Chillingo has announced that they are partnering with Icelandic developer Plain Vanilla to publish a new children’s game for iOS. Entitled The Moogies, this app is intended to be a sort of interactive toy. Children can interact with the various characters and their environments, seeing how each item reacts to the child’s touch. As well, the Moogies react to voice input, so kids get to explore this world on iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch in whatever way they want. The app will be a premium one, with no advertisements, in-app purchases, or external links.
Joe Wee, Co-General Manager of Chillingo says “As more parents adapt to using iOS devices for educational and entertainment purposes, debuting a new children franchise on this innovative platform makes a lot of sense. The Moogies is a fantastic example of how creative apps can transform a child’s learning experience.” The Moogies will be adorabling themselves on the App Store in November as a universal app. Until then, check out this announcement trailer for the app showing what it’s all about.
Like it or not, the PDF document format is here to stay. Originally created as Adobe’s proprietary attempt to undercut Microsoft’s document format, the PDF has not only become widespread, but in some cases it has even become the defacto standard. One such case is when documents need to be filled out and filed on the web. Unfortunately, the were no options to handle this kind of interaction on the iPad until PDF Expert came around.
The app was so well received that it managed to land a four and a half star rating here at 148Apps, in our official review. Along with the obvious ability to read PDFs on the iPad, some of the other standout features included the ability to both highlight and notate the text, as well as efficiently using the real estate available on the iPad. But the application’s developer, Readdle, wasn’t willing to rest on their laurels, despite the product’s stellar launch.
In fact, they just released an update that address a number of different issues that were brought to their attention by already satisfied customers. Here are some of the additions that were made:
Static Adobe LiveCycle forms are supported.
“Submit” and “Email” actions works.
Sugarsync support
More than 100 small improvements related to sync, annotations and forms.
PDF Expert allows to submit values filled into PDF form fields with full compliance with Adobe specification. Mid-sized and large businesses rely heavily on this feature of PDF forms to capture the data from many people, like customers, students or focus groups.
Desktop tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro or LiveCycle allows anyone to create such form and embed “Submit” button directly into the page. Once user fills out the values, he or she only need to tap the button to send filled data to form creator.
As much as we loved the app the first time around, you can bet that these updates will help further forge PDF Expert into a well rounded product. It is thanks to feedback from you, their customers, that aid in making products that much better. So give yourself a pat on the back, and this irreplaceable app a download. We’re sure you will find it just as useful as we did.
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Posted March 20th, 2009 by Chris Hall Our Rating: :: SLIGHTLY ABOVE AVERAGE
Good Reader is a document reader that stands out because it can read mega-sized files (200+ Mb!). The idea is wonderful, but the slow speeds and long load times make this one quite average.
Bio: Web developer by day, Mac and iPhone developer by night.
- Created iPodderX, the world’s first podcast client
- Wrote “Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Safari” prior to the SDK being released
- Loan Shark was chosen early on by Apple as a “Featured” app, and is also featured in Apple’s own “iPhone Your Life” pages.
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Finishing up our interview with August, I ask him about what it is like being an iPhone developer in the lime-light, or Celebrity Developer. He talks about how much fun it has been to break out of the traditional role from time to time, and how it has really helped out his programming business.
I also get his opinions on Apple’s filing to have jailbreaking iPhones judged illegal, what that means to the development community, and how jailbreaking is actually beneficial to the App Store and making the iPhone a popular development platform. August also tells us why he has avoided it.
Most importantly, August gives us the breaking story about the soon to be released app, YOWZA!!, and how it will change the way you shop and use your iPhone.
Listen to how August met Greg Grunberg (Matt Parkman on Heroes) on Twitter, and joined forces with Rick Yaeger from MacMerc, to create a whole new business model for an iPhone app, and how they have tackled the problems of turning your iPhone into a money-saving shopping tool! And it’s going to be FREE!
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Posted February 27th, 2009 by Gary Lucero Our Rating: :: RECOMMENDED
I'm not a scientist or medical professional so I can't attest to all of Papers' merits, but I can tell you that it appears to be a robust app that comes with a fine pedigree: The OS X version of Papers won a 2007 Apple Design Award for best scientific application for the Mac. Since Papers for the iPhone syncs with the OS X version, it allows you to leverage scientific research already in hand and also includes several search engines so you can not only take your research library with you on the go, but also add to it.
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Posted February 19th, 2009 by Gary Lucero Our Rating: :: RECOMMENDED
TextGuru is a full fledged text editor for the iPhone. It let's you organize files in nested folders, offers cut, copy and paste, can share files via wifi, and can import files via FTP and the Internet. It also serves as a viewer of common file formats such as PDF, MS Office, and more. It's a jack of all trades utility for those serious about their documents.
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Posted January 13th, 2009 by Gary Lucero Our Rating: :: ABOVE AVERAGE
While Save My Docs is a one trick pony, all it does is save documents viewed within Safari and then allow you to view them within the app, it does it fairly well. Other viewers offer a variety of ways to get documents onto your iPhone, but Save My Docs is novel and useful.
This week at 148Apps, Tweetbot was on a roll, a new storybook app joined the fold, and - oops - apps broke the Super Bowl. There's more to read, so get to it!