The iPhone App Review : iPhone Application News & Reviews

Price: $1.99    Score:  10/10    By Lara Vukelich

Whether you are a seasoned player of Cribbage, or just trying it out for the first time, Cribbage Premium by Trivial Technology is worth checking out.

For those unfamiliar, Cribbage is a two-player game involving cards and a peg board. In short, the objective is to get 121 points before your opponent; points are tracked by colored pegs that are moved along a board. At the beginning of each round, players are dealt six cards, and each of them have to put two of those cards in the crib. Players alternate taking the points in the crib every other round.

In each round, players take turns laying down a card, with the objective being to reach 31 points collectively. If a player cannot lay down a card without the total exceeding 31, he or she must say “go” and the round is over. Players get points during the round by:

• Making the total points exactly 31 points
• The other player saying “go”
• Playing the last card
• Reaching exactly 15 points
• Putting down a card that results in a pair, triple, or quad play
• Playing a sequence of cards

At the end of each round, players get additional points for a variety of reasons, including having pairs or triples in their hand, or four cards of the same suit.

For the new player, the game has an “easy” setting, and the application will count your points for you. There is also a “hint” icon available throughout the game that will come in handy if you’re unsure of the best move. For seasoned players, the application will allow you to play at the “difficult” level, and you can also score your own hand.

Cribbage Premium lets you play against the computer or peer to peer with a friend through bluetooth technology. I found the game to be fun, but definitely more engaging if you try to score your own points. If you do it wrong, the iPhone automated player will take the points from you! For two bucks, card game lovers should consider buying this app.

Cribbage Premium is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

Price: $5.99    Score: 8/10    By Michelle Schusterman

I’ve been fortunate enough not to have any serious back problems in my life, at least so far. But judging from the personal accounts of a few people close to me, I know that it can be an incredibly painful, complex, and expensive issue to deal with.

Low Back Pain Clinical Management Guidelines is an app intended to help those suffering from lower back pain navigate through all of the possible causes and treatments – no small task, and one that developer Clinically Relevant Technologies has taken seriously.

After reading and accepting a thorough disclaimer, you begin choosing yes or no type questions to navigate through the app’s algorithm. Most steps include extra information or details, such as what you should expect at physical examinations at your particular stage in the process, etc. The app is worded as if speaking to a doctor, supplying advice on how he would approach his patient.

But if you are the patient, I think that makes this app even more valuable – knowing what to expect from your doctor. It also lets you know what kind of strategies and tests to expect when testing for specific problems, including:

• Cancer
• Cauda equina syndrome
• Vertebral fracture
• Infection (i.e. osteomyelitis)
• Spinal stenosis
• Ankylosing spondylitis

As I said, I haven’t experienced back pain myself, and clearly I’m no doctor. However, the information this guideline provides seems solid and highly researched. The format is great and easy to navigate – however, I would like to see a way of saving your current status in the algorithm. Many of the steps you reply to require doctor appointments, follow-ups, and trial therapies, which can take days or weeks to complete. Afterwards you have to start the algorithm over again to include that step.

Low Back Pain contains other useful information, like an acronym legend, other recommendations, and a statistical review. Back pain can range from a simple fix to an incredibly complicated issue, and I’ve seen more than one friend spend months and even years visiting doctors and receiving mixed diagnoses, not to mention wasting a lot of money. It’s a difficult journey to navigate, but this app does a wonderful job acting as a guide.

Low Back Pain Clinical Management Guidelines requires iPhone OS 3.1.2 or later and is compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Price: FREE (for 30 days)    Score: 8/10    By Steve Beaudry

Email is a wonderful thing. Just about all of your favorite web applications and social media sites can notify you of updates using email. Unfortunately, this often leads to a cluttered inbox (depending, of course, on how popular you are).

iPriortyMail by Ahlquist Software helps you out by not only notifying you of incoming email, but also filtering that email by sender and giving you options for a different type of notification per sender. What’s really great is that it comes with pre-set settings for popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’ve been counting on email notifications to tell you when you’ve got something new, this is your app.

It’s important to note that this is not a fully functional email client. When it sends you the notification, you can read the email in the app, but when you press the reply button it takes you to the iPhone’s native email app. I haven’t decided whether this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, the iPhone’s Mail app is all one needs to compose an email and it works perfectly. On the other hand, it gives you one  more step, one more second of loading time. Before iPriorityMail, I used another app for notifications and it was able to show me the alert and, upon load, switch to the appropriate app. iPriorityMail’s system makes it faster to see the mail and decide to respond, but it also acts as an unnecessary middle-man. So, there are pros and cons to the system here and they seem to be about equal to me. If there’s something you prefer, I’m sure you can make that decision.

The big draw here, however, is its integration with social networking sites. If you have Facebook email you every time you get a new notification, or Twitter every time you get a new DM or Follower, iPriorityMail will automatically detect that email address and give you a whole new set of settings for those notifications.  There are dozens of different ringtones from which to choose including ones that simply have a female voice saying “Twitter” or “Facebook.” The ability to change the ringtone also extends beyond simple social networking sites to whatever contact you wish to differentiate from every other email. Choose whatever contact is in your address book and create a unique notification for him so you instantly know whether or not the email you’re getting is important just by the sound.

iPriorityMail is free to download and try out for a month, but after that you have to pay $0.99 for the privilege of push notifications. Use of Apple’s push servers isn’t free, so, like most developers without a major corporation behind them have decided, the cost gets pushed out to you. So, if it’s worth it to you, then it’s a pretty good deal. Personally, I’m a cheapskate and would rather stick with the native app with its little red number on the corner.

All in all, this is a solid app that does what it aims to quite well. You can tune out certain emails in favor of the most important ones and give those emails that you choose a specific alert that tells you exactly what’s coming in. Not a bad deal at all, I say.

iPriorityMail requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch.

Price: $0.99    Score: 7/10    By Daniel Bischoff

ShowMe Stories, from developer SID On, is an app with great value for anyone with young kids.  Basically, ShowMe Stories is a collection of visuals that the user reveals by swiping his or her finger over the screen.  The images, controls, and content are all perfect for the little ones in your life.

When you start up ShowMe Stories, you’ll see four different categories to choose from, including men at work, animals, fable figures, and pictures of your own choosing.  Obviously, tapping this last option will bring up the photo albums you currently have stored on your iPhone.  If your child wants to reveal a picture of him or herself, they can do that, but the other categories also have a lot of different images to reveal.

There are 30 pictures in total, and in the first category, Professions, there are images of firemen, construction workers, doctors and garbage men.  After every picture is wiped clean and revealed, the iPhone gives off a little cheer.  It’s a real simple task, but your child is sure to get a kick out of this and want to keep playing.  Simply tapping the little arrow that appears to the right of the image will let them do that.

You can also back out of any category at any time by tapping the menu button that appears in the top left hand corner of the screen.  This helps if your child gets tired of Santa Claus or doesn’t like the hunchback of Notre Dame, from the Fairy Tales section.

Of course, your child can always check out the worms, rabbits, and other animals in the animal section if the other two haven’t appealed to them.  For $0.99, ShowMe Stories is an exceptionally well geared app for people with children who may need to entertain on the go.

While there is an age limit to the children who will be entertained by ShowMe Stories, the app can be an invaluable tool if your child falls within the appropriate age range.  It provides friendly images, audio, and interactivity all in one.

Show Me Stories is compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.  It requires the iPhone 3.0 OS or later.

Lima Sky announced today that Doodle Jump has now sold over three million copies on the iTunes App Store – the first app ever to do so. One of the most popular iPhone games since its release in 2009, Doodle Jump has occupied the #1 top paid app spot in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and several other countries and has already sold over 1.6 million units this year alone. Doodle Jump is now played a mind-boggling 5 million times a day, justifying the title’s accompanying advisory, “BE WARNED: Insanely Addictive.”

“Selling over three million copies of Doodle Jump is beyond our wildest expectations,” said Igor Pusenjak, President & Founder of Lima Sky. “We have to thank our incredible fanbase for their undying support, none of this would be possible without their help.”

Price: $2.99    Score: 10/10    By Daniel Bischoff

Have you been looking for a fun, creative way to show off your vacation photos? Just want to waste some time waiting for a movie? Strip Designer lets you do both of these while still hosting a suite of professional photo editing tools all aimed at creating professional looking comic strips.

Strip Designer, from developer Vivid Apps, doesn’t let you create just a few different types of strips, it offers TONS of templates for both comic and film strips, including both plain and embossed comic strips.  When you first open the app, it gives you the following options:

1. Create a new strip
2. Open a saved strip
3. Read instructions.

Creating a new strip will bring up all of the different templates to choose from.  After choosing your template, you’ll add photos to each frame by using easy buttons on the strip.  Once you choose a picture from your photo albums, you can rotate it, scale it to the size you’d like, and move the proper subject into frame.  While making these edits to your photo, you can also sharpen, invert, or add another filter to your photo.

Next, adding a speech balloon to your photo is easy.  Place the speech balloon on the image, then pinch and pull it to change the size.  From here, you can also add text to individual speech balloons.  After you’ve put the finishing touches on speech balloons and the like, you can save your strip to send to friends or edit later.  Strip Designer allows for sharing your created strip on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.

If you want to delve deeper into your strip editing, you can do so by installing new fonts and editing templates.  If you’ve really got a knack for creating strips, you can even join the Strip Designer Flickr group and share them with other professional strip creators.

What I like most about Strip Designer is that it offers an extremely full tool set, and doesn’t talk down to its users or dumb any of the tools down because of the platform it’s on.  At the same time, because Strip Designer is so streamlined with so many different tools at the users fingertips, it’s still really easy to use.  All of this is only further complimented by the very helpful tutorial that uses instructions and screen captures to teach the user within one tap from the title screen.

At $2.99 Strip Designer offers a ton of useful editing tools that will let anyone create a professional looking strip in minutes.  Buy it and make sharing vacation photos or that annual thanksgiving football game a bit more interesting.

Strip Designer is compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.  It requires the iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

Price: $9.99    Score: 9/10    By Shaun Campbell

There are very few iPhone games that leave your jaw on the floor. This is one of those games. Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies is one of the best-looking pieces of app to ever hit a mobile device. And while it’s not new (released late last year), there is a hot-off-the-press new map – Verrückt (insane asylum) – which adds an objective-driven campaign-style element to the game.

Developed by Activision, Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies is an iPhone adaptation of the zombie survival mode in the console version of the hugely popular Call of Duty: World at War. As in the original, Zombies pits you against a never ending onslaught of undead Nazi invaders on the familiar “Nacht der Untoten” map. As you run around furiously trying to rebuild barricades and reload your ammo the zombie hordes get harder to kill and quickly multiply in number. While the first few minutes start off rather slow, it’s easy to quickly find yourself overrun.

The basic premise of Verrückt, a $4.99 in-app purchase, is the same as for Nacht der Untoten – defend yourself from the unrelenting zombie hordes, but there are some new specific goals that allow you to unlock power-ups and new defensive items. The new features also give the game more depth – it’s no longer just about running around madly shooting zombies until you die. Verrückt also brings the player 9 new weapons, 13 new achievements to unlock as well as the introduction of “perks” like increased health and faster reloading that can be purchased from “Perks-a-Cola” machines in the game.

The control options are the same as what’s offered in the original – dual-stick (console style), tilt and swipe look. Dual-stick is the easiest to use if you’ve played any FPS on PS3/XBOX, and also offers the highest sensitivity. The graphics are incredible, but when I first tried this out on a 2G iPhone there was so much control lag in the later rounds of the game that your death was pretty much inevitable. The game has obviously been optimized for owners of the newer iPhone models -  I’ve seen this run on a 3GS and it looks amazing.

Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies supports up to four players via Wi-Fi/internet and two players via Bluetooth, so you can get online (that’s right) – and team up with your buddies across the street or across the world and dish out some Nazi justice in co-op mode. There is a big list of achievements to unlock in both maps and a worldwide leaderboard accessible within the device for international bragging rights.

My only criticism here is the price – $4.99 for the new map on top of the original $9.99 purchase price makes it one of the most expensive games on the App Store. Given the success of the franchise, this is unlikely to deter many fans and with Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies clocking up a 4.5 star average on iTunes from over 5000 ratings – the people have spoken as to the quality of this game.

Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later and is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Apple Games group at Namco Networks have just tipped us off that they’re launching a pair of puzzle matching titles set to hit the App Store in the coming weeks:

Tinseltown Dreams: The 50’s is a Match 3 movie-making game where you can create your very own box-office hit.  Accrue money by swapping tiles; then use the funds to hire a cast and crew and purchase props for your masterpiece.  Perfect timing with the Oscars last night!

Lt. Fly Rise of the Arachnids is a hybrid of genres combining Match 4 and Shooter gameplay.  Collect ammo by matching 4 and unleash the firepower on the invading Spider army.

Fighting parking fines? There’s an app for that. Just released, it’s the first app that actively helps citizens contest their parking tickets.  Through a collaboration with a veteran parking ticket appeals judge, the app, named Parking Ticket Pundit NYC, shepherds the user through a number of criteria that will automatically invalidate a ticket and get the user a full refund or cancellation of the ticket.

If none of the criteria are met, the app helps the user get an automatic reduction of his or her parking ticket fine.  If the user still wants to contest the ticket, he or she has the option of emailing the details of the ticket and the circumstances surrounding it to our parking ticket judge, who will respond with advice as to whether or not the user should pursue an appeal.  The app also offers an official guide to parking, and a large database of tips for avoiding parking tickets in the future.

Currently, the app is only geared toward New York City parking tickets, but the developers are in the process of expanding into other major cities very soon.

Price: $0.99    Score: 7/10    By Daniel Bischoff

Do remember making your own kaleidoscope? Taking a cardboard tube, packing it full of shiny, colorful foil? Do you remember spinning that tube around and around? Well, there’s an app for that.

Picture-Kaleidoscope, from developer Kevin Needlands is a small, easy to use app that takes any picture you throw at it and converts it into a kaleidoscopic image that you can save and send to friends. Picture-Kaleidoscope’s biggest draw is how easy it is to use.

When you start the app up, Picture-Kaleidoscope asks you to either choose a picture from one of your photo albums, or take a picture of whatever you have in front of you at the time. It can be fun to use a picture of one of your friends, but a more visually stunning kaleidoscope will come from an abstract or interesting picture.

After choosing your photo, you simply draw a line on the image to pick a point for the kaleidoscope to separate the image. You cut a large section, or a small one. After generating your kaleidoscope on this section, you can choose how many pieces to use and whether or not you want the image mirrored in adjacent sections of the kaleidoscope.

Voilà! You have your kaleidoscope – just please refrain from spinning your iPhone while driving or operating heavy machinery! The kaleidoscope image itself doesn’t actually spin in this app, though it would be a nice addition to see in a future update as that was half the fun of the old tube-and-foil creations.

Picture-Kaleidoscope is an extremely easy to use app, but some of that ease of use is due in part to the low number of features and options to play with. At $0.99 you can certainly get some fun out of the app, but it might not stay on your phone for long if you don’t have much room left on your hard drive.

Kaleidoscope is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  It requires the iPhone OS 3.0 or later.