When we introduced a new feature here at 148Apps, Our Favorites, we promised that more was coming down the pike (whatever *that* means). Well, that day has arrived with a new addition: Life Hacker.

These are the apps that we use to push the boundaries of our schedules, our minds, our bodies, and our working lives. Life Hacking is all about getting more done in one day than most folks get done in a week. The apps in this list will help all of us take our lives to the next level anywhere, anytime.

Check out Our Favorites for the Life Hacker right here, and be sure to see all Our Favorites lists while you’re at it.

The folks behind the ever-amazing Game Developers Conference, held each year in San Francisco, are expanding their offerings with two new conferences to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center November 5th-7th, 2013. The App Developers Conference (ADC) will focus on more than just game apps, bringing together developers for iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms for workshops, presentations, and seminars. The GDC Next conference, taking place simultaneously, is the spiritual successor to GDC Online. GDC Next will focus on the future of gaming experiences across all platforms.

Both conferences are looking for presenters from now until May 29, 2013, with the ADC looking for submissions in the areas of Entertainment, Enterprise, Health/Wellness, Lifestyle, Brand Marketing, and Education. Submissions for the ADS are open now at http://adc.callforsubmissions.gdc4p.com.

GDC Next is looking for presentations in the areas of The Future of Gaming, Next Generation Game Platforms, Free-to-Play & New Business Models, Smartphone and & Tablet Games, Cloud Gaming and Independent Games, with a submission form available at http://gdcnext.2013.gdc4p.com.

We spoke with Executive Vice President of GDC, Simon Carless (pictured, right), to find out a bit more about the impetus behind the two new conferences as well as the change in venue. The main reason to have the conferences in Los Angeles is one of logistics. “We’re finding a lot of the top game and app developers are on the West Coast – or can easily travel there thanks to the excellent airport connections Los Angeles has,” said Carless. He continued, saying that the lack of direct flights to Austin, TX, where GDC Online was traditionally held, made an otherwise successful conference tricky to get to.

A secondary reason, especially for the App Developers Conference, is that Los Angeles is a hub for many of the topical areas the conference will focus on, like entertainment, enterprise, fitness, and lifestyle apps.

As far as how GDC Next connects to the now-defunct GDC Online, Carless said, “We’re calling GDC Next the ‘spiritual successor’ to GDC Online, in that a lot of the advisory board from GDC Online are transitioning to this new event, but we’ve discovered that as their focus changes (to tablets, free to play, and beyond!), our focus for the show changed as well.” The resulting new conference and focus is more about the future of games, he said, to bring the conference up to date.

Carless is excited about the ADC, as its an area the group has never covered before, though he does mention that there will be a gaming apps track at GDC Next. “So what we found,” he said, “is that there are a LOT of apps being produced that are not games, and people were asking for a much more learning and takeaway-focused event around enterprise, entertainment, lifestyle, and other apps.” And that’s what the group is doing.

If you’re a developer of gaming or other apps and want to present at either conference, be sure to head to the respective pages, linked above, to submit your presentations to the committees who handle that sort of thing.

Image: Serious Games

Here’s a confession: I haven’t purchased a song from iTunes or Amazon or Google in a couple of years.

No, I haven’t turned to piracy via Bittorrent, and neither have I started to use (shudder) YouTube to listen to new songs.

I’ve done what millions of other folks are doing these days, namely using streaming radio.

It started with Pandora, but my experience there quickly paled as I realized I could never really get the specific artists I wanted on the stations I created. Plus, I’m an old-school music snob. I believe in the album format, as a collection of songs that makes some sort of collective statement, even when it isn’t a thematic album, per se.

Enter Rdio, Spotify, and Rhapsody. Each streaming music service has its proponents and detractors, and I’m no different. I’m an Rdio fan from the start, but keep trying out Spotify as more and more of the connections on my social networks seem to use it to share playlists. I figured I’d give Rhapsody a shot, too, since it basically does the same thing as the other two.

And there’s the rub. Each service does the same thing: offers up unlimited on-demand music from modern recorded music over the internet, via a website, computer app, or iOS app. How then, are we to choose which service is best for us? Here’s how I did it.

First of all, I’m sticking to the iOS experience. That means that each service costs about $10 a month to use. I use my iPhone in the car or on my bicycle to play music via LTE on the go. I also use my iPad 3 or iPad mini to send music to bluetooth speakers in my house. These are my default listening environments.

Therefore, I’m judging each service on how well it works as an iOS app, as a music catalogue, and as a sharing platform, because I love sharing and discovering new music via my friends and social network.

Heard it on the Rdio

Rdio has a fantastic collection of music, both old and new, and the universal app makes it super easy to see what new albums are out, what albums are trending within my network, and to search for music I want to hear. I have yet to not be able to find something I’m looking for via search, and I dig pulling up new albums by artists I know as well as by those I don’t. Rdio is visually organized around albums, which makes sense to my old music-loving brain.

While many of my music-snob friends use the service, what Rdio doesn’t have is a significant amount of the rank and file people on the service to meet my sharing/discovery needs. The playlist support is also rather hidden in the iOS app, at least, making finding new playlists a more difficult task than it should be.

Our Rdio Review :: Download Rdio (App Store)

Spotify The Difference

Here’s the current darling of the social network scene, with a broad user base and a fantastic catalog of all sorts of music. The playlist support is second to none, and finding playlists to follow is super easy and surfaced at the top of the interface, at least in the iPad version of the app. The What’s New tab has recommended albums, trending playlists, and New Releases all visible and easily accessed. This, plus the fact that many of my friends on Facebook and Twitter seem to share Spotify links more often than Rdio is what keeps me interested in the service.

However, what Spotify also has is a horrible iPhone app. I started using it on iOS via the smaller app, and almost gave up hope. It wasn’t until I opened Spotify on my iPad that I saw any use in using the service on the go. Why a universal app can’t work the same on both the iPhone and the iPad, I don’t know.

Our Spotify Review :: Download Spotify (App Store)

Rhapsody In Blue

Now here’s a service that has always seemed more corporate to me, with a big, pretty iOS interface and plenty of new artists and albums to listen to and discover. The main page is set up with New Releases, Popular Artists, and Featured albums. The genre support here is great; I can find classical, jazz, and world music as easily as I can rock or pop.

On the downside, playlists are a decidedly single affair, as I can make them, but I don’t see anywhere to find them. There’s also no connection to Facebook or Twitter, making sharing my music listening or discovering that of my friends rather difficult. The show stopper here, though, came when I tried to open up the app on my iPhone, originally having set it up on my iPad mini. I got a message saying, essentially, that I had reached my “Device Limit,” and that only one device at a time is supported. I could switch devices if I liked, but only one at a time is authorized for the Rhapsody service. Game over, which is too bad because it’s a very pretty app.

Download Rhapsody for iPad (App Store) :: Download Rhapsody for iPhone (App Store)

The Winner?

I’m still going to stick with Rdio, because it looks and works the same on my iPhone as it does my iPad. The people I’m connected to on the service are all folks with eclectic, intelligent taste in music, and I really get a lot more out of following them and their playlists on Rdio. I wish it had better ways to discover playlists, and makes browsing by genre a bigger part of the interface, but the service is still my personal favorite.

Spotify is a close second, mainly due to the trending playlist and larger-seeming user base, at least within my social scene. I wish it was less song oriented and more about the albums, but that’s more my own bias than anything significant with the service. If sharing songs with other folks is important, Spotify is a great choice.

Rapsody, sadly, while pretty, has the limitation on devices, as well as a more corporate look and feel, plus the lack of modern social network support. If none of those things matter, it’s a decent service for the same price as the other two.

Bottom line, whichever service meets the needs of its individual users is the “winner,” but I find Rdio to be the best of all worlds, and will probably stick with it for the time being, especially while the Spotify iPhone app is so awful.

Top Image: CNN Money

You know those super special apps that reside on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, always ready, always in use? The ones that you recommend to friends and family over and over?

Well, we’ve got those, too, and we spend a LOT of time with different apps around here. Every so often, we come across something that’s so good, so unique to us as individuals, that we needed a way to share it with you.

So here it is: Our Favorites. A curated set of themed lists that give you our very favorite apps for a variety of uses and personality types. Are you a Bored Core Gamer? Do you feel like a Social (Network) Butterfly? Do you consider yourself a Fresh Music Seeker? Well, we’ve got a Favorite list for you, culled from our own experiences in and around the iOS App Store.

Check them out, won’t you? We’ll be releasing a new list regularly, so come back often and soon.

Deirdra Kiai is a young game developer with several games to the good, including the most recent, Dominique Pamplemousse, a “stop motion musical detective adventure game” that’s available on Mac, Windows, and iPad. Here’s a quick preview, with Deirdra’s own singing voice as the lead character:

We had a chance to sit down with Deirdra this past GDC week, and chatted a bit about Deirdra’s game development experience, the choice of gender-neutral protagonists, and some of the techniques that went into making the current game. Some of the interview has been edited for clarity.

148Apps: How many games have you made now?

Deirdra Kiai: Well, I’ve been making games ever since the early 2000s. It started out as a hobby in high school. So there are probably maybe at least ten or so games I’ve done that are available on my website. I have a reverse chronological order portfolio on my site so you can kind of see the evolution of what i’ve done there.

If you had to describe the evolution of your style of your games in a sentence or two, how would you do that?

Hm, a sentence or two? I started out heavily inspired by classic Lucas arts adventure games, (which is) apparent even today. But as I went on, I started incorporating so many more influences, particularly from interactive fiction and basically narrative-based, choice-based narrative games that aren’t necessarily always about puzzle solving but have some kind of interesting story you can explore and some kind of personal twist to it. So a big part of my evolution has been incorporating more of the personal into my work.

So when you say the personal, do you mean the characters or yourself?

Kind of both. The characters I write have a lot to do with myself and the people I know and just thoughts and feelings I have and sometimes the characters I write embody those.

Would you say your work is becoming more personal over time?

Absolutely.

So, Dominique, how do you say the last name?

Pamplemousse. It’s the French word for grapefruit.

Why ‘grapefruit’?

I just think it’s a cool word. It just sounds cool. it’s like an early detective–a big French detective name and I’ve always liked pamplemousse. I want a character named Pamplemousse. And what’s a good gender-neutral French sounding name? Dominique.

The gender neutral thing is a big part of this game, and the last one you made, as well. Tell us a bit more about it?

Well the genesis of the whole idea of doing a gender-neutral protagonist came with some of my past games featuring female characters and protagonists–I have a very androgynous drawing style for characters. I don’t like to sexualize women. I like to design characters who I can empathize with, and that goes for female and male and whatever. And so in (my previous game), Life Flashes By, I had several comments along the lines of, “I didn’t know I was playing a woman! Charlotte totally looks like a man! She’s got a square jaw and everything.” And I was thinking I wanted to play with this a bit. I want to play with this expectation that cartoon characters and gender that you have to explicitly show tertiary and secondary characteristics if you’re going to, like Minnie Mouse is Mickey Mouse with a bow on her head and Ms. Pac-man is a Pac-man with a bow on her head.

They’re not that different, right.

Not that different at all. It’s just weird that you have to specifically mark something as female. so yes, Dominique is a very neutral character. So I was like, “Why don’t I just make the character completely neutral?”

I was also partly inspired by the game Echo Bazaar, it’s now called Fallen London, and one of the character selection options involved having a gender neutral character. So it’s like a person of mysterious and indistinct gender. I chose that as my character and as I was playing my character in this game I felt like oh, I really like this. I’m just playing kind of this sneaky, charming thief-type person and people keep going “Sir, uh, madam, uh, what…”

But that was part of the fun. I just thought that was really cool. I, myself, kind of identify as somewhat androgynous so there’s definitely a bit of personal inspiration there. Definitely in the last year or two, my personal sense of style has gotten a lot more androgynous and I really enjoyed embodying that and playing with people’s assumptions. It’s a more comfortable role for me to play. I was never always comfortable just being a full-on woman but I’ve never really felt like a man, either. So it’s inspired by personal and inspired by people’s reactions to my previous work. 

Tell us a little bit about this game and the claymation and all that. It’s taken about year to get this together?

Kind of, yeah. I’ve spent about a year, since maybe summer 2011 or so. I got started prototyping, creating and putting the materials together, making the puppets, and trying to make a set and seeing how that would look. and doing some art tests and gradually over the year. I built the preliminary game engine, I had the music um…

The music is fantastic, by the way. I love the way that plays out. 

Thank you! Yeah, so just getting the music to loop seamlessly for the most part, and getting the musical queueing to work in a way that I am more or less happy with. 

How did you put that together (besides with magic)? Was it a lot of manual tweaking or was it more programmatic?

Well, I sort of programmed a system based on counting the beats per measure, measures per loop, and I had this timer loop running, with every kick at a certain point, like, “now you can queue the music and now you can queue the action.”

What was the most challenging part of the claymation itself?

Well, it was figuring out basically what the best way to capture the characters and the background would be. I decided to create sprites like one normally would in a video game, instead of a traditional claymation movie where you shape every frame by every frame. It’s really, really time consuming. I wanted to make the best use of the interactive format as I could.

I looked into trying to create a green screen but the way I was getting my characters and the camera equipment I was using, which was admittedly quite cheap, it wound up being more cost effective to use a white background and kind of trace around in Photoshop and create the alpha channel that way. It was a slightly tedious process, but since I wound up doing a more simple animation style, cause I have kind of short-limbed characters, so they show they’re kind of moving a bit fast and stuff. It’s kind of like a herky-jerky silent film kind of feel. So I was able to maintain that, and that was kind of interesting. 

Did you study up on any claymation?

Oh yeah. I did a whole bunch of research on how people make claymation puppets and how they do armatures. The simplest way to do it is basically use aluminum wire and that’s what I did–use a skeleton and put the clay material around it. I used some silicone-based putty that cured but at the same time would also bend. So the wire would bend and the skin would move along with it. 

There isn’t a lot of deformation of the characters, right.

Yeah, it was cured material. If I were using plasticine, then there could have been more movement but at the same time a lot more potential for things to go wrong and to really deform and not being able to get it back to where it was. 

How much do you think your final product matches your initial vision? How much of a compromise did you get along the way?

Usually there’s always some kind of compromise especially when you’re a small indie developer. This was new art technique (for me). I tried to keep my expectations pretty open. I kept it to like, “Alright well, it’s not gonna look like Aardman or anything like that, but I’ll do the best I can.” I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

I wasn’t at the very start intending for it to be a black and white game, for instance. But when I was doing color tests and animation tests, I decided to try and see how it looked in black and white. The very very first game I did was also a back and white detective game and I thought I should try that again. Back to my roots! And the black and white style ended up looking really good for the art style, so I decided to keep it. So I saturated the colors a lot more so it really did feel like a silent film. 

A huge thanks to Deirdra for talking with us at GDC this year. We wish nothing but the best with Dominique Pamplemousse and any future endeavors, which–according to a blog entry–include working on an MFA in Santa Cruz, California.

$4.99

Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!"

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2013-04-01 :: Category: Games

Headphones are a funny thing. One listener’s sweet spot is another’s bass-heavy muddiness. The I-MEGO Throne headphones come in two flavors: Gold (bass heavy) and Poison (balanced clarity). I am reviewing the second model, which is a pretty purple linen underneath a silver-toned grille on each over-ear cup.

I prefer headphones that I can plug into my iPhone, use as a microphone, listen to music, and–of course–game with. To this end, the I-MEGO Throne Poison headset is ideal. These are by far the most comfortable headphones I’ve worn to date, with a soft, leather over-the-head band that never hurts, even after a couple of hours of use. Ditto the soft leather, sound-isolating ear cups, which only become uncomfortable after a long gaming session due to my upper ear piercings.

The clarity of the sound on these babies is something to experience. I dislike overly-bassy headphone like Beats as they tend to overpower the rest of the sound in the mid and high frequencies. Too high-frequency, however, leads to a tinny sound, and overly mid-range response makes things sound muddy. The I-MEGO Throne Poison headphones have an excellent, across-the-board clear sound, which makes all sorts of music delightful to listen to, including, acoustic, jazz, pop, and rock.

I was surprised by the excellent sound isolation properties of the headphones, as well. I took them on a plane recently, and figured I’d have to crank up the sound as I do with most other over-the-ear styles I’ve used. Not so, at all. I even left them on during the flight without music or games on, just to decrease the ambient noise of the jet engines. The music I listened to, Steve Martin’s banjo-tastic album, Rare Bird Alert, came through loud and clear, without having to crank up the iPhone volume beyond my usual loudness preference. These are fantastic headphones.

The only quibble I have is that the in-line mic only has one button, which lets me start and stop music playback, and answer and hand up the phone. There’s no way to use it to control volume or skip songs, like the Apple Earpods do. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but it would make an already great set of headphones even better. I also wish they came in a less “look at me” style, like a less ostentation solid black, or even white.

Bottom line, the I-MEGO Throne Poison headset is now my favorite set of phones to wear, in all sorts of settings where sound isolation and amazing clarity of sound is required. They’re well worth the price tag, and compete with much more expensive units that have a far less delightful audio response.

The Supertooth Disco Twin is a pair of great-sounding, rechargeable, stylish bluetooth speakers that connect to an iPhone or iPad with ease, allowing for full stereo sound. Each speaker alone is a fine mid-sized wireless speaker with a long battery life, but put two of them together and you have a portable sound powerhouse.

The Disco Twin speaker set is basically a pair of Disco II speakers, each weighing in at 16 watts of sound. Together, the pump out a stunning 32 watts of room-filling sound. It’s rare that you’ll find me turning a portable speaker down because it’s too loud, but these babies had me dialing it back on occasion.

The sound spectrum here is fairly good, with a solid if muffled bass response and decent mids and high range response. Audiophiles shouldn’t use portable Bluetooth speakers in the first place, but these do a fairly good job of sounding like more than a simple portable speaker, especially when separated and in full stereo.

Connecting these bad boys is a simple process, and there are great audio cues from each speaker to denote the on, off, and full stereo states. The left speaker is the master when connecting both, and when powered on, it says, “Left,” and then the right speaker says, “Right,” in a pleasant female voice. The speakers also say, “hello,” and “goodbye” when powering them on or off. It’s a nice touch.

The speakers come with a cloth bag for each separate unit, as well as a AC wall wart to charge the internal batteries. The battery life is relatively long when fully charged; I was able to listen to a full afternoon of music without draining them at a medium volume. The manufacturer promises 3 to 4 hours at high volume, and up to 10 on medium, and I’ve seen nothing to discount that.

The Disco Twin Bluetooth speakers are a delight to use separately or in concert as a full stereo portable speaker system, and they provide a decent sound quality and great volume for the price. I highly recommend them for those music lovers who want a bit more from a portable speaker.

If you’ve played Eve Online, you’ll feel right at home in Vendetta Online, an upcoming space-themed MMO for the iPad. It’s been out on Mac, PC, Linux, and Android for a while now, and is finally polished enough, according to founder and CEO, John Bergman, to make its debut on the iPad. Bergman sat down with us today in the last few hours of GDC to show off the gorgeous space sim, which includes guilds, a vast trading economy, and some fantastic space combat features. Keep your eyes on this game, as Bergman hopes to release it sometime this Spring.

One of the cool things about coming to GDC is seeing the upcoming games with a ton of potential even before they’re available in the App Store. Forge Reply Games, from Italy, showed off its in-production, early-alpha game based on the work of Joe Dever, the author of the successful series of young adult gamebook adventure novels (Lone Wolfin the 1980s. Dever is writing a new sgtory for this one, and it includes more than just reading and dice rolling, with puzzles to solve and turn-based combat in full 3D rounding out the package. Forge REply’s Alessandro Mazzega told us that they were looking for a publisher for the final push to finish and market the game, hopefully this year. Keep an eye on this one; we surely will.

Autodesk is a well-known software company that makes the programs that game designers and developers use to create the games you play and love, from indie hits to AAA console and PC titles. They’re taking a step closer to the consumer realm wiht the 123D series, notably 123Creatures, an app for iPad that lets you design a creature from the wireframe on up, letting you realize your designs in true 3D, which can then be sent to a 3D printing service from within the app itself. Cool stuff, really.

We stopped by the Neurosky booth today at GDC to learn more about the Neurosky brainwave interface, a light headset with a single sensor that rests on your forehead to pick up brainwaves. The current sensor can detect different states of mind, like meditation and attention, as well as facial gestures like blinks. The company is looking for more developers to use the technology for their apps and games. We got a short demo of a real toy helicopter ball (in the video below) and a game in which the player switches between two mind states to lift and then throw an in-game truck at his or her opponent.

Game Insight, a free-to-play game publisher, is launching Dragon Eternity, a fairly deep high-fantasy MMO to iOS today. The game should be live within the hour, and will be free to download. The time we spent with the game today showed us a game with depth and casual appeal, with cross-platform play built right in. We’ll get a review up soon, so stay tuned.

Roblox is an online sandbox game with the tools to let users create their own gaming worlds, complete with physics, weapons, and environments using consumer-level creation tools. There’s a website, too, which uses a youtube-like portal interface to help players publish their games easily, and find other games and worlds to play in. The iOS version is taking off, said CEO David Baszucki, and becoming a core part of the company strategy for cross-platform gaming, as all versions of the game have the same code base.

Sitting down with Christian Dickert of dreamfab ga(Chasing Yello) today was a delight, mostly because his company’s card battler, TriDek, isn’t hight fantasy themed. The conceit here is that the future brings gene-mod creatures to televised professional sports, letting you build decks and battle it out in a hybrid real-time and asynchronous card collecting battle game. Look for it to hit iOS and other mobile platforms soon.

Set some twenty years after the events of Ultima 4, Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is a completely redesigned, fully realized MMO for your iOS device. Our time with the game at GDC this year showed an amazingly faithful full-on MMO on the iPad, something we haven’t seen to this day. The game should release in the next few months, and we’ll be keeping our beady little eye on it until then.

We had the rare honor of sitting down with Paul Trowe, one of the original Leisure Suit Larry producers, to talk about his upcoming iPad game, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, a remake of the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The new title, set to release in the next few months, is a complete re-do of the title, with all new puzzle solutions, art, music (by Austin Wintory, no less), and writing.

The signature double and triple entendres are there, both in the actual dialogue and in the artwork. There are tons of Kickstarter backers created as characters in the game as well, making this truly a community-driven game.

Big Fish Games previewed their new match three game, Zombies Zombies Zombies, for us today. The mechanic actually works well, here, as you tap same-color zombies in triangle patterns to have your apocalypse survivors blow hem to smithereens. There are a ton of fun power-ups, and playing it was super easy to get into, and very satisfying to play. Look for it to come out this summer.

SEGA showed off a bunch of new games today at the Games Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. One promising iPad/Browser game, developed by Gogogic Games, is Godsrule: War of Mortals, a city-building, battling, real time combat game that’s playable on iPad and any desktop browser. We’re excited by the depth of strategy we saw, including character upgrades, real-time battles, and clan-based trading and resource production. This one should be out in the next couple of months.