Real Drum is a fresh release from Rubel Co. released this week that puts a variety of drum sets and sounds at your fingertips.

Rubel, which also makes the Real Guitar iOS app now offers 11 unique drum sets with the newly released app. You can take your pick from: Abstract, Acoustic, Bongos, Break Beat, Conga, D’n’B, Electro, Hip Hop, Japan, Jazz, or Rock.

Tested on none other than the iPhone 4S, we could not get this app to miss a beat, pun intended. In Real Drum, you’ll find a relatively bare bones approach, consisting of two screens: the choose drum set screen, followed by the drum set screen to jam on.

While jamming, aside from the instruments, there are only two buttons, one to switch drum sets, and the other to open up the volume toggles – which allows the volume of each individual drum or cymbal to be adjusted, a nice touch for the talented finger drummer looking to perfect their beat.

Even while tapping the snare as rapidly as possible, throwing in some high hat and kick drum – this app will not lag behind the aggressive drummer. Playing multiple drums/cymbals simultaneously was clean and clear as well. You will not find any option to record, save, or upload any of your creative beats – but make no mistake, this app has the basics down. Real Drums looks and sounds great, so for $1.99, it just might be worth tapping into.

There is so much to do in Boston that living here can feel like a full-time job. It only seems fair that someone should offer monetary compensation.

No matter how satisfying your real job may be, getting paid for what you do in your leisure time will always seem ideal. Sadly, no matter how much you think about it on the T or ponder it in the Public Garden, there is nothing out there that will allow you to cash in on your spare time.

Unless of course you’ve got an iPhone. Want to get paid for your walk home? There’s an App for that.

Gigwalk is an application that allows users to report, record and share information about their surroundings. The application is free, and works by notifying users when a job is available in their area.

According to Jenifer Silver, a local Gigwalker, there are over 4,000 gigs in Boston. Provided you’re willing to snap a photo, you can now earn a second paycheck for doing whatever you’re doing, wherever you happen to be.

People rely on Gigwalk to provide them with information the internet may fail to capture, such as the daily drink special at a tiny independent cafe. Gigwalkers, as Gigwalk employees are known, function as a human search engine, providing photographic proof to specialized queries.

Silver reports responding to anywhere between five and 40 gigs per week. “My favorites are the ones where you can pop in and out without anyone noticing, such as Starbucks, McDonalds and other fast food settings. Occasionally I’ll make friends with the person working and they’ll give me a coffee!” Though Silver’s rate of response depends on her daily schedule, she points out that any time can be a good time for a gig: she’s even completed gigs on dates with her husband.

If the idea of earning $5 while dining out sounds appetizing, take heart in the fact that Gigwalk is growing. Over 100,000 gigs are available nationwide, and 5,067 of them are coming to Boston. With most gigs paying between $4 and $7 each, Gigwalkers have the potential to earn $12 to $20 an hour. Unlike you’re entry level office job, effort is always rewarded at Gigwalk. The more gigs you complete accurately, the higher your odds of accessing gigs that pay between $70 and $90 each.

“Since launching Gigwalk in May, we have rapidly grown into an on-demand mobile army of 50,000 iPhone users nationwide,” said Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk. This army isn’t fighting for just anyone, either. With a client roster that includes TomTom and MenuPages, Gigwalk could prove beneficial to both your wallet and your resume.

So go out to eat, drink, and enjoy your city. And, if you’re a Gigwalker, get paid for doing so.

Let’s face it, you just don’t reach kids with textbooks anymore. Enter the new Revolutionary War App, which aims to change how students learn.

The premise behind this iPad app is very promising and interesting, to get a more rich interaction into a history class and to add more excitement than simply reading a book. While using the app, I pictured a class room full of iPads where the teacher says to play with this app this period instead of using lectures.

Unfortunately this version of the app doesn’t live up to that expectation. There are a lot of videos, but otherwise it’s almost entirely text and pictures offering nothing that a regular text book doesn’t already offer. The videos that they do have, consist of pictures while someone talks, adding little over the text  that consists of the same information.  One such example is they include the poem of Paul Revere both as a video where they show a picture and have someone reciting it, and as the full text of the poem. The app seems to have lacked mentioning the inaccuracies of the poem, such as mentioning the other riders that warned the militia.

They do include one interactive exercise, the NY Battle Simulation. This was a good idea, but needs more polish. The Simulation is very brief on descriptions of the choices, which makes me feel like either you have to know what the expected outcome is or you randomly pick a choice.  If you pick a choice that’s different from what happened in history the simulation simply goes to a page that says “America Loses the War” with a try again button. They should have added more reasoning for why Washington took the actions he did. Information such as the state of the troops at that time, or the number of British and American troops available for the fight, and other troops that could assist in other areas. More important when you picked the wrong answer a description of why it was wrong would be helpful. Would fighting the British there have caused too many loses that they wouldn’t have been able to fight a more important battle later? Would they have likely captured all the troops including Washington?

The try again button points to another major complaint I had in this version of the app; the app has many quality assurance problems. The articles don’t have a consistency in style, the layout of one article will be completely different from another, such as the Title might be in the middle on one and Left Justified on another. There are also spelling mistakes and what looks like errors from a scanner. There are places where they replaced numbers with letters that look similar, Such as, “At z o’clock we bega.1 our march by wading through a very long ford up to our middles. After going a few miles we took 3 or 4 people who were going off to give intelligence.”  There are other places with characters that obviously are wrong, “The letter stated: “the single question then, is whether you consider Boston as now suffering a common cause, and sensibly feel and resent the injury and affront.””

One of the best parts of the app though, is that they included the full text of many important documents and diary entries of people that were relevant to the war. In a book, these documents are usually left out or put in the appendix, because of lack of interest, and the space they take up. In the American Revolution on the Go App they were able to just have a button that linked to the doc, so people could view it easily if they wanted to, or ignore it if they weren’t interested.

One of the developers, Marc Schulman, has stated that they plan “to add by the first week of September a few more interactive activities like the one at the Battle of New York as well a bibliography and of course some fixes for typos”.  I still can see them do some interesting things with more interactive scenarios, but with the version that’s available currently, I would recommend a regular text book over purchasing this app. The app still has interesting promise, but they have a lot of work still to realize that promise.

Mower Ride is a fun way to tilt your off hours away with your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

The game, released today by Vivid Games is a top-down hybrid racing and combat game, entirely motion controlled.

It is a casual game, in the spirit of a SkiFree, where you don’t need a story or elaborate point system. Just move and try not to die.

You take your turbocharged riding lawnmower through back yards, clipping lines of grass, dodging swimming pools, and trying to take out other mowers before they kill you. All while, you are trying to collect energy icons before you run out of power.

The game scores your personal best depending on how much distance you can cover before you run out of power or get taken out by an enemy.

There’s not much skill involved, and that’s the beauty of Mower Ride. It has nice cartoon graphics, catchy music, and provides just enough entertainment value to make it 99 cents worth spending.

If you get really hooked on racing a lawn mower, you can challenge your friends and spend some more cash to pimp and primp your vehicle.

The location-based app, Poynt for iPhone now has a new category of search that’s already been available for the BlackBerry and Android versions: gas prices. Now when you use this nifty little app for the iPhone, you can sort gas price results by price or proximity, and launch right into Maps for turn-by-turn directions. Additionally, there’s a few new features, such as being reminded of movie times or dinner reservations, and you can now add theaters to your favorites for quick access later on.

Download Poynt for your iPhone (for free!) after the jump!

News

If you want an idea of where the iPhone could be headed, keeping tabs on what competitors have to offer is a great place to start. At Google’s I/O conference this week, Google unveiled, among a dizzying amount of new features coming from all corners of the Googlesphere, the new Android operating system, codenamed "Froyo." The OS, otherwise known as Android 2.2, has a couple of key features that Apple needs to take notice of.

First, no syncing! That’s right, any media that Android users download on their computer is automatically updated to their phone through the cloud eliminating the nuisance of plugging a phone into a computer. Any iPhone user that has been through the agony of attempting to sync their phone when they’re halfway out the door knows how big this is. Staying with the theme of easy access to media, Android 2.2 allows users to stream all of their-DRM free music from their computer’s library to their phone. Pretty cool.

Second, the platform is lightning fast. Google has claimed that the OS is up to five times faster than its predecessor, Android 2.1, and that the Froyo mobile browser will be the fastest in the world. Mobile platforms are all about ease of use, and speed plays a huge part in the user’s experience. This may be a bigger win for Google than even they currently realize as the mobile conversation shifts away from, "We have a smartphone," to "Our smartphone is better."

Third, the Android 2.2. OS will support USB tethering and can act as a WiFi hotspot for any WiFi device. The only question is whether all mobile carriers will support tethering, but the idea of a user’s mobile phone acting as a WiFi hub for all users mobile devices is titillating, to say the least.

And finally, the dagger. Froyo will support Flash 10.1, and it doesn’t look bad at all, despite Steve Jobs’ claims to the contrary. Considering what a big story Apple’s feud with Flash has become over the past couple of years, it’s no surprise that Google had their sites set on integrating their mobile OS with Flash. If Froyo’s integration with Flash turns out to be a big success, as I suspect it will, it could turn into a major black mark on Jobs’ credibility, as it completely undermines everything the Apple CEO has been claiming for years.

As it stands now, Google is done playing catch-up on the mobile platform; they’re not only keeping pace with Apple, they’re starting to outpace them. The question may soon become something unthinkable only a year ago: Can the iPhone keep pace with Android?

Apps

The past week’s weather serves as a pretty good indication of how volatile the weather is in Boston this time of year, so you need a go-to weather app before you eschew your boots for Crocs.

Outside: We want accurate and reliable weather forecasts first and foremost, sure, but a great weather application needs an enticing user interface to keep us coming back. Fortunately, Outside has the most engaging and enjoyable interface of any weather app in the App store. While most weather applications try to jam more information than the user could ever possibly need into an over-crowded screen, Outside has a simple virtual window view that gives the user a quick, appealing view of the current weather. Users can drag the screen down to see more information, but the ease of use and unique take on a weather application sets Outside apart, though at $2.99, it won’t make it’s way onto many iPhones. 3.5 out of 5 stars

The Weather Channel: The app has long been the de facto non-native weather application for the iPhone, and it’s duly deserved. The free app has everything a user could want while staying faithful to the TV channel layout we’ve all become so accustomed to. What makes the app great is that the added information The Weather Channel gives you isn’t just filler. Items like pollen forecasts, 10-day forecasts, full screen radars and traffic cams, all contribute to the most useable weather app out there. This is one app that users download and never let go of; it’s the perfect app for its genre. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Thermometer: If you travel a lot, this app may be all you need. Instead of results based on pre-set locations that can take costly time to load, Thermometer is geographically based, allowing users to quickly find, in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, what the outside temperature is. It’s simple, but the execution is flawless, and is a must own if you live out of your suitcase. 3.5 out of 5 stars

News

We’ve talked about how Apple’s restrictive actions could end up turning away developers from creating apps for the iPhone. Though I know many of the movers and shakers at Apple read this column religiously, they did not heed my warning, and went quite the opposite way.

Apple recently announced that they will change the software development license so that developers can only use three tools to create apps instead of the myriad of tools currently being used. Many developers now use tools that they have had experience with or that have specific capabilities, like a physics engine. What makes the least sense is that the type of app most likely to suffer from the new restrictions are games, the app store’s bread and butter.

So this leads to the question of why. Why disenfranchise developers who are creating apps for the iPhone instead of Google’s Android or another platform, and why risk lowering the quality of apps by forcing developers to create with a tool they are not comfortable using? Apple has claimed that the change will improve the quality of apps in the app store. That reasoning is confusing, however, because Apple was already free to reject any app without really needing to supply an explanation. Isn’t that the most effective means of quality control? From a developer standpoint, Apple’s new restrictions are allegorical to developers only being allowed to wear wool socks when working on an application.

The real impetus behind Apple’s new policy may be the imminent release of Adobe’s Flash CS5, which had a Flash-to-iPhone compiler as one of it’s major features. Apple might as well have targeted Flash specifically in the wording of the iPhone Program Developer Agreement. I don’t know what Adobe did to piss Apple off, but it must’ve been bad. Like a Martin Brodeur sex affair bad.

Apple should use history as precedent. Many developers ran for the hills when Microsoft started clamping down on developers, and Apple benefited big from developer’s desires just to get away from Microsoft. Apple has definitely been taking a public image beating in the past year. They were always the little guy that put the consumer first, but now it is becoming readily apparent that with more power comes more opportunity to abuse that power, an avenue we find Apple increasingly going down.

Apps

Tax season is over and some of us have a little more in our bank accounts than we anticipated. Thinking you may want to plan a little summer getaway with that extra cash, we give you three great travel apps.

Wanderlust: The only app in the store that supports in-app flight bookings. With perhaps the most comprehensive worldwide airfare search today, Wanderlust searches different combinations of 400 airlines that save it’s savvy user up to 60 percent. For those traveling in Europe and Asia, Wanderlust includes low cost carriers, some of which have flights for as little as $10. The app features a powerful sorting and filtering engine and displays full prices of flights, including hidden fees, to ensure users find exactly what they’re looking for at the best rate. The app’s easy interface makes Wanderlust a must own for iPhone users to book the best flight without a travel agent. 4 out of 5 stars

Babelingo: The perfect linguistic companion, Babelingo has 300 commonly used phrases in 11 languages, presented both in the native language and phonetically for users. Selections can be made based off by situation cohorts, so users can select shopping, and then go through a list of phrases that best suit their situation. Babelingo’s search function enables users with a specific phrase in mind to search that phrase, and find the nearest translation in the desired language. The care put into Babelingo’s translations is what really sets the app apart, as experts of each of the languages have ensured that all of the translations are completely accurate. Find a phrase, speak it phonetically, and get what you want. It’s that simple. 3.5 out of 5 stars

Frommer’s Travel Tools: Whether by their own merit or through crude Eurotrip jokes, Frommer’s has become a name synonymous with travel. Now they have an excellent app to add to the resume. The app’s appeal is not necessarily that any of the tools are extraordinary, but to have so many quality tools in one location makes it a traveler’s best friend. Tools include a global tip calculator for different tipping customs in different regions, a customizable packing list, using your own pictures to create postcards to make friends and family jealous, currency, unit, and time converters, city guides, and even a flashlight. If you have to have one travel app, this should be it. 4 out of 5 stars

News

Thanks to a young Apple engineer named Gray Powell, the iPhone 4G has made its way into the public scene months before its intended release. The prototype, cleverly disguised as an iPhone 3G, was found on the bar stool of a German beer garden in Redwood City, California, and eventually found its way into the hands of online tech magazine Gizmodo, which ran a feature on it.

Though there are a lot more intriguing nuances to the story, I’ll leave them to Gizmodo, who has posted the complete saga on their Web site. For now we’ll focus on what the leak did reveal about the iPhone.

One of the immediate standout features on the iPhone 4G prototype is the front facing camera, which based on findings in the iPhone 4.0 software, will be used primarily for videochatting. That’s right, mobile-to-mobile videochatting will be possible upon the iPhone 4G’s release, and marks a new era of communication. The world just keeps getting smaller.

Most of the other impressive aspects of the new iPhone deal with the difference in appearance between it and previous generations. The phone’s designers have eschewed the concave plastic back and sides of the 3G, replacing it with a flush glass back and aluminum sides, presumably to allow for a better cell signal.

The phone’s screen is actually a little smaller than the previous generations, but the apparent quality of the screen’s resolution and undoubted enhancements to the multitouch technology should make the change a non-issue.

The phone’s volume keys are now two separate buttons, and the SIM slot has been moved to the side of the device and replaced with a Micro-SIM card. The phone also has two microphones, assumed to be for noise cancelling purposes, and a much larger back camera with a flash. This could end the iPhone user’s need for a non-SLR digital camera, as improvements to the phone’s native camera seems to have been given a high priority. This is merely another confirmation that Apple’s imperialistic forays into other electronics industries are not slowing down any time soon.

One of the biggest features I was planning to be on the lookout for when I went about assessing the new iPhone was whether the battery seemed to be improved, given the multitasking and videochatting capabilities the phone possesses. These features only mean so much if the battery life can’t sustain prolonged usage of them. Fortunately, the battery is 16 percent larger while the phone itself is even slimmer than the 3G generation, so while the specs are as yet undetermined, it’s certainly a good sign.

The phone just looks sexy. Apparently it feels sexy, too. We now have a good idea of what the iPhone 4G will be capable of upon its release, and if I had to make a gutshot reaction based on what we know know about both software and hardware, I would say that this thing is a beast, and will put the iPhone miles ahead of the mobile competition once again. Special thanks to Gray Powell for his contribution to this article.

Apps

The MBTA sucks. Really bad. And we’ve all been burned by it. Because you’ll inevitably be waiting for a long overdue train underground in the near future, we give you three insanely addicting apps that don’t require a connection to enjoy.

Doodle Jump- There is just something about this game that makes it impossible to put down. Gamers guide their character, the "Doodler," through a never-ending series of platforms by tilting the iPhone side-to-side, all the while searching for powerups and avoiding monsters, aliens and black holes. The developers, Lima Sky, take extremely good care of their loyal supporters and release new content nearly every week to keep gamers coming back. Doodle Jump is the best $0.99 one can spend in the app store. *****

Paper Toss- When I first heard of the app, I wondered, "Where’s the appeal in throwing crumpled up paper into a trash can?" I still can’t answer that question, but there is something oddly satisfying about it. Players choose different distances from which to throw the paper balls, and throw the ball in a direction based off the speed an onscreen fan is blowing. It is one of the odder concepts in the app store, but it is incredibly satisfying to watch a ball arc around the iPhone’s screen and land in the wastepaper basket. Writing about it doesn’t do Paper Toss justice, but its free price tag makes it easy to try. ****

Zen Bound- The app is half game, half experience, and completely engrossing. The object of the puzzle game is not to beat the high score, but to relax the user while stimulating the mind. The game itself is wrapping a wooden structure with a rope, but that’s only half of the app. Zen Bound has some of the best visuals on the iPhone, and an incredibly relaxing soundtrack that takes the user to another place. Zen Bound is a puzzle game in name only. The only thing users have to worry about is missing that T when it eventually does come. ****

Looking for more iPhone and iPad updates? Follow Matt on Twitter by clicking here.

News

Apple has used the iPhone to make a sneaky entrance into the gaming industry. The swing was confirmed in a recent Flurry report, which stated that while the iPhone’s games only made up 5 percent of portable gaming revenue in 2008, its market share jumped to 19 percent in 2009, to the significant detriment of both the PSP and DS. What makes this meteoric rise even more remarkable is the average price of a game in the app store is $1.36 while most new releases on both PSP and DS are $29.99.

The PSP, which has had its fair share of problems, had the bigger slip of the two, going from 20 percent of the market revenue to 11 percent in just a year. One has to wonder if the PSP’s problems, specifically a high price that ensured that the platform could never really take off, has influenced the iPad’s much lower than expected pricing, especially on the heels of a report on AppleInsider claiming that 44 percent of iPad apps being tested are games.

In addition, if you have spent any time cruising around the app store in the past week, you may have noticed that some apps now have an HD tag. Those apps are exclusively for the iPad, and will far surpass the visual capabilities of both the PSP and DS.

It was a roundabout way to enter the gaming industry, but the iPhone seems to have been the testing medium to see how the public would react to gaming apps on a ubiquitous computing device. Needless to say, the popularity of game apps on the iPhone almost assuredly contributed to what seems like a concerted focus on the gaming experience for iPad users that should make Apple’s newest creation a groundbreaking one in portable gaming.

While I’m not entirely sold on the iPad, if I was in the market for a portable gaming platform and was surveying the market, with the iPad’s functionality and fairly reasonable price, it seems to me like a no-brainer to make a bigger investment for an exponentially greater return. One vertical that Apple will certainly be watching when the iPad is released on Saturday are the gamers, who may ultimately determine whether the tablet is closer to a Macbook Air or an iPhone.

In other news, music streaming subscription site MOG announced at SXSW that they will be rolling out a $10/month mobile app for both iPhone and Android in which music files will live in the cloud, and can be downloaded any time to your smartphone.

If you read the column from two weeks ago, this is only further evidence that streaming media to smartphones is a thing of the past. MOG’s announcement is further reinforcement of the cloud revolution going on in software today. Though unproven, the subscription music model should work, given the amount of quality music that is being produced now that there are virtually no barriers to entry in the music industry. It will be interesting to see who of MOG, Rhapsody, Pandora and Spotify can corner the rapidly growing market, and how the iTunes music store will undoubtedly react.

Apps

Spring means a few things: unnecessarily wearing sandals on slightly warmer than average days, the beginning of another season of Red Sox dominance (fingers crossed), and shopping for the coming months. In the spirit of springtime, Blast gives you three apps for shopping your way towards warmth.

oMoby-Unsure about a product? Want to know more about it before you buy or walk away? oMoby is a free app that uses your phone’s camera to retrieve information, shopping options, and the obligatory Facebook and Twitter connections about the product. Simply take a picture of the item in question, and oMoby will return links pertinent to the product. Slightly gimmicky, but it works well and is a quick way to aggregate information about a product, or to show off at your Memorial Day BBQ.

RedLaser- oMoby’s grown up older brother, this app is the ultimate shopping companion, and really flexs the iPhone’s metaphorical muscle. RedLaser is a scanner that uses the phone’s camera to quickly scan an item’s barcode and return both TheFind Local Product Search and Google results to ensure that you are getting the best price on the item you are scanning. RedLaser’s barcode scanning technology is amazingly accurate so you probably won’t need it, but if you can’t scan an item, you can manually enter the UPC or EAN code and have both local and national pricing results on your phone in seconds. The app also allows you to keep a backlog of all the items you have scanned, and you can email those items to yourself and others. Even though the app is $1.99, if you use it, the app will more than pay for itself.

Sale Price- Speaking from experience, those that work in your average retail store aren’t going out of their way to make sure you get the best sales price possible on that marked down item you are about to buy. Sales Price quickly calculates the final price of your item using sliders depending on what kind of discount the retailer is offering. Bargain hunters will love the app, though with increasingly advanced retail software, who knows how long this app will be useful for. Still, for free, it’s better to have it than not.

Looking for more iPhone and iPad updates? Follow Matt on Twitter by clicking here.

News

We are the generation of Napster, LimeWire, and torrents. Needless to say, many of us don’t necessarily enjoy paying for our music. Some haven’t since 1999.

One of our favorite sources for music on the cheap, Rhapsody, recently announced its intention to re-tool their current app so that users can download any of their 9 million songs to their iPhone and listen to them even when they are in airplane mode. Users will not have to rely on a wireless signal to listen to their music and it is theirs as long as they are Rhapsody customers.

This is the beginning of a much-needed move away from streaming content. AT&T’s service sucks. We know that. Even apps that are great ideas in theory, like Ustream, fail in practice because of an over-reliance on an unreliable network. Content that you can download and use everywhere, even if it deletes itself off the iPhone after use, is exponentially better than not being able to access that content at all.

This is a great step towards increasing accessibility and transparency in content-rich apps. The concept of having unlimited access for a limited amount of time is not a new concept. It’s called a rental. It’s natural for developers to try to utilize all the bells and whistles of the iPhone, but it’s good to see that they are moving away from the streaming model towards a simpler, more effective one.

Apps

We all fancy ourselves rock stars. The vast majority of us aren’t, but that certainly doesn’t stop us from trying. When you need to rock out while on the go, turn to your trusty iPhone. Staying on the musical theme of our news section, here are three rocking apps for your rolling pleasure.

Noise Trio -- This app is a fun free one that uses tone rows to allow users to slide their finger along a matrix to create a song. Sliding sideways plays notes in the scale, up/down changes the tonality of the note, and pressing a certain cell in the matrix starts and stops a drum loop. Users can choose between three instruments: a flute, a blues guitar, and eastern bells. Each comes with their own scale, which seems limiting at first, but these scales are meant to be played in variations over and over. The guitar sounds very little like a blues guitar, but the main problem with the app is how buggy it is. When it works, however, it rocks.

Guitar Rock Tour 2 – This app is a brilliant free one for the Guitar Hero faithful. The app features the same rolling, tap based gaming interface as the console games, and has a soundtrack of classic tunes that includes “Born To Be Wild,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Paranoid.” The two aspects of the app that set it apart are the ability to play drums as well as guitar, and the option to compete over WiFi with others. The app even includes a career mode that allows users to travel across the globe with their band, a nice touch to a game that really didn’t need it.

Baby Scratch — This app is predicated on the notion that we would all be much cooler if we were behind a turntable in a crowded club, scratching away. The best part about this turntable app is the ability to sample whatever your iPhone’s mic can hear, and scratch over it. The app utilizes the Flare scratch engine, which is by far the most simplistic and fun scratching experience for the iPhone. Users can also overlay beat loops on samples and control the volume with a responsive fader. The app’s lack of variety doesn’t give it much replay value, but for all of the nothing it costs, it is certainly a great value.

News

With this week’s release of Final Fantasy I and II, and recent launches of Doom II and Wolfenstein, an exciting trend in iPhone applications is developing– relaunches of classic yet outdated video games on your iPhone.

It’s pretty cool that the iPhone has become a medium advanced enough that classic games can be even more playable on it than they were on their original consoles. Classic video games have lacked the long-term staying power in the public conscience largely because the rapid improvement of gaming technology makes fairly new games seem wildly outdated.

The iPhone’s technology has allowed for the resurrection of these classic games and will hopefully pave the way these exceptional games to be enjoyed long after their spotlight in console gaming has gone. Gamers are certainly more forgiving in what they expect from their iPhone games as compared to their console games, and since classic games are already developed, iPhone users could see a boom of classic games hitting their iPhones in the coming months. Come on, Rareware, give me GoldenEye!

Apps

Now that it’s March, the season for enjoying a nice outdoor run without returning home as a Popsicle has begun. Runners need to find routes, keep statistics, and track calories burned. Blast gives you reviews of three popular running apps for your fitness pleasure.

iMapMyRun: This app is a good free alternative for a lot of the run tracking paid apps on the App Store. Walk out your front door, hit start and run. iMapMyRun will mark your route using Google maps, and keeps vital statistics like distance, speed and elevation. When your run is over, go to MapMyRun.com, where all your statistics will already be uploaded, allowing you to delve deeper into all the aspects of your run. You can also enter in data from gym workouts, making this app a free one-stop shop for all your fitness needs. Simple and excellent execution for a free app.

iRace Me Lite: The best motivation for runners is to race against their fleet-footed brethren. Even better motivation is racing against yourself. iRace Me Lite allows users to create a loop, run it and then next time they run the loop, see where they are in relation to their previous run in real time. The obvious drawback for the app is runners continually checking their iPhone instead of running full out. This is a neat concept, however, and the addition of audio cues can all but eliminate the need for runners to pull out their iPhone, making this application a must for seasoned and novice runners alike.

Fitnio: Essentially the statistics that you would see on a treadmill on your iPhone. Adding calories burned to distance, speed and pace is a nice touch, but it is hard to see how the developers of this app can justify charging $1.99 for it. Sure, it has warm up and cool down functions, as well as a field for emergency contacts, but that is about it. The app does have a feature for cyclists as well as runners, but if you’re rolling on two feet instead of two wheels, Fitnio is a waste when compared to other free running apps.

News

Undoubtedly the biggest iPhone question of the week is whether Apple will allow the Opera Mini iPhone browser, unveiled last week at the Mobile World Congress, into the App Store. Apple has a habit of rejecting apps that may step on the toes of their native apps, most notably rejecting the Google Voice application, which reportedly managed calls, voicemails and text messages.

The circumstances around the announcement of the Opera Mini browser are interesting for two reasons. One, the browser is reportedly six times faster than the native Safari browser and uses less of the iPhone’s resources by rendering pages on a server and then compressing them by 90 percent. Second, Opera has forced Apple’s hand. By garnering significant media attention for the application before submitting it to the app store, Opera is daring Apple to reject their browser and feel the wrath of an undoubtedly disappointed customer base.

The fact that Apple would reject an application that enhances a user’s experience simply because it conflicts with a native application will not sit well with many iPhone customers. Opera has also stated that they do not anticipate a problem with the Opera Mini being accepted into the App Store, affirming that it meets all the requirements Apple provides for acceptance into the App Store. The browser will be submitted to the App Store within the next few weeks, with the decision likely to shape Apple’s apps policy for the foreseeable future.

Opera has deftly used the publicity and intrigue surrounding the Opera Mini browser’s acceptance into the App Store to make Apple finally comes to a definitive decision about allowing applications that overlap functionality with native ones. It only takes one to open the floodgates.

Apps

You love your iPhone. And you’re lazy. Turning your iPhone into a remote or mouse? Sounds perfect. Blast supports your lethargy by giving you the three best remote apps for the iPhone.

Remote- When Apple releases an app, especially a free one, we tend to pay attention. The app closes the gap between phone and computer by allowing users to control their iTunes or Apple TV over any wireless network. Remote is a simple yet effective app that gives users nearly complete control over their iTunes no matter where they are on their wireless network.

Air Mouse Pro- This app allows you to use your iPhone as a trackpad and keyboard to control your PC or Mac. The application also has embedded action buttons to control each program. An interesting feature is the gyroscopic mouse control that, while not very functional and hard to control, allows users to wave their phone around to control their mouse, and appears to be one of the major selling points of the app. The UI is polished and the pre-loaded remotes allow users to quickly navigate running programs within seconds of setting the application up. Now only $0.99 on the App store, this app is an absolute steal.

Rowmote- Rowmote, just updated last week, is like Remote, but for more than 30 programs, including Front Row, iTunes, Quicktime, Last.fm, Hulu Desktop, and perhaps most importantly, Keynote, considering Apple’s Keynote Remote app is the same price, $0.99. The application only has five functions for each program (pause, play, skip, fast forward/rewind and volume) and can have a bit of a delayed reaction, but has enough redeeming qualities, such as sleep and wake functions, launching and subsequently switching between applications, and accessing the iTunes Visualizer, to make this app worth the purchase, especially for Keynote users.

News

The mobile landscape is officially a three horse race between Apple, Google and Microsoft. Despite Microsoft entering the mobile game three years after Apple, the Windows Phone 7 Series, revealed today at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, looks like a beast.

iPhone users should and will welcome Microsoft’s new foray into mobile communications. Why? Because anyone who has seen a hacked/jailbroke iPhone knows how cool the device can be, and by comparison, how stagnant Apple’s desire to have complete autonomy over how people use their iPhones has made them. The Windows Phone 7 Series really feels like a computer that just happens to make calls and fits in your pocket. Apple will likely reveal the new iteration of the iPhone in June. Maybe by then they will have realized that the mobile world is changing rapidly and that staying relevant means treating their mobile phone as a small computer, not a smartphone. Hopefully, they will have implemented this change in ideology into the iPhone 4G.

Apple’s iPhone developers need to address some of the problems that the Windows Phone 7 Series conquers, such as stepping up the UI, allowing multiple applications to run at once, giving users the ability to download and implement web applications, and engineering seamless integration and less rigidity between phone, browsing, and social media hubs. Apple still has a huge advantage in the mobile market, but the gap was at least somewhat diminished today with the release of the Windows Phone 7 Series.

Apps

Mid February is a prime time for a winter weekend getaway, and for many New Englanders, that means hitting the mountains for some skiing and boarding. Between travel, accommodations, rentals and lift passes, everyone wants to maximize his or her time on the slopes while there. This winter, many will turn to iPhone apps for this purpose. Blast gives you the four best free apps for hitting the slopes:

The North Face Snow Report -- This app favors function over flashiness, simply giving users need-to-know information to make their trip as pleasant as possible. The app provides 24-, 48- and 72-hour snowfall conditions, trail maps and avalanche advisories. It also has a locate function to get you to the mountain and a unique resort specific Twitter feed, allowing the user to read and post tweets related to the mountain.

The Ski Computer — A handy app if you’re interested in the statistics of your riding. The Ski Computer calculates current, average and maximum ski per run, elevation, number of runs and distance per run. In addition to geotagging all the photos you take while on the mountain so you know exactly where you took them, it allows you to upload your trip in a file to EveryTrail.com, a trip sharing community.

iTrailMap – The best free app for avoiding lugging around a cumbersome trail map all day, the app contains high-resolution trail maps of over 750 resorts. With the knowledge that it can be hard to get service high in the alpines, iTrailMap downloads and stores the maps on your iPhone, eliminating the need for wireless service at all times.

Phresheez i- This app also features riding statistics such as speed, steepness, and maximum speed. Phresheez is unique, however, in that it addresses the problem of meeting up with friends on the slopes by tracking all the members of your riding party and where they are in relation to you on the mountain. The app also allows you to share your day on Facebook and Twitter.

Blast got the word on Grammy award winning artist Ziggy Marley’s latest collaboration: an iPhone application that lets fans and music lovers alike a chance to observe the music from the production side of things. Providing tools to mix tracks, beats, dub sounds, interchangeable parts for drums, melody, bass, and vocals, the iPhone application is bridging the gap between the music industry and its audience.

We chatted with Chevon Hicks, CEO of Heavenspot, the independent digital creative agency that worked along with its sister company AppWagon, to create the application and bring a unique experience for users.

BLAST: How has this evolved? Bands have offered fans the opportunity to remix their work before (for contests and such) and with technology now being available in our homes (Garage Band, even ProTools and home studios) people who would never have thought of mixing or arranging before are now diving in.

CHEVON HICKS: We wanted to create a remix application that was easy enough for novices, but had enough features to keep aficionados entertained. We wanted to work with an artist who was first and foremost “cool”, especially since we knew it would be a long process. We needed someone with international name recognition with a broad appeal across multiple genres. Ziggy Marley was the perfect fit. We are also big fans of exclusive content, we knew right away that we wanted to create music specifically for the iPhone app – not just old singles. It took quite a bit of R&D to figure out how to get 50 different song parts to work together musically, as well as getting everything to playback in perfect sync on the iPhone’s processor. Six months, thousands of dollars, and three developers later we had a fully functioning proof of concept.

Since nearly everyone at Heavenspot is a musician of some kind, it was important to us to put our artistic stamp on the music. These Ziggy Marley tracks don’t sound like the Ziggy you’re used to. We figured it would be even more interesting to take him in a different direction, so we went old school. We were inspired by movies like Rockers, and Harder They Come. Really good rootsy 70′s reggae. I instructed our composer to listen to Rocksteady artists from the 50′s and 60′s like Alton Ellis, U-Roy, Freddie MacGregor, Dennis Brown, and of course Bob Marley and The Wailers. We’ve had people walk into our conference room while we’re demoing the app and ask where we got these new Bob Marley tracks – it sounds that good. That is one thing we will insist on as a company – we make the tracks. There is also a practical reason for this, as the technology dictates that the music is constructed in a very specific manner. It is possible to retro-engineer existing songs, but we will need to control the remix process.

BLAST: Is this positive for the recording industry? Are we surrendering our power, or offering insight to fans?

CH: Agencies, Record Companies, and Brands are all a little afraid of crowd sourcing – that is giving creative control to your audience. We believe user generated content is the wave of the future. Instead of marketers putting all of their eggs in the basket of one big idea, all we need to do is to give users to the tools to create what they want. This serves two purposes – 1. it decreases the risk associated with putting a bunch of money behind an unproven idea, and 2. it serves as a research platform as the metrics (that is the tracking of what users create) will tell us volumes about what they like, what they don’t, and how to best communicate with them.

I think it’s a positive thing for the recording industry, and our app specifically represents the future of customization. Imagine being able to remix any song with any artist? Or being able to remix and create duets between your favorite crooners? Or simply extending the bridge in that Steely Dan song you love? Or just getting something completely new with a flick of the wrist? We realize that humans aren’t always in the mood to interact. Sometimes you just want to sit back and be passively entertained. Well, we’ve accounted for that too, with our “DJ For Me” mode, which uses proprietary AI to randomly remix any of the songs included on the app. This also offers a unique experience as the remix of any song will be different each time “DJ For Me” is engaged. In the end, this will sell more product, and the recording industry should be excited by that.

BLAST: Also, this is seen as a personal gesture from an artist to fans. How do you think more artists will get involved in this way?

CH: We are hoping to reskin this app with everything from country to classical music. We would love to create some old school Patsy Cline music for an artist like Tim McGraw, then have someone like Maxwell come in to provide the hook. We’d love to create a classical version where you remix Mozart’s Piano Conciertos. Our process requires very little commitment from the artist – Ziggy came in a freestyled everything in less than two hours. He heard the tracks, made some quick suggestions, and went to town. At one point, I was in the vocal booth with him capturing video. When I closed my eyes it was like being the room with Bob Marley – that same voice burns through in our application.

BLAST: How does Heavenspot view the future of music technology and the recording industry?

CH: We can see that music technology is all about simplifying the experience for the artist. What used to take tons of equipment and space can now be done on a laptop, without a noticeable degradation of quality. In the end, it’s all about ideas and no amount of technology will ever— wait, I shouldn’t speak too soon – have you heard of Ray Kurzweil’s Poetry Writing Software? Apparently even creativity can be deduced in 1s and 0s!

The recording industry needs to focus on two things, IP and Digital Distribution. They fought it for too long which hurt them gravely, but I think the right people are steering the ship these days. Finally, and Apple is testament to this, the future is in micro-transactions. Nobody thinks twice about spending 1 dollar ten times a day, but spending 10 dollars at once is scary. Our application attempts to equalize the divide with it’s low price point of .99¢, which is not an accurate reflection of it’s value. That’s exactly what we want – high value for low cost, and to get it into as many hands as possible. The more people that have it, the larger the community grows.

Composers. Radio Djs. Record Storeowners. Producers. Musicians. People with musical knowledge. These are the types of people you would go to for musical advice and recommendations, right? ‚ On October 8^th, a new relationship between music and technology was launched. Darius Fong was inspired by his experiences growing up in Hong Kong and discovering new artists and genres in record stores, and founded Panel to provide that experience to other music lovers.

Panel, a new iPhone app, founded by Darius Fong, is aiming to bring back the record store experience of yesteryear, when music industry professionals and music buffs were present at your point of purchase to give you insight on what you might like or look forward to for the next addition to your record collection.

Panel is different than other music applications or online players. While many online music sites can match a playlist to your liking very well, like the engine at Last.fm, nothing is strictly personal, like press releases or ads. It’s by music lovers, for music lovers. Each Panelist can explain their choice and their influences to help users find out more about the album.

The Panel App streams two full albums each week in various categories, including rock, pop, indie, jazz and more. Curators of the Panel App will be featured panelists that are composers, radio DJs, record storeowners, producers, musicians, and others with a musical background, every month to feature music that they love.

The iPhone application will also feature interviews with the Panelists, album descriptions, and a one-touch process will be made available to users in order to purchase albums they like. In addition, these users may then comment on selections and invite friends to join, listen, and create a fan-supported community.

To find out more, go to WearePANEL.com for images of panelists and photo journals of each week’s content, interviews, “Panel Blog”, videos, podcasts, and links from featured albums to iTunes and Amazon.

Apple’s just-updated official numbers for its App Store are out, and iPhone and iPod touch users currently have over 85,000 apps to choose from. Better yet, users have chosen more than two billion of them. McDonalds, by contrast, has only served billions and billions at this point; Apple seems to be right behind.

Obviously though, wading through all those apps can be rather daunting. While a new App Store earlier this month certainly helped, Yappler wants to take it one step further and has launched Yappler Sync, a discovery tool for Windows and OS X that allows iPhone users to share a list of their favorite apps with their friends. The tool scans a users App Store library, and sends that list to the Yappler website, where a user can share it anonymously or post it for others.

Yappler.com Sync also creates a list of the apps used by all of its users and updates the list when new apps are downloaded or old ones are deleted, generating their own Top Apps list. Users can share their own list of apps on Twitter and Facebook, or even embed the list as a widget on personal blogs and webpages, like below. We noticed that Yappler doesn’t not which apps you personally don’t sync to your phone though. We don’t actually keep multiple fart apps on our phone. Honest.

Check Yappler out, and share your app lists in the comments.

First there was Dunkin Donuts. Then “" our personal‚  burrito favorite “" there was Chipotle. And now arrives the Pizza Hut.

No, we’re not plotting the reasons for the demise of American health. These are current applications for you iPhone that allow you to place an order without ever speaking to another human! Considering that we’ll spend twenty minutes scouring websites in order to make a doctor’s appointment to avoid actually having to place a phone call, this clearly represents a marked improvement in our lives.

The application features what you would expect it to”"location awareness selects the correct store for your delivery”"to the unexpected”"shake your iPhone to make your hotwings spicy! The application is actually very svelte, and supports the entire range of iPhone input gestures. You can pinch and pull the pizza to make it go from a personal pan size to an extra-large. You can rotate the phone between landscape and portrait, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, and you can swipe forward to move steps.

The pizza builder is our favorite part. You can drag and drop individual topping to your custom pizza, or click and drag the phrases like “ranch chicken” for predefined sets of toppings.

While we haven’t technically placed an order with the application (iTunes) yet, you can check out the official YouTube video below.

With Twilight mania overtaking the world at large, it was only a matter of time before it made it to the iPhone. The Twilight Saga app offers users a way to connect with each other by “shouting” message board style to discuss the continuing Twilight saga. The app also purports to allow users to gain access to exclusive Twilight related content.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the future if there weren’t some sort of convergence, and sure enough, the app integrates with Facebook and Twitter (What, no MySpace? Twilight fans always struck us at the MySpace type) to allow users to post to their other social networks about Twilight. The app also allows users to select an avatar of their favorite Twilight character. (We wanted Bella’s dad, but that’s not a choice.)

As the release of “New Moon” approaches, the app will continue to be updated with showtimes, movie news, tickets, and and products from the Twilight series. The Twilight Tracker app is available for $2.99.

There are many things I love about my iPhone 3GS, but something that so often gets overlooked is the fact that it has a nice, roomy hard drive. I know some people who carry around all 30 GB of their music collections with them, but for the rest of us who don’t hoard all of our music, that means there’s a good bit of free hard drive space, and we should put that to good use, no?

Well, there’s an app for that. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Air Sharing Pro (iTunes link), from Avatron Software, is an amazingly featured and tight package that essentially turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wi-fi thumb drive and file explorer. As long as your computer and your iPhone are logged into the same wi-fi network, you can easily move files between the two devices without installing any extra software (well, with one minor caveat), unzip folders, print and email the files, all from within the app. The software handles a huge range of documents from .pdf, .txt, .doc, .xls, and all the usual image formats. You can also add any WebDAV enabled server, such as your MobileMe iDisk. Even better, you can do that over your iPhone’s data connection.

I tested Air Sharing Pro on my Mac and iPhone 3GS, but everything I say applies to all iPhones and the iPod Touch (substituting wi-fi for data connection where necessary). Like I mentioned earlier, no extra software is required if you’re running OS X or Windows Vista. Those running XP are highly encouraged to download the free NetDrive to fill in the gaps in XP’s networking protocols, which is a minor annoyance, but hardly a deal breaker, and especially not once you see what you can do with this app.

Setup was indeed ridiculously easy, and works exactly like the app’s help page tell you to. On OS X, all you have to do was “Add a server”¦” via Finder, and enter the IP address your phone tells you to. This mounts your iPhone as an external server, and from there, everything is a matter of moving files between folders, which I’m sure you learned to do around the third grade.

The main interface for the app is a list of the servers you can access (defaulting to your computer) followed by a list of the folders and files that you transferred to the phone. From here, you can open any of the files you want to, move them around, copy, paste, or delete them, all to your hearts content. The app flawlessly handled any file format I threw at it, which isn’t that much of a surprise considering that the iPhone is pretty good at handing most formats. Still, it was nice to see my .pdf with all of the images rendered correctly, and be able to skip around the many pages using the intuitive arrowed interface, as well as open up my .xls chart and graph. Folders of images can be viewed individually or as a slideshow.

Sharing is just as intuitive. Once you’ve selected the file or files you want to share, you have the choice to upload the file to a drop.io account so you can share them on the web, or just move the file over to the email app and send it as an attachment. You can also print any of the documents from inside the app, which is still something that blows my mind a little bit every time I do it. Accessing my iDisk was also just as easy, and the app updated itself on the fly, even as I changed and uploaded files while it was navigating them.

Although I don’t know anyone else using the software so I couldn’t test this, the app can detect other users on the same wi-fi network and allow you to connect to them and share files, which is certainly nifty and very iPhone 3.0. Security wise, the app allows you to lock access with a four digit PIN, and will transfer files on any encrypted wi-fi network. If you end up storing your iDisk credentials in the app, it’s likely a good idea to use a pin.

Air Sharing Pro is $9.99 in the app store, and while I have no problem spending $5 on a cup of coffee, I’m not easily convinced to spend as much on an app for my phone. That being said I feel is actually worth every penny considering how many features they managed to cram inside it.

Think about it: while you could always attach a file you want to an email, email it to yourself, open the email, and then download it again every time you need to view it. Or you could just move it to your iPhone once, and have permanent and quick access to it, with or without a data connection.

Should you still be unconvinced (which I find hard to believe), the basic features of the app like file moving, storing, and viewing are available in the Air Sharing App for $4.99. While you won’t have access to remote servers, be able to share the files, or print, all the other basic “thumb drive” and file-viewing features are still available. Overall, Air Sharing is one sterling app, and definitely one worth a space on your home screen.

Air Sharing Pro (iTunes link)
Air Sharing (iTunes link)

Ladies and Gentlemen of Boston: we have officially arrived at the future. How do we know? This is how:

Yes, that is indeed a Dunkin’ Donuts iPhone app (iTunes). We know, we know, it’s almost too good to be true. But wait, it gets better. You don’t even need an iPhone to take advantage of it. Here’s how it works.

You’ve been elected by the office to make the run to DD”"you are the runner. You send out an invite. Everyone submits their order to you via iPhone or the web interface at www.DunkinRun.com. Everyone’s order shows up on your phone. You place the order at DD. You deliver the goods. Everyone loves you.

The online menu and app are both very slick and really easy to use. The app will even use those newfangled push notifications to remind you that you signed up to go on the run (heaven forbid that it’s your fault no one has their morning coffee) or to notify everyone else when you return from the run”"maybe not what the execs at Apple had in mind when they developed push notifications, but a creative use nonetheless.

We can’t wait to try this one out in the office this week. If we weren’t the Alpha Geek of the office before, we certainly will be now.