Journalists are prone to hyperbole, but this title is almost euphemistic. SHAPE Services, creator of the popular IM+ client, are continuing to roll out feature after feature for their mass-market social networking application.

IM+ current supports Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN / Live, AIM (Mac users think iChat), ICQ, MySpace, Facebook, Jabber, Twitter and Skype chat. Outside of the seemingly endless list of clients, the application also provides an equally long list of push notification options, including e-mail arrival notifications from popular clients such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google Mail.

In addition to the application being universally built for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, IM+ also features an in-built browser for those who don’t have the ability to multitask – a welcome addition for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch users who are unable to avail of Apple’s much-awaited feature.

The latest update – 4.3 – brings with it a number of new themes and wallpapers, high resolution graphics for iPhone 4 users and VoiceOver support, allowing for speech recognition to be enabled. This last feature will set users back 99c a month.

There’s no doubt that SHAPE Services developers are trying to appeal to everyone. From customizable sounds and animated emoticons to geo-location support and retina display graphics, IM+ is becoming the client of choice for social networking users. It remains one of the top grossing applications for Social Networking – not bad at all for a $9.99 application with almost 4 000 competitors. And to top it all off, there’s a free version too.

$4.99

$9.99

IM+ Pro

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2008-11-13 :: Category: Social Networking

FREE!

IM+ Instant Messenger

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2008-08-27 :: Category: Social Networking

Gaming developers MumboJumbo have today launched Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials for iPad, a follow-up to the Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy game for PC. The game follows the tried, tested and proven basis of the previous Midnight Mysteries game, where you travel back and forth in time to the scene of the author’s death from present day. The author, by the way, is none other than the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne, the dark romantic novelist who died from an unexplained illness in 1864.

“Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials looks really amazing on the iPad, and we’re excited to elevate the quality of hidden-object adventure games available for the device,” said Mark Cottam, CEO of MumboJumbo. “This is a game with really beautiful graphics, an intriguing story and puzzles that will make you think—it’s a natural fit for the iPad audience.”

This is the first of the Midnight Mystery games to debut on the iPad, priced similarly to the PC versions at $9.99. For this, you’ll get ten adventure missions where you explore spooky terrain, solve puzzles and collect hidden objects, all to unravel the conspiracy of what happened at the Salem Witch Trials. There are a number of in-app purchases within the game, most notably the Collector’s Edition add-on which is, surprisingly, the same price as the game itself. Within this edition you’ll get an illustrated strategy guide, character sketches, deleted scenes from the game and more (see the iTunes page linked below for full details).

If horror and puzzles tickle your fancy, Midnight Mysteries could very well be what you’ve been looking for. “Hawthrone explored a number of moral themes throughout his works … [his] link to the infamous trials made his story the perfect fit for continuing the mystery game series” write the developers. It’s available for download now, click on the link below the enclosed YouTube video to take you straight to the iTunes page.

$4.99

Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials (Full)

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2010-08-05 :: Category: Games

We love Instaviz. In fact, we reviewed it in full back in January of this year proclaiming how good it actually was. Imagine a white board .. and then imagine all that creative power, in your pocket. You don’t need to bring anything with you. Simply you, your ideas, your thought-process, and .. your finger. Closely compared to the likes of Microsoft’s Visio, and based off the concept of Graphviz, an existing and open source software package which achieves more or less the same results, Instaviz is dubbed ‘graph creation software’ and it very cleverly uses the iPhone’s mutli-touch interface to harness the manipulation of mind-map environments.

A few weeks back now, Glen of Instaviz gave us the heads up on an update to the software Version 1.5. This new version sees a variety of new features added, some which were needed, and others which are just nice to have. The more noteworthy is this version includes an entirely new display architecture. It sounds fancy, but we’re basically told that this means that the zooming, panning and placement of objects is faster, smoother, and more reliable. Still all part of this new architecture, in 1.5 Pixelglow added animation, meaning now, any and all objects which you create morph into their final shapes, and once an item is deleted – it fades out. The update also adds two-finger panning and zooming in ‘Edit’ mode, Batch file operations in Graphs list, and complete help files and localizations in 10 languages. They’re small changes, but ones which I’m sure will make a difference.

“One of our goals with this update has been to make scrolling and zooming within Instaviz 1.5 so intuitive and smooth that you don’t notice you’re working on a small screen.”

As well as all that, they’ve also rejigged the sharing aspect of Instaviz, meaning you can now carry out features like export, duplicate delete and preview in one tidy interface, at graph level. Finally though, and probably most excitingly, is this verison adds the future foundations for Instaviz 2.0, with this verison introducing the ability to in-line edit, as well as adding CoverFlow-like views for your graphs.

INSTAVIZ 1.5 GIVEAWAY
Instaviz 1.5 is already available on the store, and courtesy of Glen and Instaviz we’ve got a whopping 10 COPIES of the application to giveaway to you creative lot! Being a creative based app, we thought long and hard about what we wanted to base this giveaway around. In the end we came up with this ..

We want you to tell us the most creative way you can think of, of how you (personally) would use Instaviz 1.5 in your day to day life.

Whether it be for business purposes, personal purposes or down right off the wall purposes, we want to know! Leave a comment on this post with your answer, and a prize for the most creative! Your answer can be as long or as short as you want it to be, and we’ll judge on creativity of your answer alone. Be quick though, we’re giving you up until December 9th @ 11am EST to get your entries in! All winners will receive one valid iTunes App Store promotional code for Instaviz 1.5, will be picked randomly, and announced here shortly afterward.

Good luck!

Update 12/10/2009: All winners have been notified. Check the email address your used when you commented to see if you have won.

$9.99

Instaviz

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2008-12-06 :: Category: Business