny Wings. Gorgeous design, simple concept.
PermalinkIntroducing Photos for OS X. Featuring an easy-to-use and streamlined design, Photos has been engineered from the ground up to help you keep your growing library organized and accessible. Powerful and intuitive editing tools help you perfect your images as well as create beautiful gifts for sharing. And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud — so you can access your entire collection from your Mac or iOS devices anytime.
I’ve been using iPhoto for a decade. I have a lot of photos. With a 6 month old (as of Sunday), I take a lot of photos these days. Having easy access to those photos across my devices seems like a dream. And Apple seems to be trying to make that dream come true.
PermalinkCool concept. A children’s book that comes to life when you look at it through your phone’s camera. $20 gets you one.
PermalinkHell, let's be honest, if you're relying on Google's own email apps on the iPhone, your experience is doubleplusungood. But there are plenty of alternatives in Apple's App Store, and it just so happens that the best among them now bears the name of Microsoft Outlook.
Never thought this would happen, did you? Gmail’s iPhone app has always sucked. When they bought out, and shut down, Sparrow years ago, we had a glimmer of hope that it would launch as a new Gmail app that was amazing. But it did. And here Microsoft buys out Acompli and does just that, rebrand and relaunch.
For me, personally, I love Mailbox for email, both on the go and at the desk. But for the pro emailer that lives by email, much more than inbox management is necessary. And it looks like Acompli had it. And now Microsoft does. And what’s more, the new Outlook supports Gmail, Dropbox, and more than just Microsoft services.
One could hope that this would convince Google to make the next move, but Google seems to ignore these kinds of things.
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