Archive for April, 2010

New iPhone Templates

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Thanks to DVDpedia user Burkhard Mudrick DVDpedia has two more iPhone-optimized export templates, Dark and Safari.

As the titles imply, one design is dark (sleek greys and black) while the other one integrates with the light and crisp Safari theme (cool blues and grey).

Both templates include a large number of fields in a neat collapsed form so as not to take up valuable real estate on your screen. Cover images get a shiny jewel-case look that works especially well with the Dark template, in my humble opinion.

These versions on our Extras page are the ‘midi’ versions of the template which include most but not all fields. If you want them all or just the basics, head over to Burkhard’s website to download the ‘mini’ and ‘maxi’ versions as well. (They’re all included in the download on his site.) He’s also got loads of screenshots of the templates there, in their various sizes.

What’s the Name of That New Rhythm Game?

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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. According to a post by chơi casino trực tuyến, 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.