Expert Blogs
You may have heard of the Tron clone Hard Lines, one of the best games in AppStore.
I've always liked playing on my mobile devices, even back in the Pocket PC / Windows Mobile / Palm OS days. They revitalize me quite a lot, particularly after a hard, exhausting day.
Playing without physical controls (buttons), only using the touchscreen, is pretty hard. This includes a lot of game types, particularly ones where quick direction changes are needed and / or you can't make the smallest mistake and must be absolutely sure even the smallest movements on the directional pads (D-pad for short) is registered. In games like these, physical D-pad / button feedback is of extreme importance.
Some of my recent tips you, assuming you're interested in programming mobile devices, may be interested in.
Ruby
HERE, I've answered a question on whether it's possible to run Ruby (a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features) scripts under iOS. It is.
Back in July, I've devoted a sizeable part of my multimedia article to the question of dynamic video de-interlacing. Back then, the only way of (dynamically) getting rid of the pretty ugly effects of interlacing was jailbreaking your iDevice and installing the not very finger-friendly, pretty awkward XBMC on it.
Today, I've decided to completely abandon the “old” 3.x series of Xcode, the development environment for iOS (and Mac OS X).
Up until now, I didn't want to switch as moving to the new Xcode required an almost complete re-learn of the system – even the basic keyboard shortcuts have been changed, to my “delight”.
Since 2005 (the initial debut of the first version), I've dedicated several articles to the alternative Web browser Opera Mini. Back in the Windows Mobile / Symbian S40...S60 / BlackBerry days, Opera Mini offered a viable and, in many respects, much better alternative to the built-in browsers of these operating systems – for example, on my Blackberry 8800, it was the only browser I ever used. On my more capable Windows Mobile and Nokia devices / phones, I also tended to prefer it to other, in general, clumsy and slow browsers.
(retina iPt screen screenshot)
If you come from Windows Mobile and are into playing MAME arcade games, you may well remember my full article dedicated to the emulation of arcade machines, including MAME, on the platform. (Note that the linked article doesn't show inline images; if you need them, check out THIS instead.)
Fortunately, on the iDevice, it's also possible to play MAME games. No, unlike on Windows Mobile, not the newer, vastly superior (NeoGeo / CPS), “only” the older ones, but it's still more than nothing, isn't it? And it's free – and is also compatible with several Bluetooth game controllers (see below).
In my Wednesday's article, I've quickly mentioned PhoneDisk by Macroplant as the most recommended application for (Mac) OS X computers to access the installed ( AppStore or Xcode) applications' home directories on non-jailbroken devices.
Today, I've helped a friend restore some contacts onto his iPhone. As the experience I gathered may be useful to you as well, I let you know.
First, on my Mac, while I had the contacts in the Windows version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 under Parallels Desktop, I had iTunes solely under my Mac OS X and didn't want to install it under Parallels to keep the Parallels image size down. (Which is of paramount importance when you use Time Machine to back up the contents of your computer, including the disk images of your Parallels virtual machines and want to save as much storage as possible.) After all, there are only two cases when it's indeed worth having iTunes in your virtual machine if you, otherwise, use the OS X version to synchronize your iOS devices:
As has been mentioned some weeks ago, it's pretty easy to record GPS information and, later, incorporate it into photos taken on a non-GPS-enabled camera.
Unfortunately, the current camera lineup doesn't really please people that would like to geotag their shots. Neither the, because of the high price-value ratio or high image quality (IQ), most popular point-and-shoot (P&S) or DSLR (including mirrorless [aka EVIL] or some lower-end [Sony] SLT) cameras have built-in GPS modules.
Some examples of the current, most popular cameras lacking any GPS support:
P&S-style "luxury" fixed-lens camera
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