BurnBall

Rating:
MMM1/2

“The Evil Dr. Gray has kidnapped your friends and taken over the planet! His dastardly plan of turning the entire planet Gray is almost complete. Stop him!” Not many games tell a story, but BurnBall does and the first screen you come to will actually allow you to watch and/or read the whole story. I must say, very interesting.

BurnBall from Tim Haines on Vimeo.

As the player, you are playing a character named Ron on a mission to rescue your friends Gibee and Ive to stop Dr. Gray and return color to the planet. The game play is pretty good. The idea is to tilt the iPhone or iPod touch to move a red ball around the screen while trying to avoid the black robots. Once you have covered a great portion of the board, you move to the next level.

Like most games, each level increases in difficulty, and this is by either adding more robots or by adding a white robot; the dangerous… more...

William, an astute reader on TUAW, has discovered that typing http://www.iphonenano.com into your browser, much to all the doubters’ surprise, lands you at Apple’s own iPhone web page.

Now sure, Apple could be just covering their bases - you know, just in case, one day - or maybe it’s even a way to gauge interest in said mythical device, but hey, since I’m a believer, my vote’s with it being tangible proof that Apple is planning an iPhone nano sometime soon.

And as another TUAW reader, Scott, points out, Apple doesn’t even own http://www.ipodnano.com. Just checking, and Apple doesn’t own http://www.iphone3g.com (nor iphonemini.com) either.

So, for all of you unable to justify the cost vs features of the iPhone 3G, your Appley phone may be just around the corner when the tubby, jolly man appears. (Phil, not Santa)

However, I would love to hear what the naysayers say, am I getting over excited?

Two new rumors on MacRumors are pointing to an imminent release of an iPhone nano, although MacRumors has heard some plans for MacWorld have been delayed, so maybe we won’t see an iPhone nano at MWSF09.

First, case manufacturer XSKN, who have a reputation for spilling the beans, has put a link to an iPhone nano section on its website. XSKN have twice this year already jumped the gun by pre-releasing cases first for the iPhone 3G and then for the fourth gen iPod nano.

Second, MacRumors shows another image circulating of a supposed iPhone nano. MacRumors is fairly confident it is a fake image; however, it’s probably a fairly accurate fake.

Form factor
It makes you wonder though, does an iPhone nano really have to have different form factor? Why can’t it just have less features? (such as no internet). That way developers wouldn’t have to code for different screens and you wouldn’t have the issue with the onscreen keyboard taking up so much of the screen (or being shrunken).

There’s three possible form factors for the nano:

1)… more...

Although many might argue the Catholic Church is out of touch, technologically it has always been quick to embrace new technology. Again proving the amazing reach of the iPhone, the Catholic Church has released its prayer books onto the iPhone, in the form of iBreviary, at US$0.99.

You may find a slight bug though in the description on the App Store - it’s currently in Italian.

For the technologically enhanced Catholics, this is a neat app to connect to a practice almost as ancient as the Church itself, and you might just get a bit of spiritual wellness out of it too.

So you want to develop apps for the iPhone but are not sure where to start. The iCode Blog is a damn fine place to start.

The iCode Blog is run by Brandon, an iPhone developer who provides useful real world tutorials (rather than Hello World nonsense), such as an excellent four-part one on coding up a to do list app.

Brandon says on his about page:
I became interested in iPhone development with the launch of the web applications and had Apple accept 3 of my web applications.  The Cost Per Square Foot Calculator, the Daily Calorie Calculator, and a Weight Watchers app that they later pulled due to copyright.

Since the launch of the app store, I have been spending countless hours learning and researching iPhone programming using XCode.  One huge issue I noticed is the extreme lack of iPhone Programming tutorials on the web.  The best I could find was some outdated Hello World tutorial on YouTube.  So, I have decided to create iCodeBlog to share the things that I learn along the way.

It’s always great when someone gives back to… more...

With all the talk - and complaints - early on about data plans and how much MB they had, and some were offering GB, you’d be forgiven for thinking the iPhone was gunna suck the data just like your home computer does.

My experience, and those of other iPhone owners I’ve met, is distinctly different to that.

I know two other iPhone owners and both use 3G at whim, that is, whenever and wherever necessary. Since Telstra provided the higher data plans for me, I’ve also done the same. We all have wifi at home and we don’t download YouTube videos on the iPhone (I’ve tried and even over wifi it’s painfully slow)

But for all three of us, we are only using 40MB or so a month.

40MB?! That’s nothing! Considering the average phone plan (in Australia) now generously gives ten times that much, you wonder why.

If you’re thinking of signing up for an iPhone, then think again about your data usage, it may be a lot lower than you’d expect.

What are other iPhone users finding?

MobileMe has somewhat of a bad reputation, however, perhaps some good news about MobileMe will boost it up a bit.

An iPhone thief was caught after the stolen device synced to MobileMe. iPhone owner, Rob was at the dry cleaner’s one day when his iPhone was stolen. He purchased another one that night under the assumption that it was gone forever; So he thought…

Much to his surprise, contacts started appearing on his new phone. The thief was entering the information of his closest friends onto the device, and MobileMe was syncing them to his new phone over-the-air.

Rob was able to get some information from the thief’s friends and police apprehended him later that night, with the iPhone returned to it’s rightful owner. However, Rob still had his new phone so he, of course, put it up for sale. According to Tuaw, Rob put the iPhone up for auction on Ebay, but I am probably sure it is gone by now.

Some developers are having trouble getting apps approved for the App Store. Here is a particularly frustrating example that we reported on earlier.  What holds up some apps why others sneak right out? What can developers add to ensure their app slips quietly into the air of mainstream apps? How can a developer makes sure their app burst noisily onto the scene?

The answer seems to be: add fart noises. We’re not going to say that cyber flatulence isn’t the height of comedy but it sure does seem to be Apple’s definition of the funniest thing ever*. How can we be sure someone at Apple is endlessly cracked up by fart noises? Because Apple approved fourteen new fart apps yesterday. It is almost like the pressure to approve fart apps had been building and building until finally, after the approval of Pull My finger was complete, the pressure became too great to contain and approvals blew out loud and fast, creating a giant cloud of Apple approved fart apps. Anyway, one suspects that if Newber could switch calls between… more...

If you’re about to invest a bunch of time in developing an iPhone app there are a bunch of things to consider before you start coding. Will your app the popular list (thus guaranteeing sales)? Will some other developer come out with an app that mirrors the functionality of your app before you can get yours cranked out? Is your app pornographic or just not safe for work? The biggest question is “will Apple approve my app for the App Store?”

The last question is the toughest to answer. Only Apple knows why an app is approved or rejected and the company is not always forthcoming as to how the decision was reached. How frustrating is thing for a developer? Check out Macblogz for the frustrating tale of Newber. Newber is a ful

So you’re an iPhone type person but you’re also a business tyoe person. What you want is a list of business apps to make your life easier. And your life is tough. You’ve got to submit expenses, convert currencies on over seas trips and track your time. Usually that kind of stuff means dragging your notebook around and a lot of phone calls.

Not anymore. Resourcenation has a pretty great list of 11 surprisingly useful business apps for your iPhone. We haven’t tried out any of the apps yet but if the descriptions are correct some the apps on the list are pretty damn cool.