United Lemur announces Puzzllotto for iPhone

United Lemur, a group of veteran Mac and iPhone developers, on Thursday announced the company's first product, Puzzllotto for iPhone. Available sometime in the next few weeks for $4.99, Puzzllotto is described as an “exploration puzzle game,” in the spirit of Zork and Myst, set in the dark jungles of an “eighth continent.”

Among the contributors to Puzzllotto is IconFactory’s David Lanham, who worked on the game’s artwork. At a press event on Thursday, United Lemur noted that the game’s graphics are so detailed that you can tell the difference between male and female lemurs. (None of the press in attendance asked for proof of this claim.) The game’s audio includes nature sounds licensed from Dr. Douglas Quin, a well-known sound designer who also did the audio for Spore.

Lifted iPhone NDA opens the door for conferences, books

The collective sigh of relief when Apple lifted the iPhone non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which had prevented developers from discussing iPhone programming, came not just from developers, but also from educators, authors, and publishers. With the NDA gone, iPhone-related books can be published, and conferences can be much more detailed—leading to better education.

Publishers and authors who had books written had to shelve them because publishing the material would have broken the guidelines of the NDA. However, with the NDA removed, users can expect to see an abundance of information hitting the market, targeting everyone from developers to end users.

“It was huge having the NDA lifted,” said Bill Dudney, trainer and co-author of the upcoming book iPhone SDK Development (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2008).

Review: Newsstand and News Now for iPhone

Old rituals wither and die; new rituals crop up and replace the old. When I used to work on the west side of Los Angeles, one of my favorite rituals was to stop every morning at a newsstand at Robertson Avenue and Pico Boulevard and load up on reading materials—three or four newspapers and often one or two magazines. The year was 1994.

I kept up the habit for about 18 months. Although I still read a ton of magazines, I almost never touch newsprint. But my daily ritual trip to the newsstand has been replaced by a routine check of my RSS feeds.

Now I can visit the newsstand and check my feeds, thanks to a clever app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Newsstand.

Apple launches iPhone Tech Talk World Tour

If you’re looking to fill your brain up with the latest information about iPhone development, then Apple’s happy to help you out. Beginning at the end of October, Apple is holding a worldwide series of free tech talks about the iPhone, giving developers a chance to interact with Apple engineers and evangelists and get their questions answered about developing for the iPhone.

The all-day talks cover a wide range of topics, from an introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to how to integrate the iPhone into an IT environment. Other subjects include submitting your app to the App Store, iPhone Game Development, and a multi-hour Technical Q&A, for which bringing your laptop, code, and iPhone is recommended.

Review: Fuel mileage trackers for iPhone

Back when I learned to drive—no, it wasn’t in the Model T—one of the things my father instilled in me was the need to track my vehicle’s gas mileage. Such information would alert me to problems before they became major issues, or so I remember hearing. For some reason, that particular lesson has stuck with me over the years, even as cars have evolved with systems that will find trouble spots long before they become obvious in a mileage book. So in every car I’ve owned, I’ve always kept a small notebook and pen. Every time I fill up, I pull out the notebook, and jot down the miles driven, gallons bought, and (usually) the cost per gallon. I then transfer these figures to a spreadsheet and track and calculate my miles per gallon over time. Have I ever actually done anything with this information? Not that I can recall… yet still, I diligently record every fuel purchase.

The advent of the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, however, has brought out a handful of applications that aim to put my little mileage book out of business. These mileage trackers help you record mileage, fuel costs, and in some cases, additional information about your car’s behavior over time. I took a look at five such programs in order to identify which do the best job of replacing my manual mileage logs. To evaluate the programs, I developed a set of conditions around what it would take to replace my manual mileage logs. To me, an ideal application in this category would meet all of the following criteria:

• Has a fast and easy-to-use data input screen.
• Supports more than one vehicle.
• Tracks per-tank and overall fuel mileage data.
• Can import and export data.
• Has a database of vehicles, to make setup quicker.
• Can use the vehicle’s trip meter or its odometer for mileage tracking.
• Generates useful reports based off the stored data.

While no program successfully met every single criteria, two came quite close, while three others fell short in a number of areas.

Review: Trip Cubby for iPhone

If you spend a lot of time in the car for business reasons, then you’re probably familiar with (and at least mildly annoyed by) the need to track your mileage for tax purposes. This used to require an arduous and painstaking process of logging your information in some sort of notebook (or, for the less organized, discarded receipts, envelope backs, and scrap paper) so that when tax time rolls around, you can enter all that information into your return.

Even if technology can’t necessarily do something about the painstaking part of the process, it can help somewhat with the arduous part. App Cubby’s Trip Cubby software lets you track your billable miles right on your iPhone and it does so in a clean, friendly interface that’s easy to use, even if there are a few quirks here and there.

Launching Trip Cubby will present you with a list of your logged trips, including the purpose, destination, date, mileage, and whether they were for paid or unpaid reasons. At the bottom of the screen there’s a button labeled with an eye that lets you sort by different criteria, such as date, distance, or alphabetical order. Tapping any of the logged trips will provide you with a nice little summary screen of the trip in question. From there you can tap the edit button in the top right to change any details if necessary.

Freeverse offers Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab for iPhone

Freeverse Software has released Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab for the iPhone and iPod touch. It costs 99 cents and is available for purchase and download from the App Store.

Based on their Mac game of the same name, Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab combines five action puzzle games in one — Color Reaction, where you match colored balls; Hex Bonding, where you assemble rows of falling pieces; Test Tube, where you must rotate balls in-line to create matches; Mission Mode, which combines all modes and adds a new quest for each level; and Zen Mode, which features zen graphics, haikus and no pressure.

The game features more than 15 “Special Power” pieces and a “Versus” mode that lets you compete against the computer.

iPhone 3G Feather case measures less than 1mm

Incipio has introduced the Feather, a new case for the iPhone 3G. It costs $19.99.

The Feather measures less than one millimeter thick. It's made of a polymer material and is a form-fitting case. It features a soft touch matte finish and includes two surface protectors and a cleaning cloth.

The FEather comes in a variety of colors including black, white, turquoise, olive green and magenta. It's thin enough that Incipio claims you can use it with many of the iPhone-compatible docks currently on the market.

Review: TV Forecast 1.0.1 for iPhone

In these days of TiVo and other DVRs, many TV watchers are oblivious to when particular shows air. After all, you just tell your DVR which shows you like, and it automatically records everything for watching at your leisure.

Yet I find that I still want to know when my favorite shows are on. Sometimes it’s because I want to watch something live with other people. Other times it’s because I use TiVo—I need a reminder that there are going to be new episodes waiting for me to watch. Similarly, people who watch their favorite shows via iTunes downloads or on TV-network Web sites want to know when the latest episodes will be available. And, of course, not everyone has a DVR.

One of my favorite Dashboard widgets for Mac OS X is Big Bucket Software’s TV Forecast, which lets you input your favorite TV series and then displays when the next episode of each will air. When the iPhone was released, you could get similar functionality on your iPhone using the TV Forecast Web app, but the developer recently released a native iPhone version, TV Forecast 1.0.1, and it’s earned a permanent spot on my iPhone.

Six essential Apple iPhone security tips

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

If you’re an Apple iPhone user and security’s not on your mind, you’re at risk; at risk of having a Web mail account hacked; at risk of having your online identity stolen; and at risk of losing valuable personal information, such as wireless service account data, that could result in financial losses, among other disasters.

When it comes to mobile devices, security tops the list of IT security managers’ concerns. And rightly so: According to a Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) survey of 2,024 information security professionals earlier this year, more than half of respondents say risks related to mobile devices and remote workers are up significantly compared to 2007.