Popular Mechanics (iTunes Link), might be the exception for many reasons.

1. They priced the app right. 1.99. It’s a beta, so I hope they see that the price is a huge deal and keep it at something reasonable, and below the dead tree edition.

2. They don’t go rich media crazy like Wired did. There’s plenty of pages of simple text for reading. Maybe a nice transition of a graphic element sliding in slightly after the page transition finishes, but every page isn’t a multimedia orgy.

3. They started slow. Both Men’s Health and Wired, dove right in with high priced, “billed as complete” as far as I know offerings. It’s nice to see Pop. Mech. admit they’re testing the waters.

4. They valued consumer feedback. The app asks you (sadly it doesn’t seem to know that I’ve already done the survey, which is a might annoying) to fill out a survey about your experience with the app. The content, the ads, etc. Neither Wired nor MH, seem to care. In fact I had trouble with the MH app (It ate my $5 issue) and it took me hours to find an email to ask for help, and the email bounced. The support site, is only for subscribers. FAIL on so many levels, the app is deleted from my iPad.

5. don’t waste space. Honestly I’m not sure how big the PM app is, but I don’t think it was as big as Wired. I don’t want my magazines to take up so much space I’m debating what to sync and not sync, video or magazine. etc. Bloat is overrated.

I’m really digging the Pop. Mech. issue so far. As always great content, but also a pleasing experience. I’m not taping, swiping, and pinching every element to see if there’s something hidden like in other magazine apps. I’m very hopeful that they learn the right lessons from this beta, and create a digital magazine worth subscribing too.

For me that would be.

1. Not $5 an issue. between $2 and $3 i think is the sweet spot. I don’t want to pay as much or more than the dead tree edition costs.
2. Subscription price that makes sense. Not more than the dead tree, and not (digital) cover price X 12
3. Leave the multi media orgy for others. Every issue should be just interactive enough to make sure I don’t think they simply uploaded a PDF of the print issue. I don’t need that much interactivity, it takes away from the content.

He’s an awesome developer, great speaker, and his latest game LandFormer (iTunes Link) is an awesome time suck! That’s a good thing :)

Owen’s not new to games, but I think this latest release is his coming out game. This is the game that’s the start of truly awesome things for Owen.

Ok enough gushing!

LandFormer is a straightforward puzzle game, you don’t really need instructions or tutorials, pick it up, try it out and away you go.

The objective is to make the ground perfectly flat; raising and lowering the terrain in patterns to accomplish your goal.

You’ve got 6 patterns and 2 choices of terraforming; Up or down. Each level has a  number of moves it should take to clear the level. Some are pretty straightforward, but the game quickly moves into, “hmm well maybe this, then this… nope, undo!” Which is good. I’m usually pretty quickly turned off by games that start too hard, or don’t progress past easy.

It’s very addictive, sitting there staring at the terrain, thinking through permutations.

Graphics wise the game is stunning, a perfect match to the game play. Ditto on the sound, the effects and background music are incredible and all blend together for a calming, tho sometimes frustrating brain game.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Owen has not just made the game expandable with In App Purchase, but also for free, you can exchange levels. You can email a level, heck you can tweet a level. People can follow your URL and add the level to their game to play. It’s easy to create levels, it’s basically solving a map, backwards :) just start arranging the terrain, when you’re done, save and share.

The IAP is awesome, I’m really glad he went this route. I think IAP is one of the best features for game devs, to make money with their hard work.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want useless crapware that I can’t use without purchasing something. Quite the contrary with LandFormer, you can go (I assume) forever without ever buying any of Owen’s premium content, getting levels from friends and the internet, but why? Sure that’s fun and I hope we’ll see more and more tweets with levels in them, but Owen has put together a shit ton of levels for purchase, why not get those and test your abilities. And test them they will!

Oh and the game itself is skinnable, how awesome is that!?

If you haven’t already grabbed LandFormer, go get it! Heck even Apple likes it.

My only complaint (and I know Owen started this before the iPad was announced, at least I think so) is that it’d kick ass on the iPad. Either more complex patterns, or larger maps, etc. I think it’d be awesome. I’d suggest that be his next project, but he owe me bacon farmer!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty, but not useful. Yet.

And before you decide I’m just an Apple hater, let me lay out my credentials for those that don’t know me.

I own:

Unibody Macbook, 2 Minis, 3 iPods (including an iPod Photo), 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, 2 Airport Express, 1 Airport Extreme, my wife has a white plastic macbook.

I’ve Previously owned:

a Macbook Pro, Newton 110, Powerbook 510, Performa.  I think it’s safe to say my fanboi-ness is secure.

That out of the way.

The iPad is a very pretty device, and if your life (as some do) revolves around reading websites, watching videos, and …. well that’s it. Checking email I suppose too. Then the iPad is the perfect toy for you (albeit, for those simple tasks, the price IMO is a bit steep).

I tried. I didn’t write this review the night i got my iPad, I didn’t write it Sunday night, I waited and actually tried to do things I’d normally grab my Macbook for.

First I went up on my deck, to get some sun, and enjoy working outside. Since I was just gonna reply to a few emails, I grabbed the iPad.

• While I enjoy seeing myself, i don’t want to watch my face as I type emails. That’s easily fixable though, so it’s not a knock. Why Apple is obsessed with uselessly glossy screens is beyond me.
• First I tried holding it and typing with my thumbs. I prefer landscape mode, and have locked it in that orientation. I have big hands, so it’s quite possible, but not a long term thing. Then I set it in my lap, as many have proclaimed is the perfect use case… I got a sore neck. By this time I’d responded (lengthy responses sure) to two emails. Perhaps if I invested in a $40 (?) case from Apple that i could sit on our patio table, and use? Or buy a Bluetooth keyboard?
• One email I needed to send an export of attendee data to. I couldn’t. The export is .xls of CSV. kudos to Mobile Safari for opening the .xls and showing me, but I needed to send it to some one. Sure the iPhone doesn’t support this, but if the iPad is a revolutionary bridge device between my iPhone and a laptop, I expect a few laptop like things to be there.
• Of course since I can’t run two things at once, I had to close out mail.app mid compose to look up a discount code for a sponsor. Close mail, open safari, go to eventbrite, copy the code, close safari, open mail.app
• Then I thought I’d take a break, check on my Kingdom and my weird little people on Planet Wilker. Thankfully the display is so crisp and bright, it overpowers (mostly) the sun, so i could actually enjoy those games.

Last night I went to a user group meeting, taking only my Mifi and my iPad.

• The auto brightness doesn’t seem very responsive, so I was routinely blinded when loading something with a white screen in the darkened room. No biggy really, annoying a little, sure, but not a “Damn you Apple”
• I had two tasks I was hoping to get done, or at least get started, while listening to the presentation. Write an email to attendees of 360|iDev (thru eventbrite.com’s email feature), and compose the last speaker email to speakers at 360|iDev using mailchimp. The result. FAIL. Both websites use HTML based text editors, apparently not the html web that Apple supports. Kinda crappy. Can’t use Flash, can’t use some HTML…
• So I spent the UG meeting, not using my iPad except to occasionally tweet, and that was only because my iPhone was in my pocket

I’ve tried to replace some of the things I do on my iPhone and my laptop

• I completely understand why Apple made the iPad support iPhone apps. It’s nice to launch and crow about 100k + apps. I have yet to use an iPhone app on the iPad that wasn’t completely and utterly fail. Why use it in 1x mode? I’ll just fire up my iPhone. In 2x mode, no app escapes the ugly tree. I understand the logic, but think Apple should have given developers more time to get their apps ready. I mean really, no facebook app? Hell, the mobileMe app… uh Apple. I know you want me to shell out $30 for the iWorks, but I’d love to be able to access my mobileMe account in a native iPad app, how about that?
• I think the iPad will be much more interesting 3 months from now. Now that developers have an actual device to test with, those that (I can’t blame them) waited to actually use the device before building apps for it, will begin releasing apps. Right now the iPad app store is woe-fully anemic… well maybe not if you’re independently wealthy, and can afford every $9.99 app, LOL. Even then, there’s only a small list of apps I’m buying later, as I feel richer. Most of the apps I want, aren’t there.

Yeah Apple is about the experience, I agree, and sure surfing the web is very nice, if you only want to surf the web and consume. If you actually want to create… well so far the iPad hasn’t done much to support creation. I read one review that gushed and gushed about how awesome surfing the web is. OK sure, but I don’t spend my day complaining about surfing the web now.

So what do I like?

• The feel of it. It’s a nice piece of equipment. The screen (once covered in a smudge/glare free cover) is awesome. Sure I’d like to not have letterboxing when I watch a movie but whatever, that’s a first world problem, and not that important to me.
• The OS, it’s the iPhone OS, which while I wish wasn’t so closed off, and anti-hacker (Pro user), it’s an easy OS to understand.
• The Apps. iPad apps, are nice. They use the screen really well. Those that will shine are the ones that didn’t simply recompile for the larger device.
• The future potential. The iPad right now, for me is a cute toy that gets attention, and let’s me play a few games, and waste time. The iPad in 6 months, could seriously kick ass. There will be more apps that are useful, there will be (Please Apple, it’s kinda obvious) some way for me to work on files in mobileMe (or Googledocs) over the cloud. Screw this dragging files into iTunes, and back and forth. It’s 2010 Apple, you have a cloud storage service, that people are paying money for now. Tie that in to your devices!

What don’t I like? (and please, you don’t have to agree, I welcome your opinion, but if Apple makes you happy with what they deliver, don’t try to tell me what I should be happy too)

• It’s a bit heavy. Not really a “Bad mark” but it’s not light.
• The video app needs an update. Looking at my movies, it’s fine to see the thumbnail and name. Looking at TV shows. A thumbnail from an episode, isn’t helpful. I had 6 icons. Some Seinfeld, some Big Bang Theory. No labels. I had to open one up to see that it was the folder for a season of that show. I like the breakdown by season, that’s nice, but not having any visible clue, it’s like hunting around to find the show you want to watch.
• The single port. This is totally an Apple thing, and I wasn’t surprised, that they’d only have a dock connector, and sell $29 things that plug into the dock connector. Doesn’t mean I think it’s ok.
• The lack of Flash. I don’t actually miss Flash THAT much, because I’ve had my iPhone for a while. I think flash on the iPhone isn’t really a deal breaker. But the iPad is another device entirely. I expect on a media consumption tablet, that I could hit up Hulu, or youtube (fuck having a separate app, that’s lame), or any of the what? 80% of the web that uses flash to deliver content. It’s a business play pure and simple, and as a business person, I can’t find fault. As a consumer, hacker, and person who tries to see thru bull shit, I think it’s weak sauce. “Open Web”, my ass, it’s the “Apple Web”, and them trying to come off like it’s anything but a power grab, is disingenuous at best.
• the iPad of now. If 360|iDev wasn’t the weak after iPadmas, I probably would have waited. It just doesn’t do anything I can’t do now with the tools I have. I don’t need “an semi-adequate alternative” I need a “solid replacement”… the iPad isn’t there.

Procamera has an impressive list of features.

• Steady Cam
• timer
• autosave
• full rez zoom
• virtual horizon
• pro grid
• compass
• Digital zoom

Here’s a zoomed in pic and a regular to compare.

Zoomed in

Regular

I was really impressed with the zoom, it’s digital of course, but NOT complete crap.

One of my favorite features, and what really lost it for Gorillcam, background saving.

Once you a take a picture, the UI bar turns red, you can take more pictures, and use the app like normal, but until it’s green it’s saving in the back ground.

As long as you have auto save turned on, just keep taking pictures.

I’ve actually moved pro Camera to page 1 of my homescreen, and the built in cam app is on the last page where Apple’s unremovable apps live.

Pros: Saving in the background. That’s huge.  The horizon is nice too. I always try to offset me horizons when I take pictures

Cons: None that come to mind, it’s a great app. i love the feature set, and the functionality.

When i saw that GorillaPod had an iphone app, and a camera app no less I was intrigued.

The iPhone camera is kind the suck. At least for anything more than, “Oh hey a unicorn in the middle of the street, lemme snap a pick for twitter”

Try taking an “arms length” picture and good luck tapping the right place on the screen.

Enter GorillaCam (iTunes Link)!

It’s pretty simple, it replaces the existing camera app on your phone. It replaces it with WAY more functionality.

Pros

Timer: Awesome. Especially when doing arms length photos, etc.

Time Lapse. Less impressive only because of the apps slowness (see the ‘cons’ section). The lapses would be 30 seconds or more apart. not sure what benefit that gives.

3 Shot burst is nice.

Bubble level: blah whatever. I don’t need perfectly level photos from my iPhone.

Grid: Kinda cool, just for lining things up in the shot, I like it, but I think i like for some useless nerdcore reason.

Press Anywhere: Worth the price of the app just for this. Again, when taking those arms length-eiffel tower-in the background shots, having to tap the exact spot on the screen where the shutter button appears is almost impossible. It’s led to plenty of pics of me and Nicole where we’re laughing at the silliness of the problem or making a weird face thinking I hit the button, when I didn’t, but then did hit the button when I wasn’t planning to.

Being able to just tap anywhere on the screen is AWESOME. It’s made the app really useful.

Cons.

The biggest, and only real downside to the app is the saving. I don’t know if it’s the app, the camera API, or what, but it’s slow. Almost unusably slow. It’s fine if you’re just taking a one off photo of something, but if you’re trying to snap pics at an event or something where you’d like to take more than 2 pictures a minute, you’re out of luck. Hopefully it changes in a future release. Right now it’s not a full replacement of the Camera app. Close though.

In the end, if you’re looking for more features from your iPhone camera, this app is great. It offers a ton of cool (and some less cool) features that just make taking pictures easier/better. If you can live with the delay, it’s worth it, no question.

Oh and I’m on a 3GS, so it’s not (I assume) a hardware issue.

It’s as shitty as I said.

My free disc arrived and I figured, you know what, I’ll try it out, maybe I’m wrong, it happens from time to time. I wasn’t.

The interface is craptastic. You load the disc like any other, it spends some time connecting, then it brings up a nice little screen with an alpha numeric code, that I have to plug into my Netflix account. Too bad my laptop was upstairs doing something so I had to commit it to memory. Lame. I know it would have been extra work on Netflix’s part, but it would have been an awesome gesture if they could have pre-registered the disc they sent to my account “Welcome John, here’s your instant Queue”

The browsing is about as simple as it could be, a linear horizontal display of movies. You have to just scroll left and right through the list. That’s it.

No bells, no whistles. Even on my connection which doesn’t suck but isn’t an OC3 or anything, the cover art took a while to load, so I was scrolling through blank images.

I suppose if you don’t have a media center machine (I’m running Boxee and it’s Netflix app is awesome, by comparison), or a laptop you can connect to your TV, then this method is better than a poke in the eye with a spoon. Otherwise, wait for the Disc in the mail, or for Whatever exclusivity Netflix gave Xbox (stupidly) to expire.

Thankfully, what I assumed was just a natural state of affairs, I had no control over, turns out to be a completely manageable process, thanks to Network Location. I would have never known this app existed, if not for twitter. Someone (I don’t recall who) pointed out the One Finger Discount site, and after looking over the offerings, I was clicking purchase.

It was especially good timing. I was leaving for a trip to San Jose, so I’d get to test the app out. Set up is really straight forward. You define your locations (Home, Office, Travel, Starbucks, etc)

The things that get me, are printers, Time Machine, etc. When I’m traveling for work, I almost always have my portable HP printer, so I’d like to not have to remember to change printers.

I hate having Time Machine try to run when I’m not home, sitting there spinning wasting cycles, and bandwidth looking for the drobo that isn’t there.

Defining my locations, solves those.

The nice thing is, while yeah it will pop up a nice little widget asking me where I am, it can also auto sense, and take action, based on geolocation, and Access Point name. So now, whenever I’m at home and connect to my home AP, it’ll mount the drives I want mounted all the time.

This past weekend it’s been so nice, knowing my Default printer was what it needed to be.

If you’re a road warrior, that has to constantly fuss with settings between location, this app is for you!!

I loved V as a kid, it was a great show, good message. Sure it was campy and Jane Badler was a psycho bitch of a bad guy, but it was a great show and set of Miniseries/TV Movies.

I watched the new V the other night and while I think it’s got promise, and I admit, it’s a “re-imagining” it’s got some work to do to measure up to the original.

Sure networks today, are run by retards, who give a show 1 episode to hit #1 and if it doesn’t they cancel so they can air more Dancing|singing|boxing|dieting with the stars, so I hope V get’s a chance to work out the kinks.

I’ll work thru the hour with my issues.

The Arrival. So big ass ships arrive over head. They look mean, not nearly as peaceful and goofy as the old series’ saucers. These new ships are bad ass looking. What do New Yorkers do? They clap. Uh, ok. Let’s assume this world hasn’t seen “Independence Day” oh wait, they make a reference to it, so big ass ships appear over head, and we clap? yeah.

The “Vs”. What. The. Fuck?! Is there no word we won’t just use as it is? We have to shorten to rediculousness? I mean, WTF STFU srsly? ;) Calling the Visitors “Vs” is just lame, they’re the Visitors.  Sure they dress snappy in modern human outfits, but they’re still Visitors.

Dress code. Sure the old red jumpsuits were a bit corny, but uh hello. The Visitors are a military/scientific mission. What military travels around in Armani suits? The uniform identified them as 1. visitors and 2. an army. Now they’re neither. Hell in this series “Vs” could all jump out of their ships, run thru the city and immediately blend in. No crazy shades needed, no off kilter voices.

The Red “V” as a propaganda tool FOR the visitors? Uh, I seem to recall pretty clearly that in the original the red “V” was a sign of defiance. It was V for victory over the Visitors, not V for Visitors. Again, What. The. Fuck

Pacing. Sure, like I said, networks today aren’t willing to wait an entire season or even half a season to spin out a compelling story, it needs to be out there fast, and each episode needs to stand on it’s own for the retarded masses with the memory of a goldfish. but really? 1 hour covered a good 3/4 of the series.

We saw, the Visitors revealed as lizards, we saw the existence of the 5th column, we saw the creation, and full fledged existence of the resistance, we didn’t and I suspect we won’t see the vilification of scientists. All we didn’t see was the guinea pig get eaten. I guess they had to keep something for episode 2. Oh and of course the teenage sex leading to an alien baby, looks like that’s lined up for early in the season too.

Lastly I’m bummed we didn’t get more of the original cast re-imagined. Unless they’ve been so re-imagined I didn’t even recognize them that is.

I’m not a big Role player, so probly not the best person for this game. I did enjoy it a bit, but as a ‘casual gamer’ it wouldn’t be for me.

The game play is fun, but a bit confusing, there’s cross hairs, icons, double tapping, etc.

Story: Very interesting. The british accents are hilarious, the dialogue, just about worth the game on it’s own. It truly is hilarious!

Game play: Tricky. I’ve played the game several times, for varying lengths of time, and (I’ll admit I didn’t read the directions) have no idea what half the icons mean. A box? Simon pushing a box? a hammer?

I’ve tried each icon and Simon mocks me for trying to do anything. I’ve had a blast interacting with characters, but as far as interacting with the environment I’ve drawn a complete blank.

The only tough part of interacting with people in the game, is the dialogue selection. It’s as if the game was ported from something that that a d-pad or number pad or something. the font is so small you kinda have to slide your finger to see the faint highlighting take place so you can select. It took me a long time to figure this out, because simply tapping, the hit space doesn’t seem to be exactly where your finger is.

The graphics are great. Not photo realistic or anything, but great to look at. The entire environment is pretty interactive; things are  happening, moving, etc.

So, overall, Simon the Sorcerer 2 is a entertaining game, but the game place isn’t really iPhone friendly in it’s current state. It’s fun, but not quite there.

I originally looked for a broadband hotspot I could use my extra AT&T SIM with, but alas, the only option I found was for sale overseas and shipping, and conversion to Euro’s well put it out of my price range (Still looking for a device to use that SIM in, not really a netbook guy, so don’t offer that up :D ). Luckily our sprint cards were upgradeable. Well one was. the other was free to cancel so we did.

Now we share the mifi and whomever travels gets it, and when we travel together, well we can both use it.

It’s an awesome little device. We used it this past weekend in Vail. The hotel had wifi, but hell if we could find it. Every SSID was locked, and no one provided us the password. Mifi to the rescue, power it up and bam, surfing along just fine.

As much as I’m a fan of public wifi it’s just not reliable. Either the coffee shop router is unplugged, maxed out, or “I don’t think it works” or worse, NOT FREE. So I don’t bother. Sit down, fire it up. iPhone can use it, laptop can use it, hell someone I’m sitting with can too. I don’t have to worry about the guy next to me streaming pandora, or the girl in the corner using Skype to conference call, etc. I have my own 3G connection. Sure it might not be as fast as a hardline, but it’s always available, and ready.

Pros:

• Super portable
• Doesn’t waste a precious (On a unibody Mac) USB port
• Doesn’t require stupid drivers or apps
• easy to set up and connect to
• did I mention super portable?
• The controls interface (web site) is really easy to use
• You can run it on AC power too, so if the battery dies you’re not SOL. I haven’t tried running it off, USB power yet.
• Biggest Pro. I’m AT&T Proof. (See below)

Cons:

• Not sure if it’s Mifi or what, but sometimes the iPhone and Macbook, don’t immediately see the AP, even when it’s on and ready to go. They seem to forget that they’ve used that AP before. Possibly an IP thing? Kinda lame sometimes to have to re connect.
• Battery life. 4 hours with 1 isn’t so bad, but it goes down with each connection

AT&T Proof?

It’s common, if anecdotal knowledge in downtown Denver that during Rockies home games, the AT&T network pretty much collapses (sad, but true). You’ll have full bars, and can’t complete a call or open an email. I’ve taken to carrying the Mifi in my pocket or backback (as the case may be) and having it on the whole time and letting that serve up data for my iPhone. Voice is a little trickier, but Skype solves that issue, if I REALLY need to make a call right then. Sad, but hey, it’s a nice back up plan, since AT&T can’t be relied on.