• Published:March 21st, 2010
• Comments:2 Comments
• Section:Apps, Healthcare & Fitness, Reviews

We’re back from the dead!  Well,  for now.  We’ll probably let the site die again in another week after a short spurt of updating, but something’s better than nothing.  I’m back to review a little app I’ve been using a lot lately.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new bicycle.  One of the things that excited me most was the prospect of visiting new places and seeing just how far I could travel under my own power.  On the first day after my first real ride, I got back to the computer and started trying to plot my route out on Google maps.  After manually mapping where I went and doing things like having to try and remember what side streets I took, etc., the old App Store motto took over and I though, “Why surely there must be an app for this!”  Enter Cyclemeter.

Well, its full name is Cyclemeter GPS Cycling Computer for Road & Mountain Biking ($4.99, iTunes, AppShopper) by Abvio LLC, but that’s kind of a mouthful so I’ll keep on calling it Cyclemeter.  I just set out looking for any sort of GPS tracker.  Initially I had looked at MapMyRun.com’s app because I have used their website in the past, but reviews were mixed.  Eventually I found Cyclemeter, which had good reviews and seemed like it did everything I wanted.  I must admit I was a little weary at the five dollar price tag (I know, I know, the App Store economy is broken and tragically undervalues apps but what can I say?) and the inability to use a lite version or whatnot, but I decided to take the plunge and drop a Lincoln for it.

Boy was I pleased! As I was looking for, Cyclemeter uses the iPhone 3G/3GS’s built-in GPS to keep track of your route, and plots it to Google maps as you can see above.  It works well as long as you’ve got decent GPS reception, and the app itself includes a GPS strength indicator and will warn you if you try to start a ride before it has gotten a decent GPS lock (which I promptly ignored and had a route that began in Canada somehow! Heed the warnings, friends!).  You don’t have to stick to just looking at the map on the phone, you can export it via email and view it on the big screen.

Cyclemeter does a lot more than just mapping, though.  Its default screen is actually the Stopwatch page, which as you can see on the left, shows you all the essential information about your ride.  The calorie burn counter is nice as another one of my primary cycling goals is to avoid becoming a fat slob.  It’s nice to also have a speedometer, and the app can also display graphs showing your speed and elevation for your entire ride.  Cyclemeter seems to handle most things exactly how you’d expect everything to.  You can pause your ride if you stop somewhere (perfect for when I ride to work but want to track the whole thing as one big round trip), and it resumes fine even after the app has been closed.  Locking the screen doesn’t stop or affect the tracking, which is good, as I found that to be an incredibly stupid design flaw I found in a few other GPS trackers.  If you don’t want to lock the screen, it uses the proximity sensor to automatically shut the screen off and save the battery just like when you’re on a phone call.

I was already happy with these features, that alone more than justified the five bucks.  But if you’re so inclined, Cyclemeter does a lot more.  If you’d like, it can save your routes, and then allow you to compared your progress over time, i.e. if you were preparing for a race or something like that, it will automatically tell you when you’re improving, and when you’re not.  I can’t honestly say I have used this feature at all since I’ve just been riding around and don’t have any “official” routes but just for fun I tried to make one and it all seemed like it functioned correctly.

One of the other really neat features is the Twitter integration.  I admit I’m a big Twitter user and that was one of the big selling points for Cyclemeter.  I gotta admit, I really love the idea of tweeting after I finish a ride about how far I went, and even including a link to the Google map.  Cyclemeter can do that all automatically for you, you can have it automatically tweet when you start, stop, and at various other points.  Or, you can just do it all manually.  It’s incredibly customizable, you can choose exactly what kind of statistics you want to include.  But Cyclemeter’s Twitter integration doesn’t end there.  It’s not merely a broadcaster, it also receives tweets, and, here’s the cool part, it can read your tweets to you while you’re cycling around using text-to-speech.  By default it’s set up to just read tweets that are replies to your cyclemeter tweets, ideally your friend would see you’re riding and go “Keep going!” or something and then the app will read it out loud to you.  You can set it up to just read any tweet that comes in on your timeline though, if that’s what you fancy.  Honestly, I don’t even use this text-to-speech feature very much but just the fact that the dev thought to include it is really cool.  Of course, if you happen to be against Twitter you can turn it all off.  And even then, the text-to-speech thing is not purely a Twitter feature, it can still be useful to everyone as it can tell you various statistics about your ride at various intervals, like distance checkpoints, your total time, etc. which saves you the hassle of having to whip your phone out and take a look at the screen to see what kind of progress you’re making.

If I had to find flaw with Cyclemeter I would say that perhaps if anything it is a bit too customizable.  Some of the options in the settings menu aren’t really documented too well, and then some of the options referred to in the documentation didn’t exist, which was a little confusing!  There are still a few menu options I must admit I have no idea what they do, and there might be more potential to be unlocked.  This could also be off-putting to the less technologically inclined.  There are also a few glitches, for instance, it won’t tweet my Google map data in Twitter unless I manually have the app generate the link data for an email first, which adds a little extra waiting and a discarded email to the end of every day’s ride.  But at the end of the day, I’d rather have over-customization than under-, and I’m sure the kinks will continue to be worked out.

Actually, developer support is part of what makes Cyclemeter a completely recommended app.  The app has been out since September of last year and has seen a steady stream of updates by the developer, so you know that new features are coming down the pipeline and bugs/glitches will be sorted out in the future.  Abvio seems to be dedicated to putting out a quality app, and they’re also active on Twitter and quick with the support to discuss any issues users may be experiencing.

Cyclemeter is an extremely polished Cycling app.  It does everything I was looking for very well, and then some!  Obviously this isn’t an app for everybody, but that’s another cool feature, even if you’re not going cycling but want to keep track of distance or a route via GPS, Cyclemeter allows you to enter another type of activity and track it separately from your cycling statistics.  If you’re a dedicated runner or walker, it appears that Abvio has put out similar apps based on the same concept as Cyclemeter for both activities, but really I feel that Cyclemeter alone would do well enough for tracking walks and even car trips if I wanted to have a map of where I went.  Like I said, this app does so much stuff I think it would be difficult to recommend anything else if you are looking for anything in the GPS-tracking arena on iPhone, even if you’re not a dedicated cyclist.  If you’re looking to utilize the GPS on your phone to track your outdoor activities, or you found this review on Google because you’re simply on the fence about the $4.99 price tag and looking for that final justification to buy it, I’d definitely say go for it, you won’t regret it.

Vitals:
Name: Cyclemeter GPS Cycling Computer for Road & Mountain Biking
Linkage: iTunes :: AppShopper ::  Official Site
Price: $4.99
Developer: Abvio LLC
Genre: Apps / Healthcare & Fitness
Bottom Line: This is an excellent way to keep track of your cycling or really any outdoor activity where you’re travelling a decent amount of distance using your phone’s GPS.  It’s incredibly fully-featured and has tons of nice little touches, like great Twitter integration.  Highly recommended.

• Published:September 5th, 2009
• Comments:No Comments
• Section:Card, Games, Reviews

What could be a greater concept than a card game as an app for your iPod?  Where do you spend most of your time using your apps?  If you’re like me than you spend most of your time playing around with your iPod on the bus/subway, during your 5 minutes of down time at work, or while you are teaching a one-on-one class with a kid who is currently writing the line “I will not fall asleep on test day” 50 times.  This is where a portable card game would really shine, because they are completely turn-based and don’t require your constant attention and tweaking.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the more complex games that can be had, but my most used apps are the small simple ones that just help pass the time. This is where Right of Way comes in.  Now recently I made Right of Way my first pick of the week, so you can probably already guess that I’m going to give it a fairly positive review.  Well it’s true, I do enjoy the game quite a bit, but please stick with me and see what I have to say.  Right of Way has a lot of features that are good and some good features that are missing, but on the whole is a very complete package that is a lot of fun.  So, on with the review!

First things first, what is Right of Way?  Well Right of Way is an app based on the classic French card game Mille Bornes.  The game itself is based off of a pretty easy concept.  Basically you and your opponent are in a race to 700 miles (or kilometers).  Sounds easy, right?  Well it gets a little bit more complex than that.  First off you have to get your car moving (which requires a roll card).  This seemingly simple task can cause such incredible amounts of frustration that it amazes me to this day, and I’ve played Mille Bornes for probably something close to 15 years.  Once you get rolling any of a number of things can happen to you.  See, the game has this category of cards called the “Hazard” cards.  These cards serve only one purpose; to mess up your opponent.  They can be anything from a simple speed limit (50 miles per turn), to an accident, a flat tire, a stop sign, or an empty fuel tank.  All of these things (barring the speed limit) will require you to find the proper “Support” card (repairs, a spare tire, end of limit, or gas).  After you manage to get yourself a support card you need to get another roll card to get moving.  That’s right, with one card your opponent can stop you for at least two turns.  All this is assuming that you have both a roll and the proper support card in your hand, which is only seven cards.  And as if all that isn’t complicated enough, the player can also get his or her hands on a safety card.  There are four safety cards in the deck, and each negates a certain hazard card.  Oh, and as a final obstacle you must land on 700 miles exactly, no going over.  So if you are sitting at 675 (dumb move) you need to wait and hope that you draw a 25 mile card.

Okay, now that I got the basics out of the way I can actually move onto the app itself.  Right of way is priced at $2.99, and has been there since it was released.  Now I’m sure most of you are getting ready to close this review cause the app is  too expensive, and I can sort of sympathize with you there.  When the app store is full of apps that are $0.99 why pay $3 for an app?  Well I’ll tell you why, it’s a great app!  It’s got unlimited replay, 4 different difficulty modes, and it’s simple to play with no headache inducing bugs.  So let’s get on with how it plays.

You buy Right of Way and load it up.  What are you greeted with?  Well since this is your first time loading the app you’ll be greeted with the main menu.  It’s simple, it’s clean, and you will not see a lot of it.  There are exactly three buttons on it; they are “Opponent” (where you set the difficulty), “Statistics” (keeps a running count of all your wins/loses per difficulty level), and” Start New Game” (guess what this does).  Depending on your experience with Mille Bornes you can play on either the Trivial, Basic, Advanced, or Expert difficulty levels.  Trivial really offers no challenge at all, and should only be used to learn the basics of the game.  Basic generally plays the smart move, where as Advanced always plays the smart move.  Expert is Advanced with the added skill of counting the cards.  Don’t worry though, you too can count the cards easily.  There is a menu that you can access at anytime that will have the count of every kind of card in the deck and how many have been played or discarded.  Once you choose your difficulty you hit start game and off you go!

Now that you’ve got a game going, you want to kick your opponent down a flight of stairs.  Well that’s easy enough to do in Right of Way.  The interface doesn’t get in the way of anything, and is actually quite easy to use.  Everything has a very obvious place, and you can’t do anything stupid like accidentally discard a card by dragging it a little too far away from the play field.  You have your hand which is always located on the bottom of the screen, the playing field which is located on top of your hand, and this discard pile which is located in the bottom right corner of the screen.  Right of way will automatically set itself to either portrait or landscape mode based on how you hold your iPod which is nice but can sometimes bum you out if you are trying to play the game while laying down in bed.  I personally prefer to play the game in landscape mode because it gives the play field a less cluttered look.  While playing the game each class of card is easy to tell apart at a glance.  Milestones are just cards with numbers on them, support cards are blue, hazard cards are red, and safety cards are solid green.  Playing your turn is simple, you just drag whatever card you want to play onto the play field.  You don’t even need to drag it into the proper play field, as long as you get it up over your hand you can just release it and watch it auto drop where it should go.  Same goes for a discard, as long as you get it over near the discard pile it will fall where it should go.  Ah, and one final gameplay thing, if you have a safety card in your hand and your opponent plays the corresponding hazard card on you, the game will automatically play a “coup fourre” for you.  A coup fourre is a giant “screw you” to your opponent where you draw two cards, go, and get an extra 300 points at the end of the round.  Oh and the hazard card is negated immediately.

One final thing that I can talk about is the scoring/card counting system included in the game.  The scoring is pretty easy and all taken care of for you, but if you want to see a detailed break down of the points you can always hit the “detail” button on the score page.  This will bring up another screen that breaks everything down for you in a very simple to read screen.  The card counting can come in handy if you are into that.  I personally don’t use it too much, but it is nice to know if I’m going to be screwed into having a speed limit for the rest of the game since all the end of limit cards are gone.  Whenever you are playing you can hit the little “i” button in the lower left corner of the screen.  This will bring up your in-game menu in which you can see the current games score, the current break down of points, and the card count. The card count is laid out in a pretty simple manner, you see all the cards listed with their graphic and names followed by a number count. So maybe you’ll see “25 miles 10/10″. That basically means that all of the 25 mile cards are out on the board or have been discarded and if you are sitting at 675 you made the wrong move.

Now that I’ve given you the basics of the game, how the app works, and what features are included I can tell you that I feel Right of Way is a great purchase.  Sure it may not be the prettiest app in the app store, but it will keep you coming back for more.  It is one of the apps that I go to all of the time and I don’t think that will change anytime soon.  Each time you boot up the game you will be playing a completely different hand.  Sometimes you’ll be able to thrash your opponent and score a complete shut out, and other times you’ll get devastated with 20 hazards while your opponent finishes easily.  Couple all the great features I listed with the fact that Right of Way will save your games on the fly and you have a winner.  Need to get up off the bus and transfer?  Just shut off your phone and next time you boot up Right of Way it’ll bring you right back into the game.  No menu, no hitting continue or load game, just right back to the spot you were at.

Vitals
Name: Right of Way
Links: iTunes :: AppShopper :: Official Site
Price: $2.99
Developer: DejaVu Software
Genre: Games / Card
Bottom Line: A great port of a classic game.  Well worth the $3 if you like card games or enjoyed Mille Bornes in the past.  No major problems with the interface or design of the game, and gets updates from the developer addressing any issues that are found.

• Published:September 1st, 2009
• Comments:No Comments
• Section:Games, Racing, Reviews

While mere introductions may be satisfactory to Mr. Ramey down there, I’ll get the real content rolling with a little game review.  I suppose I’ll start off our content with a fizzle rather than a bang, for my first review is not exactly an amazing blockbuster.

I’m pretty much a racing nut, both as a spectator and a gamer.  I’ve sunk my fair share of hours into rFactor while seated at a desk with a steering wheel, only to be the constant subject of mockery by my roommates, friends, and other people simply passing by.  Naturally, I’ve been long in search of great racing games for the iPhone ever since I got one.  For a while, the scene was dominated by arcade-y racing games like Namco’s Pole Position: Remix or Gameloft’s various offerings, like Asphalt4 or Ferrari GT: Evolution.  While these were all fine and dandy, they weren’t really what I was looking for.

Enter Firemint’s Real Racing.  It was a long time in the waiting, but what finally came out was amazing. The controls, the artwork, the overall package, it was all incredible, and even at the premium price point, it was more than worth it in this racing fan’s eyes.  Real Racing scratched 99% of my iPhone racing itch.  The only thing that was left?  Well, my favorite type of racing to watch is Formula 1, and Real Racing lacked any sort of open-wheel option.  I needed to drive an open-wheeled car, preferably a F1 car.

My prayers were answered, sorta, as I found out while randomly poking through the App Store.  I’m not exactly sure what to call it, since on my Springboard it’s listed as Brawn GP, but in the App Store it’s listed as GP Racing.  Let’s just go with Brawn GP Racing:

On first glance, this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.  By its description, it kind of sounded like Real Racing, but with Brawn GP Formula 1 cars (Brawn GP is a real team that currently leads the Formula 1 championship, for anyone interested).  Of course I bought it and started playing it right away.

When you first start playing, graphically speaking, it’s pretty good.  While not quite as polished as Real Racing, the full-3D graphics are nice, and the Brawn GP car is modeled accurately to the car’s looks in real life. The tracks also feature nice details, like landmarks based on the track’s location, grandstands, and other details that make them look like real Formula 1 circuits.  What really lured me in was the cockpit mode, which is the way I play all my racing games on PC.  Brawn GP Racing does a good job of making it look like you really are behind the wheel of the car.  If that’s not your thing, there’s always an option to view the car chasing from behind, which does afford you a pretty view of the car model.  The visuals here are certainly not lacking.  As far as sounds are concerned, I can’t tell you much about the included default music, because I it turned off the first time I booted up the game, and never turned back on.  I’m pretty sure it was a simple electronic/techno beat that you’ll often find in these types of games.  The only other sound in the game is that of the engine.  The rev-up and rev-down sounds are good, as are the gear changes–again, fairly realistic.  One problem is that the sound samples are pretty short in length.  While you don’t notice this as you’re going up or down the gears, on a straight, where you’re going flat out, you can quite easily catch the audio sample looping, a little annoying but nothing major.  Additionally, sometimes random sounds would just plain drop out, like the car wouldn’t make any down shifting sounds or it would only make sound when driving off-road but not actually on the track, and whenever this happens, a full reboot of the app is required.

While the graphics are pretty good and the sounds okay, the game starts to fall apart in other areas.  The most important thing Real Racing got right was the controls. Real Racing really handles superbly, using the accelerometer to turn the whole iPhone into a steering wheel, tap anywhere on the left hand side to brake, and tap anywhere on the right to accelerate (there are other inputs available, but that’s what I roll with).  While Brawn GP Racing offers a similar setup, the results are not anywhere near as good.  Here, again, you use the accelerometer to turn the car, but even with the sensitivity set to 100%, turning the car feels something more like steering a block of cheese than a Formula 1 car.  The wheels respond very slowly, it’s almost an art of predicting where you want the car to turn and doing it in advance, rather than just, y’know, when you want the damn car to turn.  The brakes and throttle are controlled via little pedals in the corner, and they far too often get “stuck” down, even when you take your fingers off the screen, you’ll watch your car zoom helplessly into gravel traps.  And yes, I’m quite sure I have auto-accelerate turned off.  And yet, while the wheel-turning itself may be super slow and unresponsive, the controls do let you turn the wheels completely perpendicular to the car, meaning you can make the car look pretty funny with wheels in impossible positions as you do circles in the grass.

The controls are possibly the most important part, and they’re pretty much terrible.  That’s the deal breaker right there, but if you’re looking for other lackluster elements to Brawn GP Racing, you won’t be disappointed in your disappointments.  There are only three available tracks, “London”, “Las Vegas”, and “Europe”, none of which are based on real-life circuits, and some of them are downright terrible, as you can likely see in the mini-maps on the screenshots.  A fourth track will supposedly be added later via update.  The only game mode is time trial, by yourself, one lap.  No other options.    There is an online leaderboard, as well as an option to Tweet and/or Facebook your lap times.  The game also includes Brawn GP-related media, which boils down to a fancy Brawn GP RSS feed reader and a photo gallery consisting of 12 random photos, for those times you really need to show off the sexiness of Jensen Button or Old Man Rubens.  Another annoying problem is the menu interface itself.  The developers must have somehow messed up the hitboxes on the buttons, as a lot of the time when I go to hit a button, I find that the game actually registers a press on the button below where I actually pressed.  Annoying at worst, but just another problem with this game that makes it feel like it was really half-assed.

At the end of the day, Brawn GP Racing isn’t the worst thing ever.  I admit I still play it a decent bit if I feel like just having a tiny bit of Formula 1 wheel time–that’s the kind of hardcore F1 guy I am.  It looks fine, and it sound fine, so if you just want an audio and visual F1 fix, it works in that regard.  But otherwise, it’s bogged down by other problems, especially the controls which can make the game really frustrating.  But even if the controls did work fine, there wouldn’t be much depth here anyway.  I bought the game when it was on sale for $1.99, and at that price I don’t really feel like I got ripped off, but again, I was really jonesing for some Formula 1 racing on my iPhone.  For $3.99, its current and non-sale price, I might have felt a little more gypped.  The worst part is, again, how half-hearted the entire effort is.  It seems the developer had some good ideas, and put some good initiative into making everything look good, but then they just kind of gave up and released it as-is.  Pick it up if you want to support Brawn GP, or if you really need to feel like you’re driving a Formula 1 car on your iPhone–sorta.

Vitals:
Name: Brawn GP Racing
Linkage: iTunes :: AppShopper :: Official Site
Price: $3.99
Developer: Brawn GP/Fish Labs
Genre: Games / Racing
Bottom Line: Good graphics and decent sound almost make Brawn GP Racing a decent iPhone racing title–but terrible controls, lackluster tracks, and zero variety in game modes, along with other random glitchiness relegates this game into a category that only the most hardcore Formula 1 enthusiasts will likely want to consider.