Bruji News

A childhood friend has released his first iOS app and has named it in honor of the Pedias. Recipedia comes to fill all your kitchen organizing needs. We attended my friend’s wedding last year and we expected a different kind of announcement a year later but that just goes to show the rise of iOS is so meteoric that the first creation of a married couple is now an app. Jose did all the programming and his wife the design.

For a 1.0 it’s a solid release, stable with all the main areas that you might need in a recipe organizer. The option to edit online recipes once they’re saved is very useful since I often tinker with recipes to fit my tastes. The flow of some areas needs updating such as the “save recipe” button which asks you to chose a category to store the recipe in but it’s not immediately clear where this option is located. Ideally the alert would include the different categories as button choices, saving one click. Power users will then automatically figure out that they can set the category beforehand, while the rest of us can continue to use the buttons.

It’d also be nice to get a picture of your own recipes in the internal search results, especially given the height available for each search result. I would like to the see the “add new recipe” and “copy/paste recipe” integrated into a single command and merge the smarts of copy/paste (automatic separation of ingredients and steps) directly into the individual fields (with an option to undo, should I want to keep all paragraphs in one step). But here I am probably overlooking some complicated technical details that would not make this possible. As a personal favorite I’d love to see Serious Eats as an online source and the ability to change the order of ingredients and instructions.

At $2.99 Recipedia is a steal and if you’re into cooking you should check out this adopted brother of the Pedias. Getting started in the App Store is very exciting and we wish them the best of luck. Being able to live of your software creation and then have the financial/fan support to continue to develop it is a great career.

We’re slowly but surely making our way into the 21st century: Bruji finally has a Twitter account!

Follow @teambruji to hear all about new releases, happenings at Bruji HQ and short musings from Alex about games, comics and other fun stuff.

Today we had the rare opportunity to see where Apple devices are born. Luckily we were allowed to take a few pictures and with the sun just right, it was a magical moment.

We decided to take the office outdoors on this sunny Sunday afternoon. (Click on the images to view larger.)

DVDpedia user Chas has written an info view template, with the help of Forum user Jonas, that includes some nifty links to Wikipedia and IMDb.

Just click on the little icons next to a name and the relevant page will open. Of course the possibilities here are endless – icons like these could be used for links to Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu… (Reminds me of the LeoTab info view template which incorporates a trailer and cover image search.)

You can download the template from our Extras page. I hope you enjoy it; thanks Chas!

What better way to celebrate the start of 2011 than with some excellent shots of DVDpedia in action, courtesy of DVDpedia user SP. He currently has 4365 movies in the program (total duration 631.92 days) and quite a sweet setup in his living room:

Can any one compete with this, setup and/or library-size wise? Let’s hear it!

The Child’s Play charity was set up a few years ago by the funny folks from Penny Arcade. They collect toys, video games, movies, books and money for children’s hospitals in North America (and expanding around the world). Being in hospital is awful enough but it’s even worse during the holidays so hopefully these donations make the time a bit more enjoyable and bring some cheer to the kids.

Bruji is proud to be a corporate sponsor for Child’s Play 2010 once again. If you’d also like to become a sponsor, donate to the hospital toy drive or just send $5 via text message, check out Child’s Play Charity for details.

Yes, you read that right: wedding bells are sounding at Bruji these days. Conor and Nora are getting married this weekend and to celebrate, all the Pedias are 20% off from the 16th till the 23rd.

Since we’ll be a little occupied with non-Bruji things in the coming days, please don’t be upset if we don’t answer your email straight away. We promise to be back to our normal routine shortly.

The fine developers at Para9, creators of the DVDpedia Front Row and Apple TV plug-in, have released their latest iPhone app – muBlip. Like all developers they’ve been excited about developing for the iPhone and after a few commission jobs they now found the time to develop an enthralling game on their own count. muBlip is a rhythm game where you tap along to the music, Guitar Hero-style. Although this has been done before, the design of muBlip is well thought out.

The game play is smooth and intuitive. Just click on the shape in time with the music. Sometimes it seems to miss a few taps and drags but to be fair this is more likely my bad rhythm. In the beginner levels muBlip uses chill tracks to teach the player to relax and follow the music. It was not until the medium levels that I ran into trouble. Here the game gets more visually oriented and the controls jump around, a bit like “Simon Says” on steroids. I enjoyed the higher levels more, where the layout stays the same and new notes are added. Levels like “Drummer Boy” are great fun as it gives you time to familiarize yourself with the current blip layout as well as the song rhythm.

I am not thrilled about the title’s first letter lowercase and subsequent camel–case. But in this day and age where all plural game names end with Z (I’m looking at you “Tigerz” and “Horsez”), creative grammar is a marketing must; after all we are already playing it on a device that starts with the one letter your English teacher fought to have always capitalized.

The game comes with few levels (11), including the tutorials, but for $1.99 it’s a fair offering. The game also scores you on accuracy, giving the levels a big replay value as you try to improve your score. This being the first release, I am looking forward to more levels as well as variety in music styles. I would love to have some blues and jazz rhythms. There is also a hardcore mode but so far I am having too much fun with the causal mode to dare venture into hardcore.

Check out the prerequisite YouTube video before you head on over to the App Store to start tapping.

For the remaining days of 2009 we’re running a Full Pedia Bundle promotion that is just too good to miss: all four Pedia programs for just $39!

If you know someone who’s interested in the Pedias or you’re looking for a gift for that special Mac user in your life, this is the perfect time to head over to our holiday page and get a bundle of joy!

Happy holidays to all and best wishes for the coming year, Conor & Nora

Daniel Jalkut has started a 20% discount website for Mac indie developers as an alternative to MacHeist. Build your own bundle and get 20% off any software from the participating companies. We are happy to have been included, so if you have been eyeing a Pedia and missed last week’s Halloween discount this is a chance to catch the savings.

Wish the page had an anchor and I could send you directly to the Bruji discount sections, but here is a link to One Finger Discount and look for number 88. Plus there is more great software on there, so take a look around as you scroll.