Binary Game is a math game from John K, one of the developers at Wine Library TV. I heard about the app from Gary Vaynerchuck’s tweets and decided I’d give it a go. In Practice mode, you learn how to play the game. It gives you a number, and as quickly as your mind can calculate, put your fingers to work choosing the correct combination of numbers to add up to your Goal. Some are easy, some are challenging, and what I like about it is that it’s not a situation where the easy ones come first and then you progress to more difficult goals. They’re all thrown in there together, so the moment you’ve got your mind working hard to solve a difficult math problem, you’re thrown to a super simple one, but it might take you a second to realize it. It’s a great brain workout for adults, and I imagine kids could learn math with it fairly easily.

Once you’ve practiced, you’ll move on to Challenge Mode and Speed Mode, and compare your scores to the other Binary Game users. Check out the Leaderboard on the site, and keep yourself motivated to get better.

The challenge for Binary Game is going to be keeping me interested long term. For people who aren’t competitive, what else can they offer in updates that will keep the game challenging and interesting? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

I travel a lot, but mostly by car. I had to fly for the first time in almost a year, so I gladly loaded Flight Status on my iPhone. There are three options for tracking a flight.

If you know the Flight number, quickly enter it, the airline and the date to see if your flight is going to be leaving on time or if you can hang out with your loved one for a little while longer. If you don’t know the flight number, choose to look up multiple flights by Route or Airport. Narrow down the search by looking for the information you do know, such as the time of the flight or travel location. You can also add a Trip that includes all your flight information, including your confirmation number, to make it easy when you get to the self service ticket counter.

I enjoyed having all of this information at my fingertips on my flight. However, coming back home, we caught a good tailwind and arrived 30 minutes early. My husband had just checked Flight Status right before I called to say we had landed. It didn’t reflect the change in time. From past experience, I’m betting that if it were late, the change would have been updated faster. Early arrivals are a rarity and the airport’s screens didn’t even reflect it when I got off the plane.

Whether you’re leaving or coming home, having the app offers peace of mind for you and the one waiting for you to arrive safely. There are lots of apps in the App Store for getting the status of a flight. Which ones have you used? What do you like?

RssPlayer

Name: RssPlayer
Price: $4.99
Category: Entertainment
Website: rssplayer.blogspot.com
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch

RssPlayer is the only iPhone app I can find that is meant for playing audio and video shows that have an RSS feed. Please correct me in the comments if I’ve missed an app! Once installed, you add your desired RSS feed(s). This is when I really hate not having cut and paste on the iPhone. You will have to type in the feed manually, but once you get all your feeds in, it’s very convenient to be able to watch your podcasts without having to sync with your computer. When you open the app, you’ll see when you have new episodes available. Choose the episode you want and click play. Using the “More” button, you can mark individual episodes as Played, Download that file or Restart the episode. It’s a great app, and is worth paying for, especially if you spend much of your day out and about.

For those of you hesitant to spend before you buy, there will be new versions coming to the App Store soon. They’ll be priced at $0.99 and free and will limit how many feeds you can add so you can try before buying the full version. More information at the developer’s blog.

UPDATE: To answer questions, yes there is iTunes on the iPhone, but it can be slow to update. Sometimes it takes a full day to get new episodes. Many people have this issue, so having an alternative is nice!

Dimensions is a full featured app with 13 tools for measuring stuff. When I say “stuff”, I mean all kinds of things, from your pace and speed, to room sizes, to a traditional ruler. The app is in the form of a tool box, which is really clever. It has three levels (again, think tool box). The first two hold all the tools, and the third is an information page. Flipping between the levels is fun and the graphics are beautiful. If you open a tool that you don’t know what to do with, there are tutorials to help you out. I’ve had fun with the app, and if you like measuring things (or have the need to), check it out!

Cro-Mag Rally has been available on the App Store for a while. It’s been very popular, and it’s easy to see why. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a 3D racing game featuring cavemen. You can Race or you can Gather, but either way you’ve got to collect bones and other goodies. If you want a challenge, definitely pick this game up. It takes skill to do right. Even a slight movement to the left or right will send your character speeding that direction. With time, you’ll figure out how to move smoothly through the course and have the ability to pick up your bones.

Even if you don’t care about skill or a challenge, and just want the feeling of flying through the game at super fast speeds, this will do it! :)

Since the iPhone was released, people have asked for the ability to search their phone contacts. Contact Find does just that, and more. Instead of just searching for the name of the person you want to call, it allows you to also search the phone number, area code, email address, physical address, and any notes attached to the contact.

For me, the main value in this application is the ability to search notes and companies. When you need to contact someone at a particular company, but can’t recall their name, this allows you to find them quickly rather than scrolling through the address book.

What do you guys think? How will you use Search on your iPhone?

Oh, yeah! iSlots finally came to the App Store, and it’s free! I’ve written before about this application, but it used to be only available on jailbroken iPhones. The interface is clean and gives you the feel of a real Las Vegas slot machine without overdoing it. This is as close as I get to gambling, since I don’t have to risk loosing actual money. Users tap the white buttons to place a bet, either “Bet One” or “Bet Max”. You can also “Cash Out” or “Spin Reels”.

For the wish list: I would like to see the ability to double tap the handle and pull it down to place a bet, giving users another option.

Mr. Bubble is a leveling application. When you set your iPhone or iPod Touch in landscape mode on a picture frame or any other object in need of leveling, Mr. Bubble will tell you when that object is straight. It works just like any other level you have lying around the house, but if, like mine, your tools aren’t always where they’re supposed to be, it’s probably a bit easier to locate when needed.

UPDATE: My apologies for the odd formatting! I’m traveling, and my hotel WiFi is not working. I’m attempting to edit on my phone. Yikes! :)

Amy A.I. is the first artificial intelligence app available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The fun in this app is knowing Amy is a computer and challenging her with questions. First, I started off simple. What’s 2+2? She answered correctly. I asked some more simple questions, like “What are your hobbies?” and “What is your favorite color”. She quickly responded with answers, including that she liked robots. A girl after my own heart!!

Then the conversation got a bit more involved. “What’s the Large Hedron Collider?” and talk of J.R. Tolkien. Okay, so she’s a chat buddy, NOT an encyclopedia. Click the picture thumbnails to read her answers.

I won’t go on about the conversation Amy and I had. Your chat will likely be much different, and no doubt a blast. Go for it…let your imagination run wild!

Editors Note: I was really excited to try this app out. I got a review copy from the developer about a month ago, but have not been able to see enough stars in the sky to give it a go. Dave Peterson from GadgetyTech.com had tried it early on, so I asked him to do a guest post here. Based on his review, I can’t wait to get out and see it in a clear sky.

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if you were seeing a constellation or whether that point of light was a star or a planet? If you’ve got Starmap installed on your iPhone, your curiosity can be answered.

Starmap is an app of unusual depth for a piece of mobile software. It provides a remarkably full set of features that I’ve found impresses people familiar with desktop astronomy software. The accelerometer is cleverly implemented to facilitate easy navigation around the sky by twisting and tilting the phone. Controls are accessed through an innovative button bar at the bottom of the screen that can be rotated to display four different sets of buttons. One of the nicest features allows the user to see names and current locations of moons around all planets in our solar system. It will even give a correct depiction of the current tilt of Saturn’s rings. A great addition in the newest version is the ability to view all screens in the application in shades of red to preserve night vision. There is also an extended Pro version in the works for release next year.

It’s tough to cover all of the notable features of this app in a short review. If you’re interested in a few more details, check out my earlier review at GadgetyTech.com, and take a look at the developer’s web site.

If you know NetNewsWire, the RSS feed reader for your Mac, you’ll love that they have an iPhone app available for free. If you don’t know about them, definitely take a look. It’s simple and easy to set up. You don’t have to have a Mac to use the iPhone app. Just sign up for an account at their website. It’s typically easiest to add your desired RSS feeds on the website, then let it sync to the iPhone or iPod Touch. After all, some feeds can be awfully long!

I have noticed some delay in the update. If you hit the update button, then leave the app and reopen, it seems to fix the issue. Links open within the app, with an option to open in Safari. I like that it doesn’t open directly in Safari because of the time that it wastes. You can also email a link to the article, or Add to Clippings.

I reviewed an application called Units last week. It gives you the option of converting many different types of measurements, including currencies. If you’re looking for strictly a currency converter, give Currency a try. It’s free, and you can edit your list of shown currencies. When you’re ready to make a conversion, tap on the header, enter the amount, and each country you’ve chosen will convert itself. If this one doesn’t do it for you for some reason, there are paid apps available in the App Store.

BF Caller is probably one of the simplest apps out there. Program one phone number, someone who you call a lot, into the app. When you open the app, it calls your “Best Friend” or “Boyfriend”. This takes the double, or triple step process out of making a phone call. There are two free options, BF Caller and Girlfriend Caller.

Each option has a “Plus” version for $0.99. With this option, you can program both home and cell numbers. The way I understand it, one number is the default, and you can choose to call the other number by shaking your phone. “1 Click Call” is also another option, also at $0.99.

When I was a kid, my dad would take us to Michigan each summer to visit his side of the family. They had a cottage on the lake, and they were Catholic. A small cottage + a huge family = lots of planned activities. My grandfather was the only one who seemed a lot like me at the time…shy, sitting by himself…he sat at one of two tables throughout the day playing games. Mostly card games, but also Dominoes when my grandmother would play finally take a break from cooking lots and lots of pasta and play with him. He taught me and my sisters how to play. I have a very sentimental view of Dominoes, to say the least.

Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that this app is just good, but I spent an hour playing the game without stopping. You can see how many pieces are left in your opponent’s hand and how many are in the “pot”. Tap the piece you want to play to make a move. If you try to make a move that isn’t allowed, a frowny face will appear and shake its head telling you “nope, you can’t do that!”. As you move through the game, pieces in the middle that can’t be played anymore will disappear to avoid having to scroll left and right.

There’s one consistent bug that causes the app to crash. When you choose a piece that could go to either side of the board, you’ll get an arrow pointing to each option. You tap the choice you want to make. Most of the time it takes action immediately, but if it lags a fraction of a second, my tendency is to think I didn’t tap in the correct spot, so I would tap again. Don’t tap twice. It will cause it to hang up, then crash.

Hopefully the developers will add the ability to save scores in future versions and fix the bug because it’s well worth a dollar.

Editor’s Note: As much as I loved playing sports as a kid, I don’t pay attention to sports anymore, so I asked Lindsay Plumley to do a guest review of an app she was excited about.

Sportacular is a fantastic app for sports lovers, the casual sports observer, or even as a surprise app installation for a significant other who is a fanatic! The application includes: MLB, NFL, NCAA FB, NBA, NCAA BB, NHL, and MLS. It has detailed player stats, scores, standings, news and much more.

This app is extremely useful if you are participating in an office football pool, like me. I have been using this to check the NFL football spread and it couldn’t be any easier.

Pros: Simple, easy to use, a great user interface, and wide array of sports. The developers claim that it is going to stay free and they’ll even add more features.

Cons: If your college football team isn’t in the top 20 you might have trouble finding them. Also it has only gone through a few iterations, so if you notice some lag that is probably the reason.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in fortune cookies lately. When I crack one open, I see more random notes than “fortunes”. When I saw that there were multiple fortune cookie apps in the App Store, I downloaded the three free ones.

Fortune (by AOL) is the most visually appealing. You get to crack open the cookie to read your fortune. Unfortunately, it had the most non-fortunes as I described above. Click “Random” to get another fortune, or “Share” to email to a friend.

Fortune (by Pure Mass Communications) is visually pretty basic. It gives you a picture of a cookie, the fortune, and the option to get more. It’s fortunes were mostly uplifting and encouraging.

Fortune Cookie (by Jack Yu Su) is also visually basic. The background is a picture of a Chinese man writing, and the fortune is displayed under the title “Origins of Chinese Culture”. It’s fortunes were also fairly encouraging. This is the only app that doesn’t allow you to get a new fortune. You have to re-open the application. I like this choice. When I go to a Chinese restaurant, I don’t open one cookie after another reading all the fortunes. I open one, and leave with one. I really don’t want to flip through fortune after fortune because it kind of waters down the impact (if there is one to begin with).

Beer Bounce is a bar game. Flip the coin and attempt to land it in the glass of beer. I can see a couple of friends having fun with this. You can choose from nine different country’s coins. It seems about as challenging as I imagine it would be in real life. I’ve never actually played the game at a bar. You have to flip the coin several times before grasping what the right amount of power it requires to score.

I don’t like the insults it shouts at me when I miss, so I play with the sound down. If you’re the type of person who would enjoy going to Dick’s Last Resort, then you might enjoy the game with the sound up. When I chose Japan’s coin, I was hoping to hear Japanese remarks. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Maybe they’ll make that possible in a future update.

There are several apps available that help you convert measurements of all kinds. Units is free, and has a pretty complete list of available measurements. Here are just a few options: Currency, Energy, Temperature, Time, Weight, Pressure, Data Storage.

Let’s take temperature as an example. When you choose Temperature, you’re taken to a screen with Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. As you type in one field, the other fields are automatically generated. I can quickly and easily see that 90 degrees Fahrenheit is 32 degrees Celsius. I wish it had a “clear all” button, but it’s free, and you can clear a single field by tapping on the field, then choosing the “x”.

I love that it includes Data Storage. I know a lot of our GeekBrief.TV audience who are tech noobies will find this useful.

Most of us have been using the Internet to look up businesses and people instead of keeping those humongous (and may I mention heavy) Yellow Pages or White Pages around. The WhitePages Mobile app is nice to have available when you’re on the go. The Map application on the iPhone takes care of finding businesses near you, and how often do you need to find people with People Search? What makes this download worth it is Reverse Phone.

Reverse Phone allows you to type in a phone number and it will tell you as much as it knows. If the number is private, it usually can at least tell you whether it’s a cell or landline, and the city associated with the number. It can be useful when you want to know who that person is that keeps calling and hanging up.

If you’ve spent any time at an arcade in your life, you’ve probably played the real life version of this game. Characters pop up out of 12 holes on the screen and it’s your job to quickly bop them in the head before they disappear. I can’t see myself playing the game on a long term basis, but it’s fun for a moment or two whenever you need to get your mind off something and maybe expend a little hostility.

The free version is basic, with one character, Gary the Gopher (quite cute, I must say). You get 15 seconds of play time per round. The paid version, which is only $0.99 for now gives you multiple levels, more characters, more time per round and it keeps track of your scores.

Toy Bot Diaries is the most fun game I’ve played on the iPhone. C’mon, how could you not love a game featuring a short little robot that makes cute little robot noises? If you watch GeekBrief.TV on a regular basis, you know that all this game had to do to win me over was just mention “robots”.

Okay, seriously. Besides the fact that the star of the game is a robot, it’s very challenging and intriguing. Toy Bot clings to pieces of metal to move through the game, and has magnetic boots that he can use to move objects around. IUGO uses the phrase “physics-based challenges”, and that’s a good description. Sometimes the next step he has to make is just out of view, and you need to reposition Toy Bot. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not, but it’s part of what makes it challenging. As you move through the levels and recover datapads (they look like tiny cell phones), the game gets a little trickier and unpredictable.

For the first time in a game, the sounds don’t get old. Usually I wind up turning the sound off five minutes into the game, but with Toy Bot, I find myself wanting to hear him squeal as he falls through the air. There’s a free version you can try out, but I highly recommend spending the $3.99. Especially if you love robots as much as I do.

Air Sharing is a free (for now) file sharing application. Follow the setup directions, and you’re ready to start accessing files in your Public folder very quickly. The app will view lots of different formats, including (but not limited to) Microsoft Office files, PDF, HTML, RTF, Plain text, some video and audio formats, PNG, GIF. You can find the full list here.

The price will be $6.99 very soon, so if you want to try it free, get it now.

Where To? is a location based app intended to give you access to any restaurant, grocery store, airport, hospital, attractions, etc, etc. Search near you to find immediate services, or enter a manual address to plan in advance. Tap Tap Tap does a great job with applications, and Where To? is no exeption. The list of categories and services available is pretty complete (over 600), and the interface is intuitive and nice to look at. You can add and edit your favorite categories and places to find them easily.

The one downside is that because it takes advantage of the Maps application on the iPhone, if you don’t find what you’re looking for immediately, you have to go back and forth between Maps and the Where To apps. I can’t see any way around this. The type of application requires this process. If you’re the impatient type, though, just know ahead of time that you’ll need to allow the time to open Maps, then time to re-open Where To.

It works on both the iPhone and iPod Touch, and is worth the $2.99 if you ever find yourself unhappy with the search feature in Maps.

Most of you know about the Remote app, which allows you to control your iTunes and Apple TV from your iPhone and iPod Touch. Simplify does the opposite. It lets you stream music from iTunes on a computer to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Users will download the app on your device, and download the Simplify Media application on each computer you want access to. It takes a minute (or twelve, depending on how much music you have) for the app to gather the music. Once it’s available, you’ll be able to stream music and listen on your iPhone.

Two downsides. You can’t fastforward through a single song. You can move from one song to the next, but the slider doesn’t function as a fastforward button. I also haven’t been able to get access to any songs I bought from iTunes. Everything I can access are songs ripped from CDs. Simplify talks about the iTunes DRM on their site:

Computers signed in with your Simplify Media screen name and authorized by the iTunes Store can play iTunes purchased songs in iTunes. Computers not signed in with your Simplify Media screen name will not see those DRM protected files.

However, with computers that are signed in with Simplify Media and authorized by iTunes, still no luck for me. It’s free though, and lots of people appear to have success, so definitely give it a go!

With ezimba, you load a picture from your photo gallery, and assign different effects to the picture. Once you apply the effect, you can save the revised version, or discard by leaving the application. The functionality of the ezimba app is also available on the website itself.

When you load a picture, it squishes the picture to fit into a square box, but be assured when you save it, it’s the correct aspect ratio. A lot of the effects are overwhelming. For example, here’s a picture of John P. (you might know him from Woopra and Layered Tech) digging into some BBQ. I thought it’d be funny to add the Fire effect, but it would work better if the fire was a bit more subtle.

Overall, it’s a fun app that you can do some cool stuff with. Enjoy!

As much as I love movies, I don’t pay much attention to pop culture. I see a celebrity couple on the front of a magazine cover and ask Neal “when did they get married?” The answer is often “uh…a year ago.” Pop Quiz! proves this.

The app gives you ten questions from a variety of trivia categories, like Movie Trivia, Music, Celebrities, Television, Movie Quotes and Fill in the Blank. The background on some of the questions is a bit too overwhelming and can make one of the answers or part of the question difficult to read. After you finish answering the questions, you’re taken to a page that tells you how many you got right (me…2) and how many wrong (8), then lists each question with the correct answer in bold, and your answer underlined.

GTS World Racing is the first car racing game I’ve tried so far (I intend to try others, too). It has sixty four tracks, three car options and four levels. The levels are Single Race, Challenge Cup, Grand Tour and the Championship.

To speed your car up, tip the iPhone or iPod Touch forward. To slow down, tip it back towards you. Tilt the device to each side to steer. It’s intuitive and easy to get started. When you turn a corner too fast and speed off into the grass, your car slows down, and it’s easy to want to push the phone forward in a hurry. When you do this, the screen will fade to red and tell it’s too flat. This is my only complaint about the game. It tells you it’s too flat way before the phone is actually flat. After a few times, though, you get used to it, and adjust accordingly.

I’ve really enjoyed playing GTS World Racing and moving through the levels. The harder levels seem to be just that - harder, and you can change the steering sensitivity to make the game even more difficult.

I’m a huge Dave Ramsey fan, so the Pennies application immediately caught my attention. It’s intended to help you keep track of your expenses on a monthly basis. Use a slider to set your monthly budget, in increments of $100. You can set your limit between $100 and $100,000 (wouldn’t that be nice?). When you spend money on something, enter the amount and the category (choose from General, Food, Amusement, Travel, Household, Auto, Hobby, Electronics, Personal, Groceries).

Pennies keeps track of how you’re doing by giving you a visual that looks like the fuel meter in your car. As you spend money, the needle moves toward empty. You can see a list of your expenses, and add notes to specify what the expense was for.

I wish there was a way to add notes when you’re actually adding the expense. As it is, it takes a couple extra steps to add and read the notes. I also would like the ability to edit the categories. I understand the need to keep the categories to a minimum, but maybe I’d like to change Hobby to Business.

It’s nicely designed and visually appealing. I could see parents teaching their kids how to manage money with this app. It’s simple enough for them to easily use, but not too simple that it feels like a toy. Of course, it’s useful for adults, too!

Drinks is a catalog of cocktails. They say they have over 4500 recipes, both well known cocktails, like the Appletini and lesser known recipes, like the Caipirinha (at least I’ve never heard of it). You can access recipes four different ways.

The first is a list of pre-determined “Favorites”, which you can edit. The “Drinks” tab is an alphabetized list of their entire catalog, or you can have the application pull up “Random” drink recipes. I’ve seen applications that do all that, but what I really like about this application is the “Ingredients” tab. Pick from a list of ingredients organized into Liquor, Mixer and Garnish. If you’re having guests over and want to try something a bit different than what you normally have, choose an ingredient you have sitting on your bar. Let’s pretend I have some Peach Schnapps sitting around that I rarely use because I don’t really know what to do with it. The app tells me I have two options. I can make Sex on the Beach or Woo Woo. As long as you have the other ingredients, you’re in luck! Take this a step further. If you enter Gin as your ingredient, you’re going to get a long list of options. Drinks allows you to enter multiple ingredients to narrow down the list.

Make notes if you play around with the recipe and decide you like a bit less of something than the recipe calls for. You can also email recipes.

I wish the Randomize option worked by shaking the phone. That’s always fun! Other than that, I can’t find any missing features. They’ve done a good job with it.

Cheers!

At first glance, PapiJump seems a bit too simple to be good, but it’s strangely relaxing. Mr. Papi is the star of the game, a little red ball. He’s constantly jumping, and it’s up to you to keep him moving up and up and up by guiding him onto the green blocks that are staggered throughout the screen. If you miss a block, Mr. Papi falls and his smiling face is gone forever. Or, until you start the game over.

Some of you may be aware of sites like eReader and Fictionwise. These are eBook stores, where you can buy books in a digital format. They also have a selection of free books. Think of them like Amazon, but for digital books.

If you don’t have a Kindle, eReader for the iPhone and iPod Touch is a nice option. You can buy books and when you sign in on your iPhone, your books are there waiting for you. Swipe to change pages, increase/decrease font size and type, read in landscape mode, search text…all that, and it’ll remember your spot when you leave the app. It’s pretty impressive and fully functional.

The whole Pong phenomenon happened long before I was born, so I don’t have the emotional connection to it that people a few years older than me have. In fact, I’ve never played Pong before.

As familiar as I am with the idea behind the game (hit the ball to your opponent and try not to let the ball pass your paddle), I didn’t know about the scoring method. Turns out it’s exactly like the game of tennis. Since I loved playing tennis when I was a teenager, I picked up on it right away. Points are scored as follows: 1 point=15, 2 points=30, 3 points=40, 4 points=Game Won.

I lost. A lot. Lucky for me, the game doesn’t keep track of your scores! I have a blast playing Pong, though, and I often find myself exclaiming out loud when I miss the ball. Neal didn’t quite know what to think about that.

There are three levels, each getting a bit faster than the last one. I found that I performed better with the faster levels. That may be a personal preference, and may vary with the user.

There’s one major drawback of the game. The use of the accelerometer seems to be a little off balance, unlike any other application. I have to tilt the phone a bit to the right to get the paddle in the middle of the screen.

Two items for the wish list. There are instructional screens every time you re-open the game. I’d like an option to turn those off. Also, there needs to be a way to pause the game. Most apps are choosing double click as the pause method, and that would work perfectly well here.

3-D Vector Pong offers a two player option via WiFi, which is a great addition. For experienced Pong players and new players, 3-D Vector Pong is absolutely worth the $1.99.

There’s a slots application for jailbroken iPhones (called iSlots) that was pretty addictive. It looked like a real slot machine and was fun to use. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for Reel Deal Slots.

There are three different themed slots to choose from, and all of them are way too busy. They look…well, just plain ugly. They don’t look anything like real slots and with things flying across the screen while you play, it’s hard to tell if you won anything. I hate being negative, but I have to warn you. It’s not worth buying.

I can’t believe it took me this long to post this application. Neal has been using and loving Texas Hold’em (released by Apple) since the first day the 2.0 software was available. Neal hates games, so the fact that he loves it and uses it while we’re out, is a high endorsement.

This is the best looking application I’ve come across so far. I love that your opponents move and get upset and cry for joy when they win. The view is your view, seeing each person as they choose whether to play a hand or fold, whether to raise or call. Each opponent has a tell that you can learn over time, and you can get player statistics by clicking on their image. If you want to get through a hand a bit quicker than normal, rotate your iPhone to landscape mode to get a birdseye view of the table. You can also play a friend via WiFi.

I can’t say how real the game is. Neal wins more than he loses. I continue to lose and win occasionally. Hardcore Hold’em players may find that the game favors the person playing the game, but I can’t verify that.

Texas Hold’em is priced lower than it’s worth, so get it while it’s still cheap.

Via appstoreapps.com

Since I just reviewed Scrabble for the iPhone, it seemed appropriate to let you know about CheckWord. CheckWord uses the TWL and SOWPODS official lists of words that accepted for games like Scrabble. If you’re not sure, type the word in question and CheckWord lets you know if it’s Good or Bad. It’s a little cumbersome to go between Scrabble and CheckWord on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Less time is taken just by trying to play the word you’re not sure about and let Scrabble tell you it’s not accepted than to leave Scrabble, open CheckWord, then re-open Scrabble.

However, it is worth going back and forth between the apps for a feature they just released, called MakeWord. When you’re stuck, type in the letters you have in your rack and MakeWords gives you all the possible word options.

Overall, CheckWord is a valuable resource while playing games like Scrabble, whether you’re on your iPhone/iPod Touch, or you’re playing actual board games.

Scrabble for the iPhone is from EA Games, and they live up to their reputation. This game is very well done. Using multi-touch, you can zoom in on the tiles at any time. All the rules of the board game apply. Pass a turn if you don’t have any letters to play, and if you exchange tiles from the bag, you pass that turn. Hit the Shuffle button to rearrange your letters if you’re stuck.

There’s an extra feature called “Best Word”. This may be an option on other mobile Scrabble games, but I’ve never come across it. Best Word chooses the best possible play for you with the letters you have. EA Games doesn’t ever say how many chances you get to use this feature in a game, so I tested it for you. The limit is four times per game. I’m blind. The Best Word countdown is at the top.

The Options menu gives you the chance to turn on/off sounds and turn off/on Game Tips. It automatically saves your ongoing game so you don’t have to worry about loosing anything if you need to take a call or send an email.

Tap Tap Revenge is one of my favorite games. The idea is similar to Guitar Hero and the Wii version of –. The game plays a song and the challenge is to tap on the appropriate beats, given different colored balls as your cues. In Tap Tap, there are three “strings” and the beats come at different times on each string. As you move through levels, you’ll find the need to tap on two or more strings at the same time. When you miss, it’ll tell you and give you a vibration.

They say you can shake the phone instead of tapping, but I haven’t been successful at that. Maybe I need to brush up on my shaking skills. You can also play with a friend in two player mode.

I love playing Tap Tap Revenge and highly recommend it. It is free, after all! Beware while playing in public, though. You may find yourself swaying to the beat and tapping your foot along with the music.

If you’ve ever worried about losing your iPhone, If Found might be a good peace-of-mind application to have. Place the app somewhere easily visible, like your iPhone dock or on the first page. Then enter your contact information, and a reward amount if applicable. If you loose your phone, the hope would be that the person who finds it would see the application, open it up and call you or mail back the phone. Think about it…if I ever found a phone, the first thing I would do is open the contacts list looking for “Mom”, “Dad” or something recognizable like that. What if someone doesn’t label their mom as “mom” and rather by her name? If Found makes it easy to get a hold of the owner directly.

Out of all the free Sudoku apps, Sudoku Daily is the best. To start with, instead of your normal “Easy, Medium, Hard” choice of levels, you’re given the options “I’m New, I’m OK, I’m Good, I’m Awesome, and I’m Clinically Insane”. You only get one game a day, so choose your level carefully!

Click on a blank space and you get a pop up with numbers to choose from. If you’re not sure which number should go where, click on the pencil to make a note, or multiple notes per square. Using the middle option (shown in the picture), make the pop up transparent to see what’s behind it, or you can just click and drag to move it out of the way.

Auto-Fill fills each box with notes telling you every possible number that could go in that blank square. A red letter will tell you you’ve made a mistake, if you turn this option on in Settings. If you want a new look for your game, choose between four skins. My favorites are Notepad and Newspaper.

This game is intuitive, with lots of options. Definitely worth it, even if they increase the price to $4.99.

Click to View Full Image

Name: iRecorder
Price: $0.99
Category: Business
Website: SimpleTouch
Recommended: Yes

You know how much I like the Jott service for recording quick reminders. iRecorder is a great option for recording any length audio, and it’s very simple to use. Hit Record, and the phone vibrates to let you know the recording has begun (I love that feature!). Hit “Stop” to save and “Cancel” if you don’t want to save it. The name automatically saves as the date and time of the recording. You can change it by clicking the blue arrow and typing the new title.

When you’re ready to listen to a recording, single click and the time will count down, showing you how long you have left. If you want to organize your files, click on the Edit button and drag to move around your recordings. Expect to take about 1.5MB per minute of recording.

Amber, the developer, is continuing to increase the functionality of this application. You can look forward to record pausing and scanning, and perhaps even the ability to sync and email your recordings.

Imagine this. You’re at a concert, the music starts to slow down, the lights dim, and thousands of people hold up their cigarette lighters. Being the techie that you are, you hold up your iPhone. On it, is an HD video of a real lighter playing in a loop, and you know if you’re an iPhone owner…the flame may be virtual, but the heat is real!

CrazyLighter is my favorite of the lighter apps in the App Store at the moment. Shake it to turn the lighter on and off, or swipe your finger across the screen. In the latest update, you can set the iPhone not to go into sleep mode while CrazyLighter is open (because, c’mon, you’ll look like a dork holding a dark iPhone in the air). You can also play music in the background now.

There are times when you need a random password. You could come up with a crazy combination of letters and numbers yourself, or you could use your iPhone or iPod Touch and a password generator application to do it for you.

PassGen, PassMake and PwGen are all free options. PassGen will give you a password between four and sixteen characters, PassMake between six and twenty characters, and PwGen between one and twenty four characters.

PwGen gives you the option to generate a series of passwords at one time instead of one at a time and you can get upper and lower case letters. PassGen gives you upper and lower case letters as well, and includes the ability to shake the phone to generate the next password, along with the option to email your new password. PassGen will be my choice when I need to generate a random password. All are worth the download.

Gyazickr does one simple thing. It allows you to post photos along with your tweets. Choose a photo from your photo library or take a new one. You can use either the Gyazickr or Flickr services as a backend to upload your photos.

The one downside is that it doesn’t give you a countdown as you type your message. I’m guessing this is because it’s meant to be a caption, not a whole tweet, but I’d still like the option.

I like this app because it’s simple, and from what I can tell, the developer intends to keep it that way.

One of the most common questions I get about iPhone Apps is “What’s your favorite Twitter app”? After using TweetDeck on my laptop, I was too spoiled to like any of the iPhone Twitter apps. There seems to be something missing from each of the options. I’ve been opting to forgo the apps, and use Safari instead. Until now.

There’s Twinkle, Twittelator, Twitterific, and TwitterFon. Am I missing any? Twinkle gives you the option of posting a photo along with your tweet, and if I could get it to work for me (works great for Neal!), I would probably be using it. My current choice of Twitter apps is a combination of Gyazickr and TwitterFon. You can find my explanation of Gyazickr here. For now, I’ll concentrate on TwitterFon.

TwitterFon separates messages into tabs - Friends, Replies and Direct Messages (DMs). Click on a message and choose the tweet button to easily re-tweet someone’s link. My favorite feature of TwitterFon is how it handles links. When someone tweets a link, you’ll see a blue link icon beside the tweet. Click on the button to open the website without ever leaving the application. Most apps choose to send you to Safari to view links. That’s what’s brilliant about TwitterFon.

I have one complaint, and this is a complaint with all Twitter apps. I haven’t found an app that gives you the ability to DM someone. If someone @replies me, I can only reply publicly, so if I want to send a direct message, I have to wait until I get home, or leave the app and use Safari on the iPhone.

UPDATE: I’m being told you can DM with Twitterific by double tapping the post button. I will have to re-load and give that a try! Also, yes, you should be able to type D spacebar username to Direct Message someone, but it’s too easy to forget that. I almost publicly tweeted my address one time meaning for it to be a DM! :)

Spinner Prologue is a series of mazes. Move the arrow through the maze without hitting any of the walls! It’s not always easy. Some of the mazes can be kind of tight. Add the fact that as you move through levels, the arrow gets faster and harder to control, and you’ve got a pretty challenging game.

The graphics are basic at best. Unfortunately, that caused me to put off trying the game for a while, even though it was already on my iPhone. Fuel Games says an expanded game is coming soon. Maybe they’ll include better graphics in that version…?

I’ve talked about Pandora before on GeekBrief.TV. It’s a company that believes in the idea behind new media and the Web - get what you want, where you want it, when you want it. They’ve been making their service available as many ways as possible, and the iPhone 2.0 software is no exception.

If you’re not familiar with Pandora, the service uses the Music Genome Project, which analyzes each song to understand characteristics of the music in order to better pair your likes and dislikes. Rather than suggesting songs just because they’re from the same artist, Pandora has a much more thorough knowledge of the song qualities.

The iPhone/iPod Touch app lives up to the expectations of anything put out by Pandora. Tell the app what you like, what you don’t like and if you’re not sure, you can skip the song without rating it. Since it’s tied to your account, you’ll get the updated results whether you’re listening on your iPhone, with the Adobe AIR app, or on the Web. They’ve also included a menu option for you to Bookmark or Buy from iTunes.

Hangman is a simple game that doesn’t require a whole lot of bling bling when it comes to graphics, and this app doesn’t attempt to make it anything but basic. As you guess letters, it starts by building the gallows before hanging the man, so you get a few more guesses. Once you’ve guessed a letter, right or wrong, it’s grayed out so you can’t guess it again.

The main negative of Hangman is the database of words. I mainly see a lot of shorter words, and it would be nice to see longer and more challenging words.

DizzyBee is an adorable little bee who makes cute (at least at first) little buzzing noises. The goal of this game is to help DizzyBee gather his friends, pick up some flowers, and make it through the maze without getting splattered by the “baddies”. The free version includes 4 levels - two easy, one medium and one difficult. By contrast, the paid version has 40 levels, plus 5 bonus levels.

Some of the mazes are pretty challenging. The “baddies” move through the maze with you, so while you’re using the accelerometer to get DizzyBee and his friends through the maze, you’ll need to pay attention to where the enemy is headed, too.

As I always suggest, definitely try out the free version, and if you like it, consider supporting the developer by paying for the more advanced version.

AirMe is a pretty perfect Flickr application. The Eye-Fi SD card automatically uploads pictures I take with my digital camera to my Flickr page. What happens when I don’t have my camera, and want to share a picture while I’m out and about, though?

AirMe requires a free account, which you can sign up for on the iPhone, and you’ll need to log into Flickr to approve AirMe as a partner. Once you’re in, you can choose from several options. It can auto-geo tag your photos (or not), you can set tags, and choose the size of the photo to upload. After setup is done, take a photo, let the application know if you like it, and it’ll upload to your Flickr account. You can also email the photo to a contact of your choice.

Once you leave the application, you loose access to that photo for use with the AirMe application, but it’s saved in your Photos, so you can email it from there if you decide you need to send it to someone else.

The one thing missing for me is the ability to send photos to my Twitter account, which they say is coming soon. I’m having a bit of a hard time waiting!

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the iPhone 2.0 software being perfect for entertaining kids at restaurants, so I asked my sister how my three year old nephew is reacting to it. Other than the fact that he can use the iPhone more proficiently than my sister, she says he loves it. He can switch between applications when he gets bored without her help, and he’s successfully entertained throughout the entire meal. He has his favorite applications, like Tic Tac Toe, and my sister is constantly on the look out for more kid-friendly apps.

Scribble is one such application. It’s a blank slate with the option of multiple colors. Touch the color box you desire and start drawing. Shake the phone to erase. It could be more precise, but for its purpose, I think it does its job fairly well.

I don’t plan to review a lot of kid-friendly applications since I don’t have a kid to test them with, but hey, I drew this pretty picture so I had to share!

Eight people bought it before it was taken out of the App Store. Eight people. That’s $8,000 minus Apple’s cut. Brilliant move, Armin Heinrich!

Neil, one of the eight customers, shot a video walk through of the application. Take a look:

UPDATE: Some people bought the application by mistake. The developer says their money will be returned.

Woohoo! I’m excited about this iPhone application. It won’t be applicable to everyone, but I have to point it out for those will want it.

A little bit of explanation is needed. GrandCentral is a service that I’ve been using for almost two years. You choose a phone number with the area code of your choice. You then assign your home number, work and cell to your GrandCentral number. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, it can ring to all your numbers so you can pick up where ever is most convenient for you. It also solves an issue when you change your phone number. If everyone has your GC number, you don’t have to go through the process of telling everyone. Just change the number on the back end, and no one knows any difference.

Unfortunately, when Google bought GrandCentral last year, they locked the service into beta and stopped allowing invites. If you don’t already have a GrandCentral number, you’ll have to wait, but remember this app.

There’s one negative about GrandCentral as a service. The idea is to keep your real phone numbers hidden, and if you call someone from your phone, they inevitably have your real number on caller ID. It’s easy to block your number when calling out, but it’s not something everyone remembers to do. GrandDialer fixes this issue. Once it’s setup, you use the app (which uses your Contacts list) to do your calling. Since GrandDialer accomplishes this by calling you first, then the phone number, it takes a few extra seconds, but worth it if you need to control access to your numbers.

I used to use my phone’s calculator every time Neal and I would go out to eat to calculate the tip. Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to rely on help and figured out easy ways to do the calculations in my head. That’s why I haven’t downloaded any tip calculator apps to date. When I was asked to review Tipulator, I didn’t expect more than basic functionality, and I was happily surprised.

You enter the price of the check using the scroll wheel, then choose your tip percentage. This is where the options get good. On one column, you can choose between No Tip (although I’m not sure why you’d need an app for that!) and 30%. On the other column, you choose how you want your tip to be calculated. Do you want it to be exactly 15%? Do you prefer to give a round tip, like $10 instead of $9.86? Or maybe you prefer to have a rounded total so your total bill is $50 instead of $49.74.

The other option you have is for splitting the bill. Tell Tipulator how many people you have, and it immediately gives you the breakdown.

This tip calculator is a full functioning app, and well worth the $0.99. Even if you don’t use it all the time, it’s a great option to have available. I even hear a little rumor that they’ll be adding a keypad if you prefer not to use the scroll wheel.

The developer creates, tests, releases, and gives out free copies to people who can review it and hopefully if the review is good, they sell more copies. It also allows people like me to review applications and provide our audiences with good information, without going broke.

When the App Store first launched, the only way to have someone review a developer’s app was to give a reviewer iTunes gift certificates. This costs the developer money, and didn’t follow the normal procedure everyone was used to.

Apple has provided developers with a distribution method known as Ad Hoc, but it’s come to my attention that a lot of iPhone App developers aren’t aware of it. Developers can distribute up to 100 copies of their application for reviewers. Jason D. O’Grady from ZDNet gives instructions on how to go about the procedure:

The procedure works like this: a developer will request your iPhone’s unique identifier. The Identifier is 40-character string that can be found in iTunes by clicking on the word “Serial Number” under the Summary tab when your iPhone is connected. You can copy the string by pressing Command-C (Control-C on a PC) for easy emailing.

The developer then uses the Identifier to compile a custom version of an iPhone application that will only run on that device. The developer then emails you the application and a special provisioning file named “adhoc_Dist.mobileprovision.” The application is installed by simultaneously dragging both the app and the .mobileprovision file to your iTunes library. The application then appears in Applications areas (under Library) and is synced to the iPhone on the next sync.

Thanks to Michael Johnston from iPhone Alley for the heads up when the Ad Hoc distribution became available!

I love Jott as a Speech to Text service. I’ve talked about it a couple times on GeekBrief.TV and I use it in my life often. Jott is a way to send reminders to yourself. Set up an account, call the Jott phone number, leave a message reminding yourself to buy a banana at the grocery store, and you’ll get an email reminder with the message written out in text form. It’s not perfect. No speech to text service is yet, but even when it gets a word wrong, most people recognize it enough to remember what they needed to do.

For me, Jott for the iPhone doesn’t add any useful functionality. Instead of getting emails with my reminder, I have to look at the Jott Notepad to see what I need to do. The brilliance of Jott has always been that you don’t have to go through any extra steps to be reminded. If I’m going to forget to do something, I assure you I’m going to forget to check my Jott Notepad on the iPhone. Again, the point was that you don’t have to do anything.

I won’t be using this application. I’ll stick to the simple phone call. That being said, I imagine there are people out there who prefer to check the Jott Notepad. Regardless of HOW you might use it, I highly recommend Jott’s service and encourage everyone to sign up for an account. No more random stickies lying around all over the car, the house and your purse!

Neal, my husband and co-producer for GeekBrief.TV, has been asking me to show him how I use gmail filters to keep my inbox organized. I figured, if he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s probably not alone.

1) At the top of your gmail page, click on Settings.
2) Choose Filters.
3) Click on “Create a new filter”. Filter by email address, subject or phrase. If you don’t want to read email from bacon haters, for example, you send email that says, “I hate bacon” straight to the trash!
4) Click “Next” and choose your settings. I have most of my filters set up to “Skip the inbox” and “Apply the label”.
5) Choose “Create Filter”

I love Gmail filters because they allow me to answer my email in an organized fashion, rather than letting everything get piled up in the Inbox.

When: August 1st @ 6:00 PM Pacific time (GMT time is 1:00 AM, August 2nd)
Where: www.CaliLive.tv

On August 6th, I’m super excited to have Geoff Smith and Jonathan Davis on the show to talk about how they created the music video for Geoff’s song One and 0s. Jonathan did an incredible job directing it and I want to know how he did it.

When: August 6th @ 6:00 Pacific time (GMT time is 1:00 AM, August 2nd)
Where: www.CaliLive.tv

On August 14th, Neal and I will be giving a presentation at the ECHO Conference. We’ll talk about how to podcast and how to do live streaming on the cheap. Join us as we stream the presentation at 7:00 AM Pacific time.

When: August 14th @ 7:00 AM Pacific time (GMT time is 2:00 PM, August 14th)
Where: www.CaliLive.tv

The last two weeks in August are still being scheduled. I’ll post as soon as the information is ready!

Name: pearMe
Price: Free
Category: Games
Recommended: Yes

pearMe is a memory test. Rather than thinking of it as a game, I like to think of it more like an “increase your brain activity” application.

On the surface, it’s pretty basic. Flip two cards over at a time and try to match them. If you don’t get a matching pair, remember where those cards are and try again. I was at a restaurant and saw a six year old playing with pearMe. I felt kind of old to be playing with it at that point, but then I realized something.

You can challenge yourself by moving the cards around on the screen. The picture of the flower that was at the bottom right corner can now be in the middle of the screen. When you come across the second picture of the flower, you have to remember not only where it was to begin with, but where you moved it. That’s a pretty cool little twist to the game. Er…”increase your brain activity” application.

Jim Lederer and Dave Teichman supplemented our Ramen diet at Bluegrass Restaurant in Highland Park, IL by giving us an employee discount. They also taught us the meaning of good food. Dave makes everything from scratch with top shelf ingredients. We even like his vegetarian dishes. His Rib Eye steak cooked medium transformed everything I ever thought about steak.

We’re not inclined to really celebrate round numbers, but since we’re headed to a place that feels more like home than any other place, I think 400 will kind of be a celebration. Friends we’ve met and friends we haven’t met will be there.

At the same time, going back will be emotional. On our last day in Highland Park, we were quickly packing up a moving truck to drive our stuff to Dallas. Our brother-in-law had just passed away and we had to get everything to Dallas and get to California for the funeral. We’re going to hopefully get the emotional part out of the way tonight.

Packing up a car and deciding to drive a thousand miles for a “BBQ Emergency” on the surface might seem a little crazy (especially with the price of gas), but it’s more about a place and friends who helped build a foundation in our lives. In so many ways, it’s the place where we really grew up.

Super Monkey Ball was featured when Steve Jobs announced the 2.0 software at WWDC this year. It’s not a new game. It was released in 2000 as an arcade game, and has developed as gaming platforms have evolved. Since the game has an existing audience, excitement about it since WWDC was obvious. It was one of the first apps many people downloaded.

It takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to move the cute little monkey trapped in a ball through a series of precarious platforms. The goal is to pick up as many bananas as possible and get to your goal quickly. Oh, and don’t fall into the water!!

At first, I was a bit disappointed by the game. It didn’t move like I thought it should. After about three or four games, though, I got used to this particular game works with the accelerometer and now I’m able to navigate the game pretty well. I enjoy it, and certainly recommend it.

Name: More Cowbell
Price: Free
Category: Entertainment
Recommended: Sure, why not

I found the perfect iPhone app for Adam Curry, the PodFather and host of Daily Source Code. It’s called More Cowbell, and if you’re familiar with the pop culture reference, you’ll know immediately what it does.

When you open the app, you see a picture of a cowbell. Start playing your favorite song, and tap the bell along with the music. I don’t really like that it shouts “I need more cowbell” at me when I stop playing. It kinda freaks me out.

During the iPhone App demo at the last keynote, one of the featured apps was Typepad. Everything I hear about Typepad is good, but I’m a Wordpress person so I started looking forward to a WordPress iPhone app. It’s here today and available for download from the App Store.

WordPress for iPhone gives bloggers power to manage WordPress.com hosted accounts and self-hosted WordPress blogs running 2.5.1 or higher.

WordPress for iPhone lets you write posts, edit posts, add photos from your camera or photo library. You can schedule posts for publication at a later time or you can publish right away.

I was looking forward to WordPress for iPhone, but it only makes the need for Apple to enable Bluetooth keyboard paring that much more a priority. As much as I like the virtual keyboard, I would really love to use a real keyboard for blogging from the iPhone.

The PayPal app is very, very basic. It allows you to send money and check your balance. I can’t log in. Each time I try the app crashes. I know this is a random issue across the board for all iPhone apps, so you may have better luck.

My main complaint with the application is that it should do more, like check history, search transactions and transfer balances. They do offer customer support contact information, which is a plus.

I may not be the ideal user for these type of apps, but there are a lot of people who will find them useful, and I’ve gotten a few inquiries into which ones I like.

There are a handful of Movie apps, both free and paid. I’m sure there will be more coming out. Here are my thoughts on the three I tried, all of which are free.

Movies.app
I like the interface on this application best. You enter your zip code, the date you want to go to the movies and whether you want to search by Theatre or Movie Title. Browsing through feels very much like an iPhone experience. You can get a map to the theatre, see showtimes, and buy tickets.

Box Office
This app offers much of the same information as Movies.app. Although the UI is a little clunkier and not as intuitive, I like that Box Office provides the phone number of the movie theatre and gives you the ability to purchase tickets for a specific time rather than a general “Buy Tickets”. You can also see movies by their Rotten Tomatoes score.

Showtimes
Showtimes uses GPS to find your location instead of asking you to enter your zip code. That’s about the only thing I like about it because it doesn’t let you buy tickets or choose the day of the movie. To get more function, you can purchase Avantar LLC’s premium app called One Tap Movies.

When you find a picture you want to keep, all you have to do is hold your finger on the picture for about two seconds. You’ll get the option to “Save Image” or “Open Link”. I like that the software gives you that option just in case you got distracted and didn’t mean to hold your finger on the image that long.

Step 1: Press the home button, then the power button. Wait for the screen to flash.

No Step 2, it’s that easy. I find myself using this all the time, and I know lots of you will find it useful, too. Enjoy!

I’ve seen pictures online with “.co.uk”, so I’m curious - do you guys in the UK have that option? Leave a comment below.

Now all we need added is “.tv” because I use that one a lot!

UrbanSpoon is an app that helps people like me (people who can’t make decisions) when it comes time to choose a place for dinner. It uses the location based search to find out where you are, then you’ll see three columns: City, Type of Food, and Price Range.

Shake the phone and the columns move like slots to pick a restaurant randomly for you. Like the Magic 8 Ball, if you don’t like the answer, you can always choose again. I tend to get mostly Thai restaurants, and haven’t followed through with any of the choices yet. I’m not sure if I ever will, but I am sure I’ll try it every once in a while.

There are two things on my wishlist for this app to make it better. One, I wish I could lock one of the columns. For example, if I only want to search in the lowest price range, I would want to be able to tell it “don’t search the other price ranges”. Two, I would want to specify the distance I’m willing to travel. That may be asking a lot for a free app, though. Maybe they could offer a premium version, like so many other developers are doing.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. When I clicked on the Locks before, they didn’t do anything. Now they are. Use the locks shown in the picture to lock a column. Thanks, Anthony!

I don’t like paying for SMS. In fact, I decided not to pay for SMS usage on the new AT&T plan (remind me to email my friends and family asking them NOT to text me anymore, or it could get expensive). The AIM application for the iPhone gives me the ability to IM people instead of texting them.

There are two requirements to use this app, and they could be a deal breaker for some. One, you have to have an internet connection to use it (3G or WiFi), unlike SMS. Two, you have to keep the application open in order to receive IMs. No iPhone application will run in the background, and this is no exception.

I may be in the minority according to iTunes reviews, but I like and recommend the app, as long as you keep in mind it’s for quick, short conversations on the go.

Name: Cube Runner
Price: Free
Category: Games
Recommended: Yes

Cube Runner takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer, and it does the best job out there, at least from what I’ve seen so far. The idea is basic. You fly through cubes on the screen and if you run into one, the game is over.

You can challenge yourself by moving in different directions and putting the accelerometer to even more use. I definitely recommend it. There’s one major problem. I can’t find the link to the app anywhere. If you have any information about where the app is, or why it disappeared, please leave a link in the comments.

Name: PhoneSaber
Price: Free
Category: Entertainment
Recommended: Yes

PhoneSaber is the ideal useless app. It’s a light saber for your iPhone. You have a choice between five different colors and when you move your phone around, the light saber makes noises that take your imagination right into Star Wars. Unfortunately, the light doesn’t move around on the screen, but that can be excused. It’s easy to get into imaginary saber fights, either with yourself or another iPhone user.

I recommend it for the occasional fun. Outside of the initial joy, I don’t see myself pulling it up very often, but as long as you have room on your iPhone, it’s perfect for whipping out and impressing your friends.

Name: iMaze
Price: Free
Category: Games
Recommended: No

iMaze is a maze application that’s supposed to take advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do it well. The ball jumps from one side of the screen to the other, instead of smoothly moving along the maze. It makes it impossible to get the ball to move where you want it to go, therefore impossible to complete the maze. I still have it installed, and if I get an update that fixes the problem, I’ll post an update at the bottom of the post. I can’t recommend it, and I’m still looking for a free maze app.

Name: JirboJive
Price: Free UPDATE: Now it’s $0.99
Category: Games
Recommended: Yes

JirboJive is something I downloaded on a whim, expecting nothing from it. It had pictures of animals after all, and as much as I love animals, it looked like a pretty basic game. I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, I was considering deleting it from my phone since I couldn’t stop playing it.

The point of the game is to line up three or more of the same picture of an animal, moving along levels as you go. You can only switch places with the characters directly beside you. You can play a timed game or an untimed game. I have enjoyed the game very much, and now that I’ve talked it up, I’m sure you’re expecting something spectacular! That’s the point - there isn’t anything about it that should set it apart, but it caught my attention nonetheless.

I was honored to be asked to be on the iPhone Alley Podcast, along with Ken Ray from Mac OS Ken, Adam Christianson from The MacCast, and of course the host, Michael Johnston. We had a great chat. Even though I could talk about the iPhone 3G for days, I don’t want to bombard GeekBrief.TV viewers with all iPhone all the time, so if you want to hear my thoughts, take a listen!

Details:
Where: NorthPark Mall (Dallas, Texas) - use the Maggianos/Dillard’s entrance
Time: We’ll be there at 6:00 AM
Lunch: Buca di Beppo @ 7843 Park Lane (Time will depend on when we’re finished at the Apple store)

If you can’t meet us at 6:00 AM, or just want to meet us for lunch, make sure you follow my tweets at www.twitter.com/calilewis. I’ll make sure I post updates so you can find us.

Please RSVP by leaving a comment here so I can give Buca di Beppo a heads up!

The release of the iPhone last year was one of the most fun days of my life. We waited in line for ten hours and bonded with the people waiting with us. We're not expecting the same magic this year, but we still want to make it an unforgettable day.

Friday, July 11, 2008 People are flying and driving in to buy their phones with us at Northpark in Dallas, and then we'll all have lunch at Buca di Beppo (Park Lane).

The music video is from the launch of the iPhone and the song is Hello, Hello by Geoff Smith. You can buy his latest album, Ones and 0's, at RingtoneFeeder.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/GeoffSmith.

This is a (very dated) video he made back in the 80s about marketing. When I watch it, and hear the questions it raises, I think podcasting answers them. I wish he was here to watch and help us. He would love the interactive nature of the new media revolution.

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The fire alarm at our apartment complex went off at 3AM! I don’t know what you guys would think about in such a situation, but our first thought was, “Oooo! Let’s go live!”

The result is a bit different than we expected:

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In the tech world, there are three people who do live extremely well: Leo Laporte, Chris Pirillo and Patrick Norton (who, if he has a personal Web site, I can’t find it). Those three guys can start a conversation and keep it interesting for hours. A big part of their ability to do that is talent. Another big part of their ability to do that is years of practice.

Neal is currently obsessed with the technical challenges of creating a professional looking live show. I’m obsessed with being interesting for longer than a few minutes at a time. The reason we’re obsessed is very different than when we started GeekBrief.TV. That was about creating a new kind of life for ourselves. The obsession to get good at live is really just about learning to do something well that isn’t easy to do well.

Right now, it feels overwhelming, but we’re both driven to figure this stuff out. I think about Howard Stern’s movie and how he started out not being very good. Then there’s that one moment where he stops the B.S. and starts being himself. That’s when his career really began.

In the world of Podcasting, we’re about as successful as anyone. Figuring out this streaming thing isn’t about outside success as much as it is about inside success. We’re obsessed with figuring this out, just because it seems like a massive mountain worth climbing.

The process is going to be very experimental. A lot of times it’s going to be crap. There will be times, though, when we’re pretty happy with what we pull off. Mostly…for a while…you might have to be over the top fond of me to pay attention. In the mean time, thanks for watching.

The next On Location episode will be this Wednesday at 6 PM PDT (1 AM GMT). The MannersCast is produced by five guys with often differing opinions on what the right rules are in very modern situations.. Forget Ms. Manners. The MannersCast guys introduce us to a whole new vocabulary that includes concepts like Spanking the Sofa and The Immaculate Hand.

Three of the hosts, Trent Armstrong, Derek Norton and Colin Smith, will join me to talk about their show. I’m sure they’ll also show me exactly how little I know about manners!

Check out a couple of their episodes and videos, and let me know what questions you have about manners. Then join me on www.CaliLIVE.tv at 6 PM Pacific time this Wednesday June 11th. If you can’t be there live, the recorded version will be available for playback on the site.

I’m so excited to introduce you to the three guys that have joined the team! In no particular order, we have Rick Mac Merc from www.macmerc.com. Some of you might know him from appearances on The Lab with Leo Laporte. Nick McKinney is from TWiP (This Week in Podcast), and has been around GeekBrief.TV for a long time. We also have David Peralty from www.xfep.com. He knows WordPress inside and out, and actually was a co-host on The WordPress Podcast for a while. All three guys are a fantastic addition to the team!

Our next On Location episode is scheduled for Saturday, June 7th at 12:00 PM Pacific (7:00 PM GMT). My guest will be John P., CEO & President of Woopra, and Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President for Layered Technologies.

He’s also the “founder of HTMLHelp.com, former Vice President of Sales for SAVVIS Communications, bladesmith, welder and Direct Metal Artist, chef, computer expert and world traveler.” Whoa! This guy’s been busy!

As I was chatting with Dave Peterson about On Location and what I wanted to be better and different (we’re still in the tweaking stage of the show), he suggested that I ask for questions ahead of time to supplement the live chatroom questions. So I am.

What do you guys want to know about John P., and his projects? Leave a comment, and join us Saturday at 12:00 PM Pacific for the show!

UPDATE: If you can’t join us live, you can catch the recorded version on www.CaliLIVE.tv.

Location doesn’t matter! We’re based out of Dallas, and all communication will be via email, phone or Skype.

Please contact me at cali [at] geekbrief [dot] com. VERY IMPORTANT: Please put “Intern: Your Name” in the subject line. I’m interested in your skills and what you want out of the internship. If you have a resume, please include it in the email.

Our big push behind-the-scenes lately has been to understand lighting more than we ever have before. It’s kind of fun to solve the puzzle of making the show look good whether we shoot during the day or after dark.

We’ve also been working on a show called Cali Live On Location. It’s a live streaming show on Ustream.TV where I interview bloggers, podcasters and people doing interesting things on the Web. I haven’t promoted it yet, other than on Twitter, because it only looks about half as good as we want it to.

It really needs two camera live switching so it doesn’t become too monotonous over the course of an hour.

We tried CamTwist Studio as a software solution. Both of our cameras are the same so it recognizes them as a single XH-A1. We considered Wirecast, but it won’t be compatible with Ustream until late Summer 2008. Mike Versteeg has an amazing switching application for Windows called Vidblaster but it doesn’t work with live streaming services either. Besides, there are some Firewire bus bandwidth limitations that make a software solution less than a joy to work with.

We would love to have a TriCaster from NewTek. Leo Laporte is using one for his live streaming stuff. It’s also what they use for DL.TV. It’s an amazing piece of hardware that does much more than we really need at a price that we cannot easily justify ($10,000).

Looking around, there is clearly something missing from the market, and there is an opportunity for someone to come in a meet the need. The product missing from the market is a glitch free firewire switcher for under $1000. It doesn’t need to do all that a TriCaster will do. It only needs to jump cut between two, three or four cameras without any hiccups and present the signal as a single live camera to a PC or Mac. Ideally, switching could be controlled with a remote control.

It would meet my needs and it would also meet the needs of churches and schools that are doing simple live streaming productions. The market for something like this is large and growing.

The closest thing we found is a VS-66FW bi-directional matrix switcher/hub for FireWire signals from Kramer Electronics. The specs hint that it may do what we need, but it doesn’t come right out and say that it will switch live video signals for live streaming.

If anyone knows about the Kramer option or any other option that might be similar, please leave a comment.

In preparation for the Big Trip, we’ve sold and given away furniture, clothing and electronics. We could stay on here month to month or transition to a much smaller place while we continue to look for a bus. Moving means we would save a bunch of money on rent, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Hopefully, we can find a place with a month-to-month option. Otherwise, we’ll have to sign a 3-4 month lease. It’s a lot to get done in just a week, so I probably won’t be responding to email much until we’re resettled in a new place.

Last week Apple Universe podcaster, Daniel Brusilovsky, pinged Neal on iChat. He sent Neal a link and password to his private ustream.tv channel.

Since we started The Brief, having a camera stream live as we work has been something we wanted to do, but we wanted to find a way to only make it available to insiders so that people in the chat room wouldn’t include the dunderheads who are always asking me to take off my top.

The chat with Daniel gave us the idea to make the stream available to anyone who supports the Big Trip by buying ads on PaidbyPixels.com, T-Shirts (available in about a week) or DVDs (TBA).

Big Trip T-Shirts will sell for $25, including shipping. Pixels are sold in blocks of 100 for $50. Anyone who buys two or more blocks of pixels will receive a complementary Big Trip T-Shirt. Everyone who buys a shirt or pixels will receive a password for access to the live, behind-the-scenes stream.

The streaming camera will be on from the time that we shower in the morning up until it’s time to upload Geek Brief. Sometimes it will be as boring as watching socks dry. Sometimes it will be interesting, and hopefully, sometimes it will be exciting.

The camera is on and passwords have just been sent to pixel owners.

UPDATE: Someone asked if we would be able to continue this during the trip. We won’t be able to stream while driving, but our goal is to have it live while the bus is parked. It will depend on the up speeds we’ll be able to get on the bus.

Pre-rolls

Web video is hot right now. Ad buyers like it because they get to repurpose expensively produced ads originally made for TV. I think they also like the idea of you and me clicking and instantly seeing an ad.

Consumers of online media often find pre-rolls annoying, especially when they cannot be skipped. It isn’t because a viewer doesn’t want to support a show. It’s because the ads rarely add value and they end up being repetitive. If you watch much programing on hulu, you may see the same ad 20 or more times. There is a limit to how much repetition viewers will tolerate.

At first, I turned down the Beck’s advertising opportunity because I don’t personally like the use of commercial pre-rolls. Then I decided to ask the Geek Brief audience. The feedback was consistent. Few people enjoy pre-rolls. Most people thought we should do what we had to to pay the bills and fund The Big Trip. There was a pretty clear consensus of how pre-rolls can be done in a way that balances the needs of the audience with the needs of the producer and the advertisers who pay the bills.

If there are going to be pre-rolls, they should be different almost every time, they should be short and they should feature the host of the show. The biggest difference in opinion was about relevance. About half of you thought ads should be related to the content of the show and the other half thought they shouldn’t. For GeekBrief.TV, an ad for a router would be relevant and consistent with our content. An ad for Doritos would be differentiated from the content of the show.

I decided I would test a pre-roll campaign with some limits. In the Beck’s Beer campaign, there will be 4 episodes of the Brief that start with a pre-roll. The ad agency produced the ad and it’s 15 seconds. More about that later.

Beer Advertising

In my life, I may have had beer five times. I’m agnostic about it. I’ve never been in an environment where people abuse it, so my association with people drinking it is all positive. I’ve never acquired the taste so I don’t drink it myself. I drink wine and gin.

I’ve probably seen thousands of beer advertisements throughout my life and not one has enticed me into beer drinking. I would suggest beer ads aren’t intended to compel people to drink. They’re intended to associate brand with lifestyle. Beck’s seems to want to position itself at the beer of choice for tech savvy, iPhone, loving geek-chic types.

Given my personal experience with beer and the way I view the purpose of advertising, I hope it explains why I agreed to do the campaign.

I’m ambivalent about beer as a beverage, but I like Beck’s brand messaging, and the campaign is brief. It is ideal for starting a conversation what our perimeters should be.

The Conversation

The feedback I’m getting will have an impact on the choices we make in the future. I’ve heard from parents and teachers who aren’t happy seeing beer ads on Geek Brief. Even though I don’t have a problem with beer ads, I don’t want parents or teacher to feel uncomfortable exposing their kids to the show, so after this campaign ends, we won’t agree to another campaign involving alcohol.

The rest of the conversation is important for marketers to hear because you’re backing up what I’ve been telling them. They need to know why repurposing a TV ad turns people off. They need to know why the ads need to be different. I would say, if there are 10 pre-rolls, there should be 10 ads, and they have to demonstrate an appreciation for the viewers time by being compelling.

I can tell from conversations I’ve had with people in the ad business that they want to adjust to the demands of the audience, but it’s almost like we’re dealing with the inertia of a machine that is just too big to turn over night.

Keep the comments coming because I want you and me to decide how we want our media to be.

UPDATE: Don Thorp pointed out that we should offer teachers an ad free feed. That’s something we’ve been talking about for a couple days. We could accomplish it using PremiumCast.com, we just have to find a way to verify that they’re a teacher.

Adam Curry and Leo Laporte are foundational thought leaders who approach the business of delivering media through RSS, aka podcasting, differently, but they both agree the word podcasting is limiting. Leo uses the word netcast to describe what he does. Adam prefers to just call it media.

There are three ways to deliver media online that don’t involve physical product:

• RSS
• Streaming
• Direct Downloads

RSS

RSS is my favorite. It’s a push system that allows writers and media producers to release content at any time. That content, whether it be text, audio or video, is immediately delivered to subscribers through a feed reader, like Google reader, or a podcatcher, like iTunes.

With audio and video, in particular, the media can be consumed any way the subscriber wants. It can be watched on a computer, an xbox, an iPod or on AppleTV.

Streaming

Streaming is my least favorite form of Web media distribution. It’s the method preferred by the dark lords in old media. The content remains locked on a server, but it can be viewed on demand, usually with pre-requisite commercials that cannot be skipped. It’s limited to proprietary formats like Flash and Silverlight.

There is streaming of professionally produced media. The least obnoxious example is hulu.

There is streaming of amateur and simi-professional media. YouTube is the obvious example, but my heart is with Vimeo because they keep it simple and provide the tools for video to look excellent.

There is also live streaming provided by companies like USTREAM.TV and QIK. It makes much more sense to stream live situations than recorded entertainment.

The clear benefit of streaming, though, is its very low barrier to entry. You really don’t need to know anything beyond how to click a mouse to watch a streaming video. I think that just might explain the quality of comments on YouTube.

Direct Download

Direct Downloads have been around forever. The media file rests on a server, and a link on a Web page initiates a download. If the file is Quicktime or Windows Media, you might get a streaming/download hybrid experience where the media streams during the download, but when the download is complete, you can save it to your hard drive and put it on a portable player.

Enter MEVIO

MEVIO provides a platform that supports all three types of media distribution. Geek Brief can be caught as a podcast, embedded and streamed from a Web site or downloaded from a direct link to the media file.

Ultimately, the name doesn’t matter nearly as much as the user experience we deliver. Consumers of online media want it to be simple, flexible and portable. They’re okay if we monetize it, as long as monetization is respectful of their time and attention.

I’m all for the PodShow name change because it represents being about more than only a distribution platform for podcasting. I like that MEVIO makes it possible to get GeekBrief.TV in any of the three ways a viewer might choose.

That said, I’m also extremely proud to call myself a professional podcaster. Podcasting won my heart three years when I first heard Dawn and Drew podcasting from their farm house in Wisconsin. Podcasting is the better of the three distribution methods so it’s the one I’ll continue to promote…except right now because this flash video produced by Dawn is hilarious!

When I arrived to setup for my speech, I found out that I was almost an hour late, and the majority of people that had been waiting patiently had moved on to other sessions.

I was devastated, and still am. I’m pedantic about time, and unless Neal makes me slow down, I’m early for everything. I can’t stand disappointing people, and it breaks my heart that I did today (They told me there were 50 librarians waiting for me). Since I like to be early, we were there walking around the whole time they were waiting.

There were a few people left when we got to the room, so instead of a formal presentation, we just sat down and talked informally about new media and podcasting.

This is the most embarrassing moment of my life, both personally and professionally. I want to publicly apologize to all the librarians who were in that room waiting, and to Todd Humble, the organizer.

UPDATE: I didn’t say why I was late. I put the time down wrong in my calendar, even after triple checking the time slot.

I don’t know how much money is on the table, but I know what other people are getting for pre-roll. It should be a Godfather (or Podfather) offer that would be hard to refuse, and since our fundraising goal for the Big Trip is pretty massive, I’m tempted to be tempted. Not knowing how much they’re offering, though, makes it a little easier to be philosophical in the discussion.

Compromising idealism is hard for me. I worry about offending Geek Brief viewers, and that’s why I want to bring you guys into the conversation.

These would not be made for TV spots re-used for the Web. It’s a unique campaign and the pre-roll spots will be quick. I have some theories about pre-roll that would, in my mind, make the difference between an acceptable application and an annoying application, but I want to save those for the discussion. I want to hear what you guys think first.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to share your thoughts.