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Forum Review: eMees Avatar Creator for the iPhone

eMees Avatar Creator Forum Review by cjvitek For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!

I have a Wii, and one of the most enjoyable things (surprisingly) that I do with the system is created the Miis. And now, Mii creation comes to the iPhone!

eMees is a tool to create avatars for the iPhone. Once you create an avatar, you can save it to your photo roll, and you can even assign it to one of your contacts as their photo! As someone who doesn’t have any photos associated with contacts, this is a nice feature to have!

The concept behind eMees is the same idea as creating a Mii on the Wii. You choose various features – like head shape, hair pattern, eyes, lips, eyebrows, etc) to combine into a face. You can also adjust the color, and for some items (like nose, eyes, eyebrows) you can adjust the size, orientation, and horizontal or vertical position. Combine these features and you have a lot of flexability in creating an avatar, and as you practice and get more talented, you can get quite good at creating avatars that start to look like the intended target!

One additional feature this program has is called the pose option. You can take you avatar and put them into one of three pre-determined posed (sledding, skateboarding, or typing). Unfortunately those are the only poses that are offered – hopefully more will be included in future updated.

I had one major issue with this program. The primary issue was the speed. The interface is very slow….very veryslow. It takes a while to load, and then it takes a long time to flip between the various avatar options as well. In fact, the delay almost makes the program unusable in my opinion. The delay is especially pronounced when you are flipping between the various options for each facial feature – the different hair styles for example, or the different eye glass options.

The only other concerns I had with this app is a minor one – the difficulty of using an avatar outside of the app. I would have thought that when you save an avatar, you would have the option of saving it as a contact photo, or in your photo roll. But when you save it, it enters the eMees gallery. From there, you then need to select it again tothen save it as a contact photo. It seems like the additional step of requiring you to save it first in the eMees gallery is not needed.

You also don’t have any option within the app to email an avatar to anything – you need to save it as a photo, then go out, look at the photo, and then email it to someone.

Pros:

• Fun way to design avatars for your contacts

Cons:

• Limited poses,
• program is much too slow,
• using avatars in contacts is needlessly convoluted

Conclusion

All in all, this is a pretty well designed program. The options to create the avatars are rather full featured, and the ability to use the avatars as a contact ID is great. However, the program is much, much to slow and I got frustrated many times while trying to use it because of the lag. The price is currently $.99, down from $2.99, so you may want to jump on it now, and hope future updates improve the speed problems. As the lag really impacts the usability of the program, I am giving the app only three out of five stars. If future updates improve the speed issues, than it will really be worthwhile application.

Forum Review Rating

[Monopoly is available from the iTunes App Store.]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Forum Review: eMees Avatar Creator for the iPhone

Last-minute App Store freebie: Wanted

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

Last-minute App Store freebie: Wanted originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last-minute App Store freebie: Wanted originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google releases Books browser for iPhone

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Freeware, Internet, Internet Tools, Developer, iPhone, iPod touch

Google releases Books browser for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google releases Books browser for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Gratitude Journal for iPhone

One Page of Apps: 16 random reviews

Filed under: Reviews, iPhone, iPod touch

Gallery: One Page, 16 apps, chosen at random

One Page of Apps: 16 random reviews originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One Page of Apps: 16 random reviews originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Carriers won’t stop exclusive phone deals despite churn risk

Google Latitude will soon Allow you to Track your Friends on the iPhone

Google Books Now Also Optimized for iPhone!

Sure, we lost iGoogle, but we gained Gmail Tasks, have been promised Google Latitude, and now have been served up a piping hot portion of Google Books optimized for the iPhone.

Authors, no doubt, may continue to have a problem with Google willfully ignoring copyright for their own content lust, while mobile users jump up and down in glee, like one author and mobile accomplisher, Andy Ihnatko is doing on his Celestial Waste of Bandwidth:

Yes, all 1.5 million public-domain texts in the Google Books project are now available to mobile users, behind a fairly awesome, slick interface. [...] And I scroll down a bit and find many titles of interest. I give one of ‘em a tap, and soon I’m looking at a very credible little mobile book reader. [..] Good golly. If Google is evil, then they’re a Doctor Doom sort of evil. What’s a little evil, when the totalitarian dictator takes such wonderful, indulgent care of his subjects?

Indeed. Google is really stepping up to showcase what great WebApps can still do in the post-App Store iPhone world. Any ebook aficionados try this out yet? How does it compare to native apps like Classic and Stanza? And how does the iPhone experience compare to the Kindle for that matter?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Google Books Now Also Optimized for iPhone!

What Do You Want to See in MobileMe 2.0?

MobileMe was announced by Steve Jobs and demonstrated by Phil Schiller at WWDC 2008. Tagged originally as “Exchange for the rest of us”, a disastrous launch — where Apple tried to do too much at once, including the iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0, and the App Store — and a problem with early computer-side syncing forced them to downgrade the promise of “push” to more of a gentle “nudge”.

Fast forward 6 months and MobileMe has grown through its pain becoming almost, though not quite, everything Apple promised it would be at WWDC. Web-based email, contacts, and calendar are synced in near-real time to and from the iPhone and the Mac (Windows mileage may vary). Photos function, and iDisk is beefier, but still functionally on par with its .Mac roots.

But what do the next 6 months hold? If we get new iPhone hardware in June, and iPhone OS 3.0 along with it, could Apple be ballsy enough to try and give us MobileMe Take 2 at the same time? And if they are, what do we want to see in it?

Mac users already get tons more, highly useful features in MobileMe than Windows users. Sync will literally duplicate preferences, docks, bookmarks, password keychains, and more. And Back to my Mac, which keeps track of the IP addresses of your different Macs and then “just works” out file and screen sharing is epic (nope, I’ve never had a problem with it — and it saved my skin at Macworld!). Some of these, however, would be welcome as additions to the iPhone’s function set. Having Mobile Safari sync and make available logins to iPhone Apps like 1Password would be convenient. Being able to screen share like Jaadu VNC would be excellent, but it’s just a start.

Email

Dieter’s list includes the ability to easily send from different email aliases. The iPhone in general currently makes it impossible to set up an email address alias on the device (and working around it via syncing mail settings with iTunes isn’t always elegant). Having MobileMe handle this, along with taking a page from Gmail and actually allowing MobileMe to POP email from other services and push it directly to the iPhone would be excellent.

To round out the MobileMe mail upgrades, giving us server-side rules/filters would be highly useful (e.g, applying a rule to move all newsletters to a sub-folder that doesn’t alert me when it arrives would be welcome). Add to that the ability to star/flag email directly on the iPhone (and sync those states between web and PC) and it would become a competitive offering worth its premium price!

Contacts and Calendars

Moving on to MobileMe’s Contacts and Calendars, why not hook them fully into Apple’s own CalDAV and CardDAV protocols? Let us subscribe to online directories and shared calendars right from the iPhone (or the web).

Let’s take a page from Palm’s Pre and transparently pull — and aggregate — contact and calendar information from popular online services like Google and Facebook.

Photos

Photos should sync. We should be able to upload a photo to MobileMe’s gallery and have it sync back to a subscribed gallery in the iPhone’s Photo app, same as it does in iPhoto. For bonus points, iPhoto smart albums should also be sync’able. If I use iPhoto 09’s Faces feature to tag my godson, and create a smart album based in part on that tag, having that go automagically to MobileMe and the iPhone would be killer. Allowing a Flickr option? Double killer.

iDisk

Chad remembered that we were originally promised iDisk file sharing via email link. We haven’t seen it yet, how about it Apple? While we’re at it, while MobileFiles is a great app, iDisk should be built into the iPhone. If iWork.com actually becomes a viable product for Apple, that should be built-in accessible as well. The lack of an on-device file system and document editor could be slightly mitigated with just those two additions.

Notes and To-Do’s

The iPhone was originally supposed to sync notes via iTunes but that feature fell off the roadmap at some point and hasn’t been seen since. To Do/Tasks, of course, never even made it onto the roadmap. Heck, Exchange supports syncing those data types, and the iPhone won’t even do it via ActiveSync. It should, and Apple should include it in MobileMe 2.0 and build the apps into iPhone OS 3.0.

What Else?

Well, those are just a few ideas, we’re sure you must have a bunch more great ones. Let us know in the comments. We have a few months left and maybe Apple will listen: what do You want to see in MobileMe 2.0?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

What Do You Want to See in MobileMe 2.0?

LaserPup trains for battle with Laser Cats

Continue reading LaserPup trains for battle with Laser Cats

Filed under: Household

LaserPup trains for battle with Laser Cats originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nine-year-old boy writes popular iPhone app

iTunes Crashing After iPhone 2.2.1 Update?

So today I had a bit of a scare. I went to sync my iPhone 3G with my Macbook and noticed when I’d plug in the phone it would say it is syncing while iTunes simply showed nothing — no kind of response whatsoever. Yes, everything is up to date on my Macbook so that was not the problem. After a few reboots of the Macbook and iPhone the same behavior still continued like clockwork.

Next step was to do some research online and send off an email to Rene for some more ideas. To our surprise this seems to be a bigger than we thought with many people seeing the same issue. I decided it could not hurt to give Apple a call about this and as I was on hold I figured I’d try one more time and shockingly it worked. I had to do a double take at my screens but it worked. To make sure it was not a fluke I unplugged everything and rebooted both Macbook and iPhone, still worked!

This issue seems to be completely random and Apple claims to be looking into it. So, if this happens to you, keep trying to sync, chances are you may get lucky. I’d say avoid doing a complete restore to your phone because if it does lock up during the restore you will be left with a empty iPhone. That’s not good.

Hope Apple updates iTunes fast to prevent this from happening to any of our readers. In the meantime, have any of you had this misfortune?

Let us know!

[Thanks to @Rene for the backup!]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iTunes Crashing After iPhone 2.2.1 Update?

Snow Leopard gets hip to CoreLocation and multitouch

We're in the Q1 2009, folks, and while we'd love to believe that the release of Snow Leopard is imminent, it looks like all we'll have to be sustained by is rumors and innuendo for the time being. According to "insiders" at, well, Apple Insider, the eagerly awaited operating system will be taking some cues from the iPhone, adding both CoreLocation and opening up the multitouch trackpad to third-party developers. Since MacBooks don't currently have GPS, we're guessing CoreLocation will be powered by Skyhook's WiFi-positioning service, but anything can happen down the line. With all the buzz over Google Latitude making its way onto all manner of devices, including the G1, select Blackberrys, and (someday!) the iPhone and iPod touch. With Mac sales being particularly laptop-heavy lately, it looks like location awareness is shaping up to be the must-have functionality of the coming year. Fabulous, darling. Fabulous.

Filed under: Laptops

Snow Leopard gets hip to CoreLocation and multitouch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Review: TouchTerm for iPhone